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Folie a Deux, Episode 02

By: Senor_Smut



Reaction to the first chapter in this ongoing story was polarized. Some loved it and others didn't - and the ones who didn't really didn't! Most of the objections concerned the format of the story, since some folks didn't like the documentary transcript style (or even the first person narration). I assumed this would be the case, since it's dramatically different from anything else I've read - and that's one of the reasons I wanted to write it this way! I'd started this story a dozen different ways before I thought of this, and this seemed to me to be the ideal vehicle for blending the accounts of several unreliable narrators with some objective evidence of their relative truthfulness (based on their reactions to the unseen interviewers). This was an experiment for me to see if this format worked for a story; I write for an audience of one, but since I liked the results I decided to share it. That means that this and all future chapters in this story will be in the same format. Other stories I might write in the future may or may not be, but that depends wholly on what works best for the story in question. Also, if this tickles your fancy and you'd like to try a story of your own with this sort of format, I strongly encourage it, since it's at once liberating and confining in such a manner as to stimulate creativity. 

***** 

Folie à Deux 

Episode 2: Homecoming 

By Senor Smut 

The screen is black as we hear a man speak. The voice is young, strong, vibrant, and deep, with a solid Midwestern accent. "I've never been as uncomfortable as I was with mom over the next few days. How could we discuss what we did? How could we not discuss what we did?" 

We now see a closeup of a young man against a black background. He is white, in his early 20s at the most, and very handsome. His face is composed all of bold lines, from his high cheekbones to his striking jawline and his cleft, pointed chin. His mouth is a thin line that shows a certain determination and strength of character, while his icy blue eyes hint at depth and reserves of intelligence and thoughtfulness. His hair is short, straight, and dark. 

Below, we see the legend Mike Larsen. 

"There was a massive thing between us now, and neither of us could figure out a way to get our arms around it," he continues. "I knew that if we didn't figure it out, I mean just how to live with it, it was going to tear our family apart. And I didn't have the first idea how to begin." 

Mike disappears, replaced by a black screen with the words: 

Folie à Deux 

Episode 2: Homecoming 

The title is replaced by another familiar face: a woman in her early 40s who bears a striking family resemblance to Mike, but for her generous lips, her dark eyes, and especially her wild mane of untameable blonde locks. She's wearing a red shirt with a narrow collar, hinting that this is a different day from the first interview. 

Her name is given as Emily Larsen. 

"The next several days were more awkward for me than actually doing what the Visigoths had forced us to do," she relates. "When we were there and being forced to have sex in front of the gang, we didn't focus on anything but the moment. We simply couldn't afford to. We had to do what we were told under threat of death, and when one is in that sort of a situation one doesn't have the luxury of looking ahead. We were forced to focus on the moment." 

Mike reappears, looking pensive. "In the moment, there was nothing but the moment. I mean, the furthest ahead I could think was to the period immediately after we got done having sex, where I didn't want my mom to be thinking 'Damn, that was bad sex in addition to being sex with my son.' That was, like, as far ahead as my mind could even conceive of. And once we got done, it was like...my mind still couldn't conceive of anything after that sex. It was like we were both stuck there." 

"Looking back on it, it was very clearly a mistake not to address it right away," Emily says. "I think, had we talked during that short period after we'd finished having sex but before the bikers drove us into town, we'd have been able to find words much more easily. We were both traumatized, however, and rather...lost in our own thoughts. It was difficult to find words that didn't feel trite or tremendously inappropriate. And of course, the longer we let the silence go, the more difficult it was to breach it." 

Mike is rubbing his chin and looking to the side. "I remember...uh...I remember sitting on the airplane, sitting right next to mom, and absolutely not knowing the first word to say. Like not even how to start the first sentence. I kept opening my mouth and - well, no, I kept thinking about opening my mouth and then not doing it because whenever I thought about talking to her, I could feel my throat squeeze closed. Seriously." 

"Whenever I thought I knew how to start a conversation," Emily says, "I would remember what we did. It wasn't simply that we'd done it. We'd loved it. I'd begged him in the most obscene terms possible. It seemed humiliating simply to start a conversation." 

"So yeah, whole flight, not a word," Mike sighs. "We land, I called dad to tell him we'd arrived safe and everything. Said we'd meet him at the hotel. Then mom and I waited for our bags. Just...stood there. Not talking. Not even looking at each other, because every time I looked at her all I could see was her down on her knees, naked with my cock in her mouth. So we just...stared." 

"The taxi ride to the hotel was silent," Emily says. "For a time I was lost in a sort of...a fugue, I suppose, reliving the event to the extent that I was even smelling what I'd smelled the day before, the urine smell of the drug lab and the roasting pork." 

"How were those recollections making you feel?" asks an offscreen voice. This interviewer is male with a slight English accent and he sounds older than the woman who interviewed the pair in the first episode. 

"That was a very interesting thing, because they were making me feel very nearly the opposite of what I felt at the time," Emily says. "As it was going on, I was caught up in a spiral of lust that quickly got out of control. My son is an exceptional lover and we both managed to lose ourselves in the moment. However, as I relived it, all I could feel was shame and self-loathing." 

"Did you feel loathing toward Mike?" the interviewer asks. 

"No, of course not," she says, though a quaver in her voice indicates that the answer may be more complex than that. 

"How did I feel toward mom then," Mike muses, then exhales heavily. "I felt...I felt like she was...I don't know. I did feel bad for her, because in the house I grew up in there's no hiding loud noises and I'd never, ever heard her make sounds like I made her make. So, like, she wasn't getting that from dad at all. But then I started wondering if that made me a better lover than my dad, and when you start wondering whether your mom thinks you're a better lay than your dad is, you've gone down a real weird fucking road. So basically whenever I started to think about her, I'd force myself to think of something else, but I couldn't think of anything else for more than about thirty seconds before I'd start thinking about her again." 

"Did you want to have sex with her again?" the interviewer asks. 

"Not then!" Mike laughs. "I wasn't even sure I could ever look at her again. Fucking her was the last thing I had on my mind." 

"I didn't want to have sex with Mike again," Emily says, "but I couldn't stop thinking about it. It had been extraordinary - revelatory, as I said last time. I found I was relieving specific moments over and over again. They were just instants, really, sensations or impressions." 

"Such as?" the interviewer asks. 

"Well...just little things," Emily says uncomfortably, her awkwardness when discussing sex in full play. "Things he did or things I felt. Things that were different from what I was used to. Certain comparisons were inevitable, and I felt incredibly guilty making them but I couldn't help myself." 

"Why not?" 

Emily looks truly uncomfortable, and she shrugs. 

"When we got to the hotel," Mike says, "I think it was the first time either of us realized that we were about five minutes from seeing dad and Olivia. I...I freaked, I'll be honest. I had a straight-up panic attack." 

Emily still looks shaken. "When we pulled to a stop and I looked up and saw the rather severe white facade of the Hotel Whitcomb and realized that my husband and daughter were waiting for us inside, I felt as though someone had punched me in the stomach. And then I..." 

"And then you what?" the interviewer asks. 

"Mom opened the cab door and puked on the sidewalk," Mike chuckles, "so at least I handled it better than she did! Not like I handled it well or anything. I sort of hyperventilated." 

"In the time since we'd...in the time since it had happened, I had thought almost continuously about how I would ever face Mike again," Emily says. "I had thought very little about how I would face Bob or Olivia. Somehow, seeing them again always felt distant, even when we were on the way to the hotel. And now I was faced with seeing them in moments and I didn't have any idea what to say or do." 

"I didn't even really know what mom had told dad," Mike says. "I knew she'd told him we had an accident but I didn't know if she'd told him anything else, or what. I mean, we hadn't discussed it, right? But it was going to be obvious that something had happened between us, something really big and really traumatic, and I didn't know what the hell to tell dad or Olivia." 

"The doorman helped me out of the taxi," Emily says. "I'm afraid I didn't stop to say anything to Mike. I know I should have, but suddenly all I could think about was the foul taste in my mouth. I went inside and immediately went to the restroom to try to clean up." 

"I paid the taxi and made sure the porters got everything inside," Mike says. "But I was still, like, panicking. My heart was just hammering and my mind was racing. I couldn't think of anything to say or do. I knew mom went to the bathroom and I absolutely no way wanted to be the first one up to the rooms. But then it was weird to wait for her because I didn't even want to look at her, much less talk to her. So I paid the porter a twenty to take the bags up to the rooms and I went for a walk." 

"You sent the bags up but you didn't go up yourself?" the interviewer clarifies, sounding incredulous. 

"Yeah, I went out," Mike nods. "Walking. Walking around. Just...walking." 

"For how long?" 

Mike shifts a bit and looks embarrassed as he says, "Um...four hours. Closer to five." 

"When I got out of the restroom about...half an hour later, I didn't see Mike or the bags," Emily says. "I naturally assumed he'd gone up first with the luggage and had already seen his father and sister. That was when my telephone rang. Bob was wondering where we were - he said the bags had been brought up twenty minutes before but neither of us were there, and he was worried." 

"What did you say?" 

"I didn't know what to say," Emily shrugs. "I didn't know where Mike had gone. I thought he might have run off - run away, I mean - so as not to face me. To face the family. I'm afraid I got rid of Bob very brusquely and called Mike." 

"I actually had my phone turned off," Mike said. "On the way in the taxi the buzzing from texts and Facebook and shit was driving me nuts, so I turned it off. I didn't even think about how it would all play, with the luggage showing up and then mom showing up sometime after and me not showing up at all. I really wasn't thinking at all." 

"When he didn't answer his phone, I..." Emily paused, thinks for a moment, and then laughs. "I lost my mind. I began...making a fuss." 

We now see a closeup of a man who appears to be in his early-to-mid 40s. He is handsome with icy blue eyes that resemble Mike's. His hair is dark brown except for several strands of gray at the temples; this, coupled with the care lines around his eyes, give him an air of weary wisdom. He looks familiar to those who saw Episode 1, and his identity is confirmed when he is given the name Bob Larsen in a subtitle below his face. 

"I'd been worried the night before, when I heard about the accident," Bob says in a deep, steady voice. "Emily called me and she sounded very shaken up, very upset. At the time I thought it was due to the wreck of the minivan she loved so much - she really did have a love affair with that vehicle. She told me the accident wasn't bad, but I assumed she was minimizing it to keep me from worrying, which is a habit she's always had. Anyway, I was looking forward to seeing her in the morning. 

"I knew something really odd was going on when the suitcases showed up without either her or Mike," Bob continues. "It was Emily and me in one room and Mike and Olivia in another, and Olivia thought it was pretty odd too, so after we waited a few more minutes I called Emily. When she freaked out and basically hung up on me, I knew something more had happened than just a car accident - of course, I had no idea what. Then about five minutes later, hotel staff called and told me my wife was making a scene in the lobby." 

"I recall...talking loudly," Emily says judiciously. "I demanded that the staff notify the police that my son was missing, and when they explained that he had apparently left of his own volition, I demanded that they send someone to look for him. I freely admit that I may not have been entirely rational at that moment." 

"When the elevator doors opened in the lobby," Bob says, "the first thing I heard was Emily screaming. Now, Emily isn't a screamer, so hearing that, I knew that there was something going on that I didn't know about. I tried to get her calmed down, but she was...irrational." 

"It was all coming out," Emily says. "The emotion, I mean, not the facts. I had been keeping all of the anxiety and fear and pain and confusion bottled up very tightly inside. I hadn't even allowed myself to speak to the only person who understood the situation - Mike - and now I was confronted by hotel staff who had absolutely no idea what I was going through and all of those emotions...exploded out of me." 

"What were you thinking?" the interviewer asks. 

"I don't believe I was thinking," she shrugs. 

"Not at all?" 

"I wanted my son there," she replies. "I wanted to know where he was at the very least. I imagine it was the motherly instinct of protection acting in a...maladaptive manner." 

"Explain?" the interviewer probes. 

"I had failed to protect my son the day before. We'd both been put into the worst sort of danger and then he had been forced to...fornicate with me. I blamed myself for those failings and for putting him into that situation. I hadn't permitted myself to approach those feelings, really, and now my son had wandered off into a strange city to do who knew what." 

"He was 18 years old," the interviewer says, "not a child." 

Emily frowns, just a bit, and says, "He's my child. No matter what else happens, to a mother part of her child is always the infant that she bore, always needing protection. I had failed to protect him and now I couldn't protect him because he wasn't there. I panicked." 

"And what did you do when you saw your husband?" the interviewer asks. 

Distress washes across Emily's features. "It...wasn't good." 

"I heard Emily screaming before the elevator doors opened," Bob recalls with a frown. "I'd never heard her like that. When I got there she was surrounded by five or six staff - the concierge, a desk clerk, bellboys, a janitor even - and she looked like she'd lost her mind." 

"What was she doing?" the interviewer asks. 

"Yelling very loudly and rather incoherently that someone needed to find Mike immediately," Bob says, "while crying and waving her arms around wildly. With her hair the way it is - very uncontrollable - she can sometimes look a little unhinged even when she's absolutely calm, but with her so frantic and her hair just flying off in all directions, she looked like a complete maniac." 

"What did you do?" 

"I went up and tried to get her to settle down," Bob said. "I mean, she was almost raving. I put my hands on her shoulders and I was as surprised as anyone when she stopped yelling, sort of collapsed against me, and started crying and apologizing." 

"I didn't notice Bob was there until he put his hands on my shoulders," Emily says, "and instantly the panic and fear all left me, simply because the guilt it made me feel left no room for anything else." 

"Why did you feel so much guilt when your husband did that?" asks the interviewer. 

"Because I'd failed Mike so badly. Because I'd wrecked the minivan that we really couldn't afford to replace. Because of the things Mike and I had been forced to do. Because the Visigoths had forced me to strip naked in front of them." Emily sighs heavily. "The main reason, though, was because I had loved the sex with my son so very much more than I ever had with my husband. When Bob put his hands on my shoulders, I had a moment of perfect, crystalline clarity in which I knew that every sexual encounter I ever had with him from then on would be bitterly disappointing. There was simply no doubt of it in my mind. My sex life with my husband, such as it was, had been completely destroyed by our own son." 

"What do you mean, 'such as it was?'" the interviewer asks. 

Emily opens her mouth to speak and then closes it again, and the camera slowly zooms in on her face during the long, and then painfully long moment she takes to compose herself and her answer. She shows a range of emotions - regret, sadness, contemplativeness, and finally a severe curtain of wariness and caution, and when she speaks her tone is measured, careful, and composed. "After the first several months together, Bob and I hadn't ever been particularly sexually active. We seldom made love anymore." 

"Why not? Is he a bad lover?" the interviewer asks. 

"No, of course not," Emily says instantly and with what comes off as well-prepared certainty. "I should rather say that, as the demands of our careers and child-raising and simply living life took their tolls, sex was one of the things that got sacrificed." 

Back to Bob. "I knew of Emily by sight and reputation before I met her. We were sophomores at the University of Minnesota and we had some overlapping friends so we'd see each other at parties. I thought she was gorgeous, to the point where I was intimidated about talking to her." 

"What was her reputation?" the interviewer asks. 

"Word was she was a...a wild girl," Bob laughs. "She liked to do crazy things, like she was an adrenaline junkie. There was one time people told me about where she got up on the roof of this eight- or ten-story building at night that had this steel girder sticking out of the side. She went out and danced on it." 

"I...did that, yes," Emily admits with what her smile makes clear is feigned reluctance. "Several friends of mine from dance and I had gotten up onto the roof of a building with a beautiful view of the Mississippi River and downtown Minneapolis. There may have been a small amount of marijuana involved." 

"It must have been quite the adrenaline rush," the interviewer says. "Is that something you like?" 

"I certainly did," she says. "I did any number of things that I'd be mortified and furious to discover my children doing now. But age and responsibility has a way of calming one down." 

"Your reputation for wildness," the interviewer says. "Was it only for daredevil stunts, or did you have a sexual reputation as well?" 


Folie a Deux, Episode 02



Emily seems a bit discomfited by the question. "I...enjoyed my first two years at college and did a great many things that college students typically do. Sexual activity was a part of that." 

"Emily had the reputation of being a hellcat in bed," Bob says with a smile. "Of course I found that intriguing!" 

"What did you think of Bob before you met him?" the interviewer asks Emily as she reappears onscreen. 

"I thought he was gorgeous. He seemed a little shy and very sweet. I had heard he was majoring in sociology, which I've always found interesting," she replies. "I was hoping I'd get a chance to talk to him." 

Bob again. "I finally got up the nerve to approach her and we ended up spending four hours talking, followed by about six hours in bed. It was a whirlwind sort of thing. We spent every free moment together for about a month, and then we sort of cooled off. I don't think we had as much in common as we thought at first. In fact, I hadn't seen her for a few days when she called and told me she was pregnant." 

Emily reappears as the interviewer asks, "You weren't on birth control?" 

"I can't use birth control, I have side effects that hinder my dancing," she replies. "We used condoms every time. Condoms are not 100% effective." 

"And what did you think when you found out?" 

"I was stunned, obviously." 

"And was it a foregone conclusion that you'd carry it?" 

"Not at all," Emily replied with a decisive shake of her head, "and even less of a conclusion that I would keep the baby. It entailed a major disruption of my life and my plans, after all, including scholarships and other funding. I was in a very great deal of turmoil, and to his everlasting credit Bob was there for me every step of the way. We spent a tremendous amount of time together over the next nine months, and by the time Michael was born, we had decided to try staying together." 

"Were you happy?" 

"In almost every way, Bob is a remarkable man," Emily says after only a moment's hesitation. "He never wavered, and he gave me every confidence that we could live a life together and raise our child - or rather, children, since Olivia came along less than a year later." Careful observers will note that she didn't answer the question. 

Bob reappears as the interviewer inquires, "How was your sex life?" 

"After Olivia came, it fell away to almost nothing," Bob replies. "We had two babies to care for, I found a full-time job with the County, and Emily went back to school for her dance degree as well as holding down part-time jobs to help us make ends meet. At the end of the day we'd be so exhausted that it was all we could do to make it to bed instead of falling asleep on the sofa." 

"Sex became a luxury," Emily says, "to be indulged in when the rare opportunity presented itself. Even then it was more companionable than lusty and transcendent. Neither of us had the time or energy for a robust sex life when the children were young, and by the time they reached their teens, we found it easier to simply stay in our rut." 

"Did you ever go outside your marriage for sex?" the interviewer asks. 

"Not until Mike," she replies simply. 

Bob tells us, "I had one...well, I won't even call it an affair. It was a fling, a woman I was with twice when I was...31 or so. She was a friend of a friend and we met for sex. I broke it off because I felt guilty, and then I simply buried it. I never told Emily." 

Emily again as the interviewer asks, "Did you love your husband?" 

Emily considers for a moment before answering, "Yes, absolutely. I still love him. There's so much to admire about him - his kindness, his compassion, his strength of character, his insight, I could go on. But by the time this was all going on, there was no passion in the marriage. None whatsoever." 

"So I'd been gone for a few hours, I don't even know how long," Mike says. "I'd walked over half the damned city and wound up down by the water. I mean, you pretty much can't go anywhere in San Francisco and not end up down by the water. I actually ended up all the way on the other side of the city, by the Pacific, like right down by the zoo? Just walking on the beach." 

"What had you been doing the whole time?" the interviewer asks. 

"Just walking, man, just trying to sort shit out in my head. I wasn't panicking anymore, I just was so...ashamed. So guilty. I didn't want to face mom again with what I'd done to her. I couldn't even imagine facing dad! I just wanted to run away." 

"Why didn't you?" the interviewer asks. 

Mike smirks and says, "All my shit was back at the hotel. Anyway, I finally turned my phone on and there were like forty messages from mom and dad and Olivia. And I'd only had it on for like three minutes when Olivia called again and was all like, 'Where the fuck are you? Mom is freaking out! What did you do? Did you have a fight?' And then I realized that Mom hadn't told them anything that happened." 

"Was that important?" the interviewer asks. 

"Yeah, I mean I didn't want anybody to know what happened, obviously," Mike replies. "So I just asked Olivia to put mom on. I hadn't even gotten the words out when mom was on the line." 

"Bob had taken me up to our room," Emily says, "and he and Olivia were trying to calm me down, but I was doing little more than crying at that point. When I heard Olivia talking to Mike, I asked her for the phone so I could speak to her." 

"Emily was lying on the bed," says Bob. "When Olivia finally got through to Mike, Emily vaulted up off the bed, leaped across the room - seriously, leaped - and ripped the phone out of her hand." 

"Mom was just bombarding me, like, 'Where are you? What are you doing? Are you safe?' All that stuff. It took a couple of minutes to get her settled down a little bit." 

"Hearing his voice was very...calming," Emily says. "When he told me he was safe and was coming back to the hotel, I felt much more rational and in control of myself." 

"When I could get a word in, I asked mom to go someplace private so we could talk without being overheard," Mike says. "I think she went out on the balcony because I was suddenly hearing wind. I asked her what she'd told them, and she couldn't really remember. She was pretty rattled. I told her just to tell them we'd had a huge fight and things had gotten personal and mean, and we'd talk when I got back to get the details of our story straight. She seemed OK with that." 

"It was good to have something to hold onto," Emily says. "Part of my panic was not knowing what to tell my husband and daughter. Having something to focus on, even if it was a lie, gave me a point around which to order my thoughts." 

"Emily came back in from the balcony," Bob says, "and said that Mike was fine and coming back. She seemed much more composed, but in a very...well, brittle way, as though she could snap again at any moment. Then she said, without any kind of preamble, that she and Mike had had a terrible fight that had left her very upset. Then she announced she was going to take a shower and locked herself in the bathroom for forty minutes." 

"Did you believe her?" the interviewer asks. 

