I'd finished a quiz in my calculus class at State early and was glad to be on my way home. No particular reason; I'd just been getting into study and some projects pretty intensely lately and I wanted some time to just veg out and ignore it all. I crossed the living room and was almost at the hallway leading to my room when I heard the unmistakable sounds of passion. I smiled. Mom had apparently invited a special guest over and I was glad of it. Like the Lamberts, we'd had to pull through the shock of a husband and father snatched from this orb before his appointed time. That was been three years ago and while Mom hadn't exactly slipped into an emotional tar pit, neither had she really gotten anything much going with anyone. In fact, it's just a bit uncanny how many parallels there were between the Lamberts' recent family history and ours. The sounds wafting past my ears now at least told me there might be a new candidate in the running.
Her bedroom door was half-open, so I decided it might be a good idea if I just got scarce for a while and returned later, at the time I normally would after class. That way she wouldn't find me in my room after her current recreation was over and realize I must have passed by the door and probably glanced inside. Not that it would have been the end of the world, but it was a little thing that might help her feel a little less self-conscious.
I was turning on my heel to leave, but then I got a little wave of curiosity. I edged over toward the door to try to hear a little more of the action for a few minutes. It was interesting, and then, unexpectedly, arousing. At least I thought so. Sure, it's not exactly strange to find the sounds of sex stimulating, but it did seem strange, or at least unexpected, that it would happen when the sounds from the female half of the program my own mother. It felt just a tiny bit creepy at first as this notion that I should stifle the feelings nagged at me, but it was just a very short time later that I let all that go. Mother or not, she's still a woman with all the things a man appreciates in a woman, and in Mom's case, quite an impressive assortment of them. Over a few minutes I found that hearing her like this, even the wordless sounds I could still recognize as her own, was unlocking some well-hidden recognition of her womanhood. It was pleasant but not passionate, and it did not worry me. It wasn't any revelation, just a sweet addition to the things about her I had already learned to admire.
The guy's grunts and noises didn't register much with me until minutes had passed and I was again about to leave. Then, hoarsely, he started to speak, and at the sound I froze, stock-still. I did recognize that voice--Jerry's! Jerry was Mom's lover, just as I was his mother's! What a kick that was! Now I was pretty sure where he had gone the day I helped Karen with the boxes--and discovered so much more. In that light it seemed perfectly fitting Mom should take easily to Jerry that way.
Suddenly I felt a sudden surge of arousal. Perhaps it was because Mom's and Jerry's affair so closely mirrored Karen's and mine that the sounds of their loving touched my own feelings of Karen's and mine and pulled them to the surface. Whatever the psychology involved, it was pretty damn nice and I stuck around for a while longer, now mentally merging Mom's sounds with my memory of Karen's into a delightful combination.
Finally I got back to my original plan and quietly left. I stopped over to a diner for a quick lunch and headed back when the time came when I'd normally be expected to arrive. Jerry had left and Mom was going about what she normally does, nothing out of the ordinary. I greeted her, a bit more warmly than usual in spite of myself, and headed to my room, hoping she wouldn't notice that and make anything of it.
In the hours, then days, that followed, now and then some little wisp of remembered sound or my mind's manufactured image of what I might have seen through that half-opened door would pop up out of nowhere and there would be a nice little surge of some sweetness for a moment. As is usual for such things, the way the the mind tries to fill in the information lacking from direct observation, I'd have some vague mental picture of what it might have looked like.
After a while, though, sometimes when the manufactured picture got a bit too vivid and interesting I'd get a really creepy twinge. It was just my imagination, of course, but there I'd be, getting good and hot gazing down on my own mother having sex with my friend, and that's not supposed to happen, right? But the twinges were short-lived; a moment's automatic reflection served to banish them.
I didn't feel anything creepy about the listening part; it was just the sounds of hot sex that were the turn-on, which is just as well, because over the course of some weeks it happened again--in fact, three times. It was a bit of a shock to me to discover that, without even knowing it, I had begun to make some effort to get home early when I could, and to realize the motivation for that. But it didn't stop me.
Sex had never been a delicate subject in our family. I'd been educated in the birds and the bees early and well. I was taught that masturbation was a perfectly normal form of pleasure, without guilt or shame, and when the time came to graduate to sex with women, my education had been about respect, self-control and empathy, knowing what to do when, and knowing when to hold off when that was the better choice. My affair with Karen was no secret; no reason why Mom's and Jerry's should be. Somewhere in the middle of another ordinary conversation I managed to bring it up, just to break the ice and erase any uncertainty.
"Y'know, Mom, by the way..."
"Brad...?"
"If Jerry's as good for you as his mother is for me, you must be getting quite a ride." I eyed Mom for a reaction, and got the one I expected. There was just an instant of surprise, and then a broad smile.
"I am getting on hell of a ride, I can tell you that, and it's sure damn welcome, too. Seems the Lambert clan is quite a sexual power-house! I don't know if it's how good it feels or just to see I can turn a young man on like that, but I feel years younger."
