The Boyfriend

by Abigail Barnette

  THE BOYFRIEND

  Abigail Barnette

  Copyright © 2018 Abigail Barnette

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Epilogue

  Chapter One

  The morning I’d been dreading my entire adult life started with my husband leaping from the bed and screaming, “Jesus bloody Christ!”

  I startled awake and clutched the sheet to my chest because the duvet had apparently sprinted across the room with Neil. I couldn’t see if that was the case because a giant store-bought birthday cake with rapidly melting candles in the shape of a three and a zero took up my entire field of vision.

  Trying not to expose myself, I scrambled backward. “What the fuck, Mom?”

  “Oh, calm down,” my mother said, blowing out the candles. “You’re gonna set the bed on fire.”

  “Sophie!” Olivia, Neil’s three-year-old granddaughter, flung herself against the bed and struggled to climb up. When she failed, she settled for jumping and slapping the mattress. “Happy birthday!”

  “Rebecca, get out!” Neil barked.

  My mother made a tsk-ing sound. “Oh, come on, guys. I knew you were asleep. I listened at the door.”

  “Gross!” I shouted over the top of Neil’s, “Leave!”

  She shook her head. “Fine. I’ll take this to the kitchen. There’s coffee on.”

  Olivia toddled to my side of the bed and raised her arms. “Help me, Sophie.”

  “What on earth was she thinking?” Neil fumed, holding the duvet around his waist as he stalked to the walk-in closet.

  I lifted Olivia up and patted the happy panda on the butt of her footie pajamas as she crawled over my legs and toward the center of the bed.

  “Thank god we didn’t leave anything interesting out last night,” I called to him, retrieving his discarded t-shirt from beneath the sheets and maneuvering it on. The thought of my mom finding freshly used sex toys or bondage gear in our bedroom was...ugh. No thank you.

  Neil emerged in sleep pants, which gave him more mobility to toss his arms around as he complained. “Sophie, I am sorry for shouting at your mother but— No. No, I am not sorry. It is not unreasonable to have a basic expectation of privacy in one’s own bedroom. If she and Tony are going to continue to live in the guesthouse, she has to respect the fact that I don’t want her walking through our door, let alone our bedroom door, whenever she wishes!”

  I understood where he was coming from, but I’d tried to explain, more than once, how hard that particular habit would die. My family didn’t have great boundaries when it came to stuff like not just bursting into each other’s homes. “You’re right. We’ve had more than a few close calls. But she knows how much I’m hating this birthday. She just wants to make me feel better.”

  “She wants to make you feel better by sending your blood sugar through the roof?” he demanded. “Has she forgotten your diagnosis?”

  I couldn’t blame her if she had. Sometimes, I forgot it. “Thanks for the reminder of my mortality. Is that my birthday present?”

  Neil shook his head in frustration. “I still do not understand why thirty is such a terrible age.”

  “Because that’s the age—” I began, preparing to repeat the reasoning I’d stated over and over for the past six weeks.

  I didn’t have to, because Neil did it for me. “—‘when everything falls apart.’ Yes. I know. And as I’ve stated many, many times, that is ridiculous.”

  “Is it really that ridiculous?” I asked, gesturing to my thighs. He couldn’t see them because the sheet covered them, but I’d had a massive crying jag just days before because I’d found the rising blue threat of a varicose vein on the outside of the left one. I didn’t want to bring it up too specifically in front of Olivia because she didn’t deserve to inherit the weird body hang-ups the women of my family had been passing down for generations.

  “That’s not the issue here. The issue is your mother barging in whenever she pleases. If we’re going to continue discussing…” he hesitated, glancing at Olivia. “...What we’ve been discussing, then this must be addressed.”

  That thing we’d been discussing was the possibility of our boyfriend, El-Mudad, moving in with us. We rarely talked about it when Olivia was around, but plans had hesitantly been forming over the past few visits. She loved El-Mudad, and we didn’t want her to become hopeful for something that might not happen.

