A Mother's Nurture

Thanks again to SaraLynn for rubbing your imagination suggestively up against mine. The result; hotter, kinkier, longer, harder and bloody shattering...

*****

1

It wasn't just Jason who needed weaning from his mother's breast milk, according to his increasingly ill-tempered father. The literal accusation was that Sara needed to stop using Jason as an excuse, to stop nursing and coddling the little mommy's boy. He wasn't a baby anymore!

She had nursed him from infancy all the way to the age of six. It wasn't simply that she couldn't or wasn't willing to stop. Jason was such a calm and affectionate little sweetheart. Whereas most other families' kids ran riot tanked up on sugar, beating on each other and growing ever rebellious against their parents, Jason was an angel.

Sara didn't want that to change and she didn't want to stop breastfeeding, for the warmth, the bonding and the happiness that it brought. God knew that happiness wasn't in surplus elsewhere in the household.

Tim, Sara's husband, hadn't been the same since Jason was born. He hadn't been the same since they got married. She didn't know about the affair with the secretary from work, or how badly it had ended, but she knew he had lost interest pretty early on.

Tim had gone so far as to threaten Kimberly to keep her mouth shut, only AFTER he fired her. He would have destroyed her life had she come clean about their office adventures after hours, purely in spite of her ruining what he had. But his conviction was fuelled only by the fear and anxiety.

After that he never dared to play around again, but his marriage soured ever after, at least his half of it!

Tim paid little to no attention as to what happened under his own roof, being that he spent nearly two thirds of his life in a business suit. He first discovered that Sara was still nursing Jason beyond the recommended age on the off-chance that he decided to spend one sick day in his own bed.

That was it! He put his foot down out of sheer disgust! What an utter disgrace! What the hell was wrong with that woman? Was she thick in the head?

He rode her back from then on, making her stop what she should have stopped over four years ago; attacking her with his subtle but vicious accusations, claiming that she had a problem and that she was going to leave the boy queer or psychotic later in life.

And so Sara lived for years with the burden on her shoulder that she was like a sex abuser with an addiction, like an alcoholic. The fact that she suffered cold turkey day and night in no longer taking Jason to her breasts left her empty and sleepless for a long time.

And for what? What was the big pay-off to her years' long compromise? Jason was clearly hurt by being forced away from me in that respect. And the distance was tangible. And then Tim wouldn't touch her at all. It was like their marriage had become a full-time job in itself.

2

Thirteen long years passed and Jason was now a strong young man. Life had defined him, with a little help from his mother. He had defied the bullies, those of the school yard and those of authority both, and in the end they were nothing but loudmouths who couldn't put their money where their mouths were.

The bullies in school who, just like his dad, called him a mommy's boy and a queer (but never a dumb ass, they could never seriously make that claim), weren't all dumb as shit. Many of them were daddy's little princesses and egotistical jerks who only ever picked on those who didn't fight back.

After school most of them failed to show anything for their grades. Most of the princesses were pregnant by the age of eighteen. Some got into drugs and others got into worse crime. Jason got into the right circles and landed himself some on the job training.

Dad - the other authoritarian bully - didn't want him to become no stinking grease monkey mechanic despite the money to be made and the assurance of steady work. There was no way he was putting the kid through college if he didn't want to follow him into the corporation, so he was instantly muted the day Jason came home with the news that he'd scored an apprenticeship with the well-known J.T. Walker garage.

Dad, who hadn't aged so well, was probably as bitter about that as he was about his marriage, spending most of his time at home in a drunk blackout, made a point of forgetting his son in a hurry after that.

Sara, however, couldn't have been any more proud, especially how he defied Tim even further by parking his car out on the driveway to accommodate his first "foreigner" job for some much needed cash.

3

Jason was working on a neighbour's car in the privacy of their own garage on a Saturday night. Dad had drunk half a bottle of whiskey in front of the game shows, then complained of a headache before going to bed for a lie down. With the television then switched off, the house was filled with nothing but the heavy grunting snores of the pig-headed old man, which caused the walls to vibrate. It wasn't even ten o'clock by then!