"Of course not," Bob replied with a shrug. "She's the worst liar I've ever known." 

"What did you think was bothering her?" 

"I didn't know. I assumed that, between her and Mike, I'd get the truth out of them soon enough," Bob says. 

"I walked back into the city and called a cab," Mike says. "I got back to the hotel about an hour after the call. Olivia was waiting for me in the lobby, and she was pissed." 

"That you'd argued with your mom and upset her?" asks the interviewer. 

"Ha! No," Mike says. "Well, a little about that, but mostly it was because all this 'drama' was ruining her time with her cousins. She was 17 years old, everything was about her. Normally I sort of blew her off, but I wasn't really in the mood this time so we ended up screaming at each other in the lobby. And then in the elevator. And then for like 15 minutes in the room we shared. And then we hugged and I told her to have a good time." 

"Olivia later told me that she left the room after telling Mike to go fuck himself," Bob says. 

"I took a shower," Mike says, "then called mom to tell her I was coming. Five minutes later I was at her door." 

"I answered the door, let him inside, and then left them alone while I went down to the Market Street Grill for lunch," Bob says. "I figured they needed some time to work out whatever was really happening between them." 

"So there we were finally, face to face," Emily says. Exhaling heavily, she adds, "And now we had to talk." 

"Was it still awkward?" asks the interviewer. 

"Surprisingly, no," Emily replies. "Of course, we didn't discuss what had happened at all." 

"You...didn't?" asks the plainly surprised interviewer. 

"No," she says. "There was no need to at that point. Well, of course there was a need to, a desperate need to, but there was something else to discuss. Namely, the details of the story we'd use." 

"Why didn't you talk about what had happened?" the interviewer asks Mike. 

"Because we had something else we could talk about instead," he replies. "And I think we'd both pretty much decided to avoid that topic as long as humanly possible. We'd have both been delighted if we could go the rest of our lives and never discuss what had happened. And yeah, of course we needed to talk about it, but we didn't." 

"The cover story we devised was, I thought, quite good," Emily says, seeming proud of herself. "We decided that Mike had convinced me that he be allowed to drive Lou, and he was behind the wheel when we struck the deer. I was angry that he had destroyed my minivan and we argued, which spiraled into a series of wholly unfair accusations on each side. However, we had now said our profoundest apologies and forgiven each other, so there was no need for Bob or Olivia to bring it up ever again." 

"And as soon as we'd figured that out," adds Mike, "I immediately got the hell away from her." 

"I was very glad when he left," Emily nods. 

"What did you do then?" the interviewer asks. 

Emily blushes demurely. "I called Bob and asked him to come back to the room for...marital relations." 

"Were you excited?" the interviewer asks. 

"I...was and I wasn't," she says. "Or rather, I was and didn't want to be. And even that's not it. I was and needed it to be something that it wasn't." 

"Can you explain that?" 

"While I was sitting in the room with my son, we were talking about a lie we were creating together, but...I...found myself thinking about certain things that had happened the day before. About how good it felt, and about how much I used to love sex. I used to look forward to it all the time, and feeling what I had felt made me..." 

"Made you what?" 

"Made me want to want it that much again," she says, her blush deepening. "That's why I called Bob." 

"Did you want it with Bob?" the interviewer asks. 

Emily's blush goes maroon. "No. But I had to want him. Then, at that moment, it needed to be him that I wanted." 

"I was surprised," Bob says, "but pleased. I went back and she attacked me the moment I got in the room. It hadn't been like that for us since...well, since before Mike was born. It was great." 

"Was it good?" the interviewer asks Emily. 

She shifts uncomfortably and shakes her head. "No. It was the same as it always was with Bob. He wasn't the one who reminded me how much I used to love sex before I was with him. How could he be?" 

"Honestly, the next couple days were pretty fun," says Mike in voiceover as we see a series of photographs of various members of the family engaging in activities with unidentified people: Bob, Emily, and a dozen other adults at Fisherman's Wharf; Mike with several males around his age at AT&T Park for a Giants game; Olivia with a large group of teenage girls all crowding into a selfie with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. "There were all kinds of cousins there, some I never even met before, and it was fun just hanging out and doing whatever. And I only saw mom in the mornings and evenings, like good morning-good night stuff." 

"Did you think about what had happened between you and her?" the interviewer asks as Mike's face reappears. 

"Yeah. I mean, of course I did," Mike says. "Even when I was doing something else, every couple of minutes I'd start thinking about it." 

"What, specifically?" 

Mike shrugs. "How good it all had been. It was the best sex I'd even had, but there was more than that. It just felt so right when it was happening. I think that was what was fucking me up. I mean, yeah, good sex is great, but when we were actually doing it? We didn't even hesitate because it all felt so...right. We just clicked so damned hard, like nobody else I'd ever been with. That's really what I couldn't stop thinking of." 

"It was constantly in my mind," Emily tells us. "Constantly. Even when I was with Bob...with him sexually, I mean. Especially then." 

"How did that make you feel?" the interviewer asks. 

Emily shrugs, then offers a wan smile and says, "Hollow." 

"Did you think about Mike in a concrete way," the interviewer asks, "or in a more abstract..." 

"I don't understand what you're asking," Emily says. 

"I mean when you were with Bob, did you visualize Mike? Did you imagine yourself with Mike again? Or was it more the sensations you'd gotten with him?" 

Emily nods. "Oh. It was a combination of both of those things. After having felt those sensations at Mike's hand, I couldn't pretend that I hadn't felt them, or that Mike hadn't been responsible. In the same way, I couldn't pretend that Bob could give me the same thing. I hated that knowledge, but I couldn't avoid it." 

"I kept thinking about the way I'd felt when mom was down on her knees," Mike says. "I kept thinking about how it felt when I went inside her. I kept thinking about how strong and how complete it made me feel. I mean, I kept coming back to that no matter how hard I tried. And it made me feel so. Goddamned. Guilty." 

The screen goes black and we see one line of text in white lettering: 

June 22 

"Bob was certain something else had happened that we weren't telling him," Emily says. "That morning, he asked me about what had happened. Mike and I had been avoiding each other very deliberately, and in retrospect it was probably obvious to Bob that there was a reason beyond an automobile accident. I told him again the lie that Mike and I had agreed upon. I...am not sure I'm a very good liar." 

"The day of the wedding was foggy and rainy," Mike recalls. "And cold. When San Francisco gets chilly, it's chilly. I hadn't seen mom for more than an hour total over the past couple days combined, and always when dad was there too. Like, for breakfasts and then a little bit after we all got back to the hotel. But this was going to be a whole different thing. We were going to be spending the whole day together - well, afternoon and evening, between the ceremony and the reception and the dance and everything. And we were gonna be busy, yeah, but we were going to have deal with each other. And with dad. I was nervous." 

"How was your father treating you?"the interviewer asks. 

"He knew something was up," Mike says. "I know he didn't suspect what it was, but he knew it was big and that mom and I were avoiding it. That morning after breakfast, he pulled me aside and asked me about it again. I told him the same thing, and it was like, yeah, he wasn't buying it. It wasn't like he called me a liar or anything. He just asked me to talk to mom privately before the wedding." 

"And did you?" 

"No. I wanted to. I knew I should have. I knew we needed to just open up with each other and be honest, but I just didn't know how to start. It was...too big for me." 

"It was a summer wedding, even though it was cold and miserable, so I had to dress like it," Emily tells in voiceover as we see a picture of her from that day. Her dress is a pleasant, unobtrusive yellow frock with lace trim, suitable for a woman in her late 30s, except perhaps that it's a touch shorter than one might expect. The relative brevity and her heels show off her perfectly-toned legs to great advantage. "In retrospect it might have been wiser to wear something longer." 

"The wedding was this huge event," Mike says, "so they'd gotten Grace Cathedral." We now see a series of stunning shots of the cavernous interior of the cathedral, with its gorgeous stained glass and murals. In voiceover, Mike continues, "We were all pretty excited because the groom was the son of a Hollywood bigwig and there were going to be all sorts of stars there. Olivia had stayed with some of the cousins the night before and was getting dressed and stuff over there, so it was just me, mom, and dad. And I thought it was going to be OK until I met up with them in the hallway and saw mom's dress." 

"What was wrong with your mother's dress?" the interviewer asks. "It seems quite normal." 

"It showed lots of leg," Mike explains with a grin. "She has amazing legs, and...well, when I saw them I just kept thinking about what was between them, about being between them. About having them wrapped around me. When I saw her wearing that dress for the first time I had this crystal-clear vision in my mind of pushing her up on the table, flipping the dress up, and...well, you know. Sex. And she was standing right next to dad when I had that picture in my mind, which like tripled the guilt I was already feeling." 

"I saw where his eyes went," Emily says, a faint blush beginning to color her cheeks, "and I knew what he was thinking. And because I knew he was thinking that, I began to think it too. It was...remarkably awkward, given that Bob was standing less than a foot away from me." 

"Of course I didn't notice anything then," Bob says. "I was probably looking at my phone or something. There were dozens and dozens of text messages flying back and forth and I was trying to keep up with what was going on." 

"I knew then that it was gonna be a tough night," Mike says. "And no matter how hard I tried, I just kept looking at her legs." 

"It made me profoundly uncomfortable," Emily admits. "Not, of course, just because he was looking or even because Bob was there, but because there was a small part of me that didn't find it unpleasurable. It was the same part of me that had so much loved what had happened between us. And when I say the part was small, I was acutely aware that it might become larger if I encouraged it, and that terrified me, but at the same time I...well, I didn't crush that part. I don't even know if I could have. I think that part of me had been awakened from a long sleep and couldn't be put down again so easily. That part of me felt proud that Mike was looking at my legs and thinking...carnally about me, and was enjoying thinking the same about him." 

"What did you do with that part of yourself?" the interviewer asks. 

Emily licks her lips delicately. "I tried to isolate it. The shame was acute, and I know I leaned in and grabbed Bob's arm reflexively, as though he were a shield of some sort. And I..." Here she pauses and her flush deepens into an actual blush before she continues, "I looked at Mike to see what effect I was having on him." 

"Looked at him?" the interviewer asks. 

Emily's blush gets redder. "In the front. His front. Of his pants." 

"I saw mom's eyes go right to my crotch like it was a magnet," Mike says, "and if I wasn't hard before, that made me so hard it hurt. And she just stared, her eyes kinda wide and her mouth open just a little bit, and God, all I could do was imagine the things she'd done with her mouth and her hands and her pussy, how insanely good that all felt and how completely fucking wrong it was that all of a sudden I wanted it again, and I knew she wanted it again too. And that was deeply, deeply fucked up."  




Folie a Deux, Episode 02



"I don't imagine most people can understand what a horrific moment it was," Emily says intensely. "To be coerced into sex with my son in the first place, and then to be standing in a hotel hallway with him aroused by me and I aroused by him, and my arm around my husband. It was a very quiet elevator ride to the lobby." 

"It got worse," Mike says. "We had to take a taxi to the church, and dad had me get in first and mom next, so she was sandwiched between us after he got in. She was pressed right up against me, shoulder against shoulder, thigh against thigh. I could feel her warmth. I kept trying to think of something else, but...yeah, get real. Not gonna happen." 

Emily will only say, "I wished it had been pleasant so we could have walked." 

We see a series of photographs of Grace Cathedral exterior and interior, from posed shots of the entire wedding party on the steps (the bride is lovely, the groom and groomsmen are handsome, and the bridesmaids are attired in a shade of peach that makes them look plump and sickly so as not to upstage the bride) to celebrities arriving (Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner walk in arm in arm, Johnny Depp climbs out of a limo in a bizarre ensemble, Emma Stone smiles hugely as she bends to accept a flower from a little girl, Julianne Moore stands laughing with George Clooney). In voiceover, Emily says, "To say we were dazzled would be an understatement. We were simple provincials from the Midwest, and suddenly it seemed we recognized someone famous everywhere we looked. And everything was so lovely! It all seemed like quite a fairy tale." 

"Grace Cathedral is pretty big, so it's not like mom was sitting on my lap or anything," Mike says. "But we were close, and she was still wearing that dress, and I kept looking." 

"Mike was still...aroused," Emily says. "It was quite obvious, and I found it difficult to keep my eyes away from it." 

"Every few minutes," Mike says, "one of us would catch the other one looking, and it was the most embarrassing thing! I mean, my cousin was getting married in a cathedral surrounded by celebrities and rich people, and I can't stop perving on her and she can't stop perving on me. It was getting out of control, and I hurt. I mean I hurt." 

"His erection looked rather painful," Emily says demurely and with a blush that the little smile at the corner of her mouth belies. 

"So the ceremony is going on and there's singing and scripture readings and shit," Mike says, "and all I can think is how good it felt to sink my cock into my mom and how good it would feel to do it again and how much I know she'd love it too and my dad was right there and we were in a fucking church and I had to do something about it because it was driving me nuts and my mom wouldn't stop looking at my crotch like she was a starving woman looking at a steak - so I...excused myself and went to the bathroom." 

"When Mike slipped out, I knew that he was going to...to masturbate," Emily says, and it's clear she's working hard to keep a smile off her face. "And as guilty as it made me feel - and it made me feel terribly guilty - I felt a horrible, thrilling element of pride. My son had to go masturbate himself because I was wearing a short dress and he could see my legs, and because of the sex we'd had. I'd lived without sex for so long that I'd forgotten it, forgotten the power that arousing someone else can fill you with. It's despicable, I know, but at that moment I was so...wet." 

"What did you do?" the interviewer asks. 

She blushes deeper, but the smile breaks out a bit more. "I sat and looked smug, I think. And...I imagined what Mike was doing and what it looked like. I tried not to, but I didn't seem to be able to control my thoughts. Images kept creeping in no matter what I did." 

"I got into the bathroom," Mike says. "Nobody else was around, thank God. I went into a stall, pulled it out, stroked it maybe twice, and then came so hard my knees almost buckled." 

"What were you thinking about when you came?" the interviewer asks. 

Mike laughs. "I didn't have time to think. It went too fast. After that I felt a lot better. I cleaned up and headed back to the service." 

"When Mike came back, I couldn't help but look at his face," Emily says. "He wouldn't meet my eyes, but now I learned what he looked like after he orgasmed, and it was obvious that he had just done so." 

"How did that make you feel?" the interviewer asks. 

"Shameful," she replies, "and triumphant. Mostly shameful, especially because seeing that expression on his face made me even more aroused. Mike came back and sat next to me and I think we kept our eyes to ourselves for the rest of the service, but as soon as the service was done, I went to the restroom and..." 

"And?" the interviewer asks. 

Emily goes red. "And I relieved tension." 

"So. I'd jerked off to my mom in the middle of a church wedding," Mike says sheepishly. "That's one thing off the bucket list." 

"The reception was at the Ritz-Carlton, just a couple of blocks away," Bob tells us. "The sun had come out during the receiving line after the ceremony, so we walked with a group of relatives. I had noticed some tension between Emily and Mike during the service, and once it was over they wouldn't even look at each other." 

"And you still had no clue it was sexual tension?" the interviewer asks. 

"No. It's not like you logically leap to the conclusion that your wife and your son are having problems in their sexual relationship," Bob says a bit harshly. "I thought that it was more of their argument leaking through, and I was getting tired of it. Emily walked at the very front of the family group heading to the reception and Mike walked at the back. We were all heading home the next day and I made up my mind that I was going to lock those two together until they sorted out whatever was bothering them once we got back to Minneapolis." 

"There was some time before the reception started," Mike says, "but I didn't have to hang with mom so it was all right. And with the edge taken off I could actually think of other things. It was kind of like a vacation." 

"The dinner was lovely," Emily recalls. "The Ritz-Carlton is gorgeous, of course, and the food was wonderful. None of the celebrities had stayed for the reception - no one I recognized, at least - and so it felt like more of a family affair. Although...well, Mike, Bob, Olivia and I were all seated at the same table and there were a few moments of...tension." 

"I was to mom's right," Mike says, "and our feet kept meeting under the table. I mean it probably happens all the time to everyone when you have four people eating at a small table, but we were both really noticing it this time. And every time they touched we'd pull back fast and look at each other with the guiltiest expressions. It would have been funny if I had been watching two other people go through it because it was just awkward and stupid and it kept happening over and over again. But it sucked to be the one dealing with it." 

"After dinner came the dance," Bob says, "so of course Emily had me out on the floor as soon as she could. I suggested she dance with Mike, and she turned white and said no. So she and I danced almost continuously." 

"I watched mom dance with dad," Mike tells us, "and she was hanging all over him, just draped on him in a way she didn't usually do when they danced. And she never even looked at me once, which was as good as staring at me the whole time. Of course I was watching her." 

"I knew Mike was watching me," Emily says. "Of course I did. He was making no secret of it. After a little while I realized that I was dancing especially close to my husband. It hadn't been deliberate before then, but it certainly became so once I had realized." 

"Why is that?" the interviewer asks. 

"Not to make Mike jealous," she answers quickly. 

"I don't think she was consciously doing it to piss me off," Mike tells us, "but I think it was definitely a 'This is my man, not you,' kind of thing, and it did make me jealous. I mean, I'd have died of shame and embarrassment if she were hanging off me like that, don't get me wrong, but a part of me was pretty envious, which is why I ended up with Brianna." 

We now see a series of pictures of a young woman of about 18, a brunette with a dazzling smile and an hourglass figure. In the first she is on a beach in a bikini that shows off her figure to advantage; the second is a duckfaced selfie with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background; the last is her at the reception in a slinky blue dress with one arm around the bride and another around a bridesmaid who strongly resembles a slightly-older version of Brianna. 

The subtitle reads Brianna Salazar. 

"Brianna was the little sister of one of the bridesmaids," Mike tells us on voiceover. "She was my age and when I asked her to dance, she said yes. Girls who aren't married tend to get pretty horny at weddings, and she had sneaked some alcohol anyway and was pretty loose. By like the second dance we did, she had her tongue down my throat." 

We see a disapproving Emily, who shakes her head and says, "Mike was making a display on the dance floor with that girl. They were kissing and pawing each other and making quite a scene. Bob seemed amused by it, but I certainly wasn't! I was about to send him over to break the pair of them up when suddenly the girl led him off the dance floor and right out the door! Of course I knew what they were going to do." 

"Were you jealous?" the interviewer asks. 

"No!" Emily snaps entirely too quickly. "I was not. I was ashamed that my son would be so accepting of the advances of a drunken...floozy and make a spectacle of himself that way in public. I wanted Bob to go stop them as they left, but he refused." 

"Go get 'em, champ!" Bob says cheerfully. 

"She pulled me right upstairs and into bed," Mike remembers. "We went at it like three times." 

"Was it good?" the interviewer asks. 

"Well, yeah," Mike replied, sounding less than convincing. "I mean, yeah, it was good. It was just that a few days before I'd had the best sex ever and I hadn't stopped thinking about it since, so it sort of paled next to that. But hell, it was fun." 

"Did you think about your mother during it?" 

"Of course I did," Mike says with a shrug. "I mean, I didn't wish it was her in bed with me or anything. Nothing that...well, that concrete. She was just always there in my mind. Mom was so good, and being with her felt so perfect. Brianna was nice and enthusiastic and good and everything, but...well, whatever comes after 'perfect' is going to be a letdown, right?" 

"Mike's behavior left me quite upset," Emily sniffs. "I didn't enjoy the night very much after that, and Bob and I left early." 

"I made it back to our hotel about 3:30 in the morning," Mike says. "Olivia wasn't there yet. She got back after I was already in bed. We had a 2:00 PM flight back to Minneapolis that day." 

"We went through a pocket of turbulence as we passed over the Rockies," Emily recalls. "Mike got a little airsick. All I could do was think that there had been some turbulence at about that spot on the way out as well. I'd always liked the mountains before, but they'd lost their luster for me, I think it's fair to say." 

"The next couple days after we got back were no better between Emily and Mike," Bob tells us. "I'd had a fleeting hope that they'd leave their troubles on the coast, but if anything it had gotten worse. They couldn't even be in the same room with each other." 

"The tension was palpable," Emily admits. "Furthermore, I could tell when Mike entered a room I was in even when I had my back turned. I could feel when he put his eyes on me. I would tense and..." she trails off. 

"And?" the interviewer asks. 

She blushes again and shrugs. "And it would become uncomfortable." 

"I was sick to my stomach for the first couple of days," Mike says. "I couldn't stop thinking about her, about it, and there was this mass of guilt and lust and self-loathing, so much self-loathing. I took three cold showers a day and nothing helped. Every time I saw her, every time I even heard her voice, I'd get this massive erection and there'd be this spike of...of longing and disgust and need and almost nausea. I wasn't sleeping. I could barely eat. No way I could look her in the eye." 

"It was very difficult," Emily confirms. "I recall once when I went to take a shower and discovered that Mike was already in there. The door was locked. I didn't see him in the shower. But I knew he was there with the water splashing over his nude body and the air would be hot and steamy and I had the most perfectly vivid image of slipping into the bathroom silently, disrobing, opening the shower door and stepping inside, seeing the look of shock on his face and silencing him with a kiss, and then him putting me against the wall and...taking me. I could picture how my legs would wrap around him. I could imagine how the water would feel running between us as we...mated. The image lasted only a moment, but it left me incredibly aroused! 

"And then I turned around and saw Bob," she continues, her face darkening. "He wasn't looking at me. He was doing something else, not paying me any mind whatsoever, but the sight of him made me feel...unclean. Deceitful. As though I'd deliberately betrayed him." She shakes her head fiercely and wipes a tear from the corner of her eye. "I wanted the thoughts of Mike to go away. I wanted things to be the way they'd been before the accident. I wanted my son back. But I wasn't in control of my thoughts." 

