William wasn't sure how he felt as he slowly climbed the stairs. He wished his mother wouldn't call him Billy, he knew that much. And he wished he'd tried harder and studied longer and brought home a more encouraging report card. He'd smiled nervously as he'd presented it to her but he'd known all along what her reaction would be.
The stairs turned near the top and afforded him the opportunity to glance behind and see her starting up in his wake. He was almost sure she loved him, it was just that she had a strange way of showing it. There were guidance counsellors at school, students were actively encouraged to go to them with any problems they might have at home. In William's case it wasn't an option.
His mother's expression was hard to describe as she followed him upstairs. She didn't look angry, she hardly ever looked really angry, and she rarely raised her voice. She simply looked like a woman who had a job to do. She might have been going upstairs to make the beds for all her face revealed of her true purpose.
As he opened his bedroom door he thought about another aspect of his feelings. They were more complicated than the vague wish that he'd tried harder in school. If he'd worked harder his mother wouldn't be taking him upstairs, and although he was reluctant to admit it, there was a part of him looked forward to the things that happened when she followed him into his bedroom and slowly closed the door.
Williams mother was a traffic warden. All day long, five days a week she wrote parking tickets and pulled off the sticky backing paper and slapped the ticket onto the windscreens of illegally parked cars. Now she closed his door shutting the two of them into his small, untidy bedroom and folded her arms. She still wore her black uniform skirt, plain white blouse, and flat, sensible shoes. She was big but not fat, shapely in an old fashioned way. William was sometimes tempted to tell her that she looked a little bit like a prison warden, especially the way she stood with her solid, shapely legs a little apart and her arms folded under her large breasts as she looked at him. He'd never told her because he didn't want to hurt her feeling but also because he was a little worried that she might stop wearing her uniform when she took him upstairs. Even though he knew it was only a traffic warden's uniform it gave her an air of authority.
"I'm very disappointed in you Billy," she told him now. "You said you'd try harder and now I have to bring you up here again because you didn't keep your promise."
As usual she didn't raise her voice or sound particularly angry but she did look quietly exasperated with him. He knew when she was exasperated because a certain look came into her eyes. To William it seemed a combination of love and regret, a mixture of the two.
He nodded slowly to show he understood but at the same time his heart began to beat a little faster and he felt butterflies in his stomach. Both were manifestations of the complicated feelings he always felt at this time.
"You're nineteen now, almost grown," she told him next, "but I'm not going to waste time talking about it again. You know why we're here and what we have to do."
William took off his striped school tie and rolled it and placed it neatly on the bedside table. He didn't look at his mother as he unbuttoned his shirt but he knew that she was watching him all the time.
A strange dark excitement came over him whenever he took off his clothes in front of her. In some ways he resented that she made him do it, in some ways it seemed forbidden and wrong, but in another way it gave him pleasure. Sometimes his fingers shook as he unfastened his belt and took down his dark, school trousers. Sometimes he could hear his mother breathing as he turned away to put them carefully on a coat hanger and hang them in his wardrobe.
Now he turned to face her and pushed down his underpants and as usual his cock was beginning to get hard. He blushed as he dropped his underpants beside his bed. Sometimes his cock became completely hard and stood out in front of him as he waited naked in front of his mother. The strange thing was that she never seemed to take any notice no matter how hard it became or how much it stuck in the air or swayed when he moved. It was almost as if she didn't see it or pretended it wasn't there. To William it was embarassing and exciting in equal proportions.
His cock stiffened a little more then as he looked at her in her black and white traffic warden's uniform. The look of exasperation in her eyes had been replaced by something much harder to define. In some respects she looked the same as always, a practical woman with a job to do and nothing more. A mother who took her responsibilities seriously. But in another way William thought perhaps this new, harder to define inward looking expression in her eyes, belonged to a completely different woman.
Now she moved and a floorboard creaked and she sat carefully on his bed and looked at him, the same but somehow not the same. William found himself looking at her knees and how tight her skirt was and the fullness of her breasts inside her white blouse and the way they stretched the crisp white cotton and strained the small white buttons and he blushed again as his cock suddenly jerked all the way fully erect and throbbing.
"Come here," she said and he went to the bed. Up close he could smell her perfume and the fabric conditioner she used and mixed with that her own smell underneath and mingled with it all.