I nodded. "It's been a long while--too long, hasn't it, Mom?"
She just nodded in agreement.
The discovery of Mom's liaisons with Jerry had triggered a small reaction not unlike the one I'd had about Karen, the way I'd begun to see her more as a woman than as just a friend's mom. I was seeing my own mother a bit differently too, a little shift away from Mom, my mother, toward Mom, a woman. It was perfectly innocent, a detached recognition, nothing to worry about, and I enjoyed it. I found myself appreciating her exceptional attractiveness, and I think she may have picked up on that a bit, and found it encouraging.
In addition--as I said, the parallels to the Lambert story are a bit uncanny--the shift seemed to be on both sides. Jerry's attentions had re-kindled her own sexuality and it was showing itself in various ways, some of which she may have been conscious of, and some, I'm sure, she wasn't. Either way, there was that same subtle change in choices of dress, her deportment and little shades of behavior that spoke of a renewed sexuality. None of that was for my benefit, of course; it was just part of the background of her life, but I noticed nonetheless, and enjoyed it.
I should mention one thing here, and that is that where we live is not exactly downtown Manhattan. It's a pretty sparsely populated corner of Montana. We're not exactly isolated, but it's a small-town kind of society, and pickings for dating partners and such are rather slim. That may have something to do with a slightly greater interest I sensed growing between Mom and me than you might expect ordinarily; I don't know. It took the form of little opportunities to notice and encourage each other. It was nice. Like being able to give her a big grin and wolf-whistle when she put on her new and very sexy swimsuit without freaking her out that her son was noticing and, maybe, getting a thrill out of it. That sort of thing.
Then came the day that I was due over at Jerry's for some computer work and I was way early. Our families were close enough to enjoy a kind of open-door policy and when nobody answered my knock I let myself in, the door being unlocked. I was instantly aware of a now-quite-familiar sound: the sound of sex. Karen was enjoying a lover. Our relationship was not a romance and not in the least exclusive, so I found myself inclined to simply take off and return later, until I heard the voices of the lovers speaking between the moaning and panting.
Karen's voice I easily recognized, but the other--the other, I recognized too, but could not believe--not accept.
It was Jerry's!
Jerry was fucking his mother!
Now, the proper reaction to this is some kind of horrid, sick revulsion, right? That's what's supposed to happen. Those are the rules. But for now, I was just in a surreal place, where the information from my senses was meeting disbelief from my mind.
I had to look, as if to satisfy myself it was real. I was now very careful to avoid detection, and managed to find a vantage point that offered a narrow, but reasonably clear, view into the room. From there, utterly transfixed, I saw the familiar athletics of sex, but at the same time, the faces of the participants, my friend, and his mother. Jerry was on his back while his mother rode him with an energy that I knew well, and well appreciated, while he ran his hands all over her breasts between feeling everything else within reach. Karen was gripping his hands in hers, pressing them against her breasts, any words lost in noisy convusions.
With a sudden movement that took me by surprise, she turned away and Jerry entered her from behind. Karen seemed to catch fire, begging him to thrust deeper, harder, and he was certainly doing all he could to do just that.
In time I saw them moving again, and I realized that I'd better get the hell out of there before there was a chance I might get caught. Silently I made my exit and drove off.
The shock of the scene kept my head swimming and I found myself heading over to a burger joint just to sit down somewhere and munch on something until my mind simmered down. And simmer down it did, slowly. As the fog of disbelief lifted I was amazed at how horrible, degraded, perverted what I had seen--wasn't. Really. I just didn't feel any of the terrible things you're supposed to feel if you've seen something like that. It was just--well, just a man and a woman, doing as a man and a woman do when there's no real reason not to, harming no one, bringing each other a lot of good. As the minutes passed it all seemed more and more normal, except with some kind of special kick I can't really explain too well. By the time I finished up with the burg and headed home, pretty much all of the troubling thoughts had faded away and the picture had become something very interesting--and, minute by minute, more and more exciting.
Despite my acceptance, I still needed to be careful to avoid letting on that I knew, so I was careful to avoid arriving at the Lamberts' anytime I wasn't expected. Not that I needed to; that occasion had been a fluke, a case where time had run away with them and they'd forgotten that I would be coming over. But the picture kept asserting itself frequently and, after a while, I wanted to break the tension. Jerry and I had been the closest of friends forever and I'd never had the slightest worry about telling him anything, but this was different. I fought the urge for a long time, until one day when were were shooting hoops at the rec and had taken a break.
"Hey, Jer," I said as breath returned.
"Yea, Brad?"
"I...I gotta tell you something."
"Sure, Bro, what?" Jerry's manner was so easy, like a million other conversations, and that, strangely, almost shot me down.
"Well, hey, y'know..."
He looked at me quizzically. This sort of reticience was foreign to our relationship.
"Hey, what is it? What's all the hemming and hawing about?"
