PAULA'S PROGRESS

Everyone who knew Ralph was stunned by his sudden death in his mid-fifties. He was an active and apparently fit man right up until the time he sank a twenty-foot putt to complete the last round of golf he would ever play. He felt a momentary sharp pain in his side as he bent to retrieve the ball from that last hole, and he felt increasingly ill as he walked with his playing partners back toward the clubhouse. Halfway there he stumbled and dropped to his knees on the walkway. His friends helped him to a bench on the clubhouse veranda. An ambulance crew took him from there to the hospital, where the Emergency Room staff did all they could to deal with his massive heart attack. Ralph died less than an hour later.

His wife Paula had rushed to the hospital as soon as she heard the news. She had been able to speak with her husband briefly before he was gone. Their son Charley, who was now 22 and no longer living at home with his parents, arrived too late to say his goodbyes to his father but he was there to comfort his mother and to take her home. Charley stayed at home with his mother for the few days it took to make the funeral arrangements and to help Paula get started in the routines of her new life as a widow.

Paula seemed too stunned by her husband's death to be doing much serious grieving. Her eyes welled up with tears at the funeral, but Charley never saw her openly crying. He intuitively felt that this was psychologically unhealthy for her, but he knew that people deal with grief and loss in their own ways. Perhaps she would grieve more deeply later on. Perhaps time was all she needed to heal her wounds and let her get on with her life.

On the weekend following the funeral, Charley again visited his mother to see how she was coping. He noticed immediately that her suffering had become more evident and was taking some disturbing forms. She would spend hours in her room alone, crying over family album pictures or over her husband's clothes and other personal belongings. She had relegated his golf bag and clubs to the basement but, oddly, the putter he had in his hand when his heart failed him now rested on a pillow on what had been his side of their bed. Maybe Paula needed some contact with the thing her husband had had his last real contact with, and of course she knew how much he had loved the game.

Charley decided to stay with his mother for a day or two, just to keep an eye on her. Living alone didn't seem to be working out too well for her just yet.

In the middle of the first night he'd slept in his childhood bedroom for a long time he was awakened by the sound of his mother crying in her bedroom. He went to her door and listened there for a moment. Then he opened the door and stepped into her completely darkened room. He waited until her sobs subsided before he let her know that he was there.

"Are you OK, Mom?" he asked. She made no reply, although she was clearly awake. Charley moved closer to the bed. "I heard you crying. Do you want to talk?" She said nothing.

Charley sat on the edge of his mother's bed for a moment. She lay on her side, facing away from him. He laid what he hoped was a comforting hand on her shoulder. She took his hand in hers and held it so tightly that it actually hurt him, but of course he couldn't tell her that.

"Just stay with me awhile, dear," she said, relaxing her grip on Charley's hand somewhat but not releasing it. "I'm still not used to being alone in this bed."

"I'll stay as long as you want me here," he said.

"Then you'd better make yourself comfortable," she said. "Move that damned golf club out of the way and lie down where your father would be if he was here." Charley did as she asked, lying on his side facing his mother's back as he assumed his father would choose to sleep. Her body would have spooned snugly against his if he had been closer to her, but he was sure that snuggling up to her in any sort of sexual way was not what she would want him to do.

The two of them lay side by side in silence. Paula kept her son's hand firmly in her own. Some minutes later her breathing became deeper and slower, and Charley realized that she was dozing off. He planned to let her sleep for a short while, and then he would free his trapped hand and return to his room for the remainder of the night. Paula made things a bit trickier by moving her hand down her front, taking her son's hand with it, to where they both came to rest just under the swells of her unrestrained breasts.

This was becoming more awkward for Charley. His eyes were now fully accustomed to the darkness, and he began to feel uncomfortable in a familiar and pleasant way that was entirely inappropriate to this situation. He could make out the curves of his mother's hips and buttocks in her full length nightgown. He inhaled her various smells and found them disturbingly arousing. His hand, still held in his mother's, was now lightly in contact with the undersides of her breasts. He was getting horny. Horny was something he knew that he should definitely not be. Not now.

Oh, shit. He was getting a hardon. Soon it would need to be touched somehow. He needed to free himself and get back to his own bed. There he could get his mother out of his perverse mind, replace her with some celebrity slut who was better suited as a fantasy fuckmate for him, and jerk off until a big cum would put his disgusting horniness to bed for the night.

