College was a bit of a mixed bag for Tracy, if she was being honest. She couldn't will herself out of bed in time for class most days, so her grades floundered early and stayed bad almost the entire rest of the time. She passed, but only ever by meeting the very minimum requirements. She stressed out immensely in once- or twice-a-semester bursts that left her completely wrung out.
She ate only the worst food, watched endless porn, and wrote nonstop in her diary.
She slept with a lot of her dormitory floormates - and give or take a couple of messy ones, this aspect of her college life was actually pretty great. She liked sex, saw genuine value in it, and could not give two fricks what anyone thought of her for that. And while she found herself withdrawing further and further into her writing by Sophomore year, this escapism only compounded her allure to would-be suitors. She retained a steady drip of curious lovers. These adventures in human chemistry nourished something in her, kept her fed, so she never fully drowned in all the seething, frothing academic stress.
She came home every winter and summer break. Seay missed winter break Junior year, and by Senior year was only making perfunctory week-long visits in the summer.
When it was just Tracy at home, Mom and Dad acted different. Dad was more strict with her. Mom was more attentive to Tracy's comings and goings. The sex between them took on a familiar, banal rhythm. Dad would bring her coffee and finger her in the mornings, and if he'd been a good Daddy she sucked him off; but lately that was a big 'if.' Mom would follow her to bed some nights, make the girl sit on her face until she came (or pretended to), and then want to snuggle and kiss and talk into the wee hours.
But the longer Seay was gone, the less frequent even these lackluster interactions became. And it fell to Tracy to go knocking on her parents' door if she was feeling under-loved. Weeks would go by sometimes.
During her "final summer at home," the one after graduating (by the skin of her teeth), Tracy only slept with Mom and Dad a handful of times. It was hard to want to. They weren't quite being themselves around her anymore. There was this awkward tension at home. And Tracy knew in her core that this tension was her own fault. She had become the odd kid out. The reclusive writer with no future plan. The stiffly upper-lipped BA in Creative Writing. She felt like a deep source of politely suppressed worry. Sometimes she'd even catch Mom frowning at her, like the poor woman was wondering, {When is my adult daughter's adulthood actually going to start?}
Seay landed kind of a dream gig right out of college - because of course he would - and so he could afford to come home to visit for a weekend here and there.
Tracy would kind of keep to herself when Seay visited. She was embarrassed to be living at home still. Her "final summer" had turned into an indeterminate stay. And was on its way to becoming a full blown failure to launch. She suppressed her embarrassment and worry, dissociated from it, most easily by staying well away from Seay. And not just because he was now the golden child, but because her brother could see through her discomfiture, smell her off-ness, and was prone to ask what was wrong.
Avoiding him was mercifully straightforward. His visits were almost entirely consumed by his parents. He was like an only child when he was there. One night, on a night he'd just flown in by surprise, Mom and Dad pulled his pants down right there inside the front door, practically before he'd even set his bags down; and when Tracy came out of hiding to say hi to her superstar brother, she found him standing there pantsless in the front hall, trembling with his eyes rolled back as Dad buried his face between his butt cheeks and Mom vocally, hand-job-intensively sucked his cock.
She had been so embarrassed, so gutted for some reason, and crept back to her room. That night, when Seay had come to greet her and ask why she was hiding from him, she stuffed her dirty underwear in his mouth and fucked him until he could barely stay awake. Once he was asleep, she snuck off to the bathroom and wept and pounded on her own head with her fists and ordered her reflection to figure her fricking shit out.
***
Seay and Mom didn't ever schedule a whole week together. That was just never going to happen with his schedule. But they did go back to the lake one weekend. Just the two of them, in secret, returned to the old cabin. It had felt extraordinarily naughty and romantic while they were planning it.
But then once they were actually there, holding a keyring with a big "RENTAL" tag on it, in what felt like someone else's cabin - because it was literally someone else's now; they'd sold it to help pay for the kids' schooling, and now all the furniture was different: the kitchenette was a kitchen proper, the family room TV was humongous and difficult to use, and the hobbit loft was now a play room / holding pen for extremely young children - they quickly realized that staging their honeymoon at the cabin had been a mistake.
