Unexpected Consequences

by Sloan Johnson

  I’m addicted to the way my body responds to his every touch, immediately launching me to the edge of a cliff. Over and over, Zeke drags the flat of his tongue through my folds, my hips thrusting off the bed, needing more friction to put me over the edge. I feel him laugh without pulling away from my body, sending shockwaves throughout my core.

  “Zeke, please,” I beg him breathlessly. He moves, hovering over me as he reaches for a condom. After quickly opening the packet and rolling the latex over his steel erection, he aligns his body and mine, his fingertips grazing my cheeks as he stares down into my eyes. “I love you,” I whisper again, knowing I’ll never get tired of saying these three little words to him.

  He slowly eases the tip of his cock inside of me, taunting me as he stalls before giving me what I’m dying to feel. I want all of him with all of me. “I’m not sure I’ll ever stop loving you, Mary,” he professes as he slides deeper, not stopping this time until he’s filling me.

  Together in the darkness, our bodies find a languid, steady rhythm, sealing our fate to one another without a single word.

  As a therapist, not a day goes by when I’m not telling someone that they have to face their problems head on. Avoidance is not an effective coping mechanism. I silence my phone as it starts ringing, unable to heed my own advice. Zeke has been calling me for the past five days and I haven’t been able to face him.

  The nightmares I had after my dad died are back. Except now, I’m not watching him T-bone a car filled with teenagers on their way home from a basketball game, it’s Zeke behind the wheel. He’s the one flying through the windshield, landing in a field while the teens scream for someone to help them.

  Mary has been meeting me at the hospital for lunch every day. Today, she didn’t even bother asking me if I was going to sit down with Zeke. I think she has resigned herself to the fact that what we had is gone. That idea hurts more than it should.

  As I walk past the dining room, a pang of guilt hits me. In all of this, Mary is the real victim. She was so certain that the three of us could take on the world and made us believe as well. She shared her heart with us, without reservation, and gave us the strength to do the same. The pink roses I gave her as a symbol of my love sit dried out in their vase at the center of the table. They’re driving me crazy, the only blight in an otherwise immaculate space, but I can’t bring myself to throw them away.

  I think it’s a sort of punishment to myself. Seeing them every time I walk through my house is a reminder that I have no business trying to open up to someone. I promised myself the morning of my dad’s funeral that I was strong enough to make it on my own, that I wouldn’t rely on anyone else. The bastard is probably looking up at me from Hell, laughing his ass off that I’m now miserable once again.

  I look out the window when the sound of someone pounding on my front door jerks me out of my internal battle. I don’t recognize the small green Mazda in the driveway.

  “Debora, what can I do for you?” I ask, confused as to why Zeke’s mom is on my front porch.

  I’m so caught off guard that it doesn’t take much for the petite woman to push her way past me. I can’t help but laugh at the fact that she doesn’t wait to be invited in. The move reminds me of something someone else I know would do. Fuck, Mary’s right. I need to talk to him.

  “We need to talk,” she informs me, motioning for me to take a seat in the living room. There’s something about her demeanor that makes me comply without challenge. Nothing like being bossed around in your own home by your ex’s mother.

  “Can I get you something to drink?” I ask, lifting myself off the couch. No matter what Debora might think right now, this is still my house and she’s my guest.

  “No, this won’t take long.” She sits in the Queen Anne chair along the wall, spine perfectly straight, one leg crossed over the other daintily. “I have some things I need to say to you.”

  “Okay?” I don’t have the heart to tell her there’s no point in her being here. Maybe, at some point in this strange exchange, she’ll tell me how she found out where I live, now that I think about it.

  “I think I might have made a mistake,” she confesses. When I look in her direction, she diverts her eyes to her lap, picking a piece of likely non-existent lint from her pencil skirt. While I wait for her to continue, I take a look at her features. Zeke looks so much like his mother that it hurts. I wish he was the one sitting with me, not Debora.

  That’s on you, he’s been trying to call and you won’t answer.

