Stoked

Preamble:

This is a surfing-themed tender, teasing mother-son love story written in ornate literary language, in languid, brooding mood, with parts dark. It has lite herbal infusions of Philosophy, Music, Art and Literature. The lovemaking scenes are described in sensual, erotic rendition, with savage high moments.

If this style of calibrated narrative is not your thing, if you much prefer wailing and flailing action by sex triathletes, skip along.

***

Wave. Surfing. Surfer.

A storm out at sea churns the surface. Creates a chop. Smaller, then larger wavelets. These amalgamate, with enough wind, into heavy seas. What surfers are waiting for on distant coasts is the energy that escapes from the storm. It radiates outwards into calmer waters in the form of wave trains. Groups of waves, increasingly organised, that travel together. Each wave sets off a column of orbiting water, most of it below the surface. The wave train produced by a storm are what surfers call a swell. A swell can travel thousands of miles. The more powerful the storm, the farther the swell travels.

As it travels, the swell becomes more organised. The distance between each wave in a train, known as the interval, becomes uniform. In a long-interval train, the orbiting water may extend more than a thousand feet beneath the ocean surface. Such a train can pass easily through surface resistance like a chop or other smaller swells, that it crosses or overtakes.

As waves from a swell approach the shoreline, they begin to feel the sea bottom. Wave trains become sets. Groups of waves that are larger, and longer-interval than their locally generated cousins. The approaching waves bend in response to the shape of the sea bottom. The visible part of the wave grows. The resistance from the sea bottom increases as the water gets shallower. It slows the progress of the water. Finally, it becomes unstable. It prepares to topple forward, to break. The rule of thumb is that it breaks when its height reaches 80% of the water's depth. An 8-feet wave breaks in 10-feet deep water. But, many subtle factors conspire to determine exactly where and how the wave breaks: wind, bottom contour, swell angle, current.

So a surf ride was set off a thousand miles away. Just for you. And you'll know it's for you, when you see it. It kinda has your name on it.

Surfing.

A surfer just hopes that the wave has a catchable moment, a take-off point, a rideable face. That it doesn't break all at once. But instead, breaks gradually, successively, allowing the surfer the privilege to coast parallel to the shore, riding the face, for a glorious while, in that spot, in that moment, just before it breaks.

Surfing has a far horizon. A fear line, that makes it different from other sports. You can surf with your bros. But, when the waves get big, or you get into a foam of shit, there never seems to be anyone around. Everything out there is tangled with everything else in random unity.

Waves are the playing field. The goal. The object of your deepest desire and adoration. At the same time, waves are your adversary. Your nemesis. Even your mortal enemy.

The surf is your refuge. Your hiding place. Your watery bolt hole. But, it's also a hostile wilderness. A dynamic, indifferent world.

Surfer.

The ocean is a power beyond measure. But, as a surfer in its shifting embrace, you need to take its measure, as a matter of survival. You need to know your limits. Physical and emotional.

But, you don't know your limits unless you test them. And if you fail your test, you're to stay cool if things go awry. Panic is the first step to drowning.

And when you prevail, in that fleeting moment, composed by an unconscious conspiracy of body, mind and ocean, everything so totally comes together, the wave and you are a single state of nature. The universe is you, and you, the universe, if only for a moment. And that moment is forever. Nobody can take that from you. Ever.

Surfers have a word for this unique experience: stoke.

What other human activity has a unique word for the unique high it gives? Only two, orgasm and Nirvana. Stoke doesn't mean just a high, but the unique, peculiar high that nothing but surfing can give. To say that the joy of surfing is simply one joy among many others is like saying that the earth is merely one planet among others.

***

The morning is breath and hush, the tide's rhythmic pull lapping at the cove's edge. Mist hangs low over the cliffs, silvered by the dawn, soft as whispered secrets. The world beyond feels distant, unreal. Only the sea is real. Salt-stung air. Hush of wind over water.

Eleanor stands barefoot on the sand. She feels the grains shift beneath her toes, cool and damp. She loves this hour. This stillness. The world caught between sleeping and waking.

A woman in the ocean's quiet gaze. Forty-five, though the years have settled into her like sunlight in deep water. She is beautiful, with daring eyes. Faint lines kiss her skin. Strength laces her limbs. Body sculpted by a lifetime of moving with the waves.

Beside her, Jude stretches. Arms lifting over his head. The long lines of his body, golden from the sun, echo hers. Broad shoulders. Lean muscles. A frame made for the ocean's embrace. He is eighteen today, though she still sees the boy in him, the child who had once clung to her hand, his voice bright with laughter.

Now, he stands in silence. Gaze drifting toward the horizon. Something thoughtful in the way he holds himself. Like a weight behind his eyes.

She reaches for her board, fingers running absently over the waxed surface.

"You're quiet today," she murmurs.

He glances at her, the flicker of a smile at the corner of his mouth.

"You always say that."

"Because it's always true."

A chuckle, low and warm. Then, after a moment, he turns toward her, reaches out. Tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear. His fingers, salt-coarse and careful, linger for the briefest second against her temple. An old habit from childhood, when she would kneel before him, smoothing his windswept curls with the same gentle touch.

Smiling at him, her eyes searching his. "Ready?"

Nods. Together, they wade into the sea.

The water cradles them. Lifts them. Pulls them into its slow, rolling breath. They move in silence, paddling side by side, the rhythm second nature. He keeps close, his presence a steady warmth beside her.

She remembers teaching him to surf. The way he had clung to her at first, his small hands gripping her arms as she guided him onto his board. The way he had looked at her, wide-eyed, trusting, as she whispered, "It's just water, love. Let it carry you."

Now, he is fluid, effortless, moving with a grace that rivals her own. And still, he lingers at her side, watching her in that quiet, searching way of his.

Then, the wave.

A perfect arc, rising like a breath held between heartbeats.

