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He jumped up and down. “Yeah!”
Feeling conflicted, I smiled. “Okay.”
Bridget’s voice came from behind me. “What’s going on in here?”
I looked her up and down, taking notice of her wind-blown, light brown locks. “Uh…we were just having a man-to-man chat.”
“Oh, really.” She looked skeptical. “What’s the razor doing out? And there’s water all over the sink.”
“It’s fine, Bridget. Everything’s under control.”
She looked down at her son. “Brendan, I thought you were supposed to be doing your reading homework.”
“Sorry, Mom.”
“Go to your room, please.”
After Brendan ran to his room, I followed Bridget out to the kitchen.
“What was he really doing in there?” she asked.
“I told him I wouldn’t tell you.”
She glared at me. “Tell me, Simon.”
“Alright, don’t tell him I told you, but…he was trying to shave.”
Her mouth dropped open. “What?”
“Yeah.”
She laughed a little. “Oh my God.”
“It’s alright. We discussed it. Someone at school told him he would grow hair if he shaved.”
“Let me tell you, I don’t know what I’m going to do with a boy…especially the older he gets.”
“You’ll do just fine. You certainly have up until this point. Just take one day at a time.”
“I’m glad he didn’t cut himself. Thank you for intervening. I guess I know I can’t trust him to be alone in his room while I work in the yard.”
I paused, unsure of whether to tell her the next thing that came to mind. “He said he remembered his dad shaving. I think that might have had something to do with why he wanted to do it.”
Bridget sighed and nodded her head in thought. “He doesn’t remember too many things about Ben very clearly, just odd things here and there. His dad worked a lot, so that didn’t help. Of course, now I’m the one working all the time.”
I leaned against the counter, moving in a bit closer to her. “My parents worked a lot, too. But I never blamed them for it. It just made me appreciate the time we had together more.”
“What did your parents do?”
“Actually, my father’s an ophthalmologist. He still has a practice in Leeds. My mother’s a secondary school teacher.”
“Wow. Did you have a good childhood?”
“I did. It was great up until a certain point.”
She kept looking at me in a way that encouraged me to continue.
Tell her.
“I don’t…I don’t really talk about this. It’s hard for me.” Glancing out the window, I continued, “The other night you asked me why I wanted to become a doctor, and I told you it was because I wanted to save people…”
“Yeah…I figured there might have been something more to that.”
“Yes.” I nodded then took a deep breath in. “Calliope and I had a mutual friend named, Blake. We were like the Three Musketeers, and Blake was like a brother to me. We were on vacation at Calliope’s parents’ lake house in Scotland when we were sixteen. She’d invited us both along. We had the bright idea to take her father’s small boat out in the middle of the night. There were only two life jackets. We agreed that Calliope should get one. Blake insisted that he was the better swimmer and told me to just take the other one. I don’t know why I agreed. I shouldn’t have let him get on the boat without a life jacket. We got pretty far out, the water was choppy…and we capsized. Blake went under, and I tried everything to find him. But it was dark and murky.” I stopped to close my eyes for a moment before saying, “They didn’t find him for three days.” I was starting to choke up but managed to control it.
“Here I was thinking that you knew nothing about loss,” she whispered.
“It’s not exactly the same as your situation, of course, but it’s certainly shaped my life. Becoming a doctor was my way of trying to make up for not being able to save him. Not a day goes by when I don’t think about what he would be like now, and not a day goes by where I don’t blame myself for letting him get on the boat like that.”
“I’m so sorry.”
Without hesitation, she reached for me and pulled me into an embrace. I could feel her heart beating against mine. Her ample tits felt so good pressed against my chest. In fact, it felt better than anything I could remember. My hands slid down her back and stopped short of her ass—as much as I wanted to touch it. I felt my erection growing by the second.
She looked up. God…the way she was looking at me. Her eyes were begging for more. No longer giving a fuck about any consequences, I slowly leaned in, readying to taste her lips.
The pitter-patter of footsteps coming down the hall stopped me in my tracks. I quickly turned toward the sink, pretending to wash the dishes as Brendan entered the room.
