by Tara Sivec
“Um, never?”
“Exactly. Here’s my wallet. I need to finish clearing all the tables. Go buy a shit-ton of tickets for that basket on the end with all the fall décor in it. I want that goddamn lantern shaped like a pumpkin, and did you smell that apple pumpkin pie candle? Need it.”
“When you’re done clearing the tables, don’t forget to clean the cafeteria kitchen.”
“That was hot. Order me around again.”
“People are staring.”
“Let them stare. I’m kissing my woman at a spaghetti dinner in the Summersweet High School gymnasium. If you close your eyes, you can almost hear the romantic melody of ‘Hero’ by Enrique Iglesias playing, and we can pretend like we’re slow-dancing at homecoming.”
“You’re crazy. I’m going to go buy some tickets now.”
“If I don’t take that pumpkin lantern home with me tonight, there will be hell to pay. You can be my hero, baby!”
“Please don’t sing that song. So you don’t want me to put tickets on the date night basket? There’s chocolate sauce, a bottle of wine, some dirty books with shirtless men on them, this thing called a flogger I saw in a movie and sounds like it could be fun, and a few toys that require batteries. Although I already have the little silver bullet and that butterfly one, but I guess you can never have too many vibrating toys.”
“I…. What the…? Holy shit…”
CHAPTER 15
Wren
“Looks like a backdoor slider to me.”
“So that makes twelve dates in two weeks, and… nothing? Maybe his dick is broken.”
I roll my eyes at Emily, holding my phone up in front of me with one hand and resting my chin in my other hand with my elbow on the purple picnic table at the Dip and Twist. For the first time in recent history, Tess and Birdie couldn’t make it to a Sip and Bitch. I probably could have just stayed in the comfort of my own home for this one, since I could Sip and Bitch with Emily anywhere, but I needed to get out of the house.
I have the night off, Shepherd was over on the mainland helping his dad fix a leaky sink at his parents’ house, and Owen had a few guys on the team currently sprawled around my living room surrounded by stacks of empty energy drink cans and bags of junk food on a PlayStation marathon. Needing to escape the constant arguing and shouting of a bunch of teenage boys acting like toddlers, the Dip and Twist was naturally my first choice.
“It’s not broken. I’ve rubbed up against how unbroken it is several times.” I sigh, feeling like such a jerk for complaining to Emily for a solid fifteen minutes since I sat down.
These last few weeks with Shepherd have been absolutely amazing. He’s spoiled me so much I don’t know how I’ll ever go back to not getting a professional hour-long massage once a week or not having to cook dinner ever. Shepherd either takes me to dinner, cooks dinner while ordering me to relax, or grabs takeout, making sure Owen is included on the nights he’s with us. And on the small handful of evenings we haven’t hung out, my freezer is fully stocked with all the food Shepherd’s mom brought with her when his parents came for a visit and ended up sleeping on my old, disgusting couch, both of them being super enthusiastic about it for some reason, staying up all night to play board games with Owen.
And don’t even get me started on the extravagance. I didn’t even know Shepherd owned a boat until it was delivered in the middle of last week. Ferry? What’s a ferry? It was like having a hot fudge sundae for the first time and knowing you’ll never be able to eat plain vanilla with nothing on it again. Screw waiting in line for twenty minutes just to go over to the mainland to grab a few things from Target. I made Shepherd take me to Target twice in one day just because he could, laughing like a lunatic as we flew by the ferry dock with everyone waiting in line. It was glorious.
These last few weeks have been amazing, and I constantly have to pinch myself, because it feels like a dream. We’re never short on conversation or laughter, I’m always counting down the seconds until I can see him again, and the way he is with Owen is so natural it fills my eyes with tears every time I watch them together. But ever since our first date when we were interrupted on the beach by Bodhi, Shepherd has been nothing but a perfect gentleman. And while I love every minute of his romantic and sweet side where he takes his time kissing me soft and slow, making sure I know how much he cherishes me, I’m seriously starting to wonder if that wild, uncontrolled, growly man who dry-humped me against the side of his cottage during our first kiss is the part that was a dream.