She moves first, body igniting, paddling hard, then rising. A moment of flight. Of weightlessness. The world narrowing to nothing but speed and sea and wind. She cuts across the wave's face, arms outstretched, spray trailing behind her in silvered ribbons. She can feel him behind her. Hear the familiar whoosh of his board slicing water. The quiet hum of their shared motion.

For a moment, they are weightless together. Carving across the ocean's skin. Two shadows moving as one.

When you dance, you just fall into the music. You forget yourself. In surfing, the wave is the music.

Then, the wave gives way beneath them, spilling into froth. They let themselves fall. She tumbles into the water, surfacing with laughter tangled in her breath. He emerges beside her, shaking his head, his grin lazy and lopsided.

She reaches for him. Brushes the droplets from his cheek. Her touch light, familiar.

"Not bad," she teases.

He catches her hand before she can pull it away. Holds it there against his face for a lingering second. The warmth of him, the salt on his skin, the way he leans into her touch just slightly, it sends something deep and bittersweet through her. Something unspoken. Something heavy with time.

"You cheated. You let me win." he murmurs.

Arching a brow, "Did I?"

He doesn't answer. Only smiles. The slow kind. The kind that makes her heart ache in ways she cannot name.

For a long moment they float, letting the water carry them. The tide rocks them closer. Shoulders brushing. Fingers drifting near each other in the current.

Then, he exhales, slow and quiet. "I think I might leave soon."

She stills.

She had known it coming. She had seen it in his silences. The way his gaze had started to stray beyond the horizon.

Eighteen. A threshold year. The edge of something new.

She reaches out. Cups his face in her palm. Thumb brushing the curve of his cheek. He closes his eyes for a moment. Leans into her touch like he used to when he was small, when comfort then was as simple as her hands, her mere presence, her breath against his skin.

"You'll always come back to the sea," she whispers.

He opens his eyes. Something dark and unreadable in them.

Slowly, he nods. "Yeah," he says softly. "I will."

The tide pulls them gently a little apart. Salt in their hair. Wind on their skin. Sky above them pale, spacious, endless. In the hush between the waves, they drift, held together by water.

***

She looks him in the eye. Cocks her head in the direction of the outcrop of rocks at the far end of the bay.

"I've something to show you."

They paddle to the shore. She leads the way, rounding the outcrop of rocks.

"What about our boards?"

"Let them go."

"What?"

"Yes"

Their boards float away to the waves, embarking on a journey of their own. Where will they beach? Mavericks? Waimea? Padang Padang? More likely, the next bay.

They swim in from the black inkwell of shadow under the cliff.

Beneath the liquid mirror of the sea, where light fractures into trembling shards and time forgets its linear march, they swim down into the hush of the deep, their breaths borrowed from the world above. Their bodies suspended between gravity and dream. The water pressed close, intimate and cool, wrapping around them like a silken whisper.

Then, as if summoned by some silent, ancient signal, they come. An effusion of silver lives, a murmur of fin and shimmer. A school of fish, numberless and precise, bloom around them in sudden, flawless choreography. The fish move not as many, but as one. An embodied thought. A living current. A ripple of instinct encoded in motion. Eleanor and Jude as intruder and witness, drift within their orbit, hearts stilled by the sheer eloquence of their being. The fish do not scatter, nor fear, but receive them with an indifferent grace, as though they are no more than another eddy in their fluid world. In that moment, they are neither above nor apart, but within, folded into the secret language of the sea, where silence sings and the self is gently unmade. It is not discovery, but initiation, into beauty that asks for nothing, and belonging that requires no name.

And then, suddenly, school's out.

They tread water, searching. Their feet sense sand. They swim right in, under the cliff, and surface.

They are standing at the back of a shallow cave, looking out under a low arch at the open sea. The water comes up to their armpits. The roof of the cave is barely two feet above their heads. The air is warm enough. Smells salty. In contrast to the brilliant light outside, the place is full of echoing gaps of blackness. There is a sense of the looming weight of the cliff above. Will the roof cave in?

There is something primordial about sea caves. Fascinating and forbidding all at once. Cosy and menacing. Secret hollows carved into the bones of the coastline, where water and stone have waltzed in slow violence for centuries. They beckon like forgotten doorways into the earth's memory. Half-drowned. Half-dreamt. Only accessible by slipping through the glinting skin of the sea. To reach them, you must surrender to the sea's mood, swimming beneath the sun's indifferent gaze, past rock and reef, where salt bites the lips and time loses its edges.

Within, the light falters. Shadows stretch long and liquid across cathedral walls of dripping stone. The cave becomes a cradle of echo, where even the smallest splash or breath blooms into music. And yet, though it may shelter you from the lash of the wind and the blaze of the sky, there is menace beneath the lull. The cave is a mouth that does not close. A womb that may not birth you back. It is both sanctuary and snare.

To enter a sea cave is to flirt with forgetting. And perhaps that is why we seek them. Not for safety. But, for the thrill of being on the edge of vanishing.

And this cave, the outer arch barely clears the surface of the water. It will be filled by any kind of swell.

They look at the seabed. Flecks of sunlight drop toward them from some light source somewhere. She puts her head down, flexes her knees to push off in a shallow dive toward the light source. He follows.

They swim underwater for half a minute. He wonders whether his breath will hold. This is the longest he has held his breath. What is this baptism of water that his mother is putting him through? An eighteen year old coming of age rite of watery passage?

They surface. An inner cave. Its roof has an opening to the sky. A one foot diameter opening. A natural skylight. Like in the movies. A temple, and then, an inner temple. A dramatic shaft of light, of biblical radiance and intensity, piercing the darkness. He admires the colour and the quality of the light.

They clamber up to the cave floor.

"What's with this shadowy Plato's cave thing?"

