The next morning, Karen hummed “Friend of the Devil” to herself as she walked to the countertop to make herself some coffee. She was in high spirits, which was rare for her at this time of day. She’d never been a morning person, and probably wasn’t going to shower or change her clothes for a few more hours.

The acid last night, as far as she could recall, had been great for the brief moment she’d been on it. Everything after the Klonopin was gone from her memory, so she assumed she’d passed out quicker than expected. She’d found Amanda’s erection pressed against her ass when she’d woken up, and she couldn’t help but admit that it helped her self-esteem somewhat to be desired by someone so beautiful, even if she was a tranny.

Something was itchy in her ass, so she started to scratch it. The itch persisted, forcing her to pull her thong aside and really jam her fingers in between her cheeks to scratch. That was when a wave of shame overcame her. She ran across the apartment to the bathroom, squatted down on the floor, and pulled her weary son out from inside her puckered hole.

Sam inhaled deeply, hoping fresh air would perhaps bring back some of his energy, but he had no such luck. The smell of where he’d spent his night clung to him and all the air that went into him passed through its filter. He was glad that his final burst of strength, upon being woken up by the shifting of the dark tunnel he was trapped, had let him escape, but as soon as he could, he passed out again.

Karen’s eyes quickly welled. After she laid Sam on the sink counter, she stormed out into the den, so angry she was crying. “You bitch!” she yelled at Amanda.

Amanda groggily lifted her head, but kept her eyes closed. “Hm?”

Karen grabbed her by the hair and lifted her up. “You bitch!” she screamed.

“What the fuck?!” Amanda yelled back, groping blindly in front of her to try to scratch Karen.

“You gave me that fucking acid and said you weren’t going to leave and then you left! I told you not to! I fucking…” Karen let go of the flailing woman’s hair and brought her hands to her own face.

Amanda’s eyes widened. “You didn’t…” she could barely bring herself to say it. “You didn’t kill him, did you?”

“I don’t know!” Karen wailed. “I’ll kill myself!” Amanda tried to collect her thoughts. “And what if I didn’t kill him? It’s almost worse! I don’t think I can even look at him.”

“Karen…” Amanda started to say, but Karen returned to her previous anger. She grabbed Amanda’s hair and slammed her face against the wall. The vibration of the thud resonated through the apartment’s walls and woke Sam back up from his all-too-brief respite.

He heard Amanda plead to be given the opportunity to rectify her position with Karen by offering herself as a messenger. She’d speak with Sam first and check in on him. Karen wouldn’t even have to look at him until the situation was copacetic.

Amanda opened the bathroom door and tiptoed in, closing the door behind her. Her nose was bleeding from both nostrils.

“Hey…” she said, trying to quietly grab tissues from the box next to Sam.

Sam didn’t say anything. He turned over onto his stomach and closed his eyes.

“Listen, Sam, I…” No words sprung to her mind that could somehow rectify the situation.

“You what?” he mumbled. He didn’t have the energy to express the anger he felt through his timbre.

“I’m sorry,” she finally said.

Sam didn’t move.

“Do you want to tell me what happened?” He had no desire to say much of anything. Amanda sighed. “Do you want me to turn the sink on so you can have a bath?” Sam grunted an affirmation.

Amanda used the cool water to wipe up her nose while she waited for it to turn warm. Then she pulled the stopper shut, so the steaming water filled the sink. Once it was filled, she shut the water off and told Sam to get up and slide into the sink. He took his time to uncurl himself, and then even more to take the few steps over, before sitting on the ledge.

Even though he knew he was only festering in his stink, he waited to slide down. “How could you do that to me, Amanda? I told you not to.”

“I gave her some pills to help her pass out quickly. I thought they’d kick in before she had the chance to wreak any havoc. And I definitely didn’t think that that was the type of havoc she’d wreak.”

“You really fucked me over, Amanda. You really fucked me.”

Amanda grabbed another tissue to clean up a fresh spurt of blood. Sam refused to look at her. She sighed. “What exactly happened?”

“She… she raped me. And then when I tried to escape she shoved me in her…” Sam gagged on the word. “I spent the whole night…”

Amanda frowned. She really couldn’t think of anything to say. She was in between a rock and a hard place as the go-between for her two friends, but the grass somehow seemed greener on the side of getting viciously attacked by Karen again. “How about I give you some space to get cleaned up while I go check on your mom?”

Sam didn’t say anything, only slid into the water.

