With special thanks to SaraLynn for your engaging, vivid, fun and creative back and forth. This one is especially for you!
*****
1
It was the final week in August that year when a third heat wave gripped the small coastal town of Clasbridge. A sleepy town where sleep didn't come easy all of a sudden, nobody appreciated the irony. The sea wind – usually at a constant – had dropped. Now it was no more cooling or refreshing than a hot, stale breath after a bowl of steamed mussels. Every day in was hotter, muggier and made people a little harder to deal with!
These days budding young writer Stephen Hiller was old enough and seemingly responsible enough to be left alone at night while his mother, Brenda, and her unofficial other half, Greta, worked the night shift at the Middleton Hotel. This heat wave hadn't been too unkind to them.
The holiday-makers were thinning out and the swingers were too easily swung out in the heat. It afforded a reprise, at least, and not least the maids packed tightly into their neat uniforms as they raced from room to room, cleaning and changing beds.
Brenda often left Steven, who wrote better at night, to do his own thing while local work prospects weren't great. What would he do at the hotel – linen? That wasn't a man's job or a boy's. Whereas Steven was no boy anymore, there were jobs better suited to him that came along once in a while and she didn't see the harm in letting him enjoy his youth.
Brenda had started young, going into the workplace as soon as she turned sixteen. Looking back she regretted putting work before life. It had been hard for her to catch a break and circumstances weren't the kindest either. It was simply a case of giving her son something she never had.
But there was no shortage of pocket change to be made, which he did. One might be surprised at the secrets a hotelier was expected to keep, and so if the window cleaner, the car wash owner or the local convenience store proprietor needed an extra hand on deck, there was a call for cash in hand if he wanted it. But that's all there was these days – pocket change.
Otherwise doing odd jobs for the neighbours along the seasons, because the reputation he had built up from his early teenage years still went a long way, kept him in pocket. He wasn't expensive to keep, being that his favourite thing to do was his writing and that his favourite place to be were the fantastical worlds he built for himself.
His sci-fi and fantasy stories were great, she thought. While he was young and so talented and knew confidently what he wanted to do, she saw it best to let him aim for his dream and to see what he could make of himself. What could it hurt?
And already he was making a little money from his writing, which he had to declare to his mother, seeing as he needed her to teach him how to pay his taxes. But when she asked to read one of the stories now earning him some coin, he was aloof all of a sudden and made the excuse that it wasn't the kind of thing she'd want to read.
Huh...
2
That was her literal reaction. Huh!
'My own son is now officially a published and paid novelist and he's hiding it from me, his mother; the woman who fed him, clothed him and raised him,' she explained to Greta one night as they stood behind the desk one evening. 'What do you make of that? What could possibly be so bad?'
'I'd say don't ask,' Greta said cautiously. 'It can't be anything illegal. Look at it that way. But he's a man after all. If he doesn't want you to know then there's probably a good reason behind it.' Greta said that last part with the slightest tremor, as though she had touched something dirty. Whatever was on her mind she couldn't bear the thought.
Two peas in a pod – that only half-explained Brenda and Greta's love life. They might not have been made for each other but they seemed so alike at times. They shared many of the same mannerisms and sentiments, but of course Greta took the lead when it came to making them known.
Otherwise they were chalk and cheese, good cop and bad cop!
At fifty six, with elfish grey hair and a boyish body, Greta was the older lover by ten years. She had discovered her true self later in life, but there was never any denying that she had always been different. There was nothing wrong with being different until it cost you your vocation. She was a school teacher once, which explained why she was still as assertive as she was nurturing. She was also still very bitter over that whole episode.
Why did life have to change so drastically? Not because she came out as gay, but because the men and women who didn't like her or the fact that she was gay, all united in a display of community spirit to pull the strings necessary to be done with her.
She wasn't innocent. She wasn't holier than anyone. But boy was she learned the art of the softer approach ever since the resulting bitterness, betrayal and depression. That played a part in how she charmed Steven's mother.
A wise mind was a rare thing in this life. Even rarer was such an unashamedly faulted heart to a point of confidence. She was direct but rarely wrong, something that captured Brenda and disarmed her habit of reluctance.
Brenda herself was, by mid-life standards, the sweetest, most caring and easily approachable ash blonde, comparably shaped by tragedy and weirdness. Her husband died young, along with Sandra who today would have been Steven's older sister, in a roadside collision. She was twenty-three and Steven was still in the womb.
The weirdness came from her own immediate family and namely her twin sister Belinda, the wild child, who had for over four decades done everything in her power not to be mistaken for an identical twin.
Considering that they weren't identical, they could be dead ringers if not the same woman living a double life, which wasn't the case.
As a result, Brenda had always been the mature, sensible and boring one of the family. But when she was with Greta, either they were identical in the sense that they were equally sensible and boring, staunch and competitive, or otherwise secretly daring and sexual; when the occasion demanded it.
When Greta first seduced her and turned her to the dark side, she was confused and yet so intensely in love, wildly remorseful and tremendously and curiously turned on. Never in her life had a woman charmed her so much and yet made her feel so at ease, only to turn on the hormones with all the devil's tricks up her sleeve and to make her want whatever the hell she was selling.
Roughly three years ago she had bought a whole damn life's supply. They never looked back unless it was together and in celebration of all things joyous and randy.
Still, it had taken Steven some getting used to. In fact things were never quite the same, but they had been alone so long that it was an adjustment for the both of them and still was. She never would have thought that he was actually jealous of Greta.
She didn't exactly have money back then. She certainly didn't have a big cock. She must have had a very persuasive hand, and mouth for that matter...
3
On the Monday Steven was drafted in to help his aunt Belinda redecorate her house. They were working day and night in this heat. Well, knowing her, she was watching Steven's butt work up and down the ladder and making cold drinks while he did all the work, which explained the sorry state he was in when he dropped by the Middleton one night to bring them some snacks on his aunt's behalf.
Late the Wednesday afternoon while Greta was preparing meals in the kitchen, Brenda's curiosity got the better of her and she found herself in her son's room, opening up his laptop and breaking and entering into his files.
The crafty little bastard! Steven had hidden a stash of PDA files in a picture gallery from a camping trip he went on a year ago. Brenda only found it by accident after giving up the search for his darkest literary secret. Boy did she get a surprise!
What started out as a tender and emotional drama between a fictional mother and son named Brenda and Steven who lived together alone in a familiar small town – and she was so proud of him the way he portrayed them both so vividly and colourfully and full of emotion - quickly transformed into a...
...seductive, steamy thriller of sorts where Steven confessed his love and sexual attraction to her!
