In Love with Lori Ch. 06

And yet a piece of me knew she was right, I could deny it with all my might, but that wouldn't stop it being true, and I didn't know what to do; everything I was feeling was wrong, it had to be wrong, it could never happen, because it was so wrong, but deep down I didn't believe my denials anymore. Deep down, I'd accepted I was in love with him, not just crushing on him, and I was screwed, because what I was feeling could never be allowed out into the open; no-one was ready to deal with stuff like that, especially not me.

One thing I knew for certain; Mom could never find out about this, she'd have me committed on the spot, loving parent or not; this wasn't the kind of mother-daughter dialog anyone would relish having.

So I did what I always did; I battened it down, bottled it up, and tried to act normally around Mom; Mom was a lot like Davey; if she thought there was something she should know, she'd doggedly go after it, and I really didn't want to be interrogated until I cracked and blurted all this stuff out.

Luckily, or perhaps not, my body was changing more and more with each passing day, my moods and emotions were all over the place, and while Mom tried to be the understanding mother of a post-pubescent teenage girl, there were times when she'd just leave me to my own devices because my smart mouth and see-sawing emotional state must have made me pretty much impossible to live with, tolerate, or be understanding about; I was the archetypal teenage nightmare, and Mom treated me as such, so I have all that to be grateful for in helping to mask what was really going on inside me.

Just as all this turmoil was going on inside me, we got the worst possible news: during a routine medical, they'd discovered several tumors on Mom's liver, and a biopsy confirmed one was malign. That was the most frightening thing I'd ever heard; to me, 'cancer' meant 'death-sentence', and all I could focus on was that Mom had cancer, and she was going to die. Of course, she began a mixed course of chemo and radiotherapy almost immediately. It seemed to go on forever, and poor Mom got weaker and weaker; her beautiful, jet-black hair fell out in big clumps and handfuls, which distressed her most of all; she aged right in front of us until her skin looked like dry, grainy old leather, and she was so tired and sick all the time from the chemo.

I was all for calling Davey and yanking him home immediately. He should be here now, Mom needed him here, but Mom wouldn't hear of it; he was at a critical juncture in his medical studies; if he gave it up now, he'd lose everything. She wouldn't risk making him give it all up after he'd worked so long and hard to catch-up with his peers and get where he was now. Right now, he couldn't afford to be distracted with worrying about her; of course she knew he'd come haring home if he knew what was happening, and that was precisely why I wasn't to tell him; he needed a clear head and a sharp focus, and she'd never forgive herself if he gave it all up for her.

So I backed down, and did as she asked; I kept the truth from him...

I know, I blamed Davey for the longest time for not coming home sooner, but I have to be honest with myself too; we didn't tell him Mom was sick, we let him believe everything was fine at home, so yes, I helped lie to him too, because Mom and Daddy knew he was so like his Daddy; he had to be who he was supposed to be, I see that now; hindsight has 20-20 vision, but right then I despised him for leaving us to suffer while he followed his dreams at the other end of the Earth.

The treatment worked, and the surgery to remove the growths was also successful; eight months after beginning chemo, Mom was pronounced free of the cancer; she was in remission, but the hospital wouldn't commit themselves when we asked if she was fully cured, only that survival rates for Stage One cancer survivors were hopeful, and that they were cautiously optimistic.

So we crossed our fingers and tried to get as much of our life back as we could. Apart from the weakness and weight-loss, Mom was still Mom, still amused by Daddy's silly jokes and God-awful puns, and still a better cook than Daddy, only now she seemed to be a lot more concerned about me than I felt comfortable with. All that stuff about Davey was still stirring around inside me, ambushing me at odd moments and refusing to be quiet or go away, and I think Mom had a pretty good idea what was up.

I tried dodging and sidestepping the issue whenever I felt it looming on the horizon, but now Mom was determined to dig-out just what it was that she could somehow sense.

One afternoon, I was alone at home with her. Daddy was flying a dogleg series of routes zig-zagging across the country, and would be gone for a couple days, so Mom obviously decided it was time for a heart-to-heart with me. I was moping in my room, obsessing about guess-who, when Mom knocked on my door, then came in without waiting for my answer, something she never did. She smoothed down my quilt and sat on the end of the bed, her hand on my ankle, looking closely at me. When she started to speak, there was no preamble; she'd obviously sussed there was something I was hiding, and she was ready to have it out with me.

