Chapter 1: Accidents Will Happen

I am a genuinely nice guy. To take just one example, I never needed to be reminded that there was a community service requirement we'd have to meet before we graduated; I'd fulfilled it before I got to eleventh grade. Mostly to get out of the house, true, but also because I really enjoyed working with the deaf kids at the public library. My cousin Martha was deaf, and the fact that my mother couldn't be bothered to learn Ameslan made it all the more attractive to me. Martha and I could sit there and "chat" right under my mom's nose. Mom's younger sister Penny knew exactly what we were saying, but she apparently had her own issues with Mom. I saw her biting her lip on more than one occasion to keep from laughing. The kids at the library were just delighted that I knew it, and we had a great time each week.

It's true that I am just a teensy bit accident-prone. And that some of those accidents were at least partially my fault. Although to hear my mother talk about it, you'd think that it was entirely predictable that a truck carrying maple syrup would crash at 4:15 p.m. on a road that I would be driving at 4:17 p.m. I mean, they weren't even going to raise our premiums for that. But no, I'd be riding my bike for the foreseeable future. And I could see where some of our neighbors might have thought, solely as a result of a complete accident, that I wasn't a nice guy. Although I still can't believe that Old Lady Willingham thought I hit her dog on purpose with that baseball; she nursed that grudge even after his cast came off.

So I think it ought to be understood, right up front, that I am a nice guy. And in that light, you have to believe that blackmail wasn't the first thing I thought of while I was watching the videotape. It wasn't even the second thing. As nice guy as I am, it actually wasn't something I thought of at all. It was an accident. That's right, an accident. If you want to point a finger of blame at somebody, I say let's start with the tape:

My mother, Deirdre Martin, peered at her friends over top of her undersized wire-rim glasses.

"All right, girls," she grinned, "but you have to swear that not a word of this will ever leave this room."

"Swear," Laura Stone gave a hesitant smile.

"Swear," Pamela Lee said.

"Swear," Natalie Winston echoed.

"Good," Mom said as she leaned forward to begin the round of tales. "Well ladies, remember last summer when I treated myself to a weekend at that fancy health spa?"

The other women nodded.

"I think I told you all about the golf and tennis, but I didn't tell you about the tennis instructor I treated myself to," Mom grinned wolfishly. "Twenty four years old, six feet two inches tall, 200 pounds of muscle, and a cock that never got soft."

"How big?" Pam asked, unconsciously licking her lips.

"Big enough," Mom snickered. "It's the only seven inch prick I've ever had."

As Mom poured another round of wine, Laura took a deep breath and began her own story. Since her divorce, she'd dated very little and engaged in sex even less frequently. As her friends gasped, she told them of the evening when her son had been out of town on a camping trip and one of his young friends had dropped by. Before she knew it, the two were upstairs in bed.

"How old was he?" asked a shocked Natalie.

"Seventeen," Laura admitted.

"Well hung?" Pam asked.

"Average," Laura shrugged.

"How'd you finally get rid of him?" Mom asked.

Laura smiled.

"It wasn't really a question of my getting rid of him," she sighed. "I'd have kept doing it the whole rest of the summer. We did it a few more times, and then he pretty much told me he was moving back to younger stuff."

"Speaking of younger stuff," Mom smiled, "Pam?"

"I need to start a little further back," Pam began. "When I was 21, I was a little short of cash. So I posed for a few pictures in a magazine."

"Any magazine we'd know?" Mom asked.

"Not unless your son collects some pretty obscure stuff," Pam chortled. "Anyway, about six years ago, one of my students found the magazine. Scared the shit out of me. Finally, he agreed to give me the magazine, but of course he had a price."

"Drive a hard bargain, did he?" Natalie giggled.

Pam laughed along with the other women.

"Hard?" she grinned. "Yes. Good? No. Big? No. After a while I just couldn't do it without laughing. So I decided to toss him out. By that time, I'd gotten him to give me all the pictures from the magazine, and I'd bought up the only two copies left in the local porn store. Once he didn't have anything on me anymore, I basically threatened to go to the police with his little blackmail."

"You hypocrite," Laura looked a little shocked. "Wasn't it you who tossed your husband out a few years ago cause you caught him doing his secretary?"

Pam simply gave the older woman a smug smile.

The women turned to Natalie, finding it hard to believe that the youngster had already cheated on her husband after only three years. She hadn't. But on the morning before the wedding, while her prospective groom was sleeping off his hangover, the prospective bride was having her fun with the prospective best man.

