📣 Hey Readers! Let's Talk About Something Special 📣
If you've been enjoying the wild ride of my fanfictions — the drama, the spice, the unexpected twists — then you're going to love what's happening over on my Patreon! 🔥
🎁 What's waiting for you there? ✔️ Advance chapters (yep, you get to read ahead!)
✔️ Unfiltered content — the real deal
✔️ A few stories available to read completely FREE
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💥 And just in case this fanfiction gets taken down (you know how these platforms can be 😬), I'll keep it going for free on Patreon — because the story deserves to be finished, no matter what.
By subscribing, you're not just getting early access — you're directly supporting me as a creator, helping me keep doing what I love, and giving back to the stories you enjoy.
👉 Join us here: patreon.com/Forbidden_lust
Whether you're reading for free or choosing to support — thank you for being here. Let's keep this story alive and burning together! 🔥
— Forbidden_Lust 🖤
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Chapter 1
I'd been home for three hours, and the first time I'd left my room was to go down to the kitchen to get something to eat. Mom was there with that tense look about her that always made me want to avoid her even more than I usually did. She was stewing about something and I just hoped it wasn't about me. Calling attention to her mood would do more harm than good, so I just heated up a microwave dinner and kept my back to her, not speaking.
Mom spoke, instead, in a weary, resigned voice. "Bobby, how was school?"
I shrugged. "The usual." I heard a buzz from my pocket and felt a wash of relief. It was a text from my friend Jack, part of an ongoing conversation we'd been having about whether Traci Roth had ulterior motives for sitting at our table at lunch. We'd joked that it might mean she liked one of us, but I didn't really believe it. I was more worried it was the prelude to some elaborate prank, where she pretended to like us in order to humiliate us later. The truth was she hadn't even sat that close to us, most likely it wasn't about us at all, but we had to talk about something. I tended to assume the worst case, anyway, it just felt safer.
"Where's your sister?" Mom asked as I read the text and thought about how to answer.
I started tapping out a reply, to the text, while I answered Mom absently. "I don't know, in her room maybe?" I didn't see Krista on the bus and for all I knew she hadn't come home at all. "You have her cell number, why are you asking me?"
"Hmm," Mom said neutrally. "You should have a real meal."
I shrugged. The microwave beeped, and I grabbed the plate. "This is fine." With that, I returned to my room. There, I had the world at my fingertips, friends, even strangers I could talk with at a moment's notice… and unlike my Mom, they weren't liable to snap my head off because they were in a bad mood.
About a half hour later, I heard my name being called, but I ignored it, and put headphones on so that I'd have an excuse. If it was important enough, Mom would just barge in and I could pretend I hadn't heard. If not, I was safer hiding out.
No such luck. A few minutes passed and, I got a text. It was from my sister. "Mom wants us dwnstairs. Fam meeting."
Great. I rolled my eyes, waited a couple minutes for good measure, and then made my way downstairs. Mom, Dad, and my sister Krista were all in the living room. Krista's hands were in her lap. Like me, she had a cell phone with her at all times, and she must have been waiting for a call or text. Dad sat on the easy chair, his chair, looking to Mom with a bored expression on his face.
Mom stood in the center, waiting. "Sit down," she said to me with a glare. I took a seat by Krista, suddenly worried that the glare meant this meeting was somehow about me. Had Mom looked in on our Internet history and saw the porn sites I'd checked out? Or maybe she'd heard my grades in History were falling faster than the Hindenburg. Which I assume fell fast, but it was a blimp, so I made a note to Google it. I was normally good in history, but they changed the seating plan and now I was sitting right next to superhot Mary Flannigan. I was so worried about not looking stupid, or worse, like a nerd, in front of her that I could barely pay attention any more.
Finally, Mom's gaze turned away from me. I shot a glance at Krista, who looked up from her phone and gave me a shrug. "I've been doing a lot of thinking lately, and I can't shake the feeling that something's just not right with us all."
A text came. I looked at it, realized from the number that it was from my sister, right beside me. "Have bd feeling abt ths." I nodded.
Oblivious to our communication, Mom continued. "So, since I had the day off today, I was watching some television."
"Uh oh," I muttered. "We've been down this road before."
"Bobby, let your mother finish." Dad looked up to her. "So, what was it this time, Lorraine? Montel Williams?" he asked, his voice full of amusement. If he was willing to poke the bear, he wasn't too worried about what Mom had on her mind. But then, that was his usual mode.
