Chapter 1
"Come on, come on!" Lydia yelled impatiently back through the door of the townhouse. "Stephanie! Simone! Let's get on the road!"
The twins appeared simultaneously, bags slung over their shoulders and both of them wolfing down the last part of their chicken salad sandwiches. "Coming, Mom," Stephanie said, stepping off the stoop and down the sidewalk as Simone balanced things precariously when she bent to lock the door.
"It's not like they'll keep us from starting our sophomore year, Mom," Stephanie said, heaving her bag into the back of the dependable 8-year-old SUV. "There's not really a deadline to check into the dorm, you know."
Lydia acknowledged her daughter's line of reasoning. "I know. It's just that I want to get on the road early for this 8-hour drive."
Simone slammed the back of the SUV shut after somehow finding just enough space to squeeze her own bag inside among the crammed-in boxes and bags that constituted two college girls' clothes and the long list of necessities to convert an empty dorm room into acceptable living quarters. Opening the passenger door behind the driver's seat, she slid in, saying, "Yeah, let's get going. I'm ready to be back on campus."
Lydia climbed in. Stephanie was already buckling in on the passenger side up front.
Pausing before she turned the key in the ignition, Lydia looked at her two daughters and said, "To think it's already a whole year since we did this last August. My two daughters as sophomores!"
"Don't get all mushy, Mom," Simone said, already pulling out her earphones. "It's great to be going to college, to be learning new stuff. It's just the way it is, you know?"
"And the college men," Stephanie said, laughing. "Yeah, I'm ready to get back to campus to meet more college men."
Lydia sighed, shook her head.
But she was grinning as much as her daughters.
***
The campus had accommodations for parents who had long drives when bringing kids or picking them up, and Lydia enjoyed being in a dorm room. Never having had the chance to be a university student living in a dorm, it was nice to spend a few hours in the spartan room, looking out on the campus through the single window. She had gotten her undergrad degree in kinesiology as a commuter student at the local state university after the divorce, and she had pretty much only been at the campus when she was in class. It was bittersweet to daydream about the college life her daughters were experiencing.
As a single mom, Lydia was so thankful her smart daughters had landed some scholarships to help pay for college. Without that extra funding, no way could Lydia afford to put them through college on her own, which is pretty much what would have been necessary — her ex-husband was barely able to pay the pitifully small amount of alimony and child support her attorney had been able to wring from the divorce settlement.
While thankful her twins were attending university, Lydia had the inevitable mom-worries about what they did as co-eds on a campus hundreds of miles away. She trusted her girls, though.
But would Lydia herself have been a wild college girl?
Probably not
, she thought, smiling to herself. She'd married her high school sweetheart the year after high school, and she'd been "promised" to him during that year she went to the local community college while he went to work straight out of high school in his dad's business.
So — as quaint as the good-girl stereotype was — Lydia Tanner (she'd returned to her maiden name) had married the only man she had ever slept with.
What would I do if I could date a bunch of different guys at the same time?
she wondered.
It was morning, and the twins were surely still asleep in their own dorm room a short walk away in one of the recently constructed dorms. Lydia would grab a shower and prepare to get back on the road, waking them by 9 a.m. if they weren't up by then to get good-bye hugs. Lingering at the window, she watched as early-rising students strolled by.
It was August and already in the mid 70s outside. The male college students who were out and about were in shorts, flip-flops, and t-shirts, which seemed to be the generally accepted dress code. Many of the guys were just sloppy, but a few raised the bar to casual in their attire.
One guy in a polo shirt and shorts was definitely cute.
At 39, Lydia didn't complain much about the cards she'd been dealt. A decade earlier, the divorce came unexpectedly, and her stay-at-home-mom days ended abruptly. She scrambled to find work that would at least pay something to a woman with no college degree and no connections and who had to support a pair of ten-year-old daughters.
The job turned out to be at a local gym where she did pretty much everything: sales person, bookkeeper (teaching herself some accounting software in the process), babysitter when a mom would bring a toddler in because grandma was sick and mom didn't want to miss her workout — every day was different.
And she did the things the gym owner just didn't want to do, like tidying up, arranging equipment repairs when something broke down, and so on.
Lydia pretty much kept the place together.
It was easy to understand — she told herself — why she had little time to find and nurture a steady relationship, so her post-divorce years were mostly consumed with raising the twins, her job at the gym, and working on a college degree.
Enrolling in college had been a very, very tough decision. It took a lot of time, and it cost money. But Lydia wanted more from life than her life was providing, even as satisfying as being a mom to two great daughters was. The idea of getting a degree and a better job had been inspired when her own time on the ellipticals and with the weights led her to an interest in body mechanics as she worked her figure — and her outlook on life — into better and better shape. With one of the perks of the job being as much time as she wanted on the weights and ellipticals and the track when she wasn't on clock hours as an employee, she had ample opportunity to convince herself to go for a kinesiology degree, do some work as a trainer along the way, and maybe even one day own her own gym.
There had been precious little dating in Lydia's life since the divorce. Throw in the usual mix of jerks among the men she had dated, and it wasn't surprising that for a stretch of years all her orgasms had been self-induced.
And though some of those climaxes had been pretty intense — especially when mixed with mental images of a handsome, naked man who was a good lover — Lydia still, of course, yearned for the real thing.
It had been easier the last year, though, with the twins off at school and her college degree and a couple of trainer certifications under her belt. There had been a couple of relationships lasting a few months each — one longer than the other — but both relationships had continued long enough for Lydia to have been in bed with the men multiple times.
They were competent lovers in some ways, but after her exclusivity of being only with one man most of her life, Lydia was in no rush to settle.
Watching the cute guy disappear from view around the corner of the adjacent building, Lydia sighed and turned to gather up the things she'd take with her to the shower down the hall.
It was a "co-ed dorm" (i.e., the closest thing to an on-campus hotel that could be shoe-horned into one floor of a building on campus converted from a dorm to a multipurpose building) for the parents dropping their sons and daughters off at university for the start of the academic year. Nothing fancy, but a nice thing to offer the few parents who took the university up on the offer of a night in a "dorm" when they brought their kids to campus.
