Chapter 1

"Where's that damned hairbrush?"

Gabriella was furious. Why on earth did things always disappear from their proper place. The hairbrush's place was right here, on top of the vanity unit. Just a bit to the right. She should be able to pick it up without having to take her eyes off the mirror. But it wasn't there.

Gabriella had just taken a shower and washed her hair. She had dried it to the point where it now needed a brushing so that it wouldn't fly all over the place in a disorderly mess. Her shoulder-length dark hair needed the discipline of the hairbrush. At least one hundred strokes. But the hairbrush had disappeared. Gabriella remembered that Lucia, the maid, had been in the bathroom the day before to put everything in order. Except that her idea of order was different from Gabriella's. Gabriella kept her things in an organised disorder; she always knew where everything was - or at least where it was supposed to be. She checked all the drawers and compartments of the vanity unit. No hairbrush.

"Bedroom," she said to herself and went looking in her bedroom. No luck.

"Other bathroom." Maybe the maid had confused things and put her hairbrush on the vanity unit in the second bathroom. Gabriella wrapped herself in a towel and went looking. Nothing.

"Tina's room," Gabriella said. Tina, her seventeen year old daughter, was in the habit of carrying off objects and leaving them in her room, similar to a burrowing animal accumulating food for winter. The cordless phone was a regular visitor there. But, over time, she had also hi-jacked the remote control for the TV set, telephone books, assorted tools and kitchen implements and the ironing board. There was a good chance that Gabriella's hairbrush had also found its way into Tina's room.

Going into Tina's room in her absence was a touchy subject. The two had had a number of noisy arguments about that. Tina accused her mother of snooping on her, trying to find out things she didn't feel like telling her mother, invading her privacy. At one stage Tina decided to lock her room whenever she went out. But then one day she left the phone inside her locked room and her mother couldn't get at it. Gabriella decided to call a locksmith to open the door and when Tina came home there was an almighty row. Tina had threatened to move out.

That was the last thing Gabriella wanted to happen. Her 'snooping', as Tina called it, wasn't purely a desire to satisfy her curiosity. Gabriella wanted to be there when Tina needed her, she wanted to know there was a problem before Tina found it important enough to tell her. If Tina were to move out, she wouldn't be able to look after her little girl, she would blame herself if anything happened to her.

When Tina was born, Gabriella had been 17 years old, just like Tina was today. Gabriella had fallen for the easy smile of Leandro, Tina's father. With his happy-go-lucky attitude and his silver tongue he was able to make any woman feel she was the most beautiful, most sexy, most desirable woman in the world. She had fallen into his bed the day he first set eyes on her. Leandro wasn't her first, but the handful of men which had come before him paled into insignificance compared to Leandro's skills in pleasing a woman. One month later - Bingo! - she knew she was pregnant.

She didn't even try to persuade him to marry her. Leandro couldn't belong to just one woman. It was pointless to try to imprison this butterfly of a man who was constantly moving from one flower to the next. As the size of her belly increased, Leandro's passion for her diminished. Then, when she was in her seventh month, he said he was going to spend some time in the wilderness. Gabriella soon found out that her name was Juraci, and she was gorgeous. If she'd been only half as intelligent as she was sensual, she would have been a genius. But the distribution of good looks and brains was quite disproportionate. 'Who am I to call other women stupid?' Gabriella scolded herself. She had fallen for Leandro's affirmation that sex wasn't any good unless it involved the direct contact of skin to skin, cock to cunt. Real men didn't use preservatives. No, Ma'am.

Gabriella knew that today's generation had different attitudes in many respects, but nobody could guarantee her that there wasn't a bastard out there who would get her daughter pregnant. She wanted Tina to be more careful, more responsible, cleverer, happier than she had been. A few times she had said, "I don't want to be a grandma at 34," and Tina had replied "Tell me when you would like to be a granny, mum, so I can try to schedule it in." In the end they had come to a 'gentlewomen's agreement'. Tina would not lock her room and her mother had promised not to snoop.

All this flashed through Gabriella's mind as she opened the door to her daughter's room, reminding herself that she was just looking for her hairbrush and wouldn't use the opportunity for having a look around. She wouldn't touch anything, just look. She wouldn't open any drawers or doors, just see if the hairbrush was lying somewhere - on the table, the bed, anywhere. Gabriella didn't find her hairbrush but something else caught her attention. It was a video cassette which, apart from the manufacturer's label, had a little sticker on it which read 'Chris 1/2'.

'Chris' was Tina's preferred nickname. She found the name Tina boring and had persuaded all her friends and teachers to call her Chris. As far as Gabriella was concerned, Tina was Tina, and that was that. Tina/Chris liked the gender ambivalence of Chris and enjoyed the confusions which arose when someone who knew her only by name, expected 'Chris' to be short for Christopher and suddenly found out that this particular Chris was short for Christina.