  “I don’t think I need to tell you what a shock it was for me to learn about my son’s relationship with you, in the middle of our family reunion no less.” She purses her lips, and I can almost seeing her trying to think of what she wants to say next. “I’m still not pleased about his preferences, but my son was right. It’s not my place to judge him.”

  “Mrs. Reed, while I appreciate--”

  “Please, let me finish.” She leans in, taking a deep breath. “I know you and my son aren’t speaking right now. Seeing how miserable he was last night at dinner was a wake-up call to me.”

  My brain races to process everything in that last sentence. I hate the fact that he’s miserable. I can tell myself it’s his own doing, but I’m just as much to blame. Even if we can’t move forward, he deserves to know why I can’t deal with certain things. And he had dinner with his mother? How did that come to be?

  “He loves you, Jeff.” She reaches to place her hand on my knee. It makes sense to me now why Zeke was so nervous about telling his mom about us. The way she’s comforting me, even though this can’t be easy for her, makes me wish I had a mother like her in my own life. Someone to worry about me, even when she doesn’t agree with the choices I make in my life. “He wouldn’t tell me what happened, but you need to know that he loves you. I’m biased enough to assume that you’re the one who hurt him. Zeke’s a wonderful boy, but he’s always been a handful.”

  I let out a huff of laughter at the truth in her words. Life with Zeke was rarely easy, but he is pretty damn amazing. “I think we both hurt each other,” I admit, looking out the front window. “There are things I never told Zeke about my past. Big things. And I don’t know if we can find a middle-ground at this point.”

  Feeling her tiny hand still resting on my knee, seeing the affection in her rich brown eyes, I want to open up to her in a way I never have to anyone. I want to think, even if just for a minute, that everything will work out and this woman could someday be a mother-figure in my own life. Even at almost thirty-six years old, I still wonder how things would have been different had my own mother not walked out, leaving me behind. What it would be like to have someone to call in times like these. But Debora Reed can’t be that person for me. At least not now, when there’s so much I can’t tell her for fear of accidentally betraying her son’s trust. If she doesn’t know what went wrong, I can’t be certain that she knows about his arrest. And I won’t be the one to tell her that.

  “Do you love him?” she asks, nothing but compassion in her soft voice. Now, I look directly into her eyes, wanting her to know that I’m speaking the truth.

  “More than I thought possible.”

  “If your love is true, I have no doubt the three of you will find a way to get past this,” she assures me. “Please, don’t give up on my son.” Her plea is sincere.

  If she can get past the beliefs she has held for over fifty years, maybe I will be able to overcome those that have jaded me for nearly twenty.

  “Hey, Uncle Zeke!” Tasha squeals when she walks out of the nursery. She’s been calling me this all week and it’s getting a bit annoying. In a few months, when she has Ava in her arms, it’ll be cute. Right now, she’s doing it to get a rise out of me.

  “Leave him alone, Tasha. I’m pretty sure that stick is so far up his ass we’re going to have to have it surgically removed at this point.” Had I know Tommy and Holly were going to be here, I might have stayed home. I’m not in the mood to deal with him today. I
know he’s dying to ask about dinner with my mother, but my head is still spinning from the evening.

  “Shut the fuck up,” I grumble, flopping down on the couch. The only good thing about being around four of my best friends is I’m not going to be a fucking pansy and call Jeff thirty-six times in an hour even though I know he won’t answer.

  “So, Zeke… how was dinner with Debora?” Holly yells from the kitchen. I seriously hate my life right now. I should love that everyone is interested in what’s going on with me, but damn, I don’t want to do this touchy-feely shit today. I want to enjoy the baseball game with the guys while the ladies go shopping.

  “Fine.” I turn on the television, hoping that if I turn up the volume loud enough she won’t press.

  “You and your mom are talking again?” Dylan asks, kicking up the footrest on his recliner.

  “Yep.” New plan for the day, see how long I can go giving them one word answers.

