Mother and daughter

Penny had curly blonde hair, cheaply dyed. A plain face. Dull blue eyes, lacking life, windows to a lazy mind. At age 38 her bloom was visibly fading: crow's feet were beginning beside her eyes, and there was even a slight sag in her cheeks -- marks of hard living, and of being passed around by countless men. But her breasts were still firm, thanks to a generous endowment of silicone.

Ava had found her for Paul, initially as a present to mark the twentieth anniversary of his marriage to her daughter, but he'd had Penny several times since then. He now knelt astride the half-naked creature, his hair greying at the temples. He glanced at her worn, expectant face, then down at her bare breasts. Large breasts had always been something he admired in women, like a good ass -- things to be respected, not slapped or spanked, for example. But Ava had persuaded him to try tit-fucking this creature, and he'd discovered that he liked it.

As for Penny herself, being tit-fucked gave her no physical pleasure, yet it was her favourite form of sex -- perhaps because that had been her first erotic experience, and for a long time the only kind she had. Long ago she'd been trained to lie still and slack as a man played with her boobs, and ran his cock between their pre-lubricated inner sides. And these days it felt right.

Paul got to work on her. Ava watched on hawklike, fiercely telling Penny what an ugly stupid and generally worthless whore she was, and as always this aroused Ava, as it aroused Paul. When he came it was not on the breasts but all over the woman's face, including her lips and eyes. Covered by his load Penny relaxed into a self-mocking smile.

Penny was in fact one of several women who Ava hired now and then for her son-in-law. Ava knew that she herself no longer attracted him physically, nor did she see herself as desirable anymore. But Paul had his male needs, and Ava was determined to be the one supplying them.

She sought out only low-grade females: broken in some way, easily dominated, and easily dispensed with at short notice. But however superior Ava felt to them, she hated Penny and her ilk for having the erotic appeal which she now lacked in Paul's eyes. Initially she'd tried to leave Paul alone with these women, and let him have his way with them in peace, but Ava could not stop herself from being there during proceedings: she had to know what was going on. And while there, she could not refrain from insulting them as Paul worked on their passive bodies. But she found Paul enjoyed that too, her stream of abuse at the females added spice for him; he became addicted to it.

Ava paid Penny (not much) and saw her to the door. She came back in pointedly brushing her hands together, as though she'd put out the rubbish.

Meanwhile Emily knelt before her husband and reverentially tucked his flaccid cock back into his trousers. That cock, she knew, would be back in her mouth before long.

He looked down at his wife's hair. She'd inherited the intense red of her mother's, but Ava had insisted that Emily's be dyed grey. When the red re-emerged at the roots, it used to remind him of lava: ash-covered but aglow, and potentially lethal. Now real grey streaked her hair, which was no longer dyed. Not all volcanoes explode, Paul reflected. Emily had simply subsided year by year, endlessly nagged by Ava, hobbled by her narrow life and by the confining clothes he kept her in.

She'd remained their unpaid housemaid. She'd had never worked outside the house, and had never left it unless in the company of her mother, or Paul; a few times she'd tried walking out the front door by herself, but found that she was too anxious to move. She'd always been quiet, but now she never spoke at all, unless to clarify, in a small faint voice, an instruction she'd received from her husband or mother. She remained quiet and docile. Now and then though, when she was half in shadow, Paul thought he saw the candlelight of madness in her eye.

Ava was a woman who enjoyed control. Her daughter had never escaped it for single day, and by now quiet subservience had entered her very bones; yes, Emily was a doormat for life, her mother thought with satisfaction. But Ava was also obsessed by the need to control Paul.

In one respect, she and Paul remained physically intimate: she still sat in his lap -- more now than ever, in fact. Her lower half had spread considerably over the years, and while this made her feel less attractive in general, it seemed to please him once she was on his bony thighs.

The lap-sitting had begun as a kind of girlish pleasure for her, part of being kept and supported by this younger man, part of being pleasantly infantilized by him -- as though he'd given her the happy girlhood she'd never enjoyed in her young days. But Ava sensed that planting her ass in his lap meant something different to Paul: he liked feeling her womanly weight on him, in the same way that he liked hearing her voice go on and on, and liked being flooded by her outpourings of emotion. Having learnt all this, she talked even when he didn't want her to, emoted even when he didn't feel like it, and sat on his lap more often than he asked for or desired -- knowing that his resentment would be mild and short term; in the end these acts deepened her hold over him.

Ava could not stop Paul's eye from following some pretty piece of ass in the street. That was of no consequence. More troubling to her was when his gaze settled on some innocent and sweet young couple, or on parents lifting their toddlers or sporting happily with older children. Still, done was done: he must know, she thought, that it was too late for him to choose that life now.

Paul did know that: his youth and the prime of life were gone. True, he had money, and in theory could find some normal, healthy-minded young woman half his age to bear his kids. But I'm not that kind of desperado, he told himself. In reality, he could not conceive of life without Ava and all she provided -- which included Emily. Yes, he knew all that. But still, seeing happy innocent families in the street disquieted him.

And that wasn't all. Even money, the great gift which had flowed in so easily, had perhaps come too easily, he now thought: he had no friends formed from a workplace, no skills or discipline gained from a professional life. All he had was his women, his money, and numbers on screens.

He did not regret his life choices, rather he wished that he might have lived parallel lives in other ways as well. He was left with a persistent melancholy.