My dad passed away two years ago on a rainy February day. I remember how mom and I were sitting on the cheap plastic chairs beside dad's hospital bed, as we had been doing for weeks, while the rain lashed against the windows overlooking the desolate parking lot.
I was reading dad from a National Geography article about the Rocky Mountains. I did this more to kill time than for him. For, dad had already lost conscious for weeks by then. Mom was holding his hand, as she always did when we sat here under the bright white hospital lights.
Having been in this limbo for so long, we almost believed that we would be here forever - going in rounds from work to the hospital to home to work to the hospital. But change has its ways of creeping up on us like a thief in the night. Mom and I watched silently as the monitor beside the bed began to bleep. We froze. The nurse ran in and we made way to let her do whatever she could to save dad. To no avail. Just like that, dad died. We watched his body, which looked exactly the same as before, and tried to realize that everything was different now.
Mom had been losing her colour since dad's illness. But at the funeral it was as if she had turned into a black and white version of herself. The priest spoke the last words as dad's body was lowered in the ground.
"I will miss him so much." I said to mom, when we hid away in the garage from all the relatives and friends swarming our house after the funeral. We felt so disoriented.
"Me too." she answered. We breathed in and out and forced ourselves to mingle again.
***
Some memories of my father.
When I was five, we used to feed the ducks at a local pond. Dad had managed to train them to catch the bread out of the air, which made all the other kids jealous of me and him.
When I was eighteen, dad managed to keep his temper when he saw my awful grades and, again, when he found the bag of weed stacked away between my shoes in my closet. Other dads would have yelled at me, but my dad simply sat down for a long and serious and calm talk about Responsibility and Discipline. Then we smoked a farewell-to-weed joint together, after which mom found us giggling and rolling over the carpet. The strategy was smart. If even my dad approved of weed, there was not any bad-boy appeal to it and I never smoked again.
When I turned nineteen, dad helped me make my own bed for in college. We worked on the project for months in the evenings and had so much fun, listening to Aerosmith on the small bluetooth speaker and shooting the shit together. Every time my parents would visit my dorm, dad would proudly pat the bed and recall how we had worked on it together.
Overall, I remember dad as the guy who kept it all together. When mom was stressed at work, he would take us camping. When I messed up at school, we would sit together and study - and with so much humour as dad had, it was always fun. Now, with him gone, I was afraid that if things fell apart, there would be no one to magically fix everything, as he had always done.
***
It was hard to continue to work the weeks after. I had just started as a high school teacher in our small Midwest town. The kids were kind to me. They listened when I told them what had happened to my father and why I might not be myself for a while. But they also were rowdy teenagers, and I had trouble retaining their attention after a kid called Brandon showed a TickTock movie of him downing a can of beer in three seconds.
In the evenings I went to mom. She had been allowed some leave time from her job as a secretary for the local university. It did not seem to do her much good. She looked pale. Having little distraction, anxious thoughts crept in her mind like so many spiders.
I worried for her. I worried so much that on top of the stress my work was giving, I was paying too little attention to my girlfriend at the time. We were living together, but I was hardly home, and when I was I was grading student papers or lying flat out in front of the television. I should have seen it coming. But I didn't. We broke up.
Mom allowed me to move in with her for a while. Secretly, I didn't mind. I wanted to be there for her. It was my way to cope with the grief, I guess. I tried to do the little things that dad did for her, like make her breakfast and prepare some cheese snacks after dinner over a glass of wine.
Whenever I thought of dad I had to fight my tears.
Mom appreciated everything I did, but she was still gloomy and pale and she looked as if the colour had been shaken out of her. But when her work started, and she had some distraction, things got a bit better.
"You can stay as long as you like." mom said over dinner one evening, as if she had telepathically read my mind. I had been worried that I was overstaying. It was three months now. Although I had half-heartedly looked for apartments in town, I simply could not see myself living anywhere else than with her for now. I needed to be here to go through the motions together.
"I want you around. It helps."
Often, we cried together over dad. We would cuddle on the couch and recall nice things about dad. How he would make awful puns on every town's name that we passed on holiday. ("You know my buddy Al? Al would move to Elwood if he could sell wood.") We chuckled. It was comforting to feel mom's warm body so close to mine. She would hide her face on my chest as I felt her warm tears through my shirt. I would kiss her hair. I recognized the smell of her shampoo.
Over time, we started to think of nice things to do in the evening. Mom was reluctant at first. She explained that she felt guilty. As if having fun was betraying her memory of dad.
"Dad would have liked you to keep on living." I replied. "He loved you most when you were happy and cheerful."
Mom took that in for a while. Memories must have flashed before her mind's eye. "Remember how he always used to tease me about my freckles?"
"He called you his summer goddess. I always cringed, but it was kind of cute actually."
"He didn't want me to stay inside but to go outside in the sun. Whenever I got too caught up in work, he would force me to take some days off and go out with the three of us. I loved our camping trips."
Mom slowly became convinced happiness wasn't a sin. I remember that the first time we went to a cinema together, she was nervous. She looked over her shoulder and seemed to want to be inside as fast as possible.
"I am afraid someone sees me. What will they think - so soon after your dad passed away?
I braided my arm through mom's and pulled her close.
"You are overthinking it. Please, please just enjoy tonight."
Her head rested on my shoulder. Her hair tickled my neck.
"Okay. I will try to."
The movie was awful but we had a great night criticizing it in the little café adjacent to the cinema. Mom did some great expressions of the actors. Only when I saw her smile, did I realize how long ago it had been since I had last seen her smile. Her blue eyes had regained some of their life.
***
Other people just didn't understand what it was like to lose someone so dear to you. Over the months, mom and I had disappointing experiences with our friends, who made blunt remarks or gave us the impression that we had been mourning for too long. People find it hard to accept grief. They do not want to acknowledge that there are things that simply will not be repaired again, that things can break for good. Everybody seemed so impatient for us to just get over it.
But because of this our bond grew stronger than it had ever been. Our house in the suburbs became our vestige. It was our safe place, in which we could show how we felt. Mom and I talked full evenings. We reflected on our grief, how it grew like an ink stain, tainting everything that it touched. How silent the house was. How hard it was for her to throw dad's clothes out.
Our house was our palace of grief. We could be who we were. And when I was sad, mom would just sense it and we would cuddle until we could face life's tasks again. When mom was sad, I made her dinner or spontaneously took her out. And sometimes, when I found her on the floor sobbing, crying her eyes out, I would just be there for her and let her go through whatever she was going through.
We worked like a well-oiled machine, and soon our lives became so intertwined that I started to feel a knot in my stomach thinking about ever leaving and living on my own again.
Mom would still meet friends. But as if by some secret agreement, she always met them at their places our outdoors. It was as if our home had become a sanctity where we could deal with our sadness as we liked, which was not to be disturbed by others. Everything was okay there, nothing would be too much.
Summer came. Mom took some weeks off, and I had my summer holidays. And we stayed inside much of the time, hiding in our bubble. Late winter we had still gone out often, but mom found it hard to be seen outside. Especially the longer days made her feel vulnerable, as more people were on the street and she didn't like the idea of seeming to be over dad already. Many of my plans to cheer her up had to take place within the four walls of our home.
"This is the first year I have seen you without freckles." I said one time over dinner. Outside the sun still shone. But we had plans to watch some music documentaries on the couch.
Mom touched her face. "You are right. We have been hiding from the world a bit, haven't we?"
For some reason, I placed my hand on hers, touching her soft cheek. She looked at me with her radiant blue eyes. Was she startled?
