Chapter 1

Life had thrown Rashida Aziz a lot of curveballs.

Born to a pair of immigrants who came to America from Morocco she was raised in a rather traditional and modest family.

Traditional and modest were not words that could have described Rashida.

She had quite the reputation throughout high school as a ‘wild child’, whatever parties she attended would soon become way out of hand, she jumped from boyfriend to boyfriend faster than a frog leapt over six lanes of traffic and partook in every form of consumption and debauchery that her parents ever mentioned much less forbade, and had the time of her life doing it.

But things got very real very quickly when she found herself missing her period a few days after a particularly wild and hard-to-remember house party.

As you can probably guess she was indeed pregnant.

Her parents were furious with her, not only was she engaging in behaviour that they had spent her lifetime pushing against, but she had been such an effective liar that this was the first hint they had ever received that Rashida was not the perfect little angel they had assured themselves she was.

She thought her father was going to have an aneurysm when she told him she had no clue who the father was.

That was the last straw for them, furious with her betrayal they handed her money for a bus ticket and her suitcase and kicked her out of the house.

She used that bus ticket to move to the other end of the state.

As you may have expected life was hard for a pregnant single mother in an unfamiliar town with no home, no job and no connections.

With no other choice, she desperately marched around town, lugging around her suitcase and her ever-expanding belly from job interview to job interview with a handful of resumes she had written on a legal pad in ballpoint pen.

Needless to say, she didn’t find much success.

Until one day she walked into a small fledgling landscaping company owned by a young man named Clark who had put it together with money he had inherited from his grandfather.

To this day Rashida claims she can still smell the paint drying on the office wall.

Perhaps he pitted her, perhaps something about her attitude and makeshift resume that impressed him, or perhaps he just related to someone starting their life over as he was.

Regardless he gave her the job as his company’s first-ever secretary, he hadn’t even realized he needed a secretary but she took to it like white on rice, turning an enterprise that started as one guy working out of a glorified garage into a business that had a chance of making some money.

They would see a change in their relationship when Clark would come into work early one morning and find her sleeping in a makeshift bed made of topsoil at the back of the warehouse.

Refusing to let one of his employees, close friends, and especially a pregnant woman live in those conditions he had her move into the other side of a duplex he had also inherited from his grandfather and was planning to rent out.

He gave her a ride to and helped pay for her first ultrasound, and even let Rashida drag him into the room with her to see the first glimpses of her son.

He helped her build the crib and baby-proof her home.

And most importantly on one fateful day, he woke up in the dead of night to drive her to the hospital where she gave birth to her son Aaron Clark Aziz on May 21st at 2:05 in the morning.

The two continued to be close as Aaron grew up.

Both of them were there to watch his first steps across the office kitchen, Clark gave Aaron his first driving lesson in the company truck, and once he was old enough Clark gave Aaron his first job at his landscaping company, and for the first 18 years of Aaron’s life he lived perfectly happily.

That is until Rashida’s diagnosis.

You see she had almost entirely put her party girl days behind her, everything except her smoking habit that she didn’t drop until she was diagnosed with a rather nasty form of lung cancer a few months ago.

Aaron felt like he was going to puke when he heard about it.

His mother was his only family, whenever he tried to contact his grandparents or any of his aunts he was met with the same cold isolating word.

‘Unread’.

And don’t even get him started on trying to track down his father.

Clark probably took it just as hard, Aaron began to observe once he reached his teenage years that Clark was desperately infatuated with Rashida, although he tried to keep it secret it was clear to everyone but Rashida herself how madly in love he was with her.

He had made it through slow seasons, economic crashes and even the mysterious nudity-causing virus ‘The Spell’ throwing the world into lockdown and freezing up business.

But this, this looked like it was going to end him.

A sober cloud of dread floated over both their homes and the business as Rashida went through the first round of the long shot that was Chemotherapy.

And on the day of her very last treatment, Aaron found himself sprawled out on the couch scrolling through Netflix, too bored to make any sort of selection and too depressed to get up and do something else.

He just kept flipping through menus and checking his phone, repeating that cycle for at least an hour before a knock on the door snapped him out of it.

As soon as he opened the door he sucked in air in surprise.

“Hey Chloe,” Aaron said nervously, his voice ready to break at any moment, “What’s up?”

“My mom was making cookies and thought you guys could do with some,” Chloe smiled, handing him the large Tupperware, careful to not let their fingers touch, “It’s your mom’s last day of Chemo right?”

“Yep,” Aaron nodded, holding the Tupperware at waist height.

You couldn’t blame Aaron for having trouble thinking right now.

He had had a crush on the little red-headed girl across the street since before either of them had entered grade school, a crush that had persisted through bad acne, tweenage social awkwardness and perhaps the worst pair of braces he had ever seen on a girl, until today with the beautiful young grown woman standing before him.

It also didn’t help his sanity much that she was butt ass naked.

You see she had an older sister who had gone off to college as the two of them had entered their senior year of high school, when she had come back for the summer she was very clearly infected by the spell.

For the last couple weeks of high school Chloe had to live with her head down as rumour spread through the hall of that girl’s naked older sister with the ‘super tits,’ he remembered them being called.

So it was, for lack of a better term, surprising when during graduation, three months after her 18th birthday, as she walked across the stage to accept her diploma and immediately after shaking hands with the principal she threw off her robe, revealing a goddess-like body with shapely legs, a bald pussy and round bouncing breasts that every man in the audience would immediately commit to memory, before jumping off the stage to give her sister the biggest hug she could manage.

