Tell Me Everything Page 11

  “That’s not what Jake is into.” I hesitated, worried that getting more specific might be too much. But then I decided to take a chance, leaving out a few key details, to see how she reacted. “He likes the idea of watching me with the other guy, and me having sex with them both. So we’ve been...talking about it a lot, as foreplay.” I paused. “Is that weird? Or wrong?”

  Charlotte tensed, and again, I knew she had to be thinking about Alex, but then she made a dismissive noise as she sipped her drink. “Not weird. Or wrong. As long as it’s just a fantasy.” She set her glass back on the table between us. “Fucking someone else with your husband might sound hot in theory, but I would bet you a million bucks that if you actually followed through, it would end badly. It might not be technically cheating, but there’s no way a guy wouldn’t be jealous once he sees another man touch you.”

  “Of course,” I said, not making eye contact with her. The truth was that I believed Jake when he claimed not to feel jealous of Will—he wasn’t demeaned or humiliated by seeing me fuck someone else. He was turned on by it as much as I was. But how could I explain that to her? How could I make her believe me? I looked back at Charlotte. “But talking about it has really heated things up.”

  “Clearly. You look amazing.”

  “Stop.”

  “You do,” she insisted. “You’re wearing that vampy red lipstick and eyeliner, for Christ’s sake. I haven’t seen you put on liner since my holiday party!” Every December, Charlotte’s company put on a gorgeous, formal event at the Bellevue Hilton, inviting pretty much all of her high-end clients, along with everyone we knew from Queens Ridge. It was the event of the season. But since our night with Will, I’d begun putting on a full face of makeup each day, realizing that I’d fallen into the same mascara-only rut that my mother lived when I was growing up. It felt good to glam up a little. I’d underestimated how powerful a thing it was to make an effort to feel pretty—I automatically felt more confident when I looked in the mirror. I appreciated the shape of my lips and brightness of my complexion, the wicked sparkle in my eyes. I saw myself the way I imagined Jake and Will had seen me on the night we shared.

  “I got a Brazilian, too,” I said, lowering my voice. I’d gotten it done in anticipation of being alone with Will, showing it off to Jake the minute I got home from a later showing that night. I barely greeted the kids, who were doing homework at the kitchen table, instead, leading Jake upstairs to our bedroom. I locked the door behind us.

  “What’re we doing?” Jake asked, but instead of answering him, I quickly stripped naked, leaving on my heels. I took my fingers and fluttered them between my legs.

  His eyes widened and he immediately dropped to his knees, grasping my ass with his hands and putting his mouth on me. I shuddered as he flicked the tip of his tongue over my newly bare skin.

  “Hey, Jake!” Tuck’s voice called out from the hallway. “Want to play catch before it gets dark?”

  “Not now,” Jake replied. He looked up at me and muttered, “Can’t a man eat his wife’s pussy in peace around here?”

  I giggled, quietly.

  “But I need to practice before the game this weekend!” Tuck argued. “I can’t do it without your help!”

  “I said, not now, Tuck,” Jake repeated, louder this time. “Go downstairs. I’ll be there in a bit.”

  “And don’t bother us unless one of you is on fire!” I said, stealing my mother’s favorite line, albeit for an entirely different reason.

  “Yeah!” Jake said as he unbuttoned his shirt. Twenty minutes later, he’d given me two orgasms, and I’d straddled him the way I knew he loved, moving my hips until he came, too.

  “So, I take it you like the wax job,” I said, afterward, as we lay together on the bed, catching our breath.

  “I like everything about you, no matter what,” he said, ever the diplomat. “But yeah. It feels different. I like it. A lot.”

  “I think Will will, too,” I said, wickedly. My fingertips glided over his cock, and it twitched.

  “Don’t get me started again,” Jake groaned. “I really should go help Tuck.”

  “Go on, then,” I said, smacking his bare butt as he stood up. “Thanks for being such a great step-dad.”

  He grinned. “Thanks for being such a great lay.”