"Lori, what's going on with you? Tell me, baby; you sit in here muttering to yourself, you don't go out with anyone anymore, you drift around with that worried, preoccupied face all day long... is it a boy? You can tell me, baby, I'm supposed to help you sort these things out, let me help you, please, sweetheart."

Much as I loved my Mom, there was no way on God's Earth I was going to share what was happening to me with anyone, least of all her; I could still barely believe it myself; even thinking about it still made me feel weird and strange inside. But she was waiting for an answer.

"Mom, look, it's something I have to try and work out, I can't share this with anyone, it's...it's just not something I want to talk about, please..."

Mom didn't look any too pleased at that; I could see that line between her eyebrows she got when she was worried, and as she looked away, scanning my room, I saw the photo of Davey on my dresser; I'd forgotten to put it back in its hiding place, between the pages of 'Little Women', and she couldn't have failed to see it.

When she looked back at me, I could see the question in her eyes, but she didn't ask it; instead, she just nodded slightly, like she'd just made a connection.

"So, tell me, baby; it's about a boy, isn't it?"

The way she said it left me no doubt as to exactly which 'boy' she was talking about; I nodded miserably, so she carried on.

"I take it this boy doesn't know what he's doing to you?"

My senses stood up and trembled at that question; did she know, or did she suspect? And if she did, was she getting ready to go postal on me? Answer her, answer her...

"He's, um, not here, no, and no, he doesn't know about me..."

Mom slid up the bed to lie next to me, and wrapped her arm, still painfully, shockingly thin from the after-effects of the chemo, but warm and gentle for all that, around me, drawing me into her.

"Baby, all I want is for you to be happy; whatever's going on here, I can see it's making you desperately unhappy. Please, let me in, let me help you; maybe we can sort this out together...?"

But I couldn't let her in; not then, not ever, and it will always weigh on my heart that I never gave her that; she knew I was unhappy, she knew how much I needed to get this thing inside me out and gone, and still I wouldn't let her help me, because I was so ashamed of what I was feeling inside...

*

My eighteenth birthday came and went with no real drama; I wasn't the kind of girl to go and party and throw being an adult around, so apart from a pizza with Josie, Sara, and a few of our classmates, I did nothing special on what was supposed to be my special day. Mom wanted a big party, but Daddy knew me well enough to know that wasn't what I wanted at all; they were both kind of disappointed, but I think probably relieved as well; once I hit fifteen, I began to look less and less like a scrawny ragamuffin, and more and more 'adult'; boys were starting to notice the changes in me, especially 'the girls', those two things up front and all the way out there, and Daddy was getting jumpy about where I was going, who I was with, were there going to be boys there, how well did I know them, did he know their parents, yada-yada-yada.

I will admit to a certain amount of enjoyment in the looks I was starting to get around town; I have very pale skin, blue-violet eyes, and lustrous black hair, just like Mom, and with the 'girls', my naturally slim but curvy shape, and my height, just enough to make me stand out, without seeming freakishly tall, I was getting to be quite the package, as Sara and Josie were quick to point out, and it did a lot to make me feel secure in my own skin.

Josie, Sara and I had also discovered that the internet was a lot more interesting than the locked-down version we had at school had led us to believe; one fateful night, while her parents were out on their weekly date, Josie and I decided to do a little exploring on her dad's computer, and it was a mind-boggling experience...

I was never prudish about sex; I just didn't know anyone I was interested in experimenting with (no, strike that; there was one, and the idea was both arousing and deeply repellent...), but to see the kind of things people were capable of dreaming-up in the name of arousal was a truly next-level revelation.

I don't know how long we sat there, eyes glued to the screen, barely breathing, as a barrage of erotic, pornographic imagery battered our senses and jump-started our curiosity, until Josie's father calling out to her shocked us back to awareness of what we were doing, and how bad it would be if we were caught like that.

