Chapter 10

Bob sat there, miserably.

"I am a bastard," he said. "I should have stopped it."

"Why didn't you?" The vitriol that had been in her exclamation was gone. Now there was something almost like inquisitiveness there.

"I don't know," he groaned. "It had been so long. And she was so sure about it. And then Sam did things with Randy that drove me nuts."

"Seeing him sleeping with her wasn't enough to drive you nuts?"

"This was before that," said Bob.

"I thought we had already covered that. Did you leave some things out?"

"A few," he said, miserably. "What I told you was bad enough. I figured to spare you what I could."

"Well, as I told you, I'm not stupid. You admitted to masturbating each other and intercourse. The most common thing in-between them is oral sex."

"Yeah," Bob sighed, softly.

"So ... are you saying that Samantha and Randy had oral sex, and told you about it?"

"No. She just did it to him in front of me. I think she was paying me back for what I did with Mal."

"And why would she pay you back for that? I thought there was a pact."

Bob felt drained. He didn't feel like he had enough energy to go into what he and Sam had done. He had no way to defend himself from those actions, none at all. He couldn't blame it on being curious, or sheltered or anything else.

"Let's just not go into that, please?" he muttered.

"I see," she said, her voice frosty. She stood again.

"Remember when this whole idea came up?" she asked.

"Which idea?" said Bob.

"The one where we talked about this hunting trip being about bonding?"

Bob's eyes widened as he remembered the conversation.

"That's not what I intended to happen," he said. "Honest."

"Well it sure seems like somebody took that seriously!" said Lucy.

"Yeah," sighed Bob, and he flopped back on the bed, his arms outstretched.

She moved toward the door. "I think I should talk with the children now. Please stay here."

The children, as she had classified them, had one possible advantage that Bob did not - time to think. While Bob had been spilling his guts in the bedroom, they had the luxury of time to try to prepare for the expected interrogation and plan what to say. Bob, however, could have used that time better. Their status as children was a legal one, and well deserved in the sense that they were not considered experienced enough to operate and survive on their own in society. They were at the upper end of that legal status, but even so, their preparations to face Lucy were those of inexperienced youth. That's the long way of saying their defense was a little juvenile and lame.

When she stalked back into the family room the whispered consultations they'd been engaged in stopped, and all three of them turned to face her.

None of them believed that Bob had told her anything even near the truth. They wouldn't have, so they assumed he hadn't either. The bulk of their debate had centered around what to do about Sam's blurted confession about "it" being an accident, and unplanned. Their final decision, reached only seconds before Lucy came back, seemed like the story that would get Mallory grounded for the least amount of time.

Lucy sat in her recliner again. She leaned back. "So!" she said. "An exciting trip, I understand."

Nobody said anything, but there were some tentative head nods. Their lack of excitement over something that, earlier, they'd been practically manic about, spoke volumes to her. But now she knew why. Lucy started like a seasoned interrogator, just probing with a bit of the truth, to see what might pop to the surface.

"Sam, you called Mal a slut. It's pretty clear you've felt like she deserved that appellation for some time. But your father wasn't aware of that before this trip. Can you tell me why?"

"I didn't tell him," said Sam, unknowingly confirming that Mallory was, in some fashion, an actual slut.

"Why not? Didn't you think he had a right to know?"

Sam blinked. What they had talked about would fit in perfectly here. It was uncanny.

"It was too personal," she said. "And Mal would have been too embarrassed. That's not something you talk to any adult about."

"We have both said you could talk to us about anything," said Lucy. "And before now, I thought you believed that."

"We would have said something," said Mallory. "But only later, when we were older. He found out about it by accident and then the cat was out of the bag."

"Tell me about how he found out about it ... by accident," said Lucy. She glanced at her son, who seemed entirely relaxed. That brought a frown to her brow.

"Sam told me not to take it along," said Mallory, adopting what Lucy instantly recognized as a falsely contrite visage. "But I get ... um ... you know ... horny a lot." The last few words were delivered in a muffled rush as Mal covered her face in equally fake embarrassment.

"I told her not to take it," said Sam, pushing the point. It had been decided that if Mallory could have kept her panties on, this whole thing would not have happened. If she'd simply let her uncle fondle her boobs, but then stopped it at that, they would have had power over him that would have protected them from disclosure about their own activities, and everything would have just gone on like before. But she hadn't done that. So she deserved taking the brunt of the damage. Even Mallory agreed on that.

