Adulthood came hard and fast in the era of the diaspora, after the Darjee announced that the Earth would be invaded by the Sa'arm in ten years. Boys became men and girls became women at the tender age of fourteen years. That had been a requirement for some time when Joe took his first CAP test. He left the CAP test center some time later with a smile. He had just scored a nice 6.6 on his first CAP test. Not only was he an adult by the rules of the diaspora era but he was one of the privileged few who was able to volunteer to go to the stars and fight the advancing horde of the Sa'arm. It hadn't taken him any time at all to volunteer to join the Navy if he should win the lottery to be picked up.

He whistled a merry tune as he made his way to the apartment that he shared with his widowed mother. He wondered if he could convince her that they should go out to celebrate his good fortune. It wouldn't be easy he knew. Their finances were rather finely tuned as a result of his mother being a widow. The fact that the advent of the Sa'arm had caused a great majority of women and girls to start to go nearly naked would not add to his mother's comfort with an outing. Still he considered the possibility. The fact was that his mother did like to occasionally visit the cafe that was near the community college. The place was convenient to where they lived and, as it catered to the college students, it wasn't too expensive.

The way to convince his mother that an evening out was reasonable was to earn some money. Begging seemed to be all the rage even though the absence of many people due to the ongoing effort of the Confederacy to pick up volunteers had left many jobs open. But that didn't fit with Joe's idea of what a man who was going to be a soldier ought to be doing. He stopped by a service station where he had an off-again, on-again gig washing windshields. Because what he wanted to do was not entirely approved by the owner, Joe could never be certain that he would be able to depend on windshield washing as a steady source of income. But he was able to do the relatively easy work often enough to make a stop there any day worth his effort.

The stop was well worth Joe's time today because Mindy was there. She was a rather ditzy girl who seemed to think with the bullets that protruded from her breasts and with her pussy. Joe wouldn't have been so crass as to say the second part of that thought aloud. Her boyfriend du jour was there ramping up Mindy's desire to get into the store room and do the horizontal boogy. "Hi Joe," Mindy said a bit breathlessly as he entered the store. "Wanna earn a bit of money? I'll get Harry here to pay you to watch the register for a while."

"If you won't get in trouble..." Joe said, playing his part.

"Nah, a blow job from me will keep Mr. Singh happy," she told him.

Since Joe didn't recognize Harry he decided to push a bit more than he would have otherwise. "I still don't know, Mindy. Mr. Singh doesn't like me to be here."

"What else do you have to do?" Harry asked impatiently. Evidently Mindy had gotten him worked up for a romp in the storeroom already.

"I could earn thirty dollars washing windshields," Joe said with certainty as he eyed the tall skinny boy who couldn't be much older than himself.

"Fine, we'll hurry. Here's twenty five in case we take longer than you wanted to spend washing windshields," Harry said as he dug in his pocket.

Listening to Mindy scream her way through several orgasms in the next thirty minutes was a prelude to hell as far as Joe was concerned. Just as she seemed to wrap up the last one, Mr. Singh came bursting into the store. Joe suspected that he had the place wired for sound and waited until Mindy was in a compromising position (or had a man in a compromising position) to come in all irate.

There was a loud argument and Harry seemed to deflate a lot when Mr. Singh put him out with the broom handle he kept handy for stickup men who tried to use something less than a gun to rob the place. The upshot of it was that Mindy ended up paying him her wages for the time that he'd spent and Mr. Singh threatened to hire him instead of a foolish woman who couldn't keep her pants on.

Joe counted his money and decided that he still needed a bit more if he was going to quell any objections his mother might have about a meal out. So with reluctant permission from Mr. Singh, he went to work washing windshields and soliciting donations for the work since Mr. Singh refused to pay for it.

