“What do you mean?”
“You’ve been 18 for a year now. You’ve been a man for a year now. What the hell are you playing at?”
“I don’t want to go to college,” I say. “I want to do my own thing. I want to make a difference. If I’m going to college, then it’s going to be on my own terms. No one’s going to be telling me what to do all the time… That’s just not my style, a coach barking commands at me all season… all school year.”
I get enough of that at home, I think to myself.
“I’m not talking about fucking college,” spits out my dad.
He looks even meaner than usual. Maybe he doesn’t like the movie, or maybe the pain’s really getting to him tonight. It’s hard to tell.
“Why don’t you take one of those pills, Dad,” I say, suggesting it in the gentlest way possible.
He grunts, and ignores me.
“You don’t need to go to college to do something with your life. But you’re smart. I’ve seen your test scores. You’re no normal meat head football player.”
I sigh. I’ve heard it all before. Yeah, I get OK grades, but I’m not exactly living up to my academic potential. That was according to my counselors, at least.
“Look, son,” says my dad. “I’m not going to tell you what to do. I don’t give a shit, really, what it is. But if you say you want to make something with your life, just go fucking do it. Don’t wait around.”
“Thanks, Dad,” I say, a little sarcastically. “Is that all?”
He doesn’t look at me. His attention is turned back to the TV movie. The military guys in the movie are rushing a beach, firing their guns as they run. One of them gets hit and goes down.
I walk slowly up to my room.
How can people tell me I’m not living up to my potential when I was the king of the school, captain of the football team? I even took college courses in my last year of school. That was partially what convinced me I didn’t want to have anything to do with college. Everything was so abstract, and not related to the real world at all. I mean, I did fine, acing all my courses.
Honestly, I only took the courses to meet college chicks. Laid a few of them, too. At 18, I was the same age as a lot of them. And I look a lot older than I am, with a beard that grows in thick and coarse if I don’t shave every day.
Lying on my bed, my thoughts turn to that gorgeous curvy chick from the pharmacy.
I’ll fuck her tomorrow, there’s no doubt in my mind. It’s just a matter of where I decide to do it.
My cock starts growing, just thinking about her. I’ve got a high sex drive. Very high.
I sigh, knowing I can’t ignore this erection. It’s the slow burning intense kind that pushes uncomfortably against my jeans.
I look over to the door, making sure it’s closed all the way.
Unzipping my pants, I pull the flaps of denim aside, letting my cock free.
My breathing is going a little ragged.
I close my eyes and picture the girl from the pharmacy counter. Her tits were so perfect.
My hand grips my hard cock, forming a fist around it. I move my hand up and down slowly at first.
But as I picture her, imagining that she’s here on the bed with me, pulling off her shirt, my fist begins to speed up substantially.
She’s climbing on top of me, her shirt off, her pants on the floor. She’s wearing a bra that’s slightly too small for her. Her tits are practically spilling out of them. She whispers something to me, telling me that she wants me, that she wants my cock. She unhooks her bra, moving her hands behind her back to do so.
Moving her arms like that cause her breasts to squish together a little. Now the bra comes off, and those beautiful, huge globes spill out.
She leans down and I take one of her nipples in my mouth.
She’s closer to my cock, closer than ever.
Her pussy is wet. She slides it down onto my thick cock. The feeling is incredible, almost unimaginable.
My hand is moving faster and faster.
In my fantasy, she begins to ride me, hard and fast. Her tits are swaying in my face and her hips are thrusting wildly, quickly, sexily.
She starts to come, screaming about my cock. The look on her face is priceless.
Suddenly, my cock erupts. My warm come shoots out, blasting all over my chest.
I’m back in reality. The fantasy fades away.
A real shame. Because she looked incredible.
But I know she’s going to look even better in person. All I have to do is wait until tomorrow. That’s going to be hard, though.
But at least I know that I’m going to have her. She won’t say no to me. I saw right through that little shy girl façade. She craves cock like everyone else. Deep down, she wants me, and she’ll admit it to me in some private discussion while we stare at the stars together.
Grabbing a tissue from my bedside table, I clean myself up.
I’m halfway through pulling my pants back up when there’s a knock on the door.
“Just a minute,” I call out.
“I need to talk,” says my dad, speaking more softly than usual.
“I’m a little busy in here,” I say.
My dad’s a guy, and he usually respects my privacy. He knows how things are.
“I need to talk,” says my dad. “I don’t care what you’re doing. Just come to the door.”
Grumbling to myself, I zip up my pants and find the difficult button of the jeans and get that done. Normally, I’d enjoy lounging around a little after a session. Talking to my dad immediately after that release is about the last thing I want to do be doing.
Sighing, I open the door.
My dad’s face surprises me.
His normally grim expression is gone. Instead, it’s replaced by a look of extreme sadness.
“What happened?” I say.
“It’s your cousin.”
“My cousin?”
“Chris…”
I don’t say anything for a moment.
I know by the tone of my dad’s voice that something awful has happened.