  She gave me a look copied directly from her late mother. It was eerie how many of Emma’s mannerisms the kid possessed, despite having been less than a year old when her parents died. “This is not in front of Olivia?”

  Neil’s anger reluctantly faded to a fond smile. He sat on the edge of the bed. “Don’t worry about not-in-front-of-Olivia. It’s Sophie’s birthday today. And I love that you helped wake her up with such a beautiful cake. Did you and Rebecca pick it out?”

  Olivia’s preschooler mind still didn’t follow conversations well, despite how mature her phrasing could sometimes be. “You were funny, Afí.”

  I tapped her on the shoulder. “Why don’t you go to the kitchen and find Rebecca, and we’ll be along in a minute, okay?”

  “Okay!” She climbed down from the mattress and charged toward the door.

  “No running!” Neil called after her. I had a feeling it fell on selectively deaf little ears. He got up and closed the door then leaned back on it with a long exhale. “Sophie. Really, now.”

  “I know.” I dropped my head into my hands in frustration. “I’ve talked to her. I have. But she’s my mom. I can’t stand to hurt her feelings.”

  “Her feelings shouldn’t be hurt over a request like, ‘please don’t barge in on my husband and I while we’re in our bedroom.’ And she of all people, considering what you—”

  One hand shot out to shush him. “No. You don’t get to take me back there.”

  Walking in on my mom having sex with our limo driver was not an experience I felt like reliving. Especially since he was about to become my stepfather.

  “Look, I’ll talk to her again, okay? And I’ll be really firm about it, too,” I promised, rising up on my knees and shuffling toward the end of the bed. “But it’s only until June. After the wedding, they’re moving out.”

  Neil came back to meet me, taking my hand to put it on his chest, over his heart. He covered my fingers with his and squeezed. “I’m sorry. I just...I so very much want this to work. I’m tired of one of us being missing.”

  I leaned my head against him. “Yeah. Me, too.”

  There was more keeping us from being the happy threesome that we wanted to be than just my mother’s lack of appropriate boundaries. El-Mudad had two children and joint custody with his ex-wife. We had yet to meet Amal and Rashida, not because he didn’t feel we were permanent enough to be a part of his daughters’ lives, but because we collectively had no idea how to approach explaining our relationship to them. We didn’t know if we even should.

  It was difficult enough for us with Olivia. She knew El-Mudad was our good friend and that he visited us for long periods of time, but we were careful not to display any kind of romantic affection toward him when she was around. Neil had reasoned that unless we wanted to be out to everyone, we’d have to keep our relationship secr
et until Olivia was an adult, at which point she would be either unsurprised after having figured it out years before or scarred for life at the thought of her parental figures hooking up with a lifelong family friend.

  In a perfect world, El-Mudad would be there for my birthday, to say some cornball thing that would sound meltingly romantic coming from him. We had second-best plans for that night. “Hey, at least we get Skype sex!”

  “Mmm, and we have a surprise planned for you, as well.” Neil lifted my hand and kissed it.

  I shivered at the thought of what that surprise might be. My Sir and Monsieur could be very inventive.

  Neil opted for a quick shower while I dressed and headed to the kitchen. Mom was there at the kitchen island, plating slices of cake while Olivia clumsily added scoops of ice cream on the side. Our housekeeper, Julia, stood by giving sidelong glares and wiping up spills and crumbs. Mariposa, Olivia’s nanny, carefully tried to supervise the ice cream part of the operation.

  She looked up, a spiraling black curl falling from her bun and into her tan face. She gave me an apologetic grimace, then came to my side to say quietly, “I’m so sorry. Your mother wanted—”

  I waved my hand. “You’re not in trouble. What were you supposed to do, hold Olivia hostage?”

  Mariposa’s shoulders visibly relaxed. I had a feeling everyone would be more at ease once my mom lived...elsewhere.

  “Olivia?” I called, and she looked up, tangled blonde curls dipping into the ice cream. “You need to go with Mariposa to get ready for the day.”

