That Damned Blessing Ch. 04

Literotic asexstories – That Damned Blessing Ch. 04 by Senor_Smut,Senor_Smut Author’s Note: All imaginary persons I imagined for the purposes of this story who engage in sexual activity of the imaginary variety are 18 imaginary years old or older, I imagine. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is coincidental but obviously fated to be, so blame the Universe and not me.

Up next: Are You Tiffani Caine? Chapter 5

That Damned Blessing, Chapter 4:

In Which the Best is Made of a Bad Situation

Day Ten

Three options had been given. The first – that both of them die – had been rejected out of hand. The second was an indefinite delay of Ryan and Jess’ joining of spirits, but one that would be difficult, painful, and temporary, and in their end would change their fates not at all. The third was to abandon all resistance and embrace the changes, to become a blissful couple, to make love and to make babies and to become rich in all the things that made life good. It had been left up to them, and the shamans were breaking up into small groups to speak in their native language.

Mother and son sat naked on stumps in the central clearing of the village as Jake explained it all. Jess leaned back so far she almost fell off her stool. Ryan put his elbows on his knees and covered his face in his hands. Neither spoke for a long time. Finally Jake said, “This is the biggest decision either of you will ever make. Take some time. Get dressed and go inside that house there. Have something to eat, maybe some whiskey. Figure out what’s best for you and we’ll take it from there.”

Like automatons, the mother and only son stood and began to pull their clothes back on. Although they hadn’t been able to take their eyes off each other while the shamans were examining them, now that they had been presented with the options, each was in their own world, staring at the ground or up at the sky as they dressed but seeing nothing. Ryan finished dressing first and watched his mother as she buttoned her last few buttons, and then they both headed for the house where they’d been several times before.

As they entered the house, they noticed that one of the shamans, a very wrinkled and elderly man, was following them. Ryan asked him if he was going to listen to their discussion, and the man looked lost for a moment and then turned and said something to Jake in the native language. Jake said, “Oh don’t worry, this is Kennan. Doesn’t speak a word of English. He’ll just be there to interrupt if you two get caught up again and start doing something physical.”

Jess and Ryan looked at each other and shrugged, and Jess said, “Good idea. It sounds like if we…if we have intercourse, it might be bad for the magic.”

“Well, sort of,” Jake said, scratching back of his head. “It would make it impossible to slow down what’s going on, but you two goin’ at it is actually a part of the ceremony to speed things up. So if you two have a naughty, well, you’re makin’ your choice.”

“Wow,” Ryan said, turning to his mother. “It’s lucky for us we stopped when we did last night. If we’d have kept on…”

They took a seat at the table while Kennan grabbed a chair across the room, put his feet up on the end table, and started drinking a warm Coke. It was Ryan who spoke first. “Alright, so…speed up or slow down. What are your thoughts?”

Jessica shook her head sadly. “I can’t believe we’re going to end up together no matter what, that I’m going to become Seetsahm. I’m going to become a whole different person, Ryan, at least physically. I don’t know. I just…wish it didn’t sound so wonderful right now. It’s everything I can do to keep from picking the third option right now and just jumping into it.”

“I know what you mean. The idea of getting to put baby after baby into you is so wonderful that I almost can’t think of anything else. But we have to.”

“Can I tell you something that’s so crazy that I can barely wrap my head around it?”

“Of course Seets – ah, mom. You can tell me anything. I think we’re past the secret-keeping stage.”

“I guess we are at that,” she chuckled mirthlessly. “I started getting my height early. By first grade I was the tallest kid in class, and I hated it. I was born with flaming ginger hair and I hated that too. I hated burning and getting sick when I went out in the sun. All I ever wanted to be was short and dark-haired and tanned.”

Ryan’s eyes widened. “Do you think…”

“I don’t know what to think. Maybe…maybe I’ve been destined to be Seetsahm since the day I was born. Maybe all this was…what, fated? And if that’s the case…”

“Then why fight it?” Ryan nodded. “In our dreams or whatever the hell they are, it’s always felt that way, hasn’t it? Not just that we were supposed to be together, but that we’ve always been together, like time doesn’t mean anything. Like we were together before the Earth formed or something.”

“That’s what I always felt too,” she said. “So do you think we should just get it over with?”

“I want to, god I want to. But there’s another part of me that wants to keep fighting it. That part’s gotten smaller every day, but it’s still there and it’s still loud. If it were just us, then yeah, I’d say take option three and live happily ever after. But it’s not just us, is it? It’s dad, it’s Kim.”

“Yeah. Yeah. And if I change all of a sudden, they might just throw me in an isolation ward because they think I’ve caught some weird disease that’s causing all of it. How are we even going to handle this when it eventually happens?”

“I don’t know, but…what if it doesn’t?”

She frowned. “They said there was nothing they could do to stop it.”

“Yeah, but do you trust them? They ain’t exactly NASA, you know? What if we get to Australia and it stops? Or back home and it stops?”

“What if it doesn’t?”

“Then we haven’t lost anything by giving it a shot. If we pick the second option, the delaying one, and we play for time? Maybe the whole thing just wears off by itself. Maybe we just need to ride out the storm.”

Jess looked into her son’s eyes. “Do you believe that? With everything we’ve been through, do you really believe that?”

“I…no,” he admitted. “At least I don’t think it’s very likely. But a slim chance is better than no chance.”

“But if we just accept it…it’s so tempting, babe. So much of me wants to just say fuck it and grab it with both hands.”

“Me too.” A long pause, then, “We could. I mean, all we have to do is tell these guys that and all this worry and stress will be over. Jake says that us fucking is part of the ceremony – maybe I could even knock you up today.”

Jess flushed deeply and squeezed her breast through her blouse. “God that sounds amazing. I just know that when you come in me for real you’re going to make a baby in me no matter how much birth control we use. It sounds so fucking perfect.”

“And when those big tits of yours fill up with milk,” he said, grinning wolfishly, “that will be hot as fuck.”

“They fed you,” she said, pinching her nipple and giving it a twirl through her blouse, “and they’ll feed our children too. And you’ll help with any milk I have left over, won’t you?”

“Damn right,” he said. He leaned forward at the same time as she did, and their tongues wrapped around each other in a frantic kiss. At the same moment his hand slipped up her blouse and pushed her bra cup up so that the nipple that had been between her fingers a moment ago was now between his. She moaned in sheer delight, arching her back to press her breast into his hand while her own hands deftly unzipped his fly and pulled forth his thick, rock-hard cock –

A burst of sheer babble pulled them away from the kiss and the looked up in surprise to see Kennan standing in front of them talking excitedly in his own language. Ryan stared at him for a long moment, then leaned back and said, “I guess that was real.”

“I guess it was. I’m glad he was here to stop us before we went too far.” Another burst of gabble from the old man, and mother and son looked down at her hand, which was still stroking his cock. Very reluctantly she forced herself to relinquish the grip and leaned away.

“Whatever decision we make, we better make it now before this fucking blessing decides for us,” Ryan sighed, tucking his junk away.

Kennan sat down again, this time at the table, and eyed them both.

“Right,” Jess sighed. “Right. OK. So…”

“So dad. Kim. As much as I want it, we can’t just give in without a fight.”

After a moment of internal struggle that was obvious on her face, she nodded. “You’re right. Of course you’re right.”

“So. Option number two?”

“Yeah. OK.”

“Then let’s tell them before we change our minds,” he said, standing up from the table and offering his hand. She adjusted her clothes, stood, and took his hand. Kennan fell in behind them as they walked out the door.

Jake must have been keeping an eye on the place, because the instant they appeared, he broke himself away from the little knot of shamans he was talking to and hurried over to them. “Hello. Have you made your choice already?”

“Yeah,” Ryan said. “We’re fighting it. We may lose, but we’ll go down swinging.”

Something that might have been pity flared in his eyes, but he nodded. “That’s the one we figured you’d pick. Have a seat back on those stumps. I’ll let everyone know.”

“Do we have to be naked this time?” Jessica asked. Her son’s eyes on her bare body were thrilling, so she wanted to hear a yes.

Unfortunately: “Nah, just have a seat. We’ll scrounge you up some water and some food. This is going to take the rest of the day, so if you need to use the dunny you should do it before we start.” He walked a few feet off, then paused and turned to add, “Oh, and it won’t be fun. Sorry, but there’s no way around it.”

