Page 92 of See Me After Class

It was like we’d become one family, and all we wanted was the best for my little girl.

We also had our own little indiscretions. One of them was calling me right now.

“Benji, I’ll call you back.”

“Oh, I knew you wouldn’t listen to me,” he replied, sounding injured. “But I’m telling you, fate?—”

“Yes, fate brought you a gorgeous girl who’ll show you the moon and the stars, Benji!” I rolled my eyes. “But it’s Naughty Lessons calling.”

“Ha!” Benjamin laughed. “I can’t believe we let Noah put us up to this. It still feels unreal.”

“It sure does,” I replied, grinning.

See, we were still men. And the one thing June told me, again and again, was to never stop living.

I couldn’t find a love like hers once again. That... it felt like a world I could not walk into yet.

But every so often, the boys and I did resort to other pleasures. Naughty Lessons had been a whole other plane, though.

When Noah had suggested it, I’d balked.

“But, think about it! It’s like this cool platform, and it has multiple chatrooms. You don’t even need to show your face in the masked one!”

“I don’t know,” I’d told him, frowning. “What if... it just feels weird, like talking about all of it.”

“Dear boy!” he’d scoffed. “You sound like a sweet summer child, only twenty years older. The best part of sex is the conversation and the dirty talk! Like, how does it even work without that?”

Cutting to the chase, he’d lectured me so hard I’d decided that joining up would be easier than listening to him ramble about sexy talk all day.

The fact that he'd almost started trying to seduce me with his words made me make the decision quicker.

But Naughty Lessons wasn’t like any other chatroom where you could just sign up and get wanking.

Oh, no, I had to go through the works—including a whole round of interviews in a posh office, with young ladies in professional skirts and shirts, each one looking me up and down like I was a mannequin with three nipples instead of two.

I answered the call.

“Hello, is this Mr. Elijah Taylor?”

“The very same.”

“We are pleased to inform you that your membership with Naughty Lessons is now approved. You may join your first chatroom tonight.”

Heck, why did that excite me so much? It was like I suddenly had a whole new world to explore, something wild and free.

“Thank you.”

The second I hung up, though, I felt a slight twinge of guilt run through me.

June was long gone, but her memory was so real that at times it felt physical.

My mind went back to our last conversation, the one we’d had in our final days. I’d been filled with anticipatory grief back then.

It was as if my soul already knew she was on another plane, and I wasn’t willing to let her go there.

So I sat by her bed as she labored through her breathing, her eyes already distant.

The accident had crushed everything but her courage.

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