Chapter 9

The car ride home started out in silence. They were almost halfway home when somebody finally spoke.

"I'm sorry," said Jack.

Karen stared straight ahead, as if she were angry, but her voice didn't convey anger.

"I'm so frustrated with you," she said. " Part of me wants to scream at you and lock you in your room. But part of me knows that it wasn't your fault."

"Mandy didn't make me do anything," he said.

"I didn't mean it was Mandy's fault. What the two of you did was normal. What frustrates me is that I don't want you to be normal. Not in that way. But I know that's not right either. I should have paid closer attention. Bob was right. We were miserable chaperones, and because of that, things you couldn't control got out of hand. We should have controlled them for you, and we didn't, because we were doing exactly the same thing you were ... falling in love."

"How could you have controlled it?" asked Jack.

"By making sure you didn't do anything more than a simple, non-sexual good night kiss," she said. "And by not doing things in front of you that you later wanted to experiment with."

"That's the funny part," said Jack.

"What?"

"I would never have admitted it to you before this, but I've seen all that stuff before, on the internet."

"Great! Now my son is addicted to porn," groaned Karen.

"I'm not addicted. I've just seen stuff now and then. You know, like when some cute girl says hi in the halls and you get a boner that won't go away, so maybe you surf around for a picture and look at it while you jack off. That kind of thing. I'm not surfing porn every night, Mom."

"You shouldn't surf porn at all," she grumbled.

"What I'm talking about is that I've seen guys sucking on women's nipples before. And it felt exciting to watch. But it wasn't anything like what I felt when I saw Bob sucking on your nipples. That's why I wanted to do it to Mandy so much." He sighed. "And that was before I saw him on top of you ... like that."

"I'm sorry you saw that," she said. "I thought he closed the door."

"The door was closed, but when I touched it, it just came open somehow."

"Why did you touch it?" she asked.

"Because it sounded like you were dying in there," he said.

"As you can see, I didn't die."

"Yes, but that's why I think I ended up finding out why you were making those sounds about fifteen minutes later."

Now she looked over at him.

"Did you 'slip' on purpose, Jack? Did you take Mandy's virginity without asking her if you could?"

"No!" he said instantly. "It really was an accident. But once I felt it, I don't think I could have stopped if she'd begged me to. I mean I did stop, for a few seconds, but then she grabbed my butt and I knew I wasn't taking it out until I was finished. It scared me, Mom, and yet it was the best thing that ever happened to me."

"I understand," she said. "That's why we have to keep you apart now. If we don't, you're going to want to do that again and again."

"Do you feel that way about Bob?"

"It's one reason I want to marry him," she said.

He went silent then, and stayed that way until they pulled into the driveway. She sensed something was bothering him.

"We have to keep you apart, Baby," she said. "I know that hurts, but we have to. At least for now."

"I can live with that," he said, gruffly.

"Then what's wrong?"

"I can't get it out of my mind," he said.

"You and Mandy?" she asked, sympathetically.

"No."

He looked over at her helplessly.

"Bob ... on top of you."

"Oh," she said, faintly.

"I don't understand," he moaned.

"I love him," she said, helplessly.

"No, that's not that I mean."

"Then what?"

"I can't understand why thinking about that gives me a boner," he said.

"Daddy?"

Mandy's voice was hesitant. She was standing in the doorway to his bathroom, something she'd done hundreds of times before. He was putting lotion on his beard, to soften it and keep it from drying out and itching. Both were ready for bed, Bob in his PJ bottoms and she in her panties and T shirt.

"What?" he asked, a little truculently. He was still thinking about the forced separation from Karen. And who had caused it.

"Does this mean you won't give me a goodnight hug anymore?"

He turned to look at her.

"What? Of course not. Where did you get that idea?"

"You just seemed so mad," she said. "It's like you hate me all of a sudden."

He wiped his hands on a towel, feeling like a beast. He put his hands on her shoulders and pulled her to him.

"I don't hate you, Baby," he said, sliding his arms around and across her back.

She snuggled up against him.

"I'm just frustrated, that's all."

