The Sex Education of M.E. Read online

  The Sex Education of M.E.

  L.B. Dunbar

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  © 2016 Laura Dunbar

  Cover Design – Shannon Passmore/Shanoff Formats

  Edit – Kiezha Ferrell/Librum Artis Editorial Services

  Format – Brenda Wright/Formatting Done Wright

  Other Works by L.B. Dunbar

  Sensations Collection

  Sound Advice

  Taste Test

  Fragrance Free

  Touch Screen

  Sight Words

  Legendary Rock Stars Series

  The Legend of Arturo King

  The Story of Lansing Lotte

  The Quest of Perkins Vale

  The Truth of Tristan Lyons

  The Trials of Guinevere DeGrance

  Paradise Stories

  Paradise Tempted: The Beginning (a novella)

  Paradise Fought: Abel

  Paradise Found: Cain

  Stories in various anthologies include:

  “The Red Dress Affair”

  “Chance Encounter”

  “Rekindled” – Hook&Ladder 69

  Dedication

  For my readers, especially those in Loving L.B. Thank you.

  And for women over forty everywhere: you still got it, girl.

  Table of Contents

  MatchMe

  The Arrangement

  The Date

  Said too much

  The Proposal

  A proposition of sorts

  Taking time

  Fresh Fruit

  Breaking the ice

  Clean up, Aisle 3

  Second first dates

  Un-expecting

  The call

  The response

  Head trumps heart

  Clubbing it

  Dancing in the dark

  Round two

  Headaches are a poor excuse, or are they?

  In sickness

  In health…

  Bike rides

  Afternoon delight

  Loose hose

  Coming clean…and not just in the laundry room

  Fine

  Bedtime stories

  Liberal Libations

  Exs and uh-ohs

  Listen with your heart before other body parts

  Breakfast dates are better

  Five Alarm Bells

  Slow burn

  Teenage Boys

  Rain delays

  Derailed

  Children are a hard limit

  Hostile takeover

  Line dancing or crossing the line

  Side streets side track

  Home

  Back from outer space

  Liking and licking

  Go large or go home

  A mother and a widow. These things defined me. Forty-something, I stopped counting once the second digit rolled past another zero. It’s funny … as a child, I couldn’t wait to get to double digits. Ten seemed so important. Thirteen entered another realm. Eighteen, twenty, twenty-one. The counting slowed down when I got closer to thirty, but the years sped up. I wanted time to stand still at forty.

  Whoever said forty was the new twenty clearly didn’t live in my body. It was curvy, but not in that seductive, luscious, twenty-something way. There were no toned abs and sculpted thighs on my body. These were the lumps and bumps of a woman who’d bore children, nursed them until her breasts sagged, and carried them until her back spread. Each child added pounds, and each decade refused to remove them.

  It has been one year since my husband’s death. This isn’t a story about the dead, however. It’s about re-birth. After my husband died, I had two choices: I could continue to sleep away each day and feel sorry for myself, or I could get my ass out of bed and take charge of my life. The life that remained after my husband’s ended. A difficult year followed after the loss of a man I’d been married to for nineteen years, but I had two children, and they needed me. The past year was a blur of firsts I didn’t wish to recall.

  What I wanted to recall was sex. More than recall it - reinstate the practice of it. To be perfectly honest, I hadn’t had sex in the last year either. The desire just hadn’t existed. I remembered it, but guilt kept me from doing anything about it. I didn’t want to dishonor the memory of a man I’d been with for twenty years. One man. It was no small feat. People wanted to glorify him after death. Nate Peters was a good man, but he wasn’t an angel. At times, I was angered by people’s praise of him; at other times, I wallowed in self-pity that I had lost a respectable man. Then one day, I snapped out of it. I still had a life to live.

