Homelands Pt. 01 Ch. 01

I stopped for a rest at the edge again.

"...I know, I know. You're totally right. I told you about that one time, right? I honestly wish I felt the same. But I don't know. There's just. When I think about...," once more, I couldn't tell what Mom said for a few moments, "...he wants, like he couldn't resist the urge even if he wanted to. You know?"

She continued on, but I couldn't hear. Whatever she was talking about, she was almost short of breath, she was so excited.

"Yeah, I see what you mean. And I think you're right. But honestly, that's what turns me off. I just can't see him being responsive to what his partner wants, and when she does or doesn't want it," Aunt Liz said.

My heart sped up. So that was what they were talking about.

"Well, listen, if you don't want to, I just may have to," Liz continued.

My mother half-shrieked, half-laughed. "I didn't say I relinquish my claim to him. All I'm saying is that I might not start with him. I mean, he is good. And a fast learner. In a few years, or maybe even a few months, he's going to be unbelievable. But we only just...."

Yet again, I couldn't tell what she was saying. Only just initiated who? Into what?

"Well, I'm not promising I'm going to wait until you're ready for him. I'm taking this conversation as you having exercised your right of first refusal." The two broke into another round of girlish giggling. Then Aunt Liz added, "But seriously. I promise to share with you when you're ready for him. Wouldn't that be nice?"

Well, it sure as hell made for a nice mental image.

Fuck. I should not, not, not be reacting this way.

They both laughed yet again. "Okay, we'll call that a deal," Mom said. "Oh, god, can you believe what we're talking about? We're so horrible!"

"Are we?" Liz said.

"If so, I'm not sure I care!" Mom practically squealed.

"To a glorious family vacation," Liz said, holding her glass up.

"You said it, sister," my mother said.

I kicked off for a few more laps, needing to let my blood flow to other parts.

#

I chatted with them for a few minutes before heading back up to the suite so that I wouldn't feel like it was obvious that I was spying on them. Maybe it worked. Maybe it wasn't a concern to begin with. But it made me feel a little better.

I heard voices from the living room of the suite as I approached. I stopped, listening at the door. The hotel air conditioning pebbled my still wet skin, but I didn't want to waste the opportunity to get a better sense of what other people knew.

The voices belonged to my father and Uncle Jim.

"...serious? No, I don't feel guilty. You think our wives aren't having the same thoughts right now? Have you seen how Ellen looks at...," my father said.

It was hard to make out, what with the door between us, but I thought he said, "Dom." And then shame filled me for being jealous, of all things, that I thought my father had just suggested that Mom wanted to fuck my older brother.

Uncle Jim laughed. "Well, I'll tell you what, that was the best lay of my life."

"We made some beautiful children, what can I say," my father said.

Oh, god. Fuck. I think he was talking about Natalie. My kid sister. Well, she wasn't a kid anymore. Not by any means. But still.

"That you did. And god damn, but can she suck a fucking dick. Doesn't have the grace my Brie has, but she sure has enthusiasm," Uncle Jim said.

My knees trembled. So it was both of them.

I couldn't take anymore. I'd confirmed what I suspected. Whatever it was, it had affected all of us. And it was more or less what I thought it was. What caused it, how it made our appearances change, I couldn't have said. But I didn't need to hear more details in order to hate myself still more for not being completely revolted.

I waited a few seconds after my key card caused the lock to beep and the bolt to click as it slid out of the lock. Then I pushed the door open slowly and walked into the suite, holding the towel a few inches out in front of me so as to hide the wholly inappropriate reaction I'd had to picturing first Brie then Nat getting double-teamed by Dad and Uncle Jim.

After some obligatory chit-chat with the two distinguished older gentlemen whose bodies belonged to much younger men, I rushed into my room. My head was spinning.

God help me, I liked that this was happening.

I should be trying to figure out a way to undo it. Shouldn't I?

It was like the world that I took for granted was just a really convincing but ultimately paper-thin illusion, under which lay a thoroughly perverse reality.

This was the oldest, strongest taboo. An act so unnatural, so depraved, that virtually every society in the world prohibited it.

Yet, incest was all I could think about.

