“Jess told me what happened,” Drew said.
“What are you talking about?” Mia looked at Jess questioningly.
“He’s underage,” Drew said.
“Excuse me?” Mia’s first instinct was to hide the wine. If Jess was underage, he shouldn’t be drinking. She looked guiltily at the glass in front of him. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You didn’t ask,” Jess said.
So Mia did ask for proof. Drew claimed that Jess left his license at home. Mia asked Jess how he could do this to her and Jess looked scared and wouldn’t speak.
Drew got to the bottom line. He and Jess were going to blackmail her and wanted at least a hundred thousand dollars. They knew how rich she was. They’d read about her sectionorce settlement in the papers. And now she’d had sex with Jess, who was underage, and if she didn’t pay she was going to be arrested.
For the next three days, Mia was in a panic. How could this happen to her? She longed to tell someone, but whom? Her girlfriends wouldn’t understand. In fact, they’d be horrified. They’d say that this confirmed what they’d secretly suspected all along—that Mia was somehow a bad person who deserved to have terrible things happen to her.
But then it wouldn’t matter, because she’d be arrested. Her photograph would go viral. Her life would be over.
* * *
A couple of days later, Jess’s boss came by. He was a nice guy from a few towns over, married with a couple of grown kids who still lived in the Hamptons. He was a talker, and before long, probably because there was no one else she could tell, Mia told him what had happened with Jess.
He was furious. He knew Jess well. Jess had gone to high school with his daughter. Jess had been telling the truth when he said he was in college. He was twenty not seventeen.
A couple of days later, Jess came over to apologize. It wasn’t his idea he said. It was Drew’s. He’d been boasting to Drew about how cool it was that he was having sex with his idol’s ex-wife and then Drew jokingly came up with this plan and Jess thought he was kidding but Drew was fucking crazy and he definitely wasn’t talking to that kid ever again.
Mia forgave him. Partly because she was a nice person and partly because she just couldn’t stand to listen to Jess and his lame excuses anymore.
Mia did eventually tell her friends, and they had a good laugh about it. In the end, Mia was like most middle-aged women whose cub adventure would become just another one of the bizarre and inexplicable things that would happen to them in the next few years.
Others, however, take their cubbing to the next stage.
The Cub Club
This happens when a woman moves from what she assumes will be a one or two time event to a more regular arrangement. The cub begins to spend the night. Now there is a very good chance he will move in.
And there he is, suddenly living in your house.
Some questions:
How do you introduce your cub to your friends? How do you explain why he’s living with you after a month? What if your friends don’t like him or, even worse, what if they just plain ignore him?
That’s what happened to Sassy and me.
* * *
We were barely two weeks into June when James appeared.
He sat uncomfortably at the edge of the kitchen table at Kitty’s, surrounded by the girls—Sassy, Tilda Tia, Marilyn, Queenie, me, and Queenie’s teenage daughter.
I assumed he was a friend of Queenie’s daughter. I didn’t think about it much, because everyone was talking loudly, and as happens in these cases when one male is outnumbered by a bunch of women, James quietly disappeared into the background.
So imagine my surprise when I stopped by Sassy’s place two days later and James was there.
It was noon and Sassy seemed a bit embarrassed, but she had a quick explanation. “James is helping me with my new phone.”
I nodded. As I would later learn, becoming indispensably helpful—i.e., programing the iPhone, showing how to connect music, and even going for alcohol and food runs—is one of the sneaky moves cubs use in order to get a woman to house them.
But I wasn’t th