Saturday

By the time I wake up, I realize I'm still under the effects of the nootropic. I check my clock--almost eight in the morning. I wander out of my bedroom and into the shower for a quick cleanse after the previous night.

As I'm drying off, I look down at my hands and realize I busted my knuckles at some point in the fight, and I have to scrub the skin to get the dried blood off. The other guys are probably waking up to worse. My only hope is that the guys know to let it go and the whole event doesn't snowball into something more violent. I look at myself in the mirror and inspect my face. I expect to see a black eye or other abrasions where I was hit, but my skin is perfectly smooth. The changes in my body continue to itch at the back of my enhanced mind, and I file it away for further review at a later time.

After getting dressed, I go downstairs to find Mom, Ashley, and Kelly sitting at the table. The moment she sees me, Kelly stands from the table and rushes over to me, wrapping her arms under my shoulders and around my back in a tight hug. She wears an old tee shirt and a pair of satin pajamas and, as both my conscious mind and cock realize from the soft sensation pressing against my chest, no bra.

"Dom," she purrs into me, not letting go.

I look over her head to see Mom and Ashley looking at me with confused expressions. I ignore them for a moment and focus on Kelly, gently caressing her blonde curls with one hand until she pulls away. She's a little teary-eyed, but otherwise no worse for wear.

"Uh, what was that?" Ashley asks.

Kelly turns to look at her, then at Mom. "What?"

"You leap up from the table to tackle Dom with a hug like that? What do you mean by 'what'? You two have hardly spoken in the past year!"

"Ashley," Mom warns, but she doesn't press further. Her body language tells me that she too wants to know the answer.

I look back at Kelly, who has a torn expression on her beautiful face. "Last night at the party, it didn't go so well. I called Dom to come and pick me up... I'm just thankful, is all."

Mom stands up from the table and walks over to Kelly, placing a hand on her face and caressing her cheek. "Are you alright, dear?"

"I am now. Dom protected me." Kelly turns back to face me and gives me another hug, nearly crushing the air from my lungs. Just as I'm almost **** to push her away, she rises onto her tip-toes and plants a wet kiss on my cheek. "Thanks, bro."

She lets go and walks to the stairs, saying, "Thanks for breakfast, too, Mom. I'm going to go see Colette."

"Okay, tell your aunt I said hi, please."

"Of course!"

As Kelly disappears upstairs to get ready for the day, I take the remaining clean place at the kitchen table, beside Ashley.

"Protected her, huh?" Ashley eyes, a bemused expression on her face.

"Some of the football players weren't being very kind. So yeah, I took care of it for her."

"Is that why your knuckles look like you put your hand in a meat grinder?"

"What?!" Mom asks and leans across the table to grasp one of my hands between hers. She pulls it towards her and inspects it for damage, all the while giving me the perfect view of her squished-together cleavage. As usual, she wears athletic clothes that do very little to hide her body. "You got in a fight?" she asks, gently rubbing the scabs on my skin.

"A little one," I answer, pulling my hand away and hiding it under the table.

"With who? Was it that dickhead, Dan?" Ashley asks.

"How'd you know?"

"I've been telling her to ditch that guy for months now. He's nothing but trouble. And his buddies are no better. Just because he's on the football team, Kelly thinks she needs to hang out with him." Ashley runs a finger through her thick black curls and sighs. "I swear that girl has daddy issues or something."

"Don't we all," I joke, and she punches me on the arm with no small ****. "Sorry."

"Dom, you're sure you didn't get hurt?" Mom repeats, her voice full of worry.

"No, I'm fine. They're probably in much worse shape this morning than I am."

"They?" Ashley asks. "Plural?"

"Well, yeah. There was Dan and a couple of his buddies."

"You fought three football players and got away?" Mom asks, confused. Ashley gives me a pointed look that says, "stop lying."

"Yes. Well. I mean I fought them together, but separately. It wasn't even really a fight. Dan hit me, I hit him back, then the other two. By the time they realized what happened, I had already gotten Kelly to the car and was on the road." My nootropic mind emphasized the right events and downplayed the others, as I explained what happened. By the time I finish, Mom looks at me with an expression of wonder, while Ashley just smiles.