The touch felt too intimate. Even though we had been so close physically many times. Snuggling on the couch. Hugging. We even kissed each other's faces when one of us was crying. But perhaps it was the casualness of my gesture that felt out of the ordinary. We both knew that I wouldn't have held her hand like this before dad passed away and that something had changed over the months. I softly pulled my hand back.
I was silent for a bit.
"I should go out more." Mom said then, but it sounded like she wasn't looking forward to it. "Perhaps I should take a small vacation or something."
I am not sure whether my touch had anything to do with it, but mom decided to take a break without me. With three friends she went to a nearby lake for a long weekend. It gave me time to think about the last few months, about how life was without dad nearby, and how my relation to mom was changing.
But overall, I just felt miserable without mom. The house, which with her was a shelter, now felt like a tomb. I also missed being able to hold her. Seeing her. Being so close to her all the time. I missed her smell of her shampoo that made the house into a home.
I went out for long walks through the suburbs, thinking about dad at first, but then quickly returning my thoughts to mom. I felt a deep urge to hold her close to me, and I missed the way she would fold her warm body into a ball so that I could fully wrap her in my arms. Sitting at a bench near a field with old oaks, I suddenly realized that I felt the same as when my relationship with my ex had just started, and when she had been away for a week. The longing was just as intense.
This was the first time I had thought about my ex at all.
how is life there? I texted mom on the second day. the house feels quite empty .
The rest of the day, I waited for a reply. Jumping up every time my phone buzzed. Only at night did mom reply.
I miss you.
I held my phone in my hand as if it held a puzzle that I had to solve. Mom missed me. Did she feel the same? I got startled when the phone buzzed again.
I will tell you more when i get home. sleep well xxx she added.
love you xxx
We had never sent each other such messages. We had hardly texted at all. In a strange way, it felt natural. But it also felt much more like messages I would send to my lover than to my mother. They sparked my longing to see her again. And they made the days that we were separated seem even longer.
The days crawled by like a wounded soldier crawling to safety. I had nothing to do, and I soon found myself hovering around my phone waiting for anything to come in.
I want to hug you. I wrote her, when I could no longer refrain.
I want to hold you close. she replied hours later, and in the meanwhile I had done nothing than fret over whether it was weird to have texted her that. Can't talk with my friends as I can with you.
Hope it isn't too bad. Miss you on the couch next to me.
I'll be back soon for you, baby. We'll cuddle as much as you like.
Mom had only been gone for three days. But we fell in each other's arms like lovers reunited after a long war when she can back.
Her holiday had been okayish. But her friends had avoided the topic of dad, which had made mom feel lonely. She knew it was just awkwardness on her friends' side. But the pain never abode.
"But you have some freckles again." I replied, while I listened to her, as I was lying against her on the couch. "Dad would have loved that. I love it."
And again I touched her face. Our eyes met as I gently patted her cheek.
After her return, mom and I both seemed to have a physical craving to be near one another. After work, we ate dinner on the couch, our bodies close. We lay in the garden, sunbathing, holding hands. Only when night fell did we separate, climbing into our separate beds, looking forward to another day of being close.
***
"Do you know how there are these moments when you forget -- only during an instant -- that he is no longer here, so that the pain only smacks you in the face when you realize that he will never walk through that door again? Like a jackhammer hitting you right in the face?" Mom had dried her tears but her blue eyes were still watery. I grabbed her hands and held them like I was protecting a frail little bird.
"I know...It's just so... Fucked. And everything just goes on and everybody expects you to have given it a place, but you haven't because there is no place to put it for you because the world just feels broken, doesn't it?"
Silence fell. We just had had dinner and our plates were still on the table. We had eaten little to nothing.
"Come, let's cuddle." mom said, after we had found nothing to say.
And we spooned on the couch, and I held mom and we just let time flow.
"It is as if only here I am understood." mom whispered, as she kissed my hand. "You know what I feel. Only you know what I feel."
I nodded. It was the same for me. My pupils had all but forgotten about that day when I told them my dad passed away. My colleagues never asked. It was just something that you were supposed to get over, I guess. But I hadn't, really.
I remembered how dad and I went fishing every summer, even after I had graduated. He used to make the stupidest jokes, that I found myself reiterating in my mind when I lay in bed. Sometimes I would share one with mom, and she would have that nostalgic smile when she remembered the occasion where dad had made it.
But overall, I found it hard to reach my pain. Sometimes I cried. But most of all, I found myself over-performing to try to keep mom happy, compensating the emptiness I felt inside. Doing chores, thinking of plans, consoling her. Still, I could only so long hold that big black cloud of grief at bay, and it felt lonely that no one in my work or of my friends understood.
No one but mom.
"I admire you, mom." I replied to her. "I think you are so strong, how you deal with your pain. And that we are really making something of life still."
"Thank you, honey. I really like you being here for me. I appreciate all the time you take to help me. It would be too lonely without you."
Mom held my hand and placed it on her face. We just lay there cuddling. It was not awkward, being so intimate with mom. I wanted to be with her, to feel her warmth warm the frozen inside me. And I felt something deep stirring in me as I kept stroking mom's cheek. We belonged.
***
A week or so after mom had returned from her holiday, we went to the pool together. The sky was blue and the sun was high, and we found a nice, cool spot near a tree. We went into the cabins to get changed.
When we both emerged again, mom wore the bikini she had already had when I was a child. Black, with white polka dots. It had been a long time since I had seen so much of mom's body. Out of decency, I tried to not look at her. Still, that bikini, her legs, her belly brought back memories of when mom bathed me as a boy -- she wore that exact bikini on pictures I had seen in our photobooks. Her body somehow signaled safety to me, a time of innocence when my body was under her complete care.
She seemed to have gained some weight over time, as her curves almost bulged out of the bikini. I saw that she realized. A blush spread across her cheeks as an octopus' ink through water.
"I must really watch what I eat." she said, while she uncomfortably held her arms in front of her, as to hide her womanly shapes.
I did not know what to reply. I wanted to compliment her, but that would have been strange. Instead, I simply placed my hand on her back and gently steered her towards the pool.
"Who's in latest is a loser!" I said. And we swam.
For some blissful moments, mom seemed to forget her sorrows. The sun shone on her red hair. The splashing water brought a smile to her face.
Later, we moved our towels to let the sun dry our bodies. It felt nice to be outside with mom. We had found a way to move our bubble beyond the house, to embrace reality somehow but still feel the safety of our palace of grief that we had built between us. It was also a relief that there was no one we knew at the pool, so that we could indulge in the security we felt between us.
When mom thought she was getting sunburned with her sensitive skin, she moved her towel to the shade under the tree again and went to read a book. I still lay directly at her feet, letting the sun tan my body, and when I turned on my belly, I could look up at mom.
"Hi there." she said.
"Hi."
And she continued reading. Her legs were up to be able to support her book on her knees, her face was hidden behind the book to me. I looked at her legs, absentmindedly, thinking about some assignments the pupils had to hand in soon.
I could see mom's bikini bottom from here. My gaze had inadvertently lowered itself to her crotch, where the fabric of her bikini bottom stretched over her intimate parts. I looked away, blushing. But soon I found my gaze drawn to her legs again. I followed her under legs. Cute tiny stubbles. Strong and smooth upper legs. Her wide thighs. Then, the point where it all came together.
I peeked up but mom was still reading. I looked down again. The bikini bottom pressed against her vagina so tightly, that I could tell out the shapes of her lips. My breath became heavier, as a dizziness came over me. It felt as if I were falling and falling. But I kept looking. And looking.
