Best Friends

Chapter Two

Typical fucking Dad: the worst man on the planet for communication. It was part of the general history of my parents' relationship that Mom was always trying to get a date with the elusive Jared Smitinger, my father by unfortunate consequence. He never phoned her, and she was sure for a while that he didn't actually like her until she accidentally ran into him at a concert and hooked up with him. I still haven't decided if their chance meeting was a blessing or a curse, considering I wouldn't have been conceived otherwise.

But I had started jumping to conclusions, and I realized I was supposed to be making an honest effort of actually liking my dad. "Emergency?" I asked, shifting my weight on my feet.

Doug stood aside so I could come into the house. "Yeah, he's on call this weekend. A pipe at the job site dislodged, and now its flooding the place and making a skating rink."

"On call? On his birthday?"

"Money can't buy you happiness, but it can get you everything you want," Doug replied, giggling to himself. I slid my feet out of my shoes and shot him a dry look. He stopped laughing and took a sip of his beer.

"Um... who are you, anyway?" I asked, unbuttoning my coat.

"I work with your dad," Doug said as I hung up my jacket in the closet. "Why, doesn't he ever talk about me?"

"No."

"Oh."

I walked into the living room and plopped onto my usual sofa. The TV was on some prime time channel, but it was on mute. I sat down and watched the screen without much interest, watching two characters scream into each other's face silently.

Doug followed me and sat on one of Dad's two recliners. He took a long draught of his beer, and I tried to avoid watching him and searched for the remote.

"Why did you have it on mute?" I asked, flipping through the channels. I must have gone through eight commercials on ten different channels before I found a news station.

"I couldn't find anything I liked."

"So why didn't you turn it off?"

"I like having something to look at."

So far Doug and I had exchanged more words than my father and I do on an average night.

I took the TV off of mute and we listened to an evening report about traffic and projected weather. Both had shitty prospects.

"So, uh... you work? In school?"

"I'm at the University," I replied. "Second year. Biological sciences."

"Hoo. Sounds smart."

I shrugged, then flipped the channel when a story about an abortion rally at a clinic came on. There was some sort of sitcom on the next channel; some dolled-up actress was blithering on about some boy. I gave up trying to find something engaging and just stared at the screen, twirling a lock of my hair around my finger, comparing myself to the actress. I had nice, arrow-straight hair that was a rich shade of reddish brown. I had a fairly simple look to me – I never went over and beyond the call of duty to look particularly stunning, like the girl did on TV, but I thought I looked pretty in a plain way.

"Oh, shit, uh – you watching this?" Doug asked a few minutes later.

What a dumb fucking question, I thought. But I said I wasn't.

"Mind if we watch the game? It's on channel twenty-two. Almost forgot."

I closed my eyes, grabbed the remote, and changed the channel for Doug. And I was beginning to think he was different from my dad.

It was a football game. I know squat about football, but I tried to scan the details anyway without much luck.

"Who's playing?" I asked.

"Indianapolis Colts versus Jacksonville Jaguars," Doug replied enthusiastically. "Looks like the Colts have 'em by the throat."

"Oh," I muttered. I looked at the score, but it didn't mean anything to me. Dad once tried to explain to me how many points a team got for what kind of score, and I failed to wrap my head around the fact that a team always scored five or seven points instead of just one.

"That Coach, Caldwell, is a rookie, but he's doin' a pretty good goddamn job," Doug continued. "They're still workin' the winning streak."

Doug continued to chatter about the Colts, and I started to tune him out. I could care less about football – I'm a girl. But even though I was ignoring his words, I was listening to the sincerity in his voice. Eventually I turned to look at him as he talked to me; he was leaning on his elbows, and he motioned with his hands as he explained the team dynamics to me. There was a hint of a smile on his face, and he was watching the TV screen intently, as if he were studying a painting and telling me everything he saw.

Doug was a pretty hot guy for someone my dad's age. He had age wrinkles around his mouth, eyes, and forehead, but it served to make him look more distinguished. He had a jawline that was sharp but not too angular. Whenever he spoke, I watched how his adam's apple slid up and down his throat and I would think how good it looked underneath that jaw.

