7. Seb
7
I t was another Thursday night, and I was surrounded by my best friends. That night, we’d chosen not to go to the bar. It wasn’t very often that we chose to skip the bars, but it happened every so often. Usually it was due to Jonas’s anxiety or one of us not feeling very well. That night, it was the latter. Holden had been feeling under the weather all week, so instead of going out without him, we all met at his and Eli’s apartment. A movie played in the background while we chatted over pizza from Pie in the Sky.
Holden and Eli were sitting together on the love seat, Holden’s head in Eli’s lap while Eli ran his fingers through his dark hair. They both looked content. Holden’s eyes were drifting shut and fluttering back open every few minutes. I wouldn’t be surprised if he ended up falling asleep. Matthew sat cross-legged on the floor, his back against the couch and a hot pink rubber duck in his hand. He had a notebook open in front of him and occasionally, he’d scribble down a few thoughts. He claimed he was working on a new freelance assignment he’d gotten, but from quick glances, it didn’t look like any project I’d ever seen. Jonas and I sat on the couch together, paper plates on the empty cushion between us.
Jonas was talking about his latest date with Silas. They’d gone to some fancy restaurant that looked too expensive for me to even breathe in the vicinity of. According to Jonas, it was all worth it. The way he talked about the steak made it sound like a religious experience. The way his face lit up while he talked about his date, about Silas, about all of it—I was jealous. I wanted something like that.
I was grateful Matt wasn’t looking at me. He’d have been able to tell what I was thinking in a heartbeat.
“You’re being awfully quiet over there,” Holden piped up as the conversation hit a lull. Apparently, there was only so much that Jonas could say about a restaurant none of the rest of us had ever been to. “Are you thinking about your fake boyfriend? Have you guys broken up yet?”
“I thought you were dying over there,” I grumbled.
Holden lazily lifted a middle finger in my direction.
Eli laughed. “I take that as a no, then?”
Now they were teaming up on me. I sighed. “He’s meeting my mom on Saturday. ”
The room was silent except for the sound of Matt’s pencil falling with an audible thud. Four pairs of eyes turned on me, expressions of various states of shock written all over their faces. There were a few beats before Jonas broke the silence. “He’s meeting your mother?”
“You’re bringing a fake boyfriend to meet your very real mother?” Matt repeated. “It took me months to introduce Lucas to my parents, and you’re introducing someone you’re not actually dating. I thought you two were breaking up this week?”
“We were, but one of his friends works with Mom and she found out and she’s insisting.” And I should have said no. I knew that I should have said no, but it was too late now. I’d already told her we’d be there.
“And you couldn’t just tell her no?” Eli asked in his always blunt manner. “You realize that she’s going to see right through you, right?”
I hadn’t thought about that. I hadn’t thought about the fact that my mom knew me better than almost anyone else on the planet, that she’d always been able to see through my poker face. We’d have to be extra convincing just to make her think that it was a real thing. What in the hell had I been thinking? “I’m screwed, aren’t I?”
“You’re completely screwed,” Eli agreed. “Maybe you should just tell her the two of you broke up. Skip the whole meet the mother part of this idiotic plan. ”
He was probably right, but she’d have a lot more questions than she would if she met him and we broke up. Or maybe she’d have less. I’d never done this before. I wasn’t exactly known for deceiving my mom, but here I was. I was deceiving a lot more than my mom, too. All of Chris’s friends… We were fucked. “I don’t think that would be a good idea. Maybe if she sees us together and then we break up, she’ll be so disappointed that she’ll stop worrying about me being alone?”
Matt’s shocked expression changed to one of sympathy. He was the only one who knew that my mom and I both wanted the same thing. For me to find my happily ever after.
“Besides, if I tell her we broke up before we meet, then she’s just going to spend the entire dinner asking me a thousand questions.”
“So it’s better that she asks both of you a thousand questions, starts planning your wedding in her head, and then you break up?” Eli asked again.
“Okay, yes. It’s a bad idea, but I can’t unmake it. I’m doing this.”
“And you’re telling us how big of a disaster it was after?” Eli questioned.
If it weren’t for Holden feeling like crap on his lap, I would have thrown something at him. He was lucky I was a good friend.
Eli’s doubts crawled into my head and under my skin. They were insidious, and they haunted every waking and sleeping moment. My brain concocted ways that this could go wrong, and then it concocted worse ways that it could go wrong. After a particularly bad imaginary video of my mother finding out the truth and completely disowning me, I almost called it off.
Then Chris texted me. He was looking forward to the date. Instead of texting my mom to cancel, I told him I was looking forward to it too and went back to the mind numbing data entry I’d been assigned that morning.
While I worked on entering numbers from my colleagues’ marketing campaigns, I tried not to think about why I was looking forward to this date with Chris. Except I couldn’t think about anything else.