I guess everybody's parents are a little weird. They say opposites attract, and it must have in their case. My Dad's pretty much the most laid-back guy you've ever met. Even when one of us kids got in trouble, he never got mad. Sure, he'd punish, but it was for the principle of the thing, he never took it personally. He'd make some sarcastic joke about why what we'd done was stupid, or he'd grin and admit he might have done the same thing, but he never yelled… or got angry, or even was especially surprised, by anything. It was like nothing fazed him. It was good, usually. He was a dependable presence in our lives. He even just looked reassuring, tall, stocky, dark hair graying at the temples. You could almost picture him with an old style pipe as one of those classic TV dads, from the era before all married men in the media were morons.
I guess he had to be laid-back, because my mother, on the other hand, was high-strung, and without Dad's calming presence in the family, we'd spin out of control. Mom was short, thin, stubborn, quick-tempered, and it was like there was always something on her mind, although what that thing was changed regularly. She'd get something in her head and it would be her new cause for a week or a month or until she forgot about it. On many occasions I wondered if she wasn't a little bit crazy.
I say that with the full knowledge that I'm also a little bit crazy. Maybe we all were. Krista seemed like the only normal one in the family, but then, I didn't feel like I knew enough about her lately to judge, either. We were only about a year and a half apart, so she was 15, though I thought she looked younger, and I was 17. Mom chose to have my sister when I was a baby because she heard that an 18 month age gap was the ideal span to ensure siblings were close. It worked, at first… Krista and I were close when we were young, but as we moved into our teens we'd drifted apart. We saw each other on the way to school, but didn't talk much outside of texts and, once in a while, when she'd burst into my room to ask to borrow something, usually money. So maybe Krista was crazy too, but I hadn't seen any evidence of it. Sure she had her bitchy days, her quiet days, but mostly she seemed friendly, happy, well-adjusted. She had lots of friends, and was popular. But then, when you're friendly and good-looking, popularity often follows. Brothers aren't supposed to think of their sisters like that, but she was really attractive, with a lithe, athletic body, flowing dark hair, flawless complexion, and beautiful green eyes. As far as I could tell she was just an average, though pretty, teenage girl. I kind of liked it that way. Somebody had to be the normal one in the family.
It certainly wasn't me. I guess in some ways I took after Mom. I was a little tightly wound, although in a different way. I was way too self-conscious. I wasn't a bad-looking guy, but somehow I was paranoid about what everybody thought about me, and it made my life miserable. It wasn't rational, but that made it no less real. I always felt like people were judging me, thinking the worst, which consequently made me not want to be seen at all. With girls I tended to obsess over every detail of our interaction, analyzing it for hidden motivations, no matter how innocent, and with almost anybody I was afraid of doing things that might attract undue attention. It was ridiculous. It wasn't so bad with family, and gradually over years I'd come to trust a few friends enough to be comfortable with them, but the fears of what people were thinking were always there, lurking. I had no claim to normalcy.
But at least Dad's utter unflappability was just a source of amusement, and my bouts of paranoid neurosis affected me alone. Mom's particular brand of crazy sometimes exploded and made the rest of our lives hell for a while. We'd all seen the signs before. One of them was Mom watching television all day.
She seemed oblivious to the warning sign herself, though. "What?" Mom asked, as though Dad's question had come out of nowhere.
"You've been watching talk shows again, haven't you?" Dad asked with a grin. "They always give you ideas."
"They do not."
But they did. Some of the worst things that could trigger Mom's 'causes' were daytime talk shows. She worked a 9-5 job, so she couldn't watch them very often, but sometimes she would have a day off and nothing to do, and would find herself watching one, and that was where the danger began… she got absorbed and took them too seriously.
"Sure, Mom," I said. "Remember that time you saw Dr. Phil talking about teen drug abuse and you tore through both of our rooms looking for hidden stashes?" She hadn't found any. I don't even smoke.
Krista smiled. "Or when Tyra Banks had a show on sexting, and you took my cell phone looking for dirty pictures?"
