I’d always dreamed of living on a property with acres. So I could have chickens. Other animals. Definitely at least one dog. Maybe a goat. As long as the goat and the dog could become friends. Natural predators became friends all the time, right? Or was that just wishful thinking on the account of the predator that was currently in my living room, doing something to the security system.
Hence me hiding in the kitchen with my peanut butter thinking about my fantasy life, building more to it. This was a habitual daydream.
I’d grow all my own vegetables.
Nathan could explore.
He could breathe in the coolness of nature, instead of the trash from the neighbors in our close city air that seemed just a little too thick.
Maybe one day if I got a better job, figured out a way to save enough for a house deposit on a place like that, found a way to support us both living so isolated.
A dark shape in the corner of my vision punctured the low light and the daydream.
His eyes focused on the jar in my hands then the spoon that had just been hanging from my mouth. My stomach dipped with his cold blank stare on my mouth. There was nothing sexual about the way he looked at me. Nothing. I was a job to him. A task.
So why was I responding the way I was?
Well, obviously because I had two eyes and hadn’t got laid in recent memory.
But it was more than horny single mother syndrome.
It was a thing, apparently.
Dangerous too, as Marie, my only other single mom friend, explained. You could find yourself desperate enough to jump the balding and overweight cable guy like some bad porno and then have to extract yourself from the situation when he wants to date you and for you to meet his mother.
This obviously didn’t happen to me.
We didn’t have a cable guy.
Luckily.
The only guys I came into contact with on a regular basis were Bobby, our line cook. Beautiful, chocolate skinned, bald-headed, muscled and oh so very gay. Logan, who had gone gray and worked it, was tall, barrel-chested and married to a woman I loved and respected and would kill anyone who looked at her husband. Then the busboys who hadn’t even graduated high school.
And then my son.
So not really laden with options.
But it wasn’t just the lack of male stimuli in my environment.
It was him.
There was something magnetic about him that yanked me in. Something very frickin’ dangerous. You’d think I learned my lesson with dangerous after everything that had happened. You’d think after my marriage and my upbringing, I’d want a safe, normal and boring type of guy.
But that was not me.
I did not come from the trailer park with dreams of a ‘normal life.’ No, I wanted a life as abnormal, unique, and my own as possible. I wanted to bring Nathan up to understand that normal was a construct made to cage people into one way of thinking. I wanted him to think however he wished, dreamed, no cages.
No normal man would cut it for me.
“Please tell me that’s not your fuckin’ dinner,” was what the dark, attractive, dangerous abnormal man said. No, demanded.
I dropped the spoon from my mouth. “Peanut butter contains a lot of protein,” I answered.
He folded his arms.
I struggled not to watch the way his veins moved as he did so.
“It also has sodium, which is important to muscle health,” I continued.
He did not look convinced or impressed.
Like at all.
“I’m not hungry?” I tried.
That was kind of a lie. I was hungry. But it was payday tomorrow.
And I budgeted fiercely around payday. Not just to the dollar. But to the cent.
All of our bills were paid—well, except the one I’d owe Greenstone Security, but I guessed that would be paid off once Nathan made me a grandmother.
The rest of them, though, rent, power, gas, Nathan’s school stuff, health insurance, all paid up.
Which meant the fridge had the fixings for Nathan’s breakfast, lunch, and snacks were in there.
The cupboards had the bare essentials, flour, sugar, canned food, Nathan’s mac and cheese, all of which I didn’t really touch in times such as these. Payday was tomorrow. I could skip breakfast and grab something at work. They always fed me at work. I wasn’t sure if it was out of pity or kindness. I didn’t say no to either. I wasn’t too proud to accept a meal. Or the leftovers they always made me take home.
Nathan loved cherry pie and I swear Bobby ‘accidentally’ made extra every two weeks. And on those other weeks he ‘accidentally’ made too much peanut butter chocolate, my ultimate weakness.
We dined with Karen and Eliza at least once a week, and they never let me bring anything but a vegetable dish which was nothing to make. Then they came over regularly too, which put a small dint in the food budget, but they always brought over bread, sides, and wine.