My Other Mother Ch. 15

My love for her was so deep, deeper than I thought I could ever love anyone, deeper than I ever even knew until that moment. I reveled in that joyful surprise, even as that vague worry of eventually losing her still nagged from somewhere at the back of my mind.

We'd left our clothes in the Driscoll's room and I had to sneak back for them. Luckily they were still fast asleep, Dan having cum in his sister's mouth in our absence. His seed ran from the peacefully sleeping girl's lips as she continued to suckle.

Mum had changed into a short sleeved, red black and gold print blouse that was short enough to show her belly along with the low cut, stretchy black shorts that allowed just the very bottoms of her ass cheeks out. She came out like this with her makeup and hair intact as I reclined on one of the beds, fully dressed and appreciating her beauty like it was the first time I really noticed it. She flashed me a sweet, almost demur smile as she laid down on her back beside me.

"We should get some sleep while we can, before room service knocks to kick us out. Then we put some miles between us and this place," she said.

"What about the Driscoll's?"

"They'll be fine," she dismissively judged.

I remained silent, but turned on my side, propping by body on my elbow so I could look her over as she lay there with her eyes closed. She was perfection in every sense of the word. Here was a woman whose love and commitment to me I'd never have need to doubt, an extraordinary beauty who would do anything I desired and so much more that I'd never even think of...

I found myself remembering the first time I fucked her, the time I raped her in front of Joe, and smiled. It seemed a very honest show of my affections at that moment more than a rape, whether Joe told me to do it or not. And it wasn't just the sex then, it was the glow of being with her, the same one Roxy clearly felt and finally ran from.

My smile faded as I appreciated the shape of her breasts in the blouse she wore and my thoughts picked up where they left off in the shower before I became distracted by just how much I loved my mother. I lingered on this pleasantry until a bold thought presented itself.

She adjusted me.

I quietly absorbed this reality as my gut started to cramp ever so slightly, silently aghast that she would and not having to wonder for too long at the nature of what she would have done while she was in my head. Whatever her subtle or unintended control over me before, while at the funeral home, she'd gone deeper and made me more open to easy suggestion from her, a form of what she did to Vivian and Taylor.

Her spectacular curves could never bore my eyes as my gut cramped tighter at the thought of some type of override in my head that she could easily access without me even realizing, at least not till later, it seemed. I also knew I was entranced with her and, to my further gut cramping alarm, knew that the sixty-nine between Bill and Dan wasn't the only thing I missed during 'the Driscoll family experience'. I can't explain it, but I just knew that there were things I couldn't remember. I lay there, trying to force my gut calm when I began recalling certain positions that I couldn't remember getting into... What happened?

I rejected that train of thought for the sake of both physical and mental comfort, but remembered how she'd brought it up. It was a test, to see if I remembered.

Did she even mean anything she said when she promised we'd slow down?

I closed my eyes, still trying to relax. It would always be this way.

"Something on your mind, sweetie pie?" she sleepily asked.

I lightly wondered if she was aware, or even cared that I was on to her as I answered with a weary tone, "Not really. ... Things seem so complicated sometimes."

"Not to me," she sighed contentedly.

Suddenly, thinking of how much less the events at Frank's place bothered me since the funeral home, I asked, "Wouldn't you rather not have to worry about the parasite?"

"I hate when you refer to us that way, appropriately or not."

This, in itself, seemed almost answer enough.

" ... Mum?"

"Mm hmm?"

"What's in the laptop bag?"

"I'd guess somewhere between two hundred and fifty to three hundred thousand Dollars. I've only had time for a rough estimate."

" ... Wow. You really came through. I guess you always do."

"Couldn't have done it without you, hon. You spotted him through Pitbull and took excellent notice, then your sacrifice down in that cellar so I could have the resources to find the best timing."

"No problem, Mum."

"Hm. You know, I meant what I said about you that day at Mispec, about how I'd teach you things and how well we're going to do, but I wanted to keep you out of the loop on this one. It was delicate because I wanted to move quickly, but I also wanted you to have some measure of plausible deniability while you got the idea of how I work from our conversations. That was another reason I brought Roxy in. She could be the second hand I at times needed for such a hasty... investigation without putting you at risk before you're ready. An alternate face who understood little of what she so accurately reported back to me. Pitbull was also quite useful."

"Okay. ... Um, can I ask you a question?"

"Of course, honey."

" ... How... how many? How many people have you...?"

"Killed?"

"Well-"

"Fourteen."

That came as a shock.

" ... Oh..." was all I could manage as my gut cramped tighter, the pain actually having abated for the most part during our conversation up to this point.

"I can imagine what you're thinking."

"Uh-h..."

"Remember I told you about my long time ago ex girlfriend, Olivia, whose father didn't like me? I actually met her through him. Ollie was sort of this small time Gangster in Kingston and when I was twenty-two I worked in his strip joint as a dancer. At the time, I was still dealing with the loss of... well, everything, and I was a bit of a mess. A very angry young woman, you might say."

I had no trouble picturing this as I listened.

"Well, one day, this asshole comes in with a beef. I'm in the middle of a table dance for Ollie and a couple of his associates, and the jerk grabs me by the hair and pulls me off the stool and out of his way. I came crashing down and I looked up at him from the floor on my back, the wind knocked out of me and... he didn't even look down. Just stood over me, tripping out on Ollie. Like I was nothing. It was very... inglorious, you might say. You might say it was ultimately humiliating considering some of the things I was trying to get over at the time.

"I managed to crawl away after a minute with some breath in my lungs and a black hatred for this man that would have blotted out the sun if I'd been outside at the time. After he left, Ollie wasn't too happy about the visit, either. The guy had embarrassed him in his own place and I knew he wanted him dead but he was too close.