When I finally looked up, I met the blue of mom's eyes. She had lowered her book and now just looked at me, showing no sign of what she was thinking. I looked back and felt myself blush.
Then mom slowly raised her book again and continued reading. I turned on my back and avoided her gaze the rest of the day.
Although I felt more awkward being close to mom after this moment, she did not show any distance. Back home, everything went on as it had. I made breakfast, we went to work, and in the evening we had dinner together.
The next day, I found mom crying in the kitchen and she beckoned me to come close. I held her sobbing body in my arms and I was glad to feel that we were as close as ever. The moment at the pool had not driven a wedge in our physical intimacy."I do not want to be ready to move on." mom told me. It was a long summer's day at the end of July. We were sitting in our garden with a glass of wine. "All my friends keep giving me this unwarranted advice. And those awful self-help books. As if all that matters is to just cut the ties to the past as soon as possible."
The crickets began their chirpy songs. A neighbour was moving his lawn in the distance. The sun was a giant disc sinking into the nearby forest.
"I feel the same." I replied. "I am not sure how I would cope just going on with everything. Ironically, we would need someone like dad to clear up the mess that his death has left behind."
"It feels like many of the things that I used to enjoy are now meaningless. I know I shouldn't abandon my friends, but all they talk about is what they saw on television and what will be the fall colour for fashion. It takes persistence to hang in there, when I am just thinking about dad or you or the things we lost."
An insect landed on the plant next to me and bobbed its lower parts in the air, before it flied off again with some distinct purpose.
"I feel like I am afraid to allow normal life to be meaningful. As if going forward would mean really acknowledging that I will not see dad anymore."
Mom took a sip of her wine. "Perhaps I am also afraid of losing what we have." She looked at me over her glass, probing my reaction.
"What do you mean?"
She sat up straighter in her chair and brushed her ginger hair behind her ear, and then grabbed my hand. "I think that we experience everything so intensely together. There is the pain, of course. But I also love you so much as my son, and I feel like everything has come to a standstill, but that I can therefore also feel that much clearer. To still be here with you, and to feel all this things is..."
"It somehow gives a sense of purpose." I added, and looked at mom. Her face radiated a gentle red, perhaps because of the alcohol or because of the sun today. She nodded.
"Nothing ever feels normal with you. I mean, nothing is bland when we are together. It is perhaps strange to say, but I also feel a deep happiness sometimes - when I am not thinking about your dad. Like... So much is lost, but there is also so much beauty in the world still. Just being here with you, like two animals hiding away together. And I like it so much when we are close. It is hard to simply let that go and to move on, to accept that everything will be regular again."
I thought about my job and how hard it was to experience it as meaningful at all. Trying to read Shakespeare with these kids was impossible. I always found myself longing to be home with mom during my breaks. The grief had opened a space that was so out of the ordinary, that everything was intensified -- normal life was just bland compared to the emotions that we went through together.
"Do you... think that it will be over soon?" mom asked, shyly. I saw that she suddenly looked away from me, towards some bird of prey flying over the fields adjacent to our house. Her blush intensified.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean... I don't want to suggest..."
"Just say it. It's okay. Remember, we have our own safe space here. Everything is allowed." I squeezed her hands.
"Well... You have been seeing that girl, right? And I was wondering... Maybe you plan on moving away from me?"
I had had a couple of blind dates, under large pressure of my friends who thought that what I needed was to get laid. I had seen a girl called Amy a couple of times, who was kind and all, but who had also got on my nerves with her happy-go-lucky attitude to life. It took her the greatest effort to understand what it was like to lose your father and see your mom suffer. I was planning on ending it soon.
"That's nothing, mom." I felt relieved that it was not mom's plan to end this period of intimacy. I would dump Amy any day over the intensity of this emotional hideaway with mom.
"I feel awful for saying this, sorry." There were tears in her eyes, which she quickly wiped away with the hand that she freed from mine. "It's stupid."
"Mom, come on. That girl is nothing. I want to be here for you, and it helps me cope with the pain and all. It's way to early to be dating for me, that was just some stupid idea of my friends."
Mom hid her face in her hands as more tears came. "I shouldn't keep you here. You should be able to meet people, but I just don't feel like I am ready yet. That's so selfish of me."
"It's nothing, mom. I mean everything I say. You are special to me. And I go on those dates more out of duty towards my friends than because I want to. If you need me, I will be here."
Mom kept apologizing for what she thought was clingy behaviour. But I felt so reassured that she wanted me here. At some point I just grabbed her hand again, kissed her salty cheeks, and then we sat silently as the sun set.
We cuddled before we went to sleep. And it was as if our love could flow more freely than ever.
"I will not let anything get between you and me, mom." I said, dramatically. But I felt mom relax in my arms as I said it.
I had shown to mom that nothing would break apart our little palace of grief.
***
It happened some days after that. I had had one more date with Amy and told her that I could not continue dating her -- that the pain was too fresh still. She accepted it without much ado and I have never spoken to her again. When I came home, mom was already in bed. I silently sneaked into the bathroom to brush my teeth.
I grabbed my towel to dry my face. Something fell on the floor. I picked it up. To my surprise, they were a pair of panties. White cotton. They were obviously mom's. She put them in my towel for me to find them.
My hands trembled and the same dizziness came over me that I had experienced at the pool, when I had looked at mom.
I let them go through my hands, folding them and unfolding them. The fabric felt soft and a musky smell was released as I knead the material. The dizziness increased.
I took the panties to my room, not knowing what to do with them. This was surreal.
I stared at the ceiling and heard cars pass by. For the rest, the night was silent, and I reckoned mom was fast asleep. I held the panties in a clenched fist.
After an hour of fighting my impulses, I brought them to my face. The world spun wildly around me as mom's tangy smell filled my nostrils. I pressed them tighter. Tighter still. The smell increased and I felt like I was fainting.
My hand slid slowly, like a spider encroaching its prey, into my boxers, and I wrapped my fingers around my cock. I kept smelling. The fabric felt strange against my tongue, as I savoured mom's taste. And licked. And licked.
She had allowed me so close to her. She had wanted me to know what she smelled like. The thought lit fireworks in my head.
And I came.
With some toilet paper I cleaned the mess I made, and silently sneaked into the bath room again to put the panties in the laundry bin. Then I lay awake worrying whether this would destroy our special bond.
But next morning, nothing seemed to have changed between mom and me. We had planned to take a walk in a nearby nature reserve, and we chatted happily as we prepared our trip.
"Can I have a hug?" mom asked, before we left. And I took her close to me, and I held her tight, and I felt that we were both sliding deeper and deeper into our recluse of confused grief and love.
That evening I did not find any panties in my towel. Just when I thought that it might have been a mistake after all, I found a pair placed on my pillow. It was a neatly folded bundle, placed as carefully on the pillow as a bar of chocolate in a hotel. They were see-through black lace. With a small, whitish stain in the front. Did mom wear stuff like this?
I relished mom's smell. I rubbed the fabric along my shaft. I put the panties in my mouth to get every last drop of mom's taste in me. And I came before long.
Somehow I understood not to speak about all this to mom. She was offering me something for cutting my ties to other women for now. And I accepted without a word. All went on as normal. We did not take more physical distance, and when we cuddled, it wasn't sexual. It felt as if something had been added to our intimacy, rather than that it had changed what there already had been.
Each night, mom would find a way to place her panties on my pillow before I went to sleep. Understanding our pattern, I allowed mom to go to sleep several minutes before I did. Soon, I recognized most of mom's underwear and I developed a preference for several of her panties. The white cotton panties that looked so innocent and that therefore made her gift even more sensual and wrong. The thongs that mom apparently wore. The lace underwear with delicate patterns sowed into them.