  “So, what did she have to say?” Tommy asks, handing a beer to Dylan and a soda to me. I haven’t had anything to drink since the night I got pulled over. It’s not that I think I have a problem or anything like that. It’s more like the taste of it churns my stomach because I now associate alcohol with the night I pushed Jeff away for good. “Are you still going to burn in hell because you like cock?”

  “Nope.”

  “Oooh, I think Zeke wants to play twenty questions!” Right about now, I would give anything to have bitchy Tasha back. This perky shit is so unlike her, it kind of scares me. “Who’s next?” The girl is seriously bouncing on the arm of the recliner.

  “Tasha, why do you insist on antagonizing him?” Mary asks as she walks in the front door. She leans over, giving me a kiss on the cheek. At least she isn’t treating me like shit on the bottom of her shoe. I haven’t had the stones to ask, but I’m pretty sure she’s trying to juggle time with me and Jeff right now. I don’t expect anything different, there’s no reason they can’t see one another just because he won’t talk to me.

  “Um, because it’s fun,” Tasha says sarcastically, crossing her eyes and sticking out her tongue at me. I can’t help but crack a smile. Tasha knows damned well I can’t stay pissed at her for long. “Spill it, Reed. What’s the deal with your mom?”

  Mary sits down next to me, wrapping her arms around my waist. She looks nervous as she waits for me to tell her what was said last night. When I told her that my mother had finally agreed to talk to me, Mary offered to cancel her girls’ night in at Holly’s house so she could be there for me. To say she was upset when I refused to let her come is an understatement, but I felt it was something I had to do on my own. I can’t rely on her to be a buffer between me and my family if we have any hope for a future together.

  “She apologized for how she reacted to finding out I’m bi,” I say quietly, focusing all my attention on Mary. “And then she ripped me a new ass when she figured out that Jeff and I aren’t together anymore.”

  I’d laugh at the way everyone is trying to pick their jaws up off the floor, but I get it. I thought I was about to fall out of my chair when she told me I had better find a way to fix whatever I had screwed up. I tried telling her that that is what I want to do but Jeff won’t fucking let me, and she told me I need to try harder. At this point, I’m not sure what she expects me to do, short of hiring a sky-writer to draw a message in the sky outside his office window. If I thought it would work, I’d be tempted to try it.

  “Wow,” Tommy whistles. “That’s about the last thing I expected you to say. But it’s a good thing.”

  “Yeah, it’s fucking awesome. Except for the fact that I’ve done everything I can and Jeff refuses to talk to me.” Mary leans in closer to me, looking up at me with those big green eyes of hers. I know this look, it’s the one that screams ‘please don’t be mad at me’. “What?” I ask her, trying to keep my voice down.

  Sign number two that she’s worried she has done something that’s going to upset me, she’s scrunching up one side of her face. “Um, your mom might have called the house this morning and asked me to meet her for coffee.”

  Great, now the two of them are going to tag-team me. Maybe beat me to a pulp for being a fucking idiot. “And?”

  “She asked me if I knew how to find Jeff,” she whispers. I look up and see everyone staring at us. They’re not even pretending that they’re not trying to overhear what she’s saying to me. “And I gave her his address.”

  “You what?” This keeps getting better and better. It’s like I’m back in high school, when my mom stormed over to Darla’s house, demanding to know why she broke up with me. And then she wonders why I don’t introduce her to the people in my life. “This isn’t good. Why would you do that? I’m sure he’ll love the fact that my mommy is showing up on his doorstep when he won’t talk to me.”

  “Z, you need to chill,” Dylan warns me. “It’s not Mary’s fault that your mother is one of the pushiest, most persuasive women to walk the face of the Earth.”

  Yep, I’m screwed.

  My hands are shaking as I work to put together a simple lasagna. One way or another, everything will be resolved tonight. Well, maybe not completely, but Jeff called me this afternoon and told me he is going to come over after work tonight, asking me if I could have dinner ready.

