“I think you might be biased, Mom. He is your grandson.” Elaine dodged looking at Ethan as she smiled at Marjorie. “I’m Elaine,” she said as a way of introduction as she held out her hand.
“Oh, Marjorie, and this is my son, Ethan. I stopped in to tell your mother that her tarot reading really gave me some insight into what I should do about my son, and I left her some of my special, dark molasses cookies. You’d better get in there before she gobbles them all up! I think I saw you eat six of them already, Priscilla.” Marjorie had turned her attention back to Priscilla and Thomas now sucking on his thumb as he perched on his grandmother’s hip.
“It’s nice to meet you, Elaine.” Did he say her name with purpose? She wasn’t sure if she should take the proffered hand or not. She hesitated and saw a flash of regret on Ethan’s face. Was it that he regretted sleeping with her? Or did he think that she didn’t want to see him again?
Do I want to see him again? She thought as she took his strong hand and gave it a firm shake before she let her own hand slide back to her side. I guess it’s a little late for that. I kind of am seeing him again, right now.
“And it happened last night! Ethan told me about how he had meant this beautiful, spectacular woman at the party last night and he was home late, Priscilla! Late,” Marjorie emphasized.
“Mom, don’t you think that’s a little too in depth with details?” Ethan smiled politely at his mother, but Elaine could see the strain. Was he embarrassed?
“Oh, there’s no shame in being embarrassed! I mean, we’re just two old women, Ethan. Oh, and Elaine. Sorry dear,” Marjorie proclaimed as she put a hand on Elaine’s shoulder. The woman was a little overly friendly, but then, so was Elaine’s mother.
“Thomas needs his bath,” Elaine said as a way of an excuse and took her son back. “It was nice meeting you both,” she managed in a polite tone before she took Thomas inside.
When the door was shut behind her and she was sure no one could see her, she let out a shaky breath and smiled at her son. He was her anchor in this world, and she wouldn’t let anything jeopardize that. Not even if the man was as sexy as hell and reminded her of the darkest chocolate she’d ever seen. Thomas wasn’t ready for a new father, and she didn’t know if she ever wanted to find one.
Yes, Ethan was fun and she really enjoyed his company, but she worried he would want more than just fun. And who had time for that anyway?
“I certainly don’t,” she muttered.
“What did you say, mommy?” Thomas asked as she helped him out of his shirt.
“Nothing sweetheart,” Elaine told him as she felt a pang of guilt. Today was her day to spend with her son, and she wasn’t going to allow a man to come between them, especially if he wasn’t already there. “Hey, what do you say we go out and get some ice cream after your bath?”
“Yeah,” Thomas told her as he grabbed his bath toys from the basket and stood by the tub. Elaine helped him in and let him splash around in the soapy water as she consciously blocked thoughts of Ethan from her mind. She’d needed his company last night, and that was it. There was no point in feeling guilty about it.
When Thomas was finished, she helped him towel dry and combed his hair as her mind wandered. “You know, you have your daddy’s eyes,” she said randomly.
“Grandma says that a lot,” Thomas told her, as his reflection looked her in the eyes. Elaine felt her heart stutter when she really looked at him. He barely had anything of her in him, but his hair and that could change.
“What else does she say?”
“That I’m a troublemaker like my mom, and that I’ll be a lady-killer when I grow up,” he said in his tiny, boyish voice. “Mom?”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t want to kill people when I grow up.” His tone was serious and his gaze was wide and sincere.
Elaine felt her lips twitch at the corners and hugged him from behind. He smelled like baby yet, and she hoped that he would always smell that way to her. “You won’t, honey. It’s an expression. I’ll tell you about it later.” She helped him into his clothes and ran her hand through her hair before she decided she was presentable enough to go out.
“How about we go get some ice cream?”
Priscilla was making herself a sandwich in the kitchen and hummed along to a song on the old radio she’d insisted upon keeping. Elaine could remember that radio from when she was a small girl and wondered if her mother had it before she had been born. “Thomas and I are going to go out and get some ice cream,” she said with a smile. “You want to come along and get some?”
