Oh, yeah, and Michael turned me on. The only way to get through the confession was to blurt it out like that. I liked him… more than I should have. I thought about him often… in ways that I shouldn’t have.
And who was I kidding? I was lonely. It’s not like I was having much luck with the boys at university… and not that I’d like them, anyway. Far too focused on getting as hammered as possible, on getting their dicks wet as much as possible, and taking as little responsibility for anything as possible.
It was either that, or the complete opposite. In an environment with tons of people, it was difficult to find those who didn’t exist on either end of the bell-curve, funnily enough.
Not my kind of guy. It was quite obvious to me, when I was younger, even, that I longed for a man more than my contemporaries did. My best friend, Janet, she enjoyed traipsing around campus, seeing who she would and wouldn’t lay, and then actually following through with it.
Fun, I suppose, in a way, but not what I wanted. I wanted something special, someone special. And for years and years, there was only one man who would fit that bill.
Michael. Yeah, you guessed it.
It was also frustrating that I was on a bit of a dry spell with myself, so to speak. To put it simply, I hadn’t been able to get myself off for weeks. Seriously. Vibrator and everything. I could just never get there, and the more I tried, the more frustrating it became.
Talk about taking the fun out of one of life’s simple and private pleasures!
This morning was no different. With Michael cooking, the sounds of utensils slapping against pots as background music, I had tried, pressing little pink vibrator so hard against my clit it had opened and spilled out its battery, and long before I had gotten anywhere close.
No worse than one of Janet’s boys, I thought to myself. She often told me how disappointed she was with the average performance of one of her lays. Why she kept doing it, I really didn’t know.
“Allie!” I heard Michael call. The apartment wasn’t big, so it’s not like he really had to yell. Maybe he thought I was still asleep.
I didn’t get out of bed. What? It was a Saturday, and I could do with a lie-in. I thought back to when I first saw Michael. Admittedly, I bloomed late. It’s not like I couldn’t tell that a boy or a man was good looking, but at fifteen, I was still actively fighting the idea of actually being with one.
Yeah, I was an innocent girl. I spent half my waking hours with my nose buried in autobiographies of famous people long since dead. I enjoyed learning about the things they did. It was all real. Fiction never really grabbed me.
So when I saw Michael, it didn’t escape me that he was a good looking man. But as far as I was concerned, he was just another of Mum’s conquests, another notch on her bedpost so to speak. Before him, she’d been through close to a dozen men. My real father left before I was born.
So I ignored Michael. I didn’t talk to him, didn’t let him see me looking at him (but I did still look, because he was handsome, and if we can’t look at good looking people, then what the hell can we do?), and just generally didn’t expect him to stick around.
But he did, and he did, and still he had continued to stick around. Soon enough, two years had passed, and he’d broken the previous record holder by something like four months. Mum didn’t manage to keep men around for very long. I could never really tell, either, if it was the men she chose, or the woman they chose.
So it was on my seventeenth birthday that I started to pay more attention to Michael. He’d helped me out with my homework for two years, taken me to swim training twice a week for over a year (and I got to see his body at the pool!), and had just generally been there for me. One night that was mortifying and embarrassing for me, I couldn’t keep the tears from flowing, and he had simply wrapped up my shoulders and held me tightly for, like, twenty minutes. He didn’t say anything, but he was just there and supportive. I thought that was sweet, though in retrospect, I wish I hadn’t let myself get that way to begin with.
Mum, of course, took him for granted, but that he hadn’t left, or didn’t show any signs of being unhappy, stuck with me. He seemed genuinely invested in taking care of me, and looking after the household. He even took care of Mum when she got drunk and nasty.
It was when I started paying attention to him that I noticed he would occasionally look at me. It would be a quick, darting glance. Our eyes would meet and then in an instant his would be back down at his paper, or back on the television, as if the stolen glance had never happened.
I suppose that was when I started to get really interested. Not only was I still an innocent maiden, as it were, but I was also of an age where my body was pretty much nearly fully developed… and as such, hormones, and nature’s course, were impressing upon me. No, scratch that. They were screaming at me to go out and get some.
I found myself thinking about him more and more, enjoying our glance-game, and as a result, growing closer to my step-father.
“Allie!” I was snatched out of reverie. “Breakfast!”
“Coming!” I yelled, my voice cracking. I got out of bed and went to the bathroom to brush my teeth, passing him in the corridor on the way.
“You’ll like what I’ve made today,” he said as I put toothpaste on my brush.
“I know I will, Daddy.” I froze, putting my hand to my mouth. Shit! I’d never called him that before. It had just totally slipped out.
“Uh,” he said, pausing, awkward.
“Um, give me a minute, yeah? I’ll be right out.”
“Of course, Allie,” he said. “Sure.”
* * *
Breakfast was delicious, but awkward. We didn’t talk much, but did catch eyes a few times. Michael had made a pancake sandwich with blueberry jam and a bit of cream in the middle.