But apparently his mother wasn't about to release his hand. In fact, she had moved her own hand more fully onto her breasts. She seemed to be caressing herself in her sleep, taking his hand along for the ride.

To make things worse, his cock was now fully erect. It was pointed right at his mother's bottom cheeks. Its head now actually touched the warm fullnesses of her generous ass. Charley couldn't back away from her, because she was now holding his hand firmly against her boobs. He shifted the position of his cock, trying to find a way to make it poke less embarrassingly against the fleshy globes of his mother's bottom. At that precise moment she shifted her hips and accidentally helped him to achieve what he was trying to do on his own. This meant that the tip of his cock was now lodged comfortably in the crease between her buttocks. He was no longer pressing rudely against her. Now she was unconsciously pressing rudely against him.

Charley wasn't fully in control of what happened in the next few minutes. Paula continued to sleep soundly, her breathing deep and even. But her nipples seemed to have become stiffer because of her self-fondling of her breasts. Her hips remained essentially motionless, but the muscles in her bottom cheeks seemed to alternately grip and then release the knob of his cock.

He gave up trying to think about his favorite celebrity sluts, or even about the more fuckable females of his acquaintance, and accepted the fact that it was his own mother that he was in intense sexual contact with, however unconscious she might be of that fact. He loved this woman, and he was becoming increasingly aware of how sexually exciting she could be. He just didn't know how to keep something bad from happening to her here.

When he felt his cock grow and harden even more, and the rush of cum rising up from his balls could not be held back any longer, he grunted "Oh, shit!" and let his orgasm have its way. He tried not to think about the mess the forceful spurts of his cum were making on his own boxers, on his mother's nightgown, and on his parents' bedsheets, and he was aware that those three disaster areas had not occurred to him in the correct order of their importance.

He'd just have to think of a good explanation for it before morning. Good luck with that, he told himself. There was no way she could fail to notice it, but he had felt powerless to keep it from happening.

Fortunately, Paula let go of Charley's hand and moved away from him soon after he'd finished cumming. He eased himself out of her bed and tiptoed back to his own room. He tried hard to feel guilty and disgusted with himself for what he'd just done, but he didn't. He couldn't. And why should he? He was just behaving as nature intended young men to behave in such situations, and his mother had made it virtually impossible for him to detach himself from her before his damaging cum flood arrived.

And it felt damned good. Thank God he hadn't fucked her. He'd just made a mess of her backside and everything in its vicinity. A shower and a laundry load would solve everything for her. Well, everything except the inexcusable fact of her son having befouled her sleeping body. That wasn't going to be so easy for her to wash away.

Charley had a horrifying momentary image of his late father chuckling at Charley's predicament. Was this one dumb mistake going to haunt him for the rest of his life? Fuck!

* * * * *

Breakfast the next morning was surreal, it seemed to Charley. Not only did his mother make absolutely no mention of the events of the previous night, but she acted as if it had simply not happened at all. This did not, however, come as a relief to Charley. His mother knew very well the positive effects of skillfully employed Maternal Psychology. By not helping her son to atone for his gross misbehavior, she was forcing him to simmer in his own guilt and to find some way to straighten matters out for himself.

Hey, maybe she really didn't care about the incident, thought Charley. Perhaps she thought that a 'wet dream' had accidentally caused him to stain her gown with a substance which she would know could only have come from him.

No. That was bullshit, and he knew it. His mother knew very well that he had outgrown his wet dreams soon after he moved from puberty into adolescence and discovered the world of masturbation.

Charley was grateful that his mother hadn't added sexual tease to her arsenal of weapons of mental torture. She had not shown up at breakfast half undressed, thank God. She had not shown up in the soiled nightgown which must have clung stickily to the rounded flesh of her bottom. She had changed her gown. She had on a loose and almost tawdry bathrobe, which made her look so sexually indifferent and unappealing that Charley suspected she may have chosen to wear it for that very reason.

The day passed without incident, which Charley found rather nerve-wracking. The two of them spent the day sorting through Ralph's possessions, discarding or recycling those that had no lasting value for them. Charley was almost desperately eager to talk with his mother about the indelicate matter of his nocturnal assault on her, but she seemed determined not to allow him that kind of satisfaction. Several times Charley was sure that Paula was about to raise the subject in some way, but she never did.