  So here I sat at a Fourth of July block party, a few streets over from my home. My best friend, Gia Carlutti, asked me to attend. The theme was screaming children and drunken fathers letting off fireworks, but what the hell, I had nothing better to do. Besides, Gia had been a huge source of support during the last year. Divorced long ago, she’d been gently encouraging me to date — something I’d refused to do.

  “It will be good for you,” she said. “Meet some people. Go to a club. Be wild again.” She swung her large hips back and forth, fluffing out her hair like a teenager. She acted like one, and I loved her for it. I’d lost track of all the men she was dating at once. She lived the life, according to her, and I needed to live mine, too. I wasn’t convinced yet that living life meant sleeping with seven different men, one for each night of the week, but what did I know? The last time I’d dated, I had gone out each night of the week. With one man, who became my husband.

  Sitting on her front steps, we sipped Moscato while her two young children rode up and down the block on their bikes, dodging laughing groups of adults and narrowly missing toddlers on tricycles. Admittedly, Sam and Sara were out of control, but Gia didn’t pay them much mind. A single mother of a six- and eight-year old, she did the best she could. According to her, their father was the one who made them unruly. He’d disappeared after only a few years of marriage. Parenting tips were not shared between us — what Gia offered was man advice.

  “Here,” she said, reaching out for my phone that lay on the stoop next to me. I don’t know why I carried it with me. I was only a few blocks from home, but it became more and more of a security measure for monitoring my teenage daughters. They were both out on this crazy night. Mitzi went to the northern suburbs with a group of friends to watch the fireworks. Bree wandered the neighborhood with other teenagers not yet old enough to drive. The phone was mischief control.

  Before I knew it, Gia had my phone in her hand, downloading an app. Another thing I hardly understood in the modern mode of communication. Other than maps and messaging, and of course, calling someone, I didn’t see the use of a variety of apps my children and Gia told me I needed. In seconds, she had something loaded and then began a litany of questions. Muttering to herself, she stated my name, birthdate, eye color, and hair color.

  “Weight?” Side-glancing at me and pouting her lower lip while rocking back and forth, she answered her own question. “Ahh…let’s say one-fifteen.”

  I snorted into my plastic cup of wine.

  “One-fifteen? Unless you are discussing the time for a meeting, that is clearly not my weight.”

  “You can’t be much more than that,” she mumbled, continuing to type.
r />   “I can. And I am. What are you doing anyway?” I reached over her arm, attempting to retrieve my phone. She held it just out of my reach, but faced my direction, and I was able to make out the logo, if I squinted. That was the other thing about age. Slowly, my eyesight was failing. I refused to give into the need for an optometrist visit and be diagnosed with reading glasses. This over-forty-thing was the pits.

  Narrowing my eyes, I read the blue swirl: MatchMe.

  “Oh no.” Leaning into her, I reached for the phone again. “No, Gia, absolutely not. I’m not that desperate.” As soon as the words escaped me, I was apologetic. MatchMe was the dating site where Gia got all her men.

  “I didn’t mean…”

  “It’s fine.” She cut me off with the wave of a hand, manicured with red nails for the holiday. “I am desperate, and actually, so are you.” Her eyebrow rose at me. Gia knew some of my deepest secrets, one of which was I hadn’t had sex since my husband’s death, and I was getting…horny. As a college professor, the profession did not provide much mingling with other adults my own age very often. Other than the fellow faculty members, most of whom were either married, too old, too young, or gay, I didn’t meet many potential candidates for my pent up frustration. In a drunken stupor one night, when I learned I couldn’t drink like a college student any longer, I confessed to Gia I wanted someone to sleep with. Just that. No dating. Just sex.

  “Friends with benefits,” I suggested.

  “Fuck buddy,” Gia said.

  “I don’t even know what that is.”

  “It’s someone you call, and if he’s available, you get together for sex. Not friends. No dates. Just sex,” she explained. I laughed, but Gia was serious. Her dark eyes danced with pleasure at teaching me my first lesson in modern sex.