It doesn’t feel like a dream. Every time I close my eyes and think about that kiss, I have to rub my thighs together and shift in my seat, because I can still feel him there, so deliciously hard between my legs. My vibrators—the ones I already owned, since of course I bought an obscene amount of tickets with Shepherd’s money so he could take home that damn pumpkin lantern instead of putting any money into the date night basket—have gotten such a workout after all our nights together that my precious, beautiful silver bullet waved the white flag in surrender and refuses to fire back up.
“Yo, earth to Wren!” Emily shouts through my phone, snapping her fingers as I blink out of my daze. “Stop thinking about Shepherd naked and focus.”
I feel my cheeks heat with embarrassment and a whole lot of something else, when now I am thinking about Shepherd naked.
“I don’t know what else to do. I did what you said when we talked before Shepherd took me on our second date at the beach movies and I’ve started being bolder,” I explain. “I nibbled his ear, I looked at him suggestively a few times like I practiced in the mirror, I talked about my toys, and I even grazed my hand against his butt twice.”
“What are you, twelve?” Emily asks with an incredulous stare. “Just take your pants off and tell him to fuck you.”
“Emily!” I whisper-shout, looking back over my shoulder and then glaring at her. “There could be children sitting here at these tables!”
“You do realize it’s ten o’clock on a school night, your mom already closed, and I can clearly see all the empty picnic tables behind you, right?”
“Who needs to take their pants off?” we hear yelled behind me.
“Shut up, Ed!” Emily shouts as loud as she can through my phone before lowering her voice to talk to me. “Ed doesn’t count.”
Glancing back over my shoulder at the older man sitting in his golf cart along the front curb of the Dip and Twist, drinking his nightly butterscotch milkshake, I give him a sheepish smile and a wave before turning back to glare at her.
“Be nice to Ed,” I scold. “You know he’s just waiting for my mom to finish so he can make sure she gets home okay. It’s sweet. Don’t be rude.”
Ed Walton, the owner of Dockside Eddy’s, has been coming up here for a nightly milkshake for as long as I can remember, making sure my mom and I are safe after locking up for the night.
“That man only comes up there now for gossip and you know it.” Emily scoffs, and I shrug, knowing she’s probably right. Ed has gotten more than an earful on the nights he’s been here for Sip and Bitches. “And now you just gave me the answer to your problem. Dammit. I was hoping Shepherd was smarter than this….” Emily trails off with a shake of her head.
“What are you talking about? What’s the answer to my problem?”
“Dude.” She snorts, bringing her face closer to the screen. “He mommed you.”
“He what me?”
“Oh man, he’s momming you so hard.” She sighs.
“Is that a weird Urban Dictionary sex thing I’m gonna have to look up and then regret looking up like the blue waffle thing I still have nightmares about? I already told you there have been no sexy times, weird or otherwise. He hasn’t even touched my boobs.”
Emily’s face gets smaller on the screen as she leans back against the headboard of her bed, resting her outstretched arms holding the phone on her bent, blanket-covered knees.
“No, it’s not a weird Urban Dictionary thing with moms, although
there is that lactophilia fetish where guys get turned on by breast milk.”
“I’m sorry I asked,” I murmur with a shake of my head.
“In a nutshell, he’s no longer looking at you like a hot piece of ass he wants to fuck into next week. Shepherd now sees you as a mom who he has to be gentle with and treat with respect,” Emily explains, my body now flushing with annoyance for that man instead of need.
“But I’m not his mother,” I complain, quickly running through every minute we’ve spent together just to make sure I never scolded him or treated him like a child, because that would certainly suck.
“But you’re someone’s mother, so it doesn’t matter. One of the guys probably got in his head and told him to slow things down. You said they told him about all the shit Kevin has done to you when they hung out at breakfast, so I’m sure that didn’t help either. A guy like Shepherd would really want to make sure you are being respected after the crap Kevin has pulled. My money is on Palmer. He’s a sensitive little shit.”