Karen was rooting through Amanda’s purse when Amanda returned to the living room. She pulled out a bottle of Hydrocodone and started to open it up when Amanda wrested it from her hands.

“Karen,” Amanda said, “the last thing you need to be doing right now is getting high. Especially on these. You’ve been clean from all opiates for almost a decade now.”

“Who cares?” Karen grumbled, but she didn’t bother to stand up and wrestle for them back. “Who fucking cares?”

Seeing her romantic interest in such a low slump hurt Amanda, too. She tried to think of the right thing to say. “You know, he said he kind of liked it,” she said. She tried to cover her own cringe. You idiot! she thought. She’s never going to believe that!

Karen looked up at her. She didn’t believe it.

“I mean, the last part he said was bad… but he liked it before then. He’s a… he’s a teenage boy. You know? And he never gets to leave the house. And pretty soon, we’re going to have to do a lot of figuring things out, when he gets to be under an inch tall. He was a virgin and everything and…”

Karen wouldn’t have believed her if she hadn’t been so desperate to want to. But she was desperate. “You really think…?”

“Listen,” Amanda said. “I’ll go check up on him to see if he’s cleaned up and then you can ask him yourself.”

Karen sighed. “Okay.”

Once the door was closed, Amanda leaned into the sink to whisper with Sam. “Listen, Sam,” she said. She paused. Part of her knew that what she was about to propose was morally wrong. That it was almost disgusting to even say it. Another part of her really believed that it was the right thing to do. “Your mom feels really, really guilty. She feels horrible. I saw her starting to take some of these.” She placed the bottle of pills on the counter where Sam could see them.

Sam, sitting on the edge of the water, slid in further, but kept his ears in the air.

“She never, ever would ever would want to hurt you. We both know her. It’s the last thing she would want. I need you…” She paused. “Your mom needs you to say that you were okay with it. Or she’s going to wind up going off the deep end.”

Sam frowned.

“Look,” she said, “I don’t blame you if you want to get the hell out of her and call the county. But if you care about your mom, you’ll know what’s right to do.”

“So I just say that I didn’t mind?”

Amanda sighed. “You mom will know exactly what ‘not minding’ means.”

Sam’s frown deepened. “You want me to say I liked it?”

“Think of it this way: You can say you liked it, but that she needs to stay away from drugs.” It crushed Amanda’s heart to say it, as acid was the only chance she’d seen to get with Karen in a more intimate way. “You can say… she was a little too rough. And that you definitely didn’t like the last part. It can be the impetus your mom needs to get into rehab again. But if she knows the truth, she’ll never be able to forgive herself long enough to want to be sober. This can be her bottom.”

She was right, in a way. Sam looked at Amanda. “I’ll lie to her to help her, you’re saying.”

“Yes.”

“To protect a rapist from herself.”

It was Amanda’s turn to frown. “To protect your mom from herself.”

Sam thought it over, and Amanda allowed him the time to do so. She felt she knew what he was going throughl. “Okay,” he finally said. “But if she doesn’t get sober, I want you to call the county. Tell them you lied about my running away. I’d rather be experimented on than be here if it’s going to be more of… that.”

“Okay,” Amanda said, relieved.

“Promise me. And look me in the eyes when you say it.”

Amanda had been looking at him the entire time, but now he was looking back. His tears made him want to cry her own. “I promise. Rehab or bust. Now finish rinsing off and I’ll bring you back out to your mom so we can talk.”

Sam told his mom what Amanda coached him to say and the three of them called Shady Oaks Rehab together and spent the afternoon getting Karen an evaluation. They put her on a waiting list for a bed in their facility 15 miles out from downtown—it would be about a week until a spot opened up for her. Because she wasn’t on any drugs that could elicit a physically harmful withdrawal (she might have fibbed to them a little) they would let her remain at home in the meantime.

Amanda said that she’d stay in the apartment with them for the week until the bed opened up, but that night, she had another client call. She asked Sam if he was okay with her leaving them alone for just an hour. With his consent, she left the apartment, promising to try to get her client to cum quickly.

Unfortunately, Amanda didn’t stick around too often that week. Every day, for at least four hours—if she wasn’t seeing a client, sometimes she’d lie, because a little bit of fresh air suited her—she’d be out of the apartment, and Karen and Sam would be alone together.

At first, Karen tested minor boundaries. If Sam had enjoyed himself, why not have a little bit of sober fun between the two of them? She was feeling depressed without her coping skills, but getting a little frisky always boosted her mood. If she were really going to stay off drugs all on her own for a whole week, this was the easiest way to do it. And her work phone was still absolutely silent.

