Edward's Mom
It was a quarter past three when I let myself into the apartment. The new key slid in like a secret; the tumblers turned with a whisper. She’d swapped the locks after the last time, but it’s amazing how easy it is to get another copy if you know the right people and the right lies. I waited a moment in the corridor, testing the air for movement, a snore, a TV muttering to itself in another room. Nothing. Not even the traffic from outside. The whole world seemed to pause, holding its breath for me.
The living room was exactly how she always kept it, neat but not tidy, a museum display designed to fool the casual observer into believing the illusion of order. Framed photographs in matching black, sofa cushions precisely arranged, coffee table wiped clean but streaked with some chemical’s residue if you looked close enough. I made a point not to touch anything as I moved, gliding in the half-light that bled in around the blinds. The door to the master bedroom was closed. She had left it unlocked.
I pushed it open and stepped in. My shoes made no sound against the plush carpet, and for a moment I just stood there, watching. She was asleep on her side, an arm thrown up, the hair on her pillow in the same artful tangle she’d sported since I was a kid. Only then it was rich chestnut, now it was salt-and-pepper, and there was more skin around her jaw and eyes than I remembered. I saw the faint rise and fall of her ribcage, the way her lips parted as she dreamed. For a second, I was a child again, and she was just my mother. Fear curled in my belly. Angry at my weakness, I locked away all of my feelings behind walls of rage. Then I flicked the switch on the wall.
The room detonated in cold, surgical brightness. She jerked upright like I’d hit her with a cattle prod, arms flailing, lips parted in a hoarse, unformed cry. Her hands snatched blindly for the glasses on her nightstand, betraying just how deep she’d been sleeping. I watched her fumble, the lenses catching the overhead light as she struggled to fit them on, her fingers stiff with panic. I could see each stage of her confusion as it passed across her face: the initial shot of fear, raw and animal, then the rationalizing, the desperate hope that I was some other shape in the doorway, and finally the instant of recognition. My mother’s eyes, blue and watery, locked onto mine.
Pleasure slithered from the cold reptile hindbrain. A predator’s pleasure. The joy of a warrior with blood on his blade. The rage of the berserker as he wades into combat. I stepped towards my mother.
“Eddie?” she said, voice thick and hoarse like she’d been swallowing gravel. I waited, letting her stare drill through me, savoring the moment where she tried to force herself awake from a nightmare but found herself awake already. She clutched at the covers, pulling them up to her chin, like that threadbare cotton could stop me. Some primal instinct warning her that she faced danger like she’d never considered.
She tried again, her voice a notch higher: “Edward, what are you…?” She didn’t finish, just hugged herself tighter, the sleeves of her robe bunching around her thin wrists. Even now, caught in the open, she tried to keep herself wrapped, modest, like all those years of propriety meant anything.
I stepped closer, into the glare, and said, “Shut up.” I said it flat, no growl, no emphasis, because I knew she would. Just the way my old man used to say it before he tuned her up. She froze, lips trembling, breath ragged. I let the silence stretch, let her imagine what came next, let her search my face for a signal of mercy. There wasn’t any.
Mom shrank back, slow-motion, her shoulders hunching toward the headboard, her knees drawing up beneath the blankets. She never took her eyes off me. I watched the fear bloom, starting at her pupils then blossoming through the rest of her body, her pulse fluttering under the papery skin of her neck. She didn’t know if I would drag her out of bed or just stand there, watching, but both options were bad, and she knew it.
I made my way around the bed, deliberate and slow, savoring the thick hush. My shoes made no sound on the carpet, a predator’s glide. I felt her need to speak, to appeal to some vestige of decency, or at least to the boy she thought she raised. But she knew better. She just pressed herself tighter to the wall, eyes darting to the window, the door, the phone on the nightstand, as if any of it would help. Prey doesn’t barter with the predator.
Leaning over her, my palms on either side of her shoulders, I caged her in the threat of my embrace. The mattress sagged beneath my weight. I could smell the sharp tang of her sweat, the faded perfume she always wore, flowery and medicinal, mixing with her exhaustion and terror. She whimpered and I felt my cock twitch in my jeans.
“What do you want?” she whispered, hand trembling in front of her like she was holding off traffic on some lethal highway. She tried to square her jaw, but her lips wobbled. It was almost funny, the way she tried to play at mother, still thinking she could negotiate with me, reason with me, even after all these years.
I let my gaze move over her, slow and deliberate. I watched her skin crawl under my scrutiny, watched her try to disappear into the mattress. Her hand was still up, palm open, a useless shield. I reached past it and brushed her hair back from her forehead, gentle, a parody of all the times she’d done the same for me when I was a little boy, feverish or scared. She flinched, and I patted her cheek, feeling the heat beneath her skin, the pulse hammering just beneath. Her glasses sat crooked on her nose, and for a moment, I wanted to break them. Instead, I smiled. Teeth tight.
“You know what I want.”
She shook her head, stammered, “I don’t, I don’t, please, Edward, just…”
“Don’t give me that shit!” I snarled, voice scraping the inside of my own skull, hating the whine of it but unable to soften. My hands, so calm a minute ago, grabbed at the blanket with a violence that felt both alien and inevitable. I yanked the sheet free from under her, the cotton snapping like a gunshot as it whipped from beneath her knees. She shrieked. Not from pain, not yet, but from the suddenness, the hornet-sting sharpness of the gesture, the reminder that nothing she’d built, not even the thin barricades of fabric and habit, could save her.
She scrabbled to clench the nightgown at her chest, knuckles whitening as she tried to rearrange modesty like the virtue it had never really been. The garment itself was a joke: pale blue, almost indecently light, made for a woman half her age or twice as desperate. In the wash of white overhead bulbs, it glimmered translucent in spots where her sweat had soaked it through. The hem cut off at mid-thigh, exposing knees that looked more brittle than I remembered, skin puckered and veined like paper left in the sun. For a moment, I was almost amused by her performance, trying to broadcast frailty, like that would do anything except excite the wolf she’d let into her bedroom.
“Fucking cunt,” I hissed, letting each word strike her face like spit. “Tonight, you start getting back what you’ve deserved all these years.”
Mom jerked, reeling from the accusation in my tone. The headboard’s padding banged her head with an upholstered thud. Her glasses slipped askew, and her eyes went cartoon-wide, wet blue irises rimmed with pink. The pitch of her voice skittered up an octave.
“Please. Just go. I’ll give you money. You want money? I’ll give you whatever you want.” Her hands sought the end table, then her purse, then the phone, ticking through helpless options as if any of them mattered in the moment. Watching her flop from one failed tactic to the next made my cock burn hotter. “Are you hungry? I’ll make you some pancakes.”
“Pancakes?” I laughed, the sound poisonous and effortless. “Money? Jesus Christ, Mom. How many times do I have to say it? I don’t want anything from you.” I breathed in, the scent of her fear and powder and perfume making me dizzy. “Not your money. Not your stuff. Not even your fucking sympathy.” I leared at her. “Well, there is one thing I want. And I’m going to take it.”
She drew herself as small as possible, a turtle with no shell, the bone-memory of survival written all over her face. “Then what?” she whispered, voice so thin it barely carried over the hum of the ceiling fan. “What, Edward? ...