"My favorite," Dad said, a twinkle in his eye, "was when she watched Maury Povich." That was one for the books. When he had one of his regular episodes on cheating husbands, Mom demanded Dad take a lie detector test to prove he hadn't been unfaithful during their marriage. He finally told her he'd be happy to, as long as they got a paternity test on the kids, too. She was instantly offended at the accusation, which made her step back and realize how much she must have offended him, too. Mom took the point and calmed down, one of the rare times Dad had been able to cut her off early before she got too crazy. I hoped whatever she had in mind, this might be another of those times.
"Let's just hope it's not Jerry Springer," Krista said, setting Dad up for the old family joke.
"I hope not. I don't think I'm ready for your mother to become a transsexual stripper, or to sleep with her cousin," Dad said.
"Don't make jokes. You know how I hate that Springer. And this is nothing like those other times." She took a breath, and then said, "I was watching Oprah…" We collectively groaned. Another family joke was that Mom's queen was Oprah Winfrey. She bought all the books for her Book Club, and supported the causes Oprah supported. She even voted Obama because of Oprah. "But it was about something I've been thinking about for a long time. The show just gave me the idea." We waited for the bomb to drop, what crazy idea Oprah had given her. "I really think this family needs some more togetherness. We're drifting apart, with our cell phones and computers." She snatched the phone out of Krista's hands. My sister had been racing her thumbs over the keypad, not listening. "And your texting. We've forgotten about the basics. Today on Oprah they had a family. A lot like ours. They didn't have time for each other. What they did was they gave up the television, the Net, and all their cell phones for a week. It was called the…" She struggled to remember. That was just like Mom too, get all excited about an idea but forget the specifics. "The No Net Challenge. No, the Unplugged Challenge. Something like that. But I think we need to do the same thing."
No computers for a week? "That's crazy!" I said. "What are we supposed to do with ourselves?"
"We connect, Bobby. We talk about what's going on in our lives. We could even play board games. You remember how we used to play board games when you were young? It was fun."
I did not recall that at all, and in fact didn't believe it was true.
"Sounds pretty lame, Mom. You can't take our phones and stuff away," Krista whined. "That's like our whole social life."
"No, it isn't, you just think it is. This family's a kind of social life too, and we've all been seriously neglecting it. I blame myself as much as you, but it's you who are going to pay the price for it." She looked at the two of us. "Look at you, you used to be inseparable, and now you barely talk. In a few years you'll be out of the house and on your own lives. I don't want the two of you winding up as the kind of siblings whose only contact is a card on Christmas and birthdays."
I rolled my eyes. Of course we'd be in contact. There was Facebook. I may not be super close to my sister, but I wouldn't defriend her.
"Can't we like, just do something a lot less extreme than this?" Krista asked. "Like have a weekly family game night or something? I'm willing to give up my Monday."
"Right," I agreed. I could sacrifice one day, for a couple weeks until Mom got tired of it. "But maybe not Monday. My guild and I quest on Mondays in Warcraft."
"Well, it can't be Tuesday, I…"
Mom interrupted the negotiation. "One week. It's not that long. Extreme times call for extreme measures. It won't be so bad. You know, the family on the show was practically a different family by the end of it."
I looked to my Dad for help, but he just shrugged. "You know how hard it is to talk your mother out of things like this." So there'd be no help from him this time. Sometimes him being so laid-back was aggravating in its own way too. But maybe he was right; usually the best way to handle Mom's causes was to ride it out as best we could. A week with no Internet, no TV, no phones? It sounded like hell, but how bad could it really be
××××××××××××××××××
📣 Hey Readers! Let's Talk About Something Special 📣
If you've been enjoying the wild ride of my fanfictions — the drama, the spice, the unexpected twists — then you're going to love what's happening over on my Patreon! 🔥
🎁 What's waiting for you there? ✔️ Advance chapters (yep, you get to read ahead!)
✔️ Unfiltered content — the real deal
✔️ A few stories available to read completely FREE
✔️ A supportive, story-loving community
💥 And just in case this fanfiction gets taken down (you know how these platforms can be 😬), I'll keep it going for free on Patreon — because the story deserves to be finished, no matter what.
By subscribing, you're not just getting early access — you're directly supporting me as a creator, helping me keep doing what I love, and giving back to the stories you enjoy.
👉 Join us here: patreon.com/Forbidden_lust
Whether you're reading for free or choosing to support — thank you for being here. Let's keep this story alive and burning together! 🔥
— Forbidden_Lust 🖤