"I'm sorry," she said, beginning to cry. Some of that emotion was relief at learning her father didn't hate her. She pushed back, as all teenagers do in a parental relationship. But some of that push-back was the same kind of resistance, or perhaps assertion, that a wife does with her husband. They were in a symbiotic relationship, but neither of them had spent any time thinking about that. They just fed off of each other, in a mildly parasitic manner, and when the other did something to disturb the flow of "nutrition" being exchanged, it created conflict.

"It's not your fault," he sighed. "I knew this could happen to you and I did a miserable job of making sure it didn't."

"I love you so much," she cried, burrowing her face into his pectoral muscle.

"And I love you," he said, squeezing her.

The next day felt odd for Bob and Karen. Considering the results of the conversation the night before, their children should have been subdued. But they weren't. Both were chipper the next morning, alert and in a good mood. Knowing your parent still loves you when you've screwed up royally will do that for you.

If anything it was the adults who were subdued. It was Friday, which meant both had to work. They talked during lunch but every idea either of them thought up had serious flaws in it.

"We can talk about it tomorrow," said Karen. "We'll have all day, then."

As it turned out, they didn't have all day. Saturday morning Karen's boss called her and said two of the clerks scheduled to work had called in sick. He asked her to come in and offered to pay her overtime. She couldn't pass up the extra money and agreed. She called Bob, who said that was fine.

"I still don't have any ideas anyway," he said.

"We'll get together tonight," she said. "Thanks. I love you."

"I love you too. So why is this so hard?"

"I wish I had the answer too," she said.

That evening the Rosses didn't get to the Thurlows' until after supper.

The parents looked at their children.

"Do you promise not to do anything you know we wouldn't like while we talk privately?" asked Karen.

They both nodded.

"Promise me!" she insisted.

"We're not animals who can't control ourselves," said Mandy.

"Promise me!" said Karen, almost shouting.

"I promise!" yipped Mandy.

"I promise, too," said Jack.

"Thank you!" snapped Karen. "I don't know how long this is going to take."

"Are you going to have sex?" asked Mandy.

Karen stared at her. "I seriously doubt it," she snarled.

"I was just curious," said Mandy, sounding hurt.

"Watch TV. Or play a board game. Just let us talk this thing out," said Karen.

"Got it," said Jack.

In Bob's bedroom, Karen paced.

"What are we going to do?" moaned Karen. "I want to marry you. I really don't want to wait two years to do that. But if we live together, they'll be in the same house, only feet apart at night. And we both know what that will eventually lead to."

"What if we let them get together, just every once in a while, under conditions we could control?" he said.

She looked up at him.

"Really?"

"Why not?" he asked in frustration. "What else are we going to do? If we try to keep them apart they'll find a way to get together again, sooner or later. And if they do that we won't be able to exert any kind of control."

"But we can't just let them act like a married couple," said Karen.

"You want to hear something crazy?" he asked.

"Is there anything about this that isn't crazy?" she responded.

"Actually, one of the things I thought about is just getting married and letting them live together while we live together," he said. "It would solve the problem."

"Until they have a fight over something and break up," said Karen.

"We'd be there to help them move on. And if they lose interest in each other that way, they'd still have separate rooms. Assuming we find a place big enough for that."

"They'd agree to that," said Karen. "Living together, I mean. Having access to each other."

"Then is that what you want to do?"

"I do want to get married and live with you," she said. "I want to go to bed with you every night."

"Let's go see what the kids think," he said.

They'd only been gone ten minutes. They found the kids sitting Indian style on the living room rug, facing each other and talking. Both looked up in surprise.

"We have a possible course of action," said Bob.

"What?" Neither teen got up.

"We find a house to all live in together. Karen and I would get married. Each of you would have your own room, but you would be allowed to spend time together whenever you wanted to. Then, later, after graduation at a minimum, if you both still feel the way you do now, you can get married."

Jack's mouth dropped open.

Mandy's face clouded over.

"Except that we couldn't," she said. "I've already said that if you get married now it will make us brother and sister. I like the other part just fine. What happens inside our houses is our business ... private ... but if you get married everybody in town will look at us like we're brother and sister. We can't be happy like that, because we can never get married if that happens."

"But you won't really be brother and sister," said Bob. "Your lineage is completely different."

"I know a girl named Becky Thompson. Her mom got married three times and she had two different sets of step brothers. Every time she talks about one of them she calls him her brother. Not step-brother ... just brother. And everybody else who talks about them calls them her brothers."

