Page 9 of Callow

She laid the attitude on thick on the drive back from the bar, but I could tell by the haunted look in her eye when I glanced over that something had definitely scared the shit out of her.

Whether that was possibly being taken somewhere mostly against her will or witnessing the guys she’d been with get the tar beat out of them was anyone’s guess.

During the ride, and the very long conversation at home afterward as well, I learned that she and Allie had some sort of falling out a few weeks before. And that all the times she was supposedly hanging out with her, she was now hanging out with this Tammy girl who was eighteen, going on nineteen, who by all accounts was wilding out.

And coming from a former very wild child, that was saying something.

I’d never been the kind of mom who believed in grounding. I’d known lots of kids growing up who had parents always grounding them. It never changed the behavior. It just made them sneakier.

That said, there was a two-and-a-half to three hour period of the day when I wasn’t around to keep an eye on her. So for those hours, she was to stay in the apartment. Alone.

I could at least make sure she did the first part, thanks to making her share her location with me on her phone.

I hated doing it. I believed in trusting your kids. That said, the kid had to earn that trust. Since she’d broken it by lying and going out when and where she shouldn’t, this was just going to have to be how it was for the time being.

I couldn’t make sure she was alone in said apartment for those hours. But as far as I could tell, there was no sign of any boys in her life. And, believe me, we’d had manymanytalks about safe sex. So I wasn’t as worried about that part.

And that was our life for the next two weeks.

Sure, Daphne bemoaned being ‘in prison’ but it was a pretty half-hearted fight, all said and done.

I hoped she’d seen just how close she’d come to something happening that couldn’t be taken back, that would potentially stick with her for the rest of her life.

If it weren’t for Callow stepping in to put a stop to it.

Even just the thought of his name sent little sparks of interest shooting across my skin.

I hadn’t exactly been a nun since becoming a mom. There’d even been a couple of men I’d had short-term physical affairs with over the years.

But it had been a really long time since I’d experienced anything even akin to desire.

I’d joked with the women at work that I was worrying that I’d completely lost all interest in men. I could pass right by an objectively handsome man and feel absolutely nothing.

I blamed being an overworked, underpaid, single parent of a kid going through a really difficult phase.

So it was a complete shock that, amongst my fear, anger, and relief as I stood in the bar parking lot, there were some interesting… flutterings going on thanks to that tall drink of water standing in front of me.

Sure, maybe you could make an argument for the fact that he’d saved my girl being a part of the interest.

But he was also just stupidly good-looking.

He was tall, wide-shouldered, with the carriage that came from being in the military. He had dark hair and a slight beard that contrasted nicely to his ice-blue eyes.

He also seemed insanely fit under his white tee with all sorts of interesting black and gray tattoos up his arms.

I couldn’t tell exactly how old he was. Men aged so damn well it wasn’t fair. But I would say he was probably closer to forty than thirty. And there were charming little crow’s feet kissing the corners of his eyes and just the slightest bit of gray starting at his temples.

I was kind of disappointed I had to meet him under such strange circumstances. Because any other day if I had felt such a reaction to a man, I might have decided to hang up my years-long celibacy streak, grab a hotel room—or backseat of a car—and have some much-needed stress relief.

“That is the third time you’ve zoned out,” Allie’s mom Britney said as she sat across from me at She’s Bean Around for our weekly coffee date. “I’m starting to worry I’ve suddenly become boring,” she added. “You want to talk about it?”

All I’d been doing was talking. Mostly about Daphne. But also Allie. And the fracture in a friendship that the girls had going strong since the first Mommy-and-Me class I’d gone to and met Britney and Allie.

Britney had been a breath of fresh air for me. Amongst a sea of perfect mommies who didn’t seem as strung out from lack ofsleep as I’d been, Britney had dark circles that rivaled mine and looked perpetually ready to burst into tears at any moment.

She’d been older than me, of course. And while she wasn’t a single mom, she was the stay-at-home partner in her relationship, so she was bearing most of the child-rearing responsibilities.

We’d bonded over our mutual struggles, our fears that we were missing some inherent ‘mom gene’ since so many of the other moms seemed to have it all together.