That night, back home in my own bed, in the gutter of the night, the scenes and situations I'd watched played endlessly in my head; I'd masturbated before, of course I had, I was a teenage girl, not a novice nun, but what I'd done before was nothing compared to what happened that night; I lay in a fever of arousal as image after image battered my senses and took over my imagination, and now it wasn't anonymous, spray-tanned, gym-bunny actors in California, now it was David and me.

Now I knew what was possible, my imagination conjured up and re-wrote those scenes endlessly, with Davey and me in the lead-roles, while I sweated in my bed, over-stimulated beyond belief, masturbating furiously as scenario after scenario presented itself. When I finally fell asleep, it was the sleep of the truly exhausted, with one thought uppermost in my mind; I was going to do all those things one day, and it was Davey I was doing them with, no-one else, ever; at last I knew, with rock-solid certainty, who and what I wanted.

I did get a lot of interest from the boys around town, but none of them piqued my interest at all; for starters, none of them were blond enough, had eyes green enough, or smiled in just the right way; also, in some strange way, I felt that dating any of them would be betraying Davey; he was the one, none of them were him, ergo I wasn't interested, period...

Mom was worried that I wasn't dating anyone; I think she was more concerned that I wasn't all girly-girly than anything else, and my disinterest in the local boys worried her; maybe she thought I was limbering-up to bat for the other team; anyway, my Senior Prom showed me why I was right to avoid the local boys...

One of the brainless jocks who played football in some capacity or other seemed to have a thing about me; as I wasn't interested in low-brow, neckless, shambling idiots, I brushed him off every time he tried to use his 'wit' and 'charm' on me (and when I say wit, I was only half right, coupled with the fact he had all the charm of a turd sandwich) I either looked him up and down, giggled, and walked away, or gave him the patented Lori Keene 'Ice-Pick In The Brain' Stare of Painful Death.

Chummy, however, was too boneheaded to get it; in common with the rest of the ham-headed yacks who made up the team, he believed he was irresistible, possibly because the school looked the other way when he and his buddies regularly beat kids up, committed what would be considered serious sexual harassment (and the rumoured occasional assault) if it happened anyplace outside the school gates, and generally behaved like a herd of entitled trolls because they won games regularly. Rah-Rah-Rah...

So, come the Senior Prom, I was flying solo because I'd turned down everyone who'd asked me, for the reasons given above, but Mom made me go, because 'a girl's not supposed to miss her Senior Prom'. Whatever. This idiot was there with some girl who looked terrified, probably because she knew what 'Prom-Night Magic' was in store for her later. I noticed him giving me the up and down, ignored him, as I usually did, and went to get a drink from the drinking fountain, because the punch was probably spiked by one of those imbeciles; it was the kind of thing they'd do, because they were imbeciles.

Once I had my drink, I began the countdown to when I could leave; I didn't want to be there, but Josie and Sara had dates, so I felt obliged to hang around and keep an eye on them, just in case their dates decided they were due a little 'Prom-Night Magic' all of their own, regardless of Josie and Sara's opinions on the matter.

While I was hanging back, basically keeping out of sight, I overheard the moron who'd been eyeing me tell his equally moronic buddies he had plans for me; he had a little something he was going to slip in my drink so I'd be easy to get to one of the hourly-rate motels up on the turnpike, where he'd show me what a man was made of.

I'll admit, I saw red; my first instinct was to go to the craft shop, find a needle file, and needle the fucker through his right eye, but then I thought: "Why wait?", so I marched up to him, smiled, put my hand on his shoulder, and when he smirked in triumph that I'd finally come through, kneed him in the balls so hard his eyes actually bugged out, then, for good measure, I did it again. Daddy and Davey had taught me well, I worked out a lot at home, and all of that went into turning that joker's balls into jelly.

His buddies watched in shock as he folded, clutching where his balls used to be, alternating between whining and puking, but they got the message; touch me, and I show you the quick way to a life singing soprano...

Round about that time, Josie came storming up, dragging Sara with her; it turns out their dates HAD been expecting a serious amount of gratitude from them for asking them to the prom, so they'd disposed of those two creeps in like fashion, and with that, we stalked out of there, drove home, and spent the night hating boys.

