You'd have to say there was something odd about Elaine and Phillip. Perhaps the oddness is best described as a lack of humor. Neither of them made friends easily, and neither showed any evidence that friendship mattered to them. They both worked at their respective tasks diligently, she at a computer in an office all day and he finishing high school. One could easily tell that they were mother and son, physically as well as by personality. "Average" would describe their appearances, if not their personalities. But behind their blank features lurked deeper similarities not hinted at. Emotionally, they were damaged, and sexually, they were smoldering.
Elaine's story is one of disappointment in relationships, alienation from family and the rest of humanity, deep sadness, and longing. It began with her parent's lack of normal affection for the child who appeared, unwanted, near the end of her mother's childbearing years. All the available love must have been spent on her 2 much older siblings, who were nearly out of the picture when she came along. Her mother found her to be too much trouble for a middle-aged woman, involved as she was in her career. And her father had never been able to relate to children on their level, expecting more maturity than she was capable of.
She was farmed out to an even older woman whose vast child-raising experience somehow had not included any close relationships with children. "Aunt Tilley", as she was called, was a caretaker, but not much of a caregiver. Tilley was herself a withdrawn and self-absorbed old woman, seeing to Elaine's needs only in a physical sense. Elaine spent most of her time at Aunt Tilley's house, when she wasn't in school. Home was for sleeping, bathing, and changing clothes.
By the time old Tilley had retired, Elaine's mother had reached the end of her career, and her life, and Elaine went back to her father's house full-time. She was old enough to look out for herself, which was a relief to her father. Her older sister and brother had long since gone away and begun lives in distant cities. Forced to confront the rearing of a teenaged daughter again, her father did a mediocre job. Elaine, desperate for some real human contact, began a sexual relationship with the only boy in school who came close to breaking through her defenses. When that ended, she was quickly on to the next, and the next, until just before high school ended, she became pregnant with Phillip. She confronted the most likely candidate among her lovers and he agreed to marry her. With financial help from her father, Elaine and her new husband were able to get a start and bring Phillip into the world.
However, a threatened breech complicated the birth, and Phillip was delivered by caesarian section. Elaine was fully prepared to devote herself to her new son and lavish upon him the pent-up love that no one, including her trapped young husband, had ever wanted. But her attempts at breastfeeding, like the childbirth itself, were problematic. Her small breasts swelled but produced very little milk. It was important to her that her son receive the immunities and other benefits of breast milk, and so Elaine and her husband, Andy, found a red-headed young girl to serve as wet nurse.
From the first, Elaine was conflicted about the whole childbearing business. Her joy at being pregnant, then getting a husband and moving to a place of their own, had been deflated by her inability to deliver normally and breastfeed her child, as well as by the tenuous relationship with Andy. Meanwhile, Andy showed signs of restlessness and in a fit of anger accused Elaine of trapping him into marriage. Phillip was barely out of diapers when Andy left. Once again, her father helped out financially, but she was emotionally alone. Elaine began to pull back from the world more, even as she entered the workforce. Her sexual activity was entirely solo, and she developed an extensive repertoire of masturbatory methods and erotic daydreams. Inadvertently, she was continuing the cycle of emotional neglect that she had grown up with, and somewhere inside, she knew it. Phillip was still a young child, but already she felt incomplete as a mother.
The dullness of Elaine's temperament rubbed off on her son. By puberty, he was settled in to her ways. The best way he knew to relate to her was by emulating her stoic nature, though he was feeling strong emotions, as was she. They began to secretly long for each other. Her longing was more for the completeness and closeness she had missed as a child and young mother, tinged with lust. His was for sex.
Even though she seemed superficially distant from him, he knew that they were two of a kind. She understood even better than he, with her years of experience, that his serious cover could be hiding a boiling pot of sexual energy, as her facade did. Elaine often reflected on her own wild sexual experimentation, even though her only outlet in many years had been her frequent masturbation sessions, securely locked away in her bed or bath. She remembered how exciting those days were, and how unfulfilled they made her feel ultimately. She wanted to spare her son those unhappy feelings, and give him something real and lasting. Most of all, she wanted to give herself to him, in some unselfish but unspecified way.
Phillip wanted to give a very specific part of himself to her, and this fueled his daily self-gratification. Why he was so attracted to her was a mystery that he never pondered, but he knew her physical attributes better than anyone else. Elaine hid her body from the world, like she hid her feelings. But in the safety of her home, she was much more open. After all, she needed some place to let down her guard. Over the years of Phil's tender youth, she had not been averse to appearing before him in bra and panties or some sheer negligee. As he entered puberty, she saw very little reason to increase her coverage, and Phillip learned early to play it cool and enjoy the view, without tipping her off to the fact that he was enjoying it. Phil's physical attributes did not go unnoticed by his mother, either, and he followed her lead in casual attire. Sometimes his face wandered in to her sexual reverie, and she didn't attempt to suppress it.
