"What's wrong?" Stacy asked. "You've been crying. Why is the phone off the hook? Why are you sitting here chain-smoking? Mother, say something, for the love of Christ!"
"Why are you here?" Connie asked suddenly, bitterly. "Have you come to put in your two cents' worth? Stacy, I can't take any more! I'm finished. I just want to go to bed and never get up again."
"My God," said Stacy. "What's happened to you?"
Connie took two or three quick puffs and ground out her cigarette. "This is the most horrid day of my life, Stacy. I want to be alone. Please."
"Nonsense!" Stacy replied firmly. "Mother – I don't know where to begin – this morning – well, actually it was a little past noon. A friend and I went to a movie…"
Connie closed her eyes, hand scrambling on the table in search of her cigarettes. Stacy grabbed the hand, and she squeezed it reassuringly. "Listen," she went on. "I know it was you, Mom. I knew it as soon as I heard your voice. But why? How? When? God, I'm still…"
"Shocked? Disgusted? Sickened? Pick one!" Connie blurted. She leaned back, not so attractive now. Her face looked old, worn, drawn, and Stacy's heart twisted in sympathy. "That's what your brother told me," Connie added. "He called me this afternoon. All the way from Albany. To tell me how much I'd shamed him. That I was nothing but a slut. He even said I was no better than a streetwalker. A whore. He called me a whore."
"Oh!" Stacy whispered, almost ready to cry. "Did he see [missing text]?" Connie shook her head. "He read about me. In this." She kicked out beneath the table and the newspaper fluttered across the floor to Stacy. The girl released her mother's hand and picked it up. The front cover was adorned with a grainy but recognizable blowup from the movie. Her mother, naked, face gripped by sexual longing, just in the act of letting down her hair. Stiff nipples, a bush that seemed to quiver even in the poorly reproduced black-and-white illustration. From the beginning of the scene, Stacy remembered.
"There's more inside," Connie said flatly. "A review of the movie. Two pages. Maybe a thousand words of copy, plus half a dozen stills. Almost all of it's about me. All the pictures are of me. You can see my face in every one of them. The editor was quite taken with me. Oh, he hated the picture but he gave it a rating of three and a half erections, which is pretty good, so I'm told. And to make it perfect, Stacy, he managed to find out my name, and he printed that along with the pictures. Isn't that darling?" Her voice was brittle with rage and her hands trembled. "God, when I saw it, I thought I was going to be sick! And then Gerry called. The things he said! Stacy, he hates me! That's what he told me. Do you hate me, too?"
Connie was on the verge of tears and so was Stacy. "Of course not," she said firmly. "I only wanted to know."
Stacy took her mother into the bedroom, noting as she turned on the light that her mother's old bed was gone. In its place stood a round waterbed, a big one, decorated with pink sheets and a fake-fur spread. "Mmm," she said admiringly. It reminded her of a certain motel on the outskirts, of Boston…
"Have you been drinking, Mom?"
Connie shook her head.
"Okay, then take this." Stacy took a tranquilizer from her purse and gave it to Connie, who swallowed it mechanically. "Now, let's get you into a warm nightie and under the covers."
Connie didn't resist as Stacy undid the robe and tossed it aside. Underneath she was wearing bra and panties, both cute and pastel pink. They were skimpy underthings, not at all the sort Stacy associated with mothers, particularly her own. The panties were hip-hugging bikinis, cut low on top and high at the bottom, and they seemed glued to her mother's trim hips, allowing the unmistakable bulge of her pubes to stand out. And the bra, a one-piece step-in, made no effort to prevent show-through of rather large brown nipples, which were standing at halfhearted erection.
Stacy left her mother and went to get a nightie from the dresser. She picked a sensible cotton one, winter-weight, and brought it back. "Come on," she said, "don't you feel better now that you've taken your pill?"
Connie did seem more relaxed. She was almost smiling. "I'm glad you're not angry," she told her daughter. "If you'd been angry I don't know what I'd be doing now."
"Who's angry?" Stacy demanded. "C'mon, lift your arms while I help you out of your bra. Lord, I don't know why you bother with them!" It was true. Her mother's breasts were as high and firm as a young girl's. They were warm, too, as Stacy couldn't help noticing when the heel of her hand brushed against one of them. She struggled to pull away the bra cups, realizing as she did so that if those breasts weren't her mother's she could be quite attracted to them.
It was a strange feeling. Stacy halted, the bra in her hands, and she crooked her head. Sometimes girls seemed so much sexier than guys. She'd made it with both sexes, and she'd never been able to decide which she preferred. Guys had their advantages – they were big and hard and muscular, and they enjoyed sweeping a girl off her feet and into the sack for some fast, furious balling, and Stacy didn't mind that when she was in the mood.
But it was different with girls. They were soft and pink and warm, tantalizing invitation written on their bare bodies. The soft curves, the tingling flesh with its smooth rounded contours. The tactile sensation of rubbing her lips back and forth across a stiffening nipple, of plying a dainty navel with a rotating fingertip, of blowing soft breath into a delicately parted set of cuntal gates and feeling the pussy aroma waft back out to her nostrils – My God, she told herself, she was her mother!
Connie stretched and yawned, her breasts shaking ever so slightly. Stacy watched the wobbling nipples, her tongue unconsciously flicking at her lips, and it didn't help when she closed her eyes because her mind was engaged in replaying a particular sequence from the movie Stacy and Don had seen that afternoon.
Stacy tried to remember how she'd thought of her mother before seeing her on an X-rated screen today. What had been the image in her head? God, she couldn't remember! She wished they'd been closer, that they'd spent more time together in the past few years. Now it was like meeting a stranger, a half-naked stranger at that, and Stacy felt bewildered.
"You'd better put on your nightie," she said, offering it. The pill was working. Connie's face had relaxed considerably and her smile was there for real now. She seemed at ease as she reached for the offered nightgown, and she dropped it lazily on the bed behind her.
Connie put her hands on the low-riding waistband of her panties and pulled them down to her knees. She raised one leg out of them, then the other, and idly hung the panties on the doorknob of a closet beside the bed. They dangled there as she turned to pick up her nightie once more. "Oh, I feel a lot better now," she sighed. "What was that pill you gave me?"
"Just a 'lude," Stacy mumbled. She wished her mother would hurry up and get her nightie on. "Oh. Goddamnit!" she exploded, taking a giant step.
She buried her face in the nape of her mother's neck, kissing and licking the warm clean flesh. "Stacy!" her mother said in a startled voice, her body stiffening against Stacy's, but Connie didn't fight.
Stacy looked up. "Oh, Mother," she said. "I'm sorry, I but I can't help myself."
The nightie fell from Connie's fingers and spread itself on the floor at her feet. Stacy threw one arm around her mother's body and hugged her closely, still neck-kissing. Her other hand made a beeline for Connie's nearest breast.
It was everything she had known it would be, and more. Stacy cupped it fiercely, pressing until she felt the nipple spring up hard and hot against her palm. With her fingertips she stroked the firm but yielding flesh of her mother's tit, and with each of those strokes the nipple seemed to become stiffer. She heard a wistful sigh seep from Connie's lips, a sigh that drew her like a beacon. Stacy raised her head and planted her lips upon her mother's.