Chapter 3: A Shower and a Ride
The water came down in sheets, steaming and relentless, and Ritchie stood beneath it with his palms pressed flat against the tile. His head hung forward, his spine curved, the muscles in his lower back still twitching from a day that had felt like a fever dream long after the fever had broken. The hot spray sluiced over his skin, carrying away the evidence—the dried streaks across his stomach and chest, the sticky residue on his hands, the heavy smell of release that had permeated his sheets like a confession he couldn't scrub away.
But the hum wouldn't leave.
It sat there behind his sternum, a low, patient pulse. His fingers pressed harder against the cool tile. He stayed in the shower until the water ran cold, until his fingers pruned and his breath evened out into something approaching normal.
His mother wasn't downstairs when he finally descended, wrapped in grey sweats and an old t-shirt that hung loose on his frame. The kitchen was empty, the clock on the wall ticking toward noon, Sunday light filtered through rain-streaked windows. He poured a glass of water from the tap, hesitated, then drank it in one long pull.
The water tasted different today. Mineral and faintly sweet.
He pulled on his rain jacket, grabbed his bike from the garage, and slipped out into the grey morning before his mother could surface. He needed to move. His muscles were tight with unspent energy, his skin crawling with a restlessness he didn't understand.
The streets of Ashfall were empty. Sunday morning quiet, the rain keeping everyone indoors. He pedaled through the old downtown, past the diner and the hardware store and the church where his family sat in the third pew every Sunday as if that might make them holy. The tires hissed through puddles, kicking up cold spray against his calves.
He didn't know where he was going. He just knew he had to move.
Rose Lake sat on the eastern edge of town, a body of water that was more pond than lake by most standards, fringed with cattails and reeds and forgotten soda cans. He hadn't planned to come here. But his bike had turned on its own, his legs pumping the pedals, and there he was.
The water was dark and still beneath the grey sky. The light seemed reluctant to touch its surface, as if something down there was hoarding the warmth.
He dropped the bike in the grass and stood at the edge of the shore, his breath fogging the air. The rain had let up to a drizzle, and the quiet was immense. He shoved his hands into his pockets and stared at the water.
The hum in his skull pulsed in time with the lapping of the waves against the bank. And beyond that, whispering at the very edge of his awareness, was something that felt like an invitation.
He stood there a long time. Long enough that the drizzle soaked through his jacket and the cold seeped into his bones. When he finally turned away, he could've sworn he heard something shift beneath the surface. A dark shape. A slow, deliberate bulge of water that had no business existing.
He pedaled home fast, his heart hammering in his ears.
---
The house was quiet when he slipped through the front door. Mud from his shoes smeared the welcome mat, and he kicked them off at the door, padding sock-footed up the stairs. He needed to change. He needed to stop thinking about dark water and deep pulsing lights.
The door to his room was open.
His mother stood at the foot of his bed, her back to him. She was wearing one of his old football t-shirts—the one he'd gotten in freshman year that never fit right and had lived in the back of his closet for years—and a pair of yoga pants that clung to her hips like a second skin. She was holding his ruined sheets in her hands, the ones he'd balled up in a corner and planned to deal with later.
The smell hit him the moment he crossed the threshold.
His own scent, amplified and somehow worse now that it was trapped in the fabric. But it wasn't just his. He could smell her, too. The sharp, sweet tang of her arousal cut through the musk of his own release, and his gut coiled with a response he didn't want to name.
She turned at the sound of his footsteps, and her eyes went dark.
"Mom." His throat clicked. "I was going to—you didn't have to—"
"Where did you go?" Her voice was strange, high and strained at the edges. A smile flickered at her lips and then faded into something hungrier. Young. She looked young in his shirt, her dark hair loose around her face, her skin flushed.
"Rose Lake. Just for a ride." He took a step back without meaning to. "Mom, you don't have to do my laundry. I can take care of it."