"I didn't know you could fight. When'd you pick that up?" she asks.

"Around the time I started doing yoga."

"Hmph," she answers and pokes her food with her fork.

Seeing the sadness in her eyes, I place a hand on her thigh and give it a soft squeeze. "If you want me to beat someone's ass for you, all you have to do is ask."

She smiles, and I look back at Mom with a grin. To my surprise, she has a faint blush on her face. She looks away and runs a hand through her hair. I immediately recognize the signs of her horniness from our massage the previous day. Interesting.

"What do you think about it, Mom?" I ask, wanting to draw the words from her.

"Well, I think it's very nice you can protect your family." She coughs into her arm and smiles at me. "You never know when we might need it. Especially with these two beautiful young women walking around."

"Three beautiful young women, but otherwise I agree."

Ashley chortles and gets up from the table. "Alright, I'm going to get started on work. Dom, I need to talk to you later about some things when you have a moment. We might want to find some smaller, short-term projects to bolster the coffers while we build Noox, if you know what I mean."

"Alright, I'll find you," I say, and Ashley disappears upstairs. I'm proud that Ashley recognized the issue. I had already been considering it but had ultimately decided to let Ashley speak up, giving her some autonomy.

Mom and I are left alone downstairs. I grab the empty plates from the table and start washing them at the sink while she watches. "How's your back?" I ask, filling the silence.

"I feel much better, actually. I might be able to start doing yoga again soon. Maybe on Monday. I'll leave the heavier workouts for another day, though. I don't want to make it worse."

I nod in agreement. "That's smart. The most important thing for a strained muscle is rest. You don't want to risk damaging the muscle or those around it."

She smiles at me and I know I'm preaching to the choir. "I'm proud of you, Dom. I want you to know that. You said you were going to step up, and you did. And so quickly, too. I feel like you've grown a decade in two weeks. I know you're not directly responsible for it, but you helped get Ashley out of a toxic job. Protected your sister in a bad situation. And you've been taking care of me. You really are becoming the man of the house, aren't you? Just like you said you would."

I put the last of the dishes onto the counter and walk over to Mom, as she leans against the counter. I pull her into a hug and wrap my arms around her back, and she sighs into my chest.

"It makes me miss having a man around here," she continues. "You know I haven't tried dating since your father passed. It never felt right. But seeing you, like this. It's reminded me what our family is missing."

"Was missing," I correct her. "To your point, it's not missing anymore." I release her from the hug and pull away, but she is still only a few inches from me. She looks up into my eyes, and I see desire lurking within them. My enhanced senses pick up on her elevated breathing, and the rushing beat of her heart.

"There are some things you can't do," she murmurs, weakly, and looks away. Before she can continue, I grab her chin with one hand and turn her head to face me.

We lock eyes. "There is nothing I can't do," I say, my voice low, gravelly, and firm. Staring into her, unblinking, I slowly lean in. She has every chance to stop me, to break the moment, but she doesn't. I knew she wouldn't when I walked over to her. I might be her son, but my nootropic mind has planned this event perfectly. Our lips meet in a delicate union, and I kiss my mother not as a son should, but as a lover. A deep inhale of breath breaks the silence as she revels in the moment, and I continue kissing her. My hand slides from her chin and into her hair, and I gently tease it. "Dom," she whispers through our kiss, "you shouldn't... I'm your mother. This isn't right." Her words are hollow, though, and she doesn't stop.

Instead, I stop for her. I pull away, replacing the distance between us, and stare into her eyes. "You might be my mother, Mom, but you're more than that. You're a beautiful woman. Absolutely beautiful woman. You deserve happiness. If I can give you that, any at all, that's exactly what I'm going to do." I start leaning in again to resume our kiss, whispering, "if I can't, or if I'm wrong, all you have to do is say stop."

But she doesn't. My mind has already played a million variations of this event. She never would. She's been too lonely, too long, and I've been molding this very moment for weeks. Building her up, earning her respect, stoking a fire between us. She melts into me once again with another kiss, her breathing heavy and her skin flushed. "This is so wrong," she murmurs to me between our broken lips.

