Chapter 2: Mom

I slept fitfully; in the back of my mind, there was some sort of conversation with my daughter Becky that I couldn't quite remember. I had a vague picture of finding her in bed"you know what I mean"with her friend Fran Ellis, but the exhaustion from pulling a double shift in the ER made it difficult to think clearly. I rolled over in bed and stretched my arm out toward my husband, but he wasn't there. Oh, now I remembered; he was in New York. Did he have a lover there? How many times had I wondered whether those meetings included a variation of 'Same Time Next Year', like maybe 'Same Time Next Month.'

He always denied having had any extra-marital affairs, and I had no hard evidence; no lipstick on his shirt collars, no sexy new underwear, notes in a feminine handwriting, unexplained credit card charges for motels and restaurants. There were no secret late night phone calls that I knew of; I had once obtained a print out of all the local calls from the phone company, but found nothing to put my finger on. Too bad the cell phone bill went to his office. While we had been sexually active since we were Becky's age, fourteen"picture two rabbits"yet whenever he came home now from the East Coast, it would be two or three days before he reached for me to make love.

And the lovemaking had become so routine; I might even say boring. In the old days, the sex would include blankets being kicked off the bed, lots of fellatio and cunnilingus, positions I can't even describe, and wind up with two screaming orgasms. Now the sex was blah. OK, so it wasn't twice a day any more, but still. Every few days, he would snuggle his lap up against my butt and I would feel the blood throbbing in his powerful penis. His hands would pinch my nipples, not hard, but he no longer feathered them. A few kisses later, he would roll me onto my back; my legs would spread to receive him. I had to produce my own lubrication, since he didn't bother to get me hot any more. The feel of him inside me was still exquisite, the muscles of my vagina squeezing him as hard as they could. But he didn't try to hold out the way he once did; a few quick strokes and he pulled out, to spend his seed on my stomach, neither caring nor embarrassed that I needed my hand to finish myself off.

That refusal to ejaculate inside me is what made me think about whether or not there was 'another woman.' Was it just some trick he had learned while watching a porn movie in his hotel room, or was there some special woman who allowed him inside her without a condom but was afraid of making a baby?

I gave up trying to analyze every word of the past two years, and finally fell asleep.

Two hours later, I was wide awake, sitting with my back against the headboard, staring in the dark at nothing. It had all come back to me in a sickening flash. Did you read 'Becky's Awakening'? When I caught her in bed with Fran, we all had a talk. I told her that I knew Janet, that the woman who had first seduced her, the Cheerleader coach, was a lesbian, because her ex-husband worked with me and had told me that while he was trying to get into my pants. When Becky asked if he had succeeded, I had told her that whenever I needed relief, I met one of the women after work. Becky had replied that she was a woman, but I was too tired to absorb her statement.

Was my younger daughter trying to seduce me? Was she offering her body for my pleasure? Did she think she was offering it for my relief? I pictured her asleep in her room, her arms wrapped around her best friend Fran, their little girl dreams looking forward to an afternoon in bed with Janet Olson, an afternoon for which I had tacitly given permission the prior evening. I closed my eyes and replayed some of the stolen hours I myself had spent with Fran's gorgeous mother. I smiled to myself in the dark, and then began to cry.

As the tears dampened my cheeks, other dampness appeared between my thighs. As my rear end slid down the bed, my nightgown stayed where it was, exposing my lower half under the sheet. My legs fell open wantonly. My hand, the only tool available within my arm's reach, found its way to the seat of pleasure. Two fingers slid inside my wet vagina, my thumb idly flicking and caressing my aroused, anxious clitoris. I was still tired enough so that my hand moved slowly, while a series of pictures flashed through my imagination: my husband's penis buried inside me, moving, plunging, his sperm pouring into me to make our babies; that same penis stroking into an unknown woman thousands of miles away, then withdrawing to deliver its creamy gift onto her belly; the soft mouth lips of Fran's mother gently attacking my own lower lips, and then my own mouth reciprocating; Becky walking naked from the shower when we were alone at home, a hint of soft down beginning to appear in her pubic area, her breasts not quite yet developed enough to jiggle.

That last picture induced my two fingers to escape from inside me and to join their sister thumb at my clitoris, the three of them working rapidly to bring me to the whimper that announced my orgasm, my teeth biting one hand to prevent the girls from hearing my relief.

A touch of the button flashed the time onto the ceiling; it was three hours later back in New York, just the right time to call the hotel. Better to use that number than his cell phone; I wanted to make sure he was in his own bed.

"Hello?" Was that a puffing I heard, a shortness of breath in his voice? Had I caught him rushing to an early meeting, or masturbating to the pictures in a 'men's' magazine, or was he maybe in the middle of an early morning session with some unknown woman? Was that the scent of perfume coming through the phone wire?

"Good morning, Richard. How are you?"

"Oh, fine, Gwen. What's up?"

"I just forgot which day you said you'd be home."

"Friday, about noon."

"OK, thanks."

When we hung up, I knew as little as when I had called, except that I noticed he had not told me that he loved me, something he usually did. Could it have been that there was someone with him? I wondered if he was wondering why I really had called.