"...now. Watch this," he said, pointing to the TV. I was so deep in thought that I almost didn't catch his words and turn around. But I looked at the screen in the nick of time to see what Doug was pointing out to me: some player ran forward on the field and kicked the ball from underneath someone's finger, and it went flipping high through the air in between the two goal posts.

"Ysss!" Doug hissed, pumping his fist and rocking back in the recliner. "Damn, that kid can kick a ball!"

"Was that your team?" I asked.

"Yeah," he laughed, keeping his eyes on the TV, "weren't you listening to me?"

"Yeah. I was just checking."

My cheeks were bound to be burning bright red.

The phone rang a minute or two later, and both Doug and I started to get up to answer it. He smiled at me and waved his free hand. "It's okay, sweetheart, I got it." He stood up and made towards the kitchen.

Sweetheart. I watched him go, my nerves tingling like I'd just fallen off a cliff.

The kitchen was free-standing between two hallways and the living room; most of the counters were island-style, and the phone cradle was on the corner of the counters, so Doug was able to just reach over and pick up the receiver.

"Yello?" he answered. "Hey, Jared. Yeah, she's here."

I automatically squinted in disapproval; my dad was likely to say something along the lines of: "Sorry I'm late, I'll be there soon, I promise," even though he wouldn't really promise anything of the sort.

"Yeah, it's no problem. We're actually hitting it off," Doug said, motioning enthusiastically with his beer. My heart stole a beat, and I twisted my fingers together.

"Okay. See you, bud." Doug replaced the receiver in the cradle, then turned back to the living room. I looked away quickly to the TV, trying to hide the fact that I'd been watching him the entire time. There were two men with headsets sitting at a desk talking nonsensically about the football game. Or, at the very least, they were talking about balls.

"He said he would be a little late, but he promised he'd be home before nine," Doug told me. I rolled my eyes – I could predict my dad to a T.

"I think your dad planned on going out to dinner with you tonight, but he doesn't know if he can make that, so he suggested maybe ordering pizza and wings. Whad'you think?"

"That sounds fine to me," I said. Suddenly I didn't mind that there was a stranger here waiting with me for my dad to come home. And suddenly I was glad he wouldn't be coming home for hours.

*****

After three hours, it was after nine o'clock, and my trustworthy dad wasn't home, or hadn't called to let us know where he was. But I hadn't given him a thought since he had last called. We had ordered pizza and eaten it an hour and a half ago – Doug got cheese pizza just for me, and he ordered an extra large meat lover's for him and my dad. Over the course of three hours I'd learned that Doug had been working with my dad for four years, that the two of them went out for beers every Friday night, and that they had something of a bromance; they'd go to movies together, go out to restaurants, and hang out when they needed someone to talk to. Best friends. I wondered why Dad never talked about Doug in the many empty silences we had.

We were watching The Godfather on TV; we'd just caught the beginning of it on some sort of unrated movie channel. I'd seen it before with my dad, but I'd only pretended to watch it to humour him. So I really didn't know what it was about. I was dazing in and out of the movie, thinking about school, friends, and vaguely wondering about Doug, when something unexpected happened on the screen.

I had no idea there was a sex scene in The God Father.

My eyes bugged and I froze in my seat. I stated at the screen incredulously, as if it made a conscious slight against me by playing a sex scene while I was next to a man roughly twice my age. I squirmed motionlessly, watching the characters fuck against a door. Someone interrupted them briefly, but then they continued, and the scene was over.

It couldn't have lasted more than ten seconds, but it kept burning in my mind long after the commercials started to play. I discreetly looked over at Doug from the corner of my eye; he had cracked another beer and was sipping at it contentedly, unperturbed by anything.

I started to notice the heat between my legs.

Shit, no, I groaned mentally. I couldn't be turned on here, not at my dad's house, not with a complete stranger sitting two feet away from me. I rarely felt aroused, and whenever I did I was in a convenient location to satisfy myself. I'd never been in someone else's home. But I'd never been this suddenly horny. And from a mediocre, short-lived sex scene.