The day the scales tipped and the tidal wave of change hit them began as many others, with Elaine off to work and Phillip off to school. By the middle of Elaine's day, she was dragging. She was nearing her 35th birthday. She realized that when that day arrived, she would be chronologically closer to 40 than to 30, and no closer to emotional completeness than she had been when Phillip had been born 18 years before. She would have to do something about that some day. Some day soon. With a little more weight on her shoulders than usual, she drove home early, knowing that her son would not be home yet. Since it was looking like rain, and the car had just been washed, she put it in the garage. Then she went to the bathroom, closed the door, drew a bath and began to relax.
Phillip's day had been more interesting. For some unexplained reason, fortune had smiled upon him, in the person of Donna Locke, known around the boy's locker room as Big Red, for obvious reasons. Donna, a girl with a school-wide reputation for fun-loving sexual experimentation, had taken a shine to our boy Phil and invited herself over to his house, which was after all only a couple of blocks from her own. In a very matter-of-fact way, Donna had proposed that Phil fuck her that afternoon, and Phil had immediately warmed to the idea. It would be his first time, although there had been a few previous encounters of a sexual nature, and he was looking forward to it. Donna had been around, so who better to hop into bed with? (Well, Mom would have been better, but Mom was unavailable.) Before school ended that afternoon, Phillip wisely found a quiet stall in the boy's bathroom and relieved himself sexually in preparation for the overwhelming excitement he expected to feel when he first touched that big red pussy of Donna's.
In a time-honored sneaking-Sally-through-the-alley move, Phil ushered Big Red in the back gate and through the sliding glass door, down the hall, and into his room. The room next to the bathroom. Knowing that his mother would not be home for at least 2 hours, and in a bit of a rush, Phillip left the door open. In the room next door, Elaine heard voices and might have called out to her son, had she not been three-quarters of the way to an orgasm, with the bath wand making the water between her splayed legs boil. Before she hit her peak, a strange fact intruded on her play. One of the voices she heard was female. And it was sighing loudly.
Instantly, Elaine was energized. There was not much doubt about what was happening in the other room. She quietly turned off the faucet and got out of the tub, wrapped herself in a large white towel, silently opened the bathroom door, and peered into her son's room. What she saw shocked her in a multitude of ways. Phillip was sitting on the bed, his shirt and shoes off, his mouth around one of a pair of large areolas, resting atop 2 large pink breasts. His right hand was rummaging around under Donna's short, tight skirt. Big Red was stroking Phillip's jean-covered crotch, her eyes closed, her head back, and her lips smiling.
On one level, Elaine was gratified to know that her son was normal and had the gumption to go out and get himself some satisfaction. But on another level, she felt jealousy and the loss of her chance to repair the bond that had never quite existed with Phillip. More than anything, as she stared at the pair on the bed, she felt irrational rage that her son was again suckling from a redheaded stranger. Just as they had when he was born, her feelings of inadequacy as a mother surfaced, like a submarine breaching the waves.
In her rage, Elaine screamed, loudly. She reacted as an animal mother might if her young one were being threatened. She charged the bed, grabbing fistfuls of flaming red hair framing a freckled face. Phillip screamed. Big Red screamed loudest and managed to sink her teeth into Elaine's forearm, which caused her to let go. In a flash, Red grabbed her bra and T-shirt and fled, her big pink breasts sloshing from side to side, leaving Elaine and Phillip breathing hard and wide-eyed. Elaine's rage immediately degenerated into tears and her shoulders slumped, and she ran down the hall to her own room, murmuring, "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry!". Phil sat down heavily on the bed and stared blankly at the closet door, the throbbing in his jeans intense. Apparently, despite his erection, he still had some blood supply to his other head, and he began to think.
In that moment, Phil could see the future as it could be. If he reacted angrily or not at all, this incident would always be a barrier between them. But having looked into her eyes moments before, Phil understood what she had felt, and he knew that her need, though different in some ways from his own, was strong, and that he had the best chance of anyone to satisfy that need. And in the process, he might satisfy his own needs. The answer was a soft reaction, an immediate reaction.
Phillip, trusting his instincts, deliberately left his shirt and shoes off and walked down the hall, where he found his distraught mother sobbing, face down, on her bed, the towel covering her to mid-thigh. Knowing exactly what to do, for the first time in his life, Phil lay down on the edge of the bed next to his mother, put his arm across her back, and just held her. She groaned and sobbed again, still murmuring, "Oh, Phillip, I'm so sorry!" And he answered, "It's alright, Mom, I understand."
"But you don't understand. You couldn't. It's because I've been such a terrible mother to you."
"You haven't been terrible. I love you, Mom."
Elaine rolled to her right enough to get her right arm around and both arms around her son, whom she hugged close.
"I was never able to breast feed you. I had to leave that to a stranger. Another woman helped you when you needed food. Now you have new needs, and... and... another woman is..."
"...taking your place?" He finished her sentence the way she would have, had she the courage. She sobbed again into his shoulder.