Plates were brought for each of them: Thick slices of grilled Spam, some kind of salad consisting of local greens and vegetables, a little fruit. Fortunately the awning was still up so neither of them burned to death under the late-morning tropical sun as the shamans buzzed around them getting things set up. The old geezers actually seemed excited to be a part of it, but then it was the most interesting thing to happen in Ranu Ratu for centuries. Toilets (really, barely outhouses) were used. Mother and son whispered quiet “I love yous” and “Good lucks.” Finally Adouwe asked, “Are you ready?”

“I guess as ready as we can be,” Ryan answered. “Are you sure this is going to work?”

“As sure as we can be,” Adouwe echoed Ryan’s uncertainty with a shrug. In the face of such overwhelming confidence, Ryan and Jess exchanged nervous glances and set their mouths into grim frowns.

The ceremony began simply enough, with some call-and-response chanting from Adouwe to the rest of the shamans and back. At some point someone lit a pile of wood – one of six that had been laid out in a circle around them – and it quickly caught, producing copious amounts of bluish smoke that made mother and son cough. After that, more chanting.

It had been going for five minutes or so before Ryan felt something tugging at the corner of his mind, an insistent pull that distracted him from the unavoidable erotic thoughts about Seetsahm. It felt like a persistent itch in his mind, and like any itch that you can’t scratch, it quickly became the focus of his attention. Also like any unscratched itch, it quickly swelled from an irritant to something more akin to pain, but inside his thoughts – not inside his brain, but the ideas his brain produced. It was the damnedest thing, and a quick glance at Jessica told him that she was experiencing the same thing.

Do not do this. The thought was powerful, unavoidable, standing in defiance of that itch and demanding that his mind return to thoughts of his mom’s plump lips wrapping around his shaft, to the way he knew her pussy would taste if they just abandoned this futile resistance and gave in to destiny, to the rapture that would accompany their first real time together and the creation of the first of so many healthy, wonderful children.

The itch recoiled, hovered, zoomed in like a dragonfly to snip at the edges of that sexual resolve. The conflict between the two opposing paradigms fucking hurt, and a few feet away Jess moaned aloud and clutched her skull in both hands. The pain only grew, and in a couple of minutes it was a headache that made the world’s worst migraine feel like a warm compress after a stressful day. He heard his mother screaming for a while before he realized he was doing the same. He wanted to shout Stop, to help her, but he was paralyzed –

And then without warning the pain receded to a dull throbbing in the center of his mind that was only as painful as it had been when he had gotten a moderate concussion a couple of years ago: still very painful, but nothing to what had come before. Squinting against the bright sunlight, he saw his mother looking around in bleary, confused discomfort. “Mom, you alright?”

“I…uh…yeah, I can hack it. Are you hanging in there, kiddo?”

“Yeah…screaming helps, kinda.”

Then Jake was in front of them. “Drink some water, you’ve both been sweating like orangutans.”

“I didn’t know they sweated,” Jess muttered.

“They’re covered in long hair in tropical jungles, they sweat like humans. The first part of the ceremony went great, so just hang in there.”

“How many parts are there?” Ryan mumbled.

“Six.”

“Well. FML.”

Another pile of wood was lit, this one giving off sweet, pinkish smoke that made it hard to keep their eyes open. The ceremony continued, for a moment Jess panicked because the way her chest exploded into agony and the pain raced down her arms made her certain she was having a heart attack. The agony arched her spine and opened her mouth in a silent wail – and then was gone, leaving an ache all through her upper body. She looked at her son, and from the way he moaned as he shifted in his seat, she knew he had just felt the same thing. And then the pain hit again, receded again, hit again, receded again, over and over, too many times for her to count…

And then it was done, leaving her feeling like she had just been beaten with a club, in addition to still feeling the pain in her mind from the first part of the ceremony. They drank more water, at least a gallon each without feeling satisfied. Jake came around to check on them and told them that what they were feeling was normal – well, not normal normal since nothing about this was normal, but at least expected. He assured them that things were going well and according to plan, and he sounded like he meant it. Oddly, it didn’t make them feel better.

The third wood pile gave off a maroon smoke when it was lit, and one smell of it was enough to make them both give involuntary shrieks of pain. Ryan felt like he was burning, aflame head to toe, and it would have made him leap up and flee but there was no way his muscles were obeying. The briefest of lulls between waves of misery allowed him to look at himself and see that he looked perfectly normal and was definitely not on fire, and that Jessica was plainly doing through the same thing. Another wave of pain hit and on and on, so that by the time this part of the ceremony concluded, he was barely capable of rational thought.

A break then when they were urged to eat. They both refused initially, but the shamans wouldn’t let up until each of them had consumed a fair amount of fruit in addition to the huge amounts of water they craved. They sat there panting as the shamans finished their meal and prepared to light the next pile, and Jessica finally summoned enough steadiness to turn to her son and ask, “Are you hanging in there alright?”

“Barely,” he said. “I don’t know how much more of this I can take. You?”

“Same. Do you feel like it’s having any effect on you?”

He thought for a moment, at least as much as the pain allowed, and recalled the most erotic dream they’d shared, the one where he was fucking her on the field during a Brewers game and the whole crowd was cheering on the conception of their first child. After a moment he shook his head and said, “Thinking of us fucking doesn’t do a thing for me now.”

She paused, plainly thinking of something they’d done in dreams, then said, “Me neither, though that might just be because I’m in so much pain right now that I couldn’t get horny no matter what happened.”

“Good point,” he nodded. “My blood isn’t even on speaking terms with my D at the moment.”

“So…progress?” she asked hopefully.

“I think so. Progress. Yeah.”

The next pile burned faintly green and smelled like cinnamon, which was quite nice for about thirty seconds before Jess’s groin and abdomen flashed a pain so intense that it knocked all the wind out of her body. It felt like her entire reproductive system from vagina to ovaries and from vulva to uterus exploded all at once. And then of course the pain reduced and redoubled in its now-customary waves, so intense that it made her see colors she didn’t know existed, and it was all she could do to cling to the very edges of consciousness as it went on and on endlessly.

But not endlessly, because suddenly the pain dwindled (though, like the other pains, it merely reduced itself to a barely-tolerable level and stayed there). A look over at her son revealed that he had leaned over and was noisily vomiting, looking ghastly and gray. She supposed she looked the same.

Jake made his inevitable appearance. “Hey, you’re doing great. There’s just two parts left, and neither of those will be half as bad as what you’ve just been through.”

Jess looked up at him, eyes red, face slack from the experience she’d just been through. “I hate you. I hate all of you.”

“Oh yeah, no, yeah, no, totally understand that,” he said with a nod. “Drink more water, it will help put you right. Oh, there is one thing: how do you say the name of your home town again?”

Ryan and Jess both wondered why that was so important (they’d said it about twenty times during the first blessing) but both felt too terrible to question it. All Ryan could so was mumble, “I guess the name of the place must be pretty important.”

“That it is,” Jake agreed with his habitual cheer. “Getting that right is as important as getting everything else right.”

The two repeated the name of their city a dozen times until Jake had it down perfectly, then guzzled water as the shamans got themselves set.

“Mom?”

“Yeah, sweetie?”

“When we decided to take this route, I was really doubting myself. I wanted you so bad that putting it off felt like cutting my own throat. But now, after so much of this has been done, I don’t feel that anymore. I want us to go back to being a normal family. I want dad to be able to come back to you being a faithful wife. I want things to be the way they were before we came to these islands.”

Jess nodded as her son spoke, and then carefully thought about her response. Finally she said, “I was right there with you. We we told Jake that we wanted to delay it, I wanted so badly to knock you down and ride some cum out of you so we could just be together. But now…now, I can’t even remember how that felt, only that I felt it.”

“I’d jump for joy if I didn’t feel like I’d die if I tried it.”

“There’s my little smartass. I love you, kiddo.”

“Love you too, mom.”

The smoke from the next pile was a sooty-grayish black that smelled like freshly-turned earth, and at the first whiff of it Ryan’s head started to swim. Within moments his vision had gone blurry, and less than a minute later all he could make out of the world around him were vaguely-colored blobs that whirled and spun in clashing directions. He clutched the sides of his stump in a desperate effort to keep oriented, but up and down didn’t seem to want to stay in their places, and left and right became concepts that were difficult even to remember.

It was impossible to know how long it went on, but slowly Jess became aware that the dizziness was subsiding somewhat. A moment later she realized she had dirt and dried grass in her mouth, and after that she understood that the reason why was that she wasn’t on her stool anymore; rather, she was face down on the ground, her fingers dug into it as though she’d been trying to keep from flying off the face of the Earth. Her left leg was half on the stump, but somehow her shoe had come off. She tried to sit up but the lingering dizziness stopped her until three pairs of hands picked her up and set her back on her stump.