Son of a Baby Ruth….
“What’s going on? What did I miss?” my mom asks excitedly, wiping her hands on the black apron she has tied around her waist as she walks around from the back of the shop to join me at the purple picnic table.
My mom and I have always been close. Birdie makes fun of me all the time, because I have always told our mom everything, good and bad. Birdie likes to have her secrets, but I don’t know. There’s just something different about my relationship with our mom, and I know it’s probably because I followed right in her footsteps, both of us getting pregnant by a loser tourist at the age of twenty. At least our sperm donor walked away and never showed his face again after Birdie was born, but it still formed a special bond between us. Like we’d both gone through the same war and lived to tell the tale. She’s as up-to-speed as Emily on my last few weeks of dating Shepherd, so at least I don’t have to go through another rundown of all our dates, making me feel guilty all over again that I’m even complaining about anything. I’d much rather hold on to my anger with Shepherd right now than go back to feeling bad.
“Well, Laura, you missed the sad reality that Shepherd has mommed Wren,” Emily explains as my mom waves to her on the screen, her smile quickly falling as her head whips to the side to look at me.
“Oh no,” she whispers. “He mommed you? I never expected this from Shepherd Oliver.”
“How in the hell do you know what that means?” I ask.
She scoffs. “Um, hello? Because I’m a mom. And in case you’ve forgotten, I have a very healthy sexual appetite.”
“Eeewww,” I mutter as Emily claps her hands and cheers.
Literally. She’s a goddamn professional cheerleader. I have to wait a full two minutes before she finishes three rounds of her S-E-X. Go Sex. Get it, Laura! chant.
“Remember Todd, the veterinarian?” my mom asks when Emily finishes.
“The one with the stutter?” Emily questions.
“No, that was Adam, the surf instructor. He was very good at oral.”
“Mom!” I complain, starting to realize maybe Birdie is right and our mom and I share entirely too much.
“Anyway, Todd and I went on three very sensual dates,” she continues while I try not to vomit when my mom says the word sensual. It’s almost worse than moist. “After the third date, we started sharing personal things. I told him about you girls, and his penis just turtleheaded itself back up inside poor Todd’s body, never to be heard from again. Sad, really. We had such a connection, and I felt like it could have gone somewhere.”
An unladylike snort comes out of me when my mom says that. Where I’ve spent my entire life dreaming about fairy tales and castles and a knight in shining armor, my mom has been perfectly content hopping from one man to the next after our father walked away. Laura Bennett decided then and there that no one would ever walk away from her again. She’s never kept a man around long enough for him to go anywhere, and they are always stunned stupid when she kicks them to the curb because she’s bored.
“It’s happened a few other times over the years,” my mom continues with a shrug. “I never cared, but that’s me, and you’re you. And you deserve to have a man who not only spoils you in life but spoils you in the bedroom. But Shepherd is a very stubborn man. Once he gets something in his head, I don’t know how easy it will be to get it out.”
“Fuuuck me,” I mutter with a huge sigh.
“Not likely.” Emily snorts, quickly sobering when I glare at her. “I’m kidding! Tess and Birdie have told me a few things about the way that man looks at you while you’ve been out and about around the island the last few weeks. There’s still hope.”
“Oooh, yes!” my mom agrees with a big smile and a nod, grabbing my phone right out of my hand so she can hold it. “I forgot about that. Oh, Emily, you should have seen the way that man stared at her cute little tush every time she bent over when they worked here that one night. And Katrina Ogden told Kelsea Moore who told Dee Trejo who told me that when they were playing cornhole out on the beach in front of Dockside Eddy’s one night after dinner, poor Shepherd kept adjusting himself in his pants every time our sweet Wrenny walked away from him!”
“Who got a woody from cornhole?”
Everyone ignores the shout from Ed in his golf cart as Emily picks up where my mom left off.
