BEEEEP!
Sighing, I kept my eyes shut for several seconds—trying to drift off to sleep again, but it was no use. I was now wide awake, and I only had myself to blame for not foreseeing this sooner.
Every three months, like clockwork, my mother unloaded her bitterness onto every blank space of my studio apartment’s antique voicemail system.
It always started simple, almost like she was a mature mom who was capable of leaving the past behind. She ranted about her job, wondered why her “beloved and only daughter” would rather live in Charlotte, North Carolina than by her side in Miami. Then she’d say, “I love you so much, Chrissie,” seconds before revealing the same center stage act each time: Extreme, vulgar pettiness about my dad.
“One last thing I need to say!” Her voice came over my speakers once more. “Your father’s bimbo of a wife is a cunt. Always has been, always will be. She’s currently posting all of her latest pregnancy pictures on Instagram with her whole, hashtag, Grover family forever, and hashtag, Mrs. Grover for eternity bullshit. I’m shocked he doesn’t slide right out of her whenever they fuck, since her vagina has to be wide as a canal after all those kids. And you know what? I’m tempted to comment on one of her posts and tell her that Mr. Grover’s tongue was once licking my asshole. I wonder if she’d put up so many pictures of him kissing her on the lips then!”
BEEEEP!
What the hell? I sat up and tossed my pillow at the machine, toppling it to the floor.
I already knew that she’d call back and leave her final, “I miss you so much, Chrissie, and I hope you’re still doing well with your tutoring job! Call me back when you get a chance!”
There was no point in feeling guilty about missing that one.
She and my father had been divorced since my junior year of high school, but their hatred for each other still burned like wildfire. Teenage sweethearts—at first, they spent more time convincing everyone else that they were in love that they forgot to tell each other. The night that they were finally going to put each other out of misery and “take a much-needed break,” they found out that they were pregnant with me. Then they got married.
“Stupidest fucking decision that I’ve ever made,” they still said to this day.
They’d moved on to new spouses and lives, but they continued to use me as a pawn in their unresolved game of hate.
Tossing the covers off my body, I slipped into my bathroom and took a quick shower—washing away all of the negativity from those voicemails. I wrapped myself in a robe and headed over to the kitchen—turning on the Keurig and my laptop.
I couldn’t afford to waste any time dealing with either of my parents right now. I had a deadline to meet, and the final scenes for My Hot Neighbor weren’t going to write themselves.
Thank God, I never told them that I quit that tutoring job and started writing smutty books for a living…
Taking a few deep breaths, I made a cup of coffee and set a timer for forty minutes—my usual time for penning a sex scene.
Picking up right where I left off yesterday, I typed a few lines and deleted them. I copied and pasted a word here or there for inspiration—“cock,” “wet slit,” “hardness”—and hoped that the sex would unfold as easily as it usually did, but before I knew it, the timer was sounding and there were only three sentences standing on my page.
“And then, with his eyes locked onto hers, he slipped his throbbing member into her juicy wet folds.”
“Then, with his heated gaze blazing, he slid into her vagina ever so slowly, passionately.”
“His cock impaled her all at once—like a freight train, consuming her whole…”
Shaking my head, I tried to convince myself that those lines weren’t as terrible as they sounded, but the truth stared me right in the face.
Throbbing member? Impaled like a freight train?
No matter how many times I read them aloud, they sounded worse with every repeat.
As much as I didn’t want to admit it, this was the third week in a row that I was having this problem. Still, I was refusing to believe that I was suffering from the worst thing an author could ever face: Writer’s Block.
Undaunted, I set the timer for double the length.
This time, I logged into a porn website and watched a few filthy videos, read through a few of my previous sex scenes, and scrolled through my dirty picture collection before trying all over again.
I tried to look away as I typed, to “feel the flow,” but when the beep sounded, and I glanced at the page, the words were more pitiful than the ones before.