Off to her left, the same was happening to a bewildered-looking Ryan. Looking at him, all she could think was that she hoped he looked worse than she did, because if she looked that bad…

Jake again, refilling the water jug she had knocked over when she toppled. “Well that could have gone worse. Could have gone better too, unfortunately.”

“Why? What happened?” Ryan asked.

“Adouwe and I will explain when the ceremony is finished. Only one more piece left, the easiest one. How are you two feeling?”

“Every cell in my body hurts and I’m having a very hard time staying upright,” Jess said, trying not to sound accusatory.

“Right, well, that’ll happen,” Jake agreed happily. “How ’bout you, Ryan?”

“I just thought of Taco Bell and my thoughts hurt. How could my thoughts hurt?”

“Well come on, nobody should think of Taco Bell. But you’re doing great – half the shamans figured you’d both be unconscious by now.”

“It’s not for lack of trying,” Jess said dryly.

Jake left them alone to drink their water and talk between each other. They were both relieved that there was only one more part to this ordeal left to go, but neither of them felt much like chatting.

Soon enough white smoke was climbing out of the woodpile and the last part of the ceremony began. There was a sudden flare of agony in their thoughts, then another, then another…and then it faded, not to the subdued level they’d suffered since the ordeal began, but until it was completely gone. The chest pain came next – stab, stab, stab, then gone completely. The invisible fire on their skin made them scream briefly before it too went wholly away, then the same with the pain in their genitals. The dizziness was last, severe but transitory, and when it passed they were both pleased to find themselves still upright. They sat, blinking at each other in surprise as the chanting wound down.

“Are you OK, sweetie?” Jess whispered just loudly enough for him to hear.

“Fine, I feel…good. How are you?”

“No pain,” she smiled. And it was true – the human nervous system is programmed to shed pain, and it was doing its job so well that even the mnemonic echoes of it were fading fast. She was hungry though, and to second that thought she heard Ryan’s stomach rumble so loudly that it competed with the chanting.

In a couple of minutes Jake and Adouwe were there, hovering solicitously as the old man said, “You both need to eat. Come on, we’re making a quick dinner,”

“How did it go?” Ryan asked, pushing himself to his feet and working out the stiffness of sitting on a stump for hours.

“To plan,” Adouwe said, then paused. “Well, pretty much to plan.”

Ryan narrowed his eyes. “I’m gonna need a fucking explanation.”

“Language, sweetie,” Jess corrected.

Ryan did not correct himself, and Jake said, “Look, let’s head inside out of the sun and have a seat at the table. We’ll hash it all out while dinner is being got ready.”

A couple of minutes later they were all sitting at the familiar table, shamans on one side and McCullens on the other. Adouwe started off. “We did everything we could figure out how to do, but things didn’t go just how we expected them to.”

“We tried to correct mid-course, and we were pretty successful. In the grand scheme of things.” Jake added.

“How successful?” Jess asked.

“Oh, pretty,” Jake nodded. “Pretty much. You know, give or take a penny here and a dollar there.”

“Just…just explain, OK?” Ryan sighed. “And no weird textile metaphors, please.”

Adouwe looked confused at that and Jake explained in the native language, whereupon Adouwe nodded. “What we wanted to do was roll everything back as far as we could and put stoppers on it to slow it down. And that’s what we did, only some things wouldn’t roll back as far as other things.”

“We had to tackle the whole shemozzle in pieces, right?” Jake said. “That’s why we had to do six separate ceremonies. And now that the whole thing is done, we can say with real confidence that you’ll have at least six months before the process finishes knitting you – uh, welding you two together. Finishes, not starts, because it’s never going to stop until it’s done. But you’ll have those six months, maybe more, maybe even two or three times that long. We can’t say for sure.”

“I hear a big, fat, stinky but in there,” Ryan frowned.

“But, it is uneven,” Adouwe said. “Most often now you will be mother and son, but there will be…” He paused, turning to Jake and speaking in the native language.

“Breakthroughs, I suppose you’d call them,” Jake said. “There will be times when you’ll each get really hot for the other one, like how it’s been happening. It won’t be a continuous pressure, kind of just waves of real intense feeling that last for some period of time. And before you ask, no we can’t tell you when or for how long.”

“Difference, though,” Adouwe said. “Up to now you had these dreams, these visions, at the same time. Maybe that will still happen, but usually it will be one or the other, not both.”

“So that means I might come on to Ryan like a bitch in heat and beg him to breed me when he’s, like, doing his homework or playing a game or something?”

“Yeah, that’s the big and small,” Jake nodded. “And when it happens like that, the other one will have the same natural reaction that they would have if you’d have tried it on before the pilaliuta ceremony that started it all.”

“Revulsion, dismay, nausea?” Ryan offered.

“Bingo,” Jake said, finger-gunning him. “Or lust. I’m not judging. So that’s how the next few months will mostly go. Only sometimes you’ll both have a breakthrough at the same time and it will be just like it’s been here. And you need to be very careful, because if you finish inside of her fanny, she’ll get pregnant and then there’ll be no slowing anything down.”

Both Ryan and Jess looked confused, but it was Jess who said, “Wait, wait,, if he comes in my butt, he’ll get me pregnant?”

“What? No,” Jake said. “The fanny is the, you know, the front bit. The baby-making bit.”

“Oh,” Ryan said, understanding dawning on his face. “Fanny means butt in America.”

Jake looked back and forth between them as though trying to figure out if he was being teased. “And I thought Australians didn’t bloody speak English.”

“So…” Jess said slowly and thoughtfully, “if we have to…it gets too much for us to handle…anal is OK?”

“Mom!”

“I’m just saying, sweetie, we have to know so we can be prepared. If we both go crazy and we need to make love, then maybe doing it in the butt will let of blow off enough steam that we don’t ruin everything.”

Ryan moaned his disgust at the very idea.

Adouwe and Jake conferred in their language, then Adouwe turned to them and shrugged. “Arse is fine.”

“No, no, not fine fine,” Jake added hastily. “Anything you do to each other in the real world will speed things up. But anal sex would speed things up a lot less than the regular kind of sex.”

“What about condoms and birth control pills and all that?” Ryan asked.

“We don’t know,” Adouwe shrugged. “Those kinds of things weren’t around when the first ceremony was done, so the magic didn’t take them into account. We think, though, that the magic will just make them not work. Maybe not. Hard to say.”

All Jess could think about was waking up with her son’s cum inside of her.

Ryan exhaled heavily. “Anything else?”

“Yeah, there is one thing,” Jake said. “The reason we needed to know the name of your town was because when the Adouwe did the blessing, he included the whole place in it.”

“It’s a big magic, hard to control,” Adouwe said. “Surprised I got it right the first time.”

“Wait, what?” Ryan demanded. “What do you mean?”

“Back when Ratu and Fa’ahotu got the blessing, everyone in the islands agreed they deserved it and that magic was real,” Adouwe said. “Not like these days in America. Big place, nobody believes in magic. I made it so all your neighbors, your whole village, would accept and…what’s the bloody word…encourage you.”

“Village?” Jessica asked. “There are over half a million people there. Are you telling me you put magic on that many people?”

“I…guess I did,” Adouwe said, sounding amazed at his own prowess. “I’m better at this than I thought I was.”

“We tried to slow that down too, to avoid people being weird to you when you get home. But like I told you, the results were uneven,” Jake went on. “We pushed it back for most folks, so now they’ll react like you’d normally expect them react you. That will last until you two finally get together – after that, they’ll be all in, the whole place will be. But it looks like…well, for some people there, what we did might actually have achieved the opposite.”

Jess frowned. “What does that mean?”

“Well most folks, especially people who don’t know you, won’t act any different than they did before,” Jake told them. “But now…well, some folks will be really enthusiastic about it. It may be folks you know, but maybe complete strangers will just walk up to you and give you encouragement to get together.”

Ryan groaned and hid his face in his hands. “You have got to be kidding me.”

“How many?” Jess demanded. “Give me a percentage.”

“Hard to say,” Adouwe frowned. “Real hard to say. But maybe one or two in a hundred.”

“ONE OR TWO IN A HUNDRED?” Jess shrieked. “I work with a hundred-eighteen people in my office. Are you telling me that one or two of them will be bugging me to let my son get me pregnant?”