On Monday, the first day after her evaluation, she laid on her bed and tucked Sam into her bra. She didn’t even masturbate, simply choosing to pay close attention to sensation of his body against her engorged nipple. They played like that for about an hour, with Karen moaning not out of necessity but to let Sam know what a good job he was doing. Occasionally, she’d switch him from one nipple to the other. She was proud of him; felt close to him, even.

To Sam, he’d been simply trying to get out of the confines of his mom’s large, sweat-stained bra at first, but when he saw how good it made her feel, he got a little bit into it. If he just imagined she were someone else, it wasn’t so bad. If he disappeared into his head.

The next time Amanda left the apartment on Tuesday, Karen put Sam in a washcloth while she was in the shower, and gently rubbed him around her whole body. She spent extra time on her ass cheeks, taking great measures to make sure he wasn’t uncomfortable. She imagined what it must have been like to be him, to have personal access to such a large, gorgeously tan ass. She knew not to put him in between her cheeks—that was the part he hadn’t liked from the other night—but that didn’t mean he didn’t like asses at all. As a reward, she placed him in between her breasts and used her thumb and pointer finger to give him a handjob to completion.

Sam didn’t like any of it, but it didn’t feel bad and it was helping his mom stay clean, physically and metaphorically. He didn’t tell Amanda: he knew she already felt guilty for putting him in this position. The week would be over soon enough and things would go back to normal. Or, no—they’d be even better than before. Besides, there wasn’t really anything sexual on his end about being in a washcloth. Sure, he’d gotten an erection, being pressed into her flesh, surrounded by the smell of her soap, and, sure, she’d taken care of it afterwards, the ridged pads of her fingers stroking him almost painstakingly slowly. His back was on her thigh and she was sitting down, craning her head over her belly to gaze down at him lovingly.

He felt a little like a toy when that happened, even though she was only doing it to make him feel good. He knew she was making him feel good to make herself feel good, and that was all. He could see it in her eyes. But whatever. All three of them were doing what they could to make sure Karen got safe and sober. It’s how they reasoned it.

On Wednesday, Karen finally gained the courage to place Sam in her underwear. Evey day she asked him if he was okay with what was happening. To Sam, saying he wasn’t would undermine the lie that he’d enjoyed it the first time, so he was, in a way, forced to consent to maintain the charade. And in her underwear, he once more imagined that it was someone else. It was pretty easy to enjoy himself in a thin, young girl’s pussy. The scents, the oils, even the stubble rubbing against him. Karen didn’t put her fingers in her pants to finish herself off: she didn’t know how it would affect Sam’s safety, and what he was doing was just fine.

She’d been having shakes from withdrawal that day, and had convinced Amanda, with Sam’s blessing, to give her a few benzos, just to get her by until she was under observation in the hospital. With her anxiety chemically removed from her, she was able to relax and let the sensations in her pants relax her even further.

He got caught up in it, in fact, when it happened again on Thursday. He rubbed his back against her labia, and started touching himself. He stopped, mortified, then started again when he noticed Karen had stopped moaning to indicate her pleasure to him. Who was here to judge him? Karen certainly wasn’t judgmental, as the oils coating his body indicated. He took his feet and slipped them inside of her. Immediately, Karen knew without even the smallest doubt that Sam was enjoying himself. He’d finally taken the plunge, so to speak.

That was all she needed to have absolute certainty. She waited until he had already placed his entire body inside of her and started rubbing his crotch against her walls, then snuck her fingers in to take care of her clitoris.

Sam had lost himself almost completely. Like, couldn’t remember the last five minutes. But here he was, back where he’d been a few days ago. Where he’d swore he’d never be again. His mom was a little high (though thankfully much less so than the last time) and he was inside of her. He waited for her to clench around him, to let him know she had finished, yet once she had, she made no indication that she’d be removing him any time soon.

She took her hand out of her pants and licked her fingers. God, he was enjoying himself so much down there. What was the point in being sober if she hadn’t actually really hurt him? She imagined that he hadn’t liked being in her ass for an extended amount of time, and she couldn’t blame him. She hadn’t prepped it to be slightly looser to accommodate him, or even cleaned it out. So she’d fix that for tomorrow.

Karen was so happy he was enjoying himself, so happy she and her son were finally able to bond, despite his condition. She clenched her cunt around him, as if to give him a hug. She knew exactly what she wanted to do on Saturday night to celebrate the eve of her final non-sober day. She was going to go out with a bang.