21.
Graham
Someone was knocking at the door.
I was lying in bed, half awake, enjoying how comfortable I was and having a rather convincing argument with myself that I should stay in bed a while longer. Then the knocking started. At first, I thought it might’ve been Chloe, but the knocking quickly morphed into banging, and I knew there was no way in hell it would be her.
“Hold on!” I shouted, throwing the sheets back, feeling fully awake—and irritated—now. If it was the fucking mailman with a package that was too big to fit in the mailbox, I was going to lose my shit.
But no, it was not the mailman; it was my mother.
“Hi! Good morning,” she said as I opened the door. I had to refrain myself from asking what the hell she was doing here. Why all the visits all of the sudden?
“Is there something wrong? Is there some sort of emergency I’m unaware of?”
My mother bustled in, looking around. Looking for clues of the presence of someone else, I knew immediately. “There’s no one else here,” I said. “Except now for you. What exactly is it that you want?”
“I’m here for a tattoo.”
I smiled thinly. “Ha ha, very funny. I don’t work out of my home, so you’re SOL, sorry. What are you actually here for?”
“I’m not just allowed to stop by? I haven’t been over here in ages. This is such an adorable little cottage.”
I stifled a yawn, wishing that I’d just ignored the banging on the door and stayed in bed. “I was thinking about running into you the other day at Lorraine’s,” my mother said. “Been thinking about it a lot, actually. She’s not the right girl for you. A mother knows these things.”
“Please. You know, despite all your talk about wanting grandchildren and all that shit, I have a feeling that it wouldn’t matter who the girl was—you wouldn’t approve.”
“That’s simply not true. I don’t think you realize how badly I want grandchildren. Even if it would make me feel old. But you need to be with someone who’s not ... how should I put this? So much of a goody-goody. She just seems so ... vanilla.”
“You don’t even know her. You met her for what? Five minutes? Less than that? And you think you know her?”
“I’m a good judge of character.”
I snorted. “Right. If by ‘good’ you mean ‘totally horrible.’”
“I’m just saying, Graham, that I don’t think she’s the right one for you.”
“Weren’t you just saying how you were going to be supportive of me? This doesn’t sound very supportive. You shouldn’t just get to drop that support because you suddenly don’t agree with me.”
“It’s like me and your father,” she said.
I held my hand up. “Just stop. I don’t need to hear anything about you and my father.”
She continued as though I hadn’t said anything. “If I had been a rich summer resident, or some tourist with a mansion out in California, do you think he would’ve just walked away like that? You bet your ass he wouldn’t have. But because I was a local girl he met at a strip club, he saw me as beneath him. Just a bit of fun for him, something that he thought he could just completely forget about once he got tired of it.”
I was tempted to put my fingers in my ears and start humming. “Really, Mom, just stop. I don’t need to hear your theories about this.”
“That’s exactly what he did, though he hadn’t been planning on you. Well, neither of us had. For a few days, I thought that this might be a turning point. You see, I actually really liked your father—he could make me laugh. I thought maybe that he was the man I’d been waiting to meet, and I’d be able to start on a different path, have the sort of life that I always imagined I’d have.”
“You could’ve had that,” I said. “It didn’t need to be dependent on some guy.”
She shot me a warning look. “I don’t need you to give me any feminist lecture.”
“It’s not actually a feminist lecture—it’s just common sense.”
“The point here being, I don’t want to see the same thing happen to you. These people are different than we are. They think different, they see the world differently. People like us, we’re disposable to them. They’re used to getting whatever they want, when they want it. Sure, your girl seems nice and charming, but that’s just because she hasn’t gotten bored with you yet. You’re like a novelty to her. Same way I was for your father.”
This sure as shit was not the fucking conversation I’d planned to start my day off with. I rubbed my temple, which was starting to throb.
“You know, Mom, as much as I appreciate this heart-to-heart, I’ve really got to get going. I’m late for an appointment.” This was a blatant lie and I was pretty sure she knew it, but I didn’t care.