  Just before we hung up, he asked me if I was the one who gave Debora his address. I had been sweating all weekend¸ worried that he would be upset, but that woman has a way of cornering someone when she wants information. Luckily, when I explained her impromptu invitation to meet her for coffee and the ensuing conversation, all he did was laugh. I didn’t get any details out of him, but he said it was completely understandable if she was half as smooth with me as she was with him.

  “Honey, I’m home!” Zeke sings as he walks in the door. I wonder if Jeff called him as well because this is a side of Zeke I haven’t seen since the night he got pulled over. It’s a welcome change, but still confusing.

  “You’re in a good mood. Have a good day?” I don’t want to say anything that will tip him off if he doesn’t know Jeff is going to be here in an hour. I poke my head out of the kitchen as he passes by, quickly kissing him before he heads toward the bedroom.

  “Unbelievable day,” he says, his smile wide enough to show the dimples on either side of his face. “We had a meeting with Jon and Colton today and they asked if we’ll take on some of their management duties. Apparently, they’ve been impressed with our work so far and Jon’s sick of trying to do it on his own.”

  “That’s great! But how will that work once they go home?” I turn my attention back to making dinner. I still have to cut the vegetables for a salad and get the bread in the oven. I’ve never thought of myself as being the homemaker type, and it’s probably too soon to be thinking about it now, but I could see myself settling into a life like this. Waiting for the two men I love to get home from work, having dinner on the table so we can eat as a family.

  “Here’s the thing,” Zeke says, returning to the kitchen when he realizes I’m not behind him. “Rain has it in her head that they need to move to Wisconsin. Apparently, Jared’s family is from Freeport and she’s a bit infatuated with the area. Since none of them really have ties to anywhere else, she was able to convince them to all come this way.”

  “That’s awesome,” I say cheerfully. It’s been nice having another friend in the area and Rain fit in from the first time she hung out with our little group. And with her and Tasha both due in the next few months, the babies will have little playmates. “What about touring?”

  I know I sound like a pessimist, but this seems too good to be true. I’m, hopefully, hours away from having my life back in some semblance of order, I’m not sure I’m ready to watch Zeke get on a tour bus for parts unknown any time soon. And I can’t expect Dylan to take on that type of commitment after Ava is born.

  “For a while, they’re going to lay low. Record some music, do local shows. Rain won’t be up for traveling before the baby is
born and she wants to have some time being a normal mom before they tour again.” Zeke’s so excited about where things are headed for their company that he hasn’t even noticed that I’m cooking. And yes, that is something to take note of because I’m usually the queen of take-out.

  “What smells so good?” he finally asks after rambling for another five minutes about how they’re doing things now that he never even imagined he would get to do.

  “Lasagna,” I answer, turning to put the garlic bread in the oven. “Go, take your shower before it’s done.” I love him to pieces, but it’s apparent that he and Jon went for a run. It’s a new thing for Zeke, but I think it’s good for him. And it has obviously been bonding time, seeing as Jon is turning over the bulk of the business operations to Zeke and Dylan.

  I stand outside Zeke’s door, debating whether I should open the door or knock and wait to be let in. It feels odd to knock when this was basically home for most of the year, but it hasn’t been for over a week now. Not since the night I left Zeke at the curb and drove off. I decide to let myself in, hoping it will cause less of a scene. If I’m already in the condo, Zeke can’t slam the door in my face.

  “Hey,” Mary says when she sees me. “Zeke’s still in the shower.” I stuff my hands in my pockets, feeling incredibly uncertain. Mary washes her hands, drying them as she makes her way to the entryway. “Don’t just stand there, get comfortable.”

  With every passing second, I start to feel a bit more at ease. Mary pulls dinner out of the oven and joins me in the living room. She curls up to my side, her feet tucked under her body as the six o’clock news starts. If I don’t think about Zeke in the other room, and the fact that there’s a good chance he’s going to be the one turning me away tonight, it’s easy to feel like things are getting back to normal.