Page 41 of Nineteen Eighty
Irish Colleen gripped his hand briefly. “Yes, you do. You’re the only one who does anymore. How I love you for it.” She sat back. “Ana seems to be recovering well.”
“You know how she healed.”
His mother nodded. “Of all the gifts of your father’s people, that one might actually be a blessing.”
“Not all of her is better, though.” Augustus ran his hands over the shadow of hair on his chin. “And while I could blame it on the accident, I believe the issue is bigger than one thing."
“Go on.”
“Ana has been very fortunate to have wonderful aunts and an amazing grandmother. She’s surrounded by love. But… there are times… I’m her father, Mama. I’m not her mother. And there are things I don’t know how to help her with. Words I’ll never know how to say. Lizzy keeps looking for reasons to come back and help, but the reason I sent her to Paris was so she’d live her own life. I can’t keep relying on family to be surrogate mothers.”
“Augustus,” Irish Colleen said carefully, “I don’t believe Ana is any worse off for not having a mother. Having said that, I understand and appreciate your meaning.”
“You do?”
“I do.”
“I’m not interested in love. I know what you’re thinking.”
“I daresay you don’t.”
He smiled. “I do, Mama. I know you want me to be happy. But I am happy. I have everything I could ever need in Ana, and DMG. I mean that, really. I don’t need someone else to love. And I have no interest in dating. I haven’t, since Ekatherina. I won’t.”
Nor do I have any desire for casual encounters, he didn’t add, thinking about the incident at the DMV last month.
He’d been waiting almost thirty minutes when the pretty young woman sat next to him, finding the only empty seat in the sea of hot, cranky patrons fanning themselves with anything they could get their hands on. She chatted him up first, and while he wasn’t in the talkative mood, he found himself engaging in light small talk, first lamenting the many numbers in front of theirs on the hand-pulled tickets, then exchanging facts about one another, some humorous, others bordering a lot closer to personal. She was a veterinary tech with a young son at home, about Ana’s age. She was also a thrill seeker, something that piqued his interest, but he could not relate to at all.
An hour into their spirited discussion, she told him to follow her; she wanted to show him something. She disappeared down the dusty hall, toward the bathrooms and offices. He still had twenty or so numbers ahead of his, so he did as she asked, and as he passed by the crowd, entering the hall in search of which direction she’d gone, a hand snaked out, pulling him into a room. The bathroom. She locked the door behind him and then threw her arms around his neck and started kissing him.
Augustus didn’t know why he kissed her back, but maybe the part of him that was turned on by the idea of thrill seeking peeked through, giving him a thrill of his own. He couldn’t believe this was happening, but he wouldn’t have the time or presence of mind to really dissect it until later. When she tugged at his pants, dropping them to his ankles, words made their way to his lips, but then died there as she pulled out his cock and placed it in her mouth.
He didn’t last long at all, gripping the paper towel holders as his knees buckled. When she finished—swallowing… my God, he didn’t need this like others did, but he was still a man—and noticed he was hard again, she backed herself up onto the sink and coaxed him forward, inside her, gently at first, and then… Augustus flushed even to think of the man who had taken his strange woman inside the DMV bathroom. It wasn’t him, but it was, and it scared him to think he could lose himself so easily with the smallest enticement.
I’ve never done that before, he’d said.
Too bad. You’re quite good at it.
She was out the bathroom door before he could respond, the transaction complete. He hid in there, ashamed, long after his number had been called.
And while sometimes, late at night, he still thought of that day, face flushed, libido aching, he was equally horrified that anything like that could ever happen to him again.
He’d never even learned her name.
He didn’t want love, but he didn’t want that, either.
“If I understand, you wish you had a woman in the house who could care for Ana, and perhaps see to the household, but without expectations.”
Augustus laughed. “If only a woman like that existed,” he said, but the hope of such a woman existing was exactly what brought him to this conversation with his mother. If anyone understood the practical side of love, it was a woman who’d married for exactly that. A woman who had never pushed him to be anything he wasn’t. While his sisters all angled to set him up on blind dates, his mother did nothing of the sort.
“I believe women like that exist. Absolutely I do,” Irish Colleen replied. “I even know of a woman who fits that bill.”
Augustus gripped his hands in his lap, afraid to be too hopeful. “You do?”
“Do you remember my friend Annie Godfrey?”
“No. Not really.”
“We sometimes play bridge together. Well, she has a daughter, closer to Maureen’s age, but of course, still well into her twenties. Barbara. She was married, to a man she was in love with from the time she was quite young, fourteen or so, and he died of an aggressive cancer last year. Really very sad, poor thing. Chandler was her married name. Barbara Chandler. Very pretty young woman, but she’s awful serious, like you. Annie was telling us a couple months ago how she wanted Barbara to go out and meet someone again, but that Barbara told her she’d never be interested in love again. She’d done that, she said, and didn’t need it now. Her only regret was that she truly felt she was born to be a caretaker. A wife and mother. Annie told her men like that don’t exist, that they come with certain expectations, but your old mama thought maybe she knew a man like that.”