by Gabi Moore
“Who was it?” I said again, this time addressing the children who all avoided my gaze. They could probably hear the anger in my voice. I pulled Ben closer to me and was about to say something else when I saw him again.
The guy with the tattoos.
I stood and we locked eyes again, but this time neither of us was in a hurry to look away. Most of the kids scurried off and the organizers seemed relieved for the chance to escape and head towards the refreshment table.
“He won’t tell you, not now at least.”
“Excuse me?”
He took a step towards me, extended his hand and I shook it.
“Sorry, my name’s Dave. I was just saying, he’s probably terrified. He won’t say who did it with everyone watching.”
I nodded. At least it was clear to one other person that it wasn’t an accident. I idly looked over Ben’s arm but he soon shrugged from my grasp and ran off to play, leaving me with the tattooed guy. I sighed.
“Uh, it’s Ally. Hi. Yeah, he’s always been a little …shy that way.”
“Great kid though.”
“Thanks.”
There was nothing to do but look into his eyes, which were a deep, opaque brown. God, he was even younger up close than he seemed at first.
“Is it Ben and Alex Watkins? Actually, I think they matched your little guys up with me,” he said and I followed his eyes as they picked through the mixed crowd of chattering children and adults.
“Oh?” Huh. Maybe things were looking up.
“Yeah, they announced it all at the start of the talk, maybe you hadn’t arrived yet.”
“Yeah, um, we were a little late. You know how it is with kids,” I said and tried to find something to do with my hands. He was easily a decade younger than me, so why did I suddenly feel like a giggly girl in his presence?
“Actually, not so much. Are they a handful?”
“Oh man, you don’t even know the half of it,” I said. “You… don’t have any kids of your own?” I was beginning to wish I had paid more attention to the talk so I at least had something to say to this good-looking guy right now. He laughed out loud at my question but then immediately stopped himself.
“I mean, I love kids, of course,” he said, suddenly serious, and then I couldn’t help laughing.
“Of course,” I said smiling and was a little surprised by the immediate, easy chemistry between us.
“Sorry, what did you say your name was again?”
“It’s Ally.”
“Ally,” he repeated. It felt weird to hear my name on his lips.
“Uh… so what do you think, a movie to start with? Or some ice cream?” I said and tried in vain to pull my gaze from his without it snapping back again. He blushed.
“A… movie? Oh wow. Yes, absolutely, why not. Sure. You like movies?” he said and flashed a playful, boyish smile my way. I burst out laughing.
“Oh shit, you meant …you meant with the kids,” he said and suddenly put his hand to his head in embarrassment.
“I… I’m sorry,” I giggled.
“No, please. I’m not usually this awkward, I promise.”
“You sure about that?” I said and relished how delicious it felt to bask in that full, easy smile of his. When was the last time I casually flirted with a genuinely handsome man? Probably since never, that’s when. There was no mistaking it now: he was blushing, and hard. It was really quote charming – his shaggy, rough face seemed to melt and he looked as bashful as a puppy. I felt my knees go weak. I don’t know why, but I cleared my throat and went into mom mode.
“Well, this coming Saturday will work really well for me, so if you want to arrange something for then, I’m sure Ben and Alex would love it.”
He started nodding and didn’t quite stop.
“Cool. Ok, great. Sounds good. I’ve already gotten all your info from the front desk, so I guess we’ll see how it goes from there.”
“Cool,” I said.
“Cool.”
I stared at the floor and then out at the boys, who were now playing again on the swings.
“I’m… not usually this awkward either,” I said and he smiled again.
Surely he couldn’t be interested in me? A worn-out, cynical-as-hell single mother of two? But there he was, making no sign of walking away. Was he just being polite?
“I was bullied as a kid,” he said at last. I turned to look at him. He was watching the kids play in the playground, hands in his pockets, standing like he owned the place.
“Really? I find that hard to believe.”
“No, it’s true. Actually, I used to be a little like your son. Kind of shy.”
I laughed. A blind person could have seen how buff and intimidating he was, with his tattoos and devil-may-care hair flopping into his eyes.
“No, really. It’s hell for a kid. You know, I could help him out with that.”
“With… what?”
“Well, with taking care of people who wanna pick on him.”
I frowned.
“Taking care of them? That sounds a little ominous.”
“I’m serious though. It’s good to nip that kind of shit in the bud.”
“Pfft.”
He looked at me.
“You know, when I was younger I really wished I had someone older to look out for me.”
“Um… I’m his mother. I look out for him plenty.”
“Of course,” he said and smiled broadly again. “But I guess that’s where this big brother thing comes in, right? Stepping in as a male role model and all that,” he said, sounding a little sheepish.
“No offense, but you don’t quite seem like the kid-loving kind,” I said, still smarting a little from his suggestion that I wasn’t able to care for my child properly.
He laughed.
“Yea, no shit. You wanna know a secret though?”
I lifted my eyebrows at him.
“I’m only here as a promise to a buddy of mine. Back when we were deployed he kind of stuck his neck out for me more than once, and you could say I owe him. He really thinks highly of this program and I agreed to give it a try.”
