Folie a Deux, Episode 05

"Did you come to any conclusions?"

"Fuck no. I was a dumbass high school kid, what did I know? I just...I understood how things had started and how they had gotten so...out of control, I guess. Because by the time that talk was done, I knew it was not in mom's control and not in Mike's control."

We come back to Emily, who says, "At the end of the conversation, Olivia asked me if Mike and I were going to stop. I thought about it for a moment and then told her that we had tried to stop twice before, at the beginning, and it had nearly driven us both mad. Now, after everything, after...after falling in love, Mike and I would not be capable of stopping."

We return to Olivia, who tells us, "And I got where they were coming from...I mean, the part about not being able to just switch it off. Or...no, I didn't get it, but I got it."

"Can you explain that?" the interviewer asks.

"OK, like...if right after the biker gang thing they had come clean about what had happened, things might have been different. I don't mean it would have been easy. They'd have probably had to have years of therapy and it would have been miserable and traumatic, but they could have stopped their sexual relationship. But they didn't go to a therapist, and I completely understand why they didn't, because I doubt I would have either if I had been in their shoes because how the hell do you have that conversation with a stranger? So then they do it again, and then there's two things they haven't dealt with. And then there's three things, and then there's a whole bunch of things. It's like an avalanche, right? Take a snowball and drop it at the top of a hill and it starts rolling, and if you act quick you can stop it. But each thing they did added a layer added to the snowball. You add enough layers to that snowball and it's not even a snowball anymore, it's a force of nature. And it just rolls on until it runs over something...or someone. Listening to mom, the way she spoke about it, the intensity of it, I knew they were at the 'force of nature' stage."

"So what did you say then?"

Olivia sighs. "I just told her to be careful."

"Did you mean she ought to use birth control?"

"Oh no!" Olivia laughs, waving her hands in front of her. "No no no, Christ no. It didn't even occur to me that they would be fucking like rabbits and using nothing. I mean, that's what a mother tells a teenager, not the other way around. I just meant 'Be careful' in the 'Please don't get caught and blow the family up and bring shame and ruination down on us all.' sense."

"I took it in the sense it was intended," Emily says, "and not in the prophylactic sense. If I had, things might perhaps have turned out very differently."

"Ooohhhhhh GOD," Olivia says as we return to her. "God, how I wished I had just left well enough alone and never taken that fucking video! I just...wolf by the fucking ears, dude!"

"You had no plan?"

"Big picture? No. Small picture, I needed to get away from it for a while. Away from the family and the house and everything. I told my mom I was going to stay at my friend Penny's place. She and her family were out of town but I knew where they kept their spare key and I knew where their liquor cabinet was. I was an extreme lightweight then, but fuck it. I didn't get plowed, I got plowed under. I just didn't want to think about anything that night, not after that. I woke up the next day on their kitchen floor in a puddle of my own vomit and with the worst headache I have ever had before or since."

"Did that help you reach any conclusions?"

Olivia smirks. "You go looking for clarity at the bottom of a tequila bottle and all you find is a worm."

The screen switches to a young man in his 20s who appears to have an admixture of Emily and Bob's features, with Emily's general facial structure but Bob's hair and eyes; the effect is quite striking. The name Mike Larsen appears beneath his face.

"I had a landscaping job that summer, and I was working on a terrace in a big yard when mom called," Mike tells us. "I knew right away something had happened just from the tone of her voice. She sounded kind of frantic. She wouldn't tell me anything on the phone, but she said she was going to come pick me up from work and take me to dinner because we needed to talk."

"What did you think then?"

"Nothing good! Mike laughed. "I had all sorts of things running through my head, like people hurt or dead, or like dad demanding a divorce out of the blue, or the house burning down." He laughs. "I had this one really odd, really specific vision in my head of someone coming into my dad's office and shooting him in the leg. The left leg, right below the knee. No idea why I thought that."

"Nothing about her and you?"

"I...um...well,"Mike says, blushing a bit. "I thought she might be pregnant. But then I did the math from her last period and realized that she couldn't be."

"How did that make you feel?"

'Relieved, mostly."

