Talk of the Devil

It started by pure chance – as so many of these things do, I suppose. But now? Well let's just say there's more than a tiny element of the deliberate involved. Let me explain...

When I say 'it started by pure chance' I mean that the discovery was accidental but the behaviour of my teenage son was anything but entirely normal. I'm Lucy, by the way, a fairly typical single mother – late thirties, single again after a reasonable attempt at the 'two are better than one' thing, still fairly presentable (enough to turn heads when I bother with ever-more-necessary make-up), a homeworker, vaguely intelligent (although you may beg to differ when you read this) – and something of an addict now, as you will see.

The genesis of this 'thing' was nothing more than a normal enough room-tidying session. I do these things occasionally, although my own mother will swear they never happen, and it was a normal enough day in every way. I had tidied the living room, my own bedroom, the kitchen, the bathroom, the hallway and, finally, plucked up the courage to venture into my son's room to tackle that one.

My darling boy, Jason, if a nineteen-year-old can still be called a boy, was – he said – having a gap year between school and university. He'd done the whole 'travelling Europe' thing and had returned to the family nest for a few weeks before taking up a seat at a non-redbrick and rather nice establishment. A few weeks that, apparently, involved quite a lot of drinking, partying, attending rock concerts and burning large holes in the savings that should have been reserved for books and living accommodation expenses for the next three years. I admired him enough for it all, though – enough, in fact, that I would never admit it.

He was as fairly typical as I was, I suppose – a typical late teen with plenty of new muscles, a ratty haircut, two motorbikes and some very dubious friends of both genders (but mostly males). That particular day he had taken himself off to one of the said friends to 'help him pack ready for college' – which I knew translated to be 'a couple of days on the piss'. As I said, a fairly typical teen.

His room was, to say the least, verging on the untidy. Okay, to be more accurate, there could have been a small tribe of pygmy rhinoceroses living in there that had never seen the light of day, but I was a brave soul – and besides, I knew there must have been at least three-quarters of a halfway decent dinner service in there somewhere and I was running out of plates.

In I went with a determined air, plus two large rubbish sacks, a gasmask, an anti-rhino crowbar, my mobile phone in case I got lost or kidnapped, the satnav from my car, a week's supply of water and my sense of humour. Most of which I needed.

To be fair, it wasn't quite as bad as I feel I'm making it sound – but it was a tip. I located most of the plates and dishes, picked up a few pistons and sundry other oily bits of motorbike, pushed his laundry into the corner of the room (using the crowbar), and was about to beat a hasty retreat when I noticed that his laptop was glowing somewhere under his duvet. I had told him a few times – okay, a few hundred times – that this was a distinct waste of electricity for which I paid several limbs' worth every three months, and I went to switch it off.

I pulled back the duvet and sighed when I saw that he had left it while not only still switched on, but still logged on to some site or other.

Now, I'm not a nosy mother – or woman in general – but something about the screen caused me a slight pause and drew me a tiny but closer. The sort of tiny bit that actually allows you to read what the hell is being displayed.

In this case it was a chat site – an adult one, to be more precise. Now, I am not in any way averse to such sites, even for my own son and heir. He's almost twenty for heaven's sake, and I'm not stupid enough to think that someone of his age wouldn't dabble in such things occasionally – even using my electricity rather than his phone – but I was very much averse to him leaving the stupid thing logged on. As I said, I'm a homeworker, but very specifically, I'm a website designer and I know full damned well that such a behaviour can attract both nuisance hackers and even more nuisance-full advertisers. With a professional sigh and making a more maternal mental note to have yet another word with my wayward teen, I leaned forward with every intention of logging him out of whatever site he was 'entertaining' himself with and then hitting the power button.

My interest, though, was taken by the avatar name he had evidently been using. It was, of course, purely a professional interest... although my maternal instincts might well have been activated by the site's banner.

It was quickly clear that he had been chatting away on a site that was distinctly adult – the screen was plain enough, but the banner suggested 'erotica', the room choice was 'kinky mothers' and the top right-hand corner of the screen was dominated by bare breasts.