Something was making her feel sentimental that day. She’d woken up with an awful hangover and come home to find the one person she couldn’t decide if she wanted to see again or not, but spending time with Thomas was her top priority. For once, she wanted her mother’s advice about something. She’d know what to do about being a single mother and spending time with a man whom she wasn’t sure she wanted to introduce to her son or not.
“Sure, just let me wrap this up and get my shoes on.”
“Did you hear that?” Elaine mock whispered as she leaned down to Thomas’ height. “Grandma’s going to wear shoes,” she joked.
Chapter Four
“And what does that one look like?” Priscilla asked as she pointed at one of the wispy clouds floating past.
Thomas seemed to mull over it as he licked his black raspberry ice cream. Elaine took a long lick of her butterscotch as she thought about how she should bring up what happened the night before with her mother. Should she tell her mother everything? Or would that be going too far?
Who was she kidding? Her mother knew almost every nitty-gritty detail about her life and there was nothing to be hidden from that woman. She may have let Thomas play on his own a little too long and allowed him to make stains on the kitchen floor, but that didn’t make her a complete fool. She just got too distracted during those readings to look after Thomas properly.
“Like a starfish,” Thomas finally answered. He took a big lick of his sticky, gooey ice cream and became enamored with the process of finding another cloud.
“So what’s on your mind, cupcake?” Elaine ignored her mother until she realized the aging woman was looking at her and not at her son.
“What makes you think something’s on my mind?”
“Well, you’ve been silent all this time, except for when you ordered the ice cream, and you’ve been acting a little odd since you woke up this morning with a-” Priscilla looked down at her grandson and, for once, seemed to have a little concern about what she was about to say around young ears.
“I just feel out of sorts since I was out so late last night.” She looked pointedly at Thomas as he gazed up at the sky and then beyond to the park that was only fifteen or so feet away. “Hey, buddy, why don’t you build me a sand castle? I could really go for one today,” she told her three-year-old as he finished his ice cream. They’d been sitting in silence for only fifteen or so minutes, but Thomas wasn’t one to fool around with ice cream.
“Alright, but what about the clouds?” he asked as he turned to his grandmother.
“They’ll be around again. That’s the great thing about clouds. There’s always an abundance of them here,” Priscilla told him as she leaned down and gave him a pat on the behind before she pushed him toward the sandbox.
He dutifully gathered sand in his palms and began to pat it together; making a sand castle like Elaine had shown him only a few weeks before.
“So what did you bring me out here to talk about?” Priscilla adopted the tone she’d had when Elaine was a teenager. It was a tone that told her daughter she was ready to hear anything, and that she wasn’t going to be judgmental about what she heard.
“You know I went out last night, and you know I came home late.” Elaine twisted her hands together. “I wanted to ask you what it was like, when you divorced Dad. Were you afraid to bring men home to meet me?”
Priscilla was silent as her lips pa
rted. She hadn’t been expecting to hear her daughter say those words and it showed on her face. Her eye crinkled at the corners as they narrowed and she gently put her teeth back together. Hadn’t she known that Elaine had slept with someone the night before? She had thought it was obvious, but perhaps it hadn’t been.
“So that’s why you were late?” Her mother asked rhetorically. Thomas squealed when he found a millipede in the sand and eagerly put it on one of his sand castle’s guard towers. At least, that’s what Elaine assumed the lump in front of the larger lump was supposed to be.
“Let’s just say I had a run-in with someone very nice last night, and he seems to be showing interest. But I don’t know if I should really be dating just yet, Mom. What if it’s too soon, or what if I introduce him to Thomas and then he just disappears? What do I say to him?” The ‘him’ she was referring to was her son and they both knew it.