“Maybe more, maybe nobody,” Adouwe said, holding up his hands defensively. “Hard to say. Real hard to say.”

“I go to school with 1,500 kids and like 120 teachers and staff,” Ryan moaned. “Like 15 students and and a couple of teachers are gonna be up my ass about this. That’s insane!”

“We have to admit here that we might be lowballing that estimate,” Jake admitted reluctantly. “It could be three or four percent. We did the best we could. Maybe you can go to a smaller school?”

“I start a few days after we get back. I don’t have time to find and get enrolled in another school. And the proportions there would be the same anyway. You guys have just set us up for real hell. I hope you know that.”

“If it gets too much,” Adouwe said, “you can always give in.”

“Whoa there Ryan, unclench your fists,” Jake said hastily. “He means well.”

“His meaning well is what got us into this,” Jess said levelly.

“Yeah, no, yeah, no, I know,” Jake nodded. “But I think the point he was trying to make is that we haven’t stopped anything. At some point, well, you will give in, your whole town will embrace it, and you’ll be very happy together for a very long time. You can make it sooner or later, but there’s no ducking it.”

“I am SO tempted to lay a curse on these whole islands!” Ryan snarled.

“He can’t curse anyone,” Jess hastened to add. “He doesn’t know how. He’s just expressing the anger and frustration we both feel.”

The shamans exchanged an uneasy look. It was Adouwe who said, “Maybe you’d better eat something. It will be dark soon and you don’t want to drive down the mountain at night.”

“Before that,” Jess said, “there’s something else. Before we came here this morning, we were both almost constantly…aroused. Is that going to just be how things are from now on?”

The two shamans exchanged a surprised look, and Jake asked, “Are you both extremely aroused now?”

“Yes,” they answered in unison.

“For each other?”

“That’s what was making us horny before,” Ryan said, “but now I’m just horny, but like, for every woman except my mom.”

“That’s how it is for me,” Jess nodded. “For every man except Ryan. Oh, and for women too.”

Ryan jerked his head to stare at her. “What?”

“I’m kind of bi,” she shrugged. “I did some stuff in college, but nothing since then. I mostly like guys anyway, but right now I’m so horny I’d take anything…anything except you.”

The two shamans discussed it in their native language for a little while before Jake turned back to them and said, “Yeah, maybe you’re both just horny from now on.”

“Oh great,” Ryan grumped. “How am I supposed to study or swim when I’ve got a 24/7 9-inch boner?”

Jess said nothing, but she was very glad she’d cleared things with Paul the day before.

Once again the shamans suggested dinner. There seemed nothing more to be said anyway. The four went out and had a meal of fresh fish and local vegetables and fruits. The shamans seemed awfully pleased with themselves on the whole. As for Jess and Ryan, they had a lot to say to each other but nothing that they wanted to say to the shamans, so they mostly remained silent for the duration of the dinner. After what they had gone through, the food was invigorating.

When they were done eating, they told Adouwe that they were going to leave, and he had all the shamans stand and sing a song to them; Jake explained that it was a standard farewell given to people who were embarking on a long voyage, was not magical, and could not backfire in any way. After that Jake and Adouwe exchanged a few private words with the pair, apologizing for everything, wishing them good luck, and hoping that their lives would be long and happy; the last part wasn’t particularly welcome.

The sun was nearing the horizon when they climbed into the jeep and drove away from the village for the last time. It was nearly five minutes before either of them spoke, and it was Jess who said, “I just wish we could tell your father and your sister.”

“You can try talking to dad. He’d have to know that there’s no way you’d make up a crazy story like this.”

“I’d try, I honestly would, but I didn’t want to be the only one who could have sex with someone else so yesterday I asked him if we could basically have an open marriage until he got home. He didn’t like it, but he agreed.”

“Yeesh, I get it. If you come up today and tell him that we’re under a magical compulsion to have sex with each other, then he’ll think that the whole thing was a charade to get him to agree to you and me boning.”

“Exactly. He’d never believe the magic part because it’s insane. I just…I just can’t bear how he’d look at me if he thought that.”

“I understand. But Kim comes home at least twice a month to do laundry and beg for money, and if there’s something between us, she will figure it out. She’s irritating as hell, but she’s not stupid.”

“Yeah. I’ll need to figure out how to break the news to her as soon as we’re home.”

Pause, then, “The first person who comes up to me and tells me to knock you up is gonna get a beatdown.”

“Can you believe that fucking bullshit?” Jess asked, despite almost never using language like that except about sex. “They didn’t just fuck us up, they fucked up a major metropolitan area. If they had that much power, they should have used it to, I dunno, end climate change or something. What a bunch of idiots.”

“And that’s why I think that they might have just been talking out their asses and we could be fine as soon as we put an ocean between us and them. Maybe all this will come to nothing.”

“I hope you’re right.”

Neither of them thought he was right.

They were quiet again and said nothing until they were on the coastal plain, the sun was down, and the headlights were on. When they did speak it was about how nice it would be to get home and get back into the swing of things, what he still needed for school, how she might wear clothes that were a little more fashionable now that she was fitter and could apparently stand some sun, and how she’d have to dye her hair brown as soon as she could. Neither thought of sexing the other up. For this moment, they were normal.

The beach party was just getting into full swing when they arrived at the hotel, with Jess returning the jeep as Ryan made his way to the festivities. He was looking for Lexy but she spotted him first, calling his name as she came trotting over. “You’re back early!”

Looking at her face gave him the exact reaction that he’d been hoping for: a pang of loss that what they had for the past month was over. He had barely felt it at all the day before when they’d said their goodbyes, but it was much sharper today; it wasn’t like he was going to burst into tears, but rather it was an acute sense of nostalgia for something and someone who wasn’t even gone yet. It was a strange thing that sadness brought him joy, but it did because it meant that his emotions were normal, at least for the moment.

There would be no sex between them tonight – they had had their goodbye fuck and neither of them wanted to disturb the status quo. Instead they danced, laughed, talked, and drank, and promised each other again that they would keep in touch.

He jerked off a couple of times before bed.

His father Paul was under no such sex ban, and he headed for the hotel to find his wife. They spotted each other as she stepped from the lobby to go look for him. He called, “Hey babe, how did it -”

She was on him before he finished the sentence, almost knocking him over as she leaped to wrap arms and legs around his body and kiss him as hard as she could. He held her up with his hands under her ass for a while, until she broke the kiss to whisper, “Take me upstairs and fuck me like it’s the last time you’ll see me until Christmas.”

He did, and she cried with joy at the first orgasm he gave her because all that had been in her mind was her husband.

Day Eleven And A Few More

Jess and Ryan both watched out the window as their plane climbed away from the island. Already they could see the whole place in a panorama and it was dwindling in the distance. Then the plane banked and they could no longer see it at all. Before long they were at 24,000 feet, heading for Brisbane.

Jess’ goodbye to her husband had been painful. Paul, of course, thought her clinging and tears were simply because she would miss him. How could he know that she was in mourning for them?

When Ryan said goodbye, he shook his father’s hand and hugged him. He loved his old man, respected him, thought the world of him, and there was a good chance he would betray him in the most fundamental way before the next time they saw each other again. The last thing his father told him was that he was the man of the house until his father got back for Christmas and to take care of his mother.

The plane was a 20-seat jet that could have carried twice as many people if much of the passenger cabin hadn’t been replaced with fuel tanks to enable long flights over the Pacific. There were two seats on the left side of the plane and one on the right, so Jess and Ryan each had window seats on the left side. Kim was supposed to be in the seat next to Jess but, since the plane was barely half full, as soon as they could move around she adjourned herself to an empty seat on the other side of the aircraft, put on her headphones, and promptly fell asleep. There was only a single flight attendant aboard, a Polynesian PYT with curly black hair that fell halfway to a perfectly-shaped pair of buttocks. She checked the passengers for their needs (Jess got a blanket and pillow, Ryan got a pillow and a bottle of water). Seven hours to Australia.

There are few things duller than being a passenger in an airplane flying over open water, so within an hour Ryan had moved up to sit next to his mother. They played a game together on his phone, chatted about very normal things, shared a few jokes. Some of the jokes were off-color, and they each told some that were positively raunchy; this was something they would never have conceived of doing before all this happened, but now it seemed the most natural thing in the world. So natural did it seem to talk sex, in fact, that when the flight attendant made her way past them toward the front of the plane, Jess elbowed her son in the side and said with a conspiratorial grin, “Look at that ass. I bet you’d love to hit that.”