"So..." Mum went on with a tired sigh. One night a couple months later, Mr. Asshole is driving home late one night, like he always did, by the usual route and at the usual time, coming to a stop at a particular red light right beside a brick wall like he sometimes had to do. It was the third night in a row I waited with that stupid tow truck. Heh, I actually had to steal it three times, returning it later until he caught a red light there, but the look on his face when I came charging out of that dark alley at speed with the headlights off... It was very satisfying, more so than when I T-boned him and drove him into the brick wall."

She started laughing a little here as she recalled this event as though she were relating a funny story from her wedding day.

"I was wearing my seatbelt and bracing myself, but I also had two pillows taped together on the steering wheel. Heh. Seems funny now. Anyway, I kept my foot right to the floor and... splat! Mr. Asshole was pizza. I took off with my pillow, fired that in a dumpster and went back to work the next night.

"Ollie was goggling over the report in the paper about the stolen tow-truck that the cops were saying was used as a joyride, pointing out the half empty bottle of whiskey I left on the floor as their evidence. I look down as I'm passing and say, "Now that I've taken care of that rude little interruption, would you like me to finish that dance?" Heh! He had me finish it alright and, after I did, we had a long conversation about a rather different job placement for me."

I swallowed, feeling beyond entertained. (fourteen fucking people!) I looked away from her for fear she'd open her eyes and see the shock in my face.

"Soon after that, I met Olivia and she very quickly seduced me. She was so good to me, helped me out of the booze and drugs, helped me to clean up and get my head on straight, to deal with things from my past to quite an extent. But by then, Ollie had gotten to know me better and he eventually took a very deep dislike of me. He didn't want me, the 'twisted little bitch' as he called me, around his daughter. But it was more than that. He came to be afraid of me and that made a man like him with the position he had a very dangerous person to me. I had to leave.

"Then," she sighed, getting sleepier, "in time, I met your father. He was... secure. He liked to have a good time and he was decent. I knew he had a raw talent for numbers and the markets, but I knew he didn't have the insight to use it and I could... well. You know."

"Be the good woman behind a successful man," I toned, thinking of how fortunate the idiot was to escape with his life after cheating on her.

"Exactly, sweetie pie." But, along with his inability to know how to move with regards to proper decisions in relation to the current events of his surroundings, he also lacked a certain social savvy. He couldn't accurately see where he was at and what would have to change and how in order to bring about a favourable outcome for himself and his family. Were it not for me, he'd have ended his days as a bank teller."

A moderately long pause between us lulled her to the point where she started ever so slightly when I spoke again.

"Mum?"

"Hmmm?"

(pause)

"Dad didn't... He didn't leave the country," I fearfully assumed with my heart in my chest. "Did he?"

She allowed another pause, shorter this time before quietly replying, "No. ... No, he didn't."

"Do- do you know where he is?"

"Yes."

" ... Uh-h... Phyllis, too?"

"Yes, hon, Phyllis too."

"They... um..."

She opened her eyes and gently pulled me down to lay against her, the side of my face on her upper chest while she rubbed my back and slowly raked her long, black coloured nails through my hair. Goosebumps broke out all over and I couldn't help a shiver, equal parts pleasure and revulsion.

"He didn't know I was monitoring his and Phyllis's emails and that's how I found out about his illegal activities, the same time I did of their planned disappearing act two days from then. He knew he was being looked into, the money was already gone ahead of him and I knew how it would go for us whether they caught him or not. I let them finish their final maneuvers and now they're both gone, aren't they? Just like they planned with all the preparations they made left behind to prove just that to the authorities. So... They're gone, the pigs will never find them and we're okay."

For whatever reason, I remembered a day long ago in the backyard, me and Dad running around in our trunks, he teaching me an impression of Mick Jagger's chicken walk while I laughed hysterically. Mum was also laughing, spraying us with the hose and pretending to be the audience.

"It was so... insulting," she continued, becoming sleepy again. "The way our nutritionist would act in front of me, unaware that I knew about her and your father, about the other women she didn't know about. ... He betrayed us so thoroughly with such little regard. He didn't love us. He'd have gotten rid of us long before that if he could have, so I don't want you to worry about it. He never loved you. Right?"

" ... Right," I somehow agreed, still in a state of shock.

Despite this shock, a deeply recessed part of me was laughing hysterically on the inside about all my previous, grossly underestimated personality evaluations of Mum while I tried to grapple with the fact that I was snuggling with a killer. My mother the killer, my father's murderer. He would have been number twelve by the latent count I was privy to. Possibly eleven if Mum chose to save him for last or to make him first watch-

"Nothing's changed other than your perspective, honey."

It was one of those times that she was just plain and simple right, but in such a wrong and now horrible way.

"We're gonna pour the rest of the booze down the toilet as soon as we get up, right Mum?"

Would it even matter? She'd only do what she wanted as she had been all along, rationalizing, nudging me where she needed to get her way like she did to get her so-called last hurrah. What was left of my 'stability' would be slowly chipped away at until I really was just as bad as her, if I wasn't already. The perversions and freedoms of our parasites would get the better of us, despite my best efforts, because time would always work against even those efforts as it always had been.

"Don't worry, sweetie pie... Mummy has it all in hand now."

I tightened my grip on her side, pulling her closer to me with my forearm over her bare stomach, eyes wide open. The staggering things she'd told me slowly sank in and became the dark facts of a new and grim reality of who my mother really was and what our future would most likely be as I lay awake, she snoozing peacefully until came the expected knock on our door.

END