The Finer Points of Sheila

"The Breaking Point..."

EDITED BY:

Miriam Belle

CREATIVE CONSULTANT:

Simply_Cyn

Author's Note:

"Before you read this chapter of the story, I would highly recommend reading the first three chapters as well as "The School Secretary" (a small spin off piece with more about Doug, Sheila, Elle and the characters in this story). Thanks for your support!"

***

The heavy aroma of authentic Italian food soothed me to a small degree, but I still found myself ready to explode. Sheila had called and asked me to meet her here. She had said we needed to talk, and that it was very serious. For all her intelligence and beauty, her levelheaded sane approach to life, she couldn't just tell me she wanted to see me. No, it had to be a "serious" conversation that couldn't wait. It was like she was torturing me. Unintentionally, I'm sure. But torture nonetheless.

The only thing I knew for certain as I sat at the small table was that my craving for a cigarette was reaching a crisis point.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck," I muttered to myself, breaking one of the long breadsticks in half and drumming the pieces on the tabletop.

I thought of Elle, my best friend who also just happened to be Sheila's daughter.

The night Elle had come on to me had been a disaster. Growing up together, I had often fantasized about what it would be like to touch her large breasts, to kiss her and hold her. The irony that permeated the timing of her decision to tell me she had feelings for me was too perfect. On some level, I knew I loved Elle. That was a fact I didn't doubt for one minute. But I didn't love her like she wanted. She wanted to know why, and she had been dogging me for days on the subject. It was getting tiresome, and of all things in this world she could have asked me about, it was the one thing I couldn't tell her.

How could she have known I was in love with her mother? What's more, how could she have known that I was sleeping with her mother on a regular basis?

"How could she have known," I said to no one.

The music piping in softly over the speakers had been just shy of becoming an ethnic slur. I could imagine some greasy, mobbed up guy wearing a white and red striped shirt to compliment his thick mustache pushing a gondola down a waterway in Venice somewhere as the omnipresent singer on the speaker crooned out his love song. I picked out the word "amore" at least sixteen times throughout the ballad, and I started praying for anything else but this.

Hell, I would have taken a song by Air Supply at this point.

The copper bell over the glass doors of the eatery rang out, and I looked immediately to the newcomer. Sheila walked in, looking painfully beautiful as she scanned the restaurant for me. Her bronzed hair was pulled back in a ponytail. The white blouse and black skirt she wore looked as though they had been tailored to her exact voluptuous measurements. She never looked to me like a 45 year old. And while I knew that 45 wasn't really very old at all, she just seemed to have a youthfulness to her that elevated her above those of similar years.

She took my breath away every time.

My heart jumped and suddenly my anxiety began to fade away. Her hair caught the warm orange and yellow lights that set the mood for the dining area, lighting her up as though she were glowing. Her dark eyes fell on me and she smiled broadly, raising one hand to me in a quiet greeting. At least she wasn't mad at me. Or, at least it didn't seem like she was mad at me.

"Hi," I said stupidly as she arrived.

"Hey you," she smiled, her full crimson lips stretched wide over her perfect white teeth, "Been here long?"

"Just got here," I lied.

Sheila sat down, and her lavender perfume rolled under my nose invitingly. I wanted to kiss her so bad, but decided to wait. I offered her my hand from across the table. She grasped it. "How have you been, Doug?"

"Terrible," I laughed, "This has been a nightmare."

"Tell me about it," Sheila sighed, setting her purse down and taking a sip of ice water.

"What happened?"

"After you left," she said, "Elle came to me and said she knew I was having an affair."

"Ah shit," I leaned back, needing my cigarette more than ever, "What did you say?"

"I denied it, of course," Sheila said, her eyes unable to hide the fact she felt bad about lying to her daughter, "But she said she didn't know with who."

"Thank God."

"It gets better. Your friend Brett showed up at the house. I guess he was the one who saw us at the Freeling Hotel that night. I thought he was going to expose us for sure, but instead he told Elle he had been mistaken. He said he made the whole thing up."

"Good," I sighed, fully relieved. "He's not a stupid as he seems."

