Under the water she held her breath, little bubbles escaping from her nostrils. With eyes wide open she stared at the bathroom ceiling as the spotlights and the patterns they made waved like liquid fire.
Under the weather again, she supposed she should hate herself, and wondered what he really thought. Lee, her loyal little pup who had grown into a man untouched by her life’s desire, who knew all and still couldn’t hate her.
Do I want him to hate me, or do I need him to? She asked herself with no clear outcome. But as if to answer her question, delivered unto him by some ghostly messenger, he told her that, no, she shouldn’t hate herself.
‘You can’t hate yourself,’ he said from the side of her bed as she lay there wrapped up in her duvet.
‘How can you not hate me?’ she asked back, but was not prepared for the answer.
‘There were times that I have, but that was when I was younger and more naive. I hated you for putting him first over me. He was more a child than I was at times. I hated you for only caring about what was wrong with me when you were so drunk you couldn’t talk or stand straight,’ he had her know.
‘You didn’t know some of the shit I had to deal with by myself when I was a teenager, but all I had to do was to adapt to survive. You still cared and you still loved me. I took for granted all the things you still did for me, which was the only thing Ray taught me as a father figure; to take you for granted!’
A single sob exited his mother’s mouth from within the rolled up bedcover. ‘Why are you so mature for your age?’ she asked.
‘Had to be,’ was all he had left to say. He didn’t know what else to say or to do, so he left her alone where she lay until she had strength left with which to hate herself. Maybe then she would grow sick of it and come to a better resolution.
10
He didn’t know where she found the energy, being that her mounting habit of wallowing in misery appeared so clearly exhausting. Of course, the longer she wallowed in that murky ditch, the harder it was to climb up out of it. Worrying about her was the only think keeping Lee from ruminating so much about the things that had transpired within those four walls all this time.
Increasingly isolated, it became impossible for him not to think about everything up until now…
Once upon a time he was the target of his stepfather’s twisted agenda, and his narcissistic ego — and more than his mother would ever know. He knew that if he told her, she would never forgive herself. But the fact was that he was always Ray’s competition, and Ray was more a psychological bully than the hands-on type.
Mind games didn’t come with physical marks!
He still blamed Ray for everything, not that these trying times had followed him suit into the unknown. Lee was no beta male, far from it. But throughout his formative years that bastard had piled on the insecurities in order to build himself up.
It was entirely possible that towards the end Ray wanted Lee’s mother to go to him, seeing as how he couldn’t have everything he wanted. Ray, whose only talents were drinking and fucking and making others feel bad about themselves, might even have used that against the both of them, or to hammer in the final nail of the family coffin.
What if he had gotten his way, if that was the truth? Mentally broken and unable to make Stevie come to her senses, Lee would have left home a motherless bastard, destined to self-destruct in failure and alienation.
But the truth according to his mother was that, even if it was what Ray wanted, she had been possessed to prey sexually upon her own son of her own accord. She wanted him that way, because that was the sexual creature she was deep inside.
He was not a child anymore. He was finally to be an adult that day. It really could have happened and he still didn’t know how it didn’t, in light of her confession. Imagine what if…
What would have become of them, had their relationship become sexual?
Any knee-jerking outsider would likely call it abuse, and the odds were undeniably in favour of that go-to accusation since Stevie herself said in so many words that it would have been nothing short of exploitation.
Incest was incest.
Oh but the internet hashtagged that love was love.
Homosexuality was once not only frowned upon. It was illegal and it was evil. Now a white guy had no privilege if he WASN’T gay. The world, for all its rules and social norms, was a fucked up place with a fucked up way of looking at things.
Who was to say that his mother’s fantasy was sick and twisted, if he were a consenting adult with total independence of thought? But was he? Not always…
How many boys fantasised of being seduced by their teachers, or any other of their adult crushes when they developed through puberty? Girls were no different. It was human nature for the curious soul to want to be shown the way, rather than to fumble in the dark any more than they already did alone.
Some sons wanted their mothers and some daughters wanted their dads, or at least that’s where it all began. The awakening of sexuality in all people began in effect with the presence of the already sexually developed elder. Fantasy was the first step into reality for every individual.
What set that reality apart from the fantasy lay in the fate of innocence. Much like a person’s dignity, innocence — and specifically virginity — was for the individual to sacrifice, not for the predator to take.
That was fact — chokingly restricted by law, by principle, and by family value, all which left billions of teenagers around the world sneaking around to get it any way that they could.
To give one’s innocence was to offer oneself to life. To retain one’s innocence was to remain not unspoiled but unappreciated. Still, the loss of Lee’s virginity to Hannah Steers during sixth form was a strange experience and not satisfying or fulfilling in any spiritual way. It was simply a rites of passage.
Both of them were inexperienced and nervous. They didn’t even like each other that much beyond looks and the fact that they had mutual friends. It was nothing more than a dare. Was he man enough? Was she woman enough? The answer to both was a glaringly obvious No!
They were simply driven by their acknowledgement for each other’s sexual maturity and willingness to try with each other. Still they became a pair for a little while, but it didn’t last long and they were strangers long before the split.
Had he learned to love from the woman who taught him how to live, Lee was in no doubt that he would have known a lot more today, but he was also glad that it didn’t happen. It meant that she did not experience the clueless boy that he was; which ultimately would have murdered that fantasy in cold blood.
Still, his love and desire for her transformed into a love and desire for the archetypal cougar, the sexually active middle-aged woman, as he pushed her away; and that was no bad thing at all.
But no harm done, his mother was no predator and she did not physically steal his innocence, or suffocate him instead through emotional incest.
But now that he knew that it could have happened and that Stevie, his own mother, was planning for it to happen, his fantasies had risen from the embers of teenage life like the resurrected phoenix, fuelled by the potent hormones of his blessed youth and virility.
Now she had revealed that hidden and torturous truth, and she hated herself. But he was becoming quickly the opposite. Ray was gone, out of the way, and hopefully forever. Anything beyond life with him was far from impossible, including the possibility that his mother still wanted to have him that way.
Just as she had summoned incredible strength to expose that side of herself, and in the hopes of freeing herself from her own personal prison, maybe Lee needed to be able to show that same strength in helping her. Maybe it was the next natural step in freeing her altogether of her judgement curse; of shame and guilt.
What he wanted to say really would take such strength, if not what it would take to rescue them both from the potential fallout!