Fresh from her shower, now that she could do as she pleased without treading on eggshells, Sara - now wrapped up somewhat conservatively in her favourite plush white cotton housecoat - dried her hair in the bathroom mirror, brushing the knots out of her long feather-light brunette curls.

Time had been much more kind to her. In the stealthiest fashion, being a housewife and doing more to keep her home and family happy than Tim ever did at work, that had kept her trim and her son had kept her sweet, being that he was where she got her affection and love from.

Oh of course at the age of forty-four she was showing a few more greys and the fullness of youth was gone. Her face was mapped out with hidden lines and there was a well-lived in tiredness to her as a result of having settled for Tim's ways over what could have been. But if you could know what Jason saw in Sara, there was a beauty beyond typical that only a real man deserved. His father was not that man.

Sara finished in the bathroom, cleaning up after herself before heading to the kitchen to make a cup of tea for Jason. He would be parched, she worried. Ever since he started working at the garage and practicing on small jobs in the garage at home, he would lose himself in there all night long.

Shuffling into the garage in her slipper-clad feet, Sara settled their cups on the work top near Jason's tool sets and stood watching as her fine young man bent over with his head under the bonnet, whirring away with his socket wrenches.

The garage hadn't seen so much life in all their years here. With the lights on, the radio playing and the smell of grease and metal, it was as it should always have been. Jason was breathing new life into it now.

'Can that wait until tomorrow, now?' she asked, causing him to jump out of his skin so comically and scold her for sneaking up on him. She apologised and laughed. 'You should rest now, honey,' she insisted. 'I brought you some tea, but all I really wanted was a kiss and a cuddle!'

Jason, with his unabashed pearly white smile and kind brown eyes raised up his oily black hands like some clawed swamp thing out of an old B-movie horror. Sara squealed and ran, yelling, 'don't you dare, Jason, not on these clothes,' as Jason gave chase around the car.

Soon she had nowhere to go in the garage's restrictive space, but after he cornered her and made her beg, he relented and surrendered his dirty hands to the air and let Sara have what she wanted.

Putting her hands on his chest so to keep a distance between her fresh cleanliness and his manly, sweaty grime, she pecked him on the lips once, then twice, and then a third time, which stuck between them for a moment.

'The old crank must be asleep again,' Jason guessed.

'Of course,' she nodded, 'would you have it any other way?'

'I wish you'd told me sooner so I could have showered. Then you wouldn't have to worry about getting dirty with me,' Jason said with a mischievous wink.

'I only wanted to tell you how proud I am of you, making something for yourself like this. He thinks it's just some fruitless phase.' She brushed his dap fringe from his forehead and reflected on all his years, marvelling at the fine specimen Jason had grown into over the years, despite his father denying him so much - not to forget the nurture of Sara's which otherwise might have known no limits. She still thought of that.

'I don't even care what he thinks anymore,' Jason said. 'It's not about him. He should just be jealous that I get more kisses and cuddles than he does.'

Sara smiled at that with an otherwise forbidden expression, slapping Jason lightly on one of his solid chest muscles. 'You used to get a lot more than that when he wasn't at home' she recalled before returning to the worktop to sip her tea.

'What?' Jason didn't seem as mindful as she. His eyes narrowed, ticking over. His memory came up blank.

'You don't remember?' she asked. 'I breastfed you for such a long time, Jason. Oh I wished sometimes that I never had to stop. But that probably sounds weird.'

He laughed, blushed then too, and raised one hand to his eyes to hide his embarrassment. 'Mom, as much as I love a hot pair of boobs in my face-

'You think my boobs are hot, huh?' she broke in shamelessly, crossing one bare leg over the other and looking down on herself.

'Did you really nurse me for so long? I don't remember. Oh my god, actually I do,' he said. 'Oh my god,' struck by such a profound and strange thing, 'I do remember. But why?'

Sara shrugged. It was no big deal to her. Not like it was to Tim. 'I liked it. It made me feel closer to you and you were such a little sweetheart when you were in my arms...'

'Aw!'

'Looking up at me with your sleepy eyes...'

'Aw...'

'Sucking gently on my nipples...'

'Jesus, mom...'