"Your late dad, my bro Cole and me. Our hidey-hole when we were young. Our little nook of the universe. We once spent a day holed up here living the noble savage thing. This was eons ago before global warming raised the tide to the level you see now. Your dad's idea. He was always having ideas like this. Rousseau's romantic idea of man enjoying a natural and noble existence until civilisation made him a slave to unnatural wants and corrupted him."

Continuing, "I just wanted to reminisce a bit with you here."

Things bittersweet. Beautiful roses and sharp thorns are part of the same plant.

***

Pensive, "Let's sit at the back of the cave for awhile."

She leans against the back wall. He does the same, next to her.

They are at a loss for words. Immersed in an aura that is a hazy unity of fantasy and reality.

He looks at his mother. In the darkness, and the radiance of the skylight, she presents a surreal vision of loveliness. She is cast in a noir and a biblical movie in the same cinematic scene.

The back of the cave is cold as damp rock would be. She shunts over, sits in front of him. Pauses momentarily as if serving him notice of her next move. Reclines gently. After a minute of snuggling down to fuzzy comfort, she cocks her head to look at him, and then twinkles a kittenish knowing smile. The beginning is always a delicate time.

They remain this way for a long while.

He thinks of the novels he had read, the movies he had watched, that featured caves.

Here, in the hush of tide and shadow, he feels the old myths of the earth return. These are places where gods might have slept. Or monsters wept. Or lovers disappeared forever. He could stay, curled within the rock's slow heart, lulled by the sea's wet breathing, wrapped in the illusion of safety. But comfort here is not freedom. It is the seductive kind that softens the will, that tempts him to forget the way back out.

"What are you thinking?"

He doesn't say anything at first. Nuzzles her neck.

"How did you spend the time when you were in this cave with dad and Uncle Cole all day?"

The memory comes back to her. But only fleetingly. Like a lighted window seen from an express train, it flickers for an instant in the distance and disappears. She is relieved, but is unsure why.

"We were a close trio. It was Cole who introduced me to your dad. We did many things together. I just want to reminisce, relive that a bit, with you here."

She has a far wistful look. Like she is mulling a question that may never be answered.

He is unsure of her meaning. But he has a sense that something is going on.

***

Hesitantly, "I want to look at you."

She turns her head back to look at him.

"Properly..."

This cave, being an inner sanctum of a cave, is quiet. Through the skylight opening, the sky is a canvas of soft blue, untouched, unsullied.

She stands with her back to the cave wall, facing him. Wafts of wind from the skylight opening teasing the loose tendrils of her dark hair.

Forty-five. Though time has been kind. Her body still strong, sculpted from years of movement, of swimming, of riding the sea's crest with effortless grace. She has always felt at home in the ocean's embrace. Yet now, here, standing before his discerning gaze, she feels something foreign creeping along her skin. Nervousness.

He dips into his surf shorts pocket, takes out his cellphone encased in a waterproof jacket.

"Can I?"

She doesn't answer.

He kneels, cellphone camera poised in his hands. Expression unreadable.

Eighteen now, a man. And yet, she still remembers him as a boy, wide-eyed, small hands clutching hers as he learned the pull of the tide, the art of balance, the language of water. How different he has become. Taller, leaner, features sharpened by time, by experience. And those hands, once small, once clumsy, now hold a camera with quiet confidence.

He had hesitantly asked her to pose for him six months ago, for his art college assignment, "The Human Form in Nature". He had explained it carefully, formally, like he was speaking to a stranger. Yet behind his words, there had been something else. Something raw. Something yearning. She had agreed.

But, they never got around to the photoshoot. Jude's father, a foreign correspondent, was killed the following day, while on assignment covering a conflict in South East Asia. The family took a turn into a tailspin with the sudden loss.

But now, standing before him in nothing but a two-piece bikini, her pulse quivers unsteadily beneath her skin.

"You don't have to do this if you're uncomfortable," he murmurs, voice low, almost cautious.

Exhaling, slow, measured. "I'm OK. I owe you that photoshoot, even if your assignment is over."

Still, she hesitates.

"But, the light is low for a proper shoot."

"Perfect for chiaroscuro."

"What?"

"A light play technique. Light and dark, representing strongly contrasting tones, such as darkened shadows and vivid shafts of light, heightening emotional tension in the imagery."

He watches her. His gaze gentle, patient. Not a boy's admiration anymore. A man's. An artist's. And, a son's.

She closes her eyes for a moment. Listening to the sea, letting it steady her. Then, her fingers move. Slow, deliberate. The ties at her hips come undone first. Fabric sliding down the curve of her thighs, pooling at her feet. She steps out of it.

He sees a faint brown bush. He can't tell if she is closely trimmed, or she is just that way. Shaped in a delicate wedge. It affords scant cover to hide the thin lips dangling sweetly between her parted legs. Is the fleeting glisten on her bush sweat or seawater, or something else? Does he notice this detail?

"You like what you see?"

Nods.

Click.

"I like it lite natural. Not pristine mown."

"Why?"

"I find bald inauthentic and plasticky. I particularly abhor a landing strip. So contrived."

"What do you think of my hirsute maintenance? Should I lighten up some?"

"I've this thing that if Nature provides natural foliage, a woman should retain at least a feminine modicum of it. So, it's a matter of calibrated rendition. You're just right."

"Glad you approve of your mother's bush."

He admires her nether charms, yearning in earnest. He touches himself in a way that a son must not touch himself while looking at a most secret part of his mother that should not even be in his visual range. This does not escape her notice. It pleases her, the cause and effect giving her a wicked tingle in her loin.

"Turn around."

Not a hussey's butt for sure. None of that crass inflated bubble butts he sees in his face on the internet. This is a woman's tail, longish and curvy.

Then, southerly, trim sturdy thighs that can be brought to bear in particular situations when things come to a head.

Click.

"Bend over."

She instinctively closes and straightens her legs in parallel. Bends down impossibly low, as only a former ballerina can. She still keeps her legs straight. Her right hand grips her left ankle, to lock down the pose. He is surprised that his mother is so charitable.

