chapter eleven

Harris

My lips are raw and red when Seb drops me off back at home. I keep touching them without thinking about it. I'll snap out of thinking about how it felt to him beneath me like that, our rib cages and flesh barely separating our thudding heartbeats.

It's only four, which means my mom is definitely awake. For her, four is breakfast time. Her twelve-hour-long night shifts has her living nearly inverted days, but her sleep schedule got royally fucked over by the graduation ceremony and my grad party at Grandma's. Is being old being unable to easily recover from lost sleep? Or is it just that she's overworked?

Even though I know she's awake, I still try to be quiet coming into the house. But there's not really much of a point, because Mom is there, sitting on one of the too-high chairs at our too-high table. She's got a full face of makeup on, and her hair is slicked back into the coiled ponytail she prefers for work. Her scrubs were an M.D. grad gift from me and Grandma, a deep, dusty pink. She looks put together, but I know how tired she must be.

"Hey, Mom," I tell her, leaving my empty shake cup from Paco's on our stained coffee table. "When'd you get up?"

"Oh, an hour ago or so," she says. "Needed time for coffee and contemplation." She gives me a tired smile, flashing the gap between her teeth, and offers up the periwinkle ceramic mug in her hands as if I wouldn't have believed she was drinking coffee otherwise.

I reach out to hug her, and she sets the mug down before returning my embrace. Even now, sitting down, she's still taller than me, but I don't mind it. I think sometimes, I like the fact that I didn't get those tall genes from my mom. In a small way, it makes me feel like I'm not growing up as fast as I don't want to be.

She presses a quick peck to my forehead before pulling away and immediately picking up the mug once more. There's a strong scent of coffee around her; coffee, and her favorite perfume, the one she's been using since I was a kid. Its familiarity is cozy. I know that it's probably to be expected of my own mother, but it's often that I feel so young around her. It's comforting.

My mom and I are actually very close. We're similar in a lot of ways—probably because I never had another parent to influence me—but we're fundamentally different in some others. For one, my mom wanted nothing more than to go to med school when she was my age, far away in Virginia. I just want to get a Business degree, because someone said it's useful and it's not like I had any other ideas, and I can't bear to go any farther than MNSU in Mankato.

She must find my lack of work ethic terribly mind-boggling at times, but she's normally pretty chill about it, so that's good. A cool but strict mom was probably the best thing I could have asked for. And she's gone at nights now, when I'm most involved in the behavior she'd murder me over.

"Have you had any breakfast yet?" I ask her.

"Uh, I was probably going to just do a bowl of cereal," she says. "We still have Lucky Charms, right?"

"Nope. Just Rice Krispies."

She sighs. "But those are for making bars for Grandma."

"Yup." If there's one Minnesotan custom, it's putting things in bars. I myself am a lemon bar man, but I can get jiggy with a good cereal bar every now and again. And homemade Rice Krispie treats kinda hit different. They're subpar only to Fruity Pebbles bars.

She leans back in her chair and draws her mouth into a tight line. "I need to go grocery shopping."

"It's fine, I should have grabbed more cereal the other day. Besides, you know you can't help yourself on a Hy-Vee trip."

"That is true."

"It's cool," I promise her. "How about I make us some omelettes, and then I'll go grocery shopping tonight."

"Fine, okay. Thanks, bub. Do you need my card?"

"Still got change from the other day."

"Oh, you little thief."

I'm already in the kitchen, pulling out a glass to whisk the eggs together. "Do you want your little floppy egg cakes or not, mother? Huh? Huh?"

"Fine, go, make me these 'little floppy egg cakes.'"

Once I'm out of Mom's sight, whisking spinach in with the eggs, my fingers wander towards my fingers once more, a completely subconscious action. He tasted like a mix of chocolate and mint chapstick. Just thinking about the feeling of him against me, his lips and his hands and his tongue and ... fuck. Fuck.

Focus on your eggs, Harris.

"What do you have going on tonight?" Mom asks. She's still at the dining table, her back turned to me. Her non-coffee mug hand massages the back of her neck.

"Nothing much." It's not a lie. Liam hasn't texted me all day, and he's usually the one who decides what we do. It's especially funny, considering he said he'd 'see me tmrw,' but I doubt he's even awake right now. I just hope that Eli Wakeman didn't have any issues getting him home. When Liam is fucked up, those issues can range from "disconcerting" to "downright terrifying." So hopefully Eli is okay. He's built like a linebacker, but with Liam, you never really know.

