For those who know my work, this will be a slow-release series based more around the drama of a not-so-well-adjusted mother and son. I'm not doing it for that little red H. I'm doing it to explore the psychology of people for whom the fetish has crossed into lifelong obsession.
In my mind, after committing myself to a fuck-tonne of research (and the great fiction of my fellow scribblers here), there's no way two characters I've invested so much reality in - for the sake of exploring the taboo - would so easily give in.
There would be fear, doubt, anxiety, self-doubt, self-loathing, and the terror of facing society's very real and very unsympathetic judgement, which nobody survives; and we know it.
So if this story bores you, I can't hold it against you. If it creeps you out a little, then that can only be healthy. If it helps you to re-acquaint yourself with the stark line between reality and fantasy, then I have done what I set out to accomplish...
*****
1
'Can we talk?'
Their little world edged on those words, ground to a stop, leaving a lingering silence hanging over them both. It was the tentative yet laboured tone of her voice, and the unusually meek nuance in the way she delivered those words, which implied that Lee Nicholson might not have wanted to hear whatever it was that was coming.
Lee's relationship with his mother had developed into something minimalistic and trivial, though very much amicable, in recent years. It was not that their bond had suddenly diminished. That had happened during his formative years.
Neither had they become enemies. The bridge was not gone, though it once hung by tethers and took some work to rebuild. It had taken a lot of time to learn to appreciate the little things, helped infinitely by the absence of his now ex-stepfather.
The silence he now shared with Stevie in the wake of that event was still something of a novelty. In fact it was bliss to Lee, who would be 21 in the summer - another year of daydreaming gone, with the time to act on those dreams diminishing alongside it.
He just needed time to adjust, yet again, and she had given him that so far. Childhood had been a strain. He deserved a break. So the way she asked that question made him wonder, what was going to change?
Now talking was good. Stevie knew that. Stevie, named after her mother's favourite singer of the seventies, and a woman she actually shared no physical traits with, especially knew that since becoming an advocate for mental well-being and talk therapy, through first-hand experience.
Many of Stevie's problems had reduced over time, by the power of talking, and left little in her way of improving on the life she had, and of leaving the past behind. A problem shared was a problem halved, and a problem halved was a burden lifted.
But Lee couldn't have known this, yet - least of all the size of the burden to come!
Was it time to get a real job and move out, he wondered? Was he neglecting his mother, or taking her for granted? Was she simply worrying about his silence, as she often did? Of course he had the time to talk. All she had to do was ask.
Well Stevie did indeed have the mother of all confessions to lift off her shoulders, and she had dreaded this moment, though it had to come. She had been feeling a stranger in his presence, more and more lately. But not because of anything he had done, or not done.
The chances were, however, that that Lee already knew at least the tip of the iceberg, in regard to his mother's dilemma.
2
Lee loved his mother, but that love was as unconventional as it was unconditional. To his mature and reserved twenty years she was a youthful forty-four. To her carefree attitude he handled himself with sometimes excessive sensibility, unable to see the bright side unless the roof was falling in.
That's probably why she didn't nag him about the weed smoking. It probably did his hidden anxieties the world of good, though he smoked it the way the same man twice his age might quietly imbibe in scotch before dinner and bedtime, rather than socially.
Lee's unconventional love for his mother came in the way that he doted on her in his quiet way, and yet didn't speak much to her. He regarded her conscientiously, and otherwise roamed the world as carefree and curious.
At 5'9" Stevie was a raven haired, grey-eyed metal-head - one of the original alternative crowd. She wore a life-story of sorts on her skin. A tapestry of tattoos down both arms made her a living testament to all things punk and metal.
The head of Judge Death, 2000AD's eponymous villain, grinned at her right shoulder. A black Punisher skull complimented the right. And filling both sleeves all the way down were the black flag of Henry Rollins fame, a Celtic cross, Marvin the Martian, Tank Girl, and others; filled in with an ink garden of roses and thorns and barbed wire.
Eagerly true to the saying that you never stop at the one, tattoo, a black Chinese dragon snaked along the line of her left hip, its tail curving to its end beneath one gravity-defying 36G-cup breast.
She was a strong woman and a real man's handful, though her ability to drink any man under the table gladly didn't show. If anything did, it was the glorious fake tits her ex-husband had paid for into the second year of their marriage.
She was made for them. Her body-type complimented those fleshy globes and vice versa. Many a guilty teenage pleasure was once had thinking about her and those tits, during the horniest years of Lee's life. That time of his life was marred, however, by the presence of Stevie's short-lived husband, "The Laughing Man."
Ray was a cocky sod who lived to show off his sex life with Stevie. He was a low-class opportunist trying to impress his way into a high-class world hopelessly beyond reach. But at any time other than when he was drinking, watching the games, or gambling, he had time for nobody.
On occasion he made time for Lee at his mother's insistence. And in those instances he had no patience. Lee was not his son. He owed that boy nothing.
Stevie couldn't have argued either. That was never part of the deal. Their relationship was never business, meaning that there was no deal. Lee had always been her responsibility, and the decision to marry had - at the time - been partly influenced by her desire to give Lee the security he needed, but otherwise he was her responsibility alone.