I pull away again, this time for good, and return to the sink. I shoot her a wink as I clean out the sink and clean the counters for her. Mom watches me in silence, her flush slowly fading. "I love you," I say, and give her a quick peck on the cheek, before heading upstairs to work for the morning. "Think about what I said."

I find Ashley already in my room, sitting on my bed and working on her laptop. Her eyes light up as I enter and sit down at my desk. "Hey, Dom," she says, scooting to the edge and placing her laptop beside her. "So, what we need to talk about. Cash flow. We need to improve it. I know we have a really great plan for Noox, but we need other money in the short term. Although those fixed-fee contracts are nice, I don't think they're setting us up for the long term. I collated a few smaller app ideas that I think you could knock out rather quickly based on your progress so far, and I could go ahead and begin marketing them on different platforms. What do you think?"

"What're the ideas?" I lean back against my chair and kick my feet out in front of me. I look at the clock beside Ashley. I have maybe two hours left before the pill wears off, but the good news is I can take another this afternoon.

She shows me her laptop screen and highlights a number of minor projects. Websites, phone apps, integrated services, and more. Lots of them focus on developer enablement tooling, which she's marked as a burgeoning market. I use her trackpad to highlight three of them.

"Those three. Those are good. I'll have the first one done today."

"Today? That seems extremely fast."

"I already have a lot of the frameworks for these tools built for Noox. I can simply fork it and make some changes, then add in the application-specific logic."

"You're the tech guy, so I'll take what you say at face value." Ashley leaps from the bed and grabs her laptop. "See you later, bro."

"Bye, Ashley."

I work for a few hours on the idea Ashley suggested. I take it a step further and abstract the platform components like infrastructure, authentication, and other things, into configurable templates that I can reuse across multiple projects. It ends up taking a little longer, but the result is that I can spit out new software even faster now. I thank my nootropic mind as I do, knowing my sober mind would be completely lost at this level of development and abstraction.

I continue uninterrupted through lunch and into the evening. I pop another pill, pushing forward into the night. Around eleven in the evening, I slide my chair back and stand with a grin on my face.

I walk over to Ashley's room and knock on her door. Mom is already asleep, and Kelly seems to be staying the night with her cousin. Ashley opens after a minute, groggy eyes and dressed in a satin pajama set.

"Wow, nice pajamas. Very stylish."

Ashley rolls her eyes at me but invites me in. "What's up? Couldn't wait until morning?"

I point to her laptop. "First app is done. Check it out."

"Done done?"

"Done done. Integrated with payment providers, all the legal stuff finished. Done done, ready to make money kind of done."

A smile grows on her face and she zips over to her desk. You follow behind her and lean against the side of the desk. She unlocks her laptop and then freezes as a porn video starts playing on her browser, undoubtedly one she had forgotten to close earlier. Images of a muscular young man with brown hair fucking a curly-headed petite woman flash across the screen.

"Big sis rides step-bro until he cums?" I ask, reading the title. I look at Ashley and see she is beet red, frozen in shock.

"Uh, sorry, yeah, just ignore that," she stutters, closing her browser. Her hand is shaking on the trackpad, and I grasp it in my own to calm her down.

"Ashley, everyone watches porn. It's not a big deal."

"Right," she says, and takes a deep breath. "It's just awkward. Can we forget about it?"

"I'll try," I say, and she slaps me on the leg. Then I give her the URL to our new product and she quickly tests it out.

"Dom, this is exactly what I outlined. I still can't believe you did it so quickly! This would've taken the developers at my old company weeks to put together."

"I guess they're not me," I say back.

"No, I guess not."

She looks up at me with a mixture of respect and wonder, and I can't help but pat her on the head. "Thanks for the idea. This is just as much your work as it is mine. We're like a power couple."

"But we're siblings."

"Power siblings."

She giggles, and I pull my hand away. "Now, I'm going to sleep. It's been a long day."

She stands from her desk and gives me a hug. As I hold Ashley between my arms, I lean down to her ear and whisper: "by the way, that's one of my favorite videos too." Before she can get over the shock I feel neutralizing her system, I leave her and return to bed. Laughing at myself, I drift away to sleep.