I needed more sleep; I expected to spend most of my compensatory time off in bed. The girls didn't need me awake; they could make their own breakfast and dress themselves. No need to embarrass them as they prepared for their lesbian 'menage a trois' experiment with Janet Olson. Maybe I should call her sometime, see if she likes grown up women...

By the time I was fully awake and dressed, the girls were already in school and would soon be at Janet's home, to do what two teenage girls and their coach do when they are naked in a bed. I silently prayed that Janet used only her body, not a strap-on or other toys. Strange, isn't it, for a mother to allow, even encourage her daughter to be in an older woman's bed, and yet to be concerned about the mechanics of their sex. I said sex, not love-making; I didn't think there was any love involved, except love for an orgasm. The picture of what they would be doing made me masturbate again; I achieved an orgasm quickly but I still wasn't satisfied.

A quick glance at my watch and a quick calculation told me that there was enough time. I called Fran's mother. "Bonnie, are you busy? I need to talk." No, you don't have to worry, I wasn't going to tell her about her daughter until Fran herself did, or gave me permission to do so. I would have told her about drugs or alcohol, or even about her daughter seeing the wrong kind of boys, but her tryst with Janet Olson (and Becky) was not the sort of stuff that needed me to deliver the news.

Bonnie understood my code words and responded with her own code. "I was just going to call you; I need your opinion on something."

My body cried out for something more than my own fingers; carrots and cucumbers often helped, as did my battery-operated friends, but that day I needed human contact, male or female. I was wearing a skirt and figured that I soon would not be wanting panties in the way so I slipped them off. I closed my eyes and remembered the days when my husband and I would go out to dinner wearing no underwear, the erotic prelude to some wild love-making.

Bonnie lived a short walk away, but she drove in order to get there quickly. She wore black leather pants, a frilly blouse and high heels; a glance at the soft swell of her breasts exposed by an open top button told me that she had left her bra at home, and I was willing to bet that her panties were there also. Her perky nipples poked out through the silk to announce their pleasure at seeing me. Her eyes shone as she approached me, only to be hidden behind lids as she closed them for our first kiss of the day, lips softly parting, tongues caressing like long-time lovers. It had only been months ago that we first touched, but it seemed as though we had been doing it forever. We're about the same height, but in her heels she towered over me as her hand gripped my bottom, pulling my crotch toward hers. My hand opened a second button on her blouse and I reached in to touch perky breasts, nipples erect under my fingers.

"I really do have to talk to you, Bonnie."

"Later, Gwen, later." Her lips were at my ear as the whispered words spoke an urgency that surprised me, given that I was the one who made the phone call. I did want to talk, but talk could wait, and my body could not. Her hand went under my skirt and she smiled knowingly as she felt my bare skin. Dropping to her knees, her head was under my skirt in a flash, her tongue licking at my still closed nether lips. I pressed her head into me, then stopped.

"Wait, wait, Bonnie; let's go upstairs." We ran up like little children, shedding clothing as we went, pausing only because she couldn't get her leather pants off without stopping. Her pubes were shaven, a condition she took to a few years after the death of her husband, when she began dating again. When I had first seen her that way, I thought of doing the same, but was unsure about how my husband would react. Maybe it was time. We were naked by the time we got to my bedroom door, scattered pieces of clothing littering the stairs. My eyes drank in her beauty, the soft curves of her body, and my blood pounded in my core. I looked back at the mess.

"I hope Becky doesn't come home before we have that cleaned up."

"Don't worry, Gwen. Fran cut her second class this morning and came home to tell me all about last night and where they were going this afternoon."

"What did you say?"

"The same thing you said."

We hugged, naked, then kissed, lips to lips, breasts to breasts, pubes aligned. We moved slowly into the bedroom, holding hands. No longer was there any lust; we were just going to make love. The dampness, the scent, were still lust, but the emotion was love. Love for each other, love for our daughters. We stood on opposite sides of the bed, carefully folding down the comforter, our eyes meeting across the bed with the knowledge that we would momentarily be lying in each other's arms.

As her body touched the bed, I bent to kiss the smooth shaven area between her legs. She took my hair and gently pulled my head to her face; her plan as it turned out was to hug and rub and caress, to bring us both to orgasm without oral sex. That was nothing unusual for us, but under the circumstances it was especially appropriate. Her lips rushed to my nipples, two of her fingers plowing up through my vaginal lips to hit bottom. A sharp fingernail made me jump, and her hand backed out a bit, the thumb ever nursing my clitoris. My hands pulled her face off my breasts and lifted it for my lips to kiss as she brought me closer and closer to orgasm. Her finger pressed against my puckered rear entrance, a place it had often entered, but I pushed it away with an admonition to return when her nails were shorter.

My fingers were inside her, searching for and finding the sensitive g-spot, triggering a flood of juice out of her sweet body as we exploded together, a finale we had often practiced in an attempt to achieve. She whispered her feelings. "I love you, Gwen." I responded wordlessly, but she understood and smiled. Our panting breaths slowed to normal.