"You knew?" she cocked her head quizzically.

I looked at her. "I found out Brett knew just after I left your house that night. He said he told Elle, and that she was going to confront you. I think he thought he was being all noble and righteous. Thing is, Brett was doing a drug deal the night he saw us together. He didn't tell Elle it was me he saw with you, thank God. But he was pushing for us to come clean. So, I threatened to turn him in if he didn't tell Elle he was lying."

"My God, Doug," Sheila half laughed, "Isn't he your friend?"

"Yes," I nodded, taking a drink of water, "But he was also threatening to destroy something very important to me."

Sheila smiled again, but there was a strange sadness in her look that made me uneasy. She looked at her water glass, "Anyway, Elle was fit to be tied. She actually punched your friend in the face. Knocked him out."

"But we're safe, yes?"

Sheila glanced up, her finger circling the lip of the glass. "Yes, for now. I still think she suspects something."

"Then we're in the clear on that one," I smiled. She wouldn't look up from her glass at me. I could feel something bearing down on her hard, and it was beginning to scare me. "Are you okay?"

Sheila smiled a little, but it didn't seem to reach her eyes. "Yes."

"You're a worse liar than I am," I eyed her.

"Elle is in love with you," she said flatly.

My heart bottomed out, and I knew she had seen us on the back porch. I slowly spoke, "Did you see what happened?"

Sheila was silent for a moment. "Yes, I did. I didn't mean to spy on you two..."

"No, Sheila," I interrupted, feeling a real panic in my chest, "No, you don't understand. Elle came on to me, yes. And she did make a pretty strong pass at me, but you gotta know that nothing happened."

"She had her shirt and bra off, Doug," Sheila whispered, still not looking at me, "She had her hand on your dick."

"I told her I was in love with some else," I blurted out. God, this was not how I wanted to tell her that I loved her.

Sheila seemed to jump at the word, as though it had stung her. "What?" she managed, her voice choking a little.

"Sheila," I felt a hot blush in my face and butterflies doing the electric slide in my stomach as I searched for the right words. "I've fallen in love with you... I didn't plan on it... I'm so sorry. I know this is not what you need right now, with your divorce from Tom just starting and all."

The waiter came by and stood by us expectantly for a moment. I looked up at the cherub-faced teenager and shook my head politely. "We're not ready yet," I said.

He nodded and walked off, politely agitated.

"You're right," Sheila nodded, "We're not ready yet."

"Maybe we are ready for what's happening here..."

"No, we're not."

"It's not as crazy as it might sound...."

"Maybe I'm not..."

"Sheila, listen," I tried to reassure her, "I'm not saying we have to be an item or anything. Just please, don't let this freak you out."

Sheila smiled ruefully. "Here's a man telling a woman not freak out over 'I love you' and commitment issues... it's usually the other way around, Doug."

"I know."

"But then nothing has really been conventional with us, right?"

I nodded. I could feel where this heading already, and my heart was screaming at her, begging her not to say the words that were as inevitable as us eventually being caught and exposed. I suppose in the back of my head, I had always known that Sheila and I wouldn't last. There with so many hurdles in the way, how could it last?

"Doug," Sheila looked at me, her eyes red and irritated from tears threatening to flow.

"Oh, don't say it, okay?" I smiled, doing my best to hide my fear. I took her hand again.

"I have to Doug," she said firmly, "Let's be realistic here. You're 18 years old and I'm 45. The math doesn't add up no matter what. You have so much to do yet. You can do amazing things with your art, and you're going to go to college... You deserve someone a little more... fresh."

"You're fresh," I tried to joke, "You always smell great."

"Oh Doug," she shook her head, a mournful smile forced on her face, "It can't ever be. There are too many things at stake here. It would ruin our relationship with Elle, and you know it. Your parents would never understand. We'd be nothing more than gossip. A joke."

"How can you say that?" I stared at her. My heart split right down the center. It wasn't a clean break either, but rather violently jagged and sharp. My heart shattered, the shards stabbing at me and making me feel a pain I had never known. Hot tears threatened to boil over, and I held them down. I summoned all the anger within me and suppressed the hateful little droplets. I beat them back because I would not cry in front of her. Goddamit, I would not shed one tear. Because if one birthed itself and fell, then all of them would and that would be it for me. I needed to at least save my dignity.

