Chapter Two: Birthday Sex
Notes/ Disclaimer: I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I've been very unmotivated to write lately, because 'There Was This Girl' is frustrating me beyond belief. Certain events have led me to be bitterly sarcastic and sex-minded, so you lovely people get a new chapter out of me. Please excuse the change in styles; this was written over a long while, and as I've said, I'm not fond of editing. I hope you enjoy it, anyway.
"Get off of my baby!"
A brief, awkward silence followed Mark's passing out, but the ever-attentive woman by the door quickly swooped down upon the couch, dropping the bags she had been clutching to the floor and rushing across the room to where Roger and Maureen were staring, wide-eyed, at the crazy person who had just invaded their home.
"Get off him, get off him!"
Silence would have been preferable.
"Mark... Mark! Answer your mother, Markie!"
Maureen, finally grasping the situation, ran a hand back through her wild curls and shook her head, muttering, "Oh, shit," as she carefully slid off of Mark's chest and to the floor, slowly making her way to Collins, who was more likely than not trying to conjure up a believable excuse as to why the room reeked of pot and was littered with empty bottles. Roger, on the other hand, being normally disrespectful and high to boot, remained very much in place on top of Mark, watching curiously as his mother shook her boy by the shoulders and smoothed his hair.
"Sshh. What the Hell are you doing? He's asleep!" Roger hissed loudly, shoving lightly at the woman's shoulder in a valiant attempt to earn his friend some sleep. "You're gonna wake him up!"
Bad idea.
Before he could even close his mouth again, the madwoman spun around, her eyes glowing red, and backhanded a smirking Roger right across the face, rocking his head and sending a sickening 'crack' into the otherwise quiet loft.
"Do not talk back to me, you...you ... hooligan!" Mrs. Cohen shrieked, glaring hard at Roger before turning back to cradling her unconscious son's head to her chest.
"She broke my face!" the glittery Roger howled back, clutching his cheek and staggering away from the couch, tears in his eyes from the sheer force of the blow. "She broke my fucking face!"
"Watch your language!" Mark's mother shouted, spinning back around to face Roger and dragging Mark off the couch by his neck in the process. Roger immediately fell silent and shuffled himself over to Collins, sore and defeated and pouting darkly.
Between the shouting and the shaking and the falling off the couch, Mark was slowly coming to, though a squeaky little voice in the back of his head advised him to stay sleeping. For a while. For the next week or so. Perhaps a month, just to be safe. Disregarding that little voice, though, the good son opened his eyes with a groan and found himself staring directly up at the slightly blurry, yet unmistakable face of his mother.
"Mom?"
The angry bear that had been his mother for the past five minutes, at the word 'mom' melted away, and a small, melancholy smile replaced the hard scowl on the woman's face.
"There you are, Mark. Here, here... look at me... that's good." For a long, long moment, Mrs. Cohen appeared as if she was going to smother her son in kisses, pinch his cheeks, or burst into tears with the way she was staring at him, in a mixture of pride and pain. As quickly as the beast had gone, though, it made its return, and the bear raised her hand again, bringing her palm down square to Mark's temple.
"You! You! How could you do that to me, Mark? You see me and you faint now, is it? Is it? You nearly stopped your mother's poor, old heart, Mark Cohen! Killed by my own son, by my own child! How would that be?" Each exclamation, it seemed, was followed and/or preceded with a swift whack to the head, until Mark, rubbing the stars out of his eyes and swatting them out of his line of vision, scrambled to his feet, dazed and dizzy.
"W-wait, Mom, I...no, please-!" Even as he backed away, Mark was meekly fending off the back of his mother's hand, which was constantly about his face. She managed to knock his glasses off his nose and back him into a wall before the beating halted and Mrs. Cohen gasped, holding her bewildered son by the shoulder and staring, perhaps frightened.
"Mark... You're wasting away to nothing! Don't you eat?" For the time, the mother was very concerned with her child's welfare, dubbing him 'too skinny, much too thin,' and 'nothing but skin and bones-- and so pale, too!' As a matter of fact, between her poking of Mark's ribs, prodding of his collarbone, and pinching his arms, Mrs. Cohen managed to thoroughly confuse Roger, who was still nursing the side of his face.
"Damn... Maureen, aren't you going to tell her off?" he whispered, staring at mother and son while Mark squirmed and looked hopelessly to his friends for any measure of help. Maureen, for her part, just shook her head and flipped Roger off.
"It's a good thing that I came when I did, Mark, or you'd starve. You'll thank me later."
A beat.
"Mark Cohen!" Shaking the birthday boy by the shoulders again, Mark's mother held him at arm's length and looked him up and down, apparently horrified at something. "What are you doing going around the house dressed like that? You look like a- like a-"
"Stripper?" Roger offered meekly from behind Collins.