  “No, thank you, please,” she said breezily, depositing another chunk of ice cream on a plate and wiping it from the spoon with her finger. Then she licked her finger and the scoop.

  The entire container was a vector for disease.

  “Olivia,” Mariposa began, gentle and stern like Mary Poppins. “Sophie told you to do something. Do you want to get a dot this early in the morning?”

  I didn’t exactly know how the dots system worked or what the consequences were if she got too many. I did know that the threat of getting one of the round stickers on her discipline chart was usually enough to motivate her. This time was no different. She held up both hands and said, “Okay, okay! I’m coming. Jeez.”

  I covered my mouth and nose to try and contain my snort of laughter. As Mariposa led Olivia from the kitchen, I heard the former firmly scold the latter about her tone.

  Mom shook her head fondly. “I remember when you were that age. You were a handful.”

  “Julia, can you give us a minute?” I asked the housekeeper, who tossed her rag down as though I’d just ordered her away from helping bleeding accident victims on the site of a grisly crash. She left the kitchen door swinging vigorously in her wake.

  Mom sighed. “Okay. Neil is pissed off at me.”

  “No. We’re both pissed off at you.” I sat on one of the stools across the island from her. “We’ve already talked about this like six hundred times.”

  “You’re my kid. It’s your birthday. I wanted to surprise you,” she said with a shrug, as though I were making way too big a deal about it.

  “I’m not a kid, though. I’m a grown woman with a husband, and you might have been the one who got surprised. Need I remind you about the great Denim & Co. tragedy?” One of my mother’s QVC orders had accidentally been left at the main house. I’d walked it down to the guesthouse and let myself in, only to catch my mother mid-coitus with her now-fiancé. “And in my defense, I didn’t even know you had a boyfriend. You’re fully aware that you could be walking into your worst nightmare.”

  “I told you, I listened at the door—”

  “Not better! Actually, way, way creepier!” I pinched the bridge of my nose and squinted my eyes shut. Wow, that really helps. No wonder Neil is doing that all the time. “Look, it’s not just that. It’s the fact that you come in here without knocking—”

  “You gave me a key!” she protested.

  “Yes. To use when we’re not home. When we’re here, please, just give us our privacy, okay?” As I finished the sentence, Neil came into the kitchen, his hair wet, wearing a t-shirt and sweatpants to deliberately annoy my mother, who hated them.

  Mom shook her head. “Back home, we always left our doors unlocked and came and went as we pleased. Have you ever once rung the doorbell at your grandma’s house?”

  “We don’t live in Calumet, Rebecca, and some of us grew up far differently than you did,” Neil said tersely. “I appreciate that you wanted to surprise Sophie for her birthday, but privacy is essential to me and, frankly, being woken by my mother-in-law while I’m stark naked in bed isn’t something I should be expected to be comfortable with.”

  She sighed like we were asking her to make the biggest sacrifice ever. “Fine. Do you want me to go?”

  “No, I just don’t want you to see my genitals!” Neil snapped back.

  Mom pushed the lid back on the ice cream container. “Then don’t wear sweatpants everywhere!”

  “Oh my god, both of you, just stop!” I threw my hands up in the air. “This is my fucking birthday! And it’s starting out like this? With both of you screaming at each other about genitals?”

  The house phone rang, and I went angrily to the handset on the wall. “Hello?”

  “...is this a bad time?” El-Mudad’s voice instantly melted away my tension, replacing it with the butterflies that never stopped fluttering when he was with me, even over the phone.

  “Not at all.” My gaze flicked to Neil. I mouthed, “Be nice,” gave my mother a warning look, and left the kitchen for somewhere more private.

  If such a place existed.

  “Do you know how much I treasure this day, my love?” El-Mudad asked.

  I smiled to myself. “Thursday?”

  He laughed softly. I could imagine his face, his fond smile, the endless depths of his warm brown eyes. My heart ached, reaching out to him over the thousands of miles between us. “Your birthday. The day you were born to be with me.”