He gleans the motherly arc of crack, then, that neat line of charm that parts a little, to a hint of tender coral moist pink. Cute, but also obscene. Maternal folds of delights that he dreams the dream that one day, maybe today if the cosmic forces are willing, he will relish in a triumphant home coming.

She is endlessly analysable. And yet somehow, analysis-proof. Any analysis effort runs aground on the limits of analysis.

Click.

"Excuse me a sec. I need to do something."

He is intrigued. What? He loves his mum when she is full of surprises.

She crawls catlike toward the farthest end of the cave before the water, very slowly, as if she is afraid she might slip on the wet cave floor.

He watches his mother stalk stealthily away from him, like a new breed of cat, her marching buttocks quivering. Is she putting up a show for him?

He supposes this is part of the shoot.

Click.

She kneels down, a few feet in front of him, facing the water, slightly raising her buttocks to him. She is dead still as if she is willing something. What now? An ancient sea worship ritual?

He feels a deep urge to rush forth, kneel behind his mother, mount her as if he is a stallion in cruel heat. But he doesn't by some superhuman will of denial he didn't know he possesses.

What was that Schopenhaeur said about free will? You can choose whatever you desire, but sorry, you are not free to choose your desires. Your desires choose you.

Just as well he didn't because in the next instant, he hears a sharp feminine hiss. It sounds secret. Only to be heard by the select privileged. Like chamber music.

Golden straw yellow jetting down powerfully from between the moons of her buttocks. The light from the skylight plays on her yellow stream, reflecting and deflecting. An impressionist scene of a certain intimate quality. She is peeing liquid gold.

Is it OK if he takes a shot of this? He can't help it. If she finds the photo objectionable later during the photo review, it can be deleted.

Click.

She goes on like, forever. How can there be so much pee in one mother? He doesn't mind so much though because it is a scenic view. It is not everyday custom that a son gets to see his mother pee. And this is a nuanced rear view, which heightens the charm.

He feels a quick rush of electricity. It makes him want to pee as well. A tightening sensation. It is like the peeing is infectious. But, he realises that it is not pee that he wants to do, but something else more releasing.

At long last, she finishes. The ebbing pee gathers at a wisp of her pubic hair, blooms into a droplet, hangs on at the wisp tip for what seems like a long time, then plops like a raindrop onto the cave floor.

Time resumes.

***

She crawls back to him. Her bikini top is loose, barely clinging to her bosom. She is trying not to jiggle her hanging breasts too lewdly. It seems less like she is wearing the bikini top, but the top is wearing her.

"Can I see your anus?"

This level of detailed interest surprises her a little.

A shy nod.

He waits for her to part her buttocks. But, she makes no movement.

She invites, "Go on."

It takes him a second to process her reply. Not quite what he expected.

The swell of her hips give way to a more hidden place. He pauses. Parts her cheeks. He relishes the tension of her cheeks pulling back to close up as if resisting the revelation of his mother's deepest secret. His first intimate touch of his mother, and that is to part her cheeks to reveal her butthole. He doesn't know what to think of that.

And there it is. The folds of her. The cleft of her. Soft ring of skin so delicately furled.

He does not rush past it. Studies it. Not with detachment, but with the tenderness of a son humbled by what he is permitted to see.

Click.

There is no vulgarity in his gaze. Only awe. In that quiet place is power, not merely physical, but intimate, knowing, ancient. She is a mature woman, yes, seasoned not by time alone but by a life deeply lived. And he, younger, yet already learning that there are places on the human body that are less about pleasure and more about surrender. Places that say, I trust you. I am here. I am open.

And so, he cannot help it but kisses her there, lightly, with a certain reverence, that may seem strange for a part of the anatomy that is less esteemed.

She didn't expect this. He feels her sigh ripple through the silence. Not with shame, but with the soft triumph of a woman who knows the beauty of being truly seen.

"Turn around."

She faces him.

He approaches her as a devotee, fascinated not by the novelty of her loins, but by the mysterious authority it holds.

He guides her to lie down. She lies before him in the hush of the skylight. Body relaxed. Legs parting slowly in invitation, not performance. There is no need for seduction. Only truth. Only presence.

Click.

His eyes trace the gentle rise of her mons. Soft, fleshy swell framed by a sparse scattering of brown hair. Like windblown grass on a sun-warmed dune. Not the tidy smoothness of youth. Something more mysterious, more human. He finds beauty in the irregularity, the soft defiance of age. He leans in, breathing in her scent. Salt and skin and something secret. A ripple of awe passes through him.

Click.

He touches her gently. Almost reverently. Letting his fingertips learn what eyes alone cannot. The texture of her labia. The subtle shift from the outer folds to the softer, darker inner petals. Warm and tender beneath his hand. The contrast moves him. This interplay of strength and softness. Exposure and invitation. Her labia are like the pages of a well-read book, shaped by time and use and memory. He studies them as if each line holds poetry.

He parts her slowly, with childlike wonderment frivolity, for indeed, he is her child. Breath shallow, as though opening the petals of a flower that only blooms in shadow.

And there, nestles within, is her centre. Pink, pulsing. Wet with readiness. Her vagina, that sacred threshold, is not merely anatomy but mystery. Not a hole to be filled, but a space to be known, honoured, entered like a cathedral with bare feet and held breath.

He looks up. Her eyes meet his. Calm and gleaming. She knows exactly what he is discovering. That he has never seen anything more beautiful in his life, and perhaps never would.

They have come so far. Her hitherto relentless search for sexual meaning in life has taken her to this point. She decides to bare her depths to her son.

She angles her hips toward him until the full vertical slit is in his view. Top to bottom. He gets closer, the best view he has had of his mother yet.