Lucy, sensing some kind of planned deception, suddenly realized that the kids had no idea what Bob had told her. Now, however, they were confessing to having possession of some "it" that they were trying to use to evade the truth with.

"I'd like to see ... it ... if I may," she said, softly.

"Do I have to?" Mallory had expected this, but still didn't want to go through with it.

"Yes, you do," said her mother.

"Okaaay," said Mal, drawing it out as if she were nine or ten, rather than sixteen.

She got up and went to her room. When she returned, she had a rolled up towel in her hand.

"Do I have to show it to you?" she complained.

"Yes."

"Can you make Randy leave the room?"

That was interesting. Lucy looked at him. He looked entirely too carefree. She wondered what they had cooked up. If the situation wasn't so serious, she might have wanted to smile.

"No, I believe Randy should stay."

Sam had a very quick and very shocking stab of concern, because while she knew what was in the towel, her Aunt Lucy didn't. Not yet. And when Mallory's plea for Randy (who also knew what was in the towel) not to see it was so easily brushed off by their mother, it seemed ... off somehow. But she didn't have time to reflect on that because Mallory unrolled the towel.

What was revealed was an anatomically correct adult penis, made of what white people call flesh colored latex. It had a nice pair of balls at the base of it that, other than being aesthetically pleasing, served as a handle of sorts. It represented a circumcised penis, and was about eight inches long.

Lucy felt something flutter in her belly at the sight of it. When her husband had left, he had left her libido behind. She had chosen not to seek some kind of sexual satisfaction with another man. She hadn't been happy with "men" in general. So she had had to make do with her fingers after that. She had almost bought something very much like what Mallory was presenting, several years back, but had fled the store in horrified anticipation of the smirk she was quite sure the clerk would give her.

"That's why I'm not a virgin any more, Mom," Mallory admitted, her voice filled with tragedy. "That's why Sam calls me a slut. I'm sorry I was too embarrassed to come talk to you about it when I got it."

Part of Lucy's mind marveled at the audacity of their attempt to subvert the truth. Another part snarled that her daughter was so willing to lie about something so important as losing her virginity. That Sam and even Randy were in on it too, just made her sad. But the overall story they'd come up with was hilarious. True, it was only hilarious because she knew the actual truth. Still, it was clever in many ways. This object had been right to hand, in her daughter's room, which might be why they cooked up this cockamamie story. And if what Bob had told her was true ... if the girls had been playing around with Randy, but stopping short of intercourse, then she would have needed something like this around. So would Sam. She looked at Bob's daughter and was about to ask if she borrowed Mal's or had her own, when the tension that had gathered inside her roared out in the form of hysterical laughter. It was just too much.

The kids sat, frozen in shock, as the woman they expected to rant and rave started laughing, and then produced belly laughs, until she actually scooted forward as if she was going to try to stand up, but lurched sideways and fell onto the floor instead. The laughing continued unabated until even inexperienced youth recognized that she was in pulmonary trouble, as she tried to breath but kept laughing anyway. It went on long enough that Bob came into the room, having heard it go on so long, and having decided it was worth risking her wrath to make sure she was all right.

Such things take care of themselves, though and, eventually, with Bob kneeling over her, Lucy relaxed and the belly laughs turned to giggles, which turned to sighs mixed with giggles. She was grinning like she'd been at a Richard Pryor show, and liked Richard Pryor a lot.

"You okay?" asked Bob, with concern in his voice that Lucy recognized as genuine. It was the first honest thing she felt like she'd heard in a long time. It sobered her. She nodded and let Bob help her up.

"Mallory showed me that," said Lucy, pointing at the pink dildo still on display on Mal's lap.

"What?!" Bob stared in shocked surprise.

"She explained how that's why she isn't a virgin any more, and why Sam calls her a slut."

Bob put both hands over his face, and a muffled "Crap!" came from beneath where they didn't quite cover his lips. He dropped his hands and looked at the kids, who looked confused.

"I told her everything," he said.

"What?!" All three teens yelped the word at the same time, in the same tone of voice and with the same level of concern. It sounded like a trained trio.

"I told her the truth," said Bob. "She deserved the truth."