'We started again later too, if you remember.' But Jason, whether he remembered or not, was at a total loss of words by that point. 'I don't think there was any milk drank by that point but, well... we both needed the closeness. It was a shitty time for all. Leave it at that!'

So they did, just as she suggested. But there was no denying, to Sara, that her confession had left her buzzing deep inside with an undiscovered excitement. She felt naughty, almost sinful, telling him this; even though it had been meant in all good humour. Hadn't it?

'Kisses and cuddles are just as good, mom,' Jason assured with a courtesy wink and excused himself to the shower.

4

On the Sunday afternoon, Tim was lounging in front of the television again and Jason was back in the garage, cleaning up the place. Bill from five doors down had returned for his pride and joy, more than happy with Jason's work. He showed his gratitude with the hundred in cash plus an extra fifty, which went straight into Jason's pocket.

Now that the garage was empty again he didn't know what to do with himself. He didn't want to go back into the house, not with the old fart casting his judgement on the soaps. It wouldn't be long before he was polishing off the whiskey and turning to smite someone non-fictional instead.

He was lowering the garage door, casting the empty concrete space into darkness when suddenly the light came on. Sara stood smiling at him proudly once more, dressed practically in a flowing peach-coloured summer dress and snug grey leggings. Instantly he went to her and dug his hand into his pocket where he took out his earnings and offered her two thirds.

'No, you put that away. You deserve it,' she assured. 'Just give your mother a kiss and a cuddle or I won't make it through the day without breaking all the plates over his head.'

She didn't have to ask twice. Jason leaned in and took his mother into his strong arms by the waist, propping her on the edge of the worktop so that despite her small stature they could meet face to face. She wrapped her arms around his neck and him into her where they breathed each other in closely and became lost in their embrace.

And then when he pulled back to meet her eye to eye, her lips planted firmly against his before she pulled away too and beckoned him to plant a kiss on her lips next. Back and forth they were behaving like a pair of chimpanzees, laughing at each other.

'You love your mom, don't you,' she sighed with contentment.

'Yes I do,' he said.

They barely heard the footsteps coming before the house door to the garage flipped wide open and his dad flipped out like a Jack-in the-Box!

The manner in which the balding old head-case appeared suggested that he suspected something, like he was trying to catch either of them in the act of hiding something from him. And the glassy stare in his cold grey eyes, set deep in his hawkish, deep-lined and soured face, as he stood there dead still with his eyes trained on Jason.

Jason felt his heart speed up only in that moment, because he knew by Tim's look that the old man was either going to challenge him or insult him somehow.

'Tim, what?' Sara asked, exasperated by his standoffish appearance.

Never mind that the garage was now empty, clean and spotless. 'Oh is the neighbour's car gone? Do I finally have my own property back now?'

'Yes,' Jason said slowly and without blinking. He was a picture of calm but inside he was brimming and his mother could feel it.

'Then you can clean up after yourself and get that piece of junk car of yours off my driveway,' Tim demanded...

'Can't you?!!'

Then finally, Jason blinked. With that, Tim turned around and walked away with his shoulders hunched, leaving the door wide open behind him.

5

It was past midnight. Sara was lying at the edge of the bed and staring up at the ceiling where the streetlights streaked across the room like spectral sunburst. The snoring beside her was deafening. Nobody could be this tired, to make such noise that could keep a whole street awake and yet never to be woken by it themselves.

In all their twenty years of marriage Tim had been stubborn to some degree. Once Jason was born, he upped the ante. She didn't know of his past affair but she wouldn't have been surprised had she found out, but now she worried that she was married to a Neanderthal in a necktie.

If he weren't so stubborn, or standoffish, or ignorant of her existence, maybe - she pained - there could have been a way back from the lives they lived now. If it wasn't for Jason, she'd have been so utterly miserable. But then maybe she'd be elsewhere instead.

His heavy lump of a useless body took up most of the bed, one knee pressing her further and further over the edge. In his sleep he mumbled, 'we're gonna drown unless you go, you fat bitch...'

That was all she could stand there and then. Easing herself off the edge of the mattress and into her slippers, Sara didn't even bother to look for her housecoat in the dark. She was wearing a blue satin nightgown, which was good enough for her to go wandering in. Jason hadn't come out of that garage all evening.

