Homelands: Autumn
Part One
Chapter One
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I previously posted a story that is excerpted from the novel of which this is the opening chapter. I will be posting the whole novel, a little at a time.
Warning: this chapter serves to set the stage. There is no sex on screen just yet.
This is primarily an incest story, but it is also sci-fi/fantasy. Supernatural forces play a prominent role throughout the novel.
All characters are over eighteen. All acts are consensual.
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I leaned against the rail of the hotel balcony, rubbing my forehead as I stared down at Mom and Aunt Liz. As had been happening to me all day, for a moment, I was sure that I'd seen something that couldn't be there. Then, in the blink of an eye, everything was back to normal. Which was itself, of course, anything but normal.
At the moment, I looked down at two ordinary middle class white women in their late forties. Each of them carried a little extra weight. In my mother's case, to be fair, it was more than a little extra. She'd have to be half her weight before most men would consider her attractive. Aunt Liz, on the other hand, might have been losing the battle to keep her figure, but she was putting up a hell of a fight. They each had once had raven-black hair, but now their locks were streaked through with silver, and even where it was still dark, it had lost its glossy sheen. All in all, the two of them presented a decidedly unappealing sight.
If not for whatever was happening to me, I wouldn't even have thought to use that word. To say that they were physically unappealing was like saying that water was wet.
But the thing was, entirely different visages flickered in and out of view, messing with my hold on reality. And much else besides.
When their appearances changed, they became hyper-sexualized fantasy versions of themselves. My mother still had oversized breasts, if not quite like before, and the swell of her hips and thighs was still anything but modest. But most of her bulk had vanished, particularly from places where it would not have been desirable. Her extreme hourglass figure was almost cartoonish. I'd once read that men were most attracted to women with a waist-to-hip ratio of about 0.7. If this version of my mother had one much above 0.5, it would shock me. There were women with thinner waists, to be sure, but not any with curves like that.
Aunt Liz's best features were similarly exaggerated. While her breasts were considerably smaller than my mother's, that was not saying much. They were nonetheless quite generous. And her legs were thickly muscled, well toned, and impossibly long. If the fantasy version of mother was the very picture of voluptuous beauty, Liz had become a cross between that and the idealization of the athletic female form.
The women that had taken the place of my mother and my aunt had the kind of hair that you saw in shampoo commercials. Long, shiny, full of volume. All those cliches. Mom's had acquired nice red highlights, while Liz's was more uniformly black.
I couldn't tell for sure, but it seemed like they suddenly had makeup on too. Which neither of them ever wore save on the rarest of occasions. Like celebrating anniversaries, or graduations, or when attending fund-raising events. Certainly not to lie by the pool.
Granted, we'd all been partying pretty hard. Maybe my cousin, Brianna, had brought some special party favors. She often did. Would that explain hallucinations the next day? I didn't even know. I tended to stick to alcohol and, sometimes, weed. I'd experimented a little with harder drugs, but if I'd ever taken anything that made me see sex goddesses when I looked at my mother and her sister, I certainly couldn't remember it.
Speaking of what I could remember, there was a big gap between the end of the semester at school and these last few days here at the resort. As it was now mid-May, there a good week or so for which I couldn't even begin to account.
And when was the last time the whole extended family went on vacation together?
Speak of the devil, Brianna stepped up beside me on the balcony.
"Oh, hey, Brie. I didn't even hear the door slide open," I said.
She smiled. "I'm like a ninja." Then, with a playful punch against my arm, she added, "Totally should have dropped your pants and snapped a pic with my camera phone. Maybe thrown it up on Facebook. Then make you pay me to take it down."
"Ha," I said.
The wind picked up, and I caught a hint of her perfume. Enticing, but not overpowering.
Had I really just said my cousin smelled enticing? What was wrong with me?
"Where's Dom?" I asked. I hadn't seen my older brother more than a few feet away from Brianna since we'd got here.
She twirled a finger around a red-brown ringlet. Her hair, like that of the living fantasies that had replaced my mother and my aunt, was absolutely perfect. Brianna had kind of red hair no one would ever associate with ginger or carrots. In the right light, you might even think her a brunette. It cascaded about her shoulders in gentle curls.
"Dunno," she said, in answer to a question I'd almost forgot asking.
Right. Dom. I doubted that she really had no idea where he was. But apparently she didn't care to tell me, and I didn't care enough to press her on it.
Brie leaned back against the stucco wall and glanced down at the pool. "Nice view."