"After a couple of days, I was completely fed up," Bob says. "By the third day Emily and Mike couldn't even be in the same room together. I was eating breakfast with Emily and we were talking about some work we needed to do in the back yard. Olivia came in, we talked with her a bit and then went on talking about the yard. A few minutes later Mike walked in, and Emily jumped up in the middle of a sentence and said she had to go. She actually left for work 20 minutes early because Mike walked into the room. I'd had enough." 

Against a black background, we see: 

June 27 

"The day after that was Saturday," Mike says. "I'd planned to go to a backyard party with some friends of mine. Hannah was supposed to be there and I was going to ask her out." 

We now see a photograph of a girl of about 18 years, a pretty, freckled redhead with a happy smile; the subtitle is Hannah Williamson. In voiceover, Mike says, "I was looking forward to it because I figured if I could get involved with another girl, I could stop obsessing about mom. I thought I could move past it. 

"But then dad walked into the room," Mike continues as we see his face again. "He told me to follow him. He took me into the living room, where mom was...dusting or cleaning or something. I remember the look of panic in her eyes very clearly." 

"I had known Bob was getting tired of the strain between Mike and me," Emily recalls uneasily. "I didn't know he was about to do something so precipitous." 

"I told them that I didn't know what had happened on the trip," Bob tells us, "but I was tired of it and it had to stop. Olivia was going to be gone for the day and I told them I was leaving too, and they had to address it. I told them they could yell or scream or throw accusations or whatever, but when I got back, I wanted their problems sorted out and whatever was bothering them to be resolved. And then I left." 

"Mom and I just stood there staring at each other for the longest time," Mike says. "We knew dad was right, we needed to talk, but neither of us knew how to start." 

"After several seconds I sat down on the sofa and had him sit next to me," Emily says. "Neither of us was comfortable. We were both quite stiff and awkward." 

"I didn't want to sit next to her," Mike agrees. "Across the room would have been more comfortable. But I sat down and looked at the floor and tried not to smell her." 

"Smell her?" the interviewer asks. 

"Yeah. It was a warm day and she'd been working. She had a little sweat going, just enough to make her glisten. I could smell it very faintly and it reminded me of when we were together, her scent - all her scents. It was making me hard." 

"After some time I said something inane," Emily tells us. "Something along the lines of 'You mustn't blame yourself' or 'Nothing that happened was your fault.' I felt stupid even as I said it." 

"Wasn't it true?" the interviewer asks. 

"It didn't matter that it was true," Emily says impatiently. "It was irrelevant. The tension between us at that point was much less about what had happened and much more about our reactions to it. We'd both loved it and neither of us could stop thinking about the other in that way. It wasn't about what we'd done, it was about what we wanted." 

"Which was?" the interviewer probes. 

"Each other," Emily says with an eloquent shrug. 

"So we were just sitting there spouting bullshit at each other," Mike recalls with a disgusted shake of his head. "Just this meaningless crap. It was all, 'I was just glad you weren't hurt, oh it could have been much worse, we got away lucky if you think about it," and none of it was even touching on what we both needed to talk about. After like three minutes I wanted to scream but we just kept jabbering like idiots at each other." 

"One thing working at a university has taught me is that if you ladle enough inanity on any problem, it goes away," Emily says. "I was beginning to think we were doing just that when I said, quite casually, that I was disappointed in how he behaved at the wedding reception when he went off with a girl." 

"When she said that, it was like this weird shadow play we were doing just dropped, just fell apart," Mike says, "and I got pissed. I was like, 'What the fuck? I'm an adult, you got no claim on me!'" 

"Mike told me that my reproach of him was about jealousy," Emily says, "which was ridiculous. As his mother, I would have chided him about promiscuous sex regardless of what had happened between us. This didn't mean I hadn't been jealous, because I'd been incredibly jealous, but at that moment I wasn't about to be scolded by my son for trying to be a mother to him, so I replied that his attitude was inappropriate." 

"So she yells at me that I'd better remember who I'm talking to, and I yell that she'd been trying to make me jealous by hanging off dad during the dance, and then she yells that I had a lot of nerve going after her for being affectionate with my father," Mike says. "We were both yelling and pointing our fingers in each other's faces and then she told me that I'd been a pig for jerking off to her during the wedding. And that's when we both got mad." 

"Mike informed me that he knew that I had...pleasured myself after the wedding," Emily says. "Furthermore, he said that I had been...looking at him lustfully when I thought he wasn't looking." 

"Had you?" the interviewer asks. 

Emily blushes. "I may have been. Occasionally." 

"She didn't like having that thrown in her face," Mike says with a frown. "She told me that I'd been acting like an asshole since our time together. Well, she didn't use that word. I think she said 'uncouth' or something like that. She said that I hadn't made an effort to talk about what had happened, which was like, yeah no shit, neither did you, you know?" 

"There were other words exchanged, each of us accusing the other of things we were equally guilty of doing," Emily says as a blush begins to color her cheeks. "After some period of time, I told him that I thought he had actually enjoyed what we had done." 




Folie a Deux, Episode 02



"And that completely pissed me off," Mike says, "because I absolutely had enjoyed it and I felt like shit about it, and furthermore, she'd enjoyed it just as much as I had. I told her...well, I told her that when she was begging me to fuck her, I knew it wasn't just for show. I told her that she'd loved sucking my cock and she'd loved getting fucked by it and if she denied it she was a liar." 

"What did she say to that?" the interviewer asks. 

Mike grins. "She hit me. Smacked me right across the face, this big, loud slap. Mom's a strong gal. I saw stars." 

"And what did you do?" the interviewer asks. 

Mike's grin widens. "I grabbed her by the shoulders, yanked her to me, and kissed her so hard my lips hurt." 

Emily's flush has deepened. "I instantly felt dreadful about that slap, but a moment later I had completely forgotten about it. Mike simply crushed me to him and put his lips on mine and...oh, my. That kiss. He kissed me like he owned me, and suddenly all the anger went out of me. Every bit of it simply fled. I got lightheaded. To be perfectly honest, I felt for a moment as though I were flying." 

"She just stiffened in my arms," Mike tells us. "Her whole body went rigid and she just held herself there while I kissed her. She didn't kiss me back. She didn't try to get away. I don't even think she breathed. She just took it. I held that kiss for a minute, maybe, and then I pulled back enough that I could see her face. I wanted to know if I had an asskicking coming." 

Emily has a dreamy look on her face. "I stared at him. I don't know for how long. I don't even remember moving, but suddenly I was kissing him back quite fiercely and pulling at his shirt." 

"When she kissed me, it was on," Mike recalls. "That was a crazy kiss. Her mouth was so hungry! Her tongue was on mine and she was pulling at my shirt like she was pissed off that I was wearing it, so pretty soon I wasn't wearing it. Then I ripped her shirt open." 

"I was wearing an old, baggy tee shirt," Emily says, her eyes gleaming, "and Mike tried to pull if off of me but I was busy getting his shirt off so he couldn't get it over my arms. So he simply grabbed it in both fists and ripped it open, right down the middle! The tearing sound was so loud, so shocking, but so erotic!" 

"What was erotic about it?" the interviewer asks. 

Emily laughs merrily. "He wanted me naked so badly that he couldn't wait to pull my shirt off, he simply destroyed it. What could be more erotic than inspiring that sort of ardor in a lover?" She doesn't seem to notice that she's used that particular word to describe her son. 

"When I tore her shirt, she made this kind of purr," Mike says, rolling the word in his mouth and plainly enjoying its feel. "She trilled her tongue in my mouth and she grabbed my back, just sank her fingers in and yanked me to her. She's a strong girl and she pulled me to her so our bellies were touching. Her skin was so hot it felt like it was glowing. I could feel her heart just hammering against me." 

"Did you think of stopping?" the interviewer asks. 

"Hell no!" Mike says emphatically. "There was so much tension between us, once we found a release, it was gonna get released." 

"I didn't think of stopping it," Emily admits. "The only thoughts I had were about how good it felt and about how much I needed it." 

"No guilt?" the interviewer asks. 

Emily shakes her head. "Not then. Only lust. The feel of his skin on mine was bliss. His hands and arms were so strong! And his kiss..." she sighs happily, a dreamy expression on her face. "Guilt wouldn't have stood a chance." 

"I tore off her bra the same way I'd done her shirt," Mike says. "It was one of those front-fasten things, which I didn't know, so I was fumbling in back for the clasp and just getting pissed. Her nipples were so hard they felt like they were poking through the cups and I wanted them in my hands, I wanted them in my mouth. I moved my hands back in front and found the clasp, but by then I was like 'Fuck that!' and just ripped it open and tore it off." 

Emily looks so aroused that she's about to swoon. "I'd thought I'd been aroused when he'd torn off my shirt, but when he did it to the bra as well! I don't think I'd ever been that excited. He was so strong, so forceful, and his arousal was so overwhelming! I had an image of him shredding everything I was wearing and simply taking me...oh my!" 

"I'm not sure how we ended up on the couch," Mike says. "I think we tripped over it and she went over backwards and took me with her, I don't know. All I know is all of a sudden we were like half-on, half-off the couch and I had her left nipple in my mouth. It was so hard it felt like a pebble against my tongue, and her fist was wrapped up in my hair so she was holding my head in place and arching her back up into me, like she was fucking my mouth with her nipple. She had her other hand down my shorts in back, pulling my ass toward her. And she was talking dirty again." 

"Oh yes, I was absolutely using filthy language," Emily nods, a bright blush on her cheeks. "I always do when I have thrilling sex." 

"And this was thrilling?" the interviewer asks. 

Emily nods again, fiercely, as her nostrils flare. "I felt drunk. The way he was treating me, manhandling me, roughly tossing me about and simply taking what he wanted had me beside myself. This was different from the first time, because now I knew how good it would be. I knew what an amazing lover my son was and I knew how perfectly we meshed together. I knew that this would be a transcendent encounter, and that this time we could do it however we wanted to, without prying eyes. This was just us, and I wanted him so badly it was all I could do to hold him and beg him like a cheap slut." 

"I went back and forth between her nipples, just devouring her," Mike says, "and before long she's reaching down and messing with my shorts, trying to get them open, but the angle was weird and she was pressed against me so hard that she was having a hell of a time." He laughs and adds, "She tried to just tear them open like I did with her clothes but they had a big rivet for a fastener instead of a button so she just got pissed off. It was cute." 

"I wanted him naked," Emily says emphatically. "I wanted every stitch off him and me, I wanted skin on skin - I wanted the sweat that two bodies make when fucking on a hot summer day, that natural lubricant that makes bodies slide against each other. The feel, the smell, the taste of a lover's sweat when I lick it off his skin, it's all like a symphony to me. It makes me feel so connected." 

"Yeah, it was pretty clear what she wanted," Mike tells us, "and I knew she'd be wet enough to fuck already. She was so worked up I could smell her through her shorts. But I wasn't going to give her my cock yet. I had something else in mind." 

"I was so frustrated when he moved down and took his shorts out of my reach!" Emily says, flushed and excited at the memory. "I wanted him inside me so bad! But then he began to kiss and lick his way down and I realized what he had planned!" 

"Mom has the most amazing stomach," Mike tells us in an appreciative tone. "Every muscle is absolutely perfectly defined, there's not an ounce of flab or sag - she works out like a maniac to be the best dancer she can be, and dancing is insanely hard work. So I was nuzzling my way down over one muscle after another and her stomach was just heaving - she was sucking in breaths, holding them while I licked or sucked or nibbled and then letting them go with a massive whoosh and sucking in another. I got to her belly button -" 

"My navel is very sensitive," Emily giggles, despite the fact that it's impossible to imagine her giggling when she's not aroused. "It's an incredibly erogenous zone for me and one that Bob had always ignored, and now I had my magnificent son's lips massaging it, his tongue flicking it. I was a whimpering, gasping mess." 

"Her whole belly vibrated against me," Mike recalls. "It was like I'd struck a chime and she was just resonating to a chord only she could hear. She was huffing little gasps, like pushing air out and sucking it in all at once, and god her skin was hot! It was crazy, she was ready to go off like a rocket, and all I could think was how much I wanted to watch her come when I put my mouth on her pussy." 

"I was wearing a tight pair of shorts," Emily says. "He tugged them and my panties down over my hips and then grabbed my legs and put them straight up in the air. I began to push my shorts and panties up my legs so I could kick them off, but when I got them to mid-thigh Mike said, 'No. Leave them there' in a voice that was so amazingly commanding that I instantly froze and let my hands fall." 

"Why did you tell her to leave her clothes on?" the interviewer asks Mike. 

Mike smiles and says, "Because I could. She wanted to take them off and I wanted her to know I was in charge. I wanted her to understand that I was in charge. So I told her to leave them on." 

"Did you consider disobeying your son?" the interviewer asks Emily. 

She grins salaciously. "Not for a second. Not when he instructed me in that voice. I felt chills up and down my spine and my pussy spasmed - I couldn't refuse even if I'd wanted to!" 

"I pushed her legs back a little so her pussy was displayed to me perfectly," Mike relates, his eyes glittering. "It was this perfect, vertical slit, the inner lips peeking out, her clit hard on the top. She shaves on the sides so it was framed just perfectly. I just took a moment to admire it, absorb how beautiful it was, how perfect. I put my nose right next to her and took a long, deep breath so I could savor that smell...and then she whimpered." 

"I was so crazy to have his mouth on me," Emily laughs, "or his fingers in me, or anything, and he was down there just looking and smelling for the longest time! It was infuriating! I didn't even know I'd whimpered, but suddenly he laughed and said, 'Oh is that so?' in this deep, sexy voice." She closes her eyes, a sensual smile spreading itself across her face. "And then he put his lips on me." 

"I leaned in a fraction more and pressed my lips right onto her pussy, right over her opening," Mike tells us, obviously delighting in the memory. "I pushed against her with my lips, moving my head in little circles, nice and slow, and she opened for me like a flower. The smell was amazing, the sensation of her against my mouth, the way she was breathing, the way she trembled...God damn." He shakes his head and chuckles, obviously aroused by the memory. "And then I tasted her for the first time." 

"What was that like?" the interviewer asks. 

Mike's expression goes a little wistful, as though he were imagining tasting her again right now. "Perfect. I don't know how to explain it any better than that. It was just...perfect. It was how a woman ought to taste, how she ought to smell and sound and feel. It was every wet dream I'd ever had all in one, even wet dreams I didn't know I had." 

"That sounds very...dramatic," the interviewer points out, sounding just a touch dubious. 

Mike shrugs and smiles. "Maybe it does. I can't help it. I don't care. It was just...when you find something you've always been looking for even when you didn't know you were looking for it, it just clicks. It all snaps into place and you know it. You know it by how right it feels. How natural it feels, even when you know it shouldn't feel natural and it shouldn't feel right." 

"And did you know that?" the interviewer asks. 

"Oh yeah," Mike smiles ruefully. "Even then, right in the moment, there was that little voice in my head calling me a sick bastard for doing this, for doing it voluntarily and loving it. But fuck it, I could ignore that voice, so I did." 

Emily reappears as the interviewer asks, "How did it feel when he began to lick you?" 

Emily rumbles something that sounds like a delighted purr. "Heaven. It had been so long!" 

"Bob seldom did that to you?" asks the interviewer. 

She laughs. "Bob never did it to me. Well, maybe a few times in the beginning, before I got pregnant, but he was never enthusiastic about it and he was never good at it. He never wanted to do it, and when one doesn't enjoy or want to do something, one isn't likely to be good at it. I think I'd forgotten how wonderful it felt to be licked by a man who loves doing it, but one swipe of the tongue from Mike and I remembered!" 

"She was so wet she was streaming," Mike recalls with considerable joy. "It was like a flood gate had been opened and she was pouring out against my tongue, on my cheeks, my chin, into my mouth, and that was right from the first lick. She gave this strangled little cry that was so fucking sexy, like she was feeling more pleasure than she even had a sound for, and that just made me dive in and go for it even harder. I didn't just want to make her come, I wanted to make her forget the world. I wanted to make her forget there was a time before or after I was going down on her. I wanted to rattle her teeth loose." 

"Oh my God," Emily says in a half-moan, eyes nearly lidded as she rocks on her seat. "I'd never been licked like that before! He was devouring me, his tongue was everywhere inside and outside all at once, up and down, in and out, fucking me with it, licking my clit, sucking my lips - it felt like a hundred tongues on me! My son is a miracle worker with his mouth, and I was on the edge of coming almost instantly." 

"I could feel the tension in mom's body, the way she quivered, the way she was holding her breath, and I knew I could send her over," Mike says. "But I didn't want to. I didn't want to give her the easy orgasm. I wanted to put it off and put it off until she was ready to explode and then shove her over the edge and make her come apart and then hold her there for as long as I could. So I backed off a little!" 

"Aaahhh!" Emily cries theatrically. "I was so close! Just one more lick of my clit would have given it to me, but pulled back and started teasing!" 

"I licked her lips," Mike tells us with a grin. "I suckled them - she loved that, but I could tell she wouldn't come just from that so I did it a lot. I licked her thighs, I nuzzled her mons, I sucked her perineum - hell, I even gave her ass a couple licks." 

"No one had ever done that to me!" Emily says, her face flushed bright and her eyes wide, "And I liked it!" 

"And did you like everything he was doing?" the interviewer asks. 

"Yes!" Emily laughs. "And noooooo! I wanted to come so badly I hurt! I know I was begging him to let me come." 

"Oh yeah, she was begging," Mike laughs. "'Let me come, let me fucking come, fuck me suck me JUST LET ME COME PLEEEAAAASE!'" 

"And did you?" asks the interviewer. 

Mike's grin goes wicked. "No. I like hearing her beg." 

"It wasn't long before I was a wreck," Emily admits happily, obviously grinding her bottom enthusiastically into her chair. "A writhing, squirming, whimpering, vulgar, begging, pleading mess. And Mike was so...wonderfully unmoved by it! He was in command, in complete command of me and what was happening, and all I could do is lie there and take whatever he decided to give me. I was utterly in his hands." 

"How did that make you feel?" the interviewer asks. 

"Hot. Safe. Frustrated. Adored. Worshipped. Desperate. Nearly mad. More aroused than I can describe. I wanted it to end instantly and I wanted it to keep going forever. I hated and loved every single second of it." 

"I don't know how long I kept her on the edge," Mike says. "Long enough that she ran out of dirty talk and was just moaning and saying 'please' over and over. So that's when I decided she'd earned an orgasm. I put my lips around her clit and she...levitated." 

"What do you mean?" the interviewer asks, sounding amused. 

"She came so hard her whole body lifted up off the couch and slammed into my mouth and she just hung in midair!" Mike is laughing. "Yeah I know she didn't really, but I swear that's what it felt like, like I'd made her come so hard she was floating!" 

"I...sort of remember that orgasm," Emily says dreamily, her face flushed and shining with perspiration, her eyes a little unfocused; she is apparently no longer grinding on the chair. "I felt like my whole body was coming apart into little pieces and flying off in every direction. It all becomes rather blurry after that." 

"Mom screamed," Mike says. "Nothing she said made sense and it was all filth, but she screamed. It was just a bunch of swearing, mostly variations on 'Fuck,' but with stuff like 'Suck my cunt' thrown in. And she said 'Shit' a lot. A LOT." 

"Your mum doesn't normally swear, does she?" asks the interviewer. 

"Fuck no!" Mike grins. "You gotta get her revved up before she cuts loose, but when she does...well, it's all filth, all the time. It's hot!" 

"What was her orgasm like?" 

"Long!" Mike laughs. "Or 'multiple,' more accurately. She just kept coming in waves, over and over and over. She was spasming at first, like bucking against me, but she couldn't keep that up. By the end she was just twitching and whimpering. And the sexiest thing - her eyes rolled back in her head. I'd never seen a woman do that before, where she comes so hard she's just out. Damn!" 

"I don't know if I lost consciousness," muses Emily. "I don't think it was that simple. I think I was just in a place where consciousness didn't matter. It was pure bliss, and I was lost in it. There wasn't anything else." 

"Eventually I stopped," Mike laughs, shrugging. "I could have kept going but my mouth was getting numb. And besides, I was so hard it was really, really painful. I wanted some relief too! So, down went the pants. I sort of tugged her to the edge of the couch, lined up, and in I went." 

"You weren't concerned about getting her consent first?" 

Mike looks at the interviewer like he's just said the stupidest thing imaginable. "While I was eating her out she begged me I don't know how many times to fuck her. I think I had consent." 

"I was out of it enough that I don't remember him entering me," Emily chuckles. "I was in a complete haze, and I gradually became aware that I was being wonderfully, magnificently fucked. What a perfect thing to wake up to!" 

"Did you realize it was Mike?" the interviewer asks. 

"That was much too complex a thought for me to be able to have in my head at that moment!" she laughs. "I just knew I was being fucked like I love to be fucked! I remember when I opened my eyes and looked up at Mike, that moment of recognition. 'Oh, it's my son. Of course it is. Only he fucks me like this.'" 

"How did you feel at that moment?" 

"Ohhhh...perfect," Emily purrs. 

"Even though it was your own son?" 

"He wasn't my son then. He was my lover, and he was giving me exactly what I needed." Her eyes are glittering, her cheeks flushed with arousal. "All I could do was to tell him to fuck my tight pussy like he owned it!" 

"God, when she said that..." Mike grins and whistles. "At that moment, the idea of owning that tight little pussy sounded really, really good! So I fucked it like I owned it." 

"My whole body was so sensitive after Mike licked me. I came again," Emily nods, excitement in her eyes. "Almost immediately. Mike's cock fits me so perfectly, and he uses it so fucking well! He wasn't trying to hold me back, and I just -" and her she claps her hands sharply - "orgasmed. I think I'd have come no matter what he did to me!" 