None of these things – truly and honestly – bothered me too much. Boys will be boys and teens will be teens – although that didn't stop me simply switching off the laptop rather than logging my errant son out of the site first. I left his room with the stack of crockery, crowbar under an arm, and a smile on my face. Naughty boy.

Later, though, I stopped to think.

*****

I had spent a couple of hours plate-scraping and washing everything in the dishwasher a few times, but my mind kept spinning back to my son's choice of chat sites. And perhaps more precisely, his choice of chat rooms.

I wasn't so dumb that I couldn't figure that 'kinky mothers' was more than likely a sort of shorthand for older women who wanted to get chattily naughty with guys – or more probably somewhere for naughty guys to go and impersonate naughty women so they could get off when other naughty guys could pretend to be desperate teens. But there again... I kept asking myself whether it really was a site where actual mothers – people like me – went to chat to genuine teenage sons to see what fantasies they shared. Or experiences.

It should have filled me with dread, that latter prospect, but for some reason it didn't. It didn't excite or arouse me, but it didn't leave me cold either. What it did do was make me wonder which version of those potentials was closer to the truth – or if both were there to some degree – and just what the hell was Jason doing there in any or either case! Surely there were more obviously 'normal' places for him to go...?

Naturally enough I decided that, as a caring mother and in no way a nosy bitch, I should investigate a little further, just to make sure that everything was normal enough and that Jason wasn't being led astray.

As a professional in the website world, the very fact that I had switched off the machine without noting down the actual site didn't faze me at all and knowing that I had another few hours at the very least before my son came home was comforting as well. I even made, and drank, a coffee before I went to retrieve the laptop.

I'm not really quite sure that my motives were entirely derived from maternal caring and defensiveness, but I can still use such values as spurs if I really need to. In any case, I sat down at the kitchen table with a knowing smile and a 'you don't escape that easy, angel' look on my face.

A few minutes later the air turned, I can now see, quite a few shades bluer.

When you work at home, alone, you can develop a habit of talking to yourself. In this particular case, I shouted.

"You little shit! You've used 'incognito' pages!"

For those of you who don't know – and you bloody should – incognito (or otherwise 'secret') web pages leave no history of what sites have been visited. Or in other words, unless I remembered the precise name of the vaguely 'erotica' related site, I was not going to be able to find out what my little darling had actually been doing – and of course, I couldn't.

I swore a little bit more. Or quite possibly a lot more. And my next coffee was laced with tequila.

As I sipped away I did try to make myself wonder why the hell I was quite so annoyed or interested, but I put that down to my own stupidity and my own stupidity. How was I supposed to have known I'd be so obsessed, and how was I supposed to have known I'd be so obsessed? (Those questions and answers do make sense if you read back...).

But I was a professional, right? I could work this out...

As I say, obsession was already creeping in – and by then, tequila or not, I was already determined to find out what had been going on. Of course, I could have fronted up to Jason when he came home – but I wasn't silly enough to believe that whatever the truth was, he'd actually tell me.

And so it started.

*****

That first night I set out to try to find out which site he was frequenting – or at least had visited that one time (how was I to know?) – which at least would give me a hint as to the type of sites he visited. Mainly though I was interested in what he'd been up to the previous night... I could visualise the web page, just not enough to remember the darned site name – and knew I needed to make the effort while I still had some memory of the place.

To say that the search term 'kinky mothers' was pretty useless – given the seemingly hundreds of very, very weird hits – was an understatement of epic proportions. I wasted hours ploughing through link after link and seeing more flesh than I had in all the years I had been on the planet (not forty of them yet, but enough to see a lot of skin – in far more savoury circumstances!). I couldn't seem to find the specific site I was after, though, and perhaps, I started to think, that was just as well.

As I surfed my way through page after page I began to have some concerns. I had a very firm view that my Jason was as normal as it was ever possible for a teenager to be, and certainly not some budding kinkster with a 'mummy' fetish. And definitely not when the said 'mummy' might even be... well, me.

