As I read her text my lips tug into a smile at seeing her immediate reply. Just as I’m about to text back another text from Jude pops up.
Jude “The Hair”
Thanks dude. She texted, here’s to hoping I get something out of this
I grimace at his remark. He didn’t seem that selfish when I first approached him but I know Celeste will put him in his place, then swiftly tell me off. Or maybe I’m just reading too much into a singular text and they hit it off right away. From the brief conversation I had with him, he seemed to tick off a lot, if not all, of the boxes on Celeste’s list: Financially stable, intellectual, goal oriented, —and annoyingly—very handsome. Physically they work like a match made in heaven. I inadvertently picture his hands roaming her curves, pulling up the hem of one of her sundresses. Her lips parting on a gasp as his teeth graze her soft neck.
I give my head a shake and rake a hand down my face. I’m just sexually frustrated and obviously just putting the two people I was just talking to together in my mind. Nothing else. The idea of Celeste and Judebeing intimatethough…
I push off the counter trying to shake all the swirling thoughts out of my brain and join everyone else in the living room. I try to jump into the conversation but images of Celeste and Jude kissing erode my ability to form words. I don’t have feelings for Celeste and I’m certainly not jealous of Jude or his beautiful hair.
I call it an early night and walk to my apartment a few streets over from Rick and Vic’s place. By the time I flop into bed, I toss and turn, unable to settle my mind. I roll over and grab my phone, scrolling Instagram. I find Celeste’s profile, my finger hovering over the follow button. I bite my lip and quickly press down before losing my bravado.
I continue scrolling for another few minutes before getting a notification that she’s followed me back. A smirk works its way onto my face. I close the app and stare at my new background photo. It’s one Celeste took of us that night we went to Maria’s ice cream shoppe. Celeste has her pink tongue sticking out with one eye closed and I have my head tilted, chin almost resting on top of her. I look over the photo, remembering the electricity I felt when we were so close, her hand bunched in my sweater when she got scared. She got scared and reached forme.
My mind floods with an image of her hand traveling south, unbuttoning my jeans and grasping me in her delicate grip. Would she bite her lower lip like I’ve seen her do before? My cock stiffens at the thought of those perfect lips. I let my hand slip under my boxers, stroking myself slowly. I can’t tell what’s got me more turned on, the idea of her full lips on me, or using them to tell me off. I work my hand faster, my head thrown back against my pillow, envisioning Celeste beside me, wrapped in my sheets, her fingers working me into a frenzy. I wonder what she likes. Would she tease the fuck out of me, edging me for hours before finally giving me release? Or would she want me to take that off her hands and relinquish control to me? I imagine tying her up to my bed and running my tongue all over her body, teasing her.
I’m as hard as a rock and pre-cum beads the slit of my cock. My breath comes in fast pants and I feel heat tingle in the base of my spine as my balls tighten. A final image of Celeste, the look on her face when I told her she didn’t need to wearheels to make her legs look sexy, floods my thoughts. The slight blush that rose to her cheeks has me groaning. I picture myself, instead of walking away in that moment, pushing her against her stupid little car and worshipping her senselessly from behind. The image does me in, spurts of cum land on my stomach in rhythmic succession. Once the waves of pleasure end, I look down at the mess I made on myself and toss my head back with a groan, this time from frustration. I’m ill-prepared for the mess, like a teenager with no self-control.
Fuck. Time for another cold shower.
TEN
Earl Grey
Celeste
I lay splayed out,head to foot board, belly down on my comforter. It’s only just past the dinner hour but I’m exhausted. Mom and I have been fixing things around the house all morning and then out thrifting, only stopping for my quick lunch date with political science guy. It ended quickly after he started quizzing me on the democratic history of our nation and what makes a fitting first lady. Apparently, as he noted, I didn’t cross my ankles correctly.
My fingers just finished typing out a message to Dominic before they start cramping from holding a gardening shovel all morning. I tried to prepare a meal for Mom before my date but she had more energy than I did today. It felt good to see her shine. She calls me her sunshine but truthfully, I’ve always shined brighter because of her. Just as mother flamingos losetheir pink colouring to nourish their babies, my mother gave me every ounce of energy she could muster. Even on days when she could barely get out of bed, she’d have a craft for us to do together under the blankets or a movie ready to play. She’s the definition of resiliency and truthfully, the reason I went into medical sciences. Seeing your mother sick for the majority of your lifetime really puts things into perspective. She always said, if you’re able to do something good, then do it. So here I am, able as ever, working my ass off to become a cancer researcher.
I close my eyes as I relive that day, Diagnosis Day, or Doomsday as I call it. It’s the day when every rock in my foundation came tumbling down.
To be honest, the entire day is fuzzy around the edges in my memory. I don’t remember the facts, just the feelings. Anxiety, nervousness, then shock. It was soon followed by immense sadness, anger, more shock, and then hopelessness. Even on her hardest day, my mom looked at me and smiled.Smiled.As if the world wasn’t crumbling around us, as if her body and husband weren’t betraying her, she smiled.