"She still had her panties around her knees so I wrapped my arm around her leg and held them to my chest and hammered her silly, right through her orgasm and into the next one and the one after that," Mike tells us excitedly. "She just came and came and came, and when she comes, God damn what her pussy does to my cock! I could have fucked her forever!" 




Folie a Deux, Episode 02



"Were you worried that your father and sister might come home?" the interviewer asks. 

Mike laughs. "No! I didn't even remember they existed! They could have walked in and stood next to me for a good look and I wouldn't have stopped!" 

"The way I felt with him inside me, coming around his cock as he fucked me," Emily says, her voice thick with excitement. "That. That was more important, in that moment, than my marriage or motherhood or anything else in my life. The purity of what we were doing burned everything else away. It was the two of us making something perfect together and I couldn't worry about anything but getting his cum." 

"I told her I was going to come inside her," Mike says, the pleasant tension obvious in how he holds his head. "She begged me to. I told her I owned her pussy, she said it was mine. I told her she was a dirty little slut for me she she howled her agreement. And then I came." 

"When I realized he was coming inside me, when I knew that he was giving me what I wanted more than anything else in the world at that moment," Emily tells us, her eyes intense and her face glowing, "I screamed so loud that I know the neighbors heard it. I know they did. They probably heard it four houses down. And I knew I was screaming that loud, begging him to fill me with cum, and didn't care. God, in that moment I wanted people to hear me!" 

"She started her last orgasm right when I started coming," Mike says. "She was just...wailing, screaming, moaning. Her pussy was squeezing me like a vise. I was groaning like I was dying. It was...astonishing. Seriously." 

"My orgasm was different than the one he'd given me with his mouth," Emily tells us. "It was less...transcendent, I suppose, but more visceral, more immediate. With his mouth he took me out of my body and sent me spinning somewhere...else. His cock brought me into myself completely. I could feel every nerve in my body, every square inch of skin, every hair on my head as it stood on end. The other one had left me hungry for more. This one left me utterly spent. Everything I had was used up in that climax. When he collapsed on top of me, all I could do was breathe. I wasn't capable of anything else." 

"Sooo...yeah," Mike says, licking his lips nervously. "I was laying there, kind of half on top of her, still holding her legs, still mostly hard inside her, having just filled my mom's pussy with my cum. There was the typical afterglow and sort of sleepiness - more than normal this time, because there had been so much tension before and it had all been released, or worked out I guess is more accurate, and I was just panting and grinning and feeling great from head to foot, all warm and tingly. And then..." 

"And then?" asks the interviewer. 

"And then it all came down on me. I'd just fucked my mom. Again. But this time there was no bikers, no threats, nobody forcing us to do anything. We fucked because..." He lapses into an awkward silence. 

After a moment, the interviewer prods, "Because?" 

"Because we wanted to. Or needed to. I don't know. It was voluntary. It was on us. Nobody else to blame this time." 

"I was lost in a haze of endorphins and oxytocin," Emily says, looking much less aroused than she had before - perhaps some time has passed since the previous portion of the interview, because she looks much more composed than she did before, and her untameable hair has been pushed back into place. "I felt as though I was adrift in a warm, beautiful mist. I could feel Mike inside me, not getting very much softer, and I recall thinking how wonderful it felt to have a penis inside me that could still be hard after...ejaculation. I had my eyes closed and was simply savoring all the sensations. 

"Then," she continues, "I head Mike gasp softly and felt his body go rigid. I opened my eyes and saw his face. He looked absolutely stricken, aghast. He was looking at me with utter horror, which was when what we had done truly struck me." 

"How did it make you feel?" the interviewer asks. 

"Physically ill." 

"She put both hands on my chest and shoved me," Mike recalls. "I leaned back, and when I pulled out there was a massive...explosion out of her. It looked like a gallon of cum spilled out of her all over the sofa. We didn't have great furniture or anything, but what we had was spotless, and now there was gonna be a massive cumstain on it. For some reason that seemed really important and really awful at the time." 

"I leaped up," Emily says. "I needed to get to the toilet because I was certain I was going to vomit." 

"Why?" 

"Shame. Self-loathing. The instant return of all the tension we'd just alleviated together, compounded by the guilt of having done this on our own. I truly felt as though I'd been beaten in my stomach with a club. I immediately stumbled because my shorts and panties were still around my legs, but I caught myself on the end table. I tried to pull my shorts up, but...unfortunately...well, that was where I made a mess." 

"You know, like it wasn't bad enough that we'd just fucked," Mike says ruefully. "But then she stands up and just hurls all over the floor. It's kind of a blow to the ego when your sex partner does that, you know?" 

"I don't think I could have felt worse at that moment," Emily admits. "I felt as though I were the world's worst mother, the world's worst wife, and, frankly, the world's worst person, and now I'd added to that the humiliation of befouling my own floor." 

"What did you do?" asks the interviewer. 

"I pulled up my underwear and shorts and, without looking at him, asked Mike to leave the house." 

"The exact words were, 'Go, just go. Please,'" Mike recalls stoically. "So I pulled myself together and went for a drive, just...driving. Nowhere in particular, you know? I don't think I even knew what I was doing. I don't remember it. The first thing I remember is sucking on a strawberry milkshake as I waited at the light at St. Anthony and Johnson, over Northeast. I have no idea how I got there. I don't know if I got the shake at a drive-thru or if I went in, or whether I got a meal with it. I was just sort of...there, feeling like an asshole." 

"I cleaned the place up," Emily says. "It took a considerable amount of effort, but I got the couch cushions clean...well, mostly. You could still tell there had been something there if you looked. I hoped no one would really look. I cleaned the floor, aired the place out, threw all my clothes in the washer, and took a very long, very hot shower." 

"And after?" the interviewer asks. 

"I had managed to pull myself together enough to start worrying about Mike," she says, "so even though I found it very awkward and humiliating, I called him. Unfortunately I heard his phone ringing in his bedroom, which speaks to his state of mind - for a teenager to leave the house without his cellphone generally takes an impending tornado. Of course that made me even more worried, in addition to the guilt and shame." 

"I didn't even care where I was going," says Mike. "I just didn't want to go home. Not then. I'd felt lousy before, but how the hell was I supposed to deal with this? I just kept thinking about how much I'd needed it, and how much she'd needed it too. There was no hiding from it now. We ripped into each other like animals, and we did it on our own. How was I supposed to look at mom after that? How was I supposed to face dad?" 

"When Bob came back," Eden tells us, "I was baking cookies and painting the hallway between the kitchen and the mud room." 

"...at the same time?" the interviewer asks. 

She smiles a bit wryly. "Yes. I began by baking cookies, but that involves too much sitting about, which just gave me time to think. We had the paint, so I washed the walls, taped it up, and began to paint the hallway." 

"She was a little...oh, what's the word...manic?" Bob tells us. "There was an odd gleam in her eye, like she was sort of out of it. If it was anyone else, I'd have sworn she was on something, but Emily hasn't even smoked weed since the kids were born. I knew Mike wasn't around because his car was gone, so I asked her how it went with him." 

"I'm reasonably certain I babbled at him like a madwoman," Emily says. 

"She launched into a kind of rant about how well it had gone," Bob says, "but she didn't give any details and, to tell the truth, she didn't make much sense. She just threw out a bunch of adjectives - 'great, fantastic, wonderful, terrific, perfect' - but didn't really connect them into sentences. So I asked her if everything had gotten straightened out between the two of them, and she sort of...lost it." 

"I was talking - raving, really," Emily relates, "and, although I don't recall what I said, I do recall that there came a point when I realized that I was simply blubbering and weeping. It was then that I collapsed against him and gave up trying to do anything but cry." 

"Honestly I had no idea what had happened," Bob says with a firm shake of his head. "I mean, none at all. I didn't know what had happened originally and I didn't know what had happened that day. All I knew was that there was something bad between them that they hadn't been able to work out, and that Emily was on the edge of a breakdown because of it." 

"What did you do?" asks the interviewer. 

"I made her take a double dose of Xanax and put her to bed," Bob says. "And then I finished baking the cookies and waited for Mike to get home." 

Back to Mike. "I didn't dare go home before I was absolutely, one-hundred-percent certain that dad was back. No way I wanted to be alone in the house with mom, no way. Just the thought of it made me queasy. So I went to a movie, hung out at a mall, tried to eat dinner and failed. I was so antsy that I couldn't focus on anything. It was like seven-thirty when I realized that, if dad did get home before me and they were there alone, she might be telling him everything." 

"Did you think she would?" the interviewer inquires. 

"I don't know, man!" Mike laughs. "I mean, no, probably not, but maybe. How should I know? So I raced back and got home about eight. I parked in the garage and came in through the mudroom, and I saw that the hallway was like one-tenth painted. The baseboards were taped up, there was a drop cloth on the floor, the whole bit. I thought that was...weird." 

"I was waiting for him in the kitchen," Bob says seriously. 

"I got like two steps in and dad was like, 'What the HELL did you do to your mother?'" Mike says, puffing his chest out to make him resemble his broader father. "And I was like, "...why, what did she say?' 'Cause I was thinking she spilled the whole thing and I needed to find someplace new to live, right?" 

"Mike was evasive, which honestly just made me angrier," Bob relates. "It wasn't that I blamed him necessarily, but I'd had to drug Emily and put her to sleep, it was plain that nothing had been resolved, and the goddamned hallway needed to be painted now because it had been started. I wanted some answers. So I told him to come clean and just tell me what was going on." 

"And I was like, 'Wheeeeew!'" Mike laughs. "Because if he was asking, then mom hadn't told him what had really happened. There was no way he'd be asking what had happened if he knew, he'd be demanding explanations or just throwing my shit out on the lawn. So I gave him some bullshit about me and mom fighting - and it wasn't even really bullshit because that's how it had started, but I didn't tell him what we'd been fighting about and I sure as hell didn't tell him I'd bottomed out in her pussy and shot her full of cum right after. I just said that I'd gotten out of line and said some mean stuff, but that mom had too, and we were both mad so neither one of us was willing to back down. I said I'd apologize in the morning." 

"I still wanted to know what it was all about," Bob says, "but to tell you the truth I wanted it settled even more, even if I never learned the details. So I accepted Mike's...well, let's call it an explanation, even though it wasn't one, and told him I expected him to follow through with that apology." 

"So then I was like, out of there," Mike says. "I went upstairs, locked myself in my bedroom, and started fucking around on Facebook, Twitter, IMing, just trying to keep myself busy enough that I didn't have to think." 

"Did it work?" the interviewer asks. 

"Oh fuck no," Mike says with a very definite shake of the head. "I could still smell her pussy on me. So eventually I went and took a long, hot shower, but that didn't help really. I went to bed and tried to sleep but once the lights were out and my eyes were closed it was like, bam!" Here he slams his fist into his palm for emphasis. "It was like I was right back there with her on the couch. I could see every expression, every time it changed because of what I did. I could hear her moans and her dirty words. I got so fucking horny, and the more I tried to stop thinking about it...well, don't think about an elephant, right?" 

"What did you do?" 

Mike smiles, but there's not much joy in it. "I beat it like I caught it stealing and came so hard I gave myself a stomach ache. Then I hated myself to sleep." 

The screen goes dark. The credits roll.



Folie a Deux, Episode 03



Author's Note:Thanks to all those who read my previous chapters, to those who faved, and to those who commented. Your comments on Episode 2 were especially valuable, as they helped me clarify the presentation in a crucial way. I'm not sure whether it's considered good etiquette on this site to respond directly in the comments section in one's own story or not, so I figured I'd thank you all here. All feedback, whether positive or negative, is deeply appreciated.

Folie à Deux

Episode 3: Hunger

Over a black screen, we hear a woman's voice. Her diction is careful and precise and her voice carries a thick note of ambivalence. "There are lines no person should cross. And if one is forced across those lines, one shouldn't linger there. The lines are there for a reason, and when one erases them...bad things start to happen."

We now see the speaker, a blonde woman of about 40 years. She has remarkable features, almost Classically Grecian in their chiseled perfection. Her dark eyes are large and intelligent, her mouth wide and full. Her blonde hair hangs in wavy, untameable strands to her shoulders. She is wearing an elegant, plum-colored, Y-neck silk blouse. 

We see her name given as Emily Larsen.

"What was between my son and me began as violation forced upon us by thugs, but it wasn't that anymore," she continues. "We had taken that violation and made it a thing of our own volition. We had become our own victimizers...and more specifically, perhaps, I had become my son's victimizer."

We now see a title card in white letters against a black background:

Folie à Deux

Episode 3: Hunger

After a few moments, the title card is replaced by one reading:

June 28

The title card vanishes, replaced by the face of a handsome young man in his early 20s. The familial resemblance to Emily is clear, with the same high cheekbones, sculpted jawline, and pointed and cleft chin. His mouth is a bit smaller and his eyes are a shade of blue reminiscent of Paul Newman's eyes. His hair is dark brown, straight, and cut in a no-nonsense short style. 

His name is shown to be Mike Larsen.

"I had it rough the night after we did it on the couch," he tells us in a rich, smooth voice. "I couldn't stand myself. I couldn't stand to be in my own skin. I felt filthy and sick. My mom and I had fucked each other like wild animals, like maniacs. I mean, as soon as dad and Olivia left and mom and I were there alone, there was no way we were getting out of that room without fucking. We had to. And that was the worst feeling I've ever had."

During what follows, as in the previous episodes, only one person is visible at a time -- plainly they were interviewed individually and clips from each interview were stitched together to make a narrative whole.

Emily again. "Bob had given me a whole Xanax that night. Normally I only take half a pill when I take it at all, but a whole pill put me to sleep all night long. I had no dreams that I remembered when I awoke that morning. When I awoke I was in the haze of a drug hangover, and for a several minutes I laid in bed with a sort of vague apprehension but no concrete memory to hang that feeling onto. Eventually, though, I remembered why my genitalia felt pleasantly bruised."

"And then?" The female interviewer from Episode 1 is back.

Emily cocks her head thoughtfully. "It is...interesting how massive, crushing guilt looks through the gauze of a narcotic hangover. The guilt is horrific and very obviously painful, but it's held at an arm's length so one may view it with...not objectivity, precisely, but at a distance. When one is immersed in guilt it feels like a sea of quicksand, a glutinous mass that holds one in place and forces one to relive the sin over and over again. However, from a distance it more resembles an iron maiden."

"An iron maiden?" the interviewer asks.

"Yes. It looks like an iron maiden with the doors gaping open. One knows one must enter. One sees each spike and can tell where it will pierce one's flesh when the doors are closed. But because it's being held at a distance, the feeling it evokes is abstract dread rather than immediate misery. I spent the first two hours of that morning lying in bed and contemplating where those spikes would drive into me when the drug wore off and the doors closed."

We see a man of approximately 40, handsome, with icy blue eyes and short, straight, dark hair that is going gray at the temples. His name is given as Bob Larsen.

"I'd left Emily and Mike alone the day before so they could work things through," he tells us, "but when I got home Emily had a breakdown and Mike was nowhere to be found. I'd had to drug Emily to get her to sleep. I was tired of all this nonsense. I wanted it resolved, or at least out in the open where we could deal with it. And I wanted the damned hallway finished."

"Emily had begun painting the hallway between the mud room and the kitchen," the interviewer supplies.

Bob nods. "It needed to be finished, and I wasn't going to do it. But more than that, I wanted the tension in the house gone. I was starting to think of it like a boil, something that needed to be lanced and drained even though it might stink at first."

"Did you have any more idea of what the problem was?" the interviewer asks.

Bob sighs heavily. "Not really. Well, not at all. The fact that my wife and our son had had sex twice never entered my mind. But I was starting to think something very bad had happened -- a crime, maybe."

"A crime? What sort of crime?"

Bob shrugs. "I didn't know. I thought maybe Mike had stolen something from one of Emily's friends. I thought she'd found out he was involved in drugs. I thought...well, I thought that maybe the wreck of the minivan was because of a hit and run accident, that maybe they'd killed someone out in the middle of nowhere and were cracking up because of it."

"Did you think that was likely?" the interviewer asks.

"No," Bob admits, "but I knew it was serious. And even now, it sounds like a likelier explanation than what really happened."

Mike again. "I knew dad had reached his breaking point. I don't even think it was mom breaking down that did it, I think it was the hallway. For some reason that really got under his skin. I came downstairs for breakfast and he lit right into me, yelling at me about the night before and the hallway -- which, I want to point out, I had nothing to do with -- and wanting to know what was going on. No way I was gonna tell him that, so I told him I'd finish the hallway. I thought that would calm him down, but he just kept going at me for another few minutes before he went upstairs to check on mom."

We then see a photograph of a pretty girl who generally resembles Bob, except with Emily's blonde mane, which she wears pulled back into a ponytail. She is wearing a highschool cheerleader's uniform. Her name is given as Olivia Larsen.

After a few seconds, the still image is replaced by grainy footage of a women's lacrosse game between Boston College and Harvard. A single Boston College player is circled and then zoomed in upon, with the footage getting correspondingly grainier. We see the text, "Four days before the filming of this episode, Olivia Larsen sustained an injury during a game of lacrosse." Moments after this text appears, we see Olivia turn her head to look back as she's running, which unfortunately causes her to miss the fact that a Harvard player has leaped in front of her. Olivia takes the other player's knee directly to the middle of her face, which we see as the film freezes for a moment.

We then see Olivia. Her nose is bandaged and her eyes are blackened. She has changed her hair color since her high school days, opting for a candy apple red, which hangs in dramatic, loose strands below shoulder length. The overall effect is somewhat reminiscent of a raccoon which has been set on fire, but she doesn't appear daunted or ashamed by the injury she bears; in fact, her bearing is one of cocky, tough-girl pride. 

When she speak, her voice is rather nasal due to her nose injury. "I wasn't as pissed off as dad was by the weirdness between mom and Mike, but then I was pretty self-absorbed back then. But I definitely noticed it. I mean, how could I not? I was at the breakfast table when dad unloaded on Mike that day, and I was like, 'Damn dad, chill, it's not like Mike killed anybody.'"

"Did you say that?" asks the interviewer.

Olivia chuckles. "No! I wasn't going to stick my neck out for Mike then, especially when I didn't know what was going on. But I did think that maybe I should try to find out what the deal was so we could get everything all settled down."

Bob again. "I went upstairs to check on Emily. She was awake but too groggy to talk, so I kissed her, told her I'd call her at lunch, wished her a good day, and left for work."

"I wasn't quite as groggy as I pretended to Bob," Emily admits, "but I wasn't in any condition to talk about the situation, if for no other reason than in my befuddled state I was likely to blurt something I shouldn't have. I told him I loved him and to have a good day."

"Once dad was gone, I asked Mike what was up," Olivia tells us as she reappears. "I knew that my style could be a little, um, grating on him, so I tried to tone it down."

Mike appears again, saying, "I was surprised when Olivia asked me nicely what was up. We weren't talking much in those days except to fight. And it was funny, because that actually made a bigger impression on me than dad did with all his yelling. It was like, if Olivia is being pleasant to me then this has gotten out of control. I knew I had to talk to mom once she was up and around."

"He told me that things had gotten heated the night before with mom," Olivia says, and then adds with a smirk, "Turns out he was telling the truth, but not the whole truth. Anyway, he said that he'd been a jerk to her and he was planning to apologize that day and get things settled down. I think I actually told him I loved him, which I totally do, but I don't think I'd said it since I was ten."

Mike reappears, still looking surprised. "Yeah, she said she loved me. I wouldn't have been more shocked if she'd said she was running off to be a nun. She grew up a lot when she went off to college, but back then she was pretty hard to take, so her saying that was cool. Awkward, but cool."

"So then I was like, 'Good, problem solved!'" Olivia laughs. "I seriously thought that was the end of it, like all I had to do was tell Mike to deal with it and it would be dealt with. So then I went off to do my day and was all pleased with myself."

"Once Olivia left, I got to finishing up the hallway," says Mike. "It wasn't a big job or anything, so I was just cleaning up when Mom came wandering downstairs."

"I felt as though I still had a head full of cotton," says Emily as we see her again, "but I couldn't stay in bed any longer. I wasn't sure if I was alone in the house. I knew Bob was at work, of course, and I knew Olivia would be off with her friends in the morning and then to her job at Arby's in the afternoon. Mike's summer job, helping a family friend with his landscaping business, was more unpredictable, and I wasn't positive whether he had to work that day or not. I had no work that day, but I could hardly hide in in the bedroom from my own son for the rest of my life, and of course I was hungry as well, so I wrapped myself in my bathrobe and went to the kitchen to make some toast."

"I'd cleaned everything up and was just heading for the shower when I literally bumped into mom coming around the corner," Mike says. "She was in a sort of daze, from the Xanax I guess, and she walked face-first right into my chest before she even realized I was there. I sort of grabbed her. It was a reflex, I took hold of her to keep her from falling down, right? But the first time I see her after we fucked and I immediately throw my arms around her. Like, not what I woulda planned."

"As slowed as I felt, I didn't even register that I had walked into Mike before his arms went around me." says Emily. "I gazed up at him rather stupidly, I confess, before the awkwardness of the situation really struck me."

"What did you say?" the interviewer asks.

"I said good morning."

Mike again. "She kind of mumbled a good morning at me. She was a little out of it. I let her go and stepped back kinda quickly. She said she needed toast. I had paint on my face. I let her pass to the kitchen."

"It was advantageous to be so befuddled,: Emily observes. "Walking into Mike's arms as soon as I got out of bed would have panicked me otherwise. As it was, I could simply be glad that we didn't fall into a lustful kiss. And, I must say, a breakfast of bread and fruit, and especially strong coffee, did wonders to clear my mind."

"It wasn't like I was turned on, but I took a cold shower anyway," says Mike. "A long, cold shower. Then I came down and had a long, rational talk with mom."