“Ugh, why did you have to say that?” he moaned playfully. “I’m already so horny I’m about to explode, and now I’ll be thinking about her bouncing on my dick.”

Jess giggled. “Be nice to her and maybe she’ll take you into the bathroom and make you a member of the club.”

They went back to their game, and it was only five minutes later when Ryan gave his mother a puzzled look and said, “It’s weird that that conversation didn’t feel awkward.”

It took Jess a while to even recall what she now considered a banal bit of conversation, but when she did, her eyes widened. “I think…I think some goalposts have been moved in what we should and shouldn’t do. I’m not attracted to you anymore, but I’m pretty sure I could talk to you about anything, especially anything sexual, and not feel ashamed at all, just like an old married couple,” Jess mused. “And no, I don’t want to screw you, but I don’t mind telling you that I’m just as horny as you are. I wonder if masturbating on a plane makes you a club member?”

“I think you’re going to find out before we land in Brisbane,” he chuckled.

“Yeah. You want to go first or should I?”

“You go, I can hold it for a bit.”

The mother used the bathroom to get herself off, and when she came back, the son took his turn. They asked each other how it went and it didn’t seem strange at all to describe to each other the very satisfying orgasms they had. They each did it once more before the flight was over, and they were both ragingly horny again before they deplaned at BNE.

Kim and Ryan went straight for a restaurant and paid way too much for some OK food; at least money wasn’t a problem, seeing as how Paul’s employers were paying for the trip. Jess, however, had another thing in mind: she found the pharmacy in the airport and made her purchases before going to the women’s room. The pregnancy test came back negative, and she’d have been astonished if it hadn’t because it was much too early for a positive result if Ryan’s dream-cum had made her real-pregnant; still, astonishment at the impossible had become a daily condition for her, so it was a relief anyhow. She took the Plan B, knowing that it might be too late if her dream sex had led to really being knocked up, masturbated, and then went to find her kids.

The flight from Brisbane to Los Angeles was 13-1/2 hours, which is a long time even in First Class on a nice plane like the Airbus they were on. They were seated all in the same row, with Kim at a window seat in the left column and Ryan and Jess side-by-side in the two seats in the middle column. Both of them masturbated as soon as they could get into the bathrooms, then settled in for a long haul with blankets and pillows.

Three hours later they were far over the ocean. It was night by this point, and Ryan and almost everyone else in the section had drifted off to sleep. Jess, for her part, had gotten a bushwhacker cocktail and was watching a mystery with headphones on. She was tired but not sleepy and she hoped the movie would knock her out; unfortunately, it was extremely interesting and she was more awake than she had been when she’d started it.

That was when Ryan nudged her arm and asked, “What are you watching?”

“Oh! I thought you were asleep.”

“Yeah, I woke up, my hard-on got uncomfortable and I had to adjust it.”

She nodded; she was wet enough that she was pretty sure she’d have soaked through her dress and half the seat cushion by the time they made LAX. “I guess you should go take care of that.”

“Yeah,” he nodded…and then his lips curled into the devilish smile that she had come to know all too well over the past week and a half. “Or, you know, you could take care of it.”

“Sweetie,” she sighed. “You know we can’t do that. And anyway, I don’t want to. You’re my son.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” he whispered. “I could barely pry your hand off of it at the village.”

“That was before they helped us.”

He was quiet for a moment before leaning in close enough that she could feel his breath in her ear as he whispered, “I know you liked how it felt. Didn’t you?”

“Sweetie, this isn’t fair and it isn’t right. Stop it.”

“Answer the question.”

She sighed. “You know I loved how it felt, babe.”

Again the wicked smile. “You loved how what felt?”

“Ryan…”

“Say it.”

His tone of command made her shiver in spite of herself, and she couldn’t stop herself from answering, “I loved how your big, hard cock felt in my hand. There, are you happy?”

“You can feel it again if you want, it’s right here.”

She gave an exasperated sigh. “You’re having one of those breakthroughs they told us about.”

“Maybe. Or maybe I’ve been continuously horny for two days and I’m tired of jerking it myself, and you’re the only one on this plane that I can ask.”

“Well please don’t. It’s not right.”

“I’m not asking you to ride it. I’m not asking to take you into the bathroom and bend you over. I’m not even asking you to suck it. Just use your hand.”

She closed her eyes. It really had felt wonderful in her hand… No! What the hell am I thinking? “Babe, you need to go to the bathroom and take care of it. On your own.”

“Come on,” he whispered, nibbling on her ear and sending shockwaves down her body and straight into her pussy. “I know you want to know how it feels to make me come for real.”

He was acting this way because of the blessing, he had to be, but damn it if her resolve wasn’t starting to weaken. He had felt amazing in her hand, and he wasn’t asking to pump a load into her – not even her butt, which was a lot safer than in her pussy. It was masturbation, just hands and just him getting off, not her. How damaging could that be? They’d be making babies eventually, so was this really that big a deal?

It needed to be a huge deal, but somehow it didn’t feel like that when he used that commanding tone on her. She had already been horny, but that voice was edging her toward a bad decision that she knew they’d both regret when the spell passed. In a tone that sounded unconvincing even to her, she whispered, “We’ll be caught…”

“We’re the only two awake in this whole section,” he countered, “and the FA just did her round, she won’t be back for half an hour.”

“I guess it wouldn’t take you that long…” she whispered, chewing her lower lip.

“Not at all,” he assured her, taking her hand. She let him guide it under the blanket and to his lap, where she found his cock already out of his pants and waiting for her touch. She tried to stop herself, but in just a few seconds she had wrapped her hand around it and started to stroke it up and down from base to crown. Her heart was hammering – this wasn’t a vision or a dream, it was real, and she was about to make her beautiful son come for the first time.

“Lick your hand,” he ordered her, and without hesitation she pulled her hand up to her mouth and gave a long, thorough lick from the palm to the ends of her fingers – knowing that just moments before that palm had been in contact with Ryan’s cock was thrilling and made her rub her thighs together. She made to put her hand back into his lap when he said, “You want to see it, don’t you? You want to watch as you make me come all over your hand.”

She looked at him with wide eyes and said nothing, but her fervent nod told him everything he needed to know. Without hesitation he pushed his blanket to the floor and she saw his erection, throbbing and almost purple with need for her. She stifled a little cry and put her hand back where it belonged, around her man’s cock. Stroking, now faster, her other hand pinching her nipple through her clothes, wishing that shaft was buried in her to the balls but loving the hushed gasps she was pulling from his lips. Faster and faster her hand went, her breath getting more and more ragged as she brought her son and lover closer.

“Mom…Seetsahm…I’m gonna…I’m…”

And then he was, in proud spurts that leaped out up to her eye height and came back down all over her hand and his thighs and his shirt. There was so much of it! So many squirts, such volume, such a mess.

Well, she was gonna have to clean that up then. Eyes locked on his, she raised her hand to her lips to taste her love’s nectar, extending her tongue to take in the first drops –

And then he was next to her so soundly asleep that a stream of drool was coming from his slack lips, blanket still covering him to his chest. She gasped, looked around startled, astonished that it had all been a vision…except that her hand was covered in his seed. She stared at it in amazement, ran her tongue across her lips, knew she should reach for a napkin…

And then she was licking it from her skin. How could she resist the greatest thing she had ever tasted in her life – well, the second greatest, after their juices when they mixed together in her cunt. It was just as perfect and delicious as she remembered it being, and even though she knew that she needed to wipe it off, she didn’t stop licking until her hand was clean.

So. That was a one of those breakthroughs they’d been warned about. Good to know.

Back in Milwaukee, they dragged their exhausted butts to bed and enjoyed a night’s sleep in familiar surroundings. The next day a little after noon, Jess knocked on Kim’s door and was told she could come in. Her daughter was sitting on the bed, and she pressed the door closed and sat next to her.

“Do you have a few minutes? There’s something I need to tell you. It’s…very important.”

It was her mother’s tone rather than her words that perked Kim up. “Umm…sure. Are you OK?”

“Well…no, not exactly. Listen, I’m about to tell you something and you’re not going to believe it, but every word of it is true. I hope you can see that.”

“Uhhh…OK…”

“You remember that the little village did a ceremony of thanks for your brother and me, right?”

“Yeah, you talked all about that.”