If nothing else, at least that.

"I'm getting back together with Tom," she said quietly. The whole room seemed to go quiet. I sat alone in a universe devoid of sound and movement as her words echoed in my head. It was so silent in the following moments that the absence of noise seemed to become a sound in and of itself. It steadily became loud and pounding, relentless as it drove the point home to me.

"What?" I asked dumbly.

"We talked, and we're going to try and work things out," she said quietly, defeated.

"Why?" I asked. She didn't believe a word of this shit, and neither did I.

"For a lot of reasons."

She couldn't look at me.

"Why?" I asked again.

"He wants to keep the family together and..."

"Why?!" I demanded, the volume of my own voice bringing the outside world back to the field of my attention as the people nearest us looked up from their dinners briefly, eyebrows raised in surprise.

"It's just easier this way," Sheila told me. I looked, and saw her wedding ring was back on her finger.

"Do you love him?" I asked pointedly.

There was a long pause. "No."

I shook my head. "Do you love me?"

Sheila looked out the window, the night illuminated up by the lights of passing cars and sodium street lamps. Her face was reflected in the glass, faded and ghostly. Yet, there was such a presence there in just that reflection. Her intentions of hiding her feelings from me were as pointless as her trying to rationalize staying with that asshole Tom. She had turned away so I wouldn't see her expression, maybe to save me some grief, but failed nonetheless.

"Sheila," I said softly, "Do you love me?"

She choked by a small sob, her head still turned.

"I think you do," I ventured, the words suddenly rising from my heart and coming out with a conviction I had never felt before. Maybe it was a desperate act of trying to save my heart, or to save the relationship or even just to try and convince her because I couldn't live anything less than her love.

Sheila still did not look at me.

"That night we sat in the kitchen, something happened to us," I said, squeezing her hand and running my thumb over her finger, "At first, it was just lust... for both of us. I know it. Maybe I just wanted to have you and call it good. Maybe you just wanted to have a fling with a younger guy. Maybe our intentions in the beginning weren't the best. But something happened to us..."

"No Doug," she whispered, her voice cracking.

"That night at the hotel," I pressed on, "Something happened I never could have predicted. I think that's when I fell in love with you. I've never been in love before, Sheila. I wouldn't have known it from a hole in the ground. But I know it now. And I think maybe you've never felt it either, and when it hit you it knocked you on your ass. It scared you."

Fat tears were rolling down her cheeks.

"Maybe we got together for all the wrong reasons. But I'm in love with you for all the right reasons," I said, my heart thundering in my chest, "I know you love me, Sheila."

There was another long pause. It might have been fifteen seconds, but for me it lasted an eternity.

She turned slowly, and her eyes locked with mine. She breathed in deeply and I smiled at her warmly, my heart hanging it's broken remains on her next words. She squeezed my hand, her lips pursed into a white line. Sheila held my gaze, and I tried to read her mind. If there was ever a time I wanted to know what was going on in someone's head, this was it. Her eyes told me she was holding back, that she was withholding something from me. And yet, there was resolve there.

And that resolve scared me to the core.

"Do you love me?" I asked again, my voice breaking, my eyes beginning to sting.

Sheila breathed deep and looked away. "No Doug, I don't."

I felt sick to my stomach. "Sheila..."

"I don't love you," she managed, her composure cracking.

I opened my mouth to speak, but she put her hand up.

"No," Sheila shook her head and stood up, gathering her purse up. "I can't do this anymore."

Sheila walked away, the entire restaurant trying to be casual about the scene unfolding before them. I watched her walk away, and felt my body go numb. My mouth hung open in a slack gape of shock as she went for the door. She was walking out of my life, she was ending this without giving me any option. I had no say so. I bolted up from my seat and ran after her, not giving a shit anymore about the people around me. I didn't care whether any of them knew my folks or people who were friends of friends. The grapevine could go fuck itself in the royally large superficial ass for all I cared anymore.

