Forbidden Love by Jack Gunthridge

Chapter One
    When I first met him, he was way off
limits. And I didn’t think of him in that way, since he was dating
my mother. He was younger than she was. Even though he was a couple
of years older than I was and extremely nice, fun to be around, and
handsome, I didn’t think of him as anything other than one of my
mother’s boy toys. He seemed to be more style than substance, which
pleased my mother. She would date men like this in an attempt to
deceive herself that she was aging. I never knew if the men were
dating her for her money, for her advanced sexual techniques she
flaunted about in her conversations, or for the fact that she put
out.
    I don’t mean for that to sound bad.
Men have a habit of knowing which women are easy to bed. Even he
has said, “Men are like electricity. We take the path of least
resistance.” Of course, he said it with a twinkle in his blue-grey
eyes and with a smile playing on his lips. I have always found him
to be the most handsome, the most charming, and the most
aggravating at these times. I’m torn between wanting to kiss him
and wanting to smack him as hard as I can. I don’t think it would
bother me so much, but I get the feeling he knows I find him
attractive and is playing with my head and emotions. It’s like he’s
trying to get me to admit something, so he can then deny he feels
the same way.
    I don’t think he would affect me this
way, but… Since I first met, my opinion of him has changed. He is
my best friend, and yet, in a lot of ways, I don’t really know him.
The more he lets me in, the more he seems to be a mystery to me. I
get the feeling he enjoys being a mystery.
    He met my mother at a wedding. She
came up to him and asked why a good looking guy like him wasn’t
dancing.
    He said, “I’ve grown tired of the
game. This is the sixth wedding I’ve been to this year. The bride
and bridesmaids might change, but it’s always the same group of
women my age trying to find a man to prove to the world they are
successful. They don’t care what the man is like as long as they
can somewhat get along with him enough to get married and pop out
at least one kid before she hits thirty and thinks she’s going to
suddenly become barren.”
    His game… His game may be that he
doesn’t see love as a game at all.
    Once, when he was single for an
extended period of time, I asked him why he wasn’t seeing anybody.
Without disclosing too much, I told him he was handsome,
successful, sensitive, and good with children. He would make any
woman happy.
    He told me, “That’s the
problem with women. They’re always judging a man by his market
value. I wasn’t born to be any woman’s possession, and I’m not
going to sell my genetic stock at a discount price just to make myself somehow
feel accomplished by continuing the human race.”
    He said it with a charming smile and
without taking his eyes off of mine. It was like he was daring me
to make him settle down. As we both waited for the other to cut the
tension that was building, he finally broke it while breaking my
heart and making me want him more.
    “Did your mother ever tell you about
the first time we made love?”
    I shook my head no. It was all I was
capable of doing as I tried to hold back the tears.
    “It was the first night I had met her.
I don’t remember now whose wedding it was. I know she approached me
in a sexual manner and wanted me just for my body. I flirted back
because she was different from every other woman there. She knew
what she wanted and wasn’t afraid to go after it, even if there was
the possibility of the younger man turning her down because she was
no longer as young as she once was.
    Youth may have no longer been her
ally, but she had confidence, poise, and the ability to carry on an
actual conversation. She wasn’t interested in me as a potential
husband. She was interested in me as a person.
    Between the alcohol and the dancing,
what I remember most about that night was how she pointed