Gabriella was a cameraman. Actually, her being a woman, this should be camerawoman. But she didn't like that term and thought the other options - cameraperson or camera operative - were even more horrible. At her place of work, they referred to her and her colleagues, both male and female, simply as camera, full stop. She worked for one of the major TV networks. It was a demanding job. You had to work all hours and be prepared to travel at short notice, which could play havoc with your social life. But the job also had its rewards. The pay was excellent and you got to meet many interesting people. She found that she spent most of her social life in the company of others who were in the same predicament as her: arranging their lives within the framework of an unsocial, unpredictable work schedule. On the whole, she thought the positive points outnumbered the negative ones by far.

She hadn't done anything to steer Tina towards working in the media. She wanted her to make her own choice, without being influenced by her mother. But she couldn't help feeling pleased when Tina chose an extra-curricular project which dealt with film and TV. A group of students had got together to study theoretical and practical aspects of film making under the tutelage of a teacher. They were going to produce a short movie and would submit it as an entry in a nationwide competition of student filmmakers. Tina had never told her mother which particular aspect of the film she was responsible for. Gabriella didn't know whether she was directing, scripting, camera, lights, special effects or any of the other disciplines involved in filmmaking. She thought it better not to ask, she didn't want to be considered intrusive. Tina had made it clear that they wanted to learn from experience, not be told how to do it by an expert.

When Gabriella saw the sticker which said 'Chris 1/2', she assumed this was the first of two parts of the film they were producing. It fired up her curiosity, both professionally and as Tina's mother. She picked up the tape to have a look at what they were doing. Maybe she could give them some hints. That wasn't snooping, was it?

Gabriella went to the living room and popped the tape into the video recorder. The search for the hairbrush was forgotten. When the initial flickering stopped, there was the picture of a naked girl. More precisely, the torso of a naked girl, because the picture had been chopped off at the neck and above the knees. "That's terrible," she said. "How can they let their camera get away with something like that?" Even without the head, the figure looked familiar. Then the girl moved. No, the camera moved. It moved back and the whole girl and part of the room came into view. It was Tina, her little Tina, posing naked for the camera! And she was standing in Gabriella's bedroom! "How dare they!" she exclaimed. Tina had never asked for permission to use her mother's bedroom as a film studio.

Gabriella ran back quickly through her recent engagements and concluded that this had probably happened during the weekend she had spent with Silvio at the health resort in the nearby mountains. Silvio had invited her to this super-luxurious spa where guests could undergo all kinds of relaxing and rejuvenating treatments in order to return full of energy to the rat race. Unfortunately, Silvio's performance in bed had been anything but healthy. It broke her heart, but she decided to be honest with him, and on the journey back she suggested he'd continue to patronize the professional ladies he was seeing regularly. They probably didn't mind if the whole action was over within the space of five minutes - on the contrary. Out of frustration and lack of anything else to do, Gabriella had used every exercise machine available and undergone every treatment the resort had to offer. She was completely exhausted when she got home. She still remembered that her sweet little daughter Tina ("I'm going to wring her neck when I get a chance.") had noticed how groggy she was. "Tough weekend?" she had asked and Gabriella had replied, "Yeah, but not because of what you think."

So, it had been on that weekend that Tina and her friends had invaded her privacy and had shot a movie in her bedroom! Tina was going to hear about that, for sure! The only problem would be explaining how she'd found out. By the way, what kind of movie was this? It dawned on her that what she'd seen so far looked more like a third-rate porn movie than an entry to a school competition.

On the video, Tina had moved onto the bed - Gabriella's bed! - and was caressing her breasts. The camera first showed the whole girl, then zoomed in, showing only the face and chest. "That's better," Gabriella said as the camera panned down the girl's body, following a hand which moved from the girl's breasts via her belly to her pussy. That move had been executed quite well, considering that they probably didn't have a steady-cam at their disposal. The camera now focussed on the girl's almost hairless pussy. The girl was stimulating herself, moving her fingers up and down her pussy lips, rubbing her clit, combining circular movements on her clit with up-and-down strokes along her slit. Gabriella was fascinated, but something wasn't quite right. She rewound the tape a little and selected replay at half speed. "That's the trick," she congratulated herself. "You've got to show this part in slow motion, it becomes more dream-like, more sensual."