Evening came, and some meaningless television viewing came with it. Bedtime approached, and with it came a sort of emotional crisis for Charley. Of course any possibility of a repeat of the previous night's fiasco was unthinkable. But he certainly didn't want to get into a debate with his mother about what might happen at bedtime. Paula had a way of turning any such discussion into a sort of verbal sparring match which he had no chance of winning. They both knew this.

"I think I'll head off to bed, Mom," he said, passing by his mother's chair and kissing her forehead gently and chastely on the way. "Sleep well."

Paula didn't reply until her son was nearly out of the room. "Aren't you going to help me get to sleep the way you did last night, dear?" she asked, in a way that left a number of possible interpretations of her meaning.

Charley froze and considered his options. Fast.

"Call me if you need me," he answered, trying to sound as enigmatic as she had. For a brief moment he felt a rush of pride at how brilliantly he'd dodged that particular bullet.

"I asked for your help, dear," she said evenly. "I wouldn't have asked for it if I didn't need it."

Oh fuck. Charley wasn't even in her league in these kinds of wordgames.

"Let me know when you're ready for bed, Mom," he said. "I'll come and keep you company until you can get to sleep."

"Thank you. That would be nice, dear," she said. "I think it helped us both sleep better last night."

Oh, fuck. He'd just have to find a way to keep from getting turned on by his own mother's body in the bed beside him. Thinking about baseball, the old standby to be used when a cold shower wasn't an option, never seemed to work for him. He always seemed to get sidetracked by the hidden meanings in phrases like foul balls, two-ball counts, going deep, working from the mound, and, of course, the importance of scoring as often as possible.

Paula called him to tell her she was in bed. He went to her room determined not to make the same mistakes he'd made there the night before. He didn't have a hardon, but he wondered if he could keep his impudent member under control for however long it took his mother to get to sleep.

* * * * *

Paula smiled at him as he entered her bedroom. She was already in bed, under the covers. Her bedside table lamp was still on. Charley thought he might get away with just lying on top of the blanket, but as he approached the bed Paula turned the covers back for him and lightly patted the bed beside her. He got into bed, lying on his back so as not to be caught staring at the babydoll gown and matching panty his mother had on. A babydoll nightie! He didn't even know she owned stuff like that.

His mother reached over to switch off the table lamp, and in so doing the back hem of her short nightie rose up enough to expose the bottom parts of her bottom parts. Not that this made a lot of difference, thought Charley, because the gown was damn near transparent anyway. Paula pulled the covers back into place over the two of them, for which Charley was thankful. She turned to lie on her side facing her son.

"Thank you for your help today, darling," she said, resting a hand on his chest in an affectionate gesture. Her fingers toyed with a curl of the hairs she found there. "I've been putting off doing a lot of things - things that just don't get done when you aren't around here to help me with them."

Charley assured her that he was more than happy to help sort out his father's belongings and to look after other routine but necessary post-funeral chores.

"I meant things that your father would be helping me with if he was still here," said Paula. Now Charley didn't know what she was referring to. His cock twitched in his boxers, giving him a bit of a clue. Oh, fuck.

His wayward cock was beginning to piss him off. Oh, wait. That was one of its jobs. He needed every little bit of silly mental diversion he could find to keep him from thinking unthinkable thoughts.

"Always glad to help out ..." he said cheerfully, turning on his side to face her and instantly knowing that he probably shouldn't have done that, "... Mom." She had moved closer to him without him knowing it, and suddenly his body and hers were very close together, almost touching, and her lovely face was suddenly very close to his.

Charley fought off a powerful urge to kiss his mother's sweet mouth, and he even managed to convince himself that she would like it if he did that. After all, she didn't pull back from him one bit. Their lips didn't touch, but they were just a fraction of an inch apart.

Paula spoke again, and with each of her words the teasing aspect of their nearly-touching mouths grew stronger. "I think it's time we talked about what happened in this bed last night," she said, her eyes fixed on his. "And about why that same sort of thing isn't going to happen here tonight."

"I'm so ashamed of what hap ..." he began, but she put a finger on his lips to silence him. Her mouth was so close to his that Charley suspected her finger might be touching both of their mouths at the same time. He had seized on that spacial relations problem to distract him from the sexual tension he was feeling. It worked too, but only briefly.