They had sex only once the entire weekend they were there. They did it in the play room, quite by accident - the room turned out to be an easy source of laughter, of self-pity, and of excuses to be on all fours and/or laying down. After fucking Mom every which way, Seay had had to scrub their giant puddle of mess out of one of those classic town rugs with roads and buildings and little traffic signs on it. He cleaned it more times than was necessary. When he was done, he realized he'd accidentally scrubbed off some of the town.
So, he bought a new rug. It was an updated version of the classic rug, slightly different, but the only one they had available anymore. He could only hope they wouldn't notice.
They went to get BBQ, but Mammy's was closed. They went to the candy store, and the grumpy old cashier - who spoke with a stutter now, and did not recognize either Mom or Seay - informed them that Mammy was dead. She had keeled over in the shitter of her own restaurant the year prior. Which was perhaps not the most respectful way the cashier could have phrased it, but as Seay pointed out on their way back to the "RENTAL," it was almost certainly how Mammy herself would have put it. And that was what made Mom finally break down crying.
Seay tried to get Mom to go swimming. They hadn't swum yet. And Mom got her suit on. But instead of swimming, she just wanted to sit there at the edge of the dock and watch the sunset while Seay held her hand and let her cry endlessly and didn't say anything.
***
Tracy feigned congratulations when Seay told her he'd gone back to the cabin with Mom. But it cooled her jets conspicuously. All the snuggle in her fizzled out. She rag-dolled underneath him. And Seay fucked her anyway. It wasn't rape, to be clear. It was just empty, sad-feeling sex. And then he had the decency to pull out. But this only made Tracy feel that much emptier. She didn't cry, but she did lose her ability to mask. And now all of a sudden Seay knew she was not okay.
He asked what was wrong.
Tracy couldn't answer. This part of her felt unlovable. It was none of his business.
He fucked her a couple more times. Try as he might, he couldn't get her to cum. Then the next morning he had to fly out early, and it was back to just Tracy and the parents.
Mom and Dad's favorite thing to do with Tracy was tie her to the bed. Dad was a knot nerd, and took great pleasure in securing his daughter's ankles and wrists. Then the two of them would put on a kind of production. It was frankly incredible, the first handful of times. And to their credit, they tried to mix it up a little now and then. But whether there were blindfolds or massage oils or ice cubes or whipped cream (side note: Tracy was actually not a fan of the canned crap, despite having loved it as a kid, and yet despite telling her parents this news they insisted on sticking with the inferior whip; Dad said he liked the convenience factor, and Mom said it was much easier to get out of the sheets) the show ultimately devolved into the same climactic tableau: Dad sucking orgasm after orgasm out of Tracy's clit while Mom either sucked his cock or rode her daughter's face.
Tracy learned how Mom's flavors changed throughout the month. The women were both on the same cycle. So Tracy learned that if her mother's p-word tasted the worst it was capable of tasting, then both their periods were imminent within the next handful of days.
To be fair, the camaraderie remained. Tracy, Mom, Dad, and Seay all still basically got along. They all still dearly loved Tracy, and let her know often. She, of course, still loved them, too. Insofar as the dream had been a life of normalcy, they were definitely still winning or whatever. This shit Tracy was going through, she owned and understood to be due to her own helplessness and self-sabotaging insecurity. She was just kind of a wastoid now, and so deserving of the self-inflicted agonies special to wastoids: self-pity, guilt, shame; breakfast, lunch, dinner.
This, really, is what made licking Mom's smelly, sticky cunt on those off-weeks, or letting Dad fuck her while she snoozed between alarms in the morning, or helping Seay cum in his own stupid, sensitive, sensationally successful mouth relatively doable. Tracy could let herself feel completely consumed by her family. It honestly didn't even hurt. It felt fricking good. And she liked the smells. The smells took her away more than anything.
***
Dad got her an interview with an office friend's daughter, a restaurant owner, who was happy to hire her on the spot as a manager in training. Tracy had waited tables off and on in high school. She had been an accidental talent, and coworkers and customers alike had loved her. But to this day, she still had occasional waitress nightmares - overwhelmed kitchens, angry customers, apathetic management - and had serious trepidations about returning to the industry.