“Deployment? So you’re a soldier.”
“Navy SEAL,” he said casually.
“Oh, that’s… kind of impressive. A shy bullied kid grows up to become a big strong Navy SEAL? That’s quite the story,” I said, and bit my tongue as I realized I’d just called him big and strong. He gave me a look that had my stomach fluttering madly and then smiled at the ground.
“Well, I wouldn’t say I’m grown up, exactly,” he said and gave me a cheeky wink.
It was ludicrous. Completely crazy. Boring average unremarkable women like me didn’t have anything to do with hot calendar model types like him. This wasn’t the Twilight Zone. And yet, every time he looked at me I could feel it like heat radiating off of him: he was definitely checking me out.
“So uh, what do you do?” he said.
“Oh, nothing quite so impressive as you I’m afraid. I’m an ER nurse. Not so much putting the gunshot wounds in as fixing them up,” I said, and inwardly kicked myself for making such an off-color joke. If I didn’t know better I’d swear it looked like I was trying to chase this guy off. But to my surprise, he was laughing.
“I like that. You’re funny. You won’t believe I but I’m actually a little squeamish myself. I could never do what you do.”
“Squeamish? But not afraid of needles, obviously,” I said and gestured to the colorful artwork all over his arms. He glanced down and then back up at me.
“Ah yeah, you got me there. What can I say, I have no rational defense for these bad boys,” he laughed. “I’m a bit… impulsive.”
And there it was. With a little lick of electricity pulsing right through me and landing square between my legs, his deep brown gaze seemed to hit deep and do strange things to me. A younger me might have returned that smoldering look. A braver me might have laughed and casually touched his arm, just so, on that thick bicep of his.
A million different versions of me could have thought of a million different things to do with this man right now…
But that was all crazy.
I was the sad ‘MILF’ in the story and the best I could hope for now was looking good ‘for my age’ and convincing a man to stick around with me and my brood, right? Not only was this young buck exactly the wrong kind of man for me; he was eons too young and almost certainly had better prospects somewhere else. So, I didn’t flirt back. I kept that desperate little ache to myself. I thought of my kids and allowed myself no more than a few minutes to fantasize that I lived another life where getting with a guy like this was totally possible.
“You’ve got some great ones yourself,” he said and stared at my chest. My heart nearly stopped when I realized that he was referring to my tattoos.
“Oh, uh, these? Yeah, I’ve had them for ages. Not your typical mom style, is it? But lord knows I’m not a typical mom,” I said absentmindedly.
“No, no you’re really not,” he said and I caught his eye.
Oh god, it had been so long since I’d had this feeling. This rush, this sweet sizzle and pop in the air like everything was filled with sexy, static electricity and if he kept giving that juicy smile I didn’t know what I was going to do with myself…
“I should get going,” I said in as decisive a voice as I could muster. “I’m good for next Saturday morning if you’re available, and we can see if you get on with the boys…”
“Yeah,” he said, but he seemed kind of distracted. “The boys. Of course.”
I extended my hand to his and he shook it quickly.
“It was nice meeting you, Dave. I’m sure the kids are going to love hanging out with a real live Navy SEAL,” I said cheerfully. But I really meant: I’m going to love hanging out with a real live Navy SEAL. I had no idea what I had in common with a guy like this, I had never known a guy nearly half as built and muscly and I still wasn’t entirely convinced he was much over 21, but I couldn’t deny that the idea of seeing him again was a sweet one.
That evening I did a shift, and lo and behold, there really was a stab wound and I instantly thought of Dave the Navy SEAL as we dressed his wounds and sent him home in the early hours of the morning. My life was the most boring thing you could imagine, but now there was a strange, bright new spot in it, a weird new idea with sparkly brown eyes which looked at me in ways that made me feel giddy.
Dave.
My mind circled round and round all throughout my shift but it kept coming back to one unavoidable, delicious fact: he was into me. And with the same kind of relish you take your first breath after being underwater for a long time, I realized how hungry I was to be into him.
Chapter 4 - David
I had waited for days for Saturday to arrive and now that it was finally happening I was petrified. I don’t know why the fuck I let Jack talk me into any of this. I wasn’t a kid’s person. What the hell was I going to do with a couple of boys for a whole morning?
I wiped my cold sweaty hands on the front of my trousers and literally imagined the cortisol being metabolized out of my body. I saw the shape of the molecule itself, and visualized myself as a tiny SEAL floating in my bloodstream, artfully shooing it away and physically slowing down my heart rate. This was a technique they had taught us on a stress management course before our Syria deployment, but I noticed with some amusement that it didn’t seem to do squat for me just then.
I was taking the two boys out to a mini obstacle course on the outskirts of town where, I don’t know, they could pretend they were GI Joes or some shit. Ally had messaged me a link to the place and booked tickets for us three, and now it was happening in a few moments, and I was petrified.