“I got a text from Jilly Bradel that said she was sitting on her boyfriend’s front porch two nights ago and saw Shepherd and Wren kissing goodnight in Shepherd’s driveway,” Emily says to my mom, sitting forward again in her bed and bouncing up and down in excitement, while I wonder if it’s possible for a person’s face to actually go up in flames. “You know how her boyfriend is on leave from the Army and he’s renting a long-term cottage right next to Shepherd? Anyway, she said Shepherd was all calm and cool with his hands in his pockets as Wren drove away, but Jilly said as soon as Wren’s golf cart was out of sight, it was like that man just lost his composure. Bent over at the waist with his hands on his knees, body heaving with all the rapid, deep breathing he was doing that Jilly got concerned he was gonna pass out. Although she didn’t seem too concerned about the possibility of having to perform CPR on Shepherd Oliver—let me tell you.”
A spark of jealously flies through me, and I momentarily forget my mom and my best friend are talking about how Shepherd has behaved around me when I wasn’t looking, like I’m not sitting right here.
I will take out Jilly Bradel at the knees with a baseball bat if she even looks at Shepherd again.
“He definitely wants to put his bat in her grassy infield.”
I really wish it was my best friend who said this last thing.
My mom laughs at her own joke, while Emily kindly informs her Shepherd dropped me off at a spa on the mainland yesterday while he ran some errands, and since I was all massaged out at that moment, I decided to get waxed.
“Okay, we can work with this.” Emily nods, her face suddenly all business. “Wrenny, it’s time for you to bring out the big guns.”
“I… I thought I had,” I reply nervously. “It took two shots of vodka from the portable bar in the sand next to the popcorn machine when Shepherd was busy setting up the movie projector just for me to get up the nerve to kiss his neck and graze my teeth over his earlobe.”
Emily just throws her head back and laughs. And laughs, and laughs, and laughs, my mom joining in with her until I finally slam my hand down on the table and they zip their lips.
“Shut the hell up and just tell me what to do.”
“That’s my girl,” Mom says with an encouraging smile, patting me on the back. “You go get yourself the D.”
“Jesus, Mom,” I complain while Emily tells me what to do.
“Listen, kid. You two have had no problem talking and spilling your guts about your gross feelings and shit once everything was out in the open. It’s time for you to do the same thing with sex. You need to tell him what you want and show him you are much more than just someone’
s mom. That you are a sexy piece of ass who deserves a good dicking for the first time in her life.”
Mom nods at what Emily’s saying, and my palms start to sweat, glad that my mom took my phone from me and is still holding it; otherwise, I’d probably drop it. She’s absolutely right, even though it makes me nervous as hell, and now I’m pissed again. I’ve waited my whole life for this, and Shepherd is continuing to make me wait. The nerve of him!
“How long is he gonna be busy with his parents?” Emily asks, and I look at the time in the upper corner of my phone screen.
“He said he’d call me as soon as he left their house and got to his boat. He hasn’t called yet, so it will be another forty minutes or so after he does.”
“I love how causally you throw out his boat, like it’s a canoe instead of a million-dollar sport yacht power boat with two cabins below deck.” Emily laughs, making me roll my eyes at her. “Change of plans. You’re going to text him right now and tell him there’s an emergency at the Dip and Twist.”
“What? Why? I don’t want to lie and scare him,” I tell her.
“No, no, this is good,” my mom nods in agreement. “Not a scary lie, just something small that will make him come running. Like, you dropped a three-gallon drum of ice cream on your foot and you think it’s broken.”
“Oooh yes!” Emily cheers. “And you really don’t want to bother him, but no one else is answering their phones, blah, blah, be your sweet, usual self who doesn’t want to put anyone out, and then bam! You’re getting fucked into next week.”
I just shake my head at her.
“I don’t understand how me lying to him and then him racing here and finding out it’s a lie is going to make him want to do anything of the sort.”
“Laura, move the phone around so I can see Wren’s back,” Emily orders.
My mom quickly does as she’s told, and Emily disappears from sight along with my mom’s arm. Before I can turn my head and ask my mom what the hell she’s doing, her hand holding the phone is already coming around from behind me to hold it up in front of us, and I can see Emily’s smiling face again.