"Thank you, Bob," said Lucy, who sat back down in her recliner. "It's refreshing that somebody thinks I deserve the truth."

The kids still had stricken looks on their faces. It was Sam who recovered first.

"How much of the truth?" she asked, staring intently at her father.

"Most of it," he said, tiredly.

"Most? So you left some things out?" Lucy looked over at him, but didn't look angry. "I'm not surprised. It was a long week."

Nobody said anything. Lucy smiled, tightly.

"You'll understand how I might have a few questions. Shall we get to those right away? And, this time, I'd like you to answer them truthfully."

The interrogation went on for another hour. Lucy seemed to have some perverse desire to make them give her details. Perhaps she knew that this amounted to punishment of a sorts.

But one thing became very clear. Mallory had, in fact, actively attempted to seduce Bob. That she did so with such ease was something Lucy had no trouble understanding. She knew her daughter was cute, and she knew that Bob wasn't the first man to think about having sex with her.

She could tell that something was being held back. The odd thing was that it seemed like all four of them were holding something back. She had watched the whole quartet squirm as she probed. She had pulled information out of them that could have been used to write the screen play for an XXX rated movie.

She decided to think about it the next day. She was too tired to work through any more of it. They'd all still be here in the days to come. Whatever the secret was, she'd worm it out of them.

She closed her eyes. Maybe not. After all, she had her own secret ... something that had happened to her when she was a teenager, like them ... something that she'd never told anybody about. Even decades later, nobody knew.

"It's late," she said. "Why don't we pick this up tomorrow?"

"You mean we aren't finished?" moaned Mallory.

"Of course we're not finished. This isn't something like trying a new food. This isn't some TV show you've watched and now you're ready to flip the channel to something else."

"Oh," said Mallory, looking sheepish.

"I'm sorry," said Bob.

"Oh, you're sorry, all right," said Lucy, but the vitriol that had been in her voice before this wasn't as sharp.

"It wasn't his fault," said Mallory.

"Yes it was. He was the only adult out there, and he should have controlled the situation."

All four sat mutely. Lucy stood up.

"We'll have to set some new rules too, but we can get to that later."

"What kind of rules?" asked Mallory.

"Surely you don't think I'm going to let you just go hop into Bob's bed whenever you feel like it," said Lucy, her voice serious.

"Oh," said Mallory again.

Bob stood.

"We'll just go now," he said. "I'm really sorry, Lucy."

"I am too, Bob," she said.

Things did not get picked up the next day. That was because Lucy got sent on a service call by her boss the next day that required her to go out of town for three days. There had been an "event" at a construction site, involving one of the company's power transfer modules. Apparently some high voltage electricity coursed through components that were only designed to handle a fraction of that. It destroyed tens of thousands of dollars' worth of equipment and the customer was screaming about suing somebody. Lucy's boss was pretty sure that one of the contractors had hooked something up wrong, probably something to do with the grounding system, but that needed to be documented. Lucy was an electrical engineer, and she was his trouble shooter, so she got the call to go do the investigation.

She couldn't very well tell her boss, "Hey, can I miss this one? I just found out my best friend is porking my daughter, and my son is fucking the daughter of said best friend, and we're still working through some issues about this."

What she could do was lay down some rules before she left. To that end, she got her children together. Looking at Mallory, she said, "I shouldn't have to tell you not to have sex with Bob while I'm gone. But since I shouldn't have had to tell you not to have sex with him to start with, I'm going to be very clear on this now. Don't have sex with Bob while I'm gone. Got it?"

"Yes, Mom," said Mallory.

Lucy looked at her son next.

"It's really Bob's business whether he lets Sam be sexually active. But you are my son, and before you go all manly on me, we need to have some discussion about your responsibilities as a sexually active male. I should have had this discussion with you already. But I didn't. For now ... no sex with Samantha while I'm gone. Not even if Bob says she can. Got that?"

"Yes, ma'am," he said.

It never occurred to her to tell them not to have sex with each other.

And she was in too much of a hurry to notice that neither of them seemed nearly as bummed out by her rules as she expected them to be.

She called Bob to explain why she was going out of town.

"You're going to have to keep an eye on their studies while I'm gone," she said. "I told Mallory she is not to have sex with you while I'm gone."