"I was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee that had gone cold, simply lost in thought, when Mike came in," Emily says. "He sat down across the table from me and said, in a very rational and calm voice, 'Mom, we need to talk.' Of course we needed to talk, so that was what we did."

"I'm not sure why we could be rational and open about it in the morning, when the day before we'd danced around the subject and then fucked," Mike muses. "Maybe we just blew off enough steam the day before that we could see it in a more realistic way, or maybe, like, enough time had passed since we first did it? Or like, we needed to do it again before we could make sense of it? I don't know. It just seemed to fall into place."

"Mike began by telling me that he loved me," Emily relates. "He said it with a directness and a sincerity that very much put me at ease. It was exactly the right thing to do. I told him I loved him as well, and he assured me that he knew that."

"She said that she was proud of the way I'd handled myself with the bikers, and that I'd saved both our lives there," he says. "I said I was just as proud of her, and that if I saved her, she saved me just as much."

Emily again, smiling gently. "After all the stress of guilt and avoidance, after all the recrimination and the suffering we'd put each other through over the past few days, it was such a profound relief to have a calm, mature, and sensible talk! I told him that the pleasure we'd taken in it was nothing to be ashamed of -- we simply didn't need to feel guilt for it. It had been forced upon us and we'd made the best of it, so there could be no shame attached to it. Certainly it would not have been better had it been painful and unpleasant for us both."

"She brought up the fact that it was good, which, like, took this massive load off, you know?" Mike says. "'Cause it was awesome, but I wasn't gonna just throw that out there with my mom, right? But when she laid it out, I could agree that, yeah, it had been great sex. It wasn't like I was supposed to know my mom was a great lay, but I did and there was nothing I could do about it, so in the light of day I was like, yeah I know this, and it gives me a better appreciation of who you are as a person. Even if it's weird that I had that appreciation, it was still something that was good about her, not something bad. So I could take that and love her all the more because I knew it."

"Of course it felt good to hear that!" Emily laughs. "It felt wonderful! It was such a relief to hear him put it in those terms. And him saying it allowed me to realize, and to tell him, that I was delighted that he would be able to keep my future daughter, whomever she might be, happy in that manner. It made me prouder of the man he had become."

"In spite of the talk about sex -- and it got fairly...direct there, it wasn't a sexual talk," Mike says. "I mean...it was a sexual  talk, but it wasn't a sensual talk. Neither of us were getting turned on or tempted to do anything again. It was like, 'Hey, you're awesome,' 'Oh, you're awesome too, that's cool to know.' Which was great. It felt sooooo good to be able to lay it out there, because once it was out in the open we could just stop feeling shame. We recognized it, we said it, we could move on and put what we'd done behind us."

The interviewer asks Emily, "Did you discuss what you did the day before, and why?"

"We did, of course," Emily nods. "We both came to the conclusion that we had done what we had done because we were trying so hard to avoid dealing with our actions and the feelings they aroused. We attached no blame, we simply agreed that it had been the result of repressed emotions expressing themselves unhelpfully, and now that we had addressed things, there would be no more of that. We both felt entirely confident of that conclusion, and of course we were both mostly wrong about the causes and entirely wrong about the future. We couldn't know that then, of course."

"It sounds like I hear a 'but' in there."

Emily immediately opens her mouth to contradict, but closes it again. In a moment she says, in a very thoughtful tone, "If I am being entirely truthful, I must admit that a part of me knew that we weren't addressing the issue completely honestly. Mike, of course, couldn't have known that because of his age and relative inexperience. I, however, was old enough to know better, even though I wasn't willing to admit that at the time."

"I thought we were solving it," Mike concedes. "I thought we were laying it all out and once that was done we'd never have to deal with wanting each other anymore, ever again. But, like, when we put our bodies together they didn't just throw off sparks, they burst into flames. We couldn't just walk away from that and expect to live together and see each other every day and expect it not to happen again. But I didn't know that then."

"We talked for quite some time," Emily says, "and long before the end, things had become quite lighthearted. We began to joke and laugh about various things that had happened on the trip -- not about the incident with the bikers, of course, but about things that had happened with the people we visited or in San Francisco. We joked about our irrationality. We even joked about the accident, although Lou's demise was still something of a tender spot for me. It was during that period that Bob called."

"I'm not even sure I expected Emily to be out of bed," Bob tells us. "I expected things to keep heading from bad to worse. But Emily answered the phone in a chipper voice. Mike was in the room and they were talking and laughing and joking around. She said that they'd had a really good talk and settled things between them, and this time I believed her. Like I said, she's the worst liar in the world, and this time I could tell she meant what she said. And I hear Mike chipping in from the background. When I hung up the phone I actually felt relaxed for the first time since the wedding. It took a huge load off my mind."

"When I finished talking with Bob, I asked Mike what he planned to do that day," Emily says. "He said he was going to see Miss Williamson." There is something cautious and deliberate in how she says that name that suggests she's concealing something.

We see a photograph of a lovely, petite redhead in her late teens. She is smiling hugely and her lively green eyes suggest intelligence and playfulness. It is labeled Hannah Williamson.

"Hannah was a girl I'd liked for a couple of years, but things just never worked out for us to get together," we hear Mike say. "But this was the time if ever there was a time, so I wanted to call her and see if we could get together."

"Was there more to it than that?" the interviewer asks.

After a moment, Mike nods. "Yeah. I mean, sure there was. I needed to get mom out of my mind and I couldn't do that hanging around the house. I needed to get out and do stuff. And I needed to do stuff with a girl to get me past what mom and I'd done. It didn't have to be sex, but it had to be fun, hanging out, doing stuff, like, laughing and being teenagers, right? Like, it had to be normal. I had to do normal stuff with a normal girl to get past the weirdness."




Folie a Deux, Episode 03



"Did you think that would work?" asks the interviewer.

"Yeah, sure. I mean...well, yeah. I hoped it would. Sure."

"But the physical connection you and your mother shared --"

"Wasn't like anything I'd ever had with anyone," Mike finishes for her. "Yeah. But I was 18, it wasn't like I had all the experience in the world. Just because I'd never had sex as good as I had with my mom didn't mean the next person I was with wouldn't be better, right? So, like, get out there and hang around with a girl I like and maybe things happen and maybe it makes forgetting what mom and I did easier."

"When he mentioned Miss Williamson, I knew that we had really solved nothing with our discussion," Emily tells the camera with a level stare. "I immediately felt a harsh stab of jealousy that was wholly unmotherly. For an instant I felt as though a lover was flaunting his infidelity to me, and I felt all the horrible things one feels in that situation."

"Such as?" prompts the interviewer.

"Anger. Disgust. Rejection," Emily says. "Followed immediately by two fully-formed and mutually contradictory ideas: the first, that I deserved better of Mike, that I deserved...fidelity, and the second, that I was a truly horrible person for feeling jealous or possessive at all."

"Mike had dated before?"

"Oh my, of course!" Emily laughs. "As you know, he's a very attractive young man. He never had problems attracting feminine attention!"

"And had you ever been jealous or possessive before with him?"

"No," Emily replies with a shake of her head. "Certainly not in that manner. I had of course experienced typical parental anxiety when my oldest child began to date, and with it the attendant feelings of impending old age, but this was a very different set of emotions. This was a lover scorning me -- that was what it felt like, I should say. It felt bitter and immediate and almost deliberately cruel."

"What did you do?"

"I instantly recognized those emotions as being...improper," she replies judiciously. "We had so recently finished a talk about putting all our actions behind us, and yet I was experiencing jealousy as though I were his wronged girlfriend instead of his mother. I felt dreadful for feeling those things, but I found that I couldn't put them from my mind. Not wholly. And that bothered me tremendously."

"And you told him that?"

"Of course not!" Emily says. "I told him I hoped he had a wonderful day."

"There was this...hesitation in mom's reaction," Mike says, "and this little flash in her eyes, this kind of...well, like she always had when I did something wrong and was trying to get away with it. It was this 'I know what you're up to and you're busted' look. But it was there and gone like that," and here he snaps his fingers, "so I wasn't even sure I saw it. I mean...no, I was sure I saw it. But I decided to ignore it. I had to ignore it. If we were gonna get back to normal, I had to ignore it. I called Hannah and asked her if she wanted to get together, and she was like, 'Hell yeah!'" 

Another picture of Hannah appears with the legend Hannah Williamson declined invitations to appear in this documentary. 

"We went to lunch that day," Mike continues in voiceover. "We went to Sebastian Joe's and got burgers and milkshakes and then walked around Lake Harriet. It started raining buckets and we ended up running and taking shelter in the Bandshell. That was where I kissed her for the first time as it poured outside -- just like out of a romance movie."

"How did that feel to you?"

"I like kissing."

"I mean, did it feel right kissing another girl after what you and your mother had done?"

"It felt...like I needed to," Mike says slowly. "I mean it was a nice kiss. Fine."

"That sounds underwhelming."

He shrugs. "When I kissed mom, steam shot out of my ears and my socks rolled up and down. When I kissed Hannah it was a nice kiss with a nice girl."

"Were you disappointed?"

He pauses to consider, then shakes his head. "No, I didn't let myself get disappointed. I needed to do it so I did it, and then I did it again and again until some guy told us to knock it the hell off."

"I avoided thinking about what Mike and Miss Williamson were doing," Emily says. "I prepared everything for dinner that night and then went to practice for several hours at the University. Of course faculty can use the facilities there for free, which saved money renting a studio space."

"And you weren't jealous?" the interviewer asks.

"No I wasn't." She pauses pregnantly, then adds, "For the most part."

"For the most part?"

She shakes her head dismissively. "Oh, minor thoughts crept in from time to time. If I had ever met Miss Williamson I didn't recall her, so I didn't know what she looked like. My mind filled in the blanks in a specific fashion."

"Which was?"

Emily begins to look irritated at this line of questioning. "I believe I imagined her as an Amazonian brunette with perfect hair and very large breasts. It hardly matters."

Mike looks amused as he reappears on camera. "Mom's always been self-conscious about her hair. From time to time she'd tried to straighten it or, like, perm it, I don't know what women do with their hair, but she did it, and it never worked out. It always just looked weird until it grew back out. And of course she's always been worried about her boobs, because they're small. I love 'em, but she's always wanted them to be bigger."

Olivia appears again. "I remember dinner that night being the first actually relaxed meal we had since we got back from the wedding. Mike and mom were relaxed and happy and goofing around, and of course I assumed that was due to my brilliant words of wisdom. Dad was delighted that they were back to normal, but once or twice I caught mom looking at Mike funny."

"Funny how?" the interviewer asks.

"Like...when two friends of yours had sex and they're pretending like they didn't only one of them can't quite pull it off," Olivia says. "Just that little possessive glance."

"You knew they'd had sex?" the interviewer asks, plainly surprised.

"No! I mean, God no, of course not! But there was that little bit of tension still there and that's what it felt like. A lot of it was from mom's side, which makes sense because she's the worst liar ever born. But some of it came from Mike too, like he'd be looking at her when she moved around the room or whatever."

"What did you make of it?"

Olivia smiles. "That maybe part of what they'd argued about was that Mike was doing something with some girl mom didn't like. Or hell, maybe he knocked somebody up. My friends were always fawning over him."

"You knew it was something sexual, though?"

"I didn't know," Olivia admits, "but it sure seemed like it. And dad was completely oblivious, of course. He didn't pick up on any of this for the longest time, not until it hit him right in the face."

In white letters against a black background, we see:

June 29 - July 2

"Things got hot fast between me and Hannah," Mike tells us. "There had always been interest there, and now that we had the chance it just kind of blew up into the classic whirlwind summer romance."

"You had sex?" the interviewer asks. 

"Yeah, after the second date, in the back seat of my car," he says.

"How was it?"

"Good. I mean...yeah, it was good. I know what you're asking, and no it wasn't as good as what I'd had with mom, but it was good. It was good sex."

"I knew when I saw Mike the day after he and Miss Williamson...became carnally involved," Emily says, her distaste very obvious. "It was wholly apparent. Her stink was practically coming off of him in waves. It was disgusting."

"The day after Hannah and I did it, mom was staring me daggers," Mike says. "Serious 'If looks could kill' stuff. She could tell what I did with Hannah. I don't know how, but she was letting me know she knew."

"I handled it perfectly rationally," Emily says primly. "He was an adult and of course I had no romantic claim on him. If he wanted to flounce about with a trollop it was no concern of mine."

"Mom was like glaring at Mike that morning," Olivia says. "I mean it was really...angry. I figured she'd gotten a call from some girl's dad or something about something he did."

"I just ate and got out of there," Mike shrugs. "I had a long day at work lined up and I didn't want to fight with mom again...not the way our last fight ended."

"Were you thinking about Mike?" the interviewer asks Emily.

"I presume you mean sexually?" Emily asks.

"Yes."

"I...was, yes. By the second or third day he'd been seeing Miss Williamson, I found myself wondering what they did together. I knew they were having sex, but I wondered precisely what they did...what he did to her, what she did to him, whether it was good...whether it was better than it was with me. Whether..." She pauses and blushes. "Well, I assume you grasp the general content of my thoughts."

"And was the guilt still present?"

"It...was, yes. Of course it was."

"But...?"

Emily blushes a little deeper. "But it was lessening, and it wasn't keeping me from thinking inappropriate thoughts."

"Such as?"

Emily blushes a little deeper still, frowns, and shifts uncomfortably. "Thoughts about what had happened between Mike and me. Detailed thoughts. At length. When I was alone or...or when I had worked up a sweat dancing. Then especially. I would feel the sweat on my body and think about the sweat we had made together and...well."

"Did you have these thoughts often?"

"I shouldn't say I had them often," Emily says immediately, and after a moment clarifies, "Not constantly. I was able to get work done, teach lessons, practice for the show I was in, function as an adult human being. I wasn't incapacitated by thoughts about him."

"Did you do anything about those thoughts?"

"No. No, not then. Not for a few days."

"Right away I started noticing she was acting different," Mike says when we see him again.

"In what way?" the interviewer asks.

"She was showing off for me. Not showing off. I mean, she was...well, she was kind of posing."

"Posing?"

"Yeah, from my first date with Hannah. When she was alone with me or when nobody else could see her but me, she'd kind of strike a pose. Like she'd bend over and give me a long look at her ass, or she'd cross her legs. She always wore shorts in the summer so she had a hell of a lot of leg to cross, and she was making sure I was looking."

"I was not behaving any differently then than I did at any other point," Emily says demurely but adamantly. "I felt things I knew I ought not to have been feeling, but I would certainly not have flaunted myself to my son when I was attempting to control myself. I have always worn tight shorts in summer and I certainly was wearing them then as well, but in exactly the same way I was wearing my customary loose tee shirts and baggy tops. In other words, I was wearing precisely what I had always worn and acting in precisely the way I had always acted. If Mike was noticing me more, then that was because of what we had done and what he wanted to do again, rather than anything I was doing."

Mike is seen looking pensive. "I...guess it's possible I was noticing her more, sure. I mean, yeah, of course I was, right? She's gorgeous and I lived with her, and now she was a sexual being to me. But there's no way that's all it was. Usually when she got like a pan or something out of a lower cupboard she'd crouch down to get it, but now she was standing with her legs straight and her ankles together and bending over so her ass was sticking out right there, and her ass is amazing. And she never did that before. And she'd cross her legs and sort of dangle her shoe off her foot and then run her hands down her legs."

"I never did that," Emily insists as she reappears on screen.

"Which part?" the interviewer asks. "Bending over, or the thing with crossing your legs?"

"Well both of --" She stops, reconsiders, and then says, "Crossing my legs in that manner. I may have bent over provocatively on...several occasions when Mike was in the room during the next two or three days. I may have."

"So, like, I was trying to spend as much time as possible away from the house, right?" Mike says. "Because she kept doing that over the next couple days, and when she did, I thought about what we'd done, and I didn't want to think about that, and once I'd start thinking about it it was hard to stop. So I just tried to avoid her."

"What did you do?" the interviewer asks.

"I hung out with friends, I worked out, I worked a lot, I spent a lot of time with Hannah. A lot of time with Hannah. By July 2nd, basically I only went home to sleep."

Again we see white letters against a black background:

July 3

"I recall very clearly that it was the third of July," Emily says, "because I was making preparations for the family to attend the annual gathering the chair of the department holds every year for the Fourth of July holiday. This was something the family had always enjoyed, since my coworkers and their significant others were artistic, bohemian, expressive sorts who tended toward...interesting behavior. And of course the department chair had a lovely house on the shore of Lake Minnetonka and always provided excellent food. It was always an enjoyable experience.

"That day, I had a practice for my show in the afternoon but nothing in the morning, so I decided to catch up on housework. Mike's bedroom door was open and I thought he had gone for the day -- I hadn't seen very much of him over the past few days so I wasn't aware of his schedule. I approached the door and I heard him talking on the telephone, and it was apparent by his tone that he was talking to Miss Williamson."

"You sound as though that bothered you," the interviewer observes. 

"Of course not," Emily says too quickly. "Why ought it have? He was free to do as he wished with anyone he chose."

"I was talking with Hannah about what we were gonna do that day," Mike tells us. "Her whole family was gone for the day, but she stayed around because she had to work that morning. I had to work too, but I was going to be off by mid-afternoon, so I was going over there and we were gonna get crazy all afternoon and evening."

"He was talking loudly enough that I could overhear it from the hallway," Emily says, a flush creeping up her cheeks, "and he was describing what he intended to do to Miss Williamson that day. The terms he was using were...vulgar and...descriptive. I'm sure that if he knew I was there he would have moderated his tone, or at least his volume, but as it was he was very florid in his terms."

"I knew she was there," Mike says with a grin as we see him again. "Of course I knew. I heard her coming down the hallway. She was standing right by the open doorway -- I could see her shadow on the door from the hall light. I heard her gasp when I told Hannah I was going to bend her over the kitchen table and fuck her from behind."

"Did you consider talking more quietly, or toning down your language?" the interviewer asks.

Mike laughs. "I wasn't even talking that dirty before she started listening in. I figured, fuck it, she wants to eavesdrop, I'll give her something to eavesdrop on, right?"

"His filthy language, and the obvious relish with which he was using it, was incredibly uncouth," Emily sniffs, her nostrils flaring and her flush creeping a bit higher, "but it had an effect on me."

"An effect?" the interviewer asks.

"Yes. It was..arousing," she explains, getting redder. "Also, it made me rather angry."

"Because of the vulgarity?"

"Nnnnnooooo," Emily says slowly. "Because it was being directed toward Miss Williamson."

"Instead of...you?"

In a long closeup in which she turns bright red, Emily makes no reply.

"So I got into it pretty good," Mike says with a smile. "I told Hannah that I wanted to watch her down on her knees with my cock in her mouth and look in her eyes as she swallowed it. I told her I wanted to put her on her back on her mother's bed, spread her legs, and use my mouth on her until she screamed. I told her I wanted her to wrap her legs around my waist and squeeze my cock with her pussy as I fucked her brains out. She was getting really hot on the other end of the line too, because I'd never talked to her like that before, so she wanted me to get the hell over there and actually do what I was promising."

"Were you getting excited too?" asks the interviewer. 

"Well yeah, of course!" Mike laughs. "I mean I was talking filthy to my girlfriend and my mom was listening in, and both of them were getting worked up by it. I'm not made of stone."

"You knew that your mother was getting excited?"

"She was panting. She's not quiet when she gets worked up -- she can't be, she doesn't know how. When I told Hannah that I was gonna make her beg me for my cum, I heard mom gasp like she does when I took her nipple into my mouth. The way her shadow was moving, I think she was touching herself."

Emily is now the color of a ripe strawberry. "I found it thrilling. Shamefully thrilling. I shifted the basket to my left hand and..."

"And?'

"And touched my breast," she continues, barely audible. "My nipple. Through my shirt. And then...I put my hand between my legs."

"Thinking about Mike doing those things with Hannah?"

Emily fidgets for a bit, then whispers, "Thinking about him doing those things to me."

"I heard this whimper, this kind of moan," Mike tells us. "It sounded like mom was getting hot. And frustrated. I thought that was hilarious, getting her wound up when she was the one trying to listen in."

"And you were alright with that?" the interviewer asks.

"At first, yeah. I thought it was funny. Kind of hot, right? But harmless, like getting her all worked up. She'd been trying to get me worked up, so this was payback. But then I started thinking, like, God, she sounds so hot that she might come in and try to do something about it. And I didn't want that!"

"Didn't you?" the interviewer asks.

"No! Of course not!" Mike tells us, not wholly convincingly. "It was one thing to get her wound up, but I didn't want to do anything more with her. I mean, she'd been making me look at her, right? So this was just throwing it back at her. But we couldn't cross that line again. So I changed the subject and started talking about when she'd be home, when I'd be off work, that kinda stuff, and headed for the door. By the time I got there, mom was gone and her bedroom door was closed."

"The moment I heard Mike heading for the door, I ran back to my bedroom," Emily says, the camera in tight closeup. "I couldn't bear to see him then -- he would know what I was thinking! It would have been so humiliating!"

"Hadn't you been trying to tempt him though?" the interviewer asks. "Bending over in front of him, making him look --"

"Yes, but I -- I had been listening to him!" Emily interjects, so red that she looks as though she might burst. "I had been eavesdropping as he said those things and his words made me think things and..and touch myself! And he would know! I couldn't have borne that!"

"So what did you do?" asks the interviewer.

"I threw myself on my bed and clenched my legs together, trying to make the heat go away. I heard him go past my door, down the steps, and outside. I heard his car start and drive off. I tried to make the heat go away. I did."

After a closeup of Emily's red, uncomfortable face and a long silence, the interviewer asks, "But?"