When I smelled them, I did not think of mom explicitly. This made it feel less sinful, I guess. The smell alone was enough. I did not have to fantasize or imagine anything. It was animal. It was deep.
And every day I felt myself falling in love deeper with mom.
***
In August, mom and I decided to take a trip together. We had had enough of friends and family giving us advice to do this or do that to cope with our loss. We had by now found our way.
We rented a small cabin not far away. It was at a large distance of any other cabins, near a beautiful lake large enough to have some people sailing over its surface.
We drove there through endless fields of corn. Mom still sunk into depressing thoughts often, her lips tightly pressed together. I would do my best to think of anything to say to make her smile. Sometimes it worked, and she would look at me shortly, shyly, with the yellow of the cornfields flashing behind her through the window.
I tried to make puns with the town's names that we passed -- but I simply wasn't on dad's level by far. Still, it brightened mom up and soon we were both trying to make jokes. The ride was over before we knew it.
The cabin just had one room. Two separate beds. A small kitchen. Everything was handcrafted. Someone must have loved making this place.
I supposed that mom's panties routine would be paused for a weekend.
We unpacked our stuff and went for a swim. Mom wore the small polka dot bikini as at the pool. Although we had crossed some lines, I still tried not to look at her too overtly. I felt, somehow, that she would not have appreciated that. Even though she allowed me to smell her panties, it was as if this was an external way to deal with urges that I might have and that I had given up to remain in our palace of grief together. Actually lusting over her body was forbidden territory. And I did not want to risk what we had.
The water was cold. We tried to swim to the other side of the lake, but I soon got a cramp and returned. I watched mom going on, until she also turned around midway, her face looking proud when she returned and emerged out of the water. There were goosebumps on her legs and arms.
I held her towel to dry her. She let me engulf her with it, and she moved close to me to warm up. We hugged. Skin against skin. Her wet hair over my shoulder. I kissed her cheek. Once. Twice. Then we kissed each other on the mouth, and I rubbed the towel softly over mom's back.
"This is so nice, mom." I said that evening, when we had made a fire in front of the cabin. "It is good to be out here with you."
Crickets chirped. A night owl hooted in the forest. And the waves just lapped the beach. I closed my eyes and listened to the crackle of the fire, when I felt mom's hand on my arm. She moved between my legs, sitting on the floor, so that I could softly massage her head.
When night fell, we went inside. It got cold, even though it had been a warm day. We brushed the sand from our feet and grabbed our pajamas from the bags we brought. Mom gestured me to turn around, so that she could take off her shirt. When I turned back she had put on an old t-shirt of dad's, which was as long as to be almost up to her knees, that functioned as her pajamas. I slid out of my trousers and shirt, as I always slept in my boxers. I felt a bit shy undressing before mom, but she hardly looked at me.
When I sat on down on my bed, which was facing mom's, she was still standing, fiddling with her shirt that almost reached to her knees. It seemed like she wanted to say something, that she was mustering up the courage.
"What's up, mom?" I whispered.
She did not look at me as she bent over a bit and slid down her panties over her knees and ankles. It was as neutral a gesture as if she was undressing alone in her room. But she wanted me to see. She was blushing, but she wanted me to see. She wanted me to know it was all okay.
With my mouth agape, I took the panties from her as she reached them to me, her eyes cast to the floor. Without a word, she turned around quickly, lay in her bed and switched off the light.
The panties were still warm. I held them for a while. This couldn't be okay. But if felt okay. Somehow, mom was starting to embrace me fully, expanding the palace of grief to accept everything -- everything -- that we two felt or needed. I felt tears in my eyes, for some reason.
Then, without making a sound I brought them to my nose. Smelled. It was intense to know that they had been on mom moments ago. I inhaled deeply. Again. And again.
I felt that it was okay for me to indulge. I knew that we were at a place where I did not have to hide my urges. That everything was accepted. We had created this palace of grief, where nothing was prohibited as long as we were together. I pleasured myself.
The bed creaked. Mom must have been able to hear it. I pressed her panties closer, feeling so connected to her, feeling so accepted.
O, mom. She was only feet away from me. She heard me. I went faster, putting the fabric in my mouth, nibbling on them, tasting her.
I thought about dad. His absence was everywhere. It was the very place where mom and I resided. Where we grew close. I was his unnameable desire for her. She lived her desire for him, which knew no boundaries now that he was no longer here, and that accepted only the impossible replacement, as that was the only answer to a loss so great.
I came. I moaned, I couldn't help it. I spurted out so much. The semen ran over my hands and onto my stomach, soiling the blanket. Breathing heavily, I lay there waiting until I had calmed down. Mom did not stir. Though I am sure she could see me in the half light, as I walked naked in the half light to fetch toilet paper to clean the mess.
"Good night." she whispered when I returned, neutrally, as she had always done when we slept in the same room on holiday.
"Good night." I managed to utter in reply.
***
The next day we repeated the swimming. Mom sought my proximity more than usual. We enjoyed being close, lying on our towels in the sand. She placed her hands on my stomach, I rested one of mine of her thighs.
Just being with her was enough. Despite what happened yesterday, there was innocence to our intimacy. Mom had simply accepted that I had needs. I, on the other hand, still did not fantasize about her. And when we lay entangled in our swim gear, it was just comforting, just as innocent as when I had hugged her the weeks after dad had passed away.
Being away from home lifted some other boundaries too, however. We started to walk hand in hand whenever we could, or I would place my hand on mom's hips. Mom helped me with the buttons on my shirt. I, in turn, zipped her dress when we went out for dinner in a nearby town. We performed all these little gestures with the self-evident attitude of a married couple, even though we were doing such things for the first time ever.
I just loved looking at mom. When we came home from dinner, we walked the moonlit lakeside. Mom was telling me something about a book she had read about a complicated family drama. I was only half listening. The moonlight played with her scarlet hair, her eyes looked so alive that I swore that they could have beamed a bright blue light over the waves retreating in darkness. I was happy to be here with her, and I felt that our retreat into each other's company had created room for an intense happiness, despite of the grief.
The second night, mom had given me her panties again, and the night before had repeated itself. But on the third night, after mom had given me her panties, she did not switch off the lights. Instead, she lay down and then turned into my direction. I saw that she was nervous. She brushed her hair behind her ear a couple of times. But she also made it clear that she would be watching me.
I was nervous too. I was holding a bright red pair of mom's lace panties in my trembling hand. The stain in the front was still wet, as the plan to leave the light on had obviously aroused mom. Mom looked at me, inquisitively. She was curious what I would do with them.
I rolled on my side, so that we were face to face. At first I could hardly breathe. But soon the nerves seemed to wear off. Mom was looking at me without any judgment, patiently waiting what would follow. Slowly I pressed her panties against my nose and sniffed, while my hand grabbed my dick. Mom must have been able to see my movements through the blankets. She did not look shocked but her eyes went from the blankets to my face, to the blanket.
My eyes went hazy. I had trouble focusing on mom's face, but her presence made everything even more exciting. I heard myself moaning. Mom's mouth hung open, her eyes displaying a sweet agony.
Dizziness. The creaking of our beds. Mom moaning. Her blanket moved as well, her hand between her thighs pleasuring herself. Her blue eyes never losing the connection with mine. Her upper lip trembling.
