But also, of course, she was off limits to Daniel. Despite his endless fantasizing, he knew it was wrong. That was his mom! Maybe not biologically, but in every other way. She raised him. She loved him like a son. She worked herself so hard providing for him and his sister, and going to school so she could better provide for them.
And then there were the holidays, especially Christmas. The woman went ALL OUT. “Holidays are family time,” she always said, “and family comes first.” Maybe because they didn’t have a big, extended family, maybe because she wasn’t their “real” mother, she always went overboard to make sure he and his sister didn’t feel like they were missing out. She made them feel special.
She sacrificed herself endlessly. She didn’t have to do that. She must have been tempted to go off and live her life, but instead, she’d sacrificed it all for kids that weren’t even hers. The woman was practically a saint. And all Daniel could think about most of the time when he was around her, disgusting Daniel, perverted Daniel, was all the ways he wanted to fuck her.
What was wrong with him?! Daniel felt so conflicted. Why couldn’t he just be normal? Why was it that the only woman in the world he wanted, really wanted, was the closest thing he had to a mother? Was it just because she was so beautiful?
It wasn’t just Daniel. Amanda too, struggled with taboo fantasies. Especially since turning 18 the November before, she couldn’t help noticing how Daniel was looking more and more like his dad. His smile especially seemed to shoot straight through her. He had David’s smile, that same smile that made her weak in the knees more than twelve years before, when David was the hot young dad and she was just their babysitter. And then later, after his wife had died, and David had caught her staring at him. He flashed her that smile, and then it turned ever so slightly, and she felt it so bad she actually squirmed in her seat. And he knew. He fucking knew.
It wasn’t long after that, only a few days, that the passion became too much for the both of them and he had taken her right on the kitchen floor, with the kids asleep upstairs. She never looked back. It seemed like she creamed her jeans constantly for that man for the next three years until he died. Would their passion have cooled eventually if he’d lived? Probably. She knew in her head that probably that couldn’t have lasted, but they never got to that part. In her memory she was always horny for him.
And now there was Daniel looking just like him. And she hadn’t had sex in five years. Even then it hadn’t been close to the same. It was so disappointing. Trent wasn’t half the lover David had been. Brian was even worse. At least they made it easier to swear off men, to devote herself to taking care of those kids who needed her so much. She was all they had. And they were great kids. It had been hard, sure, but they were good years, their years together, just the three of them.
The semblance of a normal childhood was, more than anything else, what she wanted to give them. It was so unfair that they’d had their parents taken away like that. Her mission was to do the best for those kids that she possibly could. And she had done exactly that. She felt like she had succeeded. Now David was going away to college, and not a moment too soon.