She can discern that he thinks it is lovely, the mounds of her outer lips framing and pressing against the thin folds of her inner lips. Brown well-trimmed hair lie about her lips, but do not conceal them. Her inner lips are parted. Just a crack. He glimpses a faint fleeting glistening sheen inside, from the reflected clean light of the skylight.

She spreads her legs wider still. Her lips squeak, like opening doors, as if warning that someone has entered.

"Let's put the mystique and strangeness of my nudity to rest, and enjoy the rest of our time here."

"Have you seen a woman up close?"

"No"

"You can see my hood here, covering my clitoris."

She traces its length with her index finger. It is long. It fully conceals her nub of skin underneath.

She pulls the skin of her hood up and back.

"Can you see my clitoris? My clit. It is small. Not easy to see. But, it is right here."

She touches her finger to the round pink bit of flesh under the folds of skin. She draws her finger back like she touched fire.

"Oooh, sensitive! Go ahead and get a good look of me."

He leans closer. He narrows his eyes, gazing steadily at her most intimate. Like he is looking through a gap in a curtain, surveying an intriguing room. He is mesmerised. His mother exposing herself to him as she is, and encouraging him to look at her.

"May I?"

A weak quarter nod.

Click.

She senses some part of her son appreciates that her vagina is appealing in a way that is more than sexual. That its curve and shape and colour is beautiful. Like a flower. But, at the same time, her son is aroused. It is not any pussy. It is his mum's vagina. And, sitting here, looking at her, his penis straining in his surf shorts.

"Touch me there. Touch my most sensitive."

He fingers her swollen clitoris. A dear little thing. This is the moment the world lost its vastness. A secret pearl spun from the softest silk of pleasure. He touches it lightly again. It stirs like dawn's first blush. White gunk shoots out of her lips. Some goes up his nose. It surprises him that she comes like a man. One of those serendipitous slips of the body that lovers don't plan, but which linger in the secret corners of memory.

It is not just a smell. It is her. Earthy, electric, salt-sweet and alive. It floods his senses with something older than words, something animal and divine all at once. A scent of surrender, of open want, of her body singing in its own language.

She giggles at his shock. He responds heroically by leaving the gunk in his nostrils, smiling.

"How is it?"

He looks at her, a little too stunned for words.

She sees the change in his gaze. He looks at her not just with hunger now, but with awe. He has breathed her, carrying her in him like a secret incense. And neither of them will forget it.

***

She spreads her lips apart with her fingers.

Matter-of-factly, "Now, you can see my vagina."

It may be embarrassing for him to listen to his mother talk this way. But, his eyes are glued to the pink gash that she has opened to him.

"We tend to use the word vagina loosely. Actually, the vulva is the proper name for the exterior. The vagina is only the interior part. You can see from the light reflecting off it that it is a little wet. Some women at my age get drier, especially around menopause. Dryness can make sex uncomfortable. I am fortunate. I stay fairly wet down there. That's not a problem for me."

If she is unconscious that she is talking to her son about her body's ability to handle intercourse, he isn't. Maybe in his mind he imagines a hard penis pushing into the open vagina in front of him.

"If you look down here, you can see the urethral opening. That's where pee comes out. A lot of men seem to find it a mystery where a woman's pee comes from. But there is no mystery to it."

His jaw drops. He is spellbound at this point. He can't say anything. Whether it is because it is his mum or not, he has never seen anything as arousing in his life as what she is showing him. The detached, clinical manner of her presentation somehow makes it even more arousing, not less.

"Down here, just below my urethra, you can see my vaginal opening."

She peels her vagina open still farther, so that he can look deep inside her. Where he emerged from eighteen years ago. She holds herself open, so that he can look for as long as he wants. How long, he doesn't know. He loses track of the time he spends looking deep into her, as far as he can see. Bright pink gives way to a dusky rose, that fades away into shadow. He sits transfixed, staring into her nether depths. He can't tear his eyes away. She is willing to let him look as long as he wants. When he breaks his gaze from it, and looks up at her face, he notices that she is staring at his strained surf shorts. This gives him a twitch. She notices him noticing her. He looks instinctively away.

She closes her legs.

She thinks he realises right then, if he hasn't fully realised it before, that he will never look at her the same way again.

***

Her hands reach behind her back, unclasping the top, letting it slip from her shoulders, exposing the swell of her bosom to the golden light.

He sees his mother's breasts for the first time. He is mildly amused that he has seen the most intimate details of her genitals before he sees her top. The order of business for the day is usually the other way round. This is so his mother.

Much of her chest is taken up by her breasts. Lush, abundantly radiant.

There is a certain gravity to her. An elegance of years lived richly, deeply, without apology. Her breasts, though not overly large, hold a lushness shaped not by youth but by experience. Full not in volume, but in story. They rest with a gentle, natural descent, the weight of time having softened their rise, as if gravity itself is more a caress than a thief.

Her skin bears the delicate bloom of age. Silken still, but with a faint slackening. A whisper of a woman's seasons, like petals not yet fallen but slowly curling at the edges.

Her aureoles have darkened slightly, like dusk settling over rose gold. Not the untouched crescents of girlhood, but rather the sun-kissed, time-loved pert points of a woman who had given and received much pleasure from them.

To touch her there is not to reach for perfection, but for presence, for the quiet, confident allure of a body that no longer seeks to impress, only to invite. Her breasts do not defy time. They wear it with grace.

He wonders whether her breasts are heavier than they look. He resolves to determine that firsthand later. He feels hot just looking up her body and thinking this.

She stands before him now. Bare, vulnerable, the salt-kissed wind whispering over her skin.

Naked, though she longs to take off her flesh, and sit in her bones. She finds every moment erotic in his presence.

Click.

He is watching her. Not with hesitation. Not with awkwardness. But, with something reverent. Something quiet and awed. The way an artist admires form. Admires the way light dances over flesh. The way shadows kiss curves and angles.

"You're beautiful," he says, almost absentmindedly, his fingers adjusting the camera.

