Chapter 3

As the young woman stormed into the bar, Kent couldn't help but admire her body. The girl was stick-thin, with a perfect face - cheekbones that a model would have killed for, surrounded by long and curly black hair. Though she was conservatively dressed, the large bartender could imagine exactly what she'd look like unclothed; like a pixie, lithe and graceful, slender without ever being bony.

The room was empty - the Friday night crowd wouldn't start drifting in for another hour or so, but though Kent could tell that the angry girl wasn't here for a drink, he asked her anyway.

"What can you get me? What can you GET me!? You can get me my parents back, you sick fuck!"

Tiny though she was, Kent had to admire the girl's efforts to tower over him. She'd reached out and grabbed his bow-tie with one hand, and in an attempt to pull him toward her, had only succeeded at bringing herself over the bench, her furious countenance inches away from Kent's passive face.

He didn't move at all, and when his face didn't even show a glimmer of recognition or understanding, the brunette's anger subsided slightly, only to flare up again when she saw his name-tag.

"Kent!" she thundered, and Kent nodded in response. "I know you had something to do with this! My father said that I should talk to you, and he wouldn't have done that if you weren't up to ... up to something!"

Slowly, Kent pulled out a glass and poured the girl a glass of water. His calm manner relaxed her, somehow, and after sniffing to make sure that there was nothing unusual about the beverage, the girl took a sip.

"Now," he said, his deep Southern drawl unhurried and relaxed, "why don't you start by telling me your name, and then fill me in on what you're talking about, little lady?"

She continued to glare at him, but as his hands went to adjust his bow-tie, she found her eyes strangely drawn to the red accessory. It was odd, she couldn't help but muse, how infrequently you saw bow-ties these days. Such a big man, such a small piece of clothing ... and what color is that? It's not quite red, but I don't know what you'd call it...

While she stared at the bow-tie, the girl took a deep breath and started to explain what had happened to her.

"I'm Julia," she said, not realizing that it had been more than three minutes since either of them had spoken. "And I don't know how, but I think you've done something to my parents..."

It had all started at the start of the week, when Julia's mother Trisha had come to pick her up from school. She was late, which was unusual for her, but it wasn't until Julia jumped in the car that she realized that something was wrong. Very wrong.

Trisha reeked of alcohol, she was dressed like a street whore, and her breasts had somehow more than doubled in size. Julia would have suspected surgery, but that morning when Trisha had given her a lift to the community college she attended, everything had been normal ... and she knew that at least a few days' recovery was needed after implants.

"Mom?" she'd asked, and when Trisha had turned to face her, recoiled in shock. It was as if she'd gotten into a car with a stranger - her mother had a wild, lustful look in her eyes, one that Julia had never seen in anyone but criminals on the news, or drunken jocks at frat parties.

When Trisha had smiled, Julia's skin had crawled, and another smell hit her - the smell of sex.

Her mother had just been fucked.

There's only so much weirdness you can cope with before a tiny bit of you shuts down, and Julia simply sat in shock as her mother began to drive. She didn't comment on the recklessness of the driving, and she barely noticed that they were going the wrong way.

Only when they parked under a clearing in the woods outside of town did Julia attempt to say anything, and even then she was barely a few words in before her mother interrupted.

Though she couldn't remember the exact wording of the conversation, there were two things she knew she'd never forget: the strange, lustful sound of her mother's voice - raspy, yet somehow stronger than Julia had ever heard it. Forceful, dominant ... proud. It was alarming, but not nearly as worrying as the content of what her mother was saying.

As Julia stared at the bartender's sparkling bow-tie, she recounted her mother's insistence that it was the role of a good daughter to please her parents, to please her mother. It was her job to serve her, sexually, and in that job, Julia had failed. She had failed as a daughter.

She'd shied back in fear, considered getting out of the car and running, but there was nowhere to go, and her brain still wasn't quite coping with the fact that her mother - her dear sweet mother - was lewdly telling Julia of the lesbian acts she wanted to engage in with her. Before that conversation in the car, Julia would never have even guessed that Trisha knew the word "felching", let alone wanted her own daughter to do it to her.

Again, Julia would have suspected that it was an extremely good disguise, or perhaps someone else wearing her mother's body like a suit, except that she was still Trisha. She had the same mannerisms, the same facial expressions (though thickly coated with lust) and, except for the swearing, the same turns of phrase that her mother had always used.

As Trisha had wrapped up, she'd even become a bit emotional.

"I love you, Julia." she'd said, the first sentence since Julia had gotten into the car that didn't contain any curses. " ... and I just want to fuck your sweet young cunt."