With my eyes closed, I tried to picture my mother naked. Not my mother as she really looked, which would be a disturbing sight. But the sexpot that had taken her place lately. The woman with the impossibly extreme curves. The woman with a relatively narrow waist yet breasts just this side of too big. Breasts that, for many men, probably were already well into the territory of too big, to be honest. But to me, while Liz's were very nice, Mom's were absolutely amazing. Coupled with her ultra fair skin, full red lips, big brown eyes, thick lashes, lush eyebrows, and raven-black hair, she was so fucking hot that it hurt.

My heart raced. Just the thought of it was driving me crazy.

I stood in front of the mirrored closet door. I could control this. We all could, I was sure. And perhaps that also meant we could stop it, or at least opt out. But I dismissed that thought. Entertaining it meant I had to feel guilty for not doing so.

I pulled off the fresh pair of pants and boxers I'd put on as soon as I got in my room. It took a great deal of effort, but after a fashion, I produced the desired response.

My dick, average sized on a good day with a short ruler, was growing rapidly. I must have added at least two inches to my length, and a fair amount of girth.

There had to be limits. But I kept trying, pouring more and more energy into the effort, and eventually it got to half again as big as it normally was.

#

Between grabbing a few beers not long after waking up, a few laps in the pool, and whatever it was I'd done to augment my manhood, I was just about ready for a nap. But I was afraid that if I took one, I'd miss out on too much. So I decided to take a good, long, hot shower and hope that would help wake me up.

And it did help, some. And at least I didn't smell like chlorine anymore. But I could still use a bit of a jolt. So I slipped out of my bedroom, intent on getting a cup of coffee.

"Hey, sweetie," Mom called from the sofa. She put her book down and pushed her reading glasses to the tip of her nose. But I wasn't looking at my mother, who actually needed reading glasses. This was the otherworldly temptress, who despite having a few hints of maturity here and there, could have passed for a woman in her twenties if you didn't look too closely. The one with curves that no human woman could possibly have.

Damn, the glasses looked good on her. And would look better coated in....

The rest of what she was wearing wasn't hurting anything either. Mostly because there was so damned little of it. She wore a white terry cloth robe that barely came past her waist and that was it. As far as I could tell anyway. The robe was entirely too small for a woman of her endowment though, and there was a very titillating expanse of flesh on display. If she was wearing a bra, her breasts would be sitting higher, would be pressed more tightly together. But I suppose she could have been wearing underwear, if it was a thong. Pretty much anything else, I'd have been able to see, so much of her was on full display.

"You still running around by yourself? What are your brothers up to? Your cousins?"

I shrugged. "I'm about to go see what everyone is up to. Just need some coffee first."

She nodded. "That's good. Just hate the thought of you feeling left out. I know your sister has felt that way at times. But it's not like there are no boys your age around."

I was tempted to tell my mother that I thought Nat was keeping herself plenty entertained, but I kept that one to myself. "What about you? Where's your playmate?"

A faint smile. "I'm going to wake her up in a half hour or so and we're going to go have some drinks. Cindy might be joining us. Mommy Happy Hour, I guess."

"Good for you. Must be nice to finally get to spend some time with your sister without having to worry about cleaning up after everyone, making a big holiday dinner, and all."

Mom shrugged. "Yeah. It's nice."

"Oh, come on. You're not having any more fun than at Thanksgiving or Christmas?"

She waved the question away. "Of course I am. It's great to get to relax. I just meant that Liz and I were never as close as you and your brothers."

It took some effort to keep from snickering at that. Todd and I got along well, sure. And Dom and I had started to make amends now that we were older. But our relationship had its ups and downs. To put it mildly.

Of course, Mom had always refused to see it. Just as she refused to believe anything that didn't cast Dom in a flattering light.

Had Mom and Liz been the same as Dom and I had been?

Somehow, I couldn't see Mom knocking some of Liz's teeth loose one day only to beat the crap out of a bully who'd been bothering her at school the next.

But maybe Mom, like her oldest son, had slept with some of the people her younger siblings dated. I suppose that wasn't impossible to believe.

"Well, you know, Liz was something of a goody-two shoes." Mom blushed, held up her hands in protest, though I hadn't said anything. "I don't mean that to sound judgmental. It wasn't like I didn't invite her to hang out with me and my friends. Just that she never wanted to. Probably thought I was a bad influence."

