Page 5 of My Date With A Pair of Gray Sweatpant

He shakes his head against my shoulder. “No, just the night. We’re here for the weekend.”

He still doesn’t seem to get what I’m trying to say. I roll into his embrace and turn to face him in the dark. “But what about in between the times you dream about me? What are you doing then?”

“I…”

“There was an entire week in my life that passed between our first and second dream. You remember me each time, so this can’t be a dream for you, but nothing is happening in your world in between?”

“I…”

I start to shiver in the cold of his room. “Sorry, let me get you some clothes.”

“Not the sweatpants,” I tell him. “Just a shirt.” I don’t want to accidentally wake up before I can figure out what is going on.

“O-kay,” he says, drawing out the word. He turns on the bedside light and throws me the black Mike’s Discount Furniture shirt for the third time. I pull it over my head as he pulls the sweatpants on.

A door slams down the hall and footsteps make their way toward us, growing louder and louder as they approach. The bedroom door flings open, slamming against the wall and bouncing back. An older woman in a fancy black lace nightdress and robe stands in the door. She’s beautiful. Her nightdress fits her snugly, showing off every curve of her body. Her eyes grow wide as she looks between the two of us.

“How dare you act like a whore in my home!” she says to me. I mean, I do keep waking up naked next to her son, but still,whore’s a little much. “Why, I ought to take a belt to you like I used to my daughter.”

Something in Matthew’s face changes, and he moves to step in between his mother and me. “That’s enough, mother. Go back to bed.”

“Go back to bed? So this little cunt can fuck you in my house?”

“Mother, you will not speak to Kaitlyn that way.”

She turns and looks at him. “So she’s gotten her claws in you? You don’t have to put up with her, Matthew. There are so many better women out there for you. Women that will take care of you like you deserve to be cared for.”

“Mother, no one has their claws in me. I love Kaitlyn. I want to marry her.”

“Marry her? Marry her?” the woman’s words turn into wails as her lip trembles. “You’re going to get married? My baby is going to leave me and get married?”

Matthew sighs. “Mother, I’m not leaving you. You wouldn’t be losing me, you’d be gaining Kaitlyn.”

She begins to cry. I do my best not to roll my eyes in case she can see me from where she still stands in the door. “But you’re-you’re all I have left. Your brother hardly comes around and your sister won’t speak to me. You-you-you can’t leave me.”

I expect him to comfort her, but Matthew surprises me by actually having a backbone. “Mother, there’s a reason Jennifer never speaks to you. It’s because you treated her horribly. If you can’t control yourself around Kaitlyn, we’ll have to distance ourselves as well.”

She puts a hand to her chest dramatically. I expect a full-on crying fit to erupt, but instead she wraps her hand around a ring hanging from a chain around her neck and pulls. The chain breaks and she holds out the ring to him.

“If you insist on marrying this girl, then at least have the decency to wear your father’s ring. He’d want you to have it.”

Cautiously, he takes it from her outstretched hand.

She steps closer to him and pulls the chain from the ring. “Go ahead. Try it on.”

“I don’t think now’s the time.”

“It’s such a simple thing, Matthew. Please, do it for me.”

“Fine–”

Before he can put it on himself, she takes the ring out of his palm. “With this ring,” she says, and I cringe. What kind of fucked up childhood did Matthew and his siblings endure? “I thee bind.” She slides the ring on finger and instantly the energy in the room shifts.

Matthew begins to make a sound, almost as if he’s choking. I want to scream or run or wake up, but all I can do is watch as he shrinks and disappears into the sweatpants he’s wearing.

He is fucking sweatpants? The sweat pants I’ve been wearing? The pants begin to writhe and wiggle as if they’re in pain.

There is a split second where neither of us left in the room move and then I lunge for the pants, determined to keep this disgusting woman away from them.

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