"I know one of her brothers," said Jack. "Step-brothers, I mean. One day he saw me looking at Becky and asked me if I thought his sister was hot. He didn't call her his step-sister either."

"I don't see how it will matter whether we wait until you're eighteen or not," said Karen, frowning. "Either way, you'll become each other's step-sibling when we get married."

"Where's your laptop?" asked Bob, looking at Karen.

She got it for him and he opened it. He brought up Google and started searching. He found dozens of pages related to "step-sibling incest" but none of them talked about marriage. What they did talk about was how terrible it was. There were a few on the other side of the fence, who pointed out that there was no blood relationship, but there were many more who thought it was perverted. He didn't read those to the rest of them.

He fared much better when he changed the search parameters to "step-sibling marriage". There he found dozens of posts by people who had engaged in that very pursuit, as well as posts by those wanting to and looking for information. There were conflicting comments about what the law was, which made sense, because marriage law is almost always state law.

Of particular interest were the difference in the stories of those who grew up together and then got into a romance or marriage, and those whose parents had come together while the love birds were in their mid to late teens.

The ones who grew up together had a much rougher time of it. The ones who had been adopted by a step-parent were flatly forbidden to marry, blood line or not.

Only the ones whose parents got married when the kids were older, or after they turned 18, had less, or no difficulty with the law.

One post said, "We went to a different city to get married. We had different last names. Nobody thought a thing about it. Then we went to college as a married couple. By the time anybody who had known us in the past found out about it, she'd already had my kid."

"Well," said Bob, closing the laptop. "There's good and bad news."

"What's the good news?" asked Karen.

"If they wait until they're 18 and never live together under one roof, they can probably get married without anyone raising an eyebrow."

"You don't have to tell me the bad news," said Karen, her voice tight. She looked at the kids. "To allow for your happiness, we have to give up our own."

"There has to be something else we can do," moaned Mandy, who felt like she knew exactly how Karen felt. She'd felt the same way when she thought she wouldn't be able to be with Jack any more.

"If you have any ideas, I'd love to hear them," said Karen.

Jack raised his hand, as if he was in school.

"I have an idea," he said. "What if we kept both houses, but only lived in one of them? I mean, technically, our address would be different from their address."

"Wouldn't work," said Mandy. "We have friends, and they come over. They'd find out we were all living here."

"Who said your house?" asked Jack.

"Wherever!" said Mandy. "The point is we have to live apart and they want to live together. It has to at least look like we're living in separate houses. It's fine for them to be going together and go out on dates and kiss in public. Nobody will think a thing about that."

"So," said Karen, playing devil's advocate. "What happens when you two are high school sweethearts and everybody knows it, and then after you graduate we get married? You think they'll cut you any slack then? I don't. I bet a dozen of them would tell you that you have to break up, whether you've graduated or not."

Mandy bit her lip. She knew how her friends thought, and Karen had pegged them pretty well.

"But that means we're all separated from each other," she moaned. "Except you two can still go out on dates."

"Sometimes the things you want in life mean you have to make sacrifices to get them," said Bob. "In this case, you want to be able to get married after you graduate. The sacrifice being required of you is to wait a little more than two years and then convince people that you didn't get interested in each other until after we got married. The sacrifice you're asking Karen and me to make isn't about our happiness. It's about yours. There's nothing stopping us from getting married tomorrow ... except that we want you two to be happy too. And, as parents, we're used to making sacrifices for our children. But this is a big one. If we do this for you we're going to have to be able to spend enough time together to keep our own relationship healthy."

"You can do that," Mandy assured them. "Whenever you guys want to have sex we'll leave you alone."

"I'm not talking about just sex," said Bob. "Our relationship involves much more than just sex."

"Right!" said Mandy. "Whatever you need. But can we ask for something too?"

"Shoot," said Bob.

"We could agree to your original idea and be able to live together and have sex and all that stuff," she said. "But we're giving that up because there's more than sex to our relationship too. We're thinking about the future. But we need to be able to be together sometimes. Like, maybe ... once a week?" Her voice ended up on a hopeful note.

"That's too often," said Bob. "You're on the pill, but the pill isn't foolproof. Once a month would be safer, when you are least fertile."