Chapter 1

“Well, here they are! The COVID-19 prevention and cure pills. The FDA actually approved this, hard to imagine something like that happening so quick! Then again, the President and others are eager to get the economy restarted, aren’t they?” I commented to Mom as the pills arrived via USPS, just as they did for everyone else.

“Yeah, it does seem rather ... rushed, doesn’t it? But what are the alternatives, really? I’d like you to be safe to return to work and so would you, right? This lockdown and furlough mess has driven everyone up the wall, including Darrell. The second stimulus check will help as well,” Mom agreed, “but it doesn’t help frayed nerves from being in such close ... proximity for weeks now.”

“True, we’re all a little stir crazy right now, aren’t we?” my stepsister, Jessica, spoke her mind, too, though I assumed that she was tired of me.

“Well, Jess, that’s true enough, I admit,” I grudgingly accepted the fact of her assertion, implying that it was mutual to get under her skin.

“Now, you, too, learn to get along!” Mom insisted while conveniently avoiding the issues coming up lately with Darrell Ivey, her husband, my stepfather.

Of course, some of them were due to the lockdown, I concede that much, but no small part of it was that Darrell just plain hated me. There were no two ways around it. Mom didn’t notice it too much, though she sometimes urged him to behave in a more fatherly manner. Some of his daughter Jessica’s bad disposition was clearly inherited from him, though she was still nicer than he. Yep, I didn’t have the nice, close emotional bond with my stepfather that some folks in blended families did.

Darrell just plain resented me on many levels, but I could never pinpoint the reason. I had tried to be a good stepson, tried to respect his authority, but in the past two years since Mom married him, things just got worse. He would never give me the time of day, well, maybe that wasn’t literally true, since he would try to rush me off earlier for work at my job.

Since I was furloughed, he constantly bitched at me, particularly since he was furloughed himself. Mom becoming the sole breadwinner suddenly rubbed both of us the wrong way, but it was what it was. I just didn’t try to take it out on him, as it was not his fault any more than it was mine. He didn’t show me the same courtesy, and for whatever reason, Mom didn’t notice much or if at all.

“Well, bottoms up, right? I’m so damned eager to take my pills and get ... safe to work at last!” Darrell spoke as he took the pills with a gin and tonic.

“Um, dear, shouldn’t we read the directions first? Well, I guess not for you. Too late. You’ll be the guinea pig, I suppose. Good luck!”

Mom tried to read the directions, but then realized that they were in a foreign language, so she went ahead and took hers with a glass of sherry.

“Should we be ... taking these on empty stomachs?” I asked aloud, “particularly with booze?”

“You’re just jealous that you’re underage to drink,” Darrell snarled at me, for once not waiting until Mom was out of the room.

“Darrell, please, don’t be petty like that,” Mom urged him, both of their eyes starting to take on a slight glassy look.

“As it happens, Darrell, we live in Louisiana, where it’s quite legal for a twenty-year old like me to drink some spirits if I’m accompanied by an adult older than twenty-one. That’s not the point. We don’t know what the rules or instructions or guidelines are for this medication. The directions are in ... some kind of Cyrillic language. If I hazarded a guess, I would say Russian. We shouldn’t just take chances here,” I retorted firmly.

“Don’t lecture me, sonny, like you’re our pharmacist or doctor. I’m your father!” Darrell raged at me.

“Hell, no! You’re my stepfather! And not by much ... you do nothing here but piss people off!” I snapped back while breaking down and taking the pills.

“Both of you, please!” Jessica pleaded with us now, “see, Mom ... see what they’re like! I fucking told you!”

“Watch your language, daughter!” Darrell demanded.

“Oh, pipe down, Darrell! Jess was just upset. There are bigger issues than her language. Is this how you’ve been talking to my son? Really? No wonder he doesn’t like you. He gave you a chance ... even this last commentary of his was quite sane and level-headed, if you ask me.

“He doesn’t even dislike Jessica that much. He just thinks that she doesn’t like him. You need to really dial down the hostility, Darrell. Seriously! I love you, babe, sometimes, I don’t like that you much lately. It’s probably just the cabin fever, but I mean, come on! I want the two men in my life to get along!” Mom implored him.

“Wait, you think that I don’t like you, Simon? Why would you think that? I’m sorry if I ever made you feel that way. I get along with Mom so well that I actually call her ‘Mom,’ nowadays. If I seem upset with you, bro, it’s just because you and Dad are the only two in this household who never seem to get along.

“It’s rough to be torn between my own father, with whom it’s harder to show any resentment or frustration ... and my stepbrother, who just plain seems angry with everyone of late ... especially the past few weeks of quarantine,” Jessica assured me as she took the pills now.

“Well, I assumed from your expressions that you shared Darrell’s hatred for me, since he is your father. I knew that you got along with Mom, though. I simply assumed that you inherited all of Darrell’s feelings about us in toto. Since he despised me, I thought that you did. Face it, this is the first time that you’ve even called me some version of ‘bro’ or even ‘stepbro,’ you know,” I explained.

“And you’ve never called me ‘sis,’ or even ‘stepsis,’ either, bro. Just ‘Jess,’ which is okay, I suppose. At least it’s a nickname of sorts, not ‘Jessica,’ but I’d rather you called me ‘sis.’ Come on, can the two of us agree to act like ... brother and sister? I’ve never had a brother and I really want one! Mom died when I was just six, you know, and Dad ... just recently got remarried. Dad’s still bitter about her death, I think. Breast cancer is an ugly way to go,” Jessica pleaded with me now, surprising me with both her softer side and my own weakness for it.

