Page 5 of What It Means To Be Found

Other girls my age at the country club ogled Connor James often. They called him a silver fox based on the white hair that just barely started to dust above his ears. Other girls would go out of their way to hook up with Connor like it was a game to them, or an item to check off their to-do list.

I leaned into the game a little farther than I should have.

One thing that I learned immediately, was that if that was how he was intimate with his ex-wife the entirety of their marriage, she should have left him a lot sooner.

No foreplay took place.

Kissing was not his strong suit, let alone kissing with his tongue.

I was lost thinking about my to-do list at work the next morning as Connor was thrusting inside me, hitting nothing of significance, but panting as if he was sprinting.

I also had to remind him to use a condom multiple times. As if he assumed I would be totally cool with him going forward with this hookup completely bare.

Needless to say, he came and I didn’t.

He didn’t even ask if I did, that’s how much of a shit stain he was.

He had rolled off of me and promptly passed out in his bed, and I wasted no time in getting the hell out of there. I immediately regretted my decision to sleep with an older man out of spite. That was one of the many other dominoes to fall, I realized later on. I wasn’t fit for the culture in my mother’s world anymore. The world I was raised in was full of privilege and of wanting to sleep with conventionally attractive men, simply because the opportunity arose and I had nothing better to do. A world where my mother felt completely comfortable judging other women’s bodies and making demeaning comments as if men’s approval was what all women should strive for.

I was done.

Connor, however, wasn’t. He had reached out to me multiple times after that. He left me voicemails (like the older man he was) and texted me asking for another round. I ghosted him, because obviously. A few months after that mistake, I saw him at a club in LA with my friends and told them why I was avoiding a random man at the club.

They had laughed with me, reminding me that I didn’t need to explain why I slept with a man and regretted it. They told me that his daughter, Stella, used to be a client of theirs at the early intervention clinic before I started and that Connor had been ballsy enough to ask Beck out at her place of work.

They also called him Daddy James, which was both disgusting and hilarious.

“How is Michelle?” I asked, trying to blink away the gross image of my one night with him.

“She said she was sore the next morning.” Lucy winked at me. “Ugh, I knew he would be a beast in the sack.”

I wanted to roll my eyes but refrained. I had no doubt Michelle was sore, because so was I. Not because it was good sex, but because he sucked at foreplay and getting a woman ready for penetrative sex. Michelle cared a lot about image and what other people thought of her, though, so I wasn’t surprised that she would simply lie about how good Daddy James was in bed.

“Wow, that’s wild.” I didn’t know what else to say that wasn’t a lie. “How are you, Luce?” I knew this question would get her going for a while. She started monologuing about her newest yoga class, and how I needed to go with her sometime. She also mentioned a few casual hookups she had, that I barely paid attention to. My mother had eventually come back to the table and was nodding animatedly at Lucy’s tales of what she had been up to the last few months.

In short, absolutely nothing.

She was a trust fund kid, like me. Except she loved it. To be fair, I used to as well. Having the kind of money our families did was awesome. We could do whatever we wanted with very little repercussions. I got it, I had just outgrown it.

I didn’t want to be comfortable anymore.

“…you have to come!” Lucy said, reaching out to grab my arm. My polite smile was in place, an attempt to hide the fact that I wasn’t listening to her the last few minutes.

“Pardon?”

“Tonight! Michelle’s party!” Lucy grinned, showing freshly whitened teeth. I shrugged.

“I’m sorry, I already have plans.” I pulled my phone out to check the time. The moving company had recently sent me a text message with a thumbs up emoji, indicating that all my belongings had been properly moved. I was free to go to my new home now.

“What are you doing tonight?” my mother asked, eyeballing my phone that I pocketed as I made my way to stand.

“My friends have tickets to the Ducks' game in Anaheim. I promised I would go.” I leaned forward to kiss my mother on the head and waved my fingers at Lucy. “You’ll have to tell me all the dirty details of what happens tonight.”

“Oh, I will.” Lucy wiggled her eyebrows at me while my mother just giggled at us. I waved goodbye to them both as I started speed walking for the country club exit. I wasn’t positive my mother even remembered our conversation before our friends distracted us, so I wasn’t sure how she would react when she eventually came home this afternoon and her only daughter would be nowhere to be found and her bedroom was completely empty, minus the large four-post bed frame that simply wouldn’t fit in my new bedroom.

I left the club and rushed into my car, accidentally slamming the door behind me as I landed in the driver’s seat. The exhale I made was loud and dramatic, which was another physical reminder of how important it was for me to distance myself from this part of my life.

I was improving, and I wanted to keep improving.

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