And I might hate myself for it, but I'm kinda glad it was someone else. I hate waking up the next morning and wondering just what the fuck happened the night before. And I hate that Liam can push my buttons to get me to that point, no matter what the situation. That he has some strange power over me, one where I find myself doing things I never quite agreed to. For the sake of my own sanity, I have no choice but to take his word. What Liam says happened, happened. It had to have. Before New Years, I never had a serious issue with it. Nowadays, I'm honestly happy when someone can take him home. It makes me a shitty best friend, I know, but ... I'm not sorry for being selfish. Not this time. Mostly. Somewhat.

"No? No Liam?" Mom hates Liam. She says she can tell that he's trouble, but she also said that I'm going to be friends with him anyways, and so long as I keep in mind her fervent hatred of him (she used "fervent," specifically), she's not going to get in my way. Most days, that's fine. Others, I almost wish she would.

"You can't get pregnant," she'd said on multiple occasions, "but that boy is probably a cesspool of filth and downright nastiness. So you use a condom, alright? It's better than nothing, although...." and then she'd trail off into herpes transmission statistics until I'd beg her to stop.

Chill doctor moms are really interesting for sex ed, but I guess it's better than the literal nothing on gay sex from high school sex ed.

"Nope," I tell her, "no Liam. Haven't heard from him all day actually."

Mom snorts into the rim of her coffee mug. "How late were you two out last night?"

"I got back pretty early, actually. Like, eleven-ish, I think."

"Mm. And how'd you get that cut on your forehead?"

Fuck. I completely forgot about the Band-Aid on my temple. I actually don't like lying to my mom, believe it or not. I think that's why I just avoid her when I have a secret, which also makes it super obvious when I do have a secret. So usually, telling the truth wins with my mom. She's pretty accepting of everything, which is really fucking awesome.

I debate telling the truth on this one though. How much about Sebastian do I want to tell her? She'll probably draw it out anyways, but ... should I?

"A classmate brought me back last night," I tell her. Not a lie, just not the whole truth. What's the word? An admonition? Something like that. Sebastian would know. "We almost hit a rabbit, and when he stopped, I just kinda went forward."

Great, now she's putting the coffee mug down and standing up. She wipes her palms on the pants of her scrubs. "C'mere, take it off."

"It's fine, I'm fine!" But she's already in front of me, peeling the Band-Aid away, which is so not fun, because I put honey on it like a good little boy, and it always feels weird to have a still-very-sticky Band-Aid just torn off like that. I kinda get skeeved out by the feeling, although I couldn't possibly explain how.

"Hmm," she says. "Was it bleeding bad?"

"It literally stopped by the time we got home."

"We," she says, leaning back and giving me an incredulous look through her thick-lensed glasses. Her eyes seem a little bigger than they are with those glasses—right now especially, they look like bug-eyes. "Who's we, huh?"

"No one," I tell her. Why am I lying about this? And why am I lying so poorly about this? "Just the guy who dropped me off at home. We're barely even friends, seriously."

"Mmmmmhmm, alright." She walks into the kitchen to throw the Band-Aid away and looks back at me. "And it's not Liam?"

"It's not Liam."

She grins. "Alright."

"Stop, that's creepy, Mom."

"Alright, alright, alright," she drawls.

"Stop, I'm calling CPS."

"Can't. You're eighteen. Get out."

"Somedays, I'd love to."

Mom just laughs, because she knows how much of a lie that is. And, honestly, I'm glad that it is one.

a/n -

freshman year of college is done, which is just crazy as all heck. but i think i did ... okay?? hopefully this remains my weakest semester here. i'll be okay with that. and i've got some fun stuff coming up next semester; my business communications professor from last semester wants me to join her research lab on AI and also told me to join the business honors program, sooooo, yaassssss.

i stopped writing a bit because i had some articles to write for my radio's blog (radioutd.com!!!! i embarrass myself sometimes, it's super funny :'D). also, i wrote a 19 page paper on fertility fraud state legislation for a gov class and set "some kind of record" for my citations length lmfao. so we are thriving

anyways, got more update coming up soon, so hope you guys enjoyed this chapter!! thanks for being here <3