"Mostly?"

"There was a part of me that was disappointed," he admits. "Just a little part. But for the few seconds when I thought she might be, I realized...I realized how much I loved her. She's so beautiful in every way, she's such an amazing mother. I realized we'd make really beautiful babies together. But then the thought disappeared and I didn't think of it again for a while."

"Was that the first time you'd thought about that?"

"Yeah, first time. Not the last, obviously."

"While I felt relief in unburdening myself of the secret during the conversation with Olivia," Emily tells us when we see her again, "shortly thereafter panic set in again. It was, I suppose, a reaction to the threat I was feeling toward the most important relationship in my life. I am normally a very careful driver. That day was so shaken I nearly caused several accidents on the way to pick Mike up."

"When mom pulled up to the curb and I opened the door," Mike says, "I took one look at her and said I was driving. Because she looked insane. That was the first time I ever told her anything like that."

"That she looked insane?"

Mike laughs sharply. "No, that I was driving! You know, she raised me from the time she gave birth to me. There were some things she had always done, or, you know, taken the lead on, because she's my mom. We could never afford a car for me because they didn't have money for that and every penny I made was put aside for college expenses. And most of that time she'd driven Lou, and nobody drove Lou but her. So I had never demanded to drive when it was her and me in the car. But I did that day."

"And?"

"And she slid over without a second thought and gave me the wheel," he says. It is obviously a fond memory for him. "For some reason that sticks out in my memory as being really sexy."

"I do not recall that," Emily tells us with a shrug. "Mike is a very commanding presence, very strong and assertive. I think by that point, that fact was already having its effect upon me. I was beginning to defer to him in small ways and letting him take command in a manner I never permitted his father to do. Not that Bob ever tried."

"So it wasn't something you noticed?" the interviewer asks.

"Not until later, when it had gone farther," Emily says. "The process was very natural, and one I think I must have enjoyed very much on a subconscious level."

"And when he had gotten behind the wheel?"

"I gave him exactly enough time to buckle his seat belt before telling him that we had been discovered."

"So I just get the door closed and mom's like, 'OLIVIAKNOWSABOUTUSSHESAWUSSHEHASAVIDEO!!'" Mike says. "She was talking so fast -- and what she was saying was so shocking -- that I had to make her take some deep breaths and tell me again slower. And then I was like, 'Well, fuck.'"

"It must have come as a shock."

"Well yeah, sure, but...like after a few seconds of sitting there, I was like, of course someone found out. Of course someone would. It wasn't like we'd been, what's the word, circumspect? We'd been fucking several times a day in a house where two other people lived, and more and more with those people in the house at the time. The thought I remember having was, well, at least it wasn't dad."

"Mike took it better than I did," Emily admits.

"When I could get mom calm enough to tell me the details, she explained the conversation with Olivia, the video on her phone, all that," Mike says. "And I was like, well? Well? What's she gonna do? Is she telling dad? Is she telling her blabbermouth friends? Is this the end of everything? And mom was like, oh, she told us to be cautious and not get found out by anyone else. And I was like...yeah, that ain't the end of this from Olivia."

"You expected more?" the interviewer asks.

"Olivia and I hadn't exactly gotten along since we hit our teens. I wasn't surprised that she didn't want to destroy me and mom -- it's not like we were blood enemies or anything. It's just I expected her to use this information to get stuff out of mom and to make me miserable as hell. And I was not disappointed."

"What then?"

"I drove ten minutes to a park. We got out, walked to a bench where nobody else was around, put my arm around her to pull her close, and started to talk. I made her tell me everything again from the beginning, slower this time, and I asked a lot of questions. I got a better sense of what was going on. And I decided things weren't that bad. Before we'd had to hide what we were doing from two people in the house, but now we only had to hide it from one. Just from a practical standpoint it made things a lot easier."

"That was a view of things I had not taken before Mike pointed it out to me," Emily tells us. "But of course he was right, insofar as his thinking went. It wasn't as though we could flaunt it in Olivia's face, of course, but not having to conceal things from her made it simpler logistically and emotionally. The emotional piece was especially important. I never intended to have another conversation about it with her, but knowing that someone I love dearly knew about Mike and I being in love and being lovers became a precious gift."

