Chapter 5

Bobby wasn’t doing much better than Tawny, though his mental machinations weren’t as complicated as hers. He’d never had a serious girlfriend. He had no idea what love felt like. All he knew was that he wasn’t having any fun at all because he didn’t get to see Tawny. He got to the point where he bargained with some anonymous power, saying they didn’t even have to have sex if he could just spend some time with her. He wanted to look at her, clothed or not. He wanted to talk to her, about important things or not. He just wanted to be near her and hear her voice.

That said, his mind kept replaying scenes from his memory where she was naked, and they were making love. The memories were vivid, at least the later ones. He still had difficulty remembering the first time in detail. That time was a big ball of bright light that felt warm and luscious, but that was all.

He wasn’t stupid. He thought about how cool it would be to live with Tawny, to be able to sleep with her and wake up and have breakfast and all that. But he knew that would never happen. He recognized those thoughts as fantasies. It was enough that she was doing what she was doing.

He hoped she wasn’t pregnant. That would require her to spend more time with him, both in bed and not.

He was also distracted, but young men are often distracted by thoughts of women, so this wasn’t anything new.

He functioned pretty well, all things considered.

Bobby’s phone beeped and he pulled it from his pocket and looked at the screen. It said, “Jenny”.

“Hey!” he said, happily, after swiping the green button. “I thought you weren’t going to call me.”

“I wasn’t,” she said, her voice sounding tired. “We need to talk.”

“Okay,” he said. “You want me to come over? I’m about to go to my statistics class, but I could be there in an hour and a half.”

“No. Don’t come here,” she said. “Meet me in the parking lot by the theater in the mall.”

“Okay,” he said. “Are you okay? You sound strange. Did something happen?” He was thinking of her husband finding out about them.

“No. Not exactly. We just need to talk. I’ll see you in two hours, okay?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ll be there.”

Tawny was a strong woman, in most aspects. She’d grown up in a family with three brothers and a domineering father, so male chauvinism was no stranger to her. She’d had to pay her own way through college. Scholarships had helped, but she’d also worked two jobs, until she met Murdock and he married her. She’d finished her last year while married and he had used his authority to hire her as a substitute. She wanted a full time teaching job, but he convinced her that subbing would give her valuable experience and help her avoid common pitfalls new teachers face. She was pretty sure that was bullshit, now. Murdock didn’t want her in school all day, where she might get hints of his extracurricular activities with high school girls who were vulnerable to his tactics. Had he been blackmailing high school girls for sex when he met her? Had he been raping high school girls the entire time they were married? She knew about four, but how many more victims were there?

She had been saving herself for marriage when she fell in love with Toby. Convinced that they’d be together forever, she had given her virginity to him. She’d had a few flings with college boys, but nothing worth writing home about. She didn’t think of any of that as “mistakes” in her life. They were just decisions that hadn’t worked out.

The past few days of intense introspection had brought her to the point where she knew she had made some serious mistakes, the first of which was settling for Murdock, and the second of which was letting Bobby Martin wiggle and wag his way into her heart. She was miserable and she didn’t like feeling this way.

Murdock was easy. She knew what she was going to do with him. She had a pretty good idea of how that would play out. Murdock would cease to be a problem for her.

Bobby Martin, on the other hand, was a complication which she had no idea what to do about. Part of her mind had settled irrevocably on making Bobby the father of the child that was a firm part of her revenge on Murdock. Just sending him to prison wasn’t enough. She had to flaunt a baby in his face, and she had to be able to hiss, “The father is Bobby Martin!” So she had to keep Bobby in her life, at least until she was sure she was with child.

Another part of her quailed at the thought of keeping Bobby in her life. That part recognized that her attraction to him would only grow, flower, and get further out of control. She couldn’t afford to fall in love with Bobby Martin ... assuming she wasn’t already in love with him. Her mind still warred about that. She discounted her memories of Toby. She told herself she was too young, back then, to know what love really was. Her memories of those feelings were also vague and misty. She wasn’t sure what romantic love really felt like.

She wasn’t sure what she hoped to accomplish by meeting with him. Her subconscious mind had convinced her, though, that it needed to happen. She didn’t know what she was going to say to him. She just knew that she needed to convince him that everything had to be unromantic ... needed to be practical ... should be detached.

What she was actually trying to do was convince herself.

She got there half an hour early and then sat, practicing saying things like, “We’ve had fun, but that’s all it was, all it can ever be. You know that, right?”

She was anxious, and bored. People occasionally walked past the car, on their way to the Penney’s entrance to the mall. They looked so normal, going about their day without a care in the world. Nobody paid any attention to her. She felt invisible, like she was floating above it all, watching others live their lives.