Right. Because the first thought I had when thinking about Mom was "bad influence."

Mom laughed, blushed, and looked away. "Oh, Frank. You should have seen me when I was younger. You wouldn't believe it was the same person."

Well, it wasn't as hard as it had once been to imagine her young, that was for sure.

"We all smoked, and she didn't. We drank, and she didn't really. Heck, my fiance rode a motorcycle. I think Liz thought he was in Hell's Angels," she laughed, gazed off into the distance wistfully. "I just thought the bike was cool."

"Wait, you were engaged before Dad?"

She nodded. "I thought I told you that before."

Probably had. Who listened to such things?

Only, now, I was finding the details of her love life to be quite compelling.

"Maybe. I guess I forgot. So what happened?"

"He died a month after we got engaged. Car accident."

"Oh. I'm sorry."

"Don't be," my mother said with a sigh. "If he hadn't, you'd never have been born."

True enough. But that seemed like a sick way of looking at it. And the hint of a tear in my mother's eye told me she didn't see it that way either.

"Anyway, if it wasn't bad enough that I hung out with people who smoked and drank and, if you can believe it, sometimes swore, I started dating again a week after Lenny died. In retrospect, I was obviously rebounding. But I thought I was really ready to move on. And Liz just didn't approve of that at all. Made sure I knew it too."

I'm not sure I entirely disagreed with Aunt Liz. "I didn't know that," I said, wishing I'd had something cleverer to say instead.

"Yeah. She's very traditional in a lot of ways. You know Jim was her first boyfriend? Not quite only, because they broke up for a while and she went on a few dates with guys she had absolutely no interest in just to make Jim jealous. But besides that, they've been together since they were sixteen."

I was pretty sure that this, at least, was something she had told me before. But I'm not sure it had ever occurred to me just how much more I had in common with my aunt than I did my mother. Maybe only because I'd had an image of my mother that didn't seem to fit reality so well, whereas it sounded like Liz had always been mature and responsible.

"That explains it then," I said.

"Of course...," Mom said. She hesitated, fretting at her delicious lower lip. Her brown eyes looked away, then back. "Well, I shouldn't tell you this, but we're all adults here."

I nodded and gestured for her to continue.

My mother lowered her voice to a rather more conspiratorial tone, "It is ironic that Miss Traditional Family Values with the Perfect Marriage to her High School Sweetheart hasn't exactly been monogamous for a long, long time."

I raised an eyebrow.

On a certain level, it was anything but surprising, given the extracurricular activities of which we were all, apparently, taking ample advantage. But at the same time, I hadn't yet figured out whether that was a longstanding family tradition of which I'd somehow remained previously unaware or a one time thing, brought about by some supernatural intervention. But whatever the story behind our family's involvement with incest, Liz had apparently been leading a rather adventurous love life since long before this vacation.

"I know. You'd never have guessed," Mom said. She gesticulated emphatically as she continued, slapping her knee here, raising her hands up high in exasperation there, and so on. "Women as often as men, and more for her than for Jim. In fact, I think she only lets Jim participate some of the time. Seems she's as into cuckoldry as anything."

"Wow," I said, trying to hide my arousal at the revelation. I forced a laugh. "That's certainly a bit more risque than starting to date a bit too soon after your fiance dies."

"Isn't it?" Mom exclaimed. "Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying your father and I never experiment. But I've never pretended to be...," she didn't finish the sentence.

My heart was racing. But I felt the need to maintain the illusion. I covered my ears, and said, "La la, don't need to know, la la."

Mom laughed. "Okay, okay. Sorry."

"Quite all right. Anyway, I'm going to go get some coffee. You two free-spirited libertines have fun at your happy hour."

She smiled. "We will. Now come give your mother a kiss."

I swept over to her, gave her a peck on the cheek, and left.

#

I spent the rest of the time before dinner over in the other suite. Everyone else had left by the time I got there, but sure enough, Jack and Mark were still there, playing X-box. Well, and Aunt Cindy there, drifting back and forth between the living room and her bedroom.

She was looking every bit as good as I expected, given the state of affairs. She was not an unattractive woman normally, mind. A bit too thin, maybe. Not tiny, and not as thin as I seemed to remember she had been when she was younger. But thin. And not especially athletic, so what ass she had was shapeless and droopy.