  “Yes,” I said. “Then I need one of those.” Saying “fuck” seemed a little extreme. “Why couldn’t he be a ‘sex friend’?” I asked, to which she replied: “You could call him a boy toy.” That just sounded all kinds of wrong. I didn’t want a boy. I wanted a man.

  She’d set me up with an account on her favorite dating site in hopes of finding me someone. Here’s the thing: I was scared out of my mind. I didn’t want some sex addict. I didn’t want an ax murderer. I didn’t want someone sleeping with fourteen other women ages twenty to twenty-one. A dating site wasn’t going to factor all those characters out. Every person there was like me - desperate to find someone for sex. I hung my head in shame at the thought. I was running out of choices unless I simply propositioned someone.

  “Honey, it’s perfect. Most of these men are no strings attached. It’s just what you need.”

  The fireworks were about to begin, and we entered the street like the rest of the neighbors. At the opposite end, in the cross streets, stood the first of many large displays the resident on the corner would release to celebrate the birth of our nation. Gathering in close with other adults, while children settled closer to the activity, I noticed Gia’s neighbor and a few of his male friends near us. Todd Swanker was just that – a wanker. He was crude and abrasive in his language, with no filter for all things inappropriate. Every neighborhood has one of those neighbors; the harmless, married one who flirts with every female above sixteen. Our neighborhood was not unique. Todd was our guy.

  “Ladies,” he said, stepping up to wrap an arm around each of us, letting his fall from Gia almost instantaneously but lingering on my waist. A gentle tug toward him compelled me to pull back out of his grasp as he began the first of his unfiltered comments.

  “Another year of fireworks, but of course I see them nightly,” he boasted, pausing to let the images of him and his wife sink in.

  “Bet it’s your wife who sees colors each night. The inside of her eyelids as she holds them shut tight,” Gia muttered causing me to giggle at the thought of Todd’s sexual prowess.

  “Of course, if Emme needed help in this area, I’m sure I could work something out.” He twitched his eyebrows and rubbed his hands together, as if it wouldn’t be a problem for him to provide his services to me. My name rolled over his tongue made me shiver.

  With a brief, “No thanks,” I looked around the gathered crowd.

  Nearby, but not too close, was a man I hadn’t seen before. He dragged his beer bottle up to his mouth and took a long pull before releasing the lip of the bottle. His throat rolled slowly as he swallowed, and for some reason, I was mesmerized by this motion. The slight glow of a street light illuminated our small patch of street and offered a backdrop that highlighted his features from the side: large arms with a hint of tattoo, flat stomach under a tight t-shirt, low-hanging shorts. I continued to stare, transfixed by the movement of his throat under a layer of scruff. Removing the bottle from his mouth, he turned in our direction, and I quickly looked away. My face heated, and I thanked the heavy black of night. I stared forward just in time to see another wave of fire light the sky ahead.

  “That’s Chief,” Todd offered in my ear, startling me like the buzz of a mosquito. I turned to him, and followed his gaze to the man he referenced, the same man I’d been ogling seconds ago.

  “Hey, Merek!” He motioned for the man to come closer. “Come meet Emme!” The tall man turned in our direction, and his dark eyes narrowed in on me. His hair looked thick, with a hint of salt at his temples. His face displayed a few days’ growth. His skin was tight, but the crinkles by his eyes gave away his age.

  My face flushed again, and I wanted to melt into the sidewalk, disappearing under the weight of his returned stare. Dark eyes twinkled with specks of gold met mine and playfully sparked the reflection of another round of fireworks. He held my eyes for a moment, and I noted the glassy gleam that winked at me before he took a step: an uneven, swaying step. The man was drunk. A slow curve crept up one side of his perfectly puffed mouth and tugged the other side to join, revealing a dimple I wanted to trace. My panties smoldered. The next spark of fireworks in the sky matched the instant pulse between my thighs, igniting my sensible cotton underwear. I squeezed my thighs together, imagining this stranger’s mouth on the most intimate parts of me. My sex clenched, and I looked away. Oh God, I was desperate, if I was imagining a stranger doing such things to me.