Then his car pulled up next to hers and her heart leapt in her chest. Within seconds her pulse went from sixty-five beats per minute to a hundred and twenty. He turned his head and smiled at her and she felt her shoulders sag as she went weak. He got out, closed his door and opened the passenger door of her car. She felt the vehicle dip as he sat down. She smelled his presence.

Everything fled from her mind as the truth hit her like a ton of bricks.

It was too late. She was already in too deep. There was no evading it.

She was in love with Bobby Martin. Instinct shouted it at her. She had gone to the edge of the cliff to see the view, and the edge had crumbled under her feet. Helplessly, she had fallen hard.

It hadn’t been instant, like falling off that cliff. It had happened in slow motion. But it had only taken a mere week’s time for her to fall.

“Hi,” said Bobby. He looked at her and smiled.

She sat, pale and stunned. She felt like she was tumbling through the air, now, instead of floating.

“You look good,” he said, still smiling.

Her heart thumped. Her nipples tingled.

It took fifteen seconds of further silence before she saw his smile become a frown of concern.

“Are you okay? What happened? Did he find out what we were doing?”

She forced out a simple, “No.” That tiny amount of movement allowed her to move more and she inhaled deeply. She realized she’d been holding her breath.

“Well, something’s wrong. I can see it,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. Her planned speech was nowhere to be found.

She saw impatience on his young face, but then he calmed. He just sat there. It was obvious he was waiting, giving her time to say whatever she was going to say.

“I didn’t intend for this to happen,” she blurted.

“What happened?” he asked.

“I like you,” she moaned.

“Well, that’s good, because I like you, too,” he responded.

She felt an upwelling of something luscious inside her. It was almost like an orgasm, but not nearly as strong. It was warm, though, and filled her with a sweet sensation that made her instantly horny.

“I think I love you,” she groaned.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. She was supposed to push him away, not confess how she felt.

Bobby sat there. Her confession started a chain of events in his mind that spanned a light year, but took only seconds to travel. The most advanced super computer could not have processed the information faster. Data was crunched and the output was simple.

Her being in love with him was strange ... but fine. He might feel the same way about her. Deciding that might take a little longer, but this ... was not a problem.

“Okay,” he said. “What does that mean?”

The decided lack of romanticism in his response cooled some of the warmth that had flooded through her. Her mind was loosed and she was, quite suddenly, back in control. The circumstances had changed, though, and her approach adapted as well.

“I wasn’t supposed to fall in love with you, Bobby,” she said. “I’m not supposed to be in love with you. This is a bad thing!”

“Why?” he asked. “What’s wrong with it?” His mind wasn’t working at faster than light speed any longer. The glut of data was taking longer to process. He was, for the first time, trying to analyze what his feelings for her meant in the long term.

“It would never work between us,” she said. “I’m too old and you’re too young. You have your whole life ahead of you. People would never accept us as a couple. It would just never work!”

“If we were happy being together, then who cares what people think?” he said.

“You haven’t even finished college, yet,” she said.

“Okay, so I’ll finish college.”

“We don’t have anything in common,” she said.

“Aren’t we going to have a baby in common? Or is that out the window, too? Is that what you’re saying? You don’t want to have a baby anymore?”

Again she was filled with a surge of emotion, but this was cooler, more controlled. Yes ... she did want to have this baby. That was rock solid truth and she could not ignore that. It flew in the face of all her objections, but it was there, like a big granite boulder.

“I’m not saying that at all,” she sighed. She looked at him. “I do want to have the baby, but anything beyond that ... it will be too hard. I don’t want to be in love, Bobby. My life is complicated enough as it is! It will just be too hard.”

“So, you’ve never done anything this hard before?”

“Bobby, you have your whole life ahead of you,” she said. “You need to go out and live it!”

“And what if I want to live it with you in it?” he asked. “We’re going to have a child. What if I want to be in the child’s life?”

“I don’t know,” she wailed.

“Well I do,” he said, with the simplicity and certainty of youth. “We’re in this together. That means we have to stay together.”

His confidence failed him as he contemplated that what he’d just said meant he would have a permanent relationship with Tawny Stevens. How could he possibly hope for something like that? He still thought of her as being way out of his league.

“At least part of the time,” he amended.

He reached to touch her hand.

“We have to be together at least part of the time.”

Her defenses crumbled, because what he said rang true in her.

“Yes,” she sighed. “We have to be together at least part of the time.”

“And who knows?” he said. “We’ve only known each other ... been together ... for a short time. We might have lots of things in common that we just haven’t discovered yet.”

“I hope so,” she whispered.

Agreement does not necessarily bring relief or peace. Agreement is, in some sense, the easy part, because after the agreement, then a course of action for the future has to be determined.

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Revenge is Best Served on a Warm, Naked Body

Lubrican

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