Mom and her new boyfriend were at it again. This time, they were fighting over the dishes in the sink. 

With a sigh, I got up from the dining table where I’d been working on my university assignment. 

The tap water ran warm over my hands as I washed the dishes. Mom and her boyfriend were still going at it, both voices rising and crashing like waves against the walls. 

I would give anything to make it stop, anything for them to find some kind of peace. The arguments exhausted me. I hated to see her hurt. 

I hated even more to be a helpless witness, caught in a cycle that was not my own. As I rinsed the dirty plates from dinner, the shouting began to die down.

I knew the drill. I knew it too well. They’d fight, and then they’d fuck. It was their routine, one I was never happy about, one I’d been forced to take part in.

To be fair, nobody made me do it. It wasn’t as if I had a gun to my head. I could have put on my noise-canceling headphones and buried my head in my textbooks. 

Nobody made me wash the dishes. Nobody made me stay in the house while they got up to their antics. And nobody made me go to my room, take my pants off, and jerk myself off while I listened to the sounds of Mom being fucked in the next room. 

I don’t remember when it started. 

When I was growing up with my single mother, I never saw her with a man. But something changed when I moved away for college. 

I noticed it when I visited—the cigarette lighters that couldn’t have belonged to my non-smoker mom, the men’s clothes in the laundry hamper, Mom’s phone that constantly demanded her attention. 

After I got my degree, I moved back in with Mom. It wasn’t easy to get a job in this economy, so I’d been taking extra courses to pad my resume. 

In the few months since moving back into the house, it had become a familiar pattern, watching Mom bring her boyfriend home late at night. His visits grew more frequent, and soon he was a constant background in the house. 

They'd come in like a tempest, always in the middle of some argument, the door slamming behind them, his heavy footsteps echoing on the hardwood floors. 

He didn’t speak to me much. When he did, a curt nod or a passing grunt was the most I could expect.

His presence loomed large, drowning the house in testosterone and tension. This was his territory as much as ours now, even if he wouldn’t look me in the eye.

Most of the time, they’d spend the night outside the house and then come home to fight and fuck. Otherwise, we’d have a tense, quiet dinner together, all three of us, and then they’d go into Mom’s bedroom to fight and fuck. 

Lately, I’d started to join them. 

As much as I hated Mom’s boyfriend and their fights, I’d spent a lot of time in bed tossing and turning to the sounds of their lovemaking. 

At some point, somewhere between waking and dreaming, my mom’s moans buried themselves in my mind and refused to leave. All I could think about was what was happening right behind the thin wall I shared with Mom’s bedroom. 

I tried to stop myself, to replace images of my mom in my fantasies with past girlfriends, but I couldn’t get away from those fucking moans. 

I saw my mom’s face then, her mouth wide open, her breathing heavy and punctuated with those fucking, inescapable moans. 

I thought about what she looked like being fucked. Was she lying on her back, or was she on all fours, being fucked like an animal?

I couldn’t stop it from overtaking me, this sinful ache to know, this wicked hunger to imagine. I kept thinking about my mom and her boyfriend, their bodies entwined right beyond that thin wall, his cock thrusting, her cries rising, filling all the empty spaces in the house. 

My own cock was suddenly in my hand, already hard and throbbing as I squeezed it. I pumped it in time to their fucking, to the sound of their panting, to the rhythm of the headboard’s relentless banging on the wall. 

I wanted to hate myself, wanted to stop, but instead I imagined them on top of each other, tangled and slick and shameless. 

When they came, I came too, spurting ropes of hot white cum onto my stomach and chest, my eyes squeezed shut as I imagined it was me, not him, who was making my mom moan.

The day after the first time I’d done the dirty deed, after her boyfriend had left, I sat at the dining table as Mom fluttered around me, making coffee and toast while fielding phone calls from her clients. 

As she moved around the kitchen, I could hear the soft swish of her skirt against her thighs. When she leaned over to pour coffee, I could hear the gentle rustle of her shirt against her skin. And when she spoke, I heard her soft voice as a series of moans in my head.

A faint hint of vanilla from her lotion entered my nostrils as Mom joined me at the table. The faint musk of perfume, mixed with the aroma of freshly brewed coffee, gave her a warm, comforting scent I’d come to associate with mornings.

I was frozen in place, surrounded by last night’s clutter and the echoes of my own shame. I couldn’t stop thinking about what Mom might know, whether she’d heard me, whether she was looking at me different that morning with those unreadable eyes. 

Despite her calm demeanor, I kept imagining that she must’ve known that I'd listened to her being fucked, that she’d sensed the sick pull of it whenever I was around her, that she knew which fantasies got me off. 

I could see her in my mind, whispering to herself, piecing it together, realizing that I came to fantasies about me fucking her instead of her boyfriend.

But she acted like it was just any other morning, and she soon left for work, but not before giving me a kiss that felt different from other kisses she’d given me in the past. 

My mom had always been a beautiful woman. As I got older and my friends started to notice, I had to tell them to knock it off when they started to stare too long, or when they made lewd, disrespectful comments about her womanly curves. 

I hadn’t allowed myself to think about what she looked like under her clothes then. But now that I’d come to the sounds she made while being fucked, I couldn’t help but study her.

She was lean with subtle curves, still toned from years of playing sports in her youth. Her curves were soft and alluring, with just the right amount of fullness in all the right places.

Her skin was a warm shade of olive, with freckles scattered across her shoulders and chest. Long, blonde hair fell in loose waves around her face.

Her breasts were covered in a modest, button-down shirt for work. When she bent down and pulled me into a hug, they squished against my chest. Her skin was smooth and soft to the touch, like silk against my fingertips. 

The harder I tried, the harder it became to control myself. As I sat there at the dining table, I felt my cock stir in my pants and begged the universe to not let my mom notice my erection.

Luckily, she was in a rush this morning, as she often was. 

As I watched her leave for work, her full hips swaying tantalizingly in the driveway, I couldn’t help but imagine running my hands over every inch of her.