He'd never peeked, never become aroused in my presence, never gawped at me when he saw me in a bikini, never tried to peer down any top I was wearing, or up any skirt I might have donned. He was a normal son to a normal mum, nothing more and nothing less. I couldn't doubt that could I?

Well, could I?

Those pages, though... I mean, sure, some of them were in sites just aimed at women of a certain age (or guys pretending etc., etc.) who wanted to chat about sex and very odd sexy habits, but there were more than just some which were clearly targeted at actual sons rather than their mothers (or sons and mothers) – and it started to worry me just a tiny bit. Enough, in fact, that I knew I needed to find the actual site that Jason had been chatting on at least that one time.

I desperately needed to know.

And finally, I found it.

Wouldn't you know it, though? Despite my crows of success and despite my delighted little jig of triumph, it soon became clear that the page belonged to one of those sites that seemed to have a room dedicated to pretty much every fetish known to man.

And woman and quite possibly, ferret.

Jason, it appeared, must have been chatting but he could have been trawling through every one of the rooms for all I knew, and even then he might have just been visiting 'kinky mothers' for the heck of it, to see what others were up to, to hear blatant lies and inventive fantasies... anything at all. It should have quietened me and probably would have soothed frayed nerves had not a little, nasty, voice deep inside my head not added something about my son inventing a fantasy or two. Or worse...

But, I told myself, you now have the site details – you can check out just what goes on in that room. Always assuming you have the time to learn the lingua franca of chatrooms, and really do have more than a passing interest in what your son might be up to...

I then searched for a 'chat-speak' page and got reading.

*****

I wasn't dumb enough to use my own name (or any hints at it) when I came to choose my avatar the next day, although I did select a fairly accurate description. I was going to find out what other site members really were looking to talk about, and if they were going to talk about the likes of the real me – hence the fictional one I was creating could and should at least be an accurate-enough character in the physical sense.

Had I not still been somewhat concerned about my son's choice of topic, I decided I might even enjoy being an electronic – and very anonymous – version of myself. If I was honest, it was giving me a very gentle – but very persistent – buzz.

I logged on and 'went into' the kinky mothers room where I found eighty others. The names chosen by the other occupants varied from obvious males to potential females (no ferrets there) and displayed age ranges from eighteen (the site-stated minimum) to sixty-eight. I wondered what might happen next as the chat in the room itself was somewhat banal – dog walking and that night's supper being the 'current' topics, it seemed. But I needn't have worried for long.

I had chosen the monicker 'Real Mum 36' and this was, it soon seemed, a good choice if I wanted to attract attention. It had also been a very good idea to research 'room-speak' and the 'best practice' guides I had latterly added to my reading list. I knew, for example, that 'asl' stood for 'age, sex, and location' – meaning age, gender and location – and that if it was all that a message contained it was probably a very good idea to ignore the sender completely. I did just that and also pressed the 'iggie' button on anyone who used one word 'greetings' or, worse still in many ways, simply posted a link to some very dubious site or other. I was in my thirties and a professional woman with decent breeding – I already knew what a penis looked like.

It was at this point, though, when I started to actually rather enjoy myself. My first personal 'task' was to try to determine just who I was speaking to and it was soon clear that 'Fit Guy 22' was a probably very unfit guy in his forties or more, and that 'Saucy Mom 41' was more than likely a young male with a penchant for chatting to real women but who couldn't trust a real one so speak to him if he actually admitted his age or gender.

Now I am NOT going to educate males of any age on how we can possibly tell if you're fibbing or not but there are one or two basics you should understand about female anatomy, for instance, that would help. I know for a fact that more than one man disguised very badly as a woman has spent time chatting to another poor excuse for a female in the happy belief that he had cornered a lady. Given that the other guy probably thought that too, the result is hilarious from my perspective...