“Well, no, not all about it.” Jess told her daughter about the real nature of the ceremony, about what had happened during their last week and a half on the island, the dreams, the visions, even some of their actions with each other. Kim didn’t believe a word of it until Jess showed her all the physical changes that had been happening to her; Kim still insisted that it couldn’t be magic, but the fact that she couldn’t explain how her aging mother suddenly had a better, younger body than she herself did shook her conviction. Jess went on to describe the events at the last ceremony, finishing up with, “So, six months to a year-and-a-half. That’s how much time we seem to have before your brother and I are together for good and start making you lots of siblings.”

“That’s insane,” Kim said, shaking her head. “This whole thing is insane. Are you…are you serious about this? You’re not fucking with me?”

“You’ve asked that like eight times, honey. It’s the absolute truth.”

“I’m really having a hard time believing this, but I can’t figure out why you’d tell this lie either. And all these physical changes – is Ryan changing too?”

“He looks at least five years older and his penis has grown a lot.”

“Yuck, I don’t even want to think about him having a penis. And dad doesn’t know any of this?”

“No, like I said.”

“Shit. So…fuck. God damn it. What do you want from me?”

“We don’t want anything from you that you aren’t willing to give. We hope you can still love us when we’re finally together.”

“I don’t love the troll now, how can I love him when he’s banging our mother?”

“Of course you love him, he’s your brother.”

“Ugh, fine, he’s alright. But how are you going to live as a couple when you’re not getting older and you keep getting knocked up by your son? Everybody’s gonna be screaming for you to be put in jail or a research lab.”

“Yeah, about that…”

An hour later, as Ryan stepped in the door, covered with sweat from a game of football with some friends, Kim met him in the foyer with her hands on her hips and a belligerent, “Is it true? What mom said?”

“Well I don’t know exactly what she said, but yeah, every word of it. Fucked up, isn’t it?”

“Oh, ya think? I don’t know what to believe.”

“If she keeps changing into Seetsahm, you’ll have to believe your own eyes.”

“She showed me the changes she’d gone through already and I still don’t believe it, but I can’t explain it either. Magic?”

He shrugged. “We laughed too until we realized we were having the same dreams. It’s not what either of us want. We’re fighting against it. But if what they told us is right, we’ll lose that fight.”

“Dad’s going to find out. What’s your plan for that?”

“Don’t have one. By then mom will probably have changed so much that he won’t be able to deny something unexplainable is going on. He’ll still probably never talk to either of us again.”

Kim sighed, her expression softening. “You and him have always been so close, too.”

“Yeah, it fucking sucks.”

She nodded. “I don’t know what’s really going on, but you know I come home one or two weekends a month. I’d prefer if you two didn’t do stuff when I’m in the house.”

“I’d prefer that we didn’t do stuff at all. We’ll do our best. When the spell is on us though, we aren’t in control, so no promises.”

Kim frowned and slowly shook her head. “I’m sorry all this is happening…whatever this is. It’s hard to get my head around.”

“For us too, most of the time. When we’re in it, it seems like the most natural thing in the world.”

“Mom said the…spell, whatever, will make you happy and rich and beloved. She said you’ll live to be two hundred years old and have like a hundred kids. Do you believe that?”

“It’s…it’s not whether we believe it or not. When we’re in it, we know it’s true. There’s not even a question.”

“But now that you’re not in it?”

“Now…now I hope that those old men were wrong about everything and that being on the other side of the world will break the spell. But I’m pretty sure they did exactly what they said they did. I’ve never been so scared of living a long and happy life.”

Jess awoke the next morning after a night of thoroughly normal dreams, scratched her butt as she stumbled into the bathroom to pee, and saw that her hair was now thick, rich and lustrously brown with perfect natural waves. She stared at her reflection for a long time, then shook her head and took a piss. It was just one step closer to being Seetsahm.

Ryan was not surprised, but Kim was staggered and spent the rest of the day in thoughtful near-silence. One thing both kids agreed on was that the new hair suited their mother perfectly.

The next morning, a Sunday, Kim left to go back to college. On paper she was double majoring in psychology and art with the goal of becoming an art therapist, but she’d chosen UW-Madison because it was the top party school in the state. Two days later, on the day after Labor Day, Ryan would return to school and Jess would return to work.

A little after lunch, Ryan walked into his mother’s room without even thinking about knocking to find her looking into her closet while dressed in nothing but panties. The only odd things about it were that neither found it odd that he should do so, and neither found it odd that she made no move to cover up. Just like an old married couple. He asked what she was up to, adding, “If we’re going to go shopping, then we need to get out there. The stores are always packed today.”

“I know. I was just looking at my wardrobe, all those floppy dresses and clothes designed to cover me up. I sort of feel like I should dress a little bit more fashionably now. What do you think?”

Ryan flopped down on her bed in the same childish way he’d had since he was little and propped himself up on his elbow to look at her. “Yeah, why not? I mean everything you have was bought for a pale-ass redhead, and you aren’t that anymore. You need to get into some stuff that will fit your new coloration.”

She laughed. “What do you know about complexion and women’s clothes?”

“Hey, I’m an expert. I hear girls in school talk about it all the time.”

She snorted. “Sure, you’ve learned everything there is to know. But you’re right, I do need a lot of new clothes. I’ll pick up a few outfits today.”

“What about your underwear?”

Jess looked down at her panties, then back up. “What about them?”

“You’re wearing old-lady underwear, but you’ve got a body a 23-year-old Insta model would hate you for. You can’t go walking around in granny panties.”

“Huh. Maybe you’re right. Nothing I have fits right anymore anyway. It’s been a long time since I bought sexy underwear though. And you think my ass would look good in something that covers less?”

“I think it’s a crime to put that ass in anything less revealing than a thong.” He had no sexual feelings when he said it, it was just a simple observation.

“Thank you. I guess you’re right, I’ll shop for new undies too. Hey, have you jerked off recently? I don’t want to have to wait while you hunt up a bathroom at the stores.”

“Yeah, right before I came in.”

“You’re still hard.”

“It barely goes down anymore.”

“I’ve noticed. I need to get off before we leave,” she said, reaching into her bedside table and producing a purple dildo that closely mimicked Ryan’s dimensions (something that neither one noticed). “Can I get some privacy?”

“Oh, sure thing,” he said, as though his nearly-naked mother asking him to leave the room so she could fuck herself with a fake cock was the most normal and non-sexual thing in the world. Sliding off the bed and heading for the door, he said, “Don’t take too long.”

Jess couldn’t help but grin as he walked out. He was using that commanding tone more and more these days. When he got back to school, the girls were gonna be all over him.

The first Monday in September, Labor Day, was warm and clear. Mother and son were in the car, heading north to the town of Grafton on invitation from Sue Lamb, a friend Jess had had since college. Sue had recently finished with an ugly divorce, wound up with the house on the Milwaukee River (“house” may have been too modest a word for a 28-room mansion mansion on 26 acres of wooded riverfront, but that was what they were going with) where Sue was throwing a goodbye-to-summer bash for all her friends.

It was Jess’ car, but Ryan was driving. He had announced it and taken the keys from her hands, and it never even occurred to her to question it. She had cheerfully climbed into shotgun, enjoyed a perfectly nonsexual moment of admiration of the powerful man her son was becoming, and settled in for the short jaunt north. They hadn’t even reached I-42 when flashing lights behind them signaled them to stop.

“Did you do something?” Jess asked.

“I don’t think so. I mean I was going a couple miles over the speed limit, but a cop won’t stop you for that.”

“Unless they’re an asshole.”

There was that, and asshole cops were even more of a pain to deal with than other assholes. They didn’t have to wait long to find out though, as the cop got out only a couple of minutes after they pulled over and approached the car. He was a big fellow with a very broad chest that was made even bigger by his protective vest, but he was polite enough when he asked them for their license and proof of insurance. He didn’t go back to his car to run them, instead just giving them a brief once-over before handing them back. “You folks know why I pulled you over?”

“No, officer,” Ryan said, which was always the correct answer.

“You got a taillight out. Now I’m not issuing a fine today, but – ” There followed a coply lecture of four minutes length about the importance of keeping all their lights in working order, which both of them thanked the nice officer for. Before the officer turned away, he asked Ryan, “Is this your mom?”

“Yes, officer.”

The cop smiled warmly. “Congratulations, you two make a beautiful couple. It’s great that you got together. Have a good day now, and drive safe.”

Ryan and Jess just stared at each other as the officer went back to his car and drove away. It was Ryan who finally said, “Well, hell.”