"I know you can." She let the sheets fall back into the corner, unballing them with careless ease, and crossed the room toward him. Her feet were bare. She moved like she was walking on a stage—or a tightrope. "I've been waiting for you to get home. I wanted to talk to you about yesterday."
"Mom, I'm so sorry. I never should've let—"
"Shh." She was close now, close enough that he could smell her skin, the sweet perfume she wore on Sundays, the hint of coffee on her breath. "You don't have to apologize, Ritchie."
"I do. It was—we shouldn't have—"
"What we did felt wrong." She reached out and touched his jaw, her fingers cool despite the heat coming off her in waves. "I've been telling myself all morning that it was a mistake. That I was being a bad mother. That I should've been stronger."
He couldn't meet her eyes.
"But then I found your sheets." Her hand moved from his jaw to his chest, pressing flat against the damp material of his jacket. She pulled it open, still wearing that strange, hungry smile. "And the smell of you, honey. It wouldn't leave my head. I've been standing in here breathing it in like it's the only air in the world."
"Mom, please. We can't."
"Tell me you don't want it." Her fingers curled into his t-shirt, and she pulled him forward until his chest bumped against hers. Her head tilted back, her lips parted. "Tell me you haven't been thinking about it all night like I have."
He opened his mouth. He meant to say the words. I don't want it. This is wrong. You're my mother.
But the hum surged behind his sternum, and the words died in his throat.
She smiled like she'd already heard his answer.
He couldn't explain how they ended up on the bed. One moment they're standing, her hands in his shirt, and the next the mattress hit his back and she was straddling his waist, her thighs tight against his ribs, her eyes dark as the surface of Rose Lake.
"Mom—"
"Don't." She pressed her fingers to his lips. "Don't talk, baby. Just let me feel you."
She shifted, rolling her hips against the growing thickness in his sweats, and a low moan slipped out of her. Her head fell back, her hair pooling across her shoulders, and she ground down against him with a rhythm that made his breath catch.
"God, you're already so hard," she breathed. "Are you always this hard, or is this just for me?"
He couldn't answer. His hands had found her hips the way a drowning man finds a raft, his fingers digging into the soft curve of her waist. She was warm beneath the yoga pants, impossibly soft.
She reached down and tugged at the waistband of his sweats.
"Lift up," she commanded, and his hips obeyed before his brain could intervene. His sweats came down, his briefs following, and then his cock sprang free.
It hit his stomach with an audible slap of flesh on flesh. Eleven inches of it, thick and heavy, standing at full attention with a vein pulsing along its underside. The sight of it made his mother pause, her breath catching in her throat.
"Oh," she said softly. "Oh, honey."
Her hands wrapped around him, and her fingers didn't touch. She squeezed the base first, testing its girth, and a shiver ran down her spine that he could feel through his entire body. She stroked upward, slow and reverent, her palms dragging over the sensitive skin, and then over the head, pushing back the foreskin, watching it glide back and forth.
"It's so big." Her voice was reverent, almost awed. "How did I make something this big?"
He was going to die. He was going to lie here and die on his childhood bed while his mother palmed his cock like it was something precious.
She leaned forward and pressed her lips to the underside of him.
"Your balls." She pulled back, a giggle bubbling out of her that was light and girlish and utterly at odds with what she was doing. She cupped them, his heavy sack, feeling the weight of it. "They're so full. You must have been saving this up for days."
"Since yesterday," he managed.
"Poor baby." But she didn't sound sorry. She sounded delighted.
She lowered her mouth to his balls. The heat of her tongue was a shock, a jolt that went straight up his spine and cracked behind his eyes. She sucked one of them into her mouth, laving it with her tongue, and he heard himself make a sound he'd never made before—a high, keening whimper.
She hummed against his skin and moved to the other one.
He threaded his fingers into her hair without thinking. Her hair smelled like his mother's shampoo, like childhood and comfort and something dangerously close to love. She didn't pull away.
