AllFreeNovel
Share Us
There was no denying it any longer--I was falling head over heels in love with Ricky Buckman.
Chapter Seven
Ricky
I poured myself a whiskey and sat down on the couch to take it easy for a moment; the sweet meal that Julie had just fixed was resting nicely in my stomach. She was an amazing cook. It was possibly the best spaghetti I’d ever tasted. I figured I’d get to that at some point. It had been a while since I’d had someone cook for me. Amanda and I used to split the cooking duties. She tolerated what I fixed. I’ve never been a budding chef, but I can warm up things in the oven like nobody’s business.
I turned on the television and flipped it around until I found a ball game. I wasn’t really interested and turned it off after a few minutes. I felt weird, a bit strange. I was not used to these feelings. I was tired after the day I’d had, but after spending time with Julie, I was really excited. I was almost floating a bit and I had a hard time sitting still.
I wanted to rush after her and beg her to stay for a while, talk and have a few drinks, maybe watch a movie together. And if things progressed, we could have made sweet love to each other. Wow, I couldn’t believe how much I felt for this woman I’d barely met. She was wonderful in the position I need filled, and now I was seeing how much more she could add to my life.
But none of that would have been professional or appropriate. Then again, when had I given a damn about such things? The old me, the guy who had met Amanda when we first entered our whirlwind courtship and gotten married after what most would consider a very brief dating period, had been lost inside of me somewhere along the line. Mostly right after my wife had died.
I felt guilty about having these feelings for another woman. But I knew it was wrong to feel guilty. Amanda wouldn’t have wanted me to put my life on hold because she was no longer here. She would live on in my heart forever and always be close to me, but I was not meant to be alone. If the roles were reversed and I’d met my untimely end at such a young age, I would have wanted her to move on and be happy as well.
And Julie had gotten under my skin. She was the type of woman that I’d been dreaming about (on the rare occasion that I did dream). Usually, I would wake up covered in sweat from those voyages into my subconscious. Sometimes they would be erotic, and other times those dreams would be just vague and even mundane. A lot of the time they didn’t even make any sense.
“Wow, my head is full of twisted things tonight,” I said raising the whiskey glass to my lips and taking a nice, full drink. It was one of my few vices, and after a long day I enjoyed that sweet burn of it going down.
Julie’s beautiful face was stuck like a flash after flash repeating in my head. Little snippets of things she said, of the way she did things—she was different than Amanda had been. In fact, in a lot of ways they were opposites, which was another reason I was stunned to be having so many feelings for her already.
Or was I just lonely? Was that it? I was lonely, and Julie checked enough of the right boxes for my brain to create that attraction in my life and it was now causing me massive grief.
I laughed as I thought about it. She was my employee. I couldn’t stand the idea that I might mess things up and make her uncomfortable so that she started looking for another job. Zoe loved her. The two had a great bond already. It was so sweet that Zoe wanted Julie to do bedtime with
her.
I tried to work this out, but I decided that I needed to just talk to someone, if for no other reason than to get rid of some of the noise in my head. I grabbed my phone and called Ben.
“Hey, man,” Ben replied. “I was just thinking about you.”
“Should I be worried? Are you getting too attached to me?” I teased.
“That may be it. I might have to have that talk with Becky and tell her that our bromance has evolved.”
“I think she will be ok. Just let her down gently.”
Ben chuckled. “So, what’s going on? Surprised to hear from you this late.”
“Nothing, just bored. The house is too quiet. Kid’s asleep. Long day. You know, the usual.”
“Ah, I get that. I think that is one of the reasons I play pool late at night when everyone else is in bed. I’m a night owl but I hate when everything is so quiet. So, the clanging of the balls kind of keeps me company.”
“Right. I do not have the luxury of the pool table.”
“Well, you could get one of those smaller ones and put it in the garage, but you won’t park your precious pickup truck outside.”
“Hey, the pickup is my baby.”
“Well, that’s sad in itself. A grown man being so attached to an automobile. And it’s not even that great of a truck. How many miles are on that thing? A hundred thousand?”
“Ninety-eight. It’s a classic.”
“Nobody else thinks that,” Ben said.
I took another drink and sank deeper into my couch.
“So, how is Julie working out?” Ben asked.