Some time later a short bus ride brought Joe to his apartment. When he entered he was not surprised to see his mother at home. It seemed like the only time she got out recently was when she went to her job, which was cleaning classrooms at the college after all the classes were over. That meant that she wouldn't start her shift for at least another couple of hours. Now the question was, would his mother be pleased or upset by the fact that he had volunteered to join the Confederacy Navy? How to approach this, he wondered? With his CAP score first he decided. Then he wondered, what was his mother's CAP score?

"Mom," he said, as he entered the flat and could see her, "I took the CAP test today and that got me to wondering what your CAP score is and if you had even taken the CAP test?"

"I have taken the CAP," Joe's mother said. "I didn't quite make the cut, which I suppose is usual for women. Did you get a score that would let you volunteer?"

This was going much better than Joe had reason to expect. "I just barely can volunteer. But I did volunteer for the Navy when I interviewed with the AI that ran the test center after I completed the test."

"That's a good thing I think," Joe's mother said, after a pause that gave him cause to wonder if he'd said something wrong. He hadn't, but he didn't realize what his revelation had done to his mother. Her baby was growing up. He was becoming a man. That truth slapped Sally Williams in the face, or more precisely between the legs. Before she'd been widowed, Sally and her husband had enjoyed a very active sex life. To be honest, Sally had hoped that Joe would be out of the house before she had to face the fact that he was a man. But the advent of the Sa'arm and the alliance of humans with the Darjee and thus the Confederacy which they represented had made an extreme change to that timetable.

Motherhood and widowhood had caused Sally to put aside her nature. The fact that her child was a boy just made things worse in a way. Because for Sally, having her absent husband in her bed, between her legs, pumping her full of sperm and babies had been a goal almost from the time she first met him. She had been horny and lonely. Marriage had changed that to a degree. After all Sally hadn't been so desperate as to make her pussy and body community property in an attempt to put out the fires that regularly arose when she considered being with a man. All of which made her son Joe a potential target for her desire the moment she considered him to be a man. The truth was, that ultimately, she had a relationship with him and trusted him to treat her well.

Most of that was water under the bridge so to speak, so wasn't considered. What had given Sally pause was the pulse of arousal that Joe's announcement that he had a sponsor level CAP score had given her. So it had taken her a moment to come up with something to say other than, "Please take me to bed and fuck me 'til I have your babies," to her son.

"I was wondering if maybe we could go out tonight to the Bindery for a bit of something to celebrate my success," Joe said diffidently as his mother's reaction was a bit more subdued than he might have hoped for.

Again there was a pregnant pause before his mother answered, "I'll need to change, and to make sure it won't break our budget."

"Just worry about changing. I have enough money for a night out."

"What? How?" popped out of Sally's mouth almost before she heard the last of her son's words.

Joe pulled out the cash he'd earned earlier in the day and said, "Singh's was good to me today."

His mom looked at the money and asked, "What about your college fund?"

"I don't know about that. I suppose if I get picked up by the Confederacy, it's moot anyway," Joe told his mother.

"I'll think about that while I'm getting changed," Sally said. It wouldn't do for her to go to the Bindery in a pair of sweat pants, and that really was the least of her worries. She was well aware that for the past few minutes she'd been lubricating to the point that she'd need to put in a pad to keep from showing a wet spot if she spent too much time in the presence of her son. Suiting actions to words Sally dashed to her bedroom to change.

Some bumps, scuffles, and grunts emitted from Joe's mother's bedroom. In just enough time for Joe to have begun to imagine his mother in her underwear, she reappeared. She had shucked out of the sweat pants that she usually wore for lounging around the apartment and now wore a skirt and blouse. Seeing his mother in the more feminine attire caused Joe to wonder what had kept his mother a widow for this long. Certainly it wasn't a lack of ability to attract the eyes of men, including himself lately.