"But it didn't go away. In the silence I could hear his voice, hear his words, and I began to remember what we'd done. How he'd touched me. How he felt when I touched him. The way he felt inside me." Her breathing is becoming shallower and more rapid, her eyes getting wider. "The heat became a flame. I couldn't control myself. I...touched myself. Over my clothes at first, but before very long I was nude. I don't even remember taking off my clothes, but I did. The moment I touched my pussy, I came. I came very hard."




Folie a Deux, Episode 03



"And then?"

"And then I came again, and then I came again. I kept hoping that each orgasm would make the images I had in my head, the images of Mike and I, go away, but they wouldn't leave. I couldn't drive them out. They kept getting sharper and more vivid until I swear I could feel his lips on mine, his tongue on mine, his hands on my breasts, his skin on mine, the sweat we shared, his cock in my hands, his cock in my mouth, his tongue on my pussy, the way he took control and owned me when he fucked me. I couldn't stop thinking about it! I tried but I couldn't. I don't know how many times I came but it wasn't enough to make me stop wanting him. Every time I came, I wanted him more. 

"Eventually I had to stop masturbating because I had to go to practice, but by then I could barely think of anything but what we'd done...and what I wanted to do. What I needed to do again. I went to practice with the knowledge that I simply had to have him again. I had to have my son again. I still knew it was wrong, but that didn't matter. I needed him. I was going to get him."

Against a black screen, we see in white letters:

July 4

Mike again. "The morning of the Fourth was weird. I was looking forward to the party because get-togethers at her boss' place were always a lot of fun. I mean there were other kids there around my age, younger, older, whatever, but I'd grown up with them right? Like seeing them three or four times a year, but I'd been seeing them for as long as I could remember. It was like they were distant cousins or something. Plus, the place was gorgeous. But I knew something was up with mom."

"How did you know?" the interviewer asks.

"Oh man. The way she looked at me when she saw me first thing in the morning. There was a fire in her eyes like you wouldn't believe. It was in the kitchen, I come in -- and dad and Olivia are in the room, right? So I come in and Mom turns around and she looks like...like a tiger. Like, the light was coming in from the window behind her and sort of lighting up her hair orange around the sides and she's staring at me like I'm an antelope or something, like she's going to come after me right then and there."

"I'm sure it was obvious to him," Emily tells us. "I'd had trouble sleeping the night before because it was difficult for me to stop thinking about him. He'd awakened me, sexually speaking, from a long slumber, and when one wakes up from a long slumber, one is famished. I was famished."

"She didn't just undress me with her eyes," Mike says. "That would have been awkward enough with dad and Olivia right there. No, she fucked me with her eyes. The look in her eyes was exactly like it was when we'd had sex, this kind of hungry, savage, demanding stare. She locked eyes with me and dared me to look away. And I couldn't at first."

"That moment, in the kitchen, must only have lasted a few seconds," Emily muses, "but it felt much longer to me, and, I am sure, to him as well. I felt as though there were some sort of...electrical charge, I suppose, though that's a poor phrase for it. There was some sort of current running between us, so powerful that it singed the air like lightning. He grew excited instantly, and I stared at it, directly at it."

"She looks at my hard-on and licks her lips," Mike says as we see him again. "With dad and Olivia right there, she stares at the tent in my shorts and looks horny enough that she might jump me right there. I stopped in my tracks and stared back."

"What were you thinking?" the interviewer asks.

"How it would be if we fucked again," he replies. "I could imagine grabbing her, pulling her shorts off, and just sinking balls-deep into her. I mean, it was super-vivid, like right there, right? It was like my cock remembered what she felt like inside and was playing it back. It wasn't as intense as it was when I was inside her, but every nerve in my cock lit up, pow."

"What did you do?"

Mike grins. "I think I asked if there were any Cheerios left."

"I did see Emily give Mike a stare when he walked into the room," Bob admits when we see him again. "I thought, uh-oh, whatever was between them isn't over, she's still mad at him.'"

"You still didn't see anything sexual in it?" the interviewer asks.

"You keep asking that like that should have been something that occurred to me," Bob replies, half-amused and half-irritated. "But why would it be? Do normal parents suspect their spouses of carrying on affairs with their children? Is that something that would even enter someone's mind without concrete proof?"

"I totally wondered if something was up a little after breakfast," says Olivia as she reappears on our screen. "Mom always wore these big, ugly-ass tee-shirts, floppy things that looked like sacks on her. But she asked me if she could borrow one of my shirts. She was a little bit bigger than me, like in the frame? And so any shirt of mine would be small on her anyway. But then, like, I already wore my shirts tight, so a shirt of mine would be, like, painted on her. But yeah, I lent her this cute little red shirt. She had a tight, slammin' body so she could totally rock it."

"But you knew something was up between her and Mike?" the interviewer asks.

"No! Oh no, not then. I thought maybe she was flirting with some guy from work or something and wanted to dress to impress."

"And you were fine with that?"

Olivia shrugs. "Mom and dad were always more like...cordial than passionate, you know? I mean I didn't really think about it much, because ew? But if I did think about it, I don't think I'd have been surprised to find out that either of them were doing something on the side. But it wasn't like they ever fought or even really like, disagreed or anything, so what difference did it make? Let her have her fun."

"I absolutely wore that shirt to catch Mike's eye," Emily confesses with a shrug. "I wanted him to do more than notice me. I wanted him to want me. I wanted him to notice that my nipples got hard when I looked at him. Olivia's shirt was like a second skin on me, so he would have to confront that fact."

"At this point you were deliberately trying to seduce your son," the interviewer states.

"Yes."

"You must still have felt guilt?"

Emily considers for a few moments, then says, "I was aware that I would feel guilt after we had sex. I was hardly blind to that. However, as...randy as I was feeling, future guilt for one more commission of an act already twice-committed did not seem to me to be a major consideration. I knew I could live with the guilt. I was not sure I could live without Mike back inside me."

"So now I was like...yikes," Mike tells us as we see him again. "There was no way mom would look at me like that and not try somethin'. So, like, all of a sudden I was feeling this sense of dread about the day."

"Just dread?" asks the interviewer.

"I...you know, what I was dreading was astonishing sex with someone I loved, so it was mingled with, um, anticipation, I guess you'd say. Yeah. It was like, 'I want it, I don't want it, I want it, I don't want it.'"

"But you knew it was going to happen?"

"I knew she was gonna try to make it happen. I didn't know if I'd be strong enough to want to stop her."

We now see a series of photographs of a large, elegant house on the shore of a large, gorgeous lake. One photo shows the front of the house, a brick-and-glass wall that speaks of money and class; the next photo shows a gorgeous yard, shaded in parts and including a gazebo; the next is of more of the yard sloping down to the lake shore with the far side dimly visible in the distance and the water littered with brightly-colored sails of white-hulled boats; the last shows a dock with a moored sailboat, a small waterskiing boat, and six jetskis. 

"We weren't even close to the first ones to arrive at the park-and-ride where everybody went to get the shuttle they'd hired," Mike tells us as he reappears on screen. "Olivia didn't bother to grab any of the stuff we brought, she just jumped out of the car and started talking to the girl from the next car over. Dad started to reach for stuff, but mom was like, 'Oh, never mind, Mike and I'll get it.' And I was like, OK, here it comes."

"Of course I wanted Bob out of the way," Emily tells us with a shrug and a grin that isn't as guilty as she might hope it is. "I was planning to seduce my son, and having my husband there while I did it would make it exponentially more difficult, wouldn't it?"

"Still no hesitation about the seduction?" the interviewer asks.

"Less than ever. All I'd thought about on the drive to the party how I would convince Mike to be with me again, where we would go, how it would feel -- my entire body was aroused, every nerve alive and humming. I felt like my skin was dancing on my body. I was so excited and aroused that I had insisted we drive with the windows down, even though it was warm enough for air conditioning, simply so my scent wouldn't alert everyone in the car."

"I'd been in the back seat with Olivia," Mike tells us, "and mom had barely even glanced over at me on the way there, but, like...she was staring at me through the back of her head. I'm not shitting you, that was seriously what it felt like. She had her back to me but still, somehow, she was utterly focused on me and I absolutely knew it. It couldn't have been plainer if she'd have turned around and straight-up announced she was gonna fuck me that afternoon."

"What do you --" the interviewer begins.

"I don't know!" Mike cuts her off with a helpless laugh. "I can't explain it, but there was this...connection, this energy just bouncing back and forth between me and her. I can't believe Olivia or dad didn't pick up on it."

"I knew Mike was staring at the back of my head," Emily supplies as we see her again. "I could feel his eyes on me. It simply made me more excited."

Mike reappears to tell us, "We had a bunch of stuff we had to carry, food and stuff, so we were all grabbing what we could. We were all bunched up there at the door, and mom leans over and backs her ass right into me. Like, right into my crotch. I couldn't step back because dad and Olivia were right behind me. And then she starts moving stuff around, making stacks of stuff, all that, and that made her butt wiggle. So, like, yeah, she's just grinding into me. Boing. Fucking hardon right then and there."

Emily once more, a huge and lascivious grin on her face. "Mmmm, I felt Mike go hard against me -- hard as steel. I wiggled a few times, then turned and handed him a large crock pot. He looked...aroused. Very aroused, And aghast. It was delightful!"

Mike reappears, laughing. "She just gives me this sweet smile and says, 'Here honey, carry this!' I've got a boner running down my damned leg and my dad and sister right there and there wasn't a damned thing I could say or do but take those fucking sloppy joes."

Emily looks mischievous and pleased with herself. "I loved making him uncomfortable that way! There were people about -- not only Bob and Olivia, but people I worked with and their families as well. I knew that no one would think I would deliberately press against my own son that way -- no one except Mike, of course, who would know better!"

"At least I could hold the crock pot in front of my dick," Mike grumps as we see him again briefly.

Emily again, saying with a certain smugness, "I made certain I sat in the same seat as Mike on the bus, of course. He would have selected another seat, but I loudly called on him to sit next to me. That left him no choice in the matter!"

Mike once more. "Oh yeah, I would totally have sat, like, on the opposite end of the bus, or even, like, taken the next one! Because once I sat down next to her, you know, the seats were kind of small and she pressed herself up against me, kind of wiggled up right against me, pressing her boob to my arm. I could feel her nipple right against my skin. And as soon as everyone was settled in and she saw there wasn't anybody across the aisle from us, her hand went right to my lap."

Emily giggles. "I almost felt bad for him. I knew he was thinking the same thoughts and feeling the same urges as I was, but he was actually doing a much better job of fighting them. He was trying so hard! But when I put my hand between his legs and felt his cock twitch, I knew I had him. He could try to resist, but he would come to me. Neither of us could fight it that day."

As Mike reappears on the screen, the interviewer asks, "Did you know during that bus ride that you were going to end up having sex with her during the party?"

Mike looks thoughtful. "I don't know. Does the fly know he's going to be eaten the moment he steps on the web, or does he think he can get away until the fangs sink in?"

"That sounds dire," the interviewer observes. 

Mike winces visibly and looks guilty. "Yeah, and completely unfair. When she started fondling me through my shorts on the bus, I was caught. That didn't mean I was going to stop struggling, but I already knew how it was going to go. But that's not on her, it's on me. If I hadn't wanted it to go down that way, I could have shut her down, but I wanted it as much as she did. She was just willing to admit it where I wasn't. Yet."

"I traced his length with my hand, up and down, again and again," Emily tells us. There is a growing eagerness in her voice and a growing flush on her cheeks, and the viewer might note a certain catlike quality, a rather unsettling playfulness. "Ohh, he was so hard, and knowing that my husband was three seats away and my daughter was three seats in another direction only made it more thrilling. I had made certain that no one was in a position to see before I began, of course, but simply knowing that I was touching my son in that way, in that place..." She licks her lips. "Thrilling. Delightful. And when he twitched under my fingers and made no move to stop me, I knew he was mine. I knew I could have left him alone after that, or even tried to avoid him, and he would have found me before the end of the day and had me."

"Did you leave him alone after that?"

Her smile becomes positively wicked. "Almost. I gave him one last long, lingering squeeze and whispered into his ear. And then I let him go and leaned back."

"What did she say?" the interviewer asks as we see Mike again.

He smiles, as though perhaps against his will, and says, "She whispered, 'I want this inside me today.' That was it. And I just sat there in a kind of hormone haze, trying to fight what was gonna happen."

At this point we see a series of videos of varying quality shot on the July 4th in question: shaky phone-cam footage shows several adults playing Frisbee on the sunlit grass, seven children under 10 in a watermelon-eating contest, a vast spread of food on long tables in the shade; steadier footage shows a male waterskier being towed behind the boat, then that skier and a woman being pulled in tandem the opposite direction, and finally a pyramid as a another young woman (Olivia Larsen, in fact) stands briefly atop their shoulders before tumbling unceremoniously into the water; phone-cam footage again of dogs chasing sticks and Frisbees into the lake, several people festooning each other's faces with Jell-O salad and whipped cream. It looks as though the weather is beautiful and everyone is happy. The adults, even the older ones, mostly look very fit, as one would expect of a group consisting largely of dancers, and the children are bright-eyed and active. 

"It was a great party," we hear Bob say in voice-over. "I loved the get-togethers at her department head's place. It was always a great time."

"Waterskiing!" Olivia laughs as we see her again. "Speedboats! Jetskis! Swimming! I could flirt with a bunch of hot guys I only saw a few times a year! As soon as the bus pulled in, I was off and running and I didn't even look back until it was time to leave."

"I had to get off the bus last," Mike chuckles as he reappears, "because I had to adjust myself so I wasn't tenting like a perv. So I waited until everybody else was up and in the aisle, and then I stood up. Mom brushed past me, pushing her ass right up against my crotch, and then, like, sashayed down the aisle. She knew I was looking at her booty and she shook it for me. Um...mom has an amazing ass."

Emily again. "As soon as I stepped off the bus, I was caught up in the normal whirl. Coworkers and spouses and their children, all swirling together, and there were certain niceties that had to be observed. I had to be seen, and seen to interact, because simply disappearing to a closet with Mike as soon as we climbed off the bus would have drawn attention."

"I had some friends in that group," Mike says. "I'd grown up with those guys in a way, there were a few around my age. So I caught up with them, got some food, went swimming, played some volleyball, touch football, Frisbee, flirted with some girls. I tried to stop thinking about mom and what she wanted to do -- what I wanted to do. What I wanted to do to her. It, ah, it didn't work."

We see Emily again, smiling proudly. "Mike stripped off his shirt very quickly, as most of the other teenage boys did. He was very active, playing games and swimming or diving off the dock, and he was very much the center of interest for women there. I watched him, but I also watched the women there as they watched him, and there was definitely appreciation in their eyes. Many of them told me what a handsome young man Mike had become, and I simply smiled and thanked them. None of them could have known that he was going to be taking me off to a quiet spot and...being passionate with me that very day!"

Mike again. "No matter how hard I tried to keep from doin' it, I kept looking at mom. And she wasn't even doin' anything, just hanging out, talking with her friends and coworkers, getting the meal ready with the others. But every time I looked at her I felt her hand on me again. I could feel her lips on me..both sets. I knew how she'd moan when I put my lips on her. I knew how she'd taste. I knew how she'd kiss me. Just that, man -- I knew how she kissed when she was horny and wanted to get fucked. I shouldn't have known that. I shouldn't have wanted that. But I wanted it."

Emily again, looking merry. "Three or four girls about his age tried to attract his attention. I think he even tried to divert himself with them, but he couldn't sustain that. Every time he began flirting with some empty-headed girl, he'd look over at me and give me the hungriest look. It was marvelous!"

"We eye-fucked," Mike admits. "No doubt about it, man, we eye-fucked hard, like a dozen times. It was weird, because I kept trying to think of Hannah. I'd spent the day before fucking Hannah up, down, and sideways, but during the moments when mom and I were looking at each other, I couldn't even remember what Hannah sounded like when she came. But I could remember every little thing about mom, so vivid and real it was like I was experiencing it right then. How could any other girl compete with that?"

"It came time to eat," Bob recalls as he reappears. "The host always provided the main courses -- in this case barbecued spare ribs and chicken. Oh, and some sort of vegetarian thing for weirdos. Everybody else brought sides or desserts or whatever, so there was this ridiculous profusion of food, more than two groups that size could have eaten in a day. I was engaged in a running discussion about social policy with several of the people there and I was pretty absorbed in my own thing, but I did notice that Emily kept staring at Mike. I didn't know why, but she was glaring. I thought he'd pissed her off again. And he was glaring back, so I was thinking, crap, here we go again, more of this shit."

Olivia again. "I wasn't paying that much attention to anyone but my friends and a few cute guys, but I was sitting like two spots down from Mike, which was close enough to pick up on a weird vibe from him, this kind of...well, he kept staring at mom, and she kept staring at him, and it didn't really look to me like they were mad at each other. I think at that point I'd have picked up on the vibe if it had been, like, any other two people in the world, because it was pretty thick. But I still wasn't really on that page yet."




Folie a Deux, Episode 04



Folie à Deux 

Episode 4: Mania 

By Senor Smut 

In voiceover against a dark screen, we hear the voice of a young man sounding strong, confident, and cheerful. "It was like we'd been swimming against a strong current. No matter how hard we swam, we couldn't do more than keep ourselves in place. But then it was like we turned around and put the current at our back. We went from zero to a hundred in one afternoon." 

We now see the speaker, a handsome man in his early 20s with dark hair and almost classic good looks, with high cheekbones, a sculpted jaw and dimpled chin, and shockingly pale blue eyes. 

"After the party, we couldn't deny what we wanted anymore," he goes on. "It was too much. Too much amazing sex, too much emotion, too much excitement, too much love. We started falling for each other hard and neither one of us wanted to put on the brakes." 

His name is given in subtitle as Mike Larsen. 

We now see a title card in white letters against a black background: 

Folie à Deux 

Episode 4: Mania 

After a few moments, the title card is replaced by one reading: 

July 4 

We now see a beautiful woman in her early 40s. Although her face bears definite resemblance to Mike's in structure, there are marked differences as well. Her eyes are very dark and her mouth is sensuously wide and generous. Most dramatic, of course, is the ungovernable mass of blonde locks that tumbles to just past her shoulders. She wears a pale green satin blouse and a different shade of lipstick than the had in the previous episode, showing this to likely be a different day than before. She smiles dazzlingly. 

A subtitle informs us she is Emily Larsen. 

"Walking back into that party with my son's semen leaking slowly from my body was so exciting it made me dizzy," she tells us. "I couldn't have gotten the smile off of my face if I had tried. I felt young and giddy and invincible." 

"What was it like to come face-to-face with your husband after having sex with Mike a few minutes before?" asks an off-screen man with a slight English accent - the interviewer from the second episode is back. 

Emily opens her mouth, pauses a moment, and then says, "I know I ought to tell you I felt dreadful having cuckolded my husband with our own son. That would, of course, be the proper thing say. But in truth, I didn't feel the slightest bit bad. I was euphoric. I looked into Bob's face, gave him a bright smile, and felt my heart hammering with joy. I couldn't possibly have been any happier." 

"No guilt at all?" 

"None. Does that sound awful? It simply didn't seem to me to have anything whatever to do with Bob. To be perfectly blunt, through disuse my husband had forfeited all claim to my body. Mike had planted his flag when he planted himself inside me. I was married to Bob and I loved him dearly, but it had been a platonic marriage for a very long time. I was my son's woman now." 

Emily is replaced by Mike, and for the rest of the video we see only one person on screen at any time. 

"I reeked of sex, just stunk of it," Mike chuckles, "so I sprinted right to the lake and just dove right in, splashing around and yelling and making sure everybody knew I was there. And I was having an absolute blast. I felt like I was on top of the world, you know?" 

"And did you feel guilt about betraying your father?" the interviewer asks. 

Mike shakes his head. "'Betraying?' I didn't think of it like that anymore. I mean I had until then, but now? Now it was just me and mom, that was all. Me and mom, right? Just that filled me up. I didn't have room for anything else then. When I was out in the lake with the girls there, all I was thinking about was what we'd just done together and what I was going to do to her when I got the chance again. Guilt wasn't on my radar." 

Emily again. "Perhaps I was simply alert to it, but the smell of sex on my body seemed unmistakable, so, a few minutes after I returned to the party, I contrived to spill a rather pungent chili down my front. It was less embarrassing to sport a stain than to have people wonder whom I had been mating with. It did have the side effect of ruining my daughter's shirt, however." 

Now we see a young woman who looks like an early-20s version of Emily herself, except that her hair is dyed a shockingly bright red, her nose is bandaged, and both her eyes are blackened; a careful observer might note that her black eyes look a little better than they did in the previous episode. 

Her subtitle reveals her to be named Olivia Larsen. 

"I'd made that leap when I saw mom, that leap that made me think she and Mike were having sex," she tells the camera, her tone slightly nasal from her broken nose but still discernibly amused. "It freaked me out and was kinda gross, but what made me mad was that she stained the shirt I'd lent her. I mean, all her shirts were these hideous baggy monstrosities and she'd wanted to look sexier, so I let her use the shirt, and that's how she treated it? I liked that shirt!" 

"As the party concluded," the interviewer asks, "how were you dealing with the conclusion that your mother and brother were having sex?" 

"Well at this point it wasn't a conclusion, it was a conjecture," she corrects him. "But it made sense of a lot of things that didn't make sense any other way. Their big blowup on the trip, their tension since, the walk of shame when mom came back to the party - it all fit, and I could understand how it happened because mom and dad weren't really...well, there wasn't a lot of emotional heat there, it was like they were together by inertia more than anything else. I knew in my bones I was on the right track, but it was a lot to accept. So no, it wasn't a conclusion." 

"Then how were you dealing with your conjecture?" The interviewer sounds mildly irked at being corrected. 