"I love you." I heard myself say, even though I had thought it better not to speak, to just let this happen. But I could not refrain. I felt so much love for mom. I thought she was so pretty as she lay there trembling while an orgasm was slowly forming.
My hand slid over my cock in rapid movement. I sucked on mom's panties, I wanted her to see how much how I loved her taste.
"I... love... you... too..." mom whimpered and that drove her over the edge, the same time as I came too.
I shook and almost folded double, spurting semen with mom's smell in my nostrils. It was insane to be looking her in her eyes as I came. We had never been this close, even if we weren't touching at all.
When we both regained our senses, we smiled at one another. Mom had the blankets pushed up to her blushing face. Her eyes followed me when I got up to get toilet paper, the sound of the bed creaking made me uncomfortable. Here eyes lingered on my cum leaking dick. I tried to walk steadfast, but her eyes all over me made me feel very self-aware. When I returned from the toilet, however, mom looked at me lovingly and made me feel that everything was good.
"Good night."
"Good night."
Of course, we didn't speak about this the next day. We hiked some ten miles, had a coffee, and cooked a pasta dinner at the cabin. We cuddled. We could hardly stop touching each other. But there was not a word about the boundaries we were crossing.
We had only noticed that we were less and less willing to cope with others. At the coffee place a family had started a conversation with us about the area. They were friendly, but when they invited us to come have dinner at their cabin, I was glad to see mom make up an excuse why we could not make it before I even had a chance to think about it.
When we walked away, I gently pressed mom's hand. It almost felt as if she was now rushing to get back to the cabin, to be with no one but me. God knows I was.
That evening, we repeated what we had done. But when mom and I were masturbating, our eyes locked in an intense and loving contact, mom suddenly flipped open her blankets. I could not see much of her body, as she was wearing dad's t-shirt. But the sight of her beautiful legs was inviting."Come lie with me."
I had trouble standing as my knees were shaking and I felt dizzy. But I made my way to her bed, my hands halfheartedly covering my erection. Mom scooched over, and the bed was wide enough so that we could both lay on our backs next to one other. She was still wearing the shirt, but our legs touched each other, and the motion of her fingers sliding in and out of her was transmitted.
I felt how mom was pleasuring herself. The thought made me leak precum all over my hands, lubing my dick up so that I could speed up my jerking off. I still had her panties on my face. Mom kissed my neck, and with her free hand, she caressed my torso.
The bed shrieked alarmingly when we came at the same time. I felt dizzy with love and lust, as I felt how mom pressed her body against mine as much as she could, while my semen was slung all over us. I rolled towards her, and grabbed her tightly. I could, for the first time, feel her warm and hairy pussy pressed against my lap. When we cuddled, we smeared my semen all over our shirts and my belly. We didn't care. I felt so much love.
That was the first time I kissed mom. She started it. First we just pressed our lips against each other. We opened our mouths more and more each time, until we could no longer resist. Mom's tongue slid in my mouth, gently circling mine, skillfully teasing my lips. I kissed her back, until our tongues passionately stimulated each other, until we were hungrily assaulting each other's mouth. This was so much more intimate than I had ever experienced it with any other girl. I felt mom's nose press into my cheeks, and when I opened my eyes, secretly, I saw her closed eyes close to mine in an expression of absolute bliss.
It was as if we were, one step at a time, showing our vulnerability to the other, after which the other would gently take it, and show that it was safe in their hands. It was as if with every step in unveiling these desires, we would escape further and further into this palace of grief.
However, when mom felt my cock twitch against her thigh, she broke off our kiss. I felt that she wanted me to go back to my bed and I accepted that. We had already gone so far. I was just about to go off to the toilet to fetch some paper, when she stopped me.
"I had already thought of that, silly."
And she handed me some paper to clean myself, watching intently as I scooped the semen off my half hard dick.
Then I went back to my bed and she switched the lights off, as if nothing had happened.
"Good night."
"Good night."
***
It was difficult to leave the cabin behind. We had taken steps there towards one another that would simply not fit in our normal life. Would they simply be undone?
I noticed that mom was a bit off when we got home. She forgot appointments for work. She was more silent than usual. I sometimes found her in the kitchen, staring out the window, in a torpor that was hard to chase away.
As I had feared, we did not masturbate together again. Mom did continue to give me her panties, but the step was too big to go to each other's rooms. Perhaps there were too many memories. This was the room where mom had tucked me in so many times. That was the room where mom and dad had slept together.
For the first time, I felt a slight distance between us. Mom seemed to be trying to pick up her relation to her friends, and she was away more often. We did not hug as much as we had done. I was worried that I had said something wrong. Perhaps she was disgusted by my dick twitching when we had cuddled after our masturbation session. I spent many evenings writing in my diary when I came home from school, trying to figure out if the spell that had had bound us so tightly had come undone.
I started fantasizing about mom for the first time. Perhaps it was the distance that made this necessary. I tried to picture her body as it looked in the swim suit. I remembered our evenings in the cabin bed together. Her smell. Her face as it looked when she was aroused, with her cheeks flushed and her mouth opened.
Soon, I found myself addicted to thoughts about sex with my mother. I jerked off multiple times a day, leaning with one hand against the toilet's wall to avoid toppling over. I got so dizzy each time, I felt so ecstatic. But this made it all the more painful that mom seemed to avoid me.
Then, one evening, while I was writing my diary in the living room and mom was away again, the door opened softly. Mom came in, her make up ran in long black streams over her freckles, her shoulders drooped, and she looked very miserable.
"Mom!" I said. And without a word, we hugged long and tight. Her chest went up and down under her sobs. "What happened?"
When mom had finally calmed down again, she explained that she had been on a date, the first time since dad had passed away.
It had been horrible.
The guy, an accountant, had tried his best to impress mom by telling anecdote after anecdote about his many travels. Mom had only started feeling lonelier and lonelier.
"I feel like an alien." mom whimpered. "It is as if this grief has put me on another planet. I do not want to talk about holidays to faraway countries. I feel like shit and I want to be home. With you."
I held her even more tightly. Wherever she had been, she was back again. Her arms wrapped around me as if she was a sad koala bear.
"Why did you go on a date anyway, mom?" I asked, while I kissed her hair.
She shrugged. But it was clear something was on her mind.
"I am not judging and it's okay if you want to move on." I asked, trying to air my fears. "But why are you trying to move on now?"
"I guess that..." mom broke off our hug and sat down at the table, her hands in her disheveled hair. "I guess that I was afraid that we could not have what we had in the cabin here. I have not felt so secure and loved as our week together. But it is all so confusing. I mean, there is this pain for your father, and I feel horrible not being true to him."
I sat down next to mom and held her hand. It was shocking to admit, I had not thought about what our relationship would mean to dad. In some strange way, it felt as if it was the grief over his loss that had brought us together, so that we could count on his blessing for our blossoming love. But that was ridiculous, of course. And I could understand that mom had moral doubts about how she was betraying her marriage, with the one person with whom she should not do that. Ever.
"I mean, I love you. I love you so much." she continued. "And I feel that in loving you... I don't know... I feel that I am refusing to let him go, if that makes sense?"
Mom continued talking after sobbing for a while. "And that makes me only love you more, because it means that I will not let your dad go. Because as long as I love you in this... this strange way, I refuse to live normally, and as long as I do not live normally, I hold onto the grief. But if I admit how much I love you, I feel even more guilty. And there is all this pain and guilt and love and it makes me so confused. And I want to be normal again, and to be like other people. But I know that I cannot go back and live my life just like that. The man I dated was nice, but it is wrong to pretend that nothing has happened that is just impossible to cope with."