  “Merek Elliott, meet Emme,” Todd offered. “Emme, Merek.”

  “Yummy,” he muttered with a chuckle. Instantly, I was enveloped in a sloppy hug. A dribble of beer from his bottle poured down my back as his mammoth arms engulfed me. He inhaled deeply next to my head, before he pulled back. With a slur, he said: “You’re lovely.” A hint of Irish brogue twisted into his drunken compliment, and cursing myself, I blushed again.

  “It’s Emme,” I emphasized when he released me. “It’s short for Mary Elizabeth. M. E.” Using my finger, I traced the letter M and E in the air as I enunciated my nickname since childhood.

  “That’s what I said, Yum. Me.”

  “Okay, Chief. Don’t be hitting on my ladies.” Todd reached out a hand to steady the man beside us. Drawing back, Merek held my gaze before his eyes slowly drooped downward to close, and then snapped open again. He swayed back on his feet, one kicking out to catch himself.

  “I’m not hitting on her,” Merek said. “No hitting,” he said, raising his beer bottle and taking a final long pull. I turned to Gia, who shrugged her shoulders, before glancing ahead again at the crowd near the end of the block. She returned her attention to my phone.

  “MatchMe?” Todd asked, squinting at what held Gia’s interest. “Don’t you already have like twelve of those accounts?” he teased.

  “Thirteen,” she said without batting an eye, “and it’s not for me. It’s for Emme.”

  “Gia,” I squawked, raising a hand to cover one side of my face, as if it would shield my embarrassment, while she shared this information with our most notorious neighbor and a sexy stranger. Why didn’t she just mark me with a giant D, like the scarlet letter? D is for desperate.

  “MatchMe?” Merek questioned with a slur. “The dating site?”

/>   I couldn’t respond. Reaching for my phone again, Gia relinquished it to me, and I stared down at a picture of myself. I hated having my picture taken, and this one didn’t flatter me anymore than any other might. I instantly found a hundred things to criticize. My chin sagged. The skin under my eyes had darkened with age, suggesting I didn’t sleep. My eyes didn’t sparkle cobalt blue like they once had. My nose was too pointed. My hair was almost white-blonde, and I had an age spot on my cheek.

  “How do I delete this?” I scowled, at Gia and anyone else standing too close.

  “You don’t,” she offered. “You use it. Just see what happens. Who responds.”

  “I bet you’ll get plenty of offers,” Todd commented. “But mine still stands, of course.”

  I glared at him, and I sensed the weight of Merek’s eyes on Todd, too.

  “I’ll make you an offer,” Merek suggested. All three of our heads turned in his direction.

  “Oh yeah,” Gia teased. “What offer you going to make her?”

  “What do you need?” He tilted his head ever so slightly to one side.

  “Nothing,” I blurted at the same time Gia said, “Sex.”

  An audible groan escaped Todd, and a shaky hand wiped down his face then slid over his large belly and lower, adjusting himself at the mere mention of sex. I looked away, willing the ground to open up and swallow me. I wanted to kill Gia at the moment, just strangle her right in the street. I could read the headline now: Friend Murders Friend for Soliciting Sex with a Stranger on Her Behalf. I covered my own face in horror.

  “I’m leaving now,” I said, spinning away from Gia.

  “Wait,” Merek’s voice froze me in a half-spin. “I’ll give you a ride.” He swayed back on his feet again. He righted himself this time with a firm stomp with his left. Legs straddled, he put in the effort to hold himself still. Something softened in those dark eyes, but I assumed it was nothing more than the sleepiness that takes over a drunken man at the end of his limit.

  “You’re too drunk to drive. Besides, I walked,” I said, swiping the hand that held my phone before me. I didn’t live far, and the two-block walk was what I needed to burn off the shame and fury.