"Even though she didn't approve?" the interviewer asks.

"She didn't condemn," Emily explains. "And she had listened to how the love Mike and I shared had begun and become what it was, and she was making an effort to understand how we felt and why. That was the most we could ever have asked of her. The price she extracted as time went on was reasonable for that."

We return to Mike, and we hear the interviewer ask, "Did you really think Olivia knowing was a good thing?"

"I did then," Mike shrugs. "Chalk it up to being young and inexperienced. And love not being great for clear thought. When you're head-over-heels in love, you engage in a lot of wishful thinking."

Emily again, as the interviewer asks, "After you talked to Mike for a while, how were you feeling?"

"I had been frantic during the drive over, but Mike was so calm and rational that it made me feel better just being next to him. Alone, I felt overwhelmed, but by his side I felt as though we could manage whatever came our way. That fact alone, simply being with a man who made me feel as though we never had anything to fear, was thrilling and exciting."

"Your husband never gave you that sense?" the interviewer asks.

Emily considers for a moment, then says, "It's more complicated than that. Bob is a wonderful man and he is very strong in his own way. He always wanted the very best for me, and he always wanted me to become the very best I could in whatever I chose to do. He pushed me to excel as a dancer, not in the hectoring manner of a teacher or mentor but in the loving and supportive manner of a partner; being the best dancer I could be was important to me, and he was always there to remind me never to let myself down. Whenever I had a hobby, such as cooking or painting, Bob always made sure I had the room and support to explore it fully and reach my potential. The value of that should never be underestimated."

"...but?"

"But Bob simply could never be the unshakable center for a woman in the way Mike is by nature. When there were crises, Bob and I had always met them together, but it had always been me in the lead. This was the first crisis Mike and I had faced since becoming a couple, and he took charge because it's the kind of man he is. Until that moment, I had never known how much I longed for that in a partner. I had spent my adult life caring for others, and now I had someone who would care for me, someone whom I could rely upon to be strong enough that I could be a little weak from time to time." Her eyes twinkle and her cheeks get a shade pinker. "It's rather arousing. It certainly was that afternoon."

Back to Mike, who sports a faint grin. "We talked for a while and I got mom calmed down. She was snuggled up to me in a way that dad wouldn't have liked, but we were on the other side of town from our neighborhood. Nobody knew us here. Anybody seeing us would just see boyfriend and girlfriend, which I loved the thought of. But what kind of surprised me was how she kept...smelling me."

"Smelling you?" the interviewer asks.

"Yeah. I'd been working my ass off all day long on a warm summer day. I had sweated through all my clothes."

"Honest sweat is one of the most erotic smells in the world," Emily says with mischievous grin as we see her again. "Perhaps it comes from being a dancer, but I love the smell of a man's sweat. Not body odor, but a good day's sweat from a good day's work. It makes the man's own scent come forward, free of soaps and body washes and colognes and anything else, and I have always found that a wonderful thing." She pauses, her grin getting a little naughtier, and adds, "Especially Mike's scent."

"By the time we'd talked things through and we were both calmed down, I could tell mom was getting frisky as hell," Mike grins. "She was wrapping herself around me on the bench, like real PDA stuff, and her nipples were getting hard. If I'd have known being sweaty could get that kind of reaction..."

"It wasn't only his scent, of course," Emily says. "It was mostly a reaction to being discovered. That was a stressful event, and for a while I had thought Olivia would expose us. Even after I learned that she wouldn't, I had another panic attack about how close we had come to being ended. It reminded me that I might lose my man, the only lover who has ever completed me. I believe it was a natural biological impulse to...re-stake my claim."

"It was when she dropped her hand into my lap and started rubbing me in front of God and everybody I realized mom wasn't just snuggling to be snuggly," Mike tells us. "She was horny and getting hornier fast. We hadn't had a chance to be together yet that day and so we were both hot for each other, but the way she was going at me was surprising even for her. I started to say something, but I ended up kissing her instead."