Look, I’ve spent a lot of time in active duty and I’ll be the first to say that romantic prospects are thin on the ground when you’re out in buttfuck nowhere, running on empty and some orders from a guy nobody’s ever meet. As far as I’m concerned, marriage is a racket anyway and just the same as I wasn’t going to play anybody’s Good Soldier, I sure as hell wasn’t going to play the Good Husband and slave away at a desk job so I could buy my kids state of the art lawn chairs or whatever.
And yet… Ally was different somehow. She didn’t do any of the things a single mom her age was supposed to do, as far as I could tell. When I tell women I’m a SEAL they get this look in their eyes. It’s like they’re sizing me up, trying to see what they can get from me. You can already tell they’re measuring you in their mind and making up a little costume for you to wear for a role they want you to play. I’ve seen it more times than I care to mention.
A stay at home dependapotamus attaches onto a good man and convinces him that his whole life should be nothing but duty, nothing but service, and what do you know but she’s the one who benefits from all of that. I’ve seen army pals who had wives actively celebrate their injuries because of the disability allowance it meant for them. And I’ve seen good men come back from deployments from hell only to find their women ready with divorce papers because he wasn’t ‘committed’ enough.
But not Ally. She seemed utterly unimpressed by my credentials, which weren’t anything to sniff at, I’ll tell you that. She seemed to care about one thing only: the happiness of her boys. She flirted right back with me, God knows she did, but then …nothing. I’m no calendar model, but I’m in pretty good shape and truth be told I’ve never shown interest in a woman only to have her be lukewarm about it. Does that make me an asshole? Maybe. I wasn’t sure anymore. Weren’t single moms supposed to be grateful for whatever attention they got? I know, I know, you’re not supposed to say shit like that, but I didn’t know how much I assumed that was true until I met her and she… was the exact opposite.
So now I was in the strange position of wanting to impress her by …getting on with her kids. Uncharted territory for me, naturally. I could pick up a woman in ten minutes flat if she was a little tipsy to start, but this? Damn. I was out of my league, and in a way I had never, ever expected. I kind of liked it.
I pulled up at her house and noticed the swing tire on the tree out front. It was still early enough for a little dew on the grass. I parked, went up the drive and told myself to calm down. I worked retail all week and I studied in the evenings, and now I was giving up one of my weekend days to spend time with the children of a woman I had met less than a week ago. Fuck.
The instant I rang the doorbell I heard a stampede of feet from inside and the door was flung open. Two boys, one a foot shorter than the other, stood in front of me with wide open mouths and even wider eyes. They were cute kids, both with sandy brown hair and milky blue eyes, and a band of gingery freckles spanning from one cheek to the other.
“Are you the army man?” one said and looked me up and down.
“Shut up, Ben, he’s a SEAL, I told you it’s different.”
I laughed and held out my hand.
“Hey guys. It’s David. You met me at the talk the other day, remember?”
“I remember, but Ben doesn’t,” the taller one said and took my hand matter-of-factly, like playing older brother was his god-given job.
‘Hey, uh, is your mom in?”
“I’m coming!” came her unmistakable voice from somewhere in the house. “Alex, just wait with your brother in the living room, I’ll be down in a second.”
“She’s dressing up nice,” the little one said with a naughty smile.
“Shut up, Ben.”
The two led me into the living room and I sat down with them, one on either side.
“Mom says we’re going to do an obstacle course, because you’re a SEAL and so you know about that kind of thing.”
“Sure do,” I said.
“Hey, Mr. David, can I ask—”
“It’s just David.”
“David, what’s that weird tattoo over there?”
I followed his eyes but I already knew which tattoo he was talking about. The one that catches everyone’s eye. My great conversation piece.
“Shut up, Ben,” said the older one.
“Nah, it’s OK. Everyone’s curious about that one.” I raised my sleeve so they could both lean in and take a closer look. Was this still officially being a good male role model? I was fucked if I knew.
“This is, uh… actually, I’ve never told anybody about where I got this, you know that? I always lie and make up a story when they ask.” Shit. I had no idea where that came from. But the kids seemed unfazed.
“You lie? It’s OK, everyone makes mistakes,” the little one said. That was kind of cute.
“How come you lie about it though?” Alex said, examining the poorly etched image. It was an eye inside a heart with wings, but it was done in such a way as to look blurred, as though it wasn’t quite on the skin …but underneath it.
“Well… I guess because I just don’t know how to talk about what it does mean,” I said. I guess they were just kids. What did I care to tell them my deepest darkest secrets? Maybe Jack was right and spending time with these little shits would be therapeutic somehow.
“Oh, that makes sense. There’s lots of things I don’t know how to say either,” the little one said. And just like that I think I began to like him. He reminded me a little of myself at that age. It was hard to imagine I had ever even been that age.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, if we all get on today, then maybe we can all be friends and then if we’re friends, it’s OK to tell us your secrets,” Alex said in that take-charge big-brother way I was already beginning to recognize.
“Yeah? Well, ok then. I hope we become friends in that case,” I said, and smiled. Maybe dealing with kids wasn’t going to be so hard after all. Before I could say anything more, she appeared in the doorway. Like an idiot, I just looked up at her, flanked on either side by her inquisitive kids.
“You boys being polite to Mr. Segal?”