  I smiled as he threw on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, realizing that this was the first time for as long as I could remember that he’d chosen sex with me over doing something for one of the kids.

  “Holy shit!” Charlotte exclaimed, now, snapping me back to the present. “What have you done with my bush-loving Jessica?”

  “I never had a bush! Everything was trimmed!” Charlotte and I had changed clothes together at the Queens Ridge community pool last summer, and it just happened to be after a couple of weeks of neglecting my bikini line. She’d never let me live it down.

  “And now it’s gone.” She sniffled and pretended to wipe away a tear from her eye. “My baby girl is growing up.”

  “How is Bentley?” I asked, using her “baby girl” reference as a segue from the subject of my sex life with Jake. I was a little worried if we kept talking about it I wouldn’t be able to keep myself from telling her everything. “Ready for the game tomorrow morning?”

  “I think so,” Charlotte said. “What time is your mom getting in tonight?”

  “Eleven. Jake’s picking her up at the airport.”

  “I couldn’t get Richard to do anything for my mom if I paid him.”

  “Your mom doesn’t want him to do anything for her.” I loved hearing stories about Helen, Charlotte’s mother, who, while they were both independent, was so different from mine. Helen was in her mid-seventies, still a hippie of sorts, and had never married Charlotte’s father. Or anyone else for that matter. She had worked for Planned Parenthood as a counselor for years, and now, in retirement, she regularly showed up for marches against women’s healthcare care defunding, holding a sign that said, “I can’t believe I still have to protest this shit!” She was the kind of woman who refused to let men open doors or pull out a chair for her. “I can to it my own damn self!” she had yelled at Richard the first time she met him and he’d tried to help her out of her coat. “I didn’t burn my fucking bra for you to come try and save me with your toxic masculinity!” Richard had basically refused to have anything to do with Charlotte’s mother after that. And while I found her hyper-feminism reactions amusing, I couldn’t say that I blamed him.

  “So, do you like the idea?” Charlotte said as she finished her drink and signaled the bartender for another.

  “Of doing something for your mom?” I asked, confused.

  “Of a threesome.”

  “Oh,” I said. I gave a short laugh that came out sounding high-pitched and strangled. “I mean, yeah, I guess. Like you said, in theory. It’s fun to talk about.”

  “But you wouldn’t do it.” Charlotte’s gaze was sharp; I couldn’t escape it.

  “I doubt it.” I looked away, pretending to cough. I hated lying to her, but it felt like the only thing to do.

  She sighed. “Right now I’d settle for Richard being able to get a hard-on that lasted more than ten minutes.”

  I laughed again, genuinely this time. “Maybe you should sneak him some Viagra.”

  “Don’t think I haven’t considered it, sister.” Charlotte’s drink arrived and she raised her glass for a second time. “To Viagra!” she said. “And the threesomes we’ll never have.”

  “To Viagra!” I hoped she wouldn’t notice that I didn’t repeat the second half of her toast.

  LATER that night, I was already half-asleep when Jake crawled into bed after picking up my mom from the airport. “She get in okay?” I murmured as he curled up behind me.

  “Yep. All set up in the guest room. She wants to go to Ella’s game first, and then the last half of Tuck’s.”

  “Any bets on how long it takes her to start hinting we should hire a maid?” Every time my mom visited she foun
d a way to suggest that perhaps I would be better off hiring a professional to clean the house, as she and my dad always had. I managed to laugh it off, but the implied criticism still got under my skin.

  “Don’t let her get to you,” Jake said. He gave me a quick kiss on the side of my neck. “At least she’s here.” I knew he was thinking about his own mother, who had never even met Ella and Tuck. He was right—I should be grateful mine at least made an effort.

  The next morning, I tried to utilize a positive attitude toward my mom when I entered my kitchen a little after six and found her already up, clad in yellow rubber gloves as she scrubbed down my stove.

  “Did you bring those from home?” I asked, as playfully as I could without having had my normal influx of caffeine. I wanted us to start out on the right foot.