Emily is beginning to flush in that familiar way that indicates she is discussing a particularly exciting memory. "Mike started to tell me something, I think to calm me down, but I did not want to be calm. I wanted him, and I wanted him very, very badly. I grabbed his face and kissed him hard. For the first time I kissed him that way in public."

"And then we were making out on the park bench," Mike says. "And yeah it wasn't our neighborhood and yeah there was nobody right close by, but there were plenty of people around to see, and I know some of them watched. Mom climbed onto my lap and straddled me and we started kissing hard, tongues wrapping around each other, spit making a mess of our faces. She was holding my ears to keep my face where she wanted it and I was holding her ass to keep her on my lap. All of a sudden I was at full mast and she was grinding against me in those flimsy little shorts she was wearing. It was broad daylight and she was dry humping me in public and she did not seem inclined to stop."

"Are you an exhibitionist?" the interviewer asks as we see Emily again.

Emily's salacious grin is answer enough, but she says, "I have that side to me. When I was in high school and college, before Bob, I enjoyed doing things where and when I might get caught. I hadn't had a chance to let that side of me show in nearly 19 years. I had almost forgotten it existed at all. But that day, it came roaring back."

"It didn't take long for me to realize that Mom was building up a real head of steam," Mike chuckles. "If we didn't get out of there fast, the cops were gonna show. So I grabbed her and we ran off to the car, me driving."

"Of course," Emily grins wickedly, "that gave me a chance to do something else I loved but hadn't done since before Bob."

"It never even occurred to me that mom would do that," Mike says happily, "but we weren't a block away from the park before she said, 'Keep your eyes on the road, lover," and leaned over with her head in my lap. It was such a wild idea coming from her that I didn't even realize what she was doing until she started hauling my cock out."

"What did you do?" the interviewer asks.

"I was about to get road noggin from my gorgeous mother who I was absolutely head over heels in love with," he laughs. "I shut up and let her suck my cock like a good girl."

Emily's face is crimsoning. "Allll the way down and allll the way back up," she purrs. "I adore feeling Mike's cock in my throat at any time, but this was particularly special. I know this was something men fantasize about, and I was able to give it to my perfect lover. I was going to take his cum in public. I couldn't have been prouder."

"Mom always sucks my cock like she's starving," Mike tells us, "but she was going after it. It was like a vacuum cleaner, and her tongue was doing a fucking tango on my shaft. Treatment like that, in this situation, no way I was going to last long."

"I didn't want him to last long," Emily says with a predatory smile that makes her look alarmingly feral and which makes her sudden lapse into graphic obscenity seem natural and inevitable. "I wanted to suck his balls through the end of his dick. I wanted him to lose his mind. I wanted him to come harder for me than he had ever come for anyone, for any of his silly girlfriends. I wanted to remind him who his cock belonged to."

"I didn't even know where I was driving," Mike laughs. "I was in another world. I didn't realize we had an audience until we were sitting at a light and the guys in the SUV next to us started hooting and honking the horn. I'm sure all they could see was mom's head bobbing up and down and me with an idiot grin. Mom didn't even break pace -- it was that that made me shoot off in her mouth."

"I make it a point of pride to swallow every drop of cum Mike places in my mouth," Emily smiles, "but my road head technique was rusty so some ran onto my hand. I sat up and Mike looked at me as I licked my hand clean."

"Fuuuuuck," Mike sighs. "It was like she was a big, sexy cat licking her paws and giving me the hottest look I have ever seen. After a second she was like, 'Did someone see?' and I said yeah, and her smile got even sexier and she said, 'Good.'"

"A woman is made to please her man," Emily coos, "just as a man is made to please his woman. Being seen just meant someone knew I was doing my duty to my lover."

"And that's why you're an exhibitionist," the interviewer says.

Emily nods happily. "And that's why I'm an exhibitionist."

Back to Mike. "That was Round One, but the way mom was acting, I didn't even get soft. At that time of day, rush hour, it would have been an hour at least to get home, but neither of us was going to wait that long -- and besides, Dad would be home before we got there. I remembered seeing a crappy little motel a few blocks away along the highway. That was where we went."