Author's Note:
As a thank you to user 'bwmom' for her feedback, and friendly, insightful banter throughout the making of my recent series 'A Lifetime Kink', I bashed out this piece over the space of a couple days with all that she shared with me in mind.
It's been a while since I could produce such a volume of playful drama on a whim, and whereas I've definitely had the practice lately, I really do have you to thank for giving me the characters and some of the situations. They fermented nicely upstairs and this is the result.
Ready to get pent up again?
*****
1
Sara's sex life with her husband had been pretty good, for their age, but especially for his. At fifty, she was six years Jim's junior. And despite his troubles beginning in his mid-thirties - they called it andropause, where male testosterone dips and levels off into maturity - Jim still managed to perform a couple times a week or more.
How could he not? It wasn't just the sex with Sara that kept him satisfied and faithful, at least not until middle-age soured him almost without warning. He was going the way of his father. Most men did, no matter how hard they might try not to.
But Sara was the rarest of mothers, managing a full-time job, three kids, and coming with a good set of genes that kept her defiantly young at heart and pretty. Yes she'd had her angry moments, and she could put the fear of God up her eldest son and daughter, John and Sandra. Theirs was not a perfect family, but regardless she had held up more than her own end.
Otherwise Sara could have been described as a highly-sexed blonde Mary Poppins and with the patience of an eagle. John, Sandra, and Eric, all leaving the nest - and seemingly so soon - felt almost like early retirement.
Thinking about being able to get back to that sex life of theirs was just about the only thing that got her through. In the sack she could be an angel or a demon - though Jim's choice really. That hadn't changed. Sara would never change, no matter her age.
As far as she was concerned, the spunk in his balls was the fountain of youth everybody stupidly sought these days with nip/tucks, expensive creams, and ghastly beauty procedures such as acid peels.
But as Jim approached sixty and that fountain dried up ever more, they were hit with another bomb. The menopause!
Jim seemed a little too premature in rolling over to sleep when that bomb hit, and for years Sara sank despairingly into her fifties, not knowing how to live without her sex drive.
The urge would come back on occasion, but so infrequently that if Jim couldn't or wouldn't perform, that would be it until next try - a pat on the back, "never mind, there-there," and off you pop.
When her sex drive did return, and with an unexpected vengeance three years later, he was all but completely useless!
2
Sunday noon, the roast lamb came steaming out of the oven to settle in its juices, smelling heavenly-delicious, and so it should have at Β£15 a leg!
In went the blanched potatoes to roast. John and Sandra were already talking dad's ears off in the living room. Eric was yet to turn up and with only forty minutes to his advantage.
Royal wedding this, and royal wedding that - she couldn't have cared less about the wedding or any other pretentious publicity stunt, for that matter.
Hanging up her oven gloves when the rest of the food was finally roasting away, not forgetting her inimitable Yorkshire puds, Sara left the kitchen where she spotted the distorted shadowy silhouette approaching the front door.
Unmistakeably, it was Eric. And when she glided past the half-closed living room door to let him in, her youngest - but tallest, strongest, most gentlemanly and handsome she believed - stooped into her open arms and picked her up with the same ease that he might pick up a bag of groceries.
'Oooff, always such a strong lad,' Sara marvelled, beaming up at him with the unconditional smile he always reserved for him.
Eric, six feet tall, fair-skinned - and sandy blonde like her - might have been the third wheel to his siblings and the fifth to his father, but he could never do wrong by her. He cared too much about her. Neither was he spoiled like the other two.
Eric kissed her smiling lips quietly, as if to keep this moment just between the two of them, and for a while they hugged, swaying slowly in the silence of the hallway.
'Good timing,' she said, 'dinner's almost ready. Why don't you go say hello to the family?!'
Of course even with two spare seats left, Eric would do his usual. He would stand in the doorway and nod, leave a smart comment, and then return to his mother's side so that she wouldn't be alone.
'Son,' Jim spoke from behind the hand perched at his chin, not even looking in his direction.
Sandra offered a smile that meant nothing in particular, while John nodded and asked what was new with Eric.
'Nothing in particular,' Eric replied, shaking the Levi jacket from his shoulders to hang up back in the hallway's coat rack. Eyeing the TV for a moment, he turned his nose up from the corner of his mouth.
'Royal wedding?' he asked.
'Yup,' his dad muttered.
'That Meghan Markle is about as regal as the Sunday morning rejects of grab-a-granny night at the Rat & Parrot,' he remarked before walking away tall and proud, and leaving his dad gobsmacked.
In the kitchen, having heard him, Sara's shoulders shuddered with secret laughter. 'You bring it on yourself, you know that?' she observed in reference of why his own family barely ever registered him.
'Just as well I'm only here for you,' he teased, grabbing his mother by the hips and pulling her close.
Oh but Eric shouldn't have done these things. She wondered if he still would, if only he knew of the things that filled her mind when she was left to take care of herself at night.
3
Dinner and pudding passed, and gradually so did the inevitable food comas induced by them every second Sunday. As usual little talking was done in Eric's direction, and it wasn't for sheer rudeness. What was ever different about Eric's life?
Eric whose removal van job was nothing to talk about. Eric who couldn't talk at the dinner table of the kind of women he got with. Eric who would not settle down at twenty six and get himself on the property ladder.
Eric had a smart answer for every shortcoming he felt he would be judged for, but when the questions came from his mother, who never judged him, he was nice as pie.
Back in front of the television again, Eric and his mother were forced to endure every last drop milked from that bloody royal wedding and it was unbearable. 'Dad, change the channel,' Eric piped up before he would be forced into a real coma.
'Err, I pay this TV license,' was the haughty response.
'Well you're being ripped off,' Eric shot back. 'There's only one reason it's on the telly to begin with. The taxpayer already paid for the wedding. Now you're paying for two weeks' worth of repeats?'