"Like a ping-pong ball!" Olivia laughs. "One side was denial and the other was the proverbial light bulb over my head and I was getting knocked back and forth! But besides complete denial, the main thought was what was gonna happen when dad found out. Because it's not like you can live in a house together every day and keep something like that secret. Dad's a smart guy, I knew he'd tumble to it sooner or later, probably sooner. And he's, like, mild-mannered and nice and everything, but discovering that was definitely gonna blow some gaskets." 

Olivia is replaced by a handsome man in his mid-40s, a touch of gray in his dark hair. His eyes are the same whitish-blue as Nate's. 

The subtitle reads Bob Larsen. 

"In retrospect, I suppose it was really the party where I might have started drawing some conclusions," he says. "Not about Emily and Mike, but at least about Emily's fidelity. She vanished for quite a while and then returned looking very...satisfied. Happy. Afterglowing, if I'd have just realized it. But there had never been any question of infidelity on either of our parts, and sex was rarely even mentioned. It didn't seem like something I had to worry about. And with Mike? No, that was something where I'd need direct evidence before I could even conceive of it." 

Back to Emily as the interviewer asks, "You weren't using birth control?" 

"No, I can't use most forms of birth control," she tells us, "and honestly there had been no need for many years." 

"Your son had ejaculated inside of you," the interviewer goes on. "Were you concerned about pregnancy?" 

"No, not as much as I ought to have been. That way was possibly my most fertile day, and Mike certainly was a virile young man who produced...a great many chances at fertilization, shall we say? But I was caught in the need for and rapturous joy of our coupling. Becoming pregnant by my own son wasn't something I could consider while the aftereffects of my orgasms were still rippling through my body and his semen was still leaking into my panties." 

"But you had to know it was a possibility." 

"Of course I did. I was a 38-year-old married woman with two children. I was fully aware of the process of human reproduction. At that moment, however, I was not considering it." 

Olivia reappears, telling us, "I was watching them close when we packed up to head home, and they were seriously playing the 'We didn't fuck' look for all it was worth, but once I turned around and saw them giving each other these huge smiles, these 'We've got a secret' shit-eating grins that vanished as soon as they knew I was looking." 

"Sure we were playing it cool," Mike says, "but it was hard. There'd been this massive pressure, massive tension, and now we'd just given up to it and it felt great. We were just flying, and knowing we shared the secret made it hard not to just giggle." 

"I insisted that the windows be open on the way home," Emily says, "and I am afraid I must have had a very smug look on my face the whole way. My body was still thrumming with the aftereffects of the sex, and reliving it in my mind while Mike was in the back seat and undoubtedly doing the same was delightful and thrilling." 

"Did you two do anything else that day?" the interviewer asks. 

"Not that day, no," Emily says. "Bob and Olivia were both in the house. We needed to keep a level head." 

"And did you? Keep a level head?" 

Emily's smile turns a bit rueful. "Yes. For a time." 

The screen goes black and we see the words: 

July 5 

Mike reappears and says, "I'd lain awake half the night thinking about everything that had happened, just too horny to sleep and running things over and over in my mind. I felt like I was flyin'. I couldn't wait for the next day, because it was a Sunday - Olivia worked but neither mom or I did, and dad usually did something with his friends or his brother or just ran errands on Sunday, so I knew we'd have time alone. And I knew what we'd do with that time." 

"Lying in bed with Bob that night was one of the most remarkable experiences of my life," Emily informs us. "I was aroused - agonizingly so - and even going into the bathroom in the middle of the night to...relieve pressure only whetted my appetite. All night long I simply laid there in my marriage bed with my husband, wishing I was in my son's bed instead, wishing I were being ravished by my son, wanting him on top of me and inside me, wanting to be controlled and owned by him, wishing I were doing everything to him that I never did to my husband. 

"I should have known then that that my marriage was dead," she adds, "but that realization took rather longer to sink in." 

"Olivia was gone by 11:00 the next morning," Mike informs us with a huge smile, "and dad was out by noon, I think to go help his brother replacing a garage roof. That left just me and mom. All. Day. Long." 

"I went upstairs when Bob left," Emily says, "and I wanted to do something special for Mike. All of our encounters thus far had been hurried, rushed things. Now we'd mutually decided to travel further down this road and we had time to do things right, so I wanted this to be memorable. I went to my bedroom and dressed for him. I showered, did my hair and makeup, and picked out something sexy to wear for him." 

"I was in my bedroom waitin'," Mike laughs as he appears on the screen. "I knew we were alone, and we hadn't, like, discussed it or anything but we both knew we were gonna go at it. I expected her to just grab me and jump my bones, but after like fifteen minutes she hadn't shown up so I went looking for her." 

"I'd locked my door," Emily says with a laugh. "I didn't want him to see me early and ruin the effect, so I told him to go wait for me in his bedroom. I had to promise him several times that the wait would be worth it!" 

"What did you put on?" the interviewer asks. 

"I didn't have many sexy things at that time, simply because I hadn't needed them for so long. But I did have a very lacy pair of black, French-cut panties that were essentially translucent and displayed my legs and backside to advantage, so I put those on. I accompanied that with a bustier - I had several bustiers to help...rectify certain natural deficiencies." 

We see Mike briefly, who explains, "Mom's always thought her boobs are way too small. I think they're perfect, but then I don't get judged for having small tits, so what the hell do I know?" 

Back to Emily, who continues, "I chose the best one, which was tight across the tummy and pushed my breasts up. My legs are my best feature, so I owned a lot of stockings of various sorts. I put on a pair of black Cuban heel thigh-highs, and finished it off with a pair of five-inch stilettos that I had bought years before and had only worn perhaps twice before." 

"How did you look?" the interviewer asks. 

She smiles hugely. "Very, very good." 

"I was lying on my bed fidgeting," Mike informs us with a laugh. "You know how hard it is to wait for something that's gonna be the best thing ever? It was a nightmare! And then I hear this sound in the doorway and I look up and there she is, and she's looking absolutely gorgeous. She's always beautiful, right? But that was the first time she made herself look sexy for me, like really sexy, for my eyes only. I musta stammered something idiotic 'cause she kinda swayed across the bedroom, put her hands on her hips, and said, 'Is that so, Mr. Smooth?'" 

"It was adorable!" Emily giggles. "He was so very tongue-tied. A woman who's trying to look attractive for a man longs for that result, and it felt thrilling to finally have a man to do that for. It made me want him even more." 

"I reached up, took her by the hand, and pulled her on top of me," Mike says. "Body to body, our lips together, my hands running down her back and cupping her ass, the feel of it all, in our own house, in my own bed, with hours before we had to worry about stopping. That was the first time I really, honestly felt like her man." 

"Being able to simply relax and not worry about time or being caught was magnificent," Emily tells us as she reappears. "We must have lain there, me atop him, simply kissing, for twenty minutes before he even began to undress me. It was slow, lazy, the perfect way to spend a warm summer afternoon. This was the time we actually began to know each other as lovers, truly know each other." 

"It was all so right, so perfect," Mike says. "That's what I keep comin' back to in all this, is that from the start - right from that first time in front of the bikers - it all felt right when we were doin' it. When we weren't doin'it then there'd be guilt and fear and self-loathing and all that, but when we got physical, there was no doubt, man. None at all. We were made for each other. That was it." 

"This was really the first time we had had the chance to explore," Emily says. "Part of intimacy is violent passion, of course, but more of it is simply learning every inch of your lover's body, learning how his muscles feel beneath his skin when he's moving, listening to how his breathing changes when you nibble his neck or brush your fingertips over his erection through his underwear. It's learning his moods and desires, learning how he accepts pleasure, learning how his movements and sighs tell you what he wants you to do without the need for words. And even more than that, it's opening yourself to the same exploration by him, because that sort of raw openness leaves you as vulnerable as you can possibly be. Those long lovemaking sessions build the trust and empathy you need as the basis for an ongoing relationship. Just ripping each other's clothes off and fucking, as wonderful as that is, can never give you all that." 

"I remember how the sun was coming through my window," Mike tells us. "It was making a bright patch on my sheets, and when bare skin was in that patch of light it made it glow. My mom has amazing skin, just flawless and pale where the sun doesn't normally touch her, and it seemed like it was shining with its own light. I remember she was lying on her side and the stretch of thigh between the tops of her stockings and the little thread of her panties was shining like the moon. I kept running my hand over it just so I could see the contrast between my dark tan and her porcelain. I'll remember that until the day I die." 

"How was it being with her in that way now that there was no urgency?" the interviewer asks. 

"Oh there was urgency!" Mike laughs. "I know I felt pretty damned urgent at times. But there was no pressure. There was nothing to do but learn about each other and have fun doin' it. We'd had sex before, but this was the first time it felt like..." He trails off, uncertain of his words. 

After a moment, the interviewer prompts, "Felt like?" 

"It felt like we were together. Not being forced to fuck to save our lives, not acting because the pressure had gotten too great. We were here because we wanted this with each other, and because that seemed more important than anything else at the moment. We felt like we were lovers, not just like we were fucking." 

"More intimate?" 

"Yeah," Mike nods, echoing his mother's earlier statement. "Intimate is a good word." 

"Our clothing came off so gradually that it almost seemed to happen on its own," Emily says. "I recall pushing Mike's shirt up over his abdomen so that I could kiss and lick every rippling muscle and dimple of skin, but then it simply stayed pushed up around his chest for the longest time. He unfastened my bustier in stages, though of course he had my breasts out long before he freed me from the garment. This was the first time he didn't devour my breasts like a starving baby. He stroked my nipples with just his fingertips and made them hard, and then touched me elsewhere for the longest time. Then he tugged my nipples, gently at first and then harder, sending shivers through my body that got stronger and stronger, but then he went back to touching my arms and my shoulders, the backs of my thighs, anywhere but the obvious erogenous zones. By the time he flicked at them with his tongue, I was so worked up that even that light, teasing touch was enough to bring me to the edge of climax!" 

"Our first few times were too raucous to be deliberate with anything," Mike says with a chuckle and a grin. "This time, though, I was like, 'Shit, she wants to come from me sucking her tits? Let her come from me sucking her tits.' So I slowly went from flicking with my tongue to licking to nibbling to sucking, and somewhere in there she started to come. It wasn't the biggest, baddest orgasm I'd ever given her and it sure wasn't the best of the day for her, but it just kinda set a tone." 

"It was a small, unpresumptuous, perfect little orgasm," Emily recalls, her cheeks aglow with the recollection. "It came on slowly and grew until there was a fire in the depths of my pussy - not a blaze, just a warm, soft, glowing little candle that felt marvelous and promised so very much more. And just from his mouth on my breasts!" 

"Mom has amazing hands," Mike tells us. "Everything about her is amazing, but her hands...she's got really deft fingers, really quick and clever. I didn't even really realize she'd opened my pants until she ran her fingers over my cock through my underwear. And it was such a light touch too, I mean I barely felt it, but just the way she ran her fingers around the head and then down the length and then her fingernails over my balls, it just made me stand at attention in an instant." 

Emily again, smiling like the cat who caught the canary. "It probably took another fifteen minutes before I actually got him out of the rest of his clothes, and even then I was in no hurry. I sucked his nipples - his nipples are sensitive, which I didn't know until then - and licked my way down his body. I let him feel my breath on his cock, and just when he thought I was going to take it in my mouth, I passed right by and kissed just as slowly down his legs. The poor boy groaned so loudly, but when I worked my way back up, I did take him in my mouth, and I think that made up for it!" 




Folie a Deux, Episode 04



Mike's eyes are bright and excited as he recalls, "She took her sweet time. It was...it was like she was making love to my cock. Not me, not then, just my cock, like my cock was the only thing in the world and she was using her mouth to make it dance for her. And I remember...I remember the way the light was coming in through the window and how it lit up her hair like a halo around her head, and I was staring down at an angel adoring my cock and doing things with her mouth that nobody else ever did. She took me right up to coming, then edged me back down, then back up, then back down. I wanted to come so bad! And normally when we were together, I was in charge. But at that moment, I gave it over to her. It was her tune. She'd make me come when she wanted to." 

"This was the blowjob my son deserved," Emily says firmly. "He deserved me worshipping his cock, and that was what I did. I adore oral and I wanted this to be something that he would always remember with excitement and joy. More than that, though, I wanted to learn him in the way that only extended contact can. I kept my mouth on him for perhaps 20 or 25 minutes, and when I sensed he was close I backed down, then raised him up again. And then, finally, when he was throbbing against my tongue and his moans simply didn't stop, I took him to the root and held my mouth there while he came." 

"That orgasm," Mike recalls, licking his lips and smiling. "That fucking orgasm. The way I blew off I thought cum was going to shoot out of her ears, but she didn't even flinch. She held her lips tight around the base as I flooded her mouth, and I could feel her swallowing and swallowing..." 

"I'd wanted to taste Mike's cum since the first time we were together," Emily tells us with a proud smile. "As I was kneeling in front of those savages with his cock in my mouth, I wanted to make him cum so badly! The sensation of a cock erupting in my mouth, the individual flavor of the man, the fact that I've put aside all pleasure for myself and focused solely on giving him the pleasure he deserves - it's all so perfect! And I have never in my life enjoyed giving oral as much as I did then." 

"It was like...fuck, the room got spinny!" Mike laughs. "I couldn't catch my breath. I couldn't move. I was helpless for the longest time. I mean, if dad had walked in with a shotgun I still couldn't have moved, I was fucking paralyzed."  

Emily is looking rather pleased with herself as she says, "I knew it was good from his reaction. I just watched him for the longest time, rubbing his thighs at first and then sliding up so my body could press against his. His eyes were closed and his face was beatific. He looked like a medieval painting of a saint, nothing but peace and joy on his face. He was so beautiful!" 

"As I was laying there, I just kept thinking that mom had earned some serious pleasure with that," Mike says, "so as soon as I could, like, form coherent words, I told her to get right up on top of me so I could get at her pussy." 

"He didn't tell me to take off my panties," Emily says, a kittenish gleam in her eyes, "so I didn't. I straddled his shoulders and lay down with my belly on his, my cheek against his abdomen, and simply gave myself over to him, to do with as he pleased." 

"Her panties were completely soaked, so I gave them a long lick right up her slit, all the way back to where the cloth narrowed down to a string, then back the way I came." Mike chuckles, "I did it over and over until her hips were moving and she started muttering, 'Fuck yeah, baby' and "suck my fucking cunt.' Once I get her swearing, I know she's locked in!" 

"The moment he peeled aside my panties and put his lips on me, I came hard," Emily laughs, her eyes bright and her cheeks flushed. "It was magnificent, because this time I could simply relax and feel it wash over me without knowing that we had to rush or feeling like we oughtn't be doing this at all. My sweet lover was giving me pleasure, and I could simply lie atop him and accept it, for as long as he wished to give it to me." 

"The great thing about being in that position," Mike says, "is that all of her juices ran right into my mouth, and she tastes way too good to waste a drop. I could just lie there and move my mouth, and it was so easy to take her from orgasm to orgasm to orgasm, right from peak to peak. 

"Plus, just having her there, feeling her weight on top of me, feeling her heat, was such a turn-on. She comes with her whole body, and I could feel her muscles twitching all in her body and her limbs. Whenever I did anything, the response was right there in the way she responded. I could instantly tell when something felt good, and how good it felt, by the way her stomach muscles danced on my chest. How fucking hot is that?" 

"I loved every second of simply closing my eyes and letting my son lick me," Emily assures us with complete sincerity, "but I couldn't simply let him do all the work and get nothing in return, and his cock was right in front of me...his, sweet, thick, magnificent cock. He was already hard again, of course, because he gets hard nearly instantly after coming, so I had merely to open my mouth and take him in." 

"My first 69 with mom," Mike sighs in happy reminiscence. "Not our last, that's for sure, but definitely memorable. It's so different from fucking, because I'm completely focused on giving her pleasure and she's completely focused on giving me pleasure, and neither of us are thinking about ourselves at all. She just kept coming, and now I could feel every rise and fall of her orgasms in her tongue on my cock. Man...wow!" 

"I didn't want him to come in my mouth again," Emily says, then instantly corrects that to, "Well, I did want him to come in my mouth again because it's delicious and feels fantastic, but more than that I wanted that come inside me, as deep in my pussy as he could put it, because that's where his come belongs. Every single drop of it." 

"And you still weren't trying to get pregnant?" the interviewer asks, his incredulousness obvious. 

"No, not per se," Emily replies. "It's a simple fact that, when a woman loves a man the way I love Mike, nothing in the world can possibly feel as good as having him hammer his hard cock deep inside you and put his come into your womb. There's nothing more natural on Earth than wanting that." 

"But you had to know what would eventually happen if you kept doing that," the interviewer insists. 

"I wasn't thinking about it," Emily shrugs with a smile, "and if I had thought about it I wouldn't have given a fuck. That need overcame everything else." 

Mike again. "We couldn't keep doing that, not when there was actual fucking in the offing. I don't think either of us even said anything or hinted. When the moment was perfect, we both knew and we didn't need anything else. She just lifted herself up, swung around, and then I was inside her." 

"We moved together so perfectly," Emily says with a delighted smile. "No hesitation, no falseness, no stumbles. We were one person, one movement, one pleasure. I could hardly tell where I left off and Mike began. I don't know how long it went on because it was timeless and perfect. It was us together the way we should always have been and always be." 

"There was this one moment where she was moving her hips in circles on me," Mike says. "It felt so amazing! And the light was coming in at a slant and lighting up her body and mine. It felt so warm, like we were being held in these invisible arms. She smiled down at me, and the expression on her face at that moment was just...angelic. She was an angel. I was making love to an angel. There's no way to get closer to heaven than that." 

"We came together," Emily says happily. "Of course we did. And then we lay together, me atop him, face nestled into his neck, with the sun shining off the sweat we had made together." 

"I never wanted to move again!" Mike laughs. "It felt too good just to be there with her. But dad was due back we didn't know when, so all we did was make out for a while, just kissing and touching and stroking. When she finally got up and reached for her panties, I kept thinking that it should always be this way between us. We should always be together like this, no rush, no pressure, just us sharing ourselves. It was what we both needed." 

"Of course I put my panties on!" Emily laughs. "Mike had just put about twenty gallons of cum in me! I didn't want to stain the carpets!" 

"We took a shower together, and that was just fun," Mike tells us. "Playful. We laughed, we washed each other, we fooled around a little, we sucked face in the spray. I felt her up through the towel as we dried each other off. It was a great fucking day." 

"What did you do then?" the interviewer asks Emily. 

"I believe," she says, "that I went to purchase some shirts." 

"Shirts?" 

"Yes." 

"Why?" 

"I liked to wear tee shirts around the house," she explains, "but all of mine were very baggy. I decided I wanted to emphasize my figure more, so I bought some form-fitting tees. Perhaps I was feeling less...unattractive than before. Or perhaps I simply wanted Mike to be able to appreciate me more readily. I bought shirts, came home, washed them, and was wearing one by the time Bob and Olivia got home." 

We see Bob again. "I noticed the shirt immediately. The day before, when we went to the party, was the first time I'd ever seen her wear a tight tee, and here she was in a brand new one. It caught my eye." 

"What did you think?" the interviewer asks. 

"I was glad. Emily is a beautiful woman and has a lovely figure that she busted her ass to keep. I'd always urged her to show it off a little more, so I was glad to see her drawing attention to it. I didn't think anything else of it." 

Olivia now. "They always say that someone changing the way they dress or look or losing weight or whatever is a tipoff that they're having an affair, and bam, there mom was in a tighter shirt than she ever used to wear. I asked her about it, and she was like, 'I went to the store to replace the one I borrowed yesterday and just picked some up for myself,' but I was like, yeah, OK. Sure." 

"Did she replace the shirt of yours she ruined?" the interviewer asks. 

"Oh yeah, with three new ones, all washed and put on my bed when I got home," Olivia chuckles, "so I made out OK!" 

Black screen with white letters: 

July 6 - July 23 

Mike tells us, "The next couple weeks were a blur. A happy blur! Mom and I took every chance to be together, like whenever we were alone for half an hour we'd be at it like rabbits." 

"What about you and Miss Williamson?" the interviewer asks as picture of a pretty redheaded teenager is shown on the screen. 

The picture is labeled Hannah Williamson. 

Mike reappears and says, "I forgot about her for a few days, but she was a nice girl and I didn't want to hurt her or anything, so after that I started hanging out with her again. It was weird because I felt like I was 'with' mom, so it felt like I was cheating. But at the same time...I couldn't be 'with' mom, could I? I mean, she was married to my father, not to mention the fact that she's my mom. So no matter how much heat there was there, it's not like we could, like, date, or, like, be anything more than what we were. Right? 

"But there was something else too. Being in the house with mom was hard when we couldn't do anything, because...god, I wanted to do things all the time, no matter who else was in the house, no matter what else was going on. I'd see her talking with dad or on the phone with grandma or whatever, and all I'd want to do is rip off her clothes and fuck her on the floor. Being there was driving me crazy. I had to get out and take my mind off of it, and I couldn't always do stuff with friends, so sometimes Hannah was the only one there to keep my mind off things. So I talked about the whole thing with mom, and she agreed I should keep dating Hannah." 

"Did you have sex with Hannah?" the interviewer asks. 

"Not right away. Hannah wanted to because we had been, so it was weird and awkward that we weren't fooling around." 

"What did you do?" 

"We went to a movie. We went out to dinner a couple times. We went to the mall -" 

"No, I meant physically." 

"Oh. There was no way I could avoid kissing her. I mean she kissed me, and she wasn't taking no for an answer. And we felt each other up, you know? There was no way around that. But nothing more than that until...well, something else happened later. I made a lot of excuses in the meantime." 

We see Emily again as the interviewer asks, "What did you think of Mike seeing Hannah?" 

