Forbidden Desire

When dad was still in the picture, and there were two paychecks to live off of, Target was as high as I got when it came to back to school shopping, but this was a whole new ballgame. So, I was nervous as hell about going to school with these well put together kids who talked about jetting off to Ibiza for the weekend the way I used to gush about a little weekend trip to Destin Florida.

I’ll never forget the night mom came to my new room, which I was still getting used to and handed me the envelope with the new debit card that Eric had gotten me with my name on it. They’d open an account for me and had added a few thousand dollars extra for me to go school shopping.

Then she’d explained that every month Eric would be putting money on the account for my allowance, and it was my responsibility to make it last. I’d almost hyperventilated when she told me the amount and had had to ask her to repeat herself twice to make sure I’d heard her correctly.

And then she’d added that since I needed a whole new wardrobe for the upcoming school year that he’d added a little extra for me to take care of that. I didn’t even know what to say at the time, it all just seemed so far fetched, like something you’d see on one of those cheesy teenage movies, and I didn’t know what to feel.

“Mom, are you sure you’re okay with this?” I remember asking her as she sat on my bed. I know my mom is Ms. Frugal and that one of the things she was deathly afraid of was anyone thinking that she’d married Eric for his money. “Yeah, Eric and I had a long talk about it, and he said…” There she’d got tears in her eyes, “He said that you’re his daughter now, and it’s his responsibility to take care of such things.”

I knew by now that Eric was the salt of the earth as my grandpa would say, but his generosity had blown me away. Even so, I still didn’t know what to do with myself. Like I said, I came from a staunchly middle-class background that had been ripped away, leaving mom and I staring destitution hard in the face.

So to be given that kind of money without any strings attached or hearing any grumbles the way dad used to when he had to fork out money for me to do anything was new to me. It was obvious that Eric was very kind to his son.

At seventeen, Tyler had an SUV, a sports car, and every kind of off-road vehicle you could imagine. The gold watch on his wrist cost about half what my dad used to make in a year, so yeah, I knew Tyler didn’t spend nights lying in his bed worrying about fitting in clothes-wise with his friends.

Not that I envied him or anything, but as a teenage girl, I couldn’t help thinking about those things. Tyler is the one who’d taken me around to the upscale boutiques and showed me where all the kids did their shopping; he’d all but held my hand as he took me from store to store, helping me pick out things that would suit me because I was so overwhelmed.

That first-year things had gone as smoothly as could be expected with a new blended family. There weren’t really any bumps along the way, except for my dad, who tried to make trouble once he realized that mom had married up and Tyler’s mom, whose third marriage was on the rocks.

That’s a whole other story. I still can’t get my head around any woman leaving someone as sweet and kind as Eric, but apparently, as the story goes, she’d grown tired of being a mother when Tyler was about seven or eight and just wanted out. She’d blown through her divorce settlement in no time and had been working on husband number two within a couple of years, and hadn’t seen her son in all that time.

Eric had remained single and had focused on his son and building up his construction business, which had flourished even during the economic bust because of his business savvy and was now worth almost triple what it had when he’d been married.

That seemed to be fine for his ex until he met mom and became happy, then the crazy came screeching out hard. So, you can imagine, I didn’t want to screw things up for mom, especially when I realized how much she really liked this guy.

I was too old to want my mom and dad to get back together after the crap he’d pulled and, in fact, had been secretly gleeful when dad realized that mom’s new boyfriend had him beat in every way. The rabid look on him and hagfish’s face when they found out after months of tormenting mom before we left town was priceless.