“Sure, sis. That makes me bro, right, not ‘Simon,’ you’d agree?” I urged her now.

“Yes! Thank you, thank you, thank you! I feel like this is more of a family now than it has been for the past two years!” Jessica told me, actually hugging me in a way that reminded me uncomfortably of her ... impressive bust.

Yes, I couldn’t help but notice for the past two years that my stepsister, Jessica Ivey, was a stunning girl with a nice pair of boobs. Her ass wasn’t bad, either, but the first feature that most guys noticed about her was her bosom. She had trouble finding bras that fit her D-cup tits that made her pleasing to some shallower fellows who might otherwise be put off by her plump body. Jessica was what they used to call buxom, a busty, curvy woman whose mother’s Mexican heritage was on full display with her tawny complexion and voluptuous figure.

My mother Naomi, by contrast, was ... well, a full-scale, full-throttle, all-natural blonde with curls, milky-white skin, baby blue eyes, and a more slender body with small, yet perky tits. Both ladies had nice butts, Mom’s somewhat tighter and more toned, Jessica’s rather plush, a classic Latin booty. Mom had better legs, though, no question of that. She had legs that suited her height and accentuated it considerably. In fact, Mom towered over Darrell and Jessica alike, but not over me. I took the prize for stature in my household.

Clearly, Jessica didn’t get her looks from Darrell, if I had to guess. He wasn’t ugly, but he was the shortest of us and had the classic “Napoleon complex” often associated with highly insecure short guys. He was also slim and still resembled a 98 pound weakling in appearance. He had little fat, little muscle, little mass at all. He still looked like a fifteen year old boy and often acted the part with his attitude, too.

Part of me wondered if his instant dislike of me was due to that, even though I was a chubby, prematurely balding twenty-year old lad. Then again, I was taller than him for sure, at six feet even. Mom, by contrast, was five foot ten and that was taller than Darrell or Jessica. I was also physically much stronger than my chunky figure would suggest. I could probably break Darrell in half and he knew it.

Being smarter than him on some topics also gave him cause to resent me, I suppose, since his whole identity was as a kind of financial wizard par excellence. I was neither athlete, market analyst, nor academic, yet I was brighter and tougher than my stepfather, and he must have envied me both things. He was admittedly richer (savings and investments) and more handsome than me, but I could live with that. His ego had already taken a beating from the furlough that the bosses gave most in that brokerage, though he was still far from insolvent.

I was a barber myself and made decent money as one, but the economy had forced me to dip into my savings and use the stimulus money to help survive. I pitched in as well as I could for the family, but it was Mom who had the steady income these days, being an RN (that’s registered nurse for those of you still unfamiliar with the medical field). Today was her first day off in three weeks and she was visibly exhausted.

Jessica, well, she was in college at age nineteen and far from busy with universities in lockdown mode. To say that she was bored, with no campus activities, no friends hanging out, no social life to speak of would be to understate things. To be stuck at home with a father and stepbrother who didn’t get along tended to drive her nuts, to say the least.

“Penny for your thoughts, sweetie?” Mom broke my silence now as we ate the frozen pizza that passed for supper tonight.

“Just ... about Dad,” I lied.

“I’m sorry that your father is in prison, Simon, but I’m not sorry about the divorce. It was bound to happen when he got caught stealing from the Sheriff’s Department ... what did he expect? He was going to get busted and he did. Face it, your father was ... dishonest, mean, even nasty. I was done with well before the divorce, but that was the last time.

“Face it, I have lousy taste in men. I thought that he looked handsome in his deputy’s uniform, the most strapping cop in the parish. I went for the uniform and didn’t see past it, but I don’t regret having you, trust me,” Mom was a lot more candid than usual, a lot more open about some things in her past that were always off-limits topics.

“Counting Darrell?” I asked her, noting her umbrage at that query.

“Hey, Darrell’s not a bad guy ... and neither are you! He just ... has issues,” Mom blushed as she admitted that Darrell had unresolved resentments or whatever.

“Other than his looks, his money, and his ... brains, I don’t see the appeal,” I scoffed a bit, blushing as I noted how silly I sounded.

“Well, at least you admit that I’ve got those going for me! Look ... we got off on the wrong foot ... two years ago, and we never quite buried the hatchet for whatever ... differences we had. I look at this beefy, brawny kid and at first think, ‘well, at least I’m handsomer ... and smarter than him.’ Then I realize that you’re not a dumb jock, either.

“You’re not rich like me, but you have a lot of brute physical strength and stamina, especially upper-body, and there’s no doubt that you could take me in a fight. Our brains are probably closely matched, but we ... tend to follow different paths. You seem to know a lot of history, science, things of that nature, though you haven’t used that in your career for whatever reason.

“I’ll be frank here ... you remind me of the bullies that hazed me in high school, you know. Yet you don’t bully me. You just seem to resent me. You don’t seem to have a lot of ... ambition, but I wonder if some of that is a sense of obligation to your mother, being so close to her. You’re loathe to leave her alone with Jessica and me.

“It’s like you don’t have anything to prove to anyone, which I admit annoys me in some ways. I’ve always felt the need to impress people, you know. I don’t know why I’m talking so freely, either. Why are we ... being so ... brutally frank with each other? I just don’t understand that. All of the sudden, we’re all big talkers, you know. Do you?” Darrell confronted me at last about his true feelings about me.