"Did you think I woke up this morning shocked by what I found you'd left behind?" Paula asked him.

"Well ... yeah."

"I wasn't shocked by it at all. Can you guess why?"

"Uh ... no." Charley felt completely disoriented by this line of questioning.

"I wasn't shocked because I was awake the whole time," she said.

Charley just stared at her, trying to grasp the meaning of what she was saying.

"Think about that, dear," she said, and as he thought about it she let her lips lightly brush along his. Charley's eyes went wide.

"You mean you ... you ... let it happen?" Charley was having a tough time making sense of all this.

"Yes. I knew even before last night that I wanted it to happen." Her lips pressed his more firmly. "I love you, you know."

"I know that, but ...". His words were cut off by his mother's mouth covering his, and he found himself being drawn into her embrace. When her lower body contacted his, his still lifeless cock finally got the message and began its rise to greatness.

"Oh, fuck, Mom, does this mean that ..."

"Yes, darling," she whispered. "Fuck is exactly what it means."

She threw a leg over his hips, bringing her pussy into contact with his rapidly stiffening cock. Her mouth opened to his, and their tongues played together with the frantic need of thirsty persons suddenly offered drinks of delicious water.

"But.. but you're ... my mother!" gasped Charley. He was already panting.

She pulled her face back from his. She looked directly into her son's eyes, smiled rather wickedly, and said, "Yes, and that's what will make it especially good for me!"

"Oh ... wow!" said Charley. "And I thought I was the only one who thought that way!"

They kissed more, and their hands moved over one another's body eagerly. There would be time later for oral fun and other foreplay games, but for now their first incestuous fuck was all that mattered to either of them. Once their bodies had been joined, and once their most intimate body fluids had been shared, neither of them would ever question the life-altering contract they had just made with each other.

"I want us to do this ... now ... Charley," Paula said, positioning herself so that her pussy was presented to him and ready to receive his cock. "Come into me, my darling son, and fuck me. Fuck your mother. Now!"

Charles mounted her, found her opening with the tip of his cock, and moved slowly into her until his pubic curls touched hers.

"Fuck that feels good," he said, kissing her wetly. "I can't believe it ... I'm fucking my own mother, dammit. And she wants me to fuck her!"

"Yes, my sweet son, I want you to fuck me."

He drew his hips back and then thrust deep into her again. And again, harder this time. She lifted her ass to meet his thrusts, rotating her hips to add to the thrill both of them felt at this spectacularly exciting moment in their lives. They found a good rhythm for fucking.

They kept their lovemaking up until their need for sleep caught up with their need for more and yet more physical pleasure. That took more than an hour of rather frantic sex, as their need for sexual release and their raw lust for each other was powerful indeed.

Eventually it did end, but only for this night. Charley knew that he'd be sleeping in this bed a lot from now on.

"I love you so very much, Mom," said Charley.

"You're a very good fuck yourself, son," she replied.

Charley was cradling the delicious weight of his mother's warm body in his arms, in the sweet rest which always follows good sex. Suddenly he sat bolt upright and looked down at his mother beside him.

"Hey, wait a minute!" he said. "I thought you said we weren't going to do this tonight."

"No, no, that's not what I said!" she laughed. "I said that tonight we weren't going to do what we did last night. And we didn't, did we.""Fuck no, we sure didn't," he laughed, falling back down onto the bed.

"This time we fucked instead," she giggled, cuddling into her son's embrace and letting her eyes close.

Paula thought about Ralph before she went to sleep, silently asking him for his approval of what she was doing with Charley. She had good reason to know that he would approve of it.

In the final moments of Ralph's life, as he lay in a hospital bed and held his wife's hand, he reminded her of a request he'd made of her years before. Ralph had told her, several times, that if their active and pleasurable sex life ever came to an abrupt end she should find another partner for good sex as soon as that could be done without causing a public scandal.

Paula knew now that she was going to be all right. She was ready now to move ahead in her new life without her beloved Ralph. She blew her husband a thank-you kiss in the dark.

And Charley somehow knew the same thing. He knew that his mother had reached an important place in her grief journey and was now able to move on. And he knew somehow that his father wasn't chuckling at him now. In fact, he was pretty sure that his father was smiling.