Chapter 05: Was I imagining things?

I came downstairs to see Dad lying on the couch that made up the right side of the horseshoe while Mom sat on the back couch. Dad had a blanket pulled over his body, his head on a pillow, and his remote in his hands. It looked like they were binge-watching some original series, foreign but not dubbed. The show had subtitles.

I walked around the left side of the couch that made up the back of the horseshoe and sat down on the other side of my mother. Mom looked at me and smiled. I smiled back. Mom had changed into a pajama dress, which looked like an overgrown baby blue T-shirt with a cloud print. She sat, staring at the TV and leaning against the couch’s armrest. Her long legs were visible from the mid-thigh down thanks to the light from the TV, not that there was much light. Not that I was looking. Not really. I was looking at Mom so that I could mouth the words, I’m sorry, but my mother was my mother, and a person couldn’t help but notice the smoothness of her swan-like limbs.

Since Mom wasn’t turning her head toward me, I concentrated on the movie, turning in her direction every couple of minutes to see if I could get her attention. I couldn’t. Which kind of sucked since I didn’t want to sit through a subtitle-laden TV show just so that I could make nice, but since those damn subtitles held her focus, I sat, and I sat, waiting and hoping that the episode would end soon.

Coming downstairs to apologize for something was not new to me. I was still in my jeans and shirt, and in my pocket, I had slipped my phone. I reached down into it, pulling it out and lighting up the screen as I nestled into the corner of the couch across from Mom. I swiped and swiped, and Dad said, “That phone better be on mute,” so I killed the volume as I looked up at him, but he wasn’t looking back at me.

I looked at Mom, who was looking at me, and I mouthed the words, “I’m sorry.” She smiled, but her eyes dropped to my phone, and her smile tightened.

I shrugged.

What had she expected?

Mom swung her gaze back to the TV, and I looked back at my phone. I texted Jenna, who returned my text, but we didn’t have much of anything interesting to say. We fed each other live updates of our situations, and after sighing in silence, I decided to go back upstairs for some phone sex, and that’s when I noticed something different about Mom.

Mom’s left hand lay on her thigh, just beyond the hem of her sleeping dress. The hem no longer lay in the middle of her thigh. Her fingers, which were curling and uncurling in near slow motion, had pulled her dress up along her leg so that it now rested between the middle of her thigh and her hip. She kept scratching at her leg, and the hem continued to rise, but only on her left side, the side furthest from Dad. Not that he’d noticed, lying on the side couch as he was, on his back with his eyes glued to the subtitles flashing across the screen.

I looked at the profile of Mom’s face, watching as she stared straight ahead, and then I looked down, where her fingers continued to pull the hem of her pajama dress upward. She slid her hand to the side of her thigh, her long fingers inching beneath the hem while her fingertips slid across her skin, and the TV’s whitish-blue, sometimes silver-gray light, flashed over her body.

My cheeks flushed.

Mom took a deep breath, and my eyes moved upward, traveling up her body and taking in her flaxen hair, so golden and bright that even in the near darkness, it shined like a beacon of light. My eyes shifted across her body, making the short, sideways journey to her breasts, where they rose and fell with her deep breaths. I saw, for the first time, the way her sleep-dress molded to her form. My cheeks grew hotter, almost burning, and my heartbeat rose as goosebumps sprouted across the surface of my arms. Below my waist, things warmed, causing my cock and scrotum to stretch in a pre-hardening ritual that I recognized in an instant.

I was now looking at my mother’s breasts and the way her cotton nightdress slid down the upper slopes of her tits then curved around, covering her nipples, which had grown hard and stiff sometime before I had laid my eyes on them. And they were hard and stiff, pointing outward like two solid eraser nubs that I couldn’t remember sucking on a newborn, but Mom had claimed that I had. What a weird thought. The dress continued downward, clinging to the round underside of her tits where they connected to her sternum and sides, the fabric shooting straight down her stomach and over her thighs.