I should have been taller. Dad was huge. He would fill a doorway. His hair used to brush the doorframe if he was wearing shoes. Mom is 6'2" in her socks. It is incredibly embarrassing to be 21 years old and be an inch shorter than your mother. I am, by most standards, tall, but not tall enough, if you get my meaning.
I sat on my bed, waiting for the alarm to go off before I got up. I tightened my shoelaces, straightened my belt buckle, and checked my watch against the alarm clock. Finally, the alarm went off. I slapped the button to kill it and walked quietly out of my room. It was still early and I didn't want to wake mom if I didn't have to. She was still sleeping as I made my way through our tiny apartment.
I work for a film-developing lab. I drive around to any store, shop, corner mart, retail outlet, drug store, or anywhere you can drop film and I pick it up. Some other poor bastard drives around and drops it off. It pays better than one would think, and it lets me stay out and about as part of my job. That's all nice, and that's what I tell folks if they ask what it is that I do for a living. The truth is that I am not qualified to do anything else. I am barely qualified to do that much.
At the end of the day, I would rather be doing that than some crap job that involves paper hats and nametags with pictures of french-fries on them. However, it is harder than I though it would be. Those containers get heavy. The bigger stores usually fill two containers of film on any given day. Mondays are the worst. Four containers is pretty normal for the weekend load of pictures. I wish I was one of the lucky few who delivers the pictures. They drive a company truck, and they get a spiffy red hand-truck to carry the boxes of pictures. Me? I lug them out across parking lots, through crowded stores, and past the disapproving looks of old women who think I am a janitor. But, it pays.
I spent another long day driving around the county, came home and wished I was someone else. Dad left a long time ago, and it has been mom and me ever since. I don't mind. We have it down to a kind of team thing. We had to do without for a long time, and we got to the point where things just seemed to work again.
I let the self-pity sink in for a while and then I got up to fix dinner. During the week, I did dinner and she did the light house work. On the weekends, we switched. I drifted around in thought as I stood over a popping pan of ground beef. I barely heard her when she walked in.
"Hey, you. How was your day?" She dropped her purse and gave me a kiss on the cheek.
"Pretty good," I said. She rolled her eyes and grinned.
"That sounds like the same as yesterday."
"Film pick-up is an exciting life. Few are cut out for the riggers of the job."
She laughed and went into her room to change. By the time she came out, I had dinner on the table. We ate without too much to say. Both of us were so tired by that point, dinner conversation was usually nothing more than short sentences, and grunts of agreement. I cleared the table and we went into the small living room.
This just isn't what I wanted, I thought. At 21, I wanted to be out doing something. Anything. Even if it was sitting around with friends wasting time, that was something. Instead, I was already past that and firmly entrenched in the real world.
I sat with mom and watched some TV for a while. I was suddenly aware of how badly I needed to jack- off. My body was screaming for it. It had been a long time since I did. The walls in our building were as thin as could be. It was impossible to do anything without someone on the other side, or even several rooms away, hearing what was going on. We usually turned on the exhaust fan in the bathroom just for a sense of privacy. We had learned to adjust.
Unfortunately, this meant that if I were masturbating, she would hear me. Or she would just know if I went in, shut my door, and then went to the bathroom to clean up. I couldn't handle that, so I just didn't. I didn't even have the relief of wet dreams. That would have been something, at least.
Having no real money, and no time besides, I had nothing in the way of female companionship. I was working my film job, plus two part-time jobs just to make sure we made it through the bills. Mom's job took care of food, clothes and whatever else came up.
I didn't have a life to speak of. I had television and I had mom.
I had, to my shame and to my apparent lack of any real moral fiber, begun to use mom for sexual fantasies when I was in need. She was all I had. She was still perfectly attractive. She was fit, tall, busty, and blonde. All the sweet comfort of mature ease, and she was a sexual-thought magnet. I tried not to think of her like that. I tried to think of anything else. She's part of the reason I stopped masturbating.
When I was a kid I could hear her using a vibrator to masturbate at night. I found it one day when I was looking for a pen. It was in her nightstand. I didn't know what it was at first, but when I saw that it was shaped like a dick and the switch on the bottom made the same noise I'd heard coming from mom's room nearly every night, I figured it out. It only took me ten minutes. I put it back and never mentioned it.
She stopped using it when I was 16. At least, she stopped using the vibrator part. Either that or it just up and quit.
I tried not to think about those things. I just made everything worse. I looked over to mom and sighted. She WAS really pretty. Why dad left like he did, I'll never know. She had very feminine features but they were strong and striking. Even under bargain makeup and an exhausting workday, she was pretty. I hated to leave.
"Goodnight. I'm gonna read a bit then call it a night."
"You have to work early?" Her voice was like honey.
"About 6."
"Which job is this?" She bit at her lower lip as she thought.
Must leave.
"The water delivery."
"Oh, right. You work so hard, Paul." Her eyes killed me.
"Just what has to be done. I'm not industrious by any means."
