1
That fateful Sunday ended both with a bang and with a whimper. Though not so apocalyptically - the bang was not the preferable kind - the whimper in question was not the result of Jim's increasingly foul mood but of Sara's rampant imagination and vengeful sex drive.
As the night came to a close, and all their grown children had retreated back to their own corners come early evening, the gravity of the surreal situation truly came to light. She began to notice the moment she and Jim were left alone.
There was no hiding the fact that each to their own, wanted to be left alone. The atmosphere was not so tense, but for Sara there was every danger of betraying her paranoia.
Did he know something? Surely he couldn't. But she would not put a foot wrong and find out otherwise to her inevitable mortification. So Sara mirrored his disposition diligently and kept herself busy with unimportant little things.
And off to bed earlier yet again, Jim went up without saying a word. If he had said anything at all, he must have mumbled beneath his breath from afar. His retirement was only clearly announced by the slamming of the bedroom door.
Then she came awake with a jolt, only to be left resenting him all the more, and then resenting herself for feeling this way.
In all their years, as parents and alone as a couple, they had never slept with the bedroom door closed. Only their children as teenagers, Eric alone, and John and Sandra in the other large room they used to share, had ever slept with their doors shut; and specifically in secrecy.
That one detail spoke volumes of the impasse their relationship now came to. The door was closed. Without a word he had shut her out. Now she was in the doghouse, not Jim.
As she switched on the bedside light in Eric's old room and stripped out of her clothes that night, Sara felt a well of sadness but also of disappointment for the way things had come to be. But did they really need to be this way?
According to her husband, supposedly so, yes they did. Though many couples later in life opted for the freedom of a separate bed, she couldn't imagine that they shared the same reasons. Maybe after seventy the average married couple's sex life would completely give up the ghost, but still most slept in the same bed; 'til death do they part and all that!
Until she finally heard him snoring, come 10pm, the house was stiflingly quiet, to the extent that she began to deliberately make noise and to revel in it, for fear of otherwise treading on eggshells around Jim.
Prematurely the rebel within protested his patriarchal stiffness - not kind the stiffness the lady wanted - but with no audience that inner rebel withdrew and left her to her deepest thoughts.
What was it about creaking floorboards in a house endowed with such a tense atmosphere? With his snoring coming through the walls, loud as a pneumatic drill, why was she so intent on insuring that the sleeping bull stayed sleeping?
Since the previous night spent with her son, Eric, Sara had been left in a constant state of arousal, though that had been overridden for as long as there had been family to attend to. Now she was alone and desperate to do something about it.
Sadly Eric would be asleep by now, she supposed. A naughty thought, the desire to call or to text him and to talk about what happened, and then to tell him how she felt about it, and in deliberate words to suggest a future encounter, couldn't happen - not now - but it could and did fuel her imagination.
In fact it lit her body on fire, had her calling out to him in silent cries, desiring to be filled again by the overflow of the fountain of his youth. Rampant as her sex drive had been in Sara's younger years, she could go again and again and still ache for more.
But this was different. It had been so right and it had been so wrong at the same time, and the thrill of being fucked by another man came not with the kind of danger she associated with cheating.
Cheating itself was forbidden, a taboo she never gave thought to, because she was not that kind of woman...
Well, correction; she had never been that kind of woman!
But in her mind and soul, Eric had only fulfilled a son's duty to love and protect his mother, just on another level to most. And it had led to possibly the greatest sex of her life, bar the night she and Jim had knowingly and willingly, lovingly conceived their first child.
How things had changed...
Now naked in Eric's bed she buzzed herself to many a shaking orgasm. With a fully charged vibrator she toyed with the pussy still aching and tingling from the seeing-to he had given her, when they were alone in his apartment.
Within minutes her pussy was sloshing and gushing, squirting with the release of unimagined sexual release; just as she had the previous night.
She was so sensitive, so easily brought to climax, brought back to life by her son's sexual vitality, as though having fed off him - a shameless succubus. And such deep satisfaction he was now responsible for, Sara was dying to be wrapped around Eric again; and to be left dripping from between her legs with his intimate bodily fluids.
One-handed she ploughed herself, clenching her inner muscles around the hard artificial cylinder, suffocating its surprisingly loud electric hum to the point of a murmur as it sank deep within. If it was not for those deep vibrations her toy would not have done. It could not compete with the real thing.
And how she wished it felt anywhere near the same as him - harder and yet softer, the way that only muscle and flesh could be.
Fuck it! With the other hand she thumbed out her most daring, racy message to Eric, even as the phone trembled awkwardly in her weakening grip.
'Just a goodnight text to say that I'm very... very... turned on, thanks to you!'
Sara watched her message sending, unaware that she was vocally humming along with her vibrator then, and in a deep wavering throaty growl. Scooching down the bed a little more, she opened up her thighs wider and bucked her hips up to meet the dipping and corkscrewing motions of the toy in her hand.
She wanted nothing more than to have sex with Eric again. No, it was not a one-off just to relieve the tension. The memory of him being inside her, the glorious climaxes he deeply screwed her to, and the love shared - it had to happen again.
2
How much could a family change within the space of a day? That thought was quickly becoming Monday's theme as Sara settled into the first tea break. Unusually quiet, or so the other women in the office thought, it was clear that she had something on her chest.
Half-truths had their uses, though. And could anyone accuse you of keeping secrets when you were just minding your own business?
Tessa, blissfully unaware of there being a reality outside her own despite pushing sixty, loudly presumed that all matters found their way out into the open and therefore that bottling them up made no sense.
Well thank you, Tessa, who read tarot cards and angel cards for charity and believed that her dog could read English. Thank you for sharing that with the whole office. Your contribution is as extraordinary as ever.
One moment sitting there, contemplating the future quietly over the rim of her steaming mug, and then the next being scrutinised not so covertly by "The Mothers' Gossip Circle of Preston" as she liked to call the clique in her department, now the pressure was on.