But it was only the sex scene that pushed me over the edge.

I looked at Doug from the corner of my eye again, and it only got more intense.

"I'll be right back," I said, getting up off the couch.

"Don't take too long, it'll start again soon," he replied, then took another nonchalant sip of his beer.

I crossed the living room to the furthest hallway. I walked into the bathroom at the end, flicked on the light and closed the door swiftly behind me. I turned on the fan as well, just to make cover noise, then made sure the door was locked.

I leaned against the bathroom sink with a light sigh, carefully undoing my belt buckle and my pants. I slid them down my hips to just under my ass, then shuffled upwards to sit on the edge of the counter. I was just the right height that it was comfortable to sit with my head leaning against the mirror with my feet just barely off the ground. Then I slowly ran my hands over my thighs before lightly touching myself over my panties.

I moaned softly, overly satisfied with finally being able to attend to myself. It felt like I had been waiting all day for this. I slowly rubbed two fingers over the lining of my lips, and was surprised to find that I was so wet that I was soaking through my underwear. I had never been that wet, or at least not while I was aware of it. What surprised me more was that after only seconds, I needed more intense stimulation.

I tried slipping my hand under the waistband of my briefs, and sucked in a breath of surprise at how much more pleasurable it was. I had a relatively sensitive clit, or so I used to think, so I had never been able to touch myself directly. I had always needed at least one layer between my fingers and myself. But I was so wet that it felt like I was dipping my fingers in warm oil, and it felt good.

I could feel heat spreading across my chest, and I reached behind my back to unclasp my bra with my free hand as I continued to massage circles on my lips. When I was free from my bra, I lifted it and my shirt up over my bust. Even the feel of the cool air on my nipples was enticing enough. I lightly pinched one of them between my fingers, and I arched my back as I suppressed a yelp of pleasure.

When I say I've never been this aroused, I'm painfully honest. I'd never had a boyfriend, but I'd had one or two sexual encounters before. My first time was with a drunk frat guy I took advantage of in first year, and my second was with a friend of a friend who asked if I wanted to pass time. Both events were largely unmemorable and fairly disappointing. I'd grown not to expect much from sex, and I didn't think much of guys, considering I'd never been overly attracted to them. Until now.

I felt perverse for finding an interest in Doug – for one, he was a recreation of my dad, about his age, and out of my league. Not that I thought of either of us as better than the other, but rather we were in totally different sports altogether. I was meant for college boys, he for divorced women nearing forty. But the look of his worn yet soft caramel skin and that perfectly angled jaw had drawn me in to all the other features that made me undeniably attracted to him physically.

I wasn't nearing an orgasm yet, but the tension was already surpassing anything I'd remembered enjoying. My mouth fell open slightly – I couldn't keep it closed anymore. It was also getting increasingly difficult to muffle my moans, and I hoped that I was being quiet enough to at least avoid gaining Doug's attention.

But I started to wonder what would happen if he did hear me. I fantasized about him coming into the bathroom, seeing me touch myself, then slowly pulling my pants the rest of the way down before he removed his own and fucked me against the bathroom sink.

I started to feel the build, and I gasped as I imagined his dick pressed up against my opening, teasing me. I rubbed my breast with the palm of my hand, the tingling in my nipples only adding to the burning in my thighs and the ache in the pit of my stomach.

I opened my mouth in a silent scream and arched my back again as I reached my peak. My thighs trembled and my lungs were robbed of air as my muscles clenched themselves, sending waves through my body. It was so intense that for a moment noise escaped my throat. I covered my mouth with my free hand and tried to muffle the sounds with low grunts. I rocked against my hand with each wave, riding out my orgasm.

It was, undoubtedly, the best one I'd ever had.

It must have been a good three or so minutes before the shock waves subsided. My legs were trembling so much that I didn't think I would be able to stand if I tried.

I heard a shuffle from behind the door. I froze - I nearly pissed myself in fright. I held back my yelp and tried to keep myself from flailing off the counter.

Then he walked away.

I sat still like a statue for nearly a solid minute. The only thought that ran through my head constantly was if he had been listening the entire time or not.