Anyway, I soon determined that the room was mostly made up of males who were between somewhere just under the stated site minimum to somewhere just this side of Methuselah. A smattering of apparently genuine women were also there but were often unavailable for more than a cursory greeting as their 'services' were avidly scrapped over by the males. As, indeed, were mine.

I only ever intended getting a taste of the 'private' discussion subjects – a feel for what Jason might have seen or talked about – but I confess that talking to young males about the most intimate of subject matters was rather addictive. Especially with me being the real-deal and a very anonymous one at that.

I also found that I was getting a real thrill out of pandering to young male fantasies, telling guys that I was stripping off for them, or feeling my 'full tits' and even – I admit it – stroking my neatly trimmed pussy. Not that I was, of course. Not back then.

I admit I almost did it for real a couple of times back near the start when I was sure my male chat partner was old enough but not too far out of college – because, I reasoned, I was interested to find out just what young males found entertaining, sexually, and of course NOT because it was dampening my panties. Well, not too much, anyway. For some reason that was unclear to me back then, my genuine naivety was well received – popular, even – but in all honesty I was genuinely more interested in my research than in the thrills I was starting to get ever more frequently.

One thing, though, started to make me think. I started to wonder if own son would ever try to strike up a conversation with Real Mum 36, and if so, what he might want to talk about – and also, whether I dare have such a chat even though he wouldn't have a clue who he was really chatting to. And that thought started to dominate my consciousness. I began to curse myself for switching off his laptop before I'd really checked out the site – and seeing what name he was adopting for himself.

Before long I had to admit that the thought of talking to my own son without him realising it was me started to appeal on all sorts of levels – some of which I tried desperately hard not to consider too closely. In any case, I reasoned, there was no firm evidence to suggest he even came into the Kinky Mothers room frequently and may only have ever been there that one time. But that wasn't likely, was it? But there again... what name would he adopt? Would he be just as anonymous as me and many of the others there?

Whatever the likelihoods I started to look for variations on 'Jason' and his nickname among his friends, 'Catman', often used but for no reason that I could ever make out. I started to look for any young male who also stated that he came from the same large town we lived near, and even any guy who listed painting as a hobby (something that had fascinated my son ever since he was barely old enough to hold a paintbrush without trying to eat it – even if he did sometimes still come down for supper sporting a multi-coloured moustache that was still dripping pigment onto his t-shirt).

Days and then a couple of weeks passed with no sign of my son – not that I truly thought I'd dare approach him in the room, even as anonymous as I was.

*****

When I did finally see 'CatmanDo 19' I thought it was a coincidence, despite the fact I'd been looking for just such a name. Even when I checked the profile and saw the 'young man' claimed to live in the right town, I didn't believe it could be my Jason. Or at least, my accelerated heart-rate wouldn't let me believe it.

I ignored the name and, despite my stated aim of finding out what the likes of my boy might discuss there, tried not to look at any comment CatmanDo might actually leave there in the room. Whether it really was Jason or not, though, I found myself just replying 'sorry, busy' to anyone else who tried to start up a private chat.

There was no way even if it was him that he'd try to chat to Real Mum 36, anyway, I reassured myself. I mean, it wasn't like a motherly figure would be of any interest to–

Hi there Real Mum, hru?

I stared at the words sent to me privately by CatmanDo 19. My already increased heart-rate sky-rocketed and I knew immediately that whether I tried to deny it or not, this really had to be my son. I took a deep breath or two. More likely twenty. Or two hundred. Fascination was flooding into me, though. And maybe something else...

Hello, I'm fine, hru? It took an amazing amount of determination to press the Enter key, but I managed it. Wanted to do it even more than it scared me somehow.

I'd spent hours and hours over the years telling Jason how honesty could make you strong, how it was always the best policy, always the way to go since it left no room for accusations that might otherwise be made, how it would make you feel better and more in control... But suddenly that all went out of the window. Now – now – I was going to be lying through my teeth (or at least, keyboard) and it wasn't just the best policy in these circumstances, it was highly necessary.