Beau is… hot. Handsome and so fucking sexy, but cute, too, in a way I can only describe as…adorable. My entire body lights up at just the thought of him.
Then again, I just slugged a reheated coffee the size of my head. It could be that. I take a seat at the kitchen table, drumming my fingers. My chest suddenly aches.
I wave behind Goldie to the countertop. “Hand me my pump?”
She turns around, looking shocked, so of course, I roll my eyes. “It’s clean. Don’t be weird. I’m about to sprout a leak here.”
She passes me my pump and the bottles with flanges attached, and I swear she fights the urge to rub her hands down her thighs after. I catch her eye and grin. “You’re so dumb.”
Smiling, she shakes her head. “It’s just weird! You make a drink with your body.”
I wiggle my eyebrows. “And I’m a treat. Guess that makes me a total snack.”
She rolls her eyes, but we both laugh. “You’re a mom with dad jokes.”
I nod. “I have to do both jobs, after all.” And just like that, the room grows serious again. Somber, almost.
After connecting everything, I lower my shirt and sigh. I’m sure I have a fever, or at least did. My skin is clammy, and I feel a bit woozy and so fucking tired.
“Back to Beau,” she says, sitting next to me.
“I guess I figured he’d lose interest by now. But he hasn’t. And he really cares about Jett, Goldie. It feels real.”
She nods. “I believe you. Because Nancy and Carl were like, all braggy and glowy over this guy. Seriously.” She sips her own reheated coffee. “They were never braggy over Dustin. Just sayin’,” she gloats, though I do agree.
“Well, I like him. And I could tell they really liked him, too.”
* * *
For the next two days,Beau and I text. All day. Goldie waits on me hand and foot, essentially taking care of everything for Jett, too. She brings him to me to nurse and I sleep the rest of the day, allowing her to force feed me toast and soup on the first day and just a few bites of banana on the second.
Everything hurts. Aches deep in my bones. It’s miserable, and I just have to endure because nothing is working.
I twist in my sheets, sweaty and hot, never comfortable, always awake.
I sneak moments to text Beau when I have a brief bit of clarity in the misery of this godforsaken flu.
He tells me about the time when he was seven years old and had the flu. He trusted his gas and his body broke that trust. I nearly cried laughing as he explained trying to get the sheets to his laundry room without his dad knowing because he was embarrassed.
I enjoy his openness. I don’t know yet if it's a vulnerability or just his age. I hate to say it. But younger people seem to live life limitlessly, speak without a worry of repercussions, and chalk everything up to a single feeling in a moment. Fate and karma, all this shit that doesn’t mean anything. I don’t see Beau that way, but I’m skeptical to believe he’d be so vulnerable with me.
Dustin couldn’t even admit to me that he jerked off. I asked him point blank once. “Do you jerk off?” And at first, he answered. Without a hint of doubt in his eyes, he said “no.” And it terrified me to my core. Because I’dseen himjerking off. I’d caught him more than a few times. And even if I hadn’t–everyone fucking does it.
How easily his lie came, faster than him, even, is what surprised me.
But I didn’t want to believe it. I wanted to believe he was shielding me from something he thought I may not like. That maybe his pottery-creating wife couldn’t handle the image of her husband, slippery-skinned and glassy-eyed, palming his shrimp cock over the bathroom sink, cumming into the basin like a fucking loser as he groaned no one’s name.
I can handle it. I unfortunately had to handle it too many times.
It was a sign of what was to come–him in someone else, if we’re getting cheeky. Otherwise, it was a big ass red flag, waving wildly right in front of my face. But I somehow missed it.
Beau spoke openly and freely about how much he missed his father. He told me some of his favorite memories with him–times which spanned the gamut of normal parenting, starting with snow skiing and ending with bungee jumping. The two of them did everything, and his dad seemed like a really awesome dude. I wanted to ask so many times why his dad started so late in life, but I never felt like it was an appropriate question to ask. Even though we’d been growing so close. Closer than I ever thought imaginable.
He brought a huge bag of food from my favorite deli in town. Left two kinds of soup, three hoagies, two large sugar cookies, and two Diet Cokes on the front porch. He didn’t even stay to take his many kudos. Goldie was pissed. I think her exact reaction to learning he doorbell-ditched us? “That sexy son of a bitch.”
Again, I didn’t exactly disagree.
I napped, I texted, I sweated, I moaned. Goldie was holding on like a trooper and by the end of day two had even washed my breast pump parts. She wore those rubber gloves for Ajaxing your sink, the ridiculous ones that go up to your elbows and have big alien-like fingertips.