Rewards and Responsibilities

Fortunately, it didn't take very long for John to finish cleaning up at the gym after that. With the buffs from his title and previous achievements, he actually ended up finishing the job only half an hour after Michel and the others had left. After that, once a surprised Dina had been informed of his finished job, it was a fairly simple process for him to clock out, involving nothing more than a couple button presses on some computer screen.

Still, it was useful information to have when he personally clocked himself in the next day.

In the end, it was the walk home that made John late to watch the re-run for Michel's fight that night. It wasn't a long walk, and he didn't get stopped by traffic or anything. The problem was just that he didn't want to go home, and the closer he got to his house, the slower John found himself moving.

"I'm gonna throw up..." John mumbled to himself just as he reached the block that his house was on. His stomach was in shambles, a shattered, swirling mess that left him feeling dizzy and uneven on his feet as they hit the sidewalk. The worst part of it was, he didn't want the feeling to stop, at the very least it meant that he was feeling something, and he was worried if he tried...

He might have actually been able to bury that nervousness inside him.

For the next fifteen minutes, John stood there on the corner of the street his house sat on, just leaning heavily against the nearby stop sign while he tried to think this through.

What was he even going to say to her?

'Oh, hey mom. I have a bunch of ridiculous superpowers. One of them allows me to make people horny, like last night for example!' His lunch did another flip in his stomach. Nothing about this felt like it would go well for him. There was no way for her to be relaxed and accepting about this, because the hard truths were...

He had fucked his mother, and his powers pushed her into doing it with him.

The time he spent at that stop sign felt like one of the longest moments of John's life. The nervousness, the anticipation...it built up there, rising like the boiling hot magma inside a volcano before it burst. In a way, it was like a nightmare. Even when he tried to imagine it going well, talking to her in a way that she seemed to understand, even if he got her to understand the truth and the hypothetical danger of revealing something like this, all it took was a single thought. Nothing more than a mere doubt, and every way he could think of this conversation going ended with something disastrous happening between him and his mom.

By that point... it could have been anything, and he realized that. His mother, Brenda, had been stewing in her own thoughts, stuck with her own ideas all day with no actual answer or explanation from John. He had quite literally left her to make up her own mind, and now he had to go in there and try to change it for his own preservation.

"Maybe I could just avoid it..." he joked with himself, and the pressure in his stomach lessened slightly. His expression, the joking smile on his face, fell for a moment as it hit him. Did he even have to go home? If he left... no one would have necessarily believed her for anything she saw... and he highly doubted that she would tell anybody about what had happened between them. In mere seconds, what had started out as a joke became an actual option for him...

...And he was just about to take it when he saw her.

There, standing no further than across the intersection of the four way stop, stood the very person he had been unable to expect to see here. Her hair, while long and black normally, under the dark sky and unique porch light, was unbound now, and hung freely down half the length of her back, glistening so brightly in the light that it seemed almost white at that distance. Her eyes, barely visible from across the street, burned in his direction with a fiery gaze as she stared at him. Her front, as different as it was in her outfit, was doused in the unique, baleful red light of the porch she stood on and, while in it, the plain white tee shirt she had on seemed almost pink to him.

For John, it was the first time since he had met her that he had seen Cassandra Mannilow out of her school attire. Truth be told, he thought the Ashcroft uniform didn't do her justice, at least not as much as this one did. Despite how teasingly transparent the white shirt could have been while wet, the real playful part came from below the waist. From her hips down, Cassandra wore two very specific, very enticing items of clothing to accentuate her hourglass-like waist and full womanly hips. The first was nothing more than a pair of tight, blue denim jeans, form fitting and hugging to her body like a kind of second skin. The second...was her boots. Her footwear that came in the form of a pair of thigh high, brown leather boots that went almost all the way up the impossibly long length of her legs before it ended just a few inches short of reaching her crotch, effectively turning her jeans into something that looked like nothing more than a pair of shorts which disappeared into her shoes. Her boots, as feminine and seductive as they were, were covered in layers and layers of buckles and straps, pouches that in their design and fitting looked almost military when he saw them. Each buckle had been pulled taut and locked her footwear so tightly to her plump womanly legs that the area around the hem of each boot bulged slightly as all the extra fat and muscle in her legs **** her ass to bounce and pop up with each subtle movement. And if it wasn't for the glare she continually put him off with from across the street, it might have been arousing.

No... who was he kidding? He found it arousing anyways.

Still, as he stared at her and she stared back, this creeping sensation began to crawl its way up his spine. A feeling similar to the one he got from Mrs. Wentworth bore down on John as he stood there. The hair on the back of his neck stood up suddenly, and wave after wave of unnatural goosebumps began to rush across his skin over and over. He gulped dryly. The swallowing motion of his throat straining so hard that normally it would have been audible, but he didn't hear it and, before John knew it, he found himself instinctively backing away from this woman who stood all the way across the street from him.

It was strange; even at that distance, she still felt too close.

He was overtaken suddenly by the urge to gag and cough as the seconds passed, the warring feelings of fear and nervousness wreaked havoc on his gut and, as if it had been instinctive, John tried to will them away. Just like he suspected, the moment John tried it, the sickening anticipation that had been building up in his gut vanished, as if it had only been there in the first place because he wanted it to be.

Yet the fear didn't disappear. If anything, it got stronger after that. His heart began to pound in his chest, his throat dried up, and his muscles began to lock, almost freezing him in place with fright.

Run.

It wasn't very often that John **** himself to run away from a situation like that. Most of the time, when it did happen, it was to get away from assholes like Frank because he didn't want to deal with the pain involved in that scenario. It wasn't even because of fear anymore for him. Frank had been bullying him for so long that running and submitting had pretty much become his natural survival instincts when dealing with bullies. After a while, it just became the easiest and quickest way to get rid of them.

That night, when he saw Cassandra standing outside one of the apartments near his own, there was no doubt in his mind that that had been fear. It was like the sense of dread one got when they thought that they were being followed, only worse, because she had been there. Each step on the way home only made it worse, because with each crunching footfall his feet made against the rock and hard ground, he could hear another step and another echoing his own movements, like she had been right behind him the entire time.

When he got inside and the door slammed shut behind him, John was quick to lock it and back away. His chest heaved with each massive, hungry breath as he backed away from it.

He had about three seconds to calm himself down, to scold himself for being so terrified and stupid before he heard it. It was light at first, nothing more than a mere clacking sound that he barely noticed just on the edge of his hearing. Then it got closer, and closer, each sound falling like slow, methodical footsteps as it reached the lawn of his house...then the front porch...and finally stopped right at the other side of the front door.

"Jooohnnny!" The gamer jumped as, from all the way up the stairs behind him, his mother came out from a nearby hallway to greet him with a hiccup and giggle. "What took you sho loong?" she slurred with a heavy breath and pointed at him with a deep, crimson bottle held up in one hand.