  “Good morning,” she said, ignoring my question. She was dressed in jeans and a short sleeved, blue knit top. Her no-nonsense, stick-straight silver bob was tucked behind both of her ears. “Are you working today?”

  “I have a few showings this afternoon.” My internal guard shot up—the one built, brick-by-brick, by years of living with my mom, knowing this seemingly innocuous inquiry was a set up.

  “You’d think being self-employed would give you the freedom to take a couple of days off when your mother is here,” she said.

  And there it was. I took a deep breath before responding. “Being self-employed means catering to my clients’ needs, accommodating their schedules,” I said, lightly, though my jaw clenched. However much value my mother had placed on her own career—however many weekend hours she spent holed up in her office when I was a kid—somehow, she still found a way to criticize the kind of work I did and how many hours I spent doing it. My mother was accustomed to others doing her bidding—both her students and the professors who worked under her. She couldn’t fathom the demands of a client-based business like mine.

  “I don’t know how you do it,” she said, scrubbing at some invisible spot on the counter next to the stove.

  There was no right way to answer, so instead, I walked over and hugged her, trying not to choke on the lemon-masked scent of chemical cleaning agents. We were the same height and build, though my chest was more substantial than hers, and I had my father’s hair color and curls. I was still the one who had to initiate any kind of physical affection between us.

  “How long have you been up?” I inquired.

  “About an hour.” She pulled away from our stiff embrace and removed her gloves, setting them on the counter. “I don’t sleep more than five hours a night anymore.”

  “How’s Dad?” I poured a cup of coffee from the pot my mother had already brewed, and then sat on one of the stools on the opposite side of the island. I hadn’t seen my father for almost six months, when Jake, me and the kids had spent four days before Christmas at my parents’ house, playing in the Boise snow. As usual, my dad was at the hospital almost the entire time.

  “Cancer doesn’t know it’s Christmas,” he was fond of saying when I was a kid and asked him if he could take at least a few days off around the holiday so we could go sledding or snowmobiling like my friends’ families did during the break from school. That was one of the few benefits to growing up in Boise—we almost always had a white Christmas. Later, my dad would repeat those same words to his grandchildren, who this year, looked at me with incredulous eyes.

  “Aren’t we your family?” Tuck asked, and Jake and I gave each other pointed looks.

  “It’s generous of your grandpa to work so other people can be with their families,” my mom said, jumping, as always, to her husband’s defense.

  “Out of the mouths of babes,” Jake said, later that day, as we drove home on Christmas Eve so the kids could spend Christmas morning with Peter and Kari. Since then, I’d texted with my dad a bit—his preferred method of communication, because it was brief and didn’t require him to respond right away, as a phone call would—but our conversations only skimmed the surface of what was going on in our lives.

  “Kids are good?” he’d ask.

  “Yes. How’s work?” I’d reply.

  “The same. Good days and bad. Some more than the other. The circle of life.”

  “I can only imagine.” It was frustrating, how little I knew about what it was like for him to deal with life or death situations on a daily basis. My mother said he didn’t like to talk about it, but as time passed, I concluded that he didn’t want to talk about it, or maybe he didn’t know how. I told myself that because he was a surgeon, he had to maintain a certain amount of emotional distance from his patients—that opening himself up to feeling everything that went along with telling someone about swollen and angry, malignant tumors in their bodies, and subsequently, having to slice into their fragile bodies to cut the cancer out—was simply too much of a burden to bear.

  “Busy with work, as usual,” my mom said, now. She sighed and shook her head. “He could have retired last year, but no. He says his patients need him too much.” Since she had stepped down as dean of the physics department, she had spent her time writing articles on advanced quantum theories and teaching part-time as a tenured professor. But without the more strenuous demands of heading up the department, a few months ago, she confessed to me that she had too much time on her hands. My father was working as much as he ever had, if not more.

  I made a neutral sound, not wanting to insert myself into the middle of issues my parents might be having.

  “It’s not like we need the money,” my mom continued. “I don’t understand why he doesn’t want to relax after spending so many years running around the hospital.”