Her tone had sounded a bit just too knowing. I refused to take the bait. "What did we do last night? I think I'm seeing things lately."
"I don't know. Pretty tame, really. Drank some beer, smoked a few joints. Nothing hallucinogenic, if that's what you're getting at."
I rubbed my forehead again. "What about you? Are you feeling okay?"
A slow smile formed on her ruby red lips. They were nice and full, and there was a pronounced swell in the middle of the upper one. Moaning softly, my cousin arched her back and trailed a hand down her exceptionally narrow waist, over the swell of her hip, and let it come to rest atop a lean thigh. Eventually, she replied, "Never better."
Someone seemed to have forgotten to tell her that she didn't have much of a figure. As perfect as the other version of my mother would be in the eyes of men who preferred their women voluptuous, Brianna had to be a dream come for those who preferred their women petite. I was most decidedly one of the former, but just at the moment, I was having enough doubts that I could almost see myself converting.
I forced a cough. What the fuck was wrong with me?
"Should take it easier tonight."
"You say that now," she said.
I chuckled. "You know me too well."
"Besides, we're here to have fun, aren't we?" she asked.
"Well, I'm not sure a family vacation can really be described as fun. You know, after, say, puberty. But yeah, it's nice. Quiet. The hotel is pretty damn luxurious, that's for sure."
"Oh, you don't enjoy being with your family? Am I not as fun as those college girls?"
"Well, there's something of an apples to oranges problem there," I said. "Wouldn't exactly expect you to compete with them in the ways that matter most. And if you can, kudos to you, but I'm pretty sure I don't ever want to know that," I lied. Then I added, "But what I really had in mind was the whole parental supervision thing."
She waved away the comment. "Do you see anyone playing chaperon?"
I grunted by way of response.
"Besides, no one told us we had to volunteer to stay in the suite with all the old people in it," she continued. "Besides, at least the cool cousin is staying with you."
I snorted. But perhaps that only revealed what a nerd I was, as if there had ever been any doubt, because I knew Dom agreed with her. Come to think of it, I couldn't remember how we'd decided that Dom would stay in the suite with Jack and Mark and I would stay in the same one as Brianna.
Maybe because Dom didn't want to be in the same suite as our parents?
"Come on, I bet Jack and Mark are trying to convince your brothers to play video games or something as we speak, when they should be down at the pool, trying to meet chicks. Your father's side is hopeless, and you know it."
I shook my head. "Girls just don't get video games."
She frowned and batted her ridiculously long and full eyelashes. The brown eye-shadow with red highlights was a nice touch. It went with her green eyes and red-brown hair perfectly.
Shit. I shouldn't be noticing these things.
"You do think I'm no fun. I knew it."
"Right. I'm sure that's a complaint you get all the time, too."
She looked away, but I caught a hint of a grin. "Well, apples and oranges, right?"
"How about you prove how fun you are." I cleared my throat. "Go get us a few beers."
She laughed. "So much for taking it easy tonight." She glanced down at the pool again. "Or are you just trying to get rid of me so you can enjoy the view in private?"
My pulse quickened. She wasn't really accusing me of...was she?
Not that she'd be wrong to do so. But had I been so obvious about it?
"Course not," I said without so much as glancing down at our mothers.
Brianna leaned in closer, dropped her voice. "Good. I keep telling Dom you're not as lame as he says you are." She stretched a manicured finger towards me. It was of course, red. The finger stopped just short of my bare chest. "Some day soon you're going to prove me right, aren't you?" Without waiting for an answer, my unfairly attractive cousin left. Her hips somehow managed to do a fair share of swaying, narrow though they were. And I couldn't help but notice how surprisingly round her relatively small ass looked in her tight shorts. It wasn't as big as I might like, but it was well-shaped, and those little cheeks were cleanly separated from her thighs. I hated how with most really skinny chicks, you couldn't quite tell where her legs ended and her ass began.
I cursed at myself as she disappeared into the suite.
She was my cousin, for fuck's sake!
The thoughts I'd been having when she showed up were bad enough. But there, we were only talking about fleeting glimpses of what I knew wasn't really my mother or my aunt. In a sense, I wasn't ogling them, so much as fantasies made flesh that were only relatively loosely based upon them to begin with.
Yet, here I was, getting worked up over my cousin, and I wasn't even sure how different the alternate version of her was. If I'd even just been staring at a fantasy version. There was no conceivable way that I could tell myself that I hadn't been checking out my cousin because I'd been checking out some other woman, some woman that didn't really exist.