Chris and I were best friends growing up. We did everything together. Of course, he was a few years older than me, so by the time high school came along, we didn’t spend quite as much time together. He had his own older friends.
But despite being older, Chris still would let me hang out with him and his friends from time to time. He was really cool about it. He never made me feel like I was the younger kid, just tagging along. He always included me.
I looked up to him like no one else.
Chris joined the military right after high school. I haven’t heard from him much, unless you count the occasional brief emails he’d send me, telling me that things were pretty tough over there.
“What happened?” I say, looking my dad right in the eyes. “Is he dead?”
My dad shakes his head.
“He stepped on a land mine,” he says. He pauses, a long pause. “He lost his legs…”
I’m speechless. Chris without his legs? Before me, he was the star quarterback all through school. He didn’t get a college scholarship, like the one I turned down, but he was good. He was an athlete, tall and muscular, and surprisingly nimble.
Picturing Chris without his legs is like… picturing a cheetah that can’t run. Chris was his body.
“He’s coming home on Thursday,” says my dad.
“Thursday,” I repeat vaguely. “So this happened… when?”
“He’s coming home,” says my dad. “That’s what’s important.”
I nod.
“He wants to see you.”
Facing Chris without legs? He’ll be lying in bed, unable to even walk…
I shudder at the thought.
How can I bare to face my hero, down and out, mutilated and bedbound?
Hana
“Any plans this week?” says my mom at the breakfast table.
We’re eating quinoa and boiled kale for breakfast. Not your
usual breakfast food, but my parents aren’t exactly normal parents.
They’re hippies. Big time hippies.
I shrug my shoulders, not meeting my mom’s gaze. “I might be going to a party tonight.”
Normal parents would be worried if their daughter were to say she’s going to some wild party with a football star.
But my parents? They’ve been wanting me to go to parties for as long as I can remember. They’ve encouraged me to socialize, and not to spend so much time studying. “You can’t learn everything you need in those school books,” was my dad’s constant refrain.
“Oh, honey,” says my mom, cooing. “That’s wonderful! Are you going with anyone? A boy, maybe?”
I shrug. “Yeah,” I say. “Someone asked me out at the pharmacy.”
“Harold! Did you hear that? Hana’s going to a party with a boy.” My mom shouts this to my dad, who’s in the study by the kitchen, working on one of his neverending art projects.
“That’s great,” calls out my dad.
“So who’s the lucky guy?” says my mom, leaning down and peering at me, her hands cupped under her chin.
“Just some guy I met,” I say.
“Do you think you’ll get lucky?”
“Mom!” I say, exasperated. “I don’t want to talk about that.”
“I don’t see why not,” says my mom. “Back in my day, love was free, and we talked about it fine. Your generation has so many hang-ups.”
“It’s not my generation,” I say. “It’s just that I’m normal. And you’re not talking about your whole generation… other parents aren’t like you guys…”
“We’re just a little more… liberated,” says my mom.
I grunt vaguely.
“You’re an adult, Hana,” says my mom. “It’s only healthy that you’d be sexually active.”
I almost spit out my quinoa and kale.
“Mom!” I say again.
“Oh come on, dear,” says my mom. “It’d do you some good to get laid.”
“Come on!” I say. “Why can’t you just be like other moms?”
My mom laughs.
We’ve had this conversation countless times before, about why she can’t be like other moms.
“I’m going up to my room,” I say, leaving my bowl of quinoa on the table.
I walk up the stairs and slam the door behind me.
Flopping on my bed, I look at the ceiling. I can’t wait to get out of here and get to college. I’ll be living in a dorm, living my own life, the way I want to live it.
It’s not that my parents are that weird. They’re not crazy or anything. They’re just a little different.
My dad’s an artist, and he sells some sculptures here and there. But my mom makes the majority of the money. She’s actually a professor of sociology at a local two-year college. She knows her stuff, too. She’s written books. Most of them are about the hippie culture of the ‘60s and ‘70s, especially compared to youth culture today.
Like I said, she knows her stuff. But that’s why I don’t understand why she’ll occasionally bring up stuff that I clearly don’t want to talk about.
My parents are more open than other parents, and I think that in a way I’ve reacted against them. I’ve become more closed off because of them. It’s sort of like typical teenage rebellion, but in reverse.
My mom, as a sociology professor, says it’s completely normal.
About what we were talking about… Hell, I’m actually dying to lose my virginity. It’s just that only recently have any guys even looked at me admiringly, let alone asked me out, and I’m still getting used to that.
It’s not that I don’t want to have sex. It’s just that I don’t want to talk about it with my mom. That’s pretty normal, right?
I mean, I know it’s not like she wants to hear the details or anything. Nothing weird like that.
My parents have a bit of a reputation around town. I mean, how can they not? My dad drives an old VW camper van that he fixed up himself in the driveway. He uses it to cart around pieces for his sculptures. The van is painted just like all those vans in the ‘70s, with a huge peace sign on it.
I always hated being dropped off at school in that thing. I always cringed.
If I’d known or talked to more people at school, I’m sure I would have gotten a lot of questions about them. But since the only person I talked to much was Leah, she’s the only one who really asked me about them.
