"OK," Mom announced, "we'll set up camp here." The meadow was carpeted with grass and gave a good view of the sky overhead, but the trees were dense all around it; unless you knew the winding trail to get there, you'd never get through the underbrush around it. We put our packs down. I started to take the tent out, then stopped as I noticed the odd smile on Mom's face. "Um..." I hesitated, then continued, "um... Mom, is this the second part of the bet?"
"Funny you should ask", she said, and began to undo her shorts.
***
I should have never taken the bet. Don't even ask what was involved; it was a sucker bet from the beginning, and if I hadn't been so excited by the possibility of what I would win--my own car--I would probably have figured out what she was up to. But I lost, and lost hard, and now I'd have to pay the price. And the worst part was, I didn't know what I'd have to do; the only thing that my mom would say was that it wouldn't involve public humiliation.
My mom definitely wasn't your average mother. She had a statuesque figure and curly blonde hair, and she could have had her choice of sex partners, but she said that she'd done almost all the things that she'd ever wanted to do in bed. You might think that that's something pretty unusual for a mother to tell her son, but that was my mom. She was a professional psychotherapist and had always been very frank about sex. Most guys that I know get the sex talk from their dads (mine divorced Mom when I was young and I rarely see him) and it's usually a very awkward talk, describing the basic facts of sex that the son already knows; my mom said that I probably knew all of that stuff already and that the important thing to remember was to stick to mutual masturbation with casual partners if I didn't know their sexual history, at least until I was comfortable having intercourse wearing a condom. I was pretty astonished at that, but gradually I loosened up and would confide all sorts of stuff to her. It seemed that nothing was too bizarre for her; she wouldn't say what her patients told her, but she let me know that nothing that I would come up with would beat what she heard nearly every day.
I thought that what I had seen and done while I was away at college would be the thing that would freak her out, so I held off telling her about it, until she got it out of me one evening when we were sitting in the living room talking. "Please tell me, John; I can tell that it's really bothering you." She put her hand over mine and looked into my eyes. "I promise that I won't think any of the worse of you. I know that you're a good man and that you didn't do anything to harm anyone."
I shifted in my seat, still hesitant to talk about it, but Mom persisted and finally I gave in and told her what had happened earlier in the fall semester. I had gotten a girlfriend, Laura, who was a funny and creative woman who was also a good lover. She was obviously experienced at sex, but was evasive when I asked her about past boyfriends. I didn't press too hard because the sex was so great that I didn't want to spoil a good thing. Then, one weekend, her parents came to campus to visit. Usually, when parents come to visit their kids, they stay at a local motel, take their kid out to eat several times, take a brief tour of the campus and dorm, and in general make sure that their kid is OK and getting enough sleep. Laura's parents, on the other hand, were staying on campus, in her room--her roommate had an off-campus boyfriend and had even given Laura her key so that we could have as much privacy as we wanted, and I slept with her every weekend and even some school nights. I couldn't believe that they were going to sleep in one of those little dorm beds, but Laura said that they'd insisted. Of course, that meant that we weren't going to have sex that weekend, but I thought that I could tough it out and maybe make up for it on Sunday night after the parents had left. After I met her parents--he was a big man and a little burly, but not really fat, and she was slightly chubby and a bit shorter than Laura, who was slim--I went out late Friday night while Laura was with her parents and didn't think about it.
Saturday night, I had come back from a movie and found Laura at my room. She kissed me and tugged my hand. "Come on, let's go to my room."
I hesitated. "But your parents--"