Series: Like Us Series by Krista Ritchie
Total pages in book: 241
Estimated words: 236417 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1182(@200wpm)___ 946(@250wpm)___ 788(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 236417 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1182(@200wpm)___ 946(@250wpm)___ 788(@300wpm)
Ugh, I hate those cockblockers.
I roll on my side to see the clock.
1 a.m.
Orion lets out doggy snores at the foot of my bed, and I try to think of something good. A decent memory of tonight: My mom never blamed Donnelly and me for walking in on her and my dad.
To escape the noise of the Super Bowl party, my mom and I talked in my childhood bedroom. We sat on squishy Pizza Planet beanbags, and I scanned the relic of a room. It was mostly how I remembered it. OG Luna left most of our superhero collectibles there. I’d been wondering why my ceramic Spider-Man mug was cracked into pieces and how come the Anakin Skywalker figurine was decapitated. But I didn’t ask about it.
My mom seemed nervous, tentative. Probably because involuntary tears left my eyes in the kitchen, and she knew I was blaming myself.
I held my pom headband, braving glances at her.
She had been off her crutches. Just a boot on her foot. All her bruises had vanished, and she had a cute temporary Eagles tattoo on her cheek.
“I’m sorry,” I started.
“No, it’s not your fault,” Mom reiterated again. “Your dad and I—we shouldn’t have been doing anything during the game. It was our mistake. My mistake.” She paused, her face reddening. “You didn’t see too much, did you?”
“Not really,” I told her honestly. “You were smooshed together so I turned around superfast on instinct.”
She smiled but her cheeks were still a deep-red. “You have better instincts than me.” I watched her pick up an old Hufflepuff plushie.
“I wouldn’t say that,” I whispered, the guilt surging like an incoming tsunami. “Mom, if I-I’ve been making it harder on you…”
Her face fell. “What do you mean?”
“Your addiction. If I’ve been causing you to regress, I-I’m sorry. Really sorry—”
“Nonono,” she said quickly, then tossed the plushie aside to scoot closer and clasp my hands. “Please, please don’t blame yourself.”
I swallowed a knot. “But…but I know you catching Donnelly and me in the kitchen, that probably affected you, and it-it’s probably why you’ve been avoiding him.”
She squeezed my hands, and her eyes carried an emotion I didn’t expect. Guilt. It was like looking in the mirror. How could she feel guilty? She innocently walked in on us, and it was her kitchen. “I’m working through it…and I don’t want you…I need you to know…” She huffed out a breath, struggling for the words. “I can overthink and spiral, and it’d be hard for me to walk in on any of my kids in that kind of position.” She spoke fast. “Not just you. Okay?”
“But it was me,” I muttered.
Mom thought this through. “When your brother was little, he’d forget to knock on the door before coming in the bedroom. Maximoff,” she clarified. “Your dad wanted to ground him because he kept making the same mistake, and one day, he almost walked in on us having sex.”
Oh. “I didn’t know this.”
“It was…a long time ago.” She smiled a little at the memory. “It was hard for me to even think Moffy did something wrong, when it felt like my addiction was why he needed to be grounded. That if I weren’t a sex addict, there wouldn’t be a problem, and I was causing the issue.”
“You feel the same way now?”
She nodded. “But it’s more complicated…which is why I’ve been taking some time to figure it out.” She gave herself another resolute nod, then said, “Oh and I really thought maybe you’d want the event to pass…to cool off. I didn’t want this”—she motioned between us—“to feel like an ambush.”
She had been giving me time too.
I started, “But the table—”
“I didn’t want to get a new one because I thought it’d make you feel ashamed. And sex is nothing to be ashamed of. But every time I saw the old table, it’s all I could think of.” Her cheeks were the shade of a firetruck at this point.
“I understand why you got it,” I told her. “And I’m not ashamed, Mom. Maybe I’m a real weirdo because I’m not even that embarrassed.” It’s been a fleeting feeling.
Her eyes softened. “That is a superpower.”
“Sometimes it feels like the opposite,” I told her.
She shook her head strongly like I was so, so wrong. Suddenly, her brows pinched in confusion. “Then what’s wrong with the table. Is it ugly?”
I shook my head. “No, I love it, but it’s just…” She saw the same emotion crash into me.
“You feel guilty?”
I nodded. “You only bought the table because of us, so we’d like to pay for it. Donnelly and me.”
“No.”
“Please.” It took a little more begging before she relented. And I asked the scariest question because I wasn’t sure I was ready to hear the answer. “Do you still like him?”
“Donnelly?”
“Yeah…do you like him? Do you like us together?”