"Precisely!" Mrs. Cohen exclaimed, swatting Mark once in the cheek before holding him back again and examine his short shorts with a look of complete disdain. "Mark Cohen, I do not want you falling into this... this tasteless world of pornographic thoughts and lewd ideas! Honestly, Mark, you're a smart boy; you don't need things like this!"
Mark, in the meantime, was stunned silent, burning up to his ears, his inner prepubescent boy curling up and dying at the fact that, not only had his mother waited until he was out of the house to talk sex with him, but that she was doing so in front of his closest friends, while he was standing in nothing but a sorry excuse for a pair of shorts, caught completely off-guard and red-handed, making out with his girlfriend.
As if taking a cue from Mark's internal worries, a fuming Mark's Mom turned her attention to Maureen, who up until that point had been watching, mildly entertained and quite a bit confused, the awkward mother and son reunion unfolding before her eyes.
"And you!"
Collins and Roger wisely sidestepped their positions, moving out of Mrs. Cohen's direct line of charge as she barged over to Maureen.
"You! How dare you lay your hands on my baby? To even think that my son could be corrupted enough to bend to your lascivious ways... I, I- It appalls me, absolutely appalls me that you would try to take advantage of my little boy, able to see full well that he is not interested and is too lamb-hearted to turn you away!"
Even mildly tipsy, Maureen had the good sense enough to be insulted. Her expression, which had been one of amused skepticism, fell sharply to a seething scowl, and the peeved diva pointed her finger straight at Mrs. Cohen's face, furrowing her brow and opening her mouth to speak before having her hand sharply slapped.
"Do not talk back to me, miss! What you were doing to my Mark is terrible and wrong, but believe me when I say that my child was brought up correctly; he is no woman's toy, and he knows better than to degrade himself in getting involved with harlots like you!"
"Oh, yeah?" Maureen spat back, daring to move right into the overprotective mother's face. "I wouldn't be so sure. Why don't you try telling that to his co-"
"Maureen..." Collins warned, tugging her gently by the arm, only to be forcibly pushed away.
"No! Listen, lady: I don't care what Mark was like at home under your fucking reign of terror, but I think I ought to let you know that your kid is just about as unresponsive to me as... as cabbies are to everyone , and whether or not you like to think it, your sweet, innocent little boy is pretty damn willing to come to bed with me."
Mother and son at that moment shared one more trait, in the stark whiteness of their faces.
"You wouldn't believe how hot he looks in handcuffs."
The dead silence that had fallen heavily on the room gave Maureen the perfect opportunity to spin her story to an attentive audience, and smirking horribly, she took it.
"And you know what else? He likes it. He's 'getting involved with a harlot like me every night'... sometimes more than every night, and he fucking likes it! In fact, if you hadn't shown up, we'd be having wild, passionate sex right about now, and Markie'd be having the time of his life. How about that, huh?"
The silent occupants of the loft took a collective breath, all eyes -save Roger's, which were staring down in confusion at the glittery shirt he was wearing- glued to Maureen, who was triumphant, Mrs. Cohen, who was motionless, and Mark, who looked like he was about to fall to the floor dead. One could almost hear the poor woman's fuse burning down, could feel the explosion coming. Perhaps this is why Collins gently ushered Roger behind him.
But the explosion didn't come. Rather than twist and snap and give Maureen the tongue-lashing and smack across the face that she probably deserved, Mark's mother, staring off into space, turned slowly away from the smirking Maureen and dragged herself like a cripple to the couch, where she sat in complete disregard for the grime and the coils and the lumps, turning small, slow, confused hand gestures not unlike Mark's defensive waving of his own hands.
"This is what he does to me?" she murmured to no-one in particular, staring past the puzzled youths whose attention she had captured. "My own son... he does this to me? I come to wish him another happy birthday, to see that he's well, that he's not starving or ill or hurt, and all can do is kiss with this goy kurveh and whimper and stare at me."
"Mom, I.." Mark, summoning up any and all courage he possessed, carefully approached his mother, vaguely feeling that he was walking to certain doom by the time he was standing beside her, completely ignored.
"And now this? Now my little son is sleeping with this woman, too? He's so willingly handed himself over? Where did I go wrong? I tried my best to raise him well, and as soon as he leaves home, he succumbs to a life of bad decisions and debauchery? The leaving the school was one thing, but now my baby is going to have children?"
"Whoa- wait. Hold on," Maureen added, failing to interrupt Mrs. Cohen's diatribe. "We're not going to have-"
"He's too young to be a father; he's only a child! Please, God, help my poor, misguided son to see the error in his impure actions and bring back the good little boy that I know still exists beneath the man costume he's put on for this dangerous woman."
