Page 4 of Angry Lion's Naughty Little Neighbor
How…
Wait a minute! What did Aaron say when he left? I turn the water off and stand there for a minute or so. He said… Holy crap. Aaron is the man with the voice. Aaron is the man who kept me safe and then carried me up to my bedroom. Aaron is the man I thought would take from me what he kept the boys from getting.
And instead, he put me in bed and left. The man saw me naked and drunk. The man knew he could do whatever he wanted to do to me and instead of doing it, he protected me. As a reward. I treated him like shit when he came to check on me!
I hurry out of the shower and put on my robe. I already feel breathless, though I haven’t done anything to make me feel that way. It’s just that, in an instant, my life and Aaron’s actions on behalf of my life are in crystal clear focus.
And I need to make things right.
I hurry to my closet and shuffle through an overflowing shoe rack to find a pair of old flip flops. I shove them on and run out.
It takes me about three minutes to get from my bedroom to his porch. In those three minutes, everything replays in my head several times, but now I see Aaron’s face where the stranger’s face was. I see him dismissing Tommy and his buddy. I see him staring down at me as he picks me up from the couch.
I see him scanning the room and chasing people out of my house. Then, I see him looking at me with concern as he walks me to my room and gently puts me to bed.
I also see a wildly out of control girl throwing her life away because she doesn’t have any real idea of how to connect to other people. I see a girl that looked at her mature next-door neighbor as just an annoyance.
My whole life, I’ve pushed the best kind of people away and kept the worst close to me. Some part of me knew I was not making good choices, but I felt my freedom rested in the ideathat everything I did was just a big fuck you to anyone in my life that might have wanted me to do better.
All of this happens in a flash, in just the time it takes to go from my house to his.
I can feel tears welling up even as I knock on his door.
It opens after a bit and Aaron sees me, still in a robe, and sighs.
I don’t even register it. I just blurt out, “You showed up and put me to bed last night!”
He shakes his head and looks past me. “I’ll leave you alone from now on, okay? It’s a promise.”
He makes a motion as if to shut his door, and I, without thinking, jump forward and wrap my arms around his neck.
I start sobbing. Something inside of me has broken, and I’m just thankful that Aaron is giving even this much time to me.
“I’m sorry! So sorry, Aaron! I don’t know what I’m doing. My life is just the world’s biggest shit show and I just keep making worse and worse.”
“Everyone has problems, Kelsey.”
“I’m my own problem, but I don’t know how to stop, Aaron. I just don’t!”
I trail off into blubbering and incoherency.
I stand there like that for about five minutes or five hours or five seconds or whatever. I stand there crying and blubbering without any reaction from him. I feel completely desolate and drained.Then, he brings his arm up and pulls me closer. He strokes my hair with his other hand. “It’s okay, shhhhhh...”
I’m just getting worse. Aaron will just think that his neighbor is a complete nut and deserves to be sent to an institution.
But instead, he turns me around, walks me into his house and closes the door behind us.
Chapter Four
Aaron
She’s reached the breaking point.
No. She’s past it. I suppose the only thing I can do is hope that this isn’t just temporary, that she really wants to turn her life around. No, it’s not the only thing I can do. The other thing I can most definitely do is stop thinking about how nice her body feels pressed against mine.
I can stop noticing how her robe isn’t really designed to cover her up when her body is twisted a bit because she’s turned in order to hold me while she weeps. She’s half sitting and half kneeling next to me on the couch and I’ve caught flashes of her breasts and glances of her ass. Her body is perfect.I absolutely ought to stop thinking about that, too.
Yeah, I know I saw her body yesterday. But right now, she’s so vulnerable and clinging to me—don’t get me wrong. She was vulnerable yesterday. In some ways, she was far more vulnerable yesterday than she is right now. Yesterday, I could have slept with her and she might not even remember it or, at least,wouldn’t remember it was me. Yesterday she was vulnerable in a terrifying way.