Over the next couple days, it would be evident that Chloe’s mother and father joined their daughters in the nudie lifestyle, at one point asking to borrow Clark and his truck to help them donate trash bags full of clothes to Goodwill.

“You must be excited,” Chloe said, “Hopeful even,”

“Not sure I can afford it,” Aaron admitted, “I don’t think the doctors are optimistic,”

“Right,” Chloe nodded, her face falling for a second, “But still, getting through the first round, that’s an achievement,”

“It is,” Aaron said, forcing himself to smile, “You guys have been a big help by the way,”

“Oh, it’s just my mom,” Chloe corrected, “I’m just the delivery girl,”

“I stand by my statement,” Aaron insisted.

A faint hint of blush spread across Chloe’s cheeks.

“It must also be nice having Clark around,” she said, changing the subject, “If only everyone’s boss was that nice,”

“Well it’s not the first time he’s saved our asses,” Aaron shrugged, “Doubt it will be the last,”

“He make a move on your mom yet?” She asked about ready to burst out laughing.

This wasn’t the first time she had asked this question.

It was a running joke between the two, every time they would meet he heard the same thing from her.

“Hello, how are you, Clark make a move on your mom yet?”.

“Hey, who knows,” Chloe began, “Maybe when your mom gets better he’ll realize what a fool he’s been for waiting so long,”

“I admire your optimism,” Aaron chuckled as Chloe turned to walk back to her house.

“Tell your mom we’re all praying for her,” she said, giving him a spectacular view of her tight, perfect ass as she walked away.

“Will do,” he waved.

She waved back as he closed the front door.

“Fuck,” he cursed, resting his forehead against the door as he felt his cock push against the zipper of his jeans.

“How sick am I?” Aaron thought to himself, “Perving out on her on a day like today?”

As he walked into the kitchen he threw the Tupperware down on the counter and splashed cold water across his face.

It wasn’t long before he heard Clark’s truck pull into the driveway.

He took a moment to close his eyes and mentally prepare himself as he heard the doorknob click.

“Hey!” He greeted in a soft voice with a plastered-on smile as his mother walked through the door, followed quickly by Clark.

Something seemed off however, his mother, her lovely brown locks long since gone since starting treatment, was wrapped in a foil blanket, like the ones police give people after bad car wrecks, he also felt it odd that Clark wasn’t guiding her by the hand as he usually did, instead allowing her to clutch the walls to keep her balance.

“Is everything okay?” He asked growing ever more worried.

“I’m fine baby,” Rashida assured her son, kicking off her shoes and weakly beginning to climb up the stairs to her bedroom, “I’m just tired,”

“I bring you up something to drink in a minute, okay?” Clark said softly, a worried look on his face as she walked up the stairs.

“Okay,” she sighed back, as she walked behind a wall and out of Aaron’s sight she shrugged off the foil blanket off her shoulders, Aaron could’ve sworn he caught the smallest glimpse of bare flesh before she disappeared.

The uncomfortable yet hypnotized look on Clark’s face provided another hint.

“Is everything alright?” Aaron asked as Clark walked into the kitchen and wordlessly began to pour a glass of orange juice, watering it down so the taste wasn’t too much for Rashida.

“Not really,” Clark admitted after a moment of silent contemplation, placing the glass on the counter and turning to face Aaron, “Something happened at the doctor’s office,”

He stammered and struggled to find the words leading to Aaron to grow more and more impatient.

“Just spit it out,” Aaron demanded, “You’re killing me here,”

“Apparently...” Clark began hesitantly, “An infected man and a woman stormed in during the middle of your mother’s treatment waving around a gun, wearing balaclavas and little else,”

“So they infected her?” Aaron asked, struggling to believe what he was hearing.

“Not just her,” Clark sighed, “The two other patients getting treated, the doctor, two nurses and one of the patient’s wife and daughter keeping him company,”

“Jesus,” Aaron cursed, “This is the last thing Mom needs right now,”

“We just have to take it slow with her,” Clark said, picking up the glass of juice and heading towards the staircase, “Give her the space she needs,”

A few minutes after walking up the stairs he came back down with a sober look on his face.

“Just let her rest for now,” he said, slipping his shoes back on and opening the front door, “I’ll be back to check on you guys in the morning if you need anything you know where to find me,”

Soon Aaron was alone in the kitchen, for the rest of the night he was on autopilot, his mind bouncing back and forth like an infinite game of pong as he had a bowl of cereal for dinner and flipped through social media on his phone, never full engaging with the world around him and seemingly unable to finish a thought at all, eventually when he noticed it getting dark outside he headed up to bed, sleep didn’t come easily as he tossed and turned but eventually his eyelids grew heavy and he drifted into uneven sleep.

We awoke suddenly when he heard a commotion coming from downstairs in the kitchen.

With a groan he climbed out of bed and slipped on his jeans from yesterday, carefully tiptoeing down the stairs and finding the kitchen empty of people but the counters were full of food, eggs were cooking in the frying pan and every scrap of baked pastries the neighbourhood had given them was spread out across the table.

“Hello?” He called out, not so loud that he could be heard from upstairs where his mom was resting, “Clark, you there?”

“Morning babe,” Rashida greeted her son as she walked out from behind him with a bag of frozen hash browns from the freezer in the garage, “Hungry?”

Aaron’s eyes widened as he saw his mom walk into the kitchen buck-naked.

As she pulled out another frying pan she was seeming completely apathetic to the fact that her son had a full view of her large but still firm breasts, swaying butt and mound now bare from chemical hair loss.