  “It’s never been about the money for him.” I imagined my dad would sit behind his desk, helping people through one of the most painful and devastating diagnoses a person can endure, until the day he died.

  “I know,” she sighed. “It’s about helping people. It’s not like I don’t understand that. I guess I just wish that once in a while, your father could make his life about me.”

  You’re not the only one, I thought, feeling a lump form in my throat. I scanned her face, saddened by the pain I saw in her steel-gray eyes. That was the thing about my mother. She came across as stoic, even cold, but then there were rare moments like these when she dropped her guard and showed how vulnerable she really was. As a woman born in the fifties, and the daughter of conservative parents, she had been taught that the only important roles she would play in her life were those of wife and mother. After I had my children—especially after my divorce and a couple of years of single-parenthood—I realized what a feat it had been for her to reject those limiting, traditional expectations and pursue a male-dominated field of study; in fact, to become an often-cited researcher and highly-esteemed professor. Sometimes I wondered why she and my father decided to have children in the first place, but never worked up the courage to ask. I was too afraid she might say she regretted becoming a mother, and no matter how old you are, that’s something no child wants to hear.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to her, now.

  She gave a quick shake of her head. “Enough about me. We have a soccer game to get to!” She clapped her hands once, and I smiled at this rare show of enthusiasm. However much she had lacked as a mother, she really did make up for in how she treated her grandchildren. And while it stung a little to see her lavish the kind of attention I used to crave from her onto Ella and Tuck instead of me, I told myself that it was better late than never.

  A little over an hour later, the three of us arrived at Marymoor Park, where Peter was already waiting for us in the parking lot. My ex-husband drove an enormous white truck with a double cab and his construction company’s bright red logo, “Mr. Wright General Contractors,” emblazoned upon both sides. Like Jake, Peter had worked for other companies doing grunt work until he realized that the real money was in going into business for himself, using his last name as a play on words for his endeavor.

  “Hey there,” I said to him as Jake, my mom,
and I climbed out of Jake’s SUV. Ella was already on the field with her teammates and other coach, and Peter stood on the sidewalk in front of his truck. “Aren’t you supposed to be at Tuck’s game?”

  “Ella asked me to bring her,” Peter said. “We got donuts.” His voice was low and gruff, something I’d found sexy when we first met, and later came to despise when our brief marriage started to fall apart. He was dressed in jeans, a blue and white baseball jersey, and wore a matching baseball cap on his head. At five-foot-ten, he was a few inches shorter than Jake, and after years of too many fast food meals on job-sites, his build had become stockier, too.

  “Hello, Peter,” my mom said. She smiled, but didn’t show any teeth. She’d never liked him very much, especially after we’d eloped. She was always cordial with him, though, for the sake of her grandchildren, even after we divorced.

  “Sheila,” Peter said, bobbing his head once, in her general direction. He wasn’t the president of her fan club, either.

  “Good to see you,” Jake said, reaching out to shake Peter’s hand. The two were friendly enough with each other, but Jake told me that he found Peter’s less-than-amiable personality too much like the men his mother used to bring home. “She was an asshole magnet,” he said. Not that Peter was an asshole, Jake hastened to add, but I knew that when things didn’t go my ex’s way, he certainly possessed the potential.

  Jake and my mother headed across the field to where Ella was, leaving me alone with Peter. “Everything good?” I asked him. “The kids get their homework done?”

  “Yeah.” He shoved his hands into his front pockets and thrust his shoulders back. “Tuck says his algebra teacher doesn’t like him so that’s why he’s getting a C.”

  “Bullshit. He’s getting a C because he keeps turning in his assignments late. I told him he needs to ask for extra credit to make up for it, but he hasn’t.” Tuck, especially, liked to try and play Peter and me off of each other. If his complaining about school didn’t work with one of us, he’d try the same approach with the other, seeming to forget that for the most part, as long as we kept it about the kids, Peter and I did a pretty good job of maintaining a united front.