Part 2 - Right Back To 11
Elation was tugged away because of two things happening, the first was probably nothing. Maybe the pounding of my heart, some minerals sitting in unused muscles suddenly being pushed around my bloodstream. There was a tiny light that zipped through the woods. All that registered at first was movement but I slowed slightly and took a sharp look into the trees. Whatever it was, it didn't immediately come back into sight. Not that I figured out much at seeing it again, since it seemed like nothing but a bouncing ball of light. Like a radioactive bubble. I shook my head to clear it, thinking it had to be a weird reflection or one of those eye floaters, but then my attention locked onto the other movement. The other thing. The real thing.
On the other side of the football field there were two cars parked up by the middle school. Two sitting there, one behind the other. A third coming in the entrance, pulling up behind the other two. Two and then a third. My brain was doing the mental equivalent of a fingersnap to get my attention at the sight. Forgetting the floating lightbulb at the sinking feeling in my stomach. Two and then a third. Two cars and then a third. Three cars! Three cars! I had parked my car behind mom, but there had been a third car behind mine! When I left there had been a third car! A bright fucking red minivan! Couldn't have been more difficult to miss, unless maybe if it was on fire. Somebody had come in during...
"Stupid fucker!" I did an about-face mid-run, skidding before going back the way I'd come, knowing I was asking for trouble. Not only from the fast direction change but the speed I put on. Freaked out or not I was going WAY too fast for having so little jogging experience, no cross country time, the only thing I had done in years was go around the track at the park by the old apartment. Just a few times when Malcolm had guilted me into it. That was so infrequently it couldn't count. "Stupid! Stupid!" Both for how much I was pushing myself, but also for missing the fact that there had been three cars. Mostly the three cars thing. But how could I not? I had been so distracted with delight from the sex I'd had with my own mother, the promise that there was plenty more to come. Instead of going with the path around the backs of the houses at the end of the Shrub Street cul-de-sac, I cut right through. It was a two-lane road all the way around the sac part of the cul-de-sac. Not small but my foot hit the pavement once, the grass at the center of the loop twice, and the road on the other side I almost cleared, just my heel touching. Some coward part of me hoping the cherry red minivan was gone, but it was still there. "Shit, shit, shit."
It was Aunt Allison! Mom's younger sister, new vehicle but the same license plate. PR X2 AR X2, they had two Perry Rowe's in the family, her husband and son. Two with the initials A.R. my aunt being Allison and her daughter Aubrey. While I knew that this was the best option, not a murderer or my sister and her husband, it was still bad. Mom and Aunt Allison were basically each other's best friends. Knowing mom had committed incest? I couldn't imagine Aunt Allison telling anybody, but she wouldn't be able to think of her sister in the same way ever again. They were probably in there screaming at each other right now. Their friendship over.
I wasn't winded, a little sweaty but I could have kept running. Easily. Maybe it was the cool day that kept me from sweating too much, kept my lungs okay. I certainly had never run so fast or hard before, I should have been dying. Instead, I rushed up the porch stairs that I had walked up not too long ago a completely different person. A guy who would flip off anybody who even eluded that he would have any sort of sex with his own mother. A guy who was now as worried that mom would be embarrassed and friendless forever, his aunt would think him a pervert, and disgustingly that there was no way mom would ever want to fuck me again after being found out.
It was silent in the house.
"Aunt Allison?" I asked, keeping my voice as low because if there wasn't any screaming that meant she had not confronted mom.
"What babe?" Mom asked from the bathroom, dreamily.
"Nothing!" Dropping my voice another notch so mom wouldn't hear, in the past bathtime for her had been the only time she had been oblivious to what went on in the house. "Aunt Allison!" Somehow thinking that I could handle this, mom would never have to know that her sister knew. I about spun away, but there she was, my aunt tucked back against the wall in the kitchen. I saw her because she was dragging herself up onto the counter, brought out from her shocked state by me calling her name. "Aunt Allison, I can explain."
"No! No you can't! You... Can you?" There was some tiny part of her that actually seemed hopeful. "You can explain why my sister..." But further thought had her shaking her head, "Is a pervert?" She laughed without humor, almost crazed. "Soncest. Soncest! She knew what that was! I just looked it up, not on my phone, on hers!" Thrashing her arm out hitting mom's phone off the marble counter where she'd left it. Which I stopped from shattering to the floor, jumping forward almost without thought to catch it. My shock and delight at saving it was very temporary, as I heard the grind of glass on marble, snapped my head up to see Aunt Allison had dragged THE wine bottle over to herself. (The love potion! The love potion that Jessica had delighted in telling me would make us want to be together for the rest of our lives!) I tried to hiss a warning as she bit the cork out, spitting it away, but she snapped. "Shut up!"
And really what was I going to say? That it wasn't wine but a magic potion? My girlfriend from way back had made it, with dirt and sticks and my blood. What really was I going to say? How to tell my Aunt Allison that it could be wine in the bottle but... I was very sure it was some mixture that would go right into the fire if that asshole potion master Professor Snape came across it. That even that former death eater would be disgusted by. No, I could only shake my head and flounder.
And... Didn't I have to know? My guts rotting at the idea that mom had not wanted what we'd just done but that the potion had made her do it. Do me. Jessica had said it wouldn't work unless there was some chance at it happening, or something like that. The way mom had talked there had been a chance. She totally had a deep dark fantasy, that she probably never would have acted on, except for the potion. If (IF!!) it was even a potion. Clearly Aunt Allison was NOT into it, soncest, or nephewcest in her case, and so it wouldn't work on her.