She lets out a soft breath. Half a laugh, half something else. "You sound surprised."

He shakes his head, his gaze never leaving her. "I'm not."

Another click. Then another.

Slowly, carefully, she begins to move.

She lifts an arm, allowing the light to spill down the slope of her shoulder. She arches her back slightly, feeling the shift of muscle, the way the sun paints warmth across her skin.

His voice guides her now. Soft, instructive. "Turn a little. Tilt your chin. Just like that."

Click.

Her initial stiffness dissolves into the rhythm of the shoot. It becomes something else now. Something natural, fluid. More giving.

She stretches out on the cave floor. Body half-curved. One knee bent. The line of her hip catching the golden light.

Click.

She stands, one foot resting against a rock. Hands loose at her sides. Waft of wind lifting her hair.

Click.

She turns away from him. Lets her head tip back, eyes closed, arms raised above her head in an unconscious echo of a wave's cresting rise.

Click.

He moves around her, capturing her from different angles, his concentration deep, almost breathless. He isn't just taking photos anymore. He is seeing her, truly seeing her.

Not just as his mother. But, as a woman. As a subject of beauty. As something timeless. Something elemental. Something that belongs to the sea and the light and the hush of the world.

Time blurs. She no longer thinks of her nakedness, of the closeness between them. There is only art now, only movement, only the silent language of the lens and the body.

And then, it is done.

He lowers his cellphone, exhaling. His gaze still soft, still full of something unreadable.

She lets her arms fall to her sides. Breath slowing. Body warm from the sun, from the moment.

"That was..." she starts, then stops, not knowing how to finish the sentence.

He smiles. "Yeah."

A pause.

Then, still holding the cellphone, he reaches out, brushing a grain of sand from her shoulder. A small, absentminded touch. Familiar, intimate, nothing strange. Just a son and his mother, the tide still whispering at their feet.

She looks at the water, at the waves rolling in steady and endless. Changed, somehow. But whole. Always whole.

***

"Now, make wild love to your mother before the tide comes in and drowns us both. It won't do to befuddle the Coast Guard for them to find two naked bodies who are later identified as mum and son."

"And then, we'll get the fuck out of here, or we'll drown in the rising tide."

***

He slides his surf shorts down. There is nothing more tender and erotically picturesque than a young pink cockhead oozing a streamlet of excitement. And when that cockhead and fluid is your son's, it is sordid perfection. Quite something.

Her bikini and his surf shorts rest side by side on the cave floor, like small marine creatures taking a rest.

He lies down on the cave floor facing up. The shaft of skylight illuminates him, blinding him a little, like he is the central character in a stage play.

She sits astride his thighs, facing him, and the front of the cave to keep an eye on the rising tide. His penis gives a small nod as if to acknowledge her pussy.

Given the rising tide, they kind of implicitly agree that there is no need for long refined love play. They are both too far gone for that. Foreplay can wait until later, for now, they have to free themselves from the urgency of their overstrained libidos.

He nods at her. She allows her weight to slowly grind down tightly around his thickness. Oooo, that searing first contact! The singe. He can feel her damp insides with his shaft. He is so hard as she guides him through her folds. She moans from pleasure as she sits down on him. Feeling his hardness squeezing in. Lodging deep inside her.

His hands come up to knead her breasts. He fondles her breasts so full of care. Tenderly at first, then getting a little savage.

Now, she moves slowly in a gesture of twisting and flexing her body from the effects of how full and perfect he feels inside her, before eventually coming to rest. She looks at him with a placid expression. It feels like something finally clicking into place. The fuck locked in place. Something that makes her feel more alive than she has in years.

At first, very slowly, almost imperceptibly, and then with only mildly increased vigour, he starts moving his hips, as though unable to help it, squeezing in and out of her depths where she has put him.

Supporting her back with his arms around her, he kisses her repeatedly on her collarbone, her chest. He nibbles at her puffy nipples. He makes her moan tenderly in his arms from way too much pleasure.

She too moves her hips now, riding him. It feels glorious. A sweet stinging pleasure repeating itself inside her. A warm glow of excitement making her heart beat faster.

"Mmm...", she hums musically under her breath.

He feels a trickle of fresh warm juices around his penis inside her.

Humming and emitting low moans, she throws her arms upward, clasping them up in the air while shamelessly twisting her naked torso around his penis in a gesture of expressing continued lust.

Raising her gently with his hands underneath her buttocks, he now starts thrusting that much faster. Going in just a little bit deeper now.

She starts letting out low, intense growls. She locks her arms around his neck, digs her face into his shoulder and shudders in his embrace.

He looks up at her watering eyes. Kisses her more eagerly. Suddenly, he wants her more than ever before, and presumably, the look in his eyes tells her so.

She cannot hold back a sobbing cry. She has been penetrated many times before, but somehow, this experience is different.

His length is completely inserted into her. She lets him rest there for a moment, clamping her walls round him. He moans again.

She clenches his shaft again, teasing, "Do you like this?"

"Oh God, yes! Do it again."

She flexes herself again and holds him in her grip for a few moments, then releasing him. She begins to move a little on him, "Put it all in me. Just let it all go."

"Kiss me."

She leans forward and kisses him until she cannot breathe. He holds her skin to skin.

She wants to move on him again, but he urges her to stay locked in the embrace with their arms around each other, and her breasts pressed in his chest.

Finally, he puts his hands under her and urges her to move.

She rises and falls on him, spearing herself on his stiffness. She is soaked inside and out.

He writhes as he slips into her wet fire, his feet recoil then thrust out.

He slides deeper into her skin. Their lovemaking, a song of ice and fire. There is an order to their movements, a deliberateness and focus, that is working toward a unified glorious high.

A collective shudder, then tremor. Everything so totally comes together. They collapse into a tangled body heap, lingering in the zone. Maybe it has been awhile? Maybe it is the young cock? Maybe it is the forbidden thrill of the taboo? Maybe it is the first time crossing of the line? What is for sure is the coming together of these maybes.

