Chapter 3: Incubation

Hearing a soft exhalation as I passed my daughter's room, I paused, opening the door a fraction and peering through, concerned she was breaking down under the strain or had injured herself somehow. Instead, I saw her sitting in front of her computer, attention clearly devoted to her nether regions. Face burning crimson in shame over having disturbed my daughter engaged in so intimate a pursuit, I gently closed the door, trying to put the image of her masturbating out of my mind.

Was she already beginning to succumb? I wondered, desperate with the fear it would be my turn next...

Sneaking back to my room, I thought about what I'd just witnessed. Maybe the disease was making my daughter so horny that she had to satisfy herself? It seemed to be a stupid idea, but it made about as much sense as anything else that had happened in the day since my son got home.

My son. I trembled, the fire in my cheeks replaced by an altogether different fire, one kindled much lower down. Much as the thought should repel me, I was now able to see him not just as my child, but as the man he'd become. The man he was; broad-shouldered and husky, a strapping lad the spitting image of his father at a similar age. An age, upon reflection, that was the last time she had been with anyone; when their marriage had soured, sex was the first thing to go, and after the painful divorce the priority had always been the children, not dating. By the time they'd reached an age where I could consider taking a lover, I had been so practiced in ignoring her own needs that the idea simply hadn't occurred to me.

Easing back onto the bed, I remembered one of the last good times I had shared with my ex-husband, one on the self-same bed and in this very room; the night Stacey, my daughter, had been conceived. It had been wild, and passionate; flailing limbs had knocked a bedside lamp over, the crash of its ceramics awakening young Samuel, forcing the two lovers to disengage and hurry him back to his own room so they could continue uninterrupted. The pleasant memory bought a smile to my lips, and fanned the heat between my legs. In my mind's eye, I continued comparing Samuel to his father, wondering what he looked like under his expensive suits, how he had developed since the last time I had seen him naked, voice barely beginning to crack with the onset of manhood.

I abandoned myself to those thoughts, overcome by the disease that was even now ravaging through the household. Inhibitions cast off, I hitched my house dress up, hooking the slightly damp crotch of my panties to one side and, for the first time in long months, began to attend to myself the way my daughter was down the hall. Sure she was fantasising about the only male left to the family, I tested the idea, imagining he was pinning me to the bed, that it was his touch instead of my own inflaming me, bringing me pleasure.

"Sammm..." I moaned, warming to the thought. As the syllable escaped my mouth, the doorknob turned, grating with almost geological slowness. The object of my lust poked his head through the door, investigating the sound of his name. Whatever he had expected to find, it was clearly not his mother masturbating, legs spread before his gaze, crying his name as she was overwhelmed by her passions. He stuttered, closing the door with a sense of finality that drove me to despair.

Abandoning what I was doing, I sat up, catching my breath. My mind worked at the possibilities, my torpid libido now fully awake and looking to make amends for its interminable absence. I concluded that the disease had not been as rapid in its effect on my son, for he had not come into my room to take me, but had fled. I considered the girlfriends he had introduced me to; they were uniformly tall, blonde, and willowy; I was petite, brunette, and curvaceous. Clearly, I was the opposite of his preferred type- the opposite, I realised with a chill, of Stacey down the hall.

I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror, eyes glittering with malice. I wanted- needed- sex, and I had competition for the only source of the real thing in the house- perhaps the only real thing I would ever have access to. My sense of competition also roused, I gathered some things to wear and a razor, heading to the shower in order to steal a march on my daughter, gambling that she would be occupied a while yet with her own masturbation, the way I had nearly been taken in myself. Quickly shearing away my unkempt patch of pubic hair, leaving my mound hairless in the manner I knew was favoured by young women these days, I dressed in my raciest lingerie.

Then I broke out my secret weapon; a little blue pill. One of my workmates had cadged it for me a few months ago, giving it to me as a gag. She had thought to tease me for my lack of a love-life, joking that I should Fed-Ex a parcel to myself and then spike the deliveryman's drink. Although I had wanted to slap her smug face, I had swallowed her scorn, taken it home, and promptly forgotten it.