Priscilla reached out a hand in comfort and laid it on her daughter’s knee. “You introduce the man as a friend and you let Thomas gather as much information as he needs to from that statement. And I think it’s about time you started spending more time with adults that weren’t either too old to be eligible or your mother.” Elaine knew her mother was referring to the amount of time she spent sitting on the living room floor with her son when Priscilla and Jacob were watching Wheel of Fortune or some other game show in the evening.
She had jumped Ethan because she had been lonely, but her mother hadn’t given her the answer she was looking for. Had it been right? Was she risking too much?
“I just-”
“Elaine,” Priscilla interjected with a gentle tone. “If you’re feeling lonely, then you have to take care of that. You can’t just sacrifice everything in order to be his mother when there isn’t a father in the picture. If you don’t take care of yourself first, you can’t be a healthy enough, happy enough mother for him. You won’t make the same mistakes I did,” Priscilla told her quietly as she removed her hand from her daughter’s knee.
“Mom, I didn’t say that,” Elaine replied quietly, but they both knew that was what she was worried about.
Thomas eagerly teetered over to her with a large salamander in his hands and Elaine helped him find a safe spot for it away from the sandbox. Then she took his hand and walked him home with her mother on the other side. Perhaps her mother was right. Maybe it was time to take care of herself emotionally so that she could be a happier person for her son.
Chapter Five
There was a dark car parked along the street out front of her mother’s home, and while it wasn’t odd for the occasional neighbor to have friends over who parked in one of their spaces because they rarely used them, there was something familiar about the car. It wasn’t until they were almost upon it that Elaine realized she knew exactly why the car was familiar, and she smiled at her mother as she pointed at the front door. Priscilla knew exactly what her daughter wanted and took Thomas up the front stairs. She pretended she was washing the windows with a rag about a minute later, making Elaine wonder where poor Thomas was.
The dark man who owned the car stepped out from its driver’s side and smiled at her. “I was just about to leave when I saw you walking up in my rearview mirror. I swear I was only here about a minute, but I still didn’t your number and you didn’t look too thrilled to see me earlier, so I wasn’t going to ask for it then.”
Ethan shoved his cell phone into his front pocket and closed the door to his car. He was strikingly handsome in the sunlight, and the way his lips curved at the corners, she supposed he liked what he saw in her. “I wasn’t so sure I was eager to see you either, but I’m starting to come around. Did you need the tin your mother brought the cookies over in back? I can go get them-” she trailed off as he pushed off his car and started to walk toward her. They were only five or six feet apart before, but then he was standing only two or three feet away. It was still considered friendship distance to someone who was observing on the outside, but the hairs on Elaine’s arms had stood on end.
“I’m not here to pick up mother’s tin. I was hoping I could pick up something much more beautiful; say Friday night, around seven?” She hadn’t dated much in high school and she’d never dated through college. It felt odd to have someone who was practically a stranger, even one she had slept with, ask her on a date right outside of her mother’s house.
The thought of their encounter the other night still made her blush.
“Why don’t we take a walk?” she asked as she waved at her mother to reassure the crazy woman she was okay.
“Well, alright. I’ve got to be back at the fire department in about forty-five minutes, but I think I’ve got time for a walk with an angel.” Elaine rolled her eyes, but the butterflies in her abdomen started up again. She ignored Jacob’s piercing stare as they walked past his porch and tried to think of what she wanted to say and how she wanted to say it.
“Ethan,” she started quietly, and then pressed her lips together.
“Elaine,” he said with a smile as he reached down and touched his fingertips to the back of her hand. When she looked at him imploringly, he chuckled. “I thought we were just saying each other’s names. I recall we did that a lot,” he whispered conspiratorially.
The fluttering increased into a quick tempo and she feared she might do something silly like allow him to take her hand in public. Jody had seemed so upset about learning that she had gone home the night before with Ethan Mack, and she still didn’t know why. So maybe she should start there before she answered his invitation.
“Do you know Jody Gallant?” When she asked, she studied his face to see if there was any reaction to tell her he was about to say a lie. She’d been getting good at that now that Thomas was old enough to lie about taking an extra cookie.