Mark, in the meantime, had seated himself on the floor at his mother's feet, pulled his knees up to his chest, and buried his head in his arms, his nose about to bleed from the sheer amount of blood that had rushed to his face as his mother attacked his behaviour, his girlfriend, and his soon-to-be nonexistent sex life. When she noticed him like this, Mrs. Cohen slipped from her empty pleas to God and smoothed her son's stubborn hair down across his forehead, smiling as mothers smile when they know that they've won at the expense of their children's thoughts.
"You don't have to worry, Mark," she cooed, standing to her feet and gently pulling Mark to his. "You're going to be okay, even with her mistakes. You're a good boy."
"But Mom, I-"
"Ah ah. Sh. I think it's time that we got to bed. We can talk about this in the morning, when you're better rested. So, if you don't mind-"
"Mrs. Cohen," Collins interjected, crossing to mother and son with a genial smile on his face. "If you're going to be staying the night with us, feel free to have my bed; there's nobody in my room right now, and I'll gladly sleep on the couch."
"No thank you, young man, " she replied, obviously pleased with Collins' air of politeness. "I think that I should stay with Mark tonight."
Mark bawked.
"But I'm sure that his lady-friend wouldn't mind a bed to herself tonight. "
Maureen, visibly pissed off, shot an angry look at Collins, who wisely ignored her, then to Roger, who threw his hands up before he could be blamed for anything.
"So, come on, dear. You don't want to get sick after being up so late."
When he realized through Collins' sympathetic glance that he wasn't going to get out of it, Mark hung his head and started towards the ladder that would take him to his room. "Night, guys," he sighed, waving weakly and climbing up, his mother yapping away behind him at how he needed to re-think his life, find something to do with himself, etcetera.
As soon as Mark and his mother disappeared beneath the curtain, Maureen launched on a hissed tirade, stomping and gesticulating wildly while Collins shushed her and Roger kicked a (nearly) empty beer can across the room. She didn't have much time to whine, though, as a horrible scream and a thud from upstairs interrupted any and all conversation.
"Mark Cohen! How could you?"
The thud immediately followed.
"Roger! What did you do?" Mark howled, amidst much shuffling around upstairs.
"Go to Hell! I didn't do anything!"
Biting his lip to conceal a grin, Collins shook his head and rubbed his temple with two fingers; for once, he was at fault for Mark's problems. See, while Roger had introduced Mark to the wonders of sleazy strip clubs, Maureen, April, and Collins had... decorated the room Mark and Roger shared with certain photos and posters that would go along with the strip club theme. Evidently, when Roger had gone to get changed, he hadn't the sense to hide the evidence, and Mrs. Cohen had entered her son's room to be greeted with dozens pictures of naked women and one or two naked men.
The wee hours of the next morning found Mrs. Cohen asleep next to a very much awake Mark, who had been engaged with Roger in their unique form of wordless communication, a mixture of hand gestures, expressions, blinks, and mouthed words, for the better part of the night. The general idea of this conversation was that Mark, who swore he'd never get laid again, was sleeping with his mother, who thought he was still ten.
The so-called decorations had been slashed down and replaced with pictures of Mark, which his mother so kindly supplied from one of many photo albums she had brought with her. This happened only after Mark and Roger had received a severe verbal reprimand and intense beatings around the heads and shoulders.
Come breakfast -at which everyone ate together, of course,- Mark's mother seemed a whole new person, glad to prepare food for her son and his friends, who, according to her analysis of them, were not eating nearly enough. Ignoring the fact that Maureen was still seething, that Mark and Roger were splotched black and blue, and all of the "children" were in varying stages of hung over, she disclosed way more information about her view of Mark's childhood than anyone present, including Mark, wanted to hear.
When, early the next evening, Mrs. Cohen kissed her son goodbye, made him swear that he would call more frequently, and finally left the loft bound for Scarsdale, Mark immediately collapsed into Collins, shaking and sobbing over how scared he was that she'd never leave, that Maureen was going to leave him, that he felt so sick, that his mother might return with his father in tow. Collins, very used to this sort of thing, petted his hair and assured him that if any more Cohen's showed up at their door, he'd shove Mark out onto the fire escape and blatantly deny his existence, period.
Mark's biggest fear, that Maureen, disgusted and insulted, would pack up and leave, was mollified when Maureen caught him in the shower and hurried him upstairs for hours of mind-blowing sex to make up for the birthday sex that they hadn't shared the night before, as it would have been difficult to even get started with one's mother in the bed.
Needless to say, it was the best sex Mark ever had.
And they all lived happily ever after.
The end.
End Notes: Have fun? Please review?
I want to write something darker now. Something Roger/Mark. But if I do, I know I'll get melodramatic and mawkish. Oh well. We'll see.