The girl was now masturbating in slow motion. The movement of her fingers along her slit increased in length, going as far as the little rosette of her rear hole. Then the other hand joined the first, prying her pussy lips open to reveal the entry to her love channel and allow the finger to slip inside. The movement of the finger now went from the clitoris to the anus, rubbing, stroking and slipping inside the vagina. "It's a pity there is no sound, otherwise she would be moaning by now," Gabriella said. "I wonder how they plan to add the sound. That will be one hell of a job to synchronise." Without her being aware of it, her own hands had unfastened the towel, moved to her pussy and were imitating the hands on the TV screen. Soon she was producing the moaning sounds that were missing from the tape. When she became aware of this, she stopped immediately. "That's disgusting! Here I am, getting myself off, watching a tape of my own daughter masturbating. I ought to be ashamed of myself!" But the scene on the TV screen didn't become less arousing because of this. Her own pussy wanted attention. There wasn't any face anywhere on the screen. No nametag, just a pussy and two hands. How was she supposed to know that these belonged to her daughter? The girl in the video had inserted two fingers into her pussy and was pushing them in and out with determination. Gabriella decided to follow her example. She worked in unison with the picture on the screen and pushed her fingers deep into her wet cunt. When the girl's hips bucked, indicating that she had climaxed, so did Gabriella.

The TV screen went white. Was that it? She fast-forwarded the tape to see if there was more. When the tape came to another recording showing two naked female figures, she noticed from the clock on the VCR that Tina was due to arrive in a few minutes. She quickly rewound the tape and put it back into Tina's room, exactly where she had found it.

Gabriella still didn't know whether she should feel guilty about masturbating to her daughter's performance. Watching that tape had brought her finely balanced emotive system into disarray. She was going to talk to Tina about this, but she needed a clear head, she needed to develop a strategy. She needed time to think before she'd act. For the time being she'd just pretend nothing happened. She returned to the living room and sat down on the sofa where she would wait for Tina to arrive. She wanted to create the impression that she had been sitting there all the time. When she felt something hard under her bottom, she lifted the cushion and found her hairbrush. What on earth was it doing there? Having finally found the hairbrush, Gabriella decided to return to her bathroom to brush her hair. It was probably even better to be in the middle of something when Tina came home rather than to be sitting there, waiting and worrying that Tina might notice something unusual.

As she brushed her hair, Gabriella thought how strange this situation had become. She remembered a time during her childhood when she and her older sister were secretly looking at books they weren't supposed to touch. Those books were being kept on the top shelf, too high for the girls to reach. But the girls were clever enough to get at those books using a stepladder. They would look at the pictures they weren't supposed to see and read the forbidden stories and then returned each book to its place, making sure that everything was as they had found it. But often there was one little detail they missed and their parents noticed that something was different and asked uncomfortable questions. She remembered that after their transgressions she always felt butterflies in her tummy and her heart would beat faster while she watched to see if the adults would find them out. That was exactly how she was feeling now. She had butterflies in her stomach because she was worried her daughter might find out that she'd watched the video. That was ridiculous! It was Tina who should be worried that her mother found out about this tape. Not her getting nervous about her daughter finding out she'd seen it.

There were steps outside and a knock on the door. "Hi mum, I'm home." "Hi Tina, how was your day today?" Gabriella looked at her daughter and thought what an attractive young lady she was. Although she was fully dressed - or what passes for fully dressed in these tropical climes: cut-off top, Lycra shorts, sandals - she couldn't help thinking of the close-up of Tina's pussy which had filled her TV screen only a short while ago.

For the first time Gabriella admitted that Tina's navel piercing looked distinctly sexy. That piercing had been the subject of several noisy arguments. Gabriella had been dead set against it and Tina had called her old- fashioned. 'For Christ's sake, mum, ' she had exclaimed, 'we're talking about a navel piercing. You act as if I wanted to wear a ring through my nose or have my tongue or nipples pierced.' Gabriella couldn't think of any reason why anyone would want to wear a ring through their nose, and the mere thought of having her tongue or nipples pierced made her wince. In the end Tina won and was now wearing a very attractive piece of body jewellery in her navel.

Tina looked at her mother. So she'd found the hairbrush. Good. Chances were that she had been looking in her room before she found it and then she would have seen the tape. Tina was pretty sure of that. The only remaining uncertainty was whether her mother had been able to resist the temptation to watch it.

After dinner, Gabriella relaxed in the living room, watching television. Without really knowing why, she switched to the adult channel that came with her cable TV subscription. Tina joined her after her bath.

"I didn't know you liked this kind of stuff," Tina said, rubbing her hair with a towel.

Gabriella looked at her daughter, standing there, wearing a towelling robe which reached barely to the middle of her thighs. What stunning legs Tina had! What firm thighs! Her eyes wandered up those legs to the point where her view was obscured by the robe. Then the image of Tina's pussy from the video tape returned. She had to pry her eyes away from her daughter.