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?"
My sister puffed up her chest with a deep breath. "No, you're right. I know you're right."
"Remember: they're horny young men. I think it's going to be easier than either of us could have imagined."
A few minutes later, we pulled up to the university dorm. The sidewalks were usually full of students walking to class, but with the semester coming to a close, there were scant few left who hadn't gone home or otherwise moved on.
The boys were sitting together on the curb with their backpacks -- both of which appeared to be stuffed to the brim -- on the ground beside them. The boys shared very few features, but had acted as though they were twins from a very early age.
Tom was taller than Luke, but the latter made up for it with a particularly muscular build. My son's shaggy, strawberry-blond hair fell just above his eyes unless he'd intentionally swept it off of his forehead. That day, it was held in place with a touch of putty, providing a stark contrast to the buzz-cut of his black-haired cousin.
The excitement in the car was palpable, tempered only by the solemn expression on Tom's face when I leapt out of the car to hug him. After a bear-hug that lasted nearly ten full seconds, I pulled away to find him still sulking.
I pried for information. "Honey, what's wrong?"
"My girlfriend just broke up with me, like, a couple of hours ago," he lamented sadly.
I could not hide the surprise on my face, and tried to ensure that my tone did not reveal my excitement. "I didn't even know you were seeing someone."
Tom sighed. "I was... and then, I wasn't. Then, I was. Then--"
"I think they get it, bro," Luke chimed in, cutting his cousin's mopey rambling short.
Cleo sighed gloomily and walked over to offer Tom a consolation hug. "I'm so sorry, sugar. What happened?"
Luke snickered. "Word on the street is that s
omebody
asked for a threesome."
Tom socked him in the shoulder. "Shut up, man!"
I did not want their bickering to ruin the weekend, so I stepped in to calm my son before he started seeing red. "Well, you don't have to worry about
her
right now. After this weekend, you won't think about her ever again!"
The boys looked at each other quizzically.
"Uh, why not?" Tom asked.
They were not ready for the revelation just then, so I scrambled to offer anything other than the truth. "Well, er-- we're going to have so much fun that you won't care about some silly little bitch who broke your heart!"
Luke chortled. "Damn, Auntie Deb! You got claws today!"
I made a scratching motion with my nails, swiping at the air. "Nobody hurts my baby and gets away with it. Now, hurry up and get in the car!"
The boys packed their luggage into the trunk, then climbed into the backseat. Since I was a bit shorter than my sister, Tom knew to sit behind me so that he would get extra leg room. It was not our first trip together -- but if all went to plan, I knew that it would surely be the most memorable.