“So do they like smoke pot all the time and stuff?” she’d say.
“No!” I’d say. “They’ve never done anything like that in front of me. I mean, they’ve told me they used drugs as kids. They were pretty open about it, and told me if I wanted to experiment, that it was up to me. They said they never want to tell me what to do.”
There’s a knock at my door.
“Honey?” says my mom, opening the door a crack.
“Come in,” I say.
My mom enters. Her hair, a big mess of blonde dreadlocks, enters first.
“Honey,” she says, sitting down on the edge of my bed. “That last thing I wanted to do was make you feel uncomfortable. You know that, right?”
I nod.
“When you decide to… you know… that’s up to you. If you don’t want to talk about guys with me, that’s fine.”
“OK,” I say.
There’s a pause.
I start to feel guilty about making her possibly feel bad.
“Thanks, Mom,” I say.
“Sure. Oh, one more thing. There’s a… delivery for you.”
“A delivery?”
“Hang on, let me get it. It just came.”
My mom leaves the room. She comes back holding a rose with a fancy looking envelope.
“I won’t ask,” says my mom, putting the rose and the envelope on my bed. She gives me a wink and leaves the room, closing the door behind her.
A rose? I’ve never gotten a rose before in my life. Or any flowers, for that matter.
I didn’t go to prom, or any of the school dances.
I sit up in bed and grab the rose. I hold it to my nose, inhaling deeply, savoring the scent. It’s been a long time since I’ve smelled a rose, and it’s amazing how incredible the scent is.
I open the card quickly. Perhaps too quickly.
I have a hunch who it’s from… Noah.
But could it really be? The guy that I secretly drooled over this last year? The guy that I might have… possibly fantasized about. The guy who never looked my way, not once.
He’s really writing me a card, accompanied by a rose?
“Looking forward to tonight,” reads the card.
Noah signed his name.
That’s it, that’s all the card says, but it sends a warm feeling rushing through my body.
I have to tell someone about this. I can’t believe Noah is sending me cards like this. It’s crazy, right? I mean, we just met, and we talked for, what, five minutes? Maybe even less.
Maybe he sees something special in me. Maybe he can see past this shy exterior. Maybe he sees that we’d be good together.
My mind suddenly fills with images of the two of us doing all sorts of things together—going to the movies, enjoying a romantic beach getaway vacation. Even getting married.
Now that’s taking it too far. Even I realize that. But a girl can dream, can’t she?
I mean, it’s not like I really want to marry him, but…
I have to tell someone. I grab my phone and send a text to Leah.
“You’ll never guess what just happened,” I say, tapping away at the screen, which has a big crack running through the middle of it. I tell her all about the card and the rose.
To my surprise, my phone rings.
Normally, Leah just writes me back. She usually prefers texting to speaking on the phone. Some kind of anxiety thing—I’m not sure what it is.
“What’s up?” I say. “Did you get my message?” It’s hard to contain the joy in my voice. But I never ha
ve news about guys to share with Leah, and I’m excited to do so.
“Hey,” says Leah. “Yeah, I got it…”
“What’s up?” I say, noticing the way her voice sounds. She sounds serious, rather than happy for me.
But she’s not the type to be jealous. She’s had a bunch of boyfriends over the years. And guys are always hitting on her and asking her out at the mall, at the movie theater, at all sorts of places. She’s just got one of those bodies, I suppose. And a way of looking at guys that makes them approach her.
“There’s something you should know,” says Leah.
“What?” I say. “Please don’t tell me he’s sent this same note to like a dozen other girls… Because I’m so excited right now I feel like my…”
“I hate to be the one to break it to you,” says Leah. “But, yeah… He’s well known for sending that exact same note, that exact same rose. Of course, he always gets his way. He always gets in their pants. Recently, he’s been going after college girls exclusively. Sorry to be the one to tell you.”
My heart sinks down to my knees.
“No,” I say. “Thanks for telling me.” But my voice sounds hollow and strange.
I find one guy who seems to like me, and it turns out he’s already intending to just use me? Already he’s treating me just like all the others.
Noah
There’s a lot on my mind right now.
The party’s tonight. I’m getting laid tonight. Chris is coming home tomorrow, with his legs blown off. And I’m supposed to go visit him.
When I was buying the rose, talking to the florist, I had a brief doubt in my mind—maybe today’s not the day to be trying to get laid. Maybe today’s not the day to buy the rose I always send out to make sure I seal the deal. After all, Chris lost his legs.
But what would Chris do, if he were in my situation? He’d go out and party. He’d go out and get laid. He’d be out living life, that’s what he’d be doing.
Chris would want me to do this. He’d want me to continue doing what it is I’m doing. He’d want me to be out in the thick of it, away from the bullshit, doing what matters.
So in a way, I do it for Chris. That sounds weird, maybe, but you know what I mean. I’ve got to keep the memory of him being a complete badass alive and well. If I have to up my game and up my intensity, then that’s what I’ll do.
SEAL'd Lips: A Secret Baby Romance Page 2