Her words right then are one of the few things I remember vividly, “Sunshine, this won’t stop us. We won’t give up today.”
We won’t give up today.She said that almost every day afterward for years. It got us through so much. It got us througheverything.Some days were harder of course, some mornings I could hear my mom hiding in the shower, her sobs mixing down the drain with the soapy water. She thought I couldn’t hear her, but I did. The first time I sat outside the bathroom door and cried right along with her.
For what we gained that day, and what we lost. A family torn apart, so quickly, if you blinked you would have missed it. The next few times I heard her cry in the shower, I went and made a tea for her to have afterward. She always said tea healed the soul. Every time I heard the shower turn on it stirred determination inme, a renewed energy to do something for my mom. Something to make her feel better; something to eat or setting up a craft for us to do together as she had done for me so many times. Sometimes I would just try to get a chore done in the time it took for her to finish bathing. The one thing I never did was go into the bathroom. I knew from that very first time that the reason she cried in there, and not out here, was for me. She was protecting me, even in her breakdown. I didn’t want to fracture that veil between us, that hung so carefully and delicately. We shared so much that I didn’t think it was fair to take this moment from her and insert myself in it.
I sigh in my reverie and look out to the hallway beyond my room, towards that very bathroom. Its deep rust brown tiles dating itself. Together we weren’t incredibly handy so my mom leaned into the vintage theme and threw in a small shag carpet to use as a bathmat and a couple hanging plants. Unfortunately, the rest of the house also hasn’t been updated in decades. While we had gone on a painting binge after Mom’s successful first round of chemotherapy, there is constant upkeep a house this old needs. The plumbing, the siding, some windows needing replacing…it has been just her and I since Diagnosis Day. Searching up how to fix things ourselves, DIY-ing everything we could with the limited income of disability payments. We were very lucky to come into some money from an old aunt that left a chunk of her wealth to my mother, knowing our situation and not wanting to leave us without. Unfortunately, that’s where the help ended.
My mom was a carefree spirit that held boundaries harder than a cement wall. She left her family as fast as she could in her teen years, finding my dad along the way. They were together for years before they had me. It seemed like everything was perfect, until it wasn’t.
It wasn’t until years later, once I was older, that she divulged the details. I had been a happy first grader, eager to please and as quick as a whip. My parents were happy, but decided to try for another child. It was apparently all my dad could talk about, think about,beabout. He would stay up late with her into the night talking her ear off about becoming the perfect family, they’d have a boy and we’d be complete; as if we weren’t enough just as we were.
Looking back on it, it wasn’t fair at all to put that kind of pressure on my mom, making passive comments that described his ideal life and it all rested on her shoulders, or rather, on her uterus. They tried for months. Then a year passed. Even though I know now that baby making isn’t always a coupling of love and joy, it was clear from my mom’s retelling that they were growing distant from the absence of a positive pregnancy test.
Finally, almost a year and a half after they first began trying, my mom became pregnant. Suddenly my dad was even more fixated on having a boy and creating this “traditional” family, saying we were finally complete, finally enough. I’d seen him cry more happy tears during those first couple months than ever before.
But then it all changed. A neighbour picked me up from school one day, dropping me off at the hospital and hastily walking me to an urgent care room. The first thing I saw were my parents weeping, then a doctor patting my dad’s back softly before excusing himself and walking out. The fuzziness of my memories begins here. I was old enough to remember but perhaps the trauma of seeing my parents so despondent blocked the memory from my psyche, blurring the edges and wiping the canvas of details.
My mom had lost the baby. Then, upon a pelvic exam, followed by further tests, she was officially diagnosed with ovarian cancer. The doctors came back in to tell her she neededsurgery to remove one of her ovaries. Once my dad’s tears dried up, he raged. My mom recalled how he kicked a garbage can down the hallway outside her room and security threatened to walk him out. I do remember however, him looking back at us. My mom in her hospital gown, face puffy and red with grief, her hands holding mine as I stood sentry beside her bed with my sparkly pink princess backpack still strapped to my tiny body.
I watched as he shook his head, brows furrowed in pain as he said, “I’m sorry June, I can’t do this.” And he walked. Down the hall, out of the hospital, and out of our lives. Permanently.
The grief of losing his unborn child, the grief of losing hisidealfamily, and the unforeseen future with a cancer diagnosis had my dad walk away from us forever. He had lost his child, but Mom, she had lost two members of her family that day. By the time we got home most of his things were gone, the leftover clothes and miscellaneous crap was strewn about the house. Not only was he an asshole to leave us at our worst, but he left us in an emotional and physical mess. From that day on Mom declared she’d rid herself of the cancer in her body and in her home. We spent weeks slowly but surely weeding out all his belongings and donating them. By the end of it I only had a single photograph of the three of us left.