"Nothing since then?" Mom asked.

"Nope," Natalie said as the phone in the kitchen began ringing.

"Excuse me," Mom said as she rose from the table.

"Although not because I'm really satisfied at home," Natalie muttered after a healthy gulp of wine.

"Oh, come on," Pam growled. "You're married. You can have it any time you want."

"Tell you what," Natalie said. "You find me someone who can really do it well, and you can have him any time you want."

Pam smiled and leaned forward.

"Yeah, I know what you're going to ask, you slut," Natalie giggled. "It's a little above average. The problem is it comes too fast and it ends too soon."

"Well, you can keep him then," Pam said. "Laura?"

"Yeah, right," laughed the brunette. "Who'd wanna screw a 39-year-old divorcee with a college age kid and a size 12 ass?"

"Someone who likes that Double-D rack!" Natalie offered cheerfully.

"Oh, sure, I can probably get some boy to come over," Laura said. "But not the kind of man I want."

"Somebody man enough to keep that ass in line, huh?" Pam said bluntly as Laura flushed a deep crimson.

"Anyway what do you care, Pam?" Laura interjected. "I wouldn't think you'd have any trouble getting laid!"

"My husband may have been a bastard," Pam said with toss of her hair, "but after his seven-inch cock, anything smaller doesn't even seem like fucking."

"I wonder how good Deirdre's son is," Natalie said, raising her eyebrows. "He's turned into quite the little muscle boy."

"Terry? He is cute," Laura agreed. "But I'll bet momma has him a little too "whipped," if you get my meaning. All that 'yes, ma'am, ' and 'no, ma'am' stuff."

Pam smiled.

"And I'll bet we know who'd like to be whipped instead," she said, making Laura blush again. "But she's right -- you're out of luck, Nat. He's in my French class this year, and I doubt he's any different than the rest. At least when it comes to size."

"And how would you know?" Laura asked slyly.

"At least once a week, I wear one of those tight little dresses that produce a hard-on in every boy in that class," Pam gloated. "And I haven't had a good look at Terry's bulge, but this year's jocks are a pitiful little bunch. Hell, as long as it's been since I've been laid, if I thought any of 'em even had a good thick six inches I'd be conjugating all the verbs he wanted for him after school."

"Hey, you're the quantity queen," Natalie giggled. "I just want quality."

Mom breezed back in the room just then.

"Well, ladies, I'm afraid we have to call it quits," she said. "That was my office. They just made an arrest in that forgery case I've been working on and I've got to go downtown."

Mom walked out of the room behind her guests, a faint smile playing across her lips.

I shut off the videotape and my first thought, I swear to God, was that I couldn't believe my mom was such a bitch. I mean, I could, because she was, but really, taping her friends talking about sex? After she'd steered the conversation in that direction? What a fucking bitch! My second thought? Did Laura Stone really think I was cute? I mean, I'd heard her say it, but did she really think that? I reminded myself of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer ("She things I'm cuuuuute!"), not for the first time.

I'd returned to an empty house just a few minutes after Mom and her friends had left. Almost by reflex, I'd begun to clean up the table where they'd been sitting, when I noticed that something in the room was out of place. It took me a while to identify the video camera sitting on the bookcase, pointed directly at the table. Moving closer, I noticed black tape over the red light that glowed to signal that the camera was on. And sure enough, the camera was on. I turned it off and ejected the tape. Obviously, Mom had been taping her friends, and didn't want them to know it. But why? On second thought, who the hell cared why? I had a tape of three of my mother's beautiful friends, three women who'd starred in more of my fantasies, waking and sleeping, than all the other women in the world combined.

At age eighteen, of course, it wasn't like I had a huge database of fantasies. I mean, it's not like I did it every night or something. Maybe every other night, but not every night. And there were girls at school that I liked, and actresses, of course. Hell, that chick on the Today Show looked real good some days. The one that read the news, not so much the one that took Katie's job. But these three women — Laura Stone, Natalie Winston, and Pamela Lee — were the stars. I dug through the cassettes on the shelves and found a defective tape that I'd tried to use a few weeks ago. I slipped it in the camera and put the camera back where I'd found it. Then I turned it back on in the "record" mode, so that Mom would simply assume that she'd put a bad tape in the camera. By the time she returned late that afternoon, I had already downloaded the tape into the hard drive of my PC and hidden the video file in a very safe folder in my hard drive. Erasing the tape was even easier.