Some of Sally's 'slips' that let her son have a view of her as desirable and female were driven by her nature, which seemed to be driven by her cunt. Indeed the main reason that Sally had not attempted to attract a man, or several if the truth was known, was that her husband had given her orders not to fuck up with his son while on his deathbed. Since Sally knew that her greatest weakness was sex, or rather her desire for sex, she'd done her best to excise sex from her life. However for the last year or so since Joe had figured out masturbation, her hard won control was slipping. The scent of the cum-filled rags that Joe added to the laundry with regularity was causing the hedonist that Sally had worked so hard to lock away to pull at her leash. Thus Joe had gotten more than one peek at his mother's tits and even at her pussy – and that peek when it wasn't encased in a pair of riot inducing lacy panties.

Still the skirt that Joe's mother was wearing was several cuts above anything he'd seen her wear out of the house, especially considering that the Bindery was a rather casual place that combined a cafe with a bookshop. "What's the occasion?" Joe almost stuttered at the sight of his mother in the skirt and blouse.

"I'm going out to eat with my handsome son, who is going to be fighting to stem the advancing horde of the Sa'arm."

Sometimes Joe thought that his mother had missed her calling by not becoming an actress. Still he didn't mind too much, as he was sure he'd be the envy of all the other men at the Bindery, as long as they didn't realize that the beautiful woman he was escorting was his mother. If that were realized by other men, they'd be buzzing around the table like bees around a particularly sweet flower.

The ride to the Bindery in his mother's rattletrap car was short and unremarkable. As usual there was an eclectic group of people gathered at the Bindery including several members of a chess club that met there at various times. One reason that Joe had wanted to come here tonight was that there had been a flier at school advertising a chess tournament, something that Joe suspected might attract the notice of the Confederacy. The question was whether or not there would be enough concubines available that the Confederacy would hold a pickup at the Bindery tonight.

Joe could hope though, after all he had seen large groups of women in the Bindery at other times. He pointed out a seat that was not too far from the chess games in progress and suggested that he and his mother sit there. The table was just far enough away from the chess games that he had no trouble catching the eye of the waitress. Jackie Sue had been on his short list of girls about whom he fantasized when he played the skin flute and he was pleased to watch her sway over to his table. Sure, she walked that way no matter who she was waiting on, but it was still a beautiful sight.

"What do you want to eat?" she asked, in a voice that Joe thought could have raised a mummy from its tomb.

"Could we get a couple of menus?" he asked. It was somewhat proforma, as the Bindery was somewhat famous for the fairly large and inexpensive plate of spaghetti that they served. Still Joe thought that looking over the menu would be something that his mother would appreciate.

"Why don't we just have the spaghetti?" his mother asked.

"I thought you might appreciate something different tonight," Joe answered. "I'm not as limited on funds as we usually are when we go out."

His mother studied the specials board that was posted above a counter near where some scantily clad classmates of his were apparently trying out their flirting skills on an ex-football player. At least that was Joe's initial impression of the large, older man who was leaning against the counter watching the people in the place at their various pursuits. "I like the lasagna, too," his mother said.

Joe nodded and said, "Jackie Sue, I think we will both have the lasagna and a small blended mocha."

"Do you want those together, or to have the mocha as dessert?" Jackie Sue asked.

"Together," Joe and his mother said in chorus.

Jackie Sue laughed a little and said, "I'll have that right out to you."

"You like Jackie Sue," Joe's mother said as the young woman swayed away.

"I like to look at her. I don't know much about her except that I think all the guys in school think she should star in movies."

"Porn," Joe's mother said a bit sharply.

"I suppose," Joe answered, "but you have to admit that she does have a certain attractiveness to men."

"Some women too," Joe's mother said, a bit more softly.

"I wouldn't know. I only know about myself and every other guy I talk to," Joe said.

Anything that Joe's mother might have said was drowned out by the cacophony of a dozen or more women with small children who came into the shop and headed for an area that was set aside for children. It was then that Joe noticed the lady clown over there, except there was something odd about the woman. She was either wearing stilts, or was the tallest, no make that the biggest woman Joe had ever seen. A couple of large, tall young men came in the shop a couple of minutes later. 'If I didn't know better, ' Joe thought, 'I'd think that there was going to be a pickup here; either that or the football team is here too.'