Page 27 of Summer of the Boy

Chapter Six

“Hey, Kid. You okay?” Mom asks. I look up from my phone to her standing in the doorway of my bedroom leaning against the threshold with her feet crossed at the ankle, arms crossed over her chest and a white dish towel hanging partly out of her hand. Her jeans are tight but not inappropriately so, and her faded black T-shirt, form fitting. Mom looks good for her age. Dad’s a lucky guy. And they’d gotten together at nineteen. Just like me and Rid.Rid…

“Eh…I guess.”

“You look down. No Ridley today?”

Without asking, she moves inside and shuts the door behind her, then walks over to sit at the foot of my bed.

“Talk to me,” she orders.

“I’m in love with him.” Yes. That’s what I blurt out to my mother. No lead in.

Mom laughs. Yeah, shelaughs, snatches the phone which I’d still been playing with to avoid eye contact with her and tosses it onto a pillow at the head of my bed. “I’m happy to hear you say that. But when I said talk, I meant something I didn’t know.”

“What? You know?”

“Give me some credit here, Leif. You light up when you talk to him, you light up when you talk about him, you light up when one of us brings him up.”

“I do?”

She pins me with her, ‘Really?’look.

“I do.”

“So why does love got you down? Something happened between you two.”

“Mom. I’m not talking about that with you.”

“You forget, it’s what I do.”

“I haven’t forgotten. But you’re my mom. Men don’t talk with their mothers about their sex lives.”

“That’s because most men don’t have a mom as cool as me and I’ll repeat, does itfor a living.”

“Fine. Yeah. We—god this is humiliating—we took things to the next level yesterday.”

“It’s not humiliating. How next level?”

“You are just dying to know that, aren’t you? Seems every conversation we have… no. We haven’t gone all the way yet.” I swear I catch the briefest smirk cross her face when I answer. Because I actually told her or because she’s maybe not quite ready to hear about her son rolling in the sheets with a dude, I’m still trying to figure out.

“How’d Ridley handle it?”

“Like a pro. It was his idea. I let him lead on everything relationship. But you know he’s turning twenty. Well, we got home later than his curfew so today he’s grounded.Grounded.Can you believe it? The woman wouldn’t stop texting and calling. She was out on the lawn waiting for us. And I can’t say a damn thing because he’s worried she’ll keep us apart, so she doesn’t know or hell she probably does know but won’t acknowledge that we’re together, together and it freaking sucks.”

“She knows. She might not accept it, but she knows.”

“Mom, when I think of the future, it’s of where Rid and I will be together. I can’t hold his hand or kiss him except in hiding. It’s like I’m back in that damn closet and I hate it.”

“I’m going to talk with her.”

“No.”

“Sweetheart, not just because she’s hurting you and mama bear don’t like her cubs being hurt, but because she’s hurting Ridley. He has too many strikes against him already. She needs to be schooled and we both know I’m the one to educate her.”

“We have a plan. Just sometimes, it’s really hard to stick with the plan. He’s made so many strides this summer. How can she not see it? He wants us to get an apartment together so he can go to sleep next to me every night and wake up with me every morning. And it’s not about sex because we talked about this well before yesterday happened.” I pause to take a breath. “That’s not the ramblings of a child or a child-like brain. He doesn’t want to be my roommate, Mom. He wants us to be a real couple. Ridley’s a man.”

“Yes. He is. Which is why I need to speak with Ms. McAllister. Because her sonisa man and she’s holding him back from living life.”

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