Trading with the Boys

Well Serena… what are you willing to pay?

Butterflies exploded somewhere below my navel, thinking of the implications. The ideas in my head were crazy! Stupid! Outright wrong!

And yet…

And yet somehow it excited me beyond everything else, just thinking about what he might want. It turned me on to think about how I might pay him, using my lips, my mouth, my body…

I shuddered, shoving away the thoughts even as I tried to cling to them. Maybe he wouldn’t want anything. Maybe he’d just accept the paltry few hundred dollars I’d been saving for a junker, and he’d walk away as simply a friend who did me a favor.

Yeah, right.

I’d considered the age difference, but that part turned me on too. At thirty-two and twenty-two, we were only ten years apart. A whole decade seemed almost insurmountable, yet at the same time, for what we might be doing together? That decade wouldn’t matter at all.

In fact, it might even work to our advantage.

I sighed again on the walk back from the corner store, where I’d picked up enough groceries to put together a decent dinner. I’d taken a different bus stop, only a mile from my house.

“It’s been too long,” I mumbled to myself, pushing the thoughts away again. “You’re oversexed. Underlaid.”

That part was starkly true, though I didn’t like to admit it. In the almost three years since Eric and I divorced, I’d gone out on only a handful of dates. None of them ended up as boyfriends, and only one got even remotely romantic. The whole thing ended in bitter disappointment, both physically and emotionally.

The sad truth of it was I didn’t have time for a boyfriend. I didn’t even have time for myself.

“Tonight though, dinner.”

It cheered me up instantly, thinking about cooking for Tate. I hadn’t cooked for anyone but myself since David shuffled off to school, and even on the rare occasions he returned home he barely stayed long enough to gather more things. My stepson’s room emptied out little by little, until there was nothing left. His bedroom lay empty now, alongside the equally-empty room my ex and I planned to use as a nursery, once we were ready to have a baby together.

Nothing changes if nothing changes.

It was one of the final things I’d said to Eric. My last-ditch effort to get him to pay attention to our marriage, and to take seriously the things I wanted. Instead, he’d waved me away and continued focusing on his career. His trips overseas grew longer and more frequent, until finally the day he sent me the email that ended all else between us.

Shit. I was getting too deep in the past again.

Lifting my chin, I shifted the bag of groceries to my other arm and continued walking. Tonight I was going to have fun. I was going to make a delicious dinner and sit down and eat it with a dashingly handsome mechanic, and if he wanted something interesting for his efforts I was probably going to give it to him. I decided I wouldn’t feel cheap or guilty or anything else about it, and for one very good reason.

And that’s because it’s what I wanted too.

The roar of a distant lawnmower grew louder as I approached the house, until I realized it was coming from my house. Or to be more accurate, my back lawn.

Jacob?

He was finishing up, just like last time. I watched as my shirtless landscaper killed the engine and disconnected the bag, prepping to empty it into the same mulch pile he always did. I adjusted my pace along the sidewalk, dropping my bag on the porch so I could reach him just as he turned around.

“I thought I fired you?”

Startled by my sudden appearance but not rattled, he smirked back at me. “Yeah, that didn’t take.”

He was glistening all over, but this time he didn’t reach for his shirt. His lithe, ripped body looked even more delicious than it did last time.

“I can’t pay you.”

He shrugged and continued working. “So what?”

“So plenty!” I said. “Besides, I thought I was going to cut the lawn myself?”

“Do you have an edger?”

I blinked. “What’s that?”