Tears welled up in my eyes, and I shoved my chair closer to mom's to wrap my arm around her shoulders. She dropped her head on my shoulders, and I felt the warmth of my breath as she continued.
"And when I am with you I feel so safe. And I can let it all play out. The pain and guilt, the love and the... lust."
It was the first time we even obliquely referenced to what had been going on between us. I was tense but also happy. I was afraid that making everything explicit would chase the secret away. But I was happy as we could not remain silent about this forever.
I found it hard to say express anything clearly about what I was feeling. But I tried to reach out to mom nevertheless.
"Mom, I love you so much. And I think that we should just let happen what is happening between us. It is our way of dealing with everything." I managed to say. "I... enjoy giving into... our lust. And I am..."
Mom looked up in expectation. This was harder than I thought. Harder than it had ever been.
"I am in love with you, mom."
I did not know that our house could be silent, as I waited for mom's reply. Mom remained silent for a while. Then she put her hand through my hair, combing it with her fingers. She looked at me through her tears, that ran like waterfalls over the pebbles of her freckles.
"I have never experienced a love so intense as I feel for you. I want to be here and I want to see how far we can go. I want to say fuck it to moving on." And then, with hesitation, I asked the question of which I feared the answer. "Or do you want to stop?"
Mom leaned over and kissed me on my mouth, her tongue eagerly, feverishly inviting mine for a dance. She sobbed and moaned, her hands deeply in my hair. When we broke off our kiss, mom smiled.
"Of course not."
***
It was as if we had lost all reservations. When I came home from my work, I would quickly take off my coat and hurry to find mom in the house. We would kiss, our bodies pressed tightly together. We stuck like glue and almost never went anywhere where we could not find each other quickly. We cuddled and hugged. When mom peed, she allowed me to stand next to her in the toilet, kissing her forehead, as she laughed because of the awkwardness.
We were like young lovers. And I felt so proud to be loved by a woman like mom. I bought her jewelry when I got a raise, a silver necklace, that mom wore all the time. And we started to have nicknames for each other. Mom was still shy to compliment me over my body, but I found it easy to tell her how hot I thought she looked when I pressed my face in her hair, cuddling her while we were making dinner.
However, before we went to bed, we never did anything explicitly sexual. We were close, and we talked, and we revealed secrets, but I never touched mom's breasts or her ass. Likewise, mom caressed my face, my arms, my neck, but her hands never went lower than that. Nevertheless, I think we were both hungering for each other, as we started to go to bed earlier and earlier.
After my confession that I was in love with her, we developed a new routine. Mom would tuck me in, taking her panties off, and crawling next to me in my bed. We would masturbate together under the blankets, and mom did not let me look at her body. This did not make it any less intense. Mom would hold my face while I sniffed her panties, and she allowed me to place my hand on her ass when I came. It wiggled as she herself came too, and I drove my fingers into her large buttocks, kneading it until mom thought it was time to get up and go to her own room.
Often, after our orgasm, we would lay there crying over dad. It was as if the sexual activity cleansed our minds and made room for the pain. We found comfort and mom would let me press my naked body onto her. I would kiss her forehead, her cheeks, and then, while I fondled her red hair, make out with her until we were both calmed down.
Over time, mom became more and more hesitant to leave my bed, until one day, we both fell asleep. I woke up next to her, and felt disarming pangs of love as I watched her innocent face as she slept, her chest heaving with her deep breaths. She looked in that moment as I had seen her on photo's when she had just met dad: radiating with a girlish energy and innocence. I was so happy to have her next to me. She woke up slowly, her eyes squinting against the morning light and I grabbed her face and kissed it.
After that, I realized that mom's boundaries were moving. Every time we got used to a situation, it would need to be deepened in order to retain our palace of grief. If things got normal, we would not experience our daily life as a deviance from the regular world. I did not push things, as I was already so happy to be able to admit to mom that I was head over heels with her, but I realized that more was in stall.
One evening, when I was about to go to my bed, mom awkwardly called my name. "I am going to take a shower. When I am done... Will you maybe come to my bedroom?"
She looked at the floor and tried to keep her cool, but again she was frantically brushing her hair behind her ears. And blushing. Oh, mom, your face is a mirror of your soul! She went for her shower, and I waited for a couple of minutes after I heard her turn it off.
Then I knocked on the door of mom's bedroom.
"Come in, honey." she said softly.
I opened the door. The room was filled with candles, casting a soft light throughout the room. I had not been here in a while, but nothing much had changed since dad had passed away. His clothes still hung in the open closet. The picture frames of their wedding day were still there, but mom had put them upside down. I immediately knew what was going to happen.
Mom herself was sitting on the bed. She wore a yellow dress dotted with bright flowers that brought back memories of summer holidays. Dad had loved that dress. It formed a nice contrast to her red hair that flowed freely over her shoulders, and lewdly debouched into her impressive, freckled cleavage. I could tell that she was nervous. Her breathing was shallow and her cheeks flushed. She could not stand me looking at her, and she shyly turned her head away.
I approached her, feeling just as shy. When I got close enough, mom got up and stood close to me. Insecurely, she pressed her lips against mine, and we first softly kissed as we had done many times. I felt her breasts press against my chest and could tell that she was not wearing a bra. They were pressed flat against me, and I felt their weight and suppleness. I kissed her, tentatively, and then I felt her tongue protrude into my mouth.
Shyly, I put my hand on her hips as we kissed. Through the curtains the last beams of a summer day found their way into the room, illuminating mom's red hair to almost neon like colours. Birds were still singing. And our mouths made soft smacking sounds as they pressed onto each other, with ever more passion.
All I could think was I love you I love you I love you I love you , as we made out like insecure teenagers at a prom. I had never imagined how intimate it felt to go beyond the limits of taboo with mom, how together it made us feel to have this secret. Being invited into her room was completion of the trajectory that we had gone through. We were now fully together, beyond any limits.
When we broke off our kiss, mom was too nervous to look at me. Her hands were shaking as she started fumbling with my belt. The iron strap was not hard to take off, but mom nevertheless took almost a minute to get it done. We both giggled nervously when it did, as if we had never had sex with anyone before.
Mom opened the button of my jeans, and I started to take it off. It had to jump about awkwardly to get my feet out of the legs, and mom bent down to help me.
I was now standing in the boxers that she had once bought for me when I was young. She had brought home loads of the same ones at the Target, and I saw mom smile when she recognized them.
Her hands hooked behind the strap of my boxers and slowly pulled them down. My cock sprang out, already dripping precum in long strands that stuck to my boxers before they snapped. Mom looked at it for a while, and I felt insecure for a moment, until I realized that she was admiring it, looking from its tips to my eyes and back again.
When you see a military plane fly by, it takes a while longer for the sound to reach you, which gives an outlandish effect. The same happened when mom placed her hand on my cock and gently squeezed. It took a while for the sensation to fully kick in, before I realized that mom was starting to give me a hand job.
I slouched over a bit, so intense was the feeling that mom was giving me. The soft, wet sounds of mom's hand over my precum lubricated cock was all I heard. I had trouble remaining standing, and held onto mom's soft hips. I squeezed her flesh and softly lowered my hands to her ass cheeks, which were already softly swaying under her movements.
Mom still meekly remaining her gaze fixed on my dick, and her slowly moving hand. With her other, she cupped my balls, and I couldn't help notice that she still wore dad's ring. She gently squeezed my balls, and I had never guessed that mom knew so expertly how to drive me crazy. Her thumb spread out the precum over the tip of my cock and then she sped up her movements, which made me gasp. When I almost came, she slowed down again, until she was barely moving her hand. I whimpered.