She experiences a surge of ridiculous happiness. An orgasm surprises her every time, even though she expects it. This one in particular exceeds and explodes all traditional ratings of superlative sex. She is in a fairytale space, and things are not what they seem.

She wants to be a violinist in the piazza. Dance on a hilltop. Sing in her sleep. Eat petals off flowers. Run into the rain instead of out of it. Plant a tree. Roll in the grass with her dog. Farm weed. Pirouette till she falls over. Then, writhe a floor dance till her dress is rag. Take in smells of garlic and oil and wine from sidestreet kitchens. A surfer philosopher. She wants to ride a blue bicycle around a quaint Brittany village.

There is something both whimsically heroic and hopelessly romantic about these.

These emotions, they flow from nowhere. And everywhere.

After he climbs down, he nuzzles, then kisses her, to thank his mother for making the moment possible.

He is tired in a way no other fucker had been before. He is tired in a way no one on earth had been. Yet, it feels like the best of times.

They feel something abstract and binding. Like an oath to a cause that can't quite be defined.

They are too shattered to be mindful of the rising tide. Mother and son are transported into a serene slumber.

***

She stirs first. She feels a stiff tension in her loins. Gazes down. Her slit is caked shut by the now dried sexual fluids. Still, a memory of moist air lingers.

It takes her awhile to become aware of this unlikely spacetime capsule she is in. She tries to remember the tide table for this coast. But, what time is it now?

Curiously, she feels cold and warm in equal measures. Cold on the outside. Warm on the inside.

Her movement causes him to stir. She feels a wedge of pliant softwood pressing against her buttock cheeks. Her son is decidedly awake now.

She turns her head back to gaze into his eyes. A twinkle of eager expectation. She smirks knowingly. Oh, the excesses of youth! It is in abundant flourish here.

The first thing he does is to touch her pussy. Arranges her lips and petals like a flower. Adjusts its shape carefully. Then, pats it down as if to set it in form. As if doing otherwise will lead to dire consequences. He is completely silent as he goes about this meticulous process. His lips tight, the ceremony is performed solemnly, in utter quiet. Once this is accomplished, his face breaks out in a smile.

She is a little taken aback by this ritual. She doesn't know what to make of it. Her mind flits to Georgia O'Keeffe's provocative floral art. It's nice to be regarded as art sometimes.

In the muted cave language that mother and son have become fluently conversant in, he rises, pulling her up as well. He pushes then presses her back against the cool damp cave wall. He grabs her wrists. Extends her arms out so that she is in the position of a crucifixion. This makes her breasts stick out lewdly.

He pins her down. She is nailed. She looks divine. Is this some kind of subconscious deep symbolism that is coming to the fore?

Still holding her wrists, he presses his hard against her confluence of upper thighs and mound. Her light pubic bush grazes his tender cockhead. The soft coarseness gives him a tingle. God, this triangulation feels so good!

They kiss passionately as he dry humps his mother standing up. She instinctively tightens her clenched thighs, as if egging him to piston harder, to breach her seal of thighs. His pace quickens as if goaded on by his imagined increasing thundering crescendo of the wave swells pounding the cave opening. He is urgent and propulsive.

She senses him welling up. She doesn't want him to finish this way. Her love cries end on rumbling notes of irresolution, that suggest that the journey isn't quite over, but, it'll have to do. She abruptly disentangles from him.

A wave of despair washes over him, that his mother feels that this has gone far enough. This is where they must stop.

***

She assumes a classic primal posture on the floor. In the cave, the stance exudes the most raw of instincts. He feels his loins stir in anticipation of this sensual promise.

With a gaze fixed and breath bated, he approaches her with the dogged determination of a man bewitched, wholly devoted to worship at the altar of her inviting form.

He gazes toward her shoulders and her long soft hair cascading between them at the moment when she glances back at him. Their eyes lock.

She points her luscious buttocks upward in further affirmation. A completely unobstructed view of her slightly parted buttocks, and fully revealed and light bushed pussy.

He is standing directly behind her upturned arse. His penis feels so hard, so huge. It actually eclipses his view of her buttocks as he looks down at her, the length of his shaft obscuring her arse crack from his point of view. It is with a sudden jolt back to the reality of the moment that he realises this whole time that she has been turning her head, looking back and up at his growing erection.

He can smell her. Piquant. It is a scent that he finds intoxicating. He glances down at the source of the scent. With her light bushed pussy, there is nothing to obscure the fact that she is wet, as stimulated as he is. He is so enthralled with the thought that she is as eager as he is. Mothers are not supposed to lust for their sons this way.

She lowers her upper torso even farther. His penis brushes against her buttocks. They both gasp. He lifts up slightly. He touches his tip against her most intimate, as if to complete the electric current circuit.

He realises that he is drooling copious amounts of precum. It is so enthralling. He almost feels like the next time he even so much as grazes her body with his penis, it will explode into the largest climax of his life.

Slowly but surely, they lower themselves even farther. Although it still sends shivers of lust through every fibre of his being, he miraculously does not climax the moment his penis touches her buttocks again. His shaft is now resting snugly in her crack.

He lifts up. Another electric shock of pleasure courses through him as he feels she shifts her weight slightly to one elbow, as she uses a free hand to reach back and tentatively grasp the shaft of his penis.

He feels his stiff penis being angled out away from his body, almost straight down. He realises what she is trying to do. She is trying to position it down and in between.

She parts her legs a little more. Angles her hips just so. He feels the shaft of his penis being pulled down and in between his mother's inner thighs. The upper length of his penis is now pressed firmly up against her moist labia. He shifts his weight as they connect this way. A sudden gasp escapes from her lips. Her first emission of sound from this mime performance.

Her body begins to quiver.

He feels a sheen of sweat form on her back. It seems to get warmer and wetter where his penis is pressed against her pussy.