She worked her way back up, dragging her tongue along the thick vein beneath his shaft, and when she reached the head, she paused.
"Look at me," she whispered.
He did.
Her lips parted, and she took as much of him into her mouth as she could. Which wasn't much—maybe two inches—but the sight of those lips stretched around his cock, the feeling of that wet heat swallowing him, undid something in his chest.
"Mom," he groaned.
She pulled off with a pop. "Why does that sound so good? You calling me that while I have your cock in my mouth." She stroked him, watching his face, drinking in every twitch. "I like it. I like it too much."
She took him back in her mouth, bobbing her head as far as she could manage, her hand working the bits she couldn't reach. Spit slicked his shaft, her throat working around him, and despite the awkward angle and the way she gagged every few seconds, it was the best blowjob of his life.
"You taste—" she pulled off, gasping, "—like nothing I've ever had."
---
He felt her cum before he saw it happen.
Her hips bucked against the mattress, a tremor running through her frame. She pulled off him with a gasp, her forehead pressed to his thigh, her whole body shuddering. A wet patch darkened the front of her yoga pants, spreading in a thick bloom across the fabric.
"Mom, did you—"
"Don't," she husked, her hand still stroking him. "Don't make it weird."
He laughed. Actually laughed, short and startled. "I think we're past weird, Mom."
Her lips curled against his thigh. "I guess we are."
She took him back in her mouth, and this time she was more focused, more determined. She went down as far as she could, held it until she gagged, then slid back up. She repeated the motion, faster and faster, her hand jacking the rest of the way, her eyes locked on his.
"There you go," she coaxed. "Let it go for me, honey. I want to taste it. I've been thinking about your cum all day."
He was close. So close. He tried to warn her, to pull back, but she grabbed his hips and held him steady.
"Come in my mouth," she said, the words landing wet and hot against his skin. "Come on, Ritchie. Give it to me."
His orgasm hit him like a wave.
He came in a hot, thick flood that she wasn't ready for. It filled her mouth and kept coming, spilling passed her lips, painting his thighs and his stomach. She swallowed convulsively, some of it running down her throat, more of it dripping out of her mouth to splatter against his groin.
He felt her shudder again, watched her eyes roll back in her head as she came a second time in those yoga pants, her hips rocking against the bed, riding out the shockwave of his release.
When it was over, she pulled off with a final, messy slurp. Her lips were swollen, smeared with his cum. Some of it had escaped down her chin. Some of it was dripping from her nose.
She giggled.
"What," he said, his voice wrecked.
"You're everywhere." She wiped her face with the back of her hand, licking her lips clean. "That was exactly what I needed."
"Mom." But he still had one hand tangled in her hair. "This can't—this can't be a thing."
"I know." Her smile was slow, warming. "That's what I'll keep telling myself." She pressed a kiss to his softening cock, light and almost chaste, then pulled his sweats up. She winced as she stood. "I'm going to need a shower. And to burn these yoga pants."
"Mom." He caught her wrist. "Are we going to talk about this?"
She looked down at him, her dark eyes soft and aching. "What's there to talk about, honey? It happened. It'll probably happen again." She squeezed his hand. "You're my boy. You'll always be my boy. This doesn't change that."
She left.
The door clicked shut behind her.
Ritchie lay there, his hands folded over his chest, staring at a ceiling that had seen him do a lot of things—homework, panic attacks, teenage grief—but nothing like that. His cock was finally soft, the hum dialed down to a quiet purr.
He'd just had his first blowjob. Four days ago he couldn't get a girl to look at him. Now his mother had swallowed his cum and orgasmed in her yoga pants just from the taste of him.
He waited for the shame to hit.
Nothing came.
The rain stopped outside. The clouds broke apart, and pale winter sunlight spilled into his room.
In the lake, the sphere pulsed, faster now, a heartbeat of satisfaction. The human experiment was progressing beautifully.