The party was fun, but more for Ryan than for Jess. He hung out with the husbands, but since they were mostly talking about the Packers and the Bucks he felt right at home. The eye candy was good too, because the ladies there were the sorts of middle-aged women who cared about their looks and kept them up – it was cougars and MILFs from here to the river’s edge. Most of them had had at least some cosmetic surgery, whether to enhance what nature had given them or to preserve what time was taking away, and all of them were dressed casually and just sexy enough to show off a little in front of their friends and their friends’ husbands.

His mom was the sexiest woman there without even trying.

And that was was why she wasn’t having as good a time as he was. Her friends harangued her for her beauty secrets even worse than the Frauen-Trinkclub had. It was flattering and fun at first, but these bitches were relentless – possibly because every couple of minutes she found one of more of their husbands mentally undressing her from across the yard. The women knew that too, and behaved in a jealous sort of way that she’d never experienced from them before. Well, what did I expect? I’d have been acting the same way if one of my 44-year-old friends showed up looking 22, especially if Paul were here to drool over her.

During the six hours they were there, Ryan slipped off to masturbate three times and Jess managed two. At the end, as Ryan was driving them home in the gathering darkness, Jess could only wonder how the people at work would react when they saw her tomorrow.

The First Day Back

Ryan rolled up to his high school with half an hour to spare and parked in the student lot. He always liked to arrive early on the first day back, not to learn his way around (this was his fourth year at the school, he already knew every nook and cranny) but because he liked to say hello to people he hadn’t seen all summer and absorb the school vibe after time away.

High school was a big pile of bullshit, of course, but he enjoyed learning and liked a lot of his classmates. Being the school’s star swimmer, he had a foot in the jock clique, but he liked his studies and was smart enough that half his classes were advanced placement, so a lot of the brains liked him too. Social groups you weren’t in could get pretty bitchy at this school, but he had always been able to give as good as he got and most people who didn’t like him just left him alone rather than taunting him.

He made it halfway to the door before a call from behind brought him to a stop. He recognized the voice yelling his name, so when he turned he had an enormous smile on his face. “Mycah! Good to see you, man. How was basketball camp?”

Mycah Pryor approached with a smile and wrapped his boy in a hug. Mycah and Ryan had been best friends since second grade. A senior like Ryan, he was almost 6′ 7″ tall, one of the best if not the best high school baller in the Milwaukee area, and he had an easy charm that meant he wore girls like clothes. He had spent the past three weeks at a development camp sponsored by the NBA and run by Milwaukee Bucks and Chicago Bulls players. “Fuckin’ great, Giannis came a few times.”

“No shit? Wow, I expect to hear all about it. I saw tons of pics on your socials but I need deets. How’s home life?”

Mycah snorted. “Amber is being a cunt, so, you know, same as always,”

Mycah’s family life had never been easy. His birth mother, by all accounts a lovely woman, died in a boating accident when he was three, and his father had sought to replace her; unfortunately, his father’s taste in women was in his ass, and so the succession of girlfriends and wives that he’d had since then had almost all been awful people. Amber, his father’s third wife, was a mean, trashy bimbo who didn’t like kids – especially Mycah – but was trying to get his dad to knock her up so she’d get more money in the inevitable divorce. Ryan could only nod sympathetically and say, “The most you’ll need to put up with her is another nine-and-a-half months – if your dad hasn’t kicked her to the curb by then, you can move the hell out.”

“Heh, yeah. Hey man, you look different.”

“I got a tropical tan that lightened my hair a little.”

“Nah, it ain’t that. You filled out a lot over the summer, like a lot a lot. Looks good on you, but it makes you look like 25.”

“Ah, it ain’t that big a deal. And anyway – ”

“Excuse me,” came a high-pitched voice. “Are you Ryan McCullen?”

Both young men looked down to see someone they didn’t recognize, apparently a freshman boy who had acne and ugly shoes. “Uh, yeah?”

“I just wanted to say congratulations,” the kid said cheerfully. “I hope you’re both really happy.”

“Uhhh…thanks…” Ryan said as the boy disappeared into the crowd.

“Dafuck was all that about?” Mycah asked.

“It’s…it’s hard to explain. I’ll tell you soon. And is it my imagination or are they making freshman younger every year?”

“For real, dog. That kid looked 12.”

Not long after that, Jess pulled into a parking spot at her office. She worked at Provider Services, which was basically a middleman that healthcare providers hired to handle insurance claims. Fortunately she rarely had to deal with insurance companies directly, as she was the executive in charge of business operations, with a staff of five and her own office.

She strolled into the small lobby, hoping to say hello to Ash, the receptionist; unfortunately, Ash was busy with a visitor, so Jess just waved and headed for the door to the back.

“Excuse me, Miss?” came Ash’s voice. “That area is restricted. You have to sign in and be here to see someone in specific.”

And so it began. Jess couldn’t be surprised – in addition to the many physical changes, she was wearing a sleeveless white blouse with a significant plunge and a skirt that was tighter and shorter than anything she’d worn since before she got this job. She turned and headed back to the front, saying, “Ash, it’s me, Jess.”

Ash wrinkled her nose in the same sort of automatic irritation one got when told an obvious lie. She took a closer look, and irritation turned to amazement. “Jess? What the fu – heck?”

“A month away in a tropical paradise will do that for a person,” Jess chuckled (that was the line she had decided to say to everyone when they inevitably gawped and demanded an explanation for how her changes had come to pass). “We’ll catch up later.”

She had to walk through the entire office to get to her area in the back corner. Some of the people she passed recognized her and said she looked amazing, while others looked at her without recognition, probably thinking her some fresh-out-of-college new hire. Against her own definite wishes, all the attention felt pretty good – she hadn’t turned heads like this since she’d gotten pregnant with Kim.

The first thing she did, after saying hello to her shocked department, was to check in with her boss. Nolan Garvey was in his mid-50s, still fit and energetic, with the dignity that some men accrue as they age; he was also a sweet man who was married to the same woman he wedded in college, had three adult kids who adored him, and he genuinely cared for the welfare of those who worked for him. He looked up as she entered his office, recognition coming after a few seconds of staring. “Jess! Hot damn, I didn’t know you for a sec. Come on in, sit down, tell me about your vacation.”

Jess did, mentioning when she and Ryan saved the boy (she made it sound like it had all been Ryan) but obviously leaving out any of the magical, sexy details, finishing with, “And look, I even got a tan. Maybe I’ll hit some tanning places here to work on it over the winter.”

“It sounds like you had a great time,” he told her. “And it’s good to have you back, it doesn’t seem like home when you aren’t around.”

“Thanks!” she said, rising from her chair. “I’d better get to my desk and start digging out from under. I just wanted to say hi.”

She made it to the door before Nolan called her name. “Oh, one more thing,” he told her in a tone of gentle reassurance. “I know you’re going to need a lot of maternity leave with all the babies you and your son are going to be having, and you don’t need to worry. Your job here is safe.”

Her smile froze on her face and she felt the same chill run down her spine. It took her a moment before she offered a wooden, “Thanks, Nolan.”

The day was going unevenly for Ryan. On the one hand it was great to see friends and so far his classes seemed good; on the other hand, before and during lunch, eight people came up to congratulate him. He only knew three of them, and only one – a cheerful, nerdy girl named Pam Provenza – was someone he considered a friend, but it was still an upsetting process. This was especially true because he didn’t know how many other shoes were waiting to drop, which was very anxiety-producing.

On the way to his class after lunch finished, his phone buzzed with a message from Mycah:

wtf bro wht levi white said 2 me

what

he come up & asked if i was happy 4 u

i asked y

he said u & u mom r a couple

o 4 fuck sake

people been hitting me with it all day

ill explain after school

aint true tho rite

ill explain after school

wtf

Ryan sighed as he put away his phone. Mycah was his best friend and a constant guest at their home, so he’d have to be told sooner or later; Ryan had been hoping for later, but shit was what shit was.

His next class was math, not one of his best subjects. The teacher was Ms. Hegel, who was in her mid-30s and as smoking hot as as a teacher in a porn video. Unfortunately, Ryan had had her in both 9th and 10th grades, done poorly, and had somehow gotten on her bad side. This was gonna suck.

The class went as badly as he expected, which worried him. He wanted to go to a good university and he had the extracurriculars and grades for it in everything except math. He was going to need to ace this class, but the initial indicators were poor. He barely knew what the teacher was talking about, and it was only the first day!

When the bell rang, he got up and headed by the door, but was stopped by a call of, “Ryan, please stay behind. I’d like to speak with you for a bit.”