I wasn’t looking forward to lying to my mom, but I was curious as to how they’d get along. I wondered if he’d laugh at some of the stupid jokes she told or if he’d find them cheesy. I wondered if he would give me those little looks he’d given me at his friend’s party, the types of looks that made me wonder if he could read my mind.
And then my mind began to wander further.
I wondered if somehow, sparks would fly and we’d repeat the night we spent together. I had told Matt that I wasn’t wanting to keep doing random hookups, but that night with him had been on my mind a lot more recently. I remembered the way his soft hands had felt as they moved over my skin. I remembered the way his lips felt against my neck and the way his breath felt against my ear as he slammed into me, our chests sticky with sweat. It had been one of the best hookups I’d ever had, and I wouldn’t mind a repeat performance. Would it even count as a random hookup?
Memories raced through my mind and I felt my pants tighten.
That was not okay.
I forced myself to think about something else, anything else. Apparently thinking about Chris at work was a very bad idea.
Saturday came despite my nerves. I woke up that morning with a heavy weight in my stomach. I skipped my usual frozen breakfast sandwich and choked down half a strawberry yogurt. I thought about calling one of my friends to get them to talk me down, but Eli’s words kept playing in my head. About how this was a bad idea. I remembered Holden calling this plan a disaster. I’d seen the looks of concern Jonas and Matt exchanged when I told them he was meeting my mom.
They’d all try to talk me out of it, and it was too late to back out now .
So instead, I cleaned my already clean apartment. By the time it was late enough for me to hop in the shower, I was pretty sure my kitchen floor was clean enough to eat on even without the five second rule. Then I got to obsess over what I was going to wear. I needed to look nice enough that my mother believed that this was real, but not so nice that it looked like I was trying too hard for Chris. Except I didn’t think I had anything that fit both of those requirements, so in the end, I just settled on a pair of jeans that Jonas once claimed made my ass look nice and my periwinkle button down with the sleeves rolled up.
When Chris arrived, I knew that the outfit was a hit.
He visibly checked me out. “You look good.”
“Thanks.”
“I think you wore that shirt the night we met.”
I tried to ignore the butterflies in my stomach. At least the knot was gone, so thank God for small miracles. I grabbed my keys from the small hook by the door and stuck them in my pants pocket. “You ready?”
Twenty minutes later, we pulled up in front of my mom’s house. It wasn’t much: a small white house with red shutters and a door she painted red when I was a child. The yard was neatly trimmed, but the gardens in front of the house were overgrown. My mom always talked about finding time to weed and making them look nice, but she never got around to it. She worked too hard, and her time off was spent either taking care of the house, taking classes at the rec center, or doing jigsaw puzzles. She claimed the puzzles were relaxing. I didn’t get it.
Chris parked his car in my mom’s driveway, and the knot came back. I felt like I was going to be sick.
“You okay?” Chris asked. My tongue felt like it was made of sandpaper. I wasn’t sure I could answer. He reached over the center console and covered one of my hands with his, squeezing lightly. “It’s your mom. If you don’t think you can do this, you can cancel. Blame it on me.”
It was the same offer he’d made outside of Luce’s party. The familiar words and his genuine tone soothed me, but not as much as the weight of his hand on mine.
“It’s too late to cancel,” I told him. I reluctantly pulled my hand away from him and wiped my palms on my jeans. “Let’s do this.”
He nodded, and we walked to the front door hand in hand. I didn’t knock. Mom hated when I knocked. She always said that it always made her feel like it was no longer my house. She really hated it when I pointed out that it technically wasn’t my house anymore. “Mom!” I called out as we stepped over the threshold.
My mom’s head appeared around the corner, popping out from the kitchen. “Seb, you’re here!”
My mom rushed out of the kitchen and wrapped me into a hug. I inhaled that mom scent of hers: floral body spray mixed with the smells of her cooking. Every ounce of tension I’d been holding slipped away.
“This is Chris,” I introduced. “Chris, this is my mom.”
“Pleased to meet you, Ms. St. James.” Chris extended a hand toward my mother. Oh, he was smooth. If this weren’t such a high stakes gamble, I might have swooned.
My mom took his hand and shook it. “Please, call me Maria.” Her dark eyes took him in as she dropped his hand. “Oh, he is handsome, Sebastian.”
“Mom!”
“Thank you, Maria.”
We spoke at the same time, and my mom seemed to find that hilarious. Her eyes twinkled as she motioned for us to follow her into the small kitchen. “Seb didn’t mention if you had any dietary issues, so I hope spaghetti is okay. Seb’s friends used to rave over it, and it was always one of his favorites growing up. I figured most people like spaghetti—”
“I love spaghetti,” Chris assured her. “You have a beautiful home. I can see where Seb got his decorating skills from. Do you two have matching blankets?”