(Sidebar: I heard a couple days later moron-boy's prom-date had called her older brothers and told them what that idiot was planning to do to her, and where, and while details are hazy, apparently an unknown and unknowable someone or someones were waiting for him when Prom ended, took him somewhere scenic, miles from anywhere, and kicked living shit out of him, broke both his arms at the elbow, busted his knee and ankle with a baseball bat, and fractured his pelvis with same; I have no idea who it was, it's just another one of those small-town mysteries that will probably never be solved...

I hear he details cars for a living now, no college sports scholarships for him, not with a pronounced limp, a trick knee, and restricted hand-eye coordination...)

All the same, once I finally and irrevocably admitted to myself that Davey was what I wanted, it just made everything worse, because now I was trapped, wanting him so badly it was a physical pain in my chest, but knowing he was the one boy in the entire world I couldn't have, no matter how much I pined for him, lusted for him, wanted him.

When my friends were out having as much fun as it's possible to have in Des Moines when you're under 21, I was at home, like as not crying in my room, then having to face Mom with my eyes puffed and red from crying over that damned picture, and lie barefaced and bold to her and Daddy about why I always looked so dragged-out and miserable these days.

Mom kept trying to find a chink in the wall I put up around me, but I still couldn't let her in; whatever I was feeling about Davey, it was still surrounded by a pall of shame and guilt, and I couldn't take the chance of telling her in case she felt that loathing and disgust I'd once felt; I knew if she found out, I'd have lost her as well.

All the while this was going on with me, I never really noticed how tired and wan Mom had become until I happened to glance at my graduation picture and stopped dead in shock; she looked like an old woman, her arms and legs thin and frail, her smile vague, her forehead lined and old, and her eyes distant and so, so tired.

With that, I recognized what I'd been seeing for a long time now, but never really registering, how she seemed to be forever stopping what she was doing to just sit and catch her breath, and she'd developed a small, rasping little cough that I barely noticed, and I didn't take note of, but it never really went away; I began to hear her coughing at night after I'd gone to bed, and it was getting worse.

I asked Mom if she'd seen the doctor recently, but she brushed it all aside, telling me I was a bigger worrier than Daddy; she was just tired, that's all; it's what happens when people get old, which alarmed me; Mom wasn't yet 50, that's not old, that's barely middle-aged, but sure enough, every day she got older right before my eyes.

Daddy eventually overrode her objections and pretty much forced her into the Saturn to go see her Oncologist, something she was supposed to do immediately if she got ill or any odd or unexpected symptoms showed up.

They were gone the whole day, and when they came home, they were silent, Daddy was sombre, and he looked like he'd been crying. Mom just looked tired, but then she always did, but there was something else, and I knew what it was; the looks on their faces was enough to tell me. I had to ask her though; I needed to hear it said just once.

"Mom, what happened? What did they say? Why are you so tired all the time? Please Mom, tell me..."

So she did; Daddy tried to speak, but his voice kept breaking, and seeing him so distressed only made me more scared.

"Sweetheart, the doctors gave me a whole lot of tests, they did a PET scan, and an MRI scan, and some other things, and now we know; baby, you're an adult now, so I'm not going to sugar-coat this; you deserve to know it all. Lori, the cancer is back; it's spreading, and they can't do anything about it; there's really no drugs that can stop it now, because the cancer in my liver has what they called metastasized, which means it's causing other, different cancers to show up in my kidneys, in my lungs, and in my pancreas..."

She stopped to hold my face between her thin, little hands, seemingly so brittle, but still warm, soft, and motherly, while two big tears spilled from my eyes.

"Don't...don't do that baby, please, we always knew this might happen, I've been on borrowed time ever since the last time. It's OK, really, I know it seems like the end of the world right now, but it will be OK, I promise; you and Daddy still have each other, and I'll be here for you as long as I can; one way or another, I'll always be with you, Lori, remember that; you're my baby-girl, and I will always be there when you need me, I promise..."

She was already saying 'goodbye', but all I could do was cry in her shoulder; I tried to tell her what I know she wanted to hear, that I'd be OK, that me and Daddy would look after each other, but all I could do was cry and repeat "mamma, mamma..." endlessly, hoping that somewhere, someone or something was listening and would relent and somehow make this all not be happening, admit that it was all a big mistake, and not take my Mommy away from me...