“So, yeah, we weren’t in the worst neighborhood in town, but it was bad enough. My dad was shot during a convenience store robbery. Just in there to get a pack of cigarettes on his way home from work.”
“Oh my God. Oh, Lucas, I’m so sorry.” Still she did not move. Thankfully, or I probably wouldn’t have been able to go on. Would most likely be bawling like a baby against Lily’s soft tits.
I nodded, acknowledging her words of sympathy. “Yeah, it was bad. It really threw my mom. She was basically catatonic for a year. She lost her job as a secretary here on campus, ’cause she just wouldn’t show up. Later I realized she’d started…self-medicating, trying to block out the pain.” I swallowed, the words hard to speak. Hard to think about that time in my life, but also because…
“That’s what you did, too,” she said, totally getting it. Totally getting me. “With the Oxy. Blocked out the pain. And not just from your shoulder.”
No, not just my shoulder. It was the pain that I had lost my one chance at making a better life. That salvation, an easy life for my mom and Andy, had been in my grasp, with the likelihood of an NFL contract, when it all was just torn away, like the tendon in my shoulder.
“Yeah,” I said softly, almost a whisper. There was no judgment in Lily’s voice, but I still judged myself. And came up short every time.
But now, now it seemed I was getting a second chance to do it right. Oh, it might not be the money of the NFL, or the joy of watching my mom and Andy move into a swanky new place. But this? Taking care of Andy and seeing that my mom gets help? Working a good, honest job where I wasn’t looking over my shoulder all the time? Knowing what money I made was paying the rent on Andy and my mom’s place and not going straight to a dealer for more Oxy?
Yeah, I was not going to fuck up this second chance.
I looked at her then, finally able to handle what looking at a naked Lily would do to me in this vulnerable state. She’d covered up her ass with the ocean-like blanket, but her back was still visible. A back I’d run my tongue down just an hour ago. A back made strong from hours in the pool, yet still so female and soft.
Lily was part of my second chance, for sure. And again I told myself to not fuck this up.
“So, anyway,” I said, needing to get back on track so I didn’t crawl back into bed with her and totally blow off picking up Andy. “The guy who used to work with my father tiling, Frank, went to work at Bribury after my dad died. When I came back from USC, he called and asked if I wanted a job on the facilities crew there. Here,” I corrected myself, taking in my surroundings. “He’d worked his way up the past ten years and is head of the maintenance crew.”
“That was nice of him, to look out for you.”
“Yeah, but I told him no. Told him I was doing okay. I’d moved in with Stick and was…doing some work with him. I was throwing a few bucks my mom’s way to help out. And I didn’t really want a regular gig like he was offering.”
“Because then you couldn’t be high all the time.” Again, no judgment, just relaying the facts as she guessed them. And, of course, she was right.
“Right. And it was working for a while, and I seemed to think it could go on that way indefinitely.” I shook my head at my own idiocy. “Stupid fuck,” I said. She didn’t argue with me.
“Then I realized my mom was using again. She’d started about a year after my dad died. Party drugs at first with the married scumbag who left her pregnant. I don’t think she used when she was pregnant, but I’m not sure. But after that asshole walked away from her, and she’d had Andy, she turned to harder stuff.” I had tried to block out those years. Me being fifteen and wanting only to play ball and get laid but having a bawling, squealing, baby half brother at home and a mother who could have been in any kind of shape at any given time. “I kind of checked out then. I wasn’t much help to her. I was only looking out for myself.”
“You were a kid yourself,” she said.
She was right, and I knew that on an intellectual level. But on a gut level? “I was scared and selfish.”
“Again, a kid.” Her voice was a little firmer now. I nodded, agreeing. I would never totally let myself off the hook for being emotionally AWOL those years, but I was trying to make up for it now.
“Anyway, my mom maintained. A functional junkie, I guess you’d call it. She held down jobs…until she didn’t. Andy was always taken care of, but that was also due to Mrs. Jankowski.” It was one of the reasons I’d moved into my mom’s place instead of taking Andy to the apartment I shared with Stick. Besides that apartment not being a proper environment for a six-year-old, Mrs. Jankowski, being a caring woman who loved Andy and was basically a shut-in, was a godsend.
I waved a hand, not wanting to talk about all this shit anymore. “You know the rest. My mom started using again six months ago. I got clean. I went and saw Frank, asked him if the job was still available. He could have told me to go fuck myself, he would have had every right.”
“But he didn’t.”
I shook my head, my hair getting in my eyes. I pushed it back, off my face. “No. He said if I could pass a drug test, I was hired. Even said there were some tiling projects in the plan for the next couple of years and he thought I’d be a good fit for them.”
“He remembered you learned from your dad.”
I smiled, as touched now as I was then by Frank’s generosity. “Yep. Although I needed to brush up a little. I redid our bathroom at the apartment first. When Frank saw it, he gave me the steam room as the first Bribury project. If I do a good job, he said there are a lot more custom tiling jobs around campus, and the pay will be a lot better than what I’m making now.”
“That’s great. So, you’ve go to knock it out of the park with my steam room.” She was smiling, and she stretched again, adding to the vision that was forming in my mind for the steam room. And adding to my growing erection.
“Not a problem,” I said, leaving my chair and walking the few steps to the bed, and to a naked Lily.
Chapter16
Lily
The next threeweeks were a haze of bliss. It wasn’t easy with Lucas’s hours, Andy, and, of course, classes for me.