The other version of Cindy, though, was stunning. She had thick, blonde hair, with such prominent dark roots you could almost say she was a brunette with generous blonde highlights instead of a dirty blone. Her cornflower blue eyes were large and bright. Her skin was every bit as fair as that of most of the rest of the women of the family. Granted, even the idealized version of her had modest breasts. But then, it would be unfair to say they were too small, particularly for her frame. And they were perky. Not sloped and pointy like smaller breasts could sometimes be.

At any rate, what really caught my eye was her ass.

I probably ought to say it was perfect. It was leaning towards big even by my standards, and had a great heart shape. It bulged out behind her, rater than sagging towards the floor. And it was pretty much solid muscle. The damned thing was so ripe, so well defined, so well separated from her thighs that my mouth was practically watering.

She didn't hang around long, though. Unfortunately enough. Shortly after I arrived, she headed off for pre-dinner drinks with the other mothers. I'd almost forgotten about that.

I watched her gorgeous ass sway under the thin fabric of her dress as she left.

My cousins were damn lucky. There was no way they'd spent the afternoon with her without anything happening. Not with all that was going on.

Of course, I'd just been alone with my mother for a while, and hadn't even taken advantage of her request that I kiss her. Maybe something was wrong with me.

My cousins and I took turns facing off one-on-one in the latest first-person-shooter. While we played, I put out some light feelers to see what they knew. It was hard to say without asking more explicit questions, but I got the impression that Jack had a pretty good idea of what was happening while Mark didn't have a clue.

But then, Jack was every bit as nerdy as I was, in the best sense of that word. Meanwhile, his younger brother seemed like he should be a nerd too, given the circles he typically ran in, but was ultimately more of a jock in many ways. He had a nerd's love of role playing games, fantasy fiction, and so forth. But he also played soccer and basketball, ran track, and, most disappointingly, had the typical jock's sense of humor. Fart jokes seemed to be the height of comedic achievement in his mind.

"I can't believe we have to go to this lame family dinner," Mark said at one point. "I'd rather just order room service and keep right on kicking your ass," he said to Jack.

"Yeah? That's funny," he said gleefully. He leaned forward on the couch, raised his controller up close to his face, and jammed the buttons rapidly.

On screen, a rocket claimed Mark's life.

Jack leaned back and let the controller fall to his lap again. With a contented sigh, he added, "Because I just fracked your ass what good. Again."

Mark reached across the couch and smacked his older yet smaller brother upside the head. "Lucky shot. Punk-ass."

"I don't know," I said, shaking my head at the two of them. "Dinner sounds nice. The point of family vacation is to spend some time with, you know, your family, right?"

Jack nodded, flashing me a conspiratorial grin.

Mark shrugged. "I guess. But you're family. So's Todd. We're spending time with you guys."

"Well, yeah, but don't you ever get tired of the sausage party?" Jack said.

Mark looked at his brother like he'd just asked him if he got tired of breathing oxygen. "Dude. It's a family dinner."

And for most families, that would make Jack's comment seem quite weird.

Particularly in light of that comment, by the time we realized we really needed to head down to dinner, I was not only sure that Jack knew what was going on, but also fairly sure that he knew that I knew as well.

When Mark announced that he was going to get changed for dinner, Jack stuck around.

"I'm not alone, right?" he said as the door to the room he shared with Mark closed.

I shook my head. "No, you most definitely are not. As far as I can tell, it doesn't seem like anyone but Mark is still clueless at this point."

"Oh, he's not either," Jack said with a dismissive wave. "I assume he's just pretending not to have any idea what's going on because he doesn't know if you know. When Todd was here earlier, he mentioned that he wasn't sure if you remembered what you actually did last night. He seemed to think that maybe you were still under the veil."

"Oh," I said. "That makes sense." I hesitated, then asked, "What's a veil?"

He clapped me on the back. "It's okay. Everyone's memories seem to be at least a little scrambled. Just some more so than others, I guess. But it'll come back to you soon enough. Always does."

Always does?

"So, do you remember any of what you've done so far?" he asked.

"Not really."

"It's been a few days already. At least," he paused for a moment, scratching the back of his head, "I think it has. Do you know when we arrived?"