“Yeah, I’m cool,” I said, “but you might not be when you find out what I’ve been up to.” True confession time. I knew they’d find out eventually, and figured it was better they hear it from me rather than having it all sprung on them after they came home. So I told Mom about how I’d moved out, how I’d bribed Adama with a female duplicate to get my own suite, how I’d rumpled their bed teasing Dabbler, how I’d seduced Lord Æthar – her face got blacker and blacker as I went on. “I’m sorry,” I finished up in a pretty small voice. “I was really mad at you at the time.”
“That’s no excuse! You were irresponsible, Anna, and when I think of the distress you caused your father - !”
“Huh? But he doesn’t even know about it, yet!”
“That’s not what I mean! I’m talking about before you left!”
“But I didn’t do anything befo—oh.” I figured it out. The time when Dad and I had gotten a little too interested in each other, and I’d ended up slapping him in the face—I still can’t believe I did that, I slapped my own father in the face! And just because he’d wanted to do what I wanted to do! Shit, I don’t know what I want sometimes. “He, um, felt bad, did he?” I asked.
“I should say he did! It took him months to get his self-esteem back, I thought he was going to go crazy for a while, and I was so messed up at the time I didn’t even see it—”
“What, all that because I wouldn’t give him a tumble?”
Wrong thing to say. I think the temperature on both sides of the screen fell about twenty degrees.
“What did you say?”
“Um.”
“Anna, I happen to know your father made it his business not to look at you that way all the years we were raising you, just because he didn’t want you growing up with a complex. The idea that his self-control would break down just like that—” Then all of a sudden her eyes widened and he voice dropped. “Unless You were leading him on,” she whispered. “And you were, weren’t you?”
“Um.”
Loud again. “You were, weren’t you? Admit it!”
“No I wasn’t!” I shouted back. “T, Mom, what do you think I am?”
A small smile, and a more normal voice. “A Jaeger,” she said.
Damn! Caught!
It’s funny, now that it was out in the open she seemed a lot calmer about it, and then I put two and two together and figured out why. Dad wasn’t the only one who’d been holding off seducing me so I wouldn’t get a complex, Mom was too. After all, she was just like Dad, when you got right down to it, and I knew good and well she was as into girls as he was.
Just to keep her from getting too high and mighty I said so. That stopped her. I don’t think I’d ever seen Mom blush like that before.
Okay, cards on the table. She knew I was a typical Jaeger all right, but I knew they were just the same. But you know, I still wasn’t sure I wanted to carry that through to the logical conclusion, and I don’t think she was sure either. Like I’ve said before, fantasy’s one thing, actually acting on it’s a lot more serious a thing. Sure we had our perverse little genes telling us to just do it, but we also had the habits of a lifetime telling us not to. Funny how screwed up human beings can be, isn’t it?
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Tue Mar 18 01:59:13 2003
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