Page 34 of Mom-Com
“But I did all the things on the list!” I shouted to the closed door.
I sank onto her couch and buried my head in my hands. Well, that went real smooth. I found out that love existed and I wanted to shout it from the rooftops. However, the person responsible for the revelation wanted nothing to do with me. No wonder people wrote shitty songs and poems about broken hearts. This love stuff was hard. Confusing. And it didn’t even feel that good.
What was the point of making people feel ecstatic when love was predicated on a specific someone loving you back? That was bullshit! Something that awesome shouldn’t depend on someone else. What if no one ever loved me back? Was I supposed to go through life just feeling like shit?
I’d rather go back to not believing in love and not getting my heart trampled on.
I sat back, slouched on the couch, feeling like I was operating under a lead weight. A black cloud. A vise squeezing my chest and reminding me of how stupid I was for loving the wrong person. Or loving at all.
Absentmindedly, I took in her living room. I’d been in her house many times before, but I realized I’d always been so focused on Lily-Marie I hadn’t really looked around at her space. Her television sat on a stand against the wall opposite the couch I sat on, the cupboard below it crammed with what looked like thousands of DVDs, all bearing Disney titles. Not one romcom or thriller or sci-fi movie could be found in her collection. “Obsessed” might be too mild of a word for whatever Lily-Marie had going on here.
A framed picture of her and her children posing with Snow White at Disneyland was on top of the DVD stand, clearly a prized possession by the way it was positioned. A pang of longing hit me full force as I stood up and walked over to examine Lily-Marie’s beaming smile next to the princess. She looked more giddy than her kids.
Clark was rolling his eyes in the picture, but you could see his mouth giving way to a smile. Milly was grinning from ear to ear and holding tight to her mom’s hand. I could just be projecting, but it really seemed like there was a hole in the assembly. A hole that could be perfectly filled by Stein and me.
I put the picture down and stepped away. There would be no Disneyland trips in my future if I didn’t regroup and find a way to get through to Lily-Marie. I just didn’t understand how she couldn’t see how good we could be together. How right we were for each other.
Time to go back home and figure this thing out. Lily-Marie was it. I was sure of it.
15
Lily-Marie
What the ever-loving hell was that? My mind was screaming the entire time I fled my own damn house. I felt like I was on the run, a fugitive who needed to escape before the cops showed up. Fleeing was essential. Fleeing was the only thing I could think of to get out of whatever that was back there.
I slammed my car door shut and put it in reverse, leaving some tread on my driveway in my haste. My lungs were burning, probably wondering why we were getting all this exercise all of a sudden. Jameson had my heart rate soaring left and right. First, he nearly nailed me against the wall in a dominant move that revved my engine just fine, and then the next he was shocking the hell out of me by professing to love me.
I repeat, what the hell was that?
Who kisses with a woman for the first time and then tells her he loves her? Okay, fine, I did that a few times in high school, literally thinking we were engaged to be married and planning our kids’ names. But that was high school. Nobody was that naive by the time they hit twenty, let alone thirty.
Pulling into the school parking lot, I slammed the brakes and put the car in park. That last thought was a bit sobering, the balm I needed to calm myself. Why would Jameson react that way? Could he have so little experience with love that he was mistaking intense tonsil hockey with feelings beyond “harder, faster, oh yeah, right there?”
He had a child. I assumed he was in love with his ex-wife at some point in order to have made Stein. Although we’d never talked about our exes. For all I knew, Stein was the product of a drunken night at college. Maybe Jameson had no idea what love was about.
We barely knew each other. There was no way he could be in love with me.
I took a deep breath and felt better already. It was just a misunderstanding. I just needed to calmly tell him that he was mistaken. Things would be fine. Everything would go back to normal and it wouldn’t be at all awkward living next to each other.
I heard the bell ring and kids started flooding out the doors, racing across the playground. Trying to identify my own amongst the throng was impossible. It was too bad Jameson took things way too far with his little declaration. I would have kind of liked to have a neighbor with benefits. How convenient would that have been? Kids were off to school, I worked from home two days a week. We could have had a regular sex schedule.
My vibrator was nice, definitely got the job done. But to feel a man’s rough skin? To be touched and caressed by big hands, a solid weight pressing into me, pinning me against the wall? That hard cock doing unspeakable things even under layers of clothes? A shiver ran down my body.
The back door of my car opened with a loud click, disrupting my dirty thoughts and nearly giving me a heart attack. Clark hopped in, oblivious to where his mom had gone in her head. There I was, in the school parking lot, daydreaming about my neighbor’s thick cock, getting all hot and bothered. I really needed that orgasm, dammit. I would have been a better mom if I’d gotten it, I just knew it. Yep, I devolved into blaming my parenting on Jameson’s lack of follow-through. Seemed reasonable enough.
“How was your day, kiddo?” I eyed him in the rearview mirror, pressing my cold hands to my red cheeks, trying to calm them down and get focused.
“Good.”
“Wow, what a ringing endorsement.” Typical eight-year-old response. I rolled my eyes, but he was too busy getting his backpack off and buckling up to notice. “Where’s Stein and Milly?”
“Milly started crying because she left her folder in the classroom. Stein went back with her to get it.”
My heart melted. “Well, that was sure nice of him.” You were nice to my kid? You were my new favorite person.
“He’s always doing stuff like that. Drives me crazy. Like at recess today, we were in this long line to play tetherball and some kid got hit in the face. Instead of stepping up to play with me now that they were out, he took the kid to the nurse’s office and we lost our turn.” Now it was Clark rolling his eyes. I wondered where he got that.
“Well, honey, that was the right thing to do. Maybe next time you should follow Stein’s lead, huh?”