I let my hand trail up her silken soft upper legs, raising her dress up to her crotch, which exposed her thighs. My hand soon found her hairy pussy, which was already drenched in her juices, the tiny hairs soaking up all her wetness. The smell of mom's sex, which I knew so well from sniffing her panties for months, filled up the room. When I gently rubbed her swollen clitoris, mom sighed deeply, and in that sigh I heard that she could finally deliver herself to her desires, withdraw in her lust, and she relaxed so much that she could look at me now. It was so good to feel her. My fingers explored the velvet soft folds of her pussy, and mom's eyes widened when I pressed my index finger softly into her vagina.
We were standing so close together, pleasuring one another, looking at each other's faces to observe every twitch, every movement of the eyes, the slightest trembling of our lips. We wanted to be completely transparent to each other. To show all our vulnerabilities and to safely accept those of the other. I was bursting with love as if a thousand suns were exploding in my chest.
And mom kept moving her hand so slowly, so slowly, over the shaft and the bulb of my cock that she teased me and kept increasing my lust, but taming it at the same time. I was wax in her hands.
"You can touch my breasts." mom sighed. Adding nervously: "If you want to... Of course."
I placed my free hand on mom's left breast. Through the thin fabric of her dress, I felt her stiff nipple press into the palm of my hand. Her breast was heavy when I squeezed it gently, driving my fingers into its pliant flesh. I grabbed it and kneaded it, it felt so sexy. Mom removed her hand from my balls for a moment to scoop out both her breasts from her dress. Her skin complexion was amazing. A million tiny freckles stood out against the pale of her skin. Her aureola's were large and red, in intense contrast to the paleness of her skin. Her nipples were tiny and hard, like peas prying into the palm of my hand as it went over them. Mom moaned and her eyes flashed from her breasts to my face as to probe my reaction to her womanly shapes. I think she saw that I was admiring what I saw.
I kneaded her breast and watched her flesh ply and tremble. I cupped it and lifted it, her breast bulging over my hand. I gently let my hand's palm rub her nipples, which became even harder. I could not get enough of her.
Mom never stopped staring at me. She seemed to enjoy observing my rapture as I was playing with her breasts. I had suckled from them, I realized. The thought made hornier than I already was. As a baby, I had lay on mom's stomach and suckled those nipples. I saw the veins running under her skin, like some hidden underground network, and she just looked so extremely fertile with her large breasts.
It was surreal actually standing here. Mom and I must have shared the same thought, as her movement slowed down even further. We were taking in the reality that we had brought about. How unreal this would have been a year ago. And how much we wanted it to be real now. We drove the thoughts away by kissing."I love your smell so much." I whispered in mom's ear.
Without a warning, mom stepped back and lowered herself on the bed. She had to crawl backwards onto the sheets, which she didn't do with acrobatic flexibility. The awkwardness made her look extremely cute, even though she her face was now as red as a tomato -- so much was she blushing. Looking at me, she pulled up her skirt up to her slightly floppy belly, so that I could now fully see her puffy and wet vagina between her impressive thighs.
Mom. There we go.
I crouched towards mom, not having a clear plan, and soon found myself between her legs. I couldn't help thinking that we were desecrating their marital bed, where she and dad, only more than a year ago, had made love. But the submission on mom's timid face showed me that it was okay - perhaps it was okay precisely because we were doing it here, because there was no place else where we could perform what we were about to do. Because here it would never be okay, because by this forbidden act we would complete our palace of grief.
I bent forward and pressed my face into her pussy and inhaled deeply and I smelled her smell as never before. Musky, tangy, salty. My nose pressed into her vagina and into her wetness. Then I started licking her. Mom moaned as I went down on her, her hands in my hair. It was as if the intensity of smelling mom's panties was multiplied a thousand fold, and the dizziness returned more than ever. I closed my eyes, but I could feel my eyeballs turn upwards until they could go no further, in an expression of complete ecstasy.
When I opened my eyes, the sight was ravishing. I was in between mom's wide legs, which she had pressed against the sides of my head. Below my face, I saw mom's pussy, which had the colour of her cheeks when she was blushing. A girlish red was visible between the darker red of her labia. Her clit was almost scarlet. Her belly above my face went up and down as it spasmed out of sheer lust. I licked her and enjoyed her juices running over my face. I wanted to lose myself completely in mom. I loved her so insanely at that moment.
It did not take long for mom to orgasm, which sent a waterfall of juices running out of her vagina, which I lapped up as I kept licking her while she was cumming. She called out my name. And I realized to have that resound here, in her sanctuary where she and dad had lain, that we were reaching depths of transgression that I had never imagined possible before. And it turned me on. I kept licking and licking, while mom's body shivered and shook.
When she had calmed down, I crawled up to have my upper body hover over hers, and her eyes were like jittery radars running all over my face. She was so nervous. She knew what we were going to do next. Carefully, she raised her knees and spread her thighs. Although she was too timid to speak right now, I knew what this meant, and with one hand I directed my penis to the opening of mom's pussy. Seeing mom's every reaction suddenly filled me with shyness again, and the dizziness came over me in waves. I had trouble pointing my dick in the right direction, but soon I found my target.
We both gasped when our intimate parts touched. The tip of my dick slid across the wetness of her opening, before it found its way in to press apart her labia and enter her holiest of holiest. Inch by inch I felt how I entered my mother's body, until my balls rested on her ass and I could press no further. Mom had held her breath until I was fully in her and released it with a dramatic whimper.
I started fucking her. My pelvis rocked as the shaft of my cock slid deeper and deeper in the fleshy rose of my mom. It felt insane. I felt love. And guilt. And fear. And this mixed into a dangerous cocktail of ecstasy. My hands grabbed her dress at the height of hips to gain a grip and to be able to move faster. Mom's large breasts that still hung free just swayed at our tempo, the nipples rolling from front to side and back again. With one hand I held one of her tits and felt the impact of my own thrust reflected in its soft flesh.
Mom placed her hands lovingly under my shirt on my back and let them slide along my spine. I then let her take off my shirt while I kept making love to her.
While we were so close together, I realized that this was all that we had wanted for months but had been afraid to acknowledge. No one could touch us here, in this unspeakable secret. It felt as if we had been launched into space, falling forever, together, where no one would ever find us again. And at each thrust we kept falling further, further away from any inhabitable space by others. At each moan, we removed ourselves deeper into our hidden den of love. At each kiss, we were further and further in our own galaxy.
I wanted no one but mom. Her red hair sprawled out on the pillow as the brightest autumn leaves on the pavement. Her hips gently thrusting with my tempo, sucking me deeper inside herself. Her face, oh her face!, lured me further into the abyss, with her blue eyes that just beamed submission and love towards me.
I could not hold it anymore.
"Mom, I am coming." I panted.
"Yes!" she just screamed, and I felt her hips twitch and then move faster to take me there all the way. Then she whispered in my ear. "You can come in me, if you want."
I spurted my semen into my mother's womb. I felt the muscles inside her tense and relax and tense again as she received my seed. A deep bellowing arose from mom, as she moaned and beastly released all her tension. She was cumming too. Her legs wrapped around me and pushed me even deeper into her, as she lifted her pelvis a bit to receive all my cum.
The room shook in front of my eyes. The dizziness reached its maximum. I was floating. I was far beyond any known galaxy, together with mom. It was just her her her and the whole world went away.
Then we crashed. And our bodies, sweaty and smelling of sex, remained pressed into each other on the bed where she and dad had had so many loving nights before everything changed.