He was still there, and she didn't blame him, because he was so tense at one point that he could have taken his dad's head off with one punch, and she might not have stopped him.

She found him sat behind the wheel of his grey Oldsmobile Cutlass, which J.T. was generous enough to let him have if he could get her working in his own time. Of course, the parts weren't free. That was part of the challenge, which he aced.

'Can I come in?' she asked through the window. He nodded and she got in the passenger seat beside him, resting her head with a weary, frustrated groan. 'I'm sleeping on the couch. I'm done.'

'Why don't you use my bed,' Jason suggested, paying little attention. 'I don't think I'll be sleeping tonight.'

'Because of the way he was this afternoon?'

'Because of the way he's always been. And not just to me. I'm going to end up killing him if he gets any worse. Unless I leave, which is what he wants, isn't it?'

Sara couldn't deny that dreadful little truth. She never wanted Jason to leave, ever, but she knew that he would one day. That was just a fact of life. Everybody flew the nest sooner or later. Otherwise they were spoilt and might never be truly happy.

'I remember when I left home,' she recalled dreamily in her fatigued state. Jason turned to watch intently as he listened to her soothing tone. When he did, unable to look her in the eyes just yet, he found his attention centred on his mother's barely restrained bust; her nipples poking through the blue satin in the chill of the night.

'Thinking about it, my father was a lot like Tim is now. And I flew the nest pretty early to be with him because I thought that it was the best for everyone. He was there at just the right time. Things at home were unbearable. And now it's like I ran away from him only to end up running straight into his crosshairs.'

'What are you saying?' Jason asked.

'Well... I guess I'm saying not to run off too soon and end up suffering all the same. But if I can be honest, I just don't want you to leave me with that...'

'Troll!' Jason finished.

'Ogre,' Sara countered and offered a dry chuckle, then, 'why can't things just be like they used to be?'

'I don't get what you mean,' Jason stressed, his knuckles tightening around the steering wheel.

'When it used to feel like it was just you and me,' she explained with such longing. 'When I could hold you and help you forget the world around you and just feel good on a sort of intuitive, or instinctual way?!'

'I wish it was just you and me,' Jason admitted. Then he finally looked at her, so dark and intense in his jittery burnt out state and concluded, 'always!'

Their mutual longing was so strong. When Sara met his gaze and realised that he understood her, it was like a live connection now crackled and buzzed between them with electrical impulse. He looked away, pondering further what would come tomorrow and the next day after that.

Sara thought long and hard herself then, but not of the same things as he. The garage doors were shut tight, the night was so silent far away from that troll cave where her husband slept, and next to her was the one man in the world she loved more than anything.

When she hooked her thumbs beneath the shoulder straps of her nightie and let them fall loose, it wasn't a declaration of self-destruction or of wanting to be unfaithful. Tim had spent the past nineteen years destroying her faith in that respect.

And when she stealthily shimmied the smooth satin down over her still generous breasts, with their darkened nipples and aerola, letting it fall down to her waist and feeling the liberating chill of abandon, it was with a mother's instinct that she reclined her seat, leant back and said his name.

6

He was greeted with a kind smile and a reaching hand when he turned to see his mother lying in waiting, having bared the breasts that nursed him as a child. His heart stammered and then leapt into action. The rest of him was slow to catch up. Time, it seemed, had slowed to a grind.

'It's okay, Jason,' she assured, 'come to mom and forget everything. Nothing else matters!'

'Mom, I'm not the same anymore,' Jason said. It was only the slightest hint of a warning, without a hint of rejection. 'Where does this go?'

'Nowhere,' she assured. 'It stays between you and me.'

He moved to her, accepting her offering of nurture. Jason climbed over, uncertainly at first, so that he was kneeling between her feet. As if it wasn't cramped enough in there. He had to be careful not to crush her or to find himself in a position so not to strain himself with nowhere to rest. Nothing worked for them.

Eventually, Sara suggested that Jason recline his own seat, so returning to it with some clumsiness, he did and laid back, whereupon she climbed over into his lap. Immediately she noticed the solid bulge growing in the crotch of his jeans. She neither flinched nor said a word.