Ryan sighed, swallowed hard, and turned back to approach Ms. Hegel’s desk. He was pretty sure he was about to get a menacing comment about him being a bad student. “Yes?”

Ms. Hegel’s eyes lit up as she leaned forward. “It’s great news about you and your mom. I’m happy for you both. And between you and me, it’s hot as fuck. I’ve always had an incest kink. I hope you get her pregnant soon, I’d love to see her with a big belly from the baby you gave her.”

Ryan’s shoulders slumped, and he was prepared to thank her dully and hurry out, but something else occurred to him. “Miss Hegel, how did you hear about my mother and me?”

She looked blank. “What do you mean?”

“Well was it a rumor? Did someone come and tell you? Was it, like, on the news or something?”

“Well…no. I found out a couple of weeks ago and…funny, I don’t remember how I heard it. I suppose someone must have told me about it. Anyway, it’s wonderful news and I’m super happy for you both.”

He thanked her and headed for the door.

His last class was Financial Competency, and afterwards he met Mycah at the same door they’d come in that morning. Before he could say anything, Mycah said, “I think Imma need an explanation of this shit.”

“Yeah, and you’ll need to be sitting down for it,” Ryan nodded. “Follow me to my house?”

Mycah agreed, and 45 minutes later he leaned back on the sofa and said, “Bro, that is by far the most fucked up shit I have ever heard in my life. I’d be absolutely sure you were lying to me except for three people I know you don’t know talking to me about it today.”

Ryan nodded. “My phone’s been blowing up. Like half the school either wants to tell me that people are talking shit about me or wants to know if it’s true.”

“Fuuuuck. I mean…you know I trust you and this ain’t the kind of joke you’d play on me, but…”

“But it’s still impossible to believe.”

“Yeah. Maybe you should go see an exorcist. You guys are Catholic, right?”

“My mom is, kinda. I just go for weddings and funerals. And as crazy as that idea is, it might be worth a try.”

“But if the whole city is really under a spell…”

“Then that’s a hell of a lot of exorcisms,” Ryan nodded. “And I don’t believe it’s a demon inside us. I don’t even believe in demons.”

“Three weeks ago you didn’t believe in magic either.”

“I concede the point. I’ll talk to mom about it. Want to stay for dinner?”

“Yeah, I kinda need to see these changes in Mrs. M for myself. Maybe I’ll believe it then.”

Ryan dialed his mother’s cell. After a moment she picked up with a, “Hi, sweetie. What’s up?”

“Oh, well, everybody in school has heard about us now. There are some people who are really happy about us.”

“As far as I can tell, it’s only one person in my office. Unfortunately, that one is my boss.”

“Awkward.”

“Yeah. Did you just call to check in?”

“No. Mike’s here. People were coming up to him all day talking about us. I had to explain it to him.”

“Oh.” Pause. “I wish you would have asked me first, but he was going to see something for himself eventually. What’s his reaction?”

“Skepticism. He wants to see you, though, probably ask you some questions. I was gonna invite him for dinner.”

“I’ll pick up Chinese.”

Ryan moved his phone away from his mouth and said, “Mom’s picking up Canton Palace if you want to eat here.”

Canton Palace was Mycah’s favorite thing ever, so he agreed enthusiastically. A couple of minutes later, the two boys were in Ryan’s room playing X-Box. A couple of hours after than, when they heard Jess enter the kitchen from the garage, they made a dash for her. They found her setting out a lot of Chinese food; 18-year-old boys ate a metric shit-ton. “Hi Ryan. Hi Mycah.”

“Holy shit…oh, sorry Mrs. M, I didn’t mean to swear. It’s just…”

“It’s just I look different,” she nodded with a chuckle. “Everyone at work thinks I took the last month to have a bunch of plastic surgeries.”

“Ah, that’s bullsh…um, plastic surgery wouldn’t look that good,” Mycah said. “You’re like a whole different person.”

“Not as different as I will be,” she said resignedly. “I assume Ryan told you what’s going to happen?”

“Yeah, like really completely different, different name, shorter, all that? I didn’t believe it until I saw you.”

Jess nodded, chose her words carefully, and said, “And I guess he told you what else is going to happen?”

Mycah blushed and looked as uncomfortable as she had ever seen him. “Ummm…yeah…I guess. Like you two…”

“Becoming the perfect couple, having lots of kids, getting rich, living for a long time?” she asked. “Yes, all that is true as well.”

Ryan spoke up. “Mycah had an idea that we ought to see an exorcist.”

Jess only thought about that for a moment before saying, “I know in my bones that won’t help. Do you think it will?”

“No,” Ryan admitted. “But it’s something we should try out anyway. It can’t hurt.”

“Well, I mean, like…I was watching this thing on YouTube that said exorcists injure and even kill people that they’re working on,” Mycah admitted. “So like, maybe it could hurt.”

“Oh. Well…crap.”

Jess nodded. “You boys set the table and get the food over there. I’ll go change and then join you.”

The Next Couple of Weeks

Jess didn’t have a bad time at work, all things considered. Nolan was used to keeping employee information on the down-low, so it was only awkward in their brief daily meetings. When it was just them by themselves, he asked her what baby names they were thinking of, whether she wanted the first to be a boy or a girl, how many they wanted, that sort of thing. Some days it was hard to get him to focus on work. Other than that, the only minor irritant was that a number of middle-aged women (and a number of middle-aged men with middle-aged wives) kept pestering her for where she went for her surgeries and how much they cost; after a week of consistent denials, though, she got the sense that they were just doing it to tease her because they thought she wanted it kept a secret.

The one ray of sunshine was that her job made it easy for her to sneak off and rub one out, and between work and home she was making herself come eight or nine times a day. All those orgasms kept her pretty chipper, and not one of them was attained by thinking about her son.

On very much the other hand, Ryan was miserable. In total, twenty-three people there had fallen victim to the magic, including his math teacher, one of the assistant principals, and the girl’s volleyball coach. The adults at least kept their comments to him to one-on-one situations; the kids, though, seemed to have no sense of tact so he ended up issuing two dozen angry denials a day, sometimes two or three times to the same insistent well-wisher. Added to that was that it was much harder for him to get some privacy to jerk off – if he was lucky he managed it once during a school day, so he was always walking around with a severe erection that was usually very obvious.

It only got worse when, at the beginning of the second week of school, his car was in the shop so his mom had to drop him off: someone got video of them together and now the whole school had seen it. It wasn’t as though the video showed them acting inappropriately, but it was generally agreed that Jess looked far more like his extremely hot girlfriend than his mom.

It wasn’t just the kids under the spell that were problems. Every day he heard snickers and derogatory comments as he walked down the hall. Sometimes boys said things like, “If my mom looked like that, I’d fuck her too,” and sometimes girls said things like, “Ryan’s so cute. I wish I was his mom so he’d date me.” Always when he looked at the source of these comments, he saw people trying to hide their smirks so they could look innocent.

By far the worst person about the whole thing was Jade Oleson, whom he had dated for 18 months until shortly before he’d gone to Ranu Ratu. She went around making loud accusations that he had dumped her because he was fucking his mother until he tracked her down and announced just as loudly to her face that he had actually dumped her because he’d walked in on her fucking her mom’s boyfriend. That shut down the worst of it, but she still spread rumors about Jess already being pregnant, about Jess and Paul divorcing, about Paul walking in on his son and his wife raw dogging, about the two of them spending time in jail on the island because of incest, and whatever else her jealous mind could think of.

The next Sunday, they visited her parents in their home in the fancy northern part of the city, almost in the suburbs. Their house was lovely – both her mother and father had been well-paid research scientists – she a biologist and he a chemist – and they had invested wisely. It was a nice visit largely absorbed with mother and son telling her parents edited versions of things that went on on the islands. Neither her mother or her father said anything, but both agreed that her dad had given them both some strange looks as the day wore on; neither one thought they had behaved in an inappropriate way toward each other during the visit, but it seemed as though something – or someone – had the old man suspicious.

On the Friday evening of the second week of school, Ryan and Jess were at home. Normally he would have been out with friends on a Friday night, but even his friends were being pains in the ass; they believed his denials, but they were shit-talking young people who couldn’t resist teasing him, and tonight he just wasn’t in the mood. The only one who never joined in the shit-giving was Mycah, but he was out tonight with his basketball friends, so Ryan was home with his mother. He was ignoring his phone, which was set to silent, and his mom was bustling around doing housework. He was on his own.