Her face sours. "I...understood his need to spend time outside the house. Acting as though nothing was happening between us was exceptionally difficult when we were forced to do it. And suddenly dropping Miss Williamson would have been cruel, given the tempo of their relationship prior to that. I also realized something he did not - that completely withdrawing from his social set would raise questions we did not want raised. He needed to maintain as much of his old life as he could. Still, I have never cared for Miss Williamson." 

"What did you think of Mike seeing Hannah?" the interviewer repeats. 

Emily's sour look becomes one of distinct irritation. "He had to do it. He was acting precisely how a young man acts when he is infatuated, and his friends would have noticed that. Being with Miss Williamson provided him a cover. An excuse, if you will That doesn't mean I enjoyed it, and in light of what came later I came to regret agreeing that he should see her at all." 

Olivia appears again. "So I was definitely keeping an eye out for evidence, but man, mom was good at covering their tracks. Other than changing Mike's bedsheets like every single day, there was nothing I could really point to. Yeah there were these constant looks between them and they were totes giving off the vibe, but that's not evidence." 

"You were collecting evidence," the interviewer says. "What were you planning to do with it?" 

"I don't know!" Olivia laughs. "I wasn't thinking that far ahead, because even though I knew they were fucking, I didn't believe they were fucking. Understand the difference? I knew with my head that that was what was going on, but that didn't mean I really accepted it. I was going to need direct evidence before I'd really be convinced. Beyond convincing myself, I didn't have a plan." 

Emily again. The interviewer asks, "You were with Mike many times during the next two or two-and-a-half weeks?" 

Emily's smile is lascivious and delighted. "We seized every chance we had. Two, three...six times a day." 

"Six times?" 

"On good days," she laughs, "and those were very good days! But no day went by without us finding a way to be together at least once, even if it was only a very quick chance seized when we were in the house by ourselves for a short time." 

"Did you do anything when there were others in the house?" 

"Not yet," Emily replies. "We certainly began to eventually, but not right away. We were still able to exercise enough restraint to take elementary precautions - but it was definitely not easy! I had never been so hungry for sex before, and certainly not so hungry for one person!" 

"What does that mean?" 

Emily blushes demurely. "When I discovered sex in high school, I also discovered that I very much enjoyed it. I developed a...reputation." 

"What sort of reputation?" 

Her blush deepens. "As being sexually promiscuous." 

"Were you?" 

Her face a shining, bright red, she shifts uncomfortably and says, "I enjoyed sex and saw no reason to deprive myself. I was hardly the slut was purported to be, but I was more active than most girls and I never felt shame about it. Sex is wonderful, one of the very best things in life, and I thought it was nonsense to deprive myself of it simply to suit ridiculous and antiquated notions of morality that were, in any case, applied unequally. Why should a young man who has several partners be considered a 'cocksman' or 'player' but a girl with the same number be considered a 'slut?' If anything, I was striking a blow for women everywhere." 

"...really?" 

She sets her chin defiantly. "Yes." 

"All right. So even then, you didn't want sex as much as you did with your son?" 

"No, not even then, when my teenage hormones were raging and everything was new. And aside from that, my desires tended to be less...fixed then. I became deeply infatuated with my partners, but my infatuations were mostly short-lived and ready to move on to another partner as soon as things began to feel mundane or ordinary with the man I was with." 

"How long did this continue?" 

"Until Bob and I met. I believe there's already been a discussion of my reputation when when I met him. I had earned it in college, but again, it was nothing to be ashamed of. A young man certainly wouldn't have been ashamed of having multiple partners, so why ought I have been?" 

"And Bob was just another infatuation." 

"He was. Pregnancy altered everything, of course, and the hectic life of a financially-struggling young family effectively killed it." 

"Until Mike." 

"Until Mike," she agreed. "And once Mike and I simply let go and accepted our desires, I thought of almost nothing but him. Everything else began to suffer as we went, from my dancing to my housekeeping and cooking. I could focus on nothing - I'd be rehearsing for the show I was in and suddenly the other dancers would chastise me for daydreaming. Of course I was daydreaming constantly, about my son, about what we'd done, about what we'd continue to do, about what I wanted to do to him and what I wanted him to do to me. I dreamed ten thousand erotic scenarios, most of which were foolishly impossible, though no less erotic for that." 

"What sort of scenarios?" 

She giggles self-consciously. "Oh, the sorts of things a schoolgirl dreams about. Sex on white-sand beaches with waves crashing over us, making love in the grass under a blazing sunset, sex on a vast canopy bed with silken sheets, that sort of thing. It was all nonsense, especially for a woman rapidly approaching 40!" 

"Was there one encounter between you and your son during that time that stands out in your memory?" 

"There is one," she admits, her smile becoming mischievous. "Well, there are many, but one in particular encapsulates the entire thing for me just perfectly. It was about a week after the party, so Mike and I had become accustomed to enjoying each other. It was a weekend and I was alone in the house - or so I thought. I'd gathered the laundry and taken all of it into the basement. Laundry has always been a meditative experience for me. Certainly no other family member wants to help, so it has always been a time when I am left alone with my thoughts." 

"What were you thinking about this time?" the interviewer asks. 

"Mike!" Emily says with a laugh, as though the question was absurd. "We'd had no chance to do anything that day, and I thought we wouldn't be given the chance later because Bob was going to be coming back home in about an hour. It would have been the first day for a week that Mike and I wouldn't have made love, and that was an unpleasant prospect. I was using the quiet time to center myself. I has music on and was lost in it." 

"What sort of music do you listen to when you're alone?" 

"Oh, I like a lot of things my children hate," she replies with a laugh. "If memory serves, that day it was Bruce Springsteen's Greetings from Asbury Park, or possibly The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle. Something early, with long songs, emotional songs that a listener can get lost in. I was carefully folding clothes, very much taking my time with the task, swaying my hips and humming...and then, without warning, I felt big, strong hands on my hips." 




Folie a Deux, Episode 04



"What did you do?" 

"I screamed! I nearly leaped out of my skin! For all I knew it was some random lunatic come to murder me. I tried to whirl and, I think, claw his face, but the hands wrapped me up and held me tightly, and I could do nothing. I was terrified! I screamed so loudly that it took Mike whispering in my ear three or four times before I actually heard him." 

"What did he say?" 

She laughs. "'Quiet, mom, do you want the neighbors to hear?' When I realized it was him I turned around in his arms and gave his chest a pounding!" 

"What did he do then?" 

"He laughed and kissed me quite...hungrily. And of course I kissed him back equally fervently. He said he had told his boss that he was sick and left early because he knew I was home and he wanted, and I quote, 'to fuck my brains out.' That was a program I could certainly support! 

"He only let me kiss him briefly, however, because he turned me back around. He simply put his hands on my hips and turned me to face away from him. I couldn't have resisted his strength even if I had wanted to, and that was thrilling and perfect for me. I am in in excellent physical condition, of course, as a professional dancer, and part of that is being strong, but Mike's strength dwarfs mine. When he puts his hands on me and pushes me, twists me, bends me into the shape and position he wants, I'm like a reed before a hurricane. He overwhelms me, and in those moments I'm small and frail and delicate and perfectly, utterly feminine. 

"Then his hands were on me, pushing my shirt up, undoing my bra, feeling my breasts. His fingers pulled at my nipples as he put his lips on my neck and nibbled in all the right places to make me tingly and wet. I wiggled my ass against him and felt him hard against me - I remember that I gasped when I felt that, because I knew what it meant. My shirt came off in a flash and he was kissing his way down my back. The air conditioning was on and the cold air was blowing on me, so I shivered as he left a trail of saliva down my spine. All I could do was lean forward and put my hands on the folding table and let him do what he wanted to. As it turned out, what he wanted to do was peel my shorts off and leave me completely naked. I stepped out of them and kicked them aside as he - oh, I loved this part! - he put his hands on my ass and spread my cheeks apart. Before I knew what was happening, I felt his mouth on my ass!" 

"Do you like that?" 

"I love it! He'd done it only a couple of times, but I just..." She shivers in delight. "There is something about it that feels so very decadent!" 

"More decadent than having sex with your own son?" 

She laughs. "Given that he was the one performing analingus on me, it was a cumulative effect! But as he ran his tongue around that hole and kissed it, I could feel my arousal running down my thigh. I was literally dripping!" 

"Did you and Mike ever have anal sex?" 

"No, not in the sense I'm sure you mean. He never fucked my ass, I mean, simply because neither of us is particularly aroused by that, rather than through any 'moral' considerations. After all, my son and I were screwing like rabbits every chance we got, so neither of us were feeling particularly constrained by conventional morality! But I loved him licking my ass and he loved doing it - and very shortly after that we discovered that we liked it just as much when we changed places in that act. There are a lot of nerves there, and having those nerves teased with a tongue feels wonderful! In fact, he made me come that way." 

"And you came loudly?" 

"I always do if I'm not gagged," she giggles. "Mike loves my shouted profanity, and I barely even realize I'm doing it, much less have any ability to control it. So, yes, I am quite certain I shouted something along the lines of 'Lick my ass, motherfucker,' or 'Tongue that hole and make me fucking come.' Something in that genre. It was hardly intellectually stimulating, but my man wasn't complaining." 

"And it would have been difficult for him at any rate, with his tongue buried in your bum." 

"Very true! He was putting his mouth to better use than talking. Anyway, I was still bobbing along on the ripples of that orgasm when Mike manhandled me to the washing machine. I was helpless, he could have tossed me outside nude and I would barely have been conscious of my surroundings. However, I absolutely did realize what was going on when he pressed me up against the machine so that my clit touched it - the vibrations from it were electrifying! In the aroused state I was in, that alone might have been enough to push me over into another orgasm, but it was then that he took me by the hips again and slid his cock into me. Oh! That orgasm! I lifted up onto my toes and ground my clit into the machine as he took me from behind. I tried to straighten up, but he put one hand in the middle of my back and forced me chest-down onto the lid so I could feel the vibrations in my nipples as well. He took me hard, fast, and all I could do was lie there and come and feel him possess me. It was a perfect moment in time. When he came inside me, I felt so very happy, so very complete. That was a very memorable afternoon!" 

We see Mike now as the interviewer asks, "During that two-and-a-half week period, was there one sexual encounter with your mother that you find particularly memorable?" 

Mike grins. "There's like twenty of 'em. But yeah, there's one I still think about. Mom and I were really careful about what we did and when. We had to be super careful to keep from getting caught. We always made sure we were alone, we always made sure of everybody's schedule, we always made sure we couldn't be spotted or overheard, and we always made sure we had time to get cleaned up before we saw anyone else came home. We always did that. At first." 

"At first?" the interviewer asks. 

"Yeah. We were real careful at first. We made sure we'd get done like an hour before anybody got home so we'd have a chance to wash sheets, take a shower, be sure that all the stray underwear and clothes were picked up off the floor and all the cum drips were mopped up. But after like a week we started to get comfortable. We'd done it probably fifteen times or more during that week, so we were getting used to being together. I mean, at first every time we were together there was still this adrenaline rush like we were gonna get caught or somebody would find out or something, but once that wore off it started feeling like it was...'routine' isn't the right word, because it never, ever got routine, but it started feeling less dangerous. And when something starts to feel less dangerous, you get relaxed and take less precautions." 

"How did that process go? What corners got cut first?" 

"The timing. When we were together we didn't want it to end, so we kept pushing it later and later before we stopped. We shrunk the time from an hour to half an hour, just barely enough time to get sheets in the washer and catch a shower. More than once we'd just barely gotten cleaned up and the wash running before dad or Olivia came home." 

"Were you conscious of this?" 

"Oh yeah, of course. It was always, 'Just once more,' 'Just a few more minutes cuddling,' 'Just a little longer in the shower together.' We knew we were pushing it, but it's not like we were doing it with anyone else in the house...yet. We figured we were being careful enough. Which was stupid. I mean sooner or later we were bound to get caught. But then hindsight is 20/20." 

"What about birth control?" 

Mike makes a wry, amused face. "I was honestly starting to get worried because we weren't taking any precautions at all. When it was all new I wasn't thinking about that, I was just thinking about her and the sex, but once we settled into it, yeah it became a concern for me. And it's not like we were even taking, like, elementary precautions. Unless I came in her mouth, I was coming in her pussy - and I only came in her mouth like twice a week. That left a lot of spunk up inside her. But then she actually got her period like...two weeks or so after the party, I think. Right around the time we did this thing that I'm about to tell you." 

"Was that a relief?" 

"It was, yeah, but not really in the way you'd expect. It basically meant I stopped thinking about it at all. It was like, 'Oh, hey, I didn't knock her up, I don't have to worry about that anymore!' Which was idiotic, but when you're madly in love with someone - and you're 18 years old - you don't really think clearly. I mean, yeah, I didn't knock her up in those two weeks, but she was a fertile woman and I was a potent guy and we were doing it multiple times a day. Sooner or later biology was gonna happen. 

"Anyway, this one time dad was at work and I think Olivia was on a road trip with friends, so we knew we had all day long. We fucked in the living room, then in the kitchen, then in the bathroom, then I think in the kitchen again, and then we wound up in my bedroom. We knew it was gonna be the last one of the day just based on what time it was, so we were really milking it for all it was worth." 

"Was the last one of the day always a long session?" 

"Oh yeah. It was like, yeah, if we have to go twelve hours without acknowledging that we were fucking, we wanted enough to carry us over. And besides, that was like my sixth or seventh orgasm of the day. I was a healthy 18-year-old, but there's still a limit to how fast you can make the spunk, right? So we went past the half-hour mark before we had to start worrying about cleaning up - I think we'd barely gotten started by then - and then the 20-minute mark...then the 15-minute mark. And we were both watching the time by then, because we knew we were really pushing it. 

"Mom started to get worried I wouldn't finish in time, so she started doing all this Kegel magic which, had it been my first or second time of the day, would have gotten me off in ten seconds. But I was running dry! I remember nailing her to the mattress, just hammering her down, me on top, her folded double with her ankles up on my shoulders, kissing just as hard as we were fucking, right? And man, we were making a fucking racket too, with my headboard rattling the wall. It sounded like the whole place was gonna come down around us, and that's not even counting the sex sounds and the moaning and the filth that came out of her mouth when my lips weren't on hers. Like, even my balls slapping her ass were loud. 

"There came this point when we realized that if we wanted to cover up the evidence and even just take a quick shower, we had to stop then. I mean, we had to stop right then. I glanced at the clock and saw what time it was, and then she looked at the clock and I could see worry in her eyes...no, not worry, just concern. Just acknowledgment that, hey, it's time to come or get off the mom, right? And for just a split second I started to slow down, like my rhythm faltered...and then I kissed her hard and started fucking again." 

"How did she react to that? I mean she must have known what that meant." 

"Of course she did. She just moaned into my mouth and squeezed my cock so hard with her pussy that it felt like she was trying to rip it off. It was maybe the most turned on I'd seen her up to that point. It was like...yeah, fuck it, let's go for it. Let's do it." 

"You were willing to be caught in the act by your father?" 

"Well it wasn't like that...we thought. It was more like we were willing to take a chance on both of us being all sweated up and having my room smell like a brothel still when dad got home, right? We'd never done that before. We figured we still had time to finish before dad got home, but, like, my cum was going to be running into her panties when she greeted him at the door." 

"That didn't worry you?" 

"It should have, but it didn't. Not then, like, not right then. All I wanted was to put my seed as deep into my woman as I could get it. I wasn't thinking about shit else. And she responded to that, you know? She responded to the fact that I was willing to flaunt it a little to dad, to take the risk that dad might realize something was up. Now, it wasn't much of a risk, because dad was pretty fucking oblivious at this point, but it was more a risk than we'd taken before, and what's sexier than danger? And we thought we'd be done before dad got home, because he was regular as clockwork. Usually. 

"So there we were, goin' at it - and then we heard the garage door open. The door was on a track that gave off this loud squeak you could hear all through the house, so we knew right away what it was, and we knew it had to be dad not Olivia because only him and mom parked in the garage. So, fuck! Dad was home!" 

"What did you do?" 

Mike grins. "I looked mom in the eye and slammed in as hard as I could." 

"With your father in the house?" 

"He was in his car, in the garage," Mike corrects. "But yeah. Just knowing he was there was the edge I needed to come. Mom's eyes got gigantic and she started to howl, so I kissed her and came as deep inside her as I could. Her insides were just freaking on my cock, spasming, doing things she'd never done before. She sucked every drop of cum right out of my balls. Usually the seventh or eighth orgasm of the day is a little one, but that...what was one of the best I've ever had." 

"So she approved of this?" 

"Well...yeah. Her whole body shook. I could feel her thighs quaking where they wrapped around my body. I think we fucking levitated off the bed for a few seconds there." 

"So you simply laid there post-coitus as your father came in the house and -" 

"No! Good Lord no!" Mike laughs. "Are you fucking kidding? I don't think I'd really finished coming before I was up and yanking my clothes on - well, my shorts. I ran downstairs and was in the kitchen, shirtless and sweaty and stinking of sex, and I was just reaching into the fridge for a soda when dad came strolling in the door." 

"What did he do?" 

"He said hello," Mike shrugs. "I told him I'd been out for a run. He said the power had gone out in their building so everybody had left a half-hour early. Mom took a quick shower and came down a few minutes later. That was that, except for the looks mom and I kept giving each other all day." 

"What sort of looks?" 

"The sort of looks two people who just got away with something they really shouldn't have gotten away with give each other. I mean...we absolutely, without a doubt shoulda been caught then, but we weren't." 

"What effect did that have on you?" 

"We got more careful for about a week," Mike says, "and then we got more reckless. A lot more reckless." 

We now see Olivia, who says, "This whole thing was starting to drive me a little crazy. I mean...wouldn't it? Once you start thinking something like that about your own mom and brother, you're going to find it's hard to stop thinking about it until you get proof one way or the other. It's just...you don't want to know, but you have to know." 

"What did you do?" the interviewer asks. 

"It was frustrating!" Olivia replies with a laugh. "Because, look, I thought what mom and Mike were doing - or what I thought they were doing - was really creepy, but everything I could think of to get evidence was just as creepy." 

"Explain?" 

"OK, so the first thought I had was putting a cam in Mike's room or my parents' bedroom to get video. But then I started thinking about how creepy that was, that I was trying to get a video of two family members doing it. And besides, if I was wrong - and I had to admit that was a possibility - then I was the creep. If they weren't doing anything and Mike found my cam in his bedroom? I mean...what would he think of me?" 

"He might have thought you had prurient interest in him." 

"I know! And what if he'd have reciprocated? Oh my god, I'd have died of embarrassment! I'd have had to run away from home." 

"At the very least. What did you think of next?" 

"I kept trying to catch them doing stuff. Not actually screwing, but kissing or...something. Anything." 

"With what result?" 

"Nothing! I saw them giving each other looks all the time, but those could have been completely innocent. Maybe they had an inside joke, you know? Or maybe I was just imagining the whole thing. It could have been confirmation bias, just me seeing what I expected to see and what I was looking for." 

"There was no physical evidence?" 

"Once I found some...um...'soiled' sheets on Mike's bed, but that didn't mean anything. He was officially dating that Hannah chick, and she was bragging to everybody about how much she was getting from him so that didn't prove anything. Hell, maybe he had a wet dream. And then toward the end of July they both started acting a little spooked for a while, so I started wondering if I had been imagining the whole thing." 

"Your mother had changed her wardrobe, of course." 

"Oh yeah," Olivia nods. "She was suddenly dressing a lot sexier, and not just her tight tee shirts. She bought a bunch of sexy bras and panties, a bunch of really seductive lingerie. And all of a sudden she was definitely acting like she was getting it regular. But that could have just meant she was having an affair with some guy not named Mike Larsen." 

"But wouldn't that have been just as important to know?" 

Olivia makes a slightly surprised, slightly disgusted face. "No! If she was getting outside action I didn't even want to know." 

"That's a...slightly curious attitude." 

"Why? Mom's a human woman, and believe it or not, human women need sex just like human men do. It was obvious that dad wasn't giving it to her." 

"How was that obvious?" 

Olivia frowns, then laughs. "Have you met my dad? He's an awesome guy and I adore him, but I can't even really imagine him having sex. Can you?" 

"I generally try not to imagine other men having sex." 

She laughs again. "OK, well I do, and I can't. But mom's different. She's just more...physical. Dad's in awesome shape, especially for a man his age, but he does it because it's healthy. Mom's a dancer. She loves to move, she loves to sweat, she loves exertion. Dad's up in his head a lot more than mom is. Mom is just a really physical person, and sex is part of that. So of course she'd want it, and if she wasn't getting it from dad then it was perfectly understandable that she'd go outside the marriage." 

"But that's not something you'd want to know?" the interviewer repeats. 

"No. Sex is part of a successful marriage - or at least it is if at least one of the people in the marriage wants sex. Mom wasn't acting unhappy. She was happier than she'd been before, in fact. She wasn't taking anything away from dad. She needed it, dad wasn't giving it to her, she was getting it from somebody else. I was fine with that. I mean, there was this hot guy like two houses down that was always giving her the eye, and if she was fucking him I'd have been happy for her as long as it didn't break up the marriage." 

"So then why were you trying so hard to catch her and Mike?" 

"Because that would be creepy! Jeez. That's obvious." 

There is a silent pause as the camera lingers on Olivia. At length, the interviewer asks, "So what did you do then?" 

She shrugs and says, "I made a plan." 

The screen goes black and we see a card with white letters: 

July 24 - July 30 

Emily appears. "Bob returning unexpectedly while Mike and I were making love was terribly frightening. Of course the sheer danger of it was tremendously erotic in the instant it happened, but that was because Mike and I were already making love when that element was introduced. At that point we never would have done anything had we known Bob would return while we were making love."