“No,” I corrected. “Mom’s has oranges; mine has lemons.”
“They were on sale. I didn’t expect Seb to decorate his entire living room around it.”
We sat down at the small table in the living room. I noticed that Mom had brought in a third chair, the one she’d always kept stacks of bills on in her bedroom. It had come with the dining set, but the kitchen wasn’t big enough to have more than two chairs there full time. I wondered if the fourth one was still in her bedroom, covered in stacks of her scrubs. I wondered where she’d ended up putting the bills since the chair was in the kitchen. It was her organization system, one I would never quite understand. It worked for her, though, and that was all that mattered.
Mom brought over a bowl of salad and the pot of pasta. “I forgot to buy garlic bread. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Mom, if you needed garlic bread, you could have asked us to pick some up.”
“Then we’d have to wait to eat, and I had everything timed perfectly,” my mom countered. “Chris, would you like anything to drink? I have lemonade, sweet tea, water… I think I have a few beers.”
“Lemonade, please.”
“Seb, honey, get your boyfriend some lemonade.” I should have seen that coming a mile away. I stood from the table and pulled out a glass from the cabinet. “And while you’re up, can you make me an Arnold Palmer? Light on the ice.”
I laughed and pulled down two more glasses. While I made the drink, I listened as my mom asked Chris questions about his life. He answered each one with the same charm he’d displayed when he introduced himself. When I turned back to the table, I could see the hearts in my mother’s eyes.
This was a mistake. Chris was too charming. My mom was probably hearing wedding bells.
I handed out the drinks and took my seat next to Chris. My mom put salad on our plates. “I hope you don’t mind ranch, Chris. I forgot to check before I made everything.”
“I don’t mind ranch, ma’am,” Chris assured her.
“You don’t need to call me ma’am, either. It’s Maria,” my mom corrected with the smallest smile. I think she liked that he was calling her ma’am, even if she was.
The rest of dinner went smoothly. Mom and Chris got along like a house on fire. She listened to him when he talked about his job as an insurance adjuster. She tried to cajole him into singing when he told her that he liked to do karaoke with his friends. He assured her that it was something that no one wanted to hear sober. I fought the urge to tell him that wasn’t true, because I wanted to know if he was a good singer or not. We hadn’t listened to music in the car on any of our drives on our fake dates. We spent the time talking, going over our stories, and making sure that everything matched up in case people asked us questions.
Even though most of the things we’d talked about hadn’t really come up. It turned out that no one wanted to know if I knew his favorite quote or his favorite color.
When we finished eating, I helped Mom clean the kitchen. Every time Chris tried to help, my mom swatted his hand away. She insisted that he was a guest in this house and he would not be required to help with clean up until we’d been together a bit longer. I wondered what she’d say if she knew that there was no chance in that. I also wondered what she’d say when I told her next week that we’d broken up.
This was going to be a nightmare.
After cleaning up, we all sat around the living room and talked a little longer. Mom seemed happier than she’d been in a long time, just watching me with Chris. It wasn’t like we were doing anything interesting. We were just sitting together on the couch. Sometimes, Chris would rest his hand on my thigh. Every time, I became overly aware of the gentle pressure. It was going to be a bit harder to say goodbye than I thought.
It wasn’t hard to say goodbye to Mom though. Chris went out to the car while I said a private goodbye to my mother. “I like him,” she whispered into the hug.
“I do too.”
It didn’t feel like a lie when I said it, and that should have raised a few red flags.
I thought about it the entire ride back to my place. When Chris pulled up in front of my apartment, I didn’t want to get out of the car. I looked over at him, studying the way the streetlight hit his face and illuminated his profile. His full lips were tempting me. “Chris,” I exhaled.
He turned, and the moment our eyes met, I knew that any attempts at fighting that temptation would be in vain. I gave into my impulses and closed the space between us.
The first kiss was feather light, barely there. I started to pull away, but he wrapped his arms around my neck and pulled me closer. His tongue slipped past the seam of my lips, and the kiss grew heated fast. My hands gripped his shirt, holding him as tightly as he held me. If it weren’t for the console between us, I probably would’ve tried to climb into his lap and take it further.
I felt everything in that kiss. My heart raced and I wanted more. I wanted to take him upstairs and replay our one night together, over and over again. I wanted to say fuck it and fuck him right there in front of my apartment. I wanted to explore his body with my hands, my mouth. I wanted to lose myself in his kiss. I wanted to do a thousand different things.
Instead, I just pulled away breathless. I rested my forehead against his. “I should… I should go upstairs.”
He nodded. “Probably for the best.”
“Yeah,” I agreed.
I kissed him one last time before I finally pulled away.
“I’ll text you later?” Chris asked quietly .
I nodded, and then I climbed out of the car. The entire walk upstairs to my apartment, I regretted not inviting him upstairs.