She is in orgasm. She is experiencing a powerful climax. And this is just with her son pressing against her. Not even moving.

All he can do is to kneel there, his teeth clenched, his body stiff and shivering in excitement, as this incredible orgasm seems to bubble up from deep within her core. It seems to build and build, and last and last.

He returns his focus on himself.

At his first stroke she bucks, instinctively bringing her buttocks farther up. She is beginning to internalise the experience. Although they just did it not long ago, his performance is completely fresh and committing. She backs him hard against the cave wall while he humps her mercilessly. His hands gripping her hips, guiding her pushes and grinds while his penis makes movements inside her, to emit impolite, loose, sucking sounds that electrify him. His first ten measured strokes result in another of her vaginal contractions. She keeps pressing her buttocks harder against his strokes, wedging him against the wall. The hot, meaty penetrations of her love canal is getting to feel more pleasurable with each new stroke now.

He slows down some. He has mastered the sensual jungle. His violence has been tamed to gentler uses. She mews.

That prompts him to speed up again. There is a madness to the method.

He feels his sperms welling. He starts pushing her away a little, grinding faster, trying to initiate long strokes, while cryptically warning her by his tightening grip on her hips that he is climaxing.

She jams him harder against the wall, swivels and grinds her buttocks tightly, as if demanding him to leave it in. She loves these violent delights.

She orgasms again. He feels a joyous jolt of semen lava. He 
is wedged. He can't pull out. He shoots again and again
deep inside as he tries to pull out. But she slams him, to milk his every drop. When she at last senses that he has fired his last salvo, she gently, mercifully crawls forward, freeing him to exit. He exits, but not without extreme regret. It is like breaking with the habit of a lifetime.

It is all done in two minutes. But, it feels like they have been around the world.

They collapse like rag dolls in a tangled body heap. He watches their collective fluids track down her left thigh. They stretch out on the cave floor, in the surreal cocoon bounded by rock and water, a world unto itself, cuddling in an unstated bond of silence.

She lies over him. Flesh pressing. His body is like soft summer water that receives a swimmer's body. That bears the swimmer lightly afloat. Her heart is full in a way she has never experienced before. She has never felt so connected to herself.

Nestled in the bakery warmth of her son's chest, she imagines this as a way of life for the rest of her days. She doesn't need nothing more than this. She imagines she hears the chime of temple bells.

***

Epilogue

The North Devon Gazette

10th May

Mystery Surrounds Missing Surfer Duo

Police are continuing their enquiries after a mother and son from Hobbs Hill were reported missing earlier this month.

The pair, both described as experienced and passionate surfers, were last seen on 1st May. Concerns for their welfare have grown after two surfboards, believed to be similar in make and colour to those used by the missing individuals, were discovered washed ashore on Putsborough Sands, approximately one and a half miles northwest of Croyde, on 5th May.

The boards were found by beachgoers and are currently being examined as part of an ongoing investigation. Authorities have not yet confirmed whether the surfboards belong to the missing pair, though they are exploring the possibility.

Local residents have expressed quiet concern as the close-knit coastal community awaits further updates. Devon and Cornwall Police are urging anyone with information to come forward.

***

In the sultry, salt-sweet air of Bali's southwest coast, where the humid breath of the tropics brushes against black-sand shores, lies Canggu. Not a mere village, but a dreamscape infused with the languid rhythm of tides and the ceaseless pulse of surfboards slicing liquid sapphire.

A contradiction dressed in sunlight. A place where rice paddies shimmer in lush green humility beside chic cafés. Temple incense curls skyward while tattooed surfers wax boards like ritual.

The ocean here is no passive blue. She rears and dances, all muscle and grace, with swells that roll in from the Indian Ocean like whispered promises or roared challenges.

Canggu's soul is stitched together from fragments of myth and foam. By day, the surf culture reigns. Lean, sun-bronzed bodies gliding over waves with fluidity, their presence both feral and reverent. There is a language among them, not of words but of knowing glances, the nods exchanged at dawn on motorbikes bristling with fins, boards lashed like sacred cargo. Wax under fingernails, salt crusting eyebrows, reef tattoos earned not inked. The marks of devotion.

And when the sun tips west, sinking into the horizon, Canggu shifts once more. Beach fires crackle. The music rises. Slow at first, then with tribal insistence. Barefoot silhouettes move in the sand, caught between ancient mysticism and the wanderlust of the modern nomad.

Time folds in strange ways. Surfers chase the perfect wave and, perhaps unknowingly, brush against the perfect moment. The sea is not scenery, it is scripture. And the ones who read it know that here, amid the ash-black sand and the warm, wild sea, life can be as simple and as sacred as a ride on a wave.

***

A woman and a young man are hunkered over a small table at the Madu Oka Café.

At the table on their left is a gaggle tribe of surfies, stoked in gushing exuberance about the better waves of the day, high on the slow drip of leisure. A city of bottles on their table. They are relishing a more forgiving style of capitalism.

Table on the right, a man who could well be a Professor of something utterly important, sips his drink in measured silence with ceremonial ease. His partner appears effortlessly wealthy, flush with the glow of having everything and needing nothing.

Table just behind, an idyllic bohemian lounges with a frangipani tucked carelessly behind one ear, leafing dreamily through The Waste Land, savouring T. S. Eliot's disillusionments.

But, all this is mere speculation. In this place, such details blur. The shopkeepers look like artists. The barmen, tenors. The street sweepers, jazz musicians. What a highly evolved society. Never has people in a place appeared more rationally ordered.

From the bar comes the soft chime of ice in a shaker. Somewhere in the background, an old vinyl spins, Nina Simone, perhaps. Voice honeyed, a little sad. The breeze, on its way, seems unhurried, carrying with it the perfume of frangipani, sandalwood, and the faint memory of distant rain.

The young man leans in to the woman. She has something to tell him...

The End