*****
I went out and got two coffees, and then two chocolate croissants because they were fresh out of the oven and looked damn good. I didn’t know if Chloe would be down at the art center or not, but I figured I’d at least stop by and see. Her car was in fact there, so I parked next to her and walked inside. The lobby was quiet, and I managed to make it down the hallway to her studio without having to run in to any pretentious art people.
“Oh, hey!” she said when I stepped through the door, a smile lighting her face. “I wasn’t expecting to see you now.”
“I come bearing coffee. And chocolate croissants.” I put the pastry bag on the table and handed her one of the cups.
“You are the best,” she said. “This is exactly what I could use right about now.
She probably wasn’t trying to look smokin’ hot, but she did, in a pair of paint-spattered cutoffs and a curve-hugging, black tank top. Her hair was piled up on top of her head, wispy pieces falling across her face. She had a smear of dried clay on her cheek; I reached over and tried to wipe it away.
“How’s the work going?” I asked.
“There’s been some false starts,” she said, gesturing to the table where there were several pieces of clay that might’ve been something at one point but had been squashed back.
“So, you’re still going with the mermaid?”
“Yeah.” She took a sip of her coffee and set it down and went over to the sink and washed her hands. “But I feel like there’s supposed to be something else, too. You know, like if I just do the mermaid, that’s not enough.” She wiped her hands on her shorts and then came over and sat down.
I sat on the stool next to her and put my hand on her leg. “I’ve been thinking about you all morning,” I said.
She turned toward me, a smile on her face. “I’ve been thinking about you, too.” She leaned in and kissed me, and I felt her hand go down between my legs, where my dick was already half erect and getting harder. She unzipped my fly and then reached her hand into my pants.
“Whoa,” I said. I glanced toward the door, which was shut but definitely not locked. “Should we be doing this here ...?”
“I want to,” she said. “You were so good to me the other day ... I want to do this.”
Before I even had a chance to say anything else, she got down off the stool and was on her knees in front of me, her head in my lap.
What the fuck, but I meant that in the best way possible.
Did this somehow go from me bringing coffee and pastries to me getting a blow job?
It would seem so.
She held my dick in one hand and as she took me into her mouth. She sucked gently at first, with increasing pressure, taking more of me in until I swear I felt the back of her throat. Her mouth was so warm and wet and soft and this whole thing was such a surprise that if I wasn’t careful, I was going to unload and she’d just started less than a minute ago. I bit hard on the inside of my cheek to keep from making too much noise, and I affixed my eyes to the door, imagining any of the post-menopausal artists walking through the door in an attempt to take the edge off a bit. It worked, sort of, but then Chloe started to suck just on the head of my dick, working her hand up and down my shaft. I bit harder on my cheek, tasting blood, wanting the pain to be a diversion, but there wasn’t any way to slow this down now. I’d wrapped it up when we’d had sex, so while it was certainly good, there hadn’t been that skin-to-skin contact. Not like now. I gripped the edge of the table and gritted my teeth.
“I’m going to come,” I managed to gasp out, in case she wanted to pull up before that happened. But she either didn’t hear me or didn’t want to; the climax hit, my balls felt tight, my perineum contracted, and I came right in her mouth. “Goddamn.”
Chloe rocked back on her heels and then stood up. “I’ve never done that before,” she said.
I shook my head. “I don’t believe you.”
“I haven’t!”
“Well, that was quite impressive for a first time, then.”
I stood up and put myself back in my pants. Right as I was zipping up my fly, the door opened and one of the women that I’d seen the very first day I’d come here stuck her head in.
“Sorry to interrupt,” she said, “but can I just borrow one of those easels?” She nodded to the corner of the room.
“Of course!” Chloe said. She wiped at her mouth with the back of her hand.
“Thanks,” the woman said as she walked out of the room with one of the easels. “Hope I wasn’t interrupting anything.”
“Not at all,” Chloe said with a grin.
*****
As I walked back out to my truck, I thought about what my mother had said about Chloe earlier, about her being too much of a goody-goody. Would a goody-goody have just done that? Not that I’d ever discuss details of my sex life with my mother, but there was a part of me that was just dying to ask her that, just so she’d have to admit she was wrong.