Trisha hadn't been threatening, either verbally or physically, and aside from the passion with which she'd described a number of the sexual acts she wanted to share with her daughter, hadn't been aggressive at all either. To Julia's relief, that didn't change, even as the young woman sat there numbly, not saying a word, not sure what to say.

After more than fifteen minutes of silence, Trisha had seemed to take the hint. She'd taken another swig from an unmarked bottle in the back seat, and begun the drive home, neither mother or daughter saying a word for the entire trip.

Julia hadn't told her father - how could she? - and when he came home, she was locked in her room, holding her knees and rocking back and forth, over and over again. Something had happened to her mother, something bad.

Two days later, it happened to her father as well.

Her sensible, manly (if quiet) father had disappeared for a few hours, and when he'd come home, been dressed in nothing but a blouse and a pair of panties, sporting a pierced nose and a number of camp affectations that wouldn't go away. Though Julia hadn't spoken to her father about what had happened in the car on Monday night, there had been an unspoken solidarity between them, a shared confusion about what had happened.

Trisha had barely acknowledged Roger as a human since her grotesque transformation; it seemed to Julia that her newfound love of women was matched (if not exceeded) by a sudden hatred of men, and Roger seemed to be the one to bear the brunt of it. Julia's father had been patient, and though he'd tried - unsuccessfully - to get her to talk to him, he wasn't able to break through, get to the bottom of whatever was happening to her mother.

That day, when he arrived home wearing ladies' garments, Roger had become just as bad as Julia's mother, if not worse.

Where Trisha had seemed quite happy to leave her teenage daughter alone in her room, the new Roger was constantly pushing for her to come and join the family. He was obsessed with the idea that Julia must obey her mother, and seemed to get off on the disgust that Trisha poured his way.

And most horribly of all, though he never overtly said so, he seemed to want Julia to sleep with her mother.

The idea disgusted her, her new home situation scared her, and the fact that both her parents seemed to be acting completely out of character ... Julia was exhausted by the whole thing.

And so that morning, she hadn't gone to school. For the first time in her life, she'd just lay in bed, and listened to her parents fighting. Well, fighting was hardly the word for it - her mother was simply debasing her father, who seemed to be grovelling in apology, and barely concealing how much he was enjoying his punishment.

This went on for a few hours - there was nothing that Trisha could say, no term of abuse that was too far, nothing that Roger didn't lap up, while all the time crying out what a naughty boy he was, what a piece of human filth he was, and how he should be punished.

Just when it all seemed to be over, when Julia was thanking the stars that it had finally ended, her door opened. She held the covers up in fear, but it wasn't her mother, finally giving into temptation and taking her daughter by force - it was her father.

"I'm sorry, darling," he said sadly, and for a second it was like Julia had her father back. "This must all be very confusing to you."

When Julia nodded, he stepped forward, suddenly more confident than Julia had seen him in days. If it weren't for the cheerleader outfit he was wearing, a skirt so short it barely covered his ass, and the obvious welts from Trisha's beating, she could have pretended that nothing was strange. She could have pretended that her life hadn't abruptly been turned into a strange kind of hell that she never could have dreamed of, not in her wildest fantasies.

But then Roger spoke, and any thought of life being normal was dispelled.

"Here," he lisped, and held out an address. "Go here. Talk to the bartender, Kent.

"He'll help you understand."

With that he was gone, slinking out of the room as if he'd been walking on platform heels his entire life. He paused briefly by the underwear drawer, and when Julia checked, she tried to pretend that the pair of panties she'd left on top weren't gone. She tried to pretend that her father hadn't stolen them while standing directly front of her.

"And that's how I knew," Julia said. Her voice was no longer loud and angry, but had gradually become quieter as she'd told the story. Now it was gentle, almost reflective. "That's how I knew you had something to do with it - neither of my parents have gone to a bar in their life, and I remembered mother mentioning that she'd stopped by here before picking me up from school that day."

Kent had waited patiently as the girl said her piece, polishing a glass and enjoying the trance that Julia had let herself fall into as she stared into his twinkling bow-tie. Now that she was done, he leaned forward sympathetically.

"I'm sorry that you're mad," he said, his soft tone matching Julia's. "But there's one thing you haven't explained."

"Mmmm?" Julia replied, all of her anger gone. "What's that?"

"You haven't explained why you need to seduce your father."

Julia nodded sadly, and then looked up, snapping out of her stupor.

"What?? How did you know about that?" she said sharply. She obviously still didn't trust the bartender, but he didn't seem offended, and with a casual shrug, he gestured for her to continue.