And at first there was shame for both of us. For we had now cut all the ties that would lead us out of our sinful palace of grief. Our faces lay pressed into the bed, staring in other directions, as we felt each other's breath.
But this moment did not last long. Mom gently grabbed my face, and when I looked in her eyes, all shame made place for an insane joy, a love that I felt as a beam of light erupting from my stomach to entangle mom's soul, and we kissed and we lay there for hours until we fell asleep.
***
What started is a time of bliss. The second time we had sex was the morning after. When we woke, I kissed mom, and she started caressing my chest. Although we did not plan to have sex again, I pressed my body onto hers and she started riding my leg. I felt that her pussy radiated warmth and that it became wetter and wetter as she rubbed it against me. I took mom's dress off and moved myself quickly between her legs. Her pussy was still gooey of our sex yesterday, but I didn't care. I slid between her legs, crying in joy as I started thrusting my pelvis. Mom pressed her face into the mattress, too insecure to look at me in full day light, but I took in the beauty of mom's body under mine, shaking under my force. Mom yelped and came moments before I erupted inside of her. We kissed again, and had trouble getting up after we lay there cuddling, the love hormones running through us.
Each night we would have sex in mom's bed, sometimes multiple times in a row. Mom was insatiable. The first times, we took hours of foreplay before I would penetrate her, never losing the enchantment of seeing her pussy, but after a while, she could not have me on top her fast enough. We would cuddle and talk during the day, and then, when night fell, I would find mom waiting for me to take her in her bed. Sometimes she would hide herself under the blankets, but later she would be there stark naked, her legs spread for me already, so that I could marvel at her perfect, hairy pussy spread open for me. Even in such radical gestures, mom never became fully self-confident, and her face would be like a sail rippling in the wind, showing so many emotions that endeared me, but also turned me on. She wanted to deliver herself to me.
All this deepened our love and the sense of retreat that it meant for us. This meant that it also kept our grief open: it set us apart from everything that was normal. The more radical we would love each other, the more we would betray dad, the truer mom could be to his memory by refusing things to become normal again. Our house literally became a kind of fort against the outside world. We kept the curtains closed to avoid our secret from leaking out, and there were days when mom and I would strip naked immediately when we came home from work.
The grief did not get between us. When mom was saddest, she needed me the most. There was this time when I came home, and I found mom crying in the kitchen.
"I just miss him so much..." she explained, trying to wipe her tears.
Without a word I started kissing her face, than lapping it with my tongue, kissing all her tears away. She let me take of her blouse, revealing her breasts in a dark blue bra. Her jeans she stripped off herself, while I waited impatiently, to lift her up onto the kitchen counter. I took her panties off, while her tits started rolling out of her bra, so that she lay there in nothing but her socks and a bra that only half fulfilled its function of holding her breasts. I fucked her hard, while she let tears flow over dad, moaning with each thrust of my dick inside of her. Her breasts swayed up and down and her ass shook under my impact.
Mom cried and yelped and urged me to fuck her harder on the kitchen counter, while she tried to hold onto its sides, pushing plates and glasses onto the floor. Unflinching, I kept going at her, seeing how my dick slid in her warm body, her pussy oozing precum all along my shaft. Mom kept crying that time, somewhere in between emotional pain and intense pleasure, and when I was about to come, she just held me tight, and let me finish deep within her. Her sobbing body slowly came to halt, and we lay there for half an hour, letting things be what they were. After, we felt as if we had been given release, and we cuddled naked on the couch before going to bed for another round.
There was another effect of the grief. Mom wanted to show me that she was fully dedicated to me, that there was no one for her but me with whom she shared these feelings. This resulted in ever further reaching acts of submission. She wanted to do with me what she had never done with others. And I felt it as my task to take here there, to that place where we would be alone from everything she had ever known.
The first thing she begged me to do was to take her doggystyle. Apparently, she and dad had never done this, which I could not understand with an ass like that. There were days were mom would be waiting for me in her room, on her knees on the floor, with her upper body sprawled out on the bed, her ass perked up in the air. The first time, I remember the power I felt at having mom at my availability like this. Rock hard, I grabbed her ass and guided my dick inside of her. I heard her moan into the mattress as I took her, making her ass shake and feeling my pelvis press into at at each thrust. She loved it when I came over her ass, smearing it with cum, which she would spread out across her body with her hands. She once explained, shyly, whispering into my ear, that this really made her feel like my girl.
And another of mom's favourite became facials. On lucky days, I would come home and find mom on her knees in the hall way, so that at the very moment I opened the door, I would find greedy hands tucking at my trousers. Mom was too self-conscious to suck cock anywhere else but under the blankets, which she did as a pro, but we developed a routine in which I would jerk off, while mom would look up to me and beg me to cum on her, while she cupped her beautiful breasts. It always happened fast. My cum splashed on mom's face, often dripping down from her chin onto those beautiful boobs. She would tell me how much she loved me, and we would hug and cuddle, after I had eagerly also gotten out of my clothes. If mom could have her way, she left the cum on her face all day, as she experienced it as a mark that separated her from the normal world, a true sign that we were safely in our palace of grief where everything was allowed.
***
Now it is two years later. We are in a good place, the both of us, but we no longer live together. We have decided, half a year ago, to no longer have sex. It was hard at first, but now it is better. I still love my mom, but we have found a way to tear down our palace of grief, to let the light in.
For a year, we had the most intense relationship I will ever have in my life. Because it was built on transgression, and because we refused to come down to everyday reality, we lived out an excessive love. Of course, we ravishingly loved each other's bodies and the forbidden appeal of incestuous intimacy. It was our place to retract from the grief and the impossibility to give dad's death a place in our worlds.
But we had a special bond in so many other ways too. With mom, it was as if the smallest detail could wrest itself free from the monotony of everyday life and start its own adventure. When we were in nature, the sound of the birds resounded like a symphony in my head. But even in the mall or downtown, it was as if we were looking at life from the outside, being able to capture its outrageous beauty by holding it at a distance - which those poor people living within everyday life could never do. A piece of plastic floating on the wind, the sun reflecting on the fountain's water. My relationship with mom was a way to hold the world at bay and to marvel at its glory from the outside.
Although I can never share my secret with anyone, I am truly happy for the chance I have had to experience all this with mom. It is an unconventional mode of grieving, perhaps, but it worked for us. Especially mom would not have coped without it. As to me, I felt so loved and accepted that I dared to take the step to go to college again and study literary theory - so that I finally, some day, can teach students at a university who really want to read their Shakespeare.
Perhaps mom and I could have been in our relation forever, but at some stage, and for both of us at the same time, we felt that we did no longer need the safety of our retreat. It was still there, and that was good to know, as a place that we could always go back to, but the world started to appeal to us. My lectures started, and mom got a promotion at her work. We continued to make love every evening that we were together, but over time more and more practicalities made that we slept apart. I had to go to a conference, mom made trips with her friends.
Over a long talk, half a year ago, we decided that we should allow normal life to take us where it wants to. I moved out. Mom joined the local choir to have something to do in the evenings. In the weekends I still come over, but I sleep in my own bed. There are no more panties on my pillow.
One time, mom called me when the memory of dad became extremely painful to her. Her agony made me cry, and for a while the palace of grief flashed up as if illuminated by a sudden thunder strike. Although we didn't speak it out loud, I think mom was masturbating while we shared memories of the past. I did so too. It was good to know that our safe place is still there, even though we do not need it as often as we used to. We might still return if we have to.
But for now, the future is open.