  “You’re going to make me cry.” I blinked back my tears. “Are you still in Paris?”

  “With the girls, yes. We’ve been shopping. Enthusiastically.” He chuckled again. “But we will still be together…well, I suppose it will be tonight, for you, won’t it?”

  “And almost morning for you,” I said, worrying my bottom lip with my teeth. “Are you sure you won’t be too tired?”

  “It’s the only way I’m guaranteed time alone,” he said. “Time when no one will be banging on my locked door.”

  I snorted. “Yeah, we’ve got some of that going around here, too.”

  “Rebecca?” he asked. I knew Neil had complained to him more than once.

  “They’ll be moving after the wedding.” I took a deep breath. “And we were thinking maybe we could discuss our...arrangement more at that time?”

  “Of course. And I thought I might bring the girls along. To Christmas. If that was all right with you?”

  “Oh, um.” How did I respond to that? We’d planned to spend Christmas together at Langhurst Court the year before, but plans had fallen through when Olivia and Neil had both come down with a truly wretched case of the flu. “I’m sure Neil won’t mind. My family will be there, as well. Obviously, we’ll have to figure out some of the details—”

  “And I wouldn’t wish to do that tonight, of course,” El-Mudad said quickly. His voice lowered to a deep, intense tone. “Tonight will be all about you. Your obedience. Your pleasure.”

  My pussy went all silky and tingly, and a breathy, “Oui, Monsieur,” broke from my throat.

  “I’ve been needing to hear those words for a long time.” His voice was almost a groan of relief.

  “Can we just do this right now?” I wheedled, knowing I wouldn’t get what I wanted. Making me wait was part of the fun for him and Neil.

  “Later, my love. Right now, I just wanted to hear your voice and remind you how thankful I am that you’re alive. And you’re mine.”

  “
Oui, Monsieur,” I answered automatically.

  He laughed again. “Is Neil there? May I speak to him?”

  “Yeah, he’s in the kitchen. I’ll go get him,” I said. Then I remembered my mom was in there and I couldn’t say goodbye properly in front of her. “I love you.”

  “And I love you. Don’t let Neil forget to give you the present I sent,” he said, adding, “As if you ever would forget a present.”

  He was right. I loved presents.

  There was a giddy skip in my step as I sprinted to the kitchen. Since I could still hear Mom and Neil talking, I knew they hadn’t killed each other. So, that was good.

  I held the swinging door open with one hand. “Neil? It’s El-Mudad. He wants to talk to you.”

  Neil had just taken a sip from his coffee mug. He set it down quickly and reached for the phone. “Thank you, I’ll take it in my study.” He shot a look at my mother. “Alone and undisturbed.”

  I took a plate of cake and melting ice cream from the island and went to the kitchen table so I could face the big windows that overlooked the sea. I glanced over my shoulder at my mom. “Do me a favor and don’t ever mention that you can see my husband’s junk through his sweatpants ever again.”

  “I admit, that was unfair.” She made a pained face. “And gross. And creepy. Sometimes, I have a hard time remembering he’s my son-in-law because he’s so much older than I am.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Okay, he’s not ‘so much older’ than you are. He’s like six years older than you.”

  The age gap between my husband and me was a big issue for my mom. He’d turned fifty-four in March, and I’d just hit my...thirties.

  I choked on my cake.

  “Sophie!” Mom ran over just as I coughed up a mouthful of crumbs.

  I waved my hands in the air the way my grandma had taught both of us to do. When I could stop hacking, I gasped, “It just went down the wrong way!”

  “I’ll get you some water,” she said, bustling toward the island, her silk caftan fluttering behind her.

  Neil returned to the kitchen, phone in his hand. “Damned call cut out—” His eyebrows shot up in alarm, and he dropped the handset on the floor to run over to me, despite my frantic head shaking and attempts to explain. He’d nearly dragged me from my chair for a Heimlich before my mom managed to get through to him.