“I do,” Ethan told her as a crease developed between his brows. The gesture was so like her son it was shocking. “But I don’t know what she has to do with us.” He was telling the truth as far as Elaine could discern.
“When I told her you drove me home last night, she started acting in a way I’d never seen her act before. She almost seemed…jealous and upset at the same time. She told me to stay away from you.”
They were quiet a moment as Ethan reached up the hand furthest from her and pinched his bottom lip. He seemed to be considering what he was going to tell her, and she felt her guards starting to go up. “Jody and I met a few months ago at a party. I didn’t know who she was, and she introduced herself. She wasn’t wearing a wedding band, so I figured she was single. We danced, but I wasn’t too interested because there’s just something off about her.”
“She seems like she’s hiding behind a façade.” Elaine filled in.
“Yeah, like that. So anyway, she asked me to go outside with her and I did to be polite. I thought she wanted to talk in private and I figured I’d give her a chance, but she grabbed my face and tried to kiss me. I was shocked, so I let her, but when I refused to continue the one-sided make-out session, she retaliated.” Elaine waited for him to explain what he meant by that.
“What did she do?” she finally asked when he didn’t elaborate.
“She told everyone that I had come onto her without her consent and that she was going to have her husband come after me. I told everyone who asked that I didn’t know she was married or that she had a son, and she’s been spouting that lie ever since. Elaine,” he stopped and finally took her hand in his. “I didn’t do that, I swear! I would never push a woman beyond where she wanted to go. I-you don’t think that I would-that I had-”
It was horrifying to watch him stutter any longer and she gave his hand a squeeze. “I know you didn’t do anything she didn’t ask for, and you didn’t do anything with me I didn’t ask for. We’re two, consenting adults, and I’d be lying through my teeth if I said I didn’t enjoy every last second of it.” Her cheeks flushed a bright crimson as she looked away from him.
“Good, I’m glad,” Ethan told her as he put his fingers under
her chin to lift her gaze back to his. “So about that date?” he asked hesitantly.
“I guess I usually eat on Friday nights,” she told him with a small smile. They would talk about the even heavier stuff another time. First, she wanted to figure out if she could get along with the man when she wasn’t tipsy, but if their walk was any indication, she knew she’d like him.
Chapter Six
“Wow, look at you,” Haley said as she stopped swiping at the conveyer belt that carried the groceries down to the bagging area. She spritzed the shiny stainless steel with the vinegary smelling cleaner and Elaine made a face. “Sorry, did I get ya?” she asked innocently.
“You know you did. What are you doing here so early? I thought it was just going to be me this morning,” Elaine perched on the indent that held the bags directly behind her register. She rarely made conversation with Haley, but she would roll with it.
“I think Steve messed up the schedule so we’re both here this morning.” Haley shrugged as she started in on her register. She mercilessly sprayed it with cleaner and Elaine wondered if the poor thing would short out.
“Wow, two registers open on a Friday morning seems a little crazy,” Elaine responded as she leaned down to get her own bottle of cleaner. The blue-tinted liquid sloshed around and foamed as she began to wipe down the belt and then the screen. It looked like her station hadn’t seen a cleaning in months, but then again, either she or Haley worked the register closest to the door. There was never a second person.
Throughout her shift, Haley and Elaine chatted idly about the new renovations happening at a downtown restaurant Elaine hadn’t been to as of yet. About two hours in, Haley dropped a hint about her and her boyfriend. “They’re getting in these really awesome booths and I heard they’re hiring a new head chef. Ben, my boyfriend, he’s one of the bus boys there and he got me in last night. He showed me all the new appliances they’re getting and the new booths,” Haley trailed off with a quiet, small smile as she looked at her register screen.
ROMANCE: THREESOME : Billionaire Brothers' Party (MFM Menage Romance) (New Adult Contemporary Threesome Short Stories) Page 39
