CHAPTER 1
The highway -- one so familiar that I could have navigated it in my sleep -- was surprisingly empty for a Friday afternoon. It was pure chance that the roads were clear, and it made it a painless trip for Cleo - my older sister - to pick up both her son and mine from university. By sheer luck, both of our boys had been accepted to the same school, which was less than an hour away.
With no younger siblings behind them, their transition into college life had pushed both of us into a strange and uncomfortable middle ground where we weren't quite empty-nesters, but were very close to it.
With their graduation looming, shades of gray were threatening to become something black and white. The boys had just finished their senior year, and Cleo and I had elected to use the brief window between their final exam and their graduation ceremony to invite them to spend a weekend relaxing at the cottage with us.
Cleo gripped the steering wheel of her minivan with white knuckles, refusing to take her eyes off the road. "You stopped taking your birth control, right?"
I rolled my eyes. "Yes, for the one
millionth
time: I stopped taking the pills."
"Okay, okay, fine. How much longer until we pick the boys up at their dorm?"
I checked the navigation app on my phone. "Fifteen or so. Do you want to go over the plan again? That'll calm you down."
Cleo scrunched her nose in annoyance. "I
am
calm!"
That made me laugh. "She said violently!"
We turned off the highway, leaving mere minutes until we would get to wrap our arms around our boys. I turned down the radio so she could focus on me before our passengers got onboard.
I lifted the armrest and turned to face my sister. "Plan A-- we
don't
totally panic about our twenty-year-old boys growing up and leaving the nest."
Cleo rolled her eyes. "Ha-ha, smartass. I think we already failed that part."
"Correct! Which brings us to plan B-- let those
same
boys get us pregnant so we can be mommies all over again! Any questions?"
Her leg bounced anxiously -- a key sign that she was over-processing. "Are you sure they're going to believe that we
both
had a random birth control failure in the same month.
Again
?"
"I don't see why they wouldn't. They believed it
last
time, didn't they?"
Growing up as kids, we had always talked how much fun it would be to have boys that were the same age. Once we had gotten married, we had concocted a plan to trick our hubbies. They had fallen for it, and still to that day believed that their sons had been conceived by accident.
Working off of that precedent gave me and Cleo the confidence that we could pull it off a second time, so we had invented a plan to make it happen. The first step had been to convince our sons to join us at the cottage for a weekend. A sun-soaked celebration of their impending milestone seemed a convincing excuse, and we had specifically chosen a date where we knew that our husbands were too busy with work to accompany us.
Cleo and I shared everything with each other. Growing up, we had been each other's closest confidant, and that bond had grown even stronger when we'd both given birth. One of my confessions that I could never share with another soul was of the love I felt for Tom once he turned eighteen.
I'd wrestled with those feelings for years before revealing them to the one person I knew would never judge me. To my bewilderment, Cleo admitted that she felt the same wicked, unmotherly love for Luke. We had nobody else to vent to but each other.
Cleo chewed the inside of her cheek. "What if Luke doesn't want to fuck me?" It was a question wholly unbecoming of a mother.
"Why
wouldn't
he want to fuck you?" I asked.
Cleo shook her head in disbelief. "Because I'm his
mother
!"
She had a good point, but I waved her off and slumped back into my seat. "Oh, please. You and I both know what horribly horny monsters we raised. They're going to be kissing our feet just to get a taste of our mommy pussies."
She softened her rigid posture. "I'm sorry, Deb. I'm just a little wound up. Letting Luke spying on me while I was changing was one thing.
This
is something else entirely."
Cleo was referring to the trial run we had implemented a few weeks prior to our summer vacation. It'd been her idea to "accidentally" let them catch us changing, hoping to get a clue as to whether or not they would be receptive to our adulterous plans. It had been a test, and when the boys had passed, we'd known the wheels were in motion.
I played dumb just to annoy her a little bit more. "Do you think he liked what he saw?"
She chortled. "Um, duh, I think so! For two weeks straight he couldn't even look at me without blushing."
"That's why we did it: to test them. If they hadn't passed, we wouldn't be going all the way to the cottage to let them knock us up, would we?"