The Sick Day

Head groggy, eyes feeling like they’d been superglued together, George Foley stumbled from the welcome warmth of the bed, groping blindly for the telephone. Brain a mess, whole body wracked achingly with fever, only the autopilot of rational thought reminded George to inform his boss he was too sick to come in to work. Chin jutting, face feeling sorry for itself, a clammy hand reached for the receiver.

Damn. The hollow, lofty sound, like the inside of a church that greeted him meant only one thing: one of the kids was already using the downstairs extension. George growled in a disgruntled manner beneath his furry breath, a cough and a splutter escaping in unison as he put the receiver back down. The voice, heard briefly, had been that of Lucy, his teenaged stepdaughter, a silent curse issued her way.

He looked over longingly at the inviting bed, its warm pillows calling him back. Close to nine a.m. he had to get a message through, in line with company policy, yet something else, outside the bounds of human understanding stopped him from crawling back beneath the covers and ringing later. Instead, George place a sweaty paw back on the receiver. It was a move that, in time, would rock his comfortable world at the foundations.

Habitually the first to wake and always first to depart, long before either Josh or Lucy had even risen from their beds, his presence in the house at this advanced hour would undoubtedly come as a complete surprise. Tapping his fingers agitatedly, he hoped she’d finish soon so he could resume his slumberings. Raising the handset in readiness, he was forced to listen to a teenaged girl’s endless trivia. On school holidays again, breathlessly Lucy spoke: “Sorry about that, Tammy…I thought I heard something…now where was I?”

“Oh honey…Josh!” reminded the other girl, Lucy’s best friend of the past decade.

“Oh yeah…Josh,” Lucy uttered, her tone seeming to uplift.

Upstairs in his bedroom, the words registered on George’s addled brain though he wasn’t really paying great heed. He just wanted to make the phonecall and be back under the bedsheets. They’d had a row again, he imagined. He swallowed hard at the thought of having to be the mediator once more, the gulping motion bringing a dry pain to his sore throat.

He really ought to put the receiver down, inwardly detesting himself for listening in on one of his stepdaughter’s private conversations yet, at the same time, he was at a point where doing so might risk his being caught. Rivulets of sweat snaked their way down his fevered brow and he longed for Lucy to finish.

“You really, really, REALLY must promise not to tell anyone else,” she begged. “Promise, Tammy?”

“I promise,” assured her friend. “I PROMISE. Okay?”

Lucy paused, as above her head her stepfather held his breath simultaneously, perversely intrigued. Suddenly he was compos mentis, of brain if not body. What on earth could have happened between Josh and Lucy to prompt his stepdaughter to swear her friend to secrecy.

“I feel so, um…” Lucy began. “Oh gosh, Tammy, I’m not sure I can tell you this.”

“Oh go on,” Tammy persuaded.

Yeah go on, thought George, his curiosity piqued. In fact, some kind of sixth sense had already passed an erotic wave up to his brain which in turn had alerted his cock, the front of his pyjama bottom filling in anticipation. It was odd, but inevitably he was most horny when feeling under the weather. There had to be a direct correlation, in men at least, between sickness and sexual arousal. And right now his cock was waving like a flagpole, poking out through the fly-hole and pressing into his navel. Again he swallowed, sighing at the gravel-laden feeling in his throat and feeling sorry for himself.

“Well?” prompted Tammy. “Come on Luce. I’ve promised, haven’t I?”

Lucy took a deep breath, seemingly agonising. “Um…okay,” she consented finally, then another pause. “I, um, I caught Josh yesterday…”

“You caught him? Caught him doing what?” Tammy enquired.

Again Lucy paused, struggling with the words. “You know…in his bedroom…playing.”

“Playing…playing what?”

“Tammy, he was playing with his, um, he was playing with his thingy!”

Tammy could be heard to gasp, as did George, the outpouring suppressed beneath a palm held over the mouthpiece. He wasn’t sure he could or should listen to this, yet his cock was throbbing like it had been stung by a bumblebee. They were stepbrother and stepsister, he had to remind himself, yet it did nothing to abate the huge erection, merely causing it to throb like crazy.

—

George Foley hadn’t been blessed with the kindest luck in his forty-odd years on earth, having lost two wives before they made it to thirty. His first marriage to high school sweetheart Anna had been cruelly ended by a boating accident in the Algarve, the one, the only consolation being that she’d borne him a handsome son, Joshua.