I hurried out the doors, slamming them open just in time to see Sheila's car pull out of the parking lot and into traffic. She sped away and was soon melted into the flow of evening traffic. I stood there, dressed in my best clothes, with nothing to show for the last month other than a broken heart and love that could never be returned.

"Sir?" a voice said from behind.

I turned and saw the cherub-faced waiter standing in the doorway. I said, "Yeah?"

"Is everything all right?"

I looked at him for a moment. Was he serious?

"No, not really," I replied.

"Is your mother okay, sir?"

I glared at him, feeling a thousand horrible retorts threatening to leap out of my mouth. In the end, I just shook my head no.

"Will you be staying then, sir?"

"No," I said flatly.

The waiter could see my anger, but still kept talking. "It's just that we're very busy tonight, and if you're not using the table..."

"I'm done," I waved him off as I walked to my car.

I sat down and slammed the door shut.

I wasn't very surprised when I started weeping. It wasn't crying, or sobbing or having a fit. I actually wept.

***

That weekend, I sat alone at the food court in the mall.

I had my usual meal from Carl's Jr. and found my appetite had died right along with whatever had been between Sheila and me. I hadn't seen her at all since that night at the restaurant, and I had made no effort to go over and see her. I couldn't bear to see her and that fuckaroo Tom together again. I could just see her faking everything with him, from morning breakfast to the midnight fuck, a smile plastered on her face like some Stepford wife. I could see Tom belittling her, cheating on her and passing it off for the logical actions of "a man with needs."

"Fuck me Freddy," I chewed on my cheeseburger. I glanced at the papers and booklet sitting on top of my sketchbook next to my lunch. The Art Institute had accepted my application and request for grant money. I had damn near a full free ride to the school, and I at least had that to look forward to. Still, the victory of getting into the respected school was overshadowed by the loss of Sheila. I didn't want it to be that way, but I couldn't help it.

I tucked my acceptance letter into the back of the sketchbook and opened it. I flipped through the pages, watching my cartoons, portraits and random sketches fly by. The smell of the paper and graphite reached my nose, comforting me as much as it could. It was as soothing as the aroma of really good cigarette.

I stopped flipping the pages when I came to fresh, untouched paper. I looked at it for a moment, feeling the need to put something down on it. My hand reached into the Velcro pocket of my cargo pants and withdrew my 2H and 2B pencils, along with my kneaded rubber eraser. I held the pencils for a moment, my eyes glued to the paper. I sat the unfinished burger down on the tray and wiped my fingers off on a napkin. Something was demanding to be pulled from my head, like a sliver embedded deep into a man's flesh. It had to be extracted and brought into the light.

I started drawing, beginning with only a single broad line. The line was the epicenter of my creative tremor. It shook through my hand and made my heart jump as I began sketching, the images coming to me as though they were being played on a movie screen behind my eyes. Soon, I could see a face, beautiful and kind, smiling back at me from the page. The woman's eyes were piercing and dark. Her locks had fallen loosely at her bare shoulders, and I madly sketched and smudged in the full body of her hair.

Her hand was covering one of her enormous breasts, a gentle gesture that was more deeply rooted in modesty than eroticism. But then, that had always been this woman's way; it had always been the truth of her very essence. She never had to try and be erotic, or do anything out of the ordinary to be sexy. She simply was erotic in the most natural simplistic way. Her other breast hung down, full and heavy, cradled in the crook of her arm. I could remember the way that breast looked. I had kissed it so many times, held it so many times.

Soon, I was smudging in and defining the shadows and tones of her skin, the dimensions of her body. I was working like a madman, lost in this sudden burst of inspiration that I couldn't hold back. I had to get this out now. I was oblivious to the people around me, and whether they were offended or not. It didn't matter. I licked my lips and created the image, my pulse racing and a sense of happiness rising from within.

I needed that so badly.

"Hi Doug," a feminine voice said from beside me. I jumped, pulling my pencil back and away to avoid making a mistake. I looked up and saw Elle standing there, looking so much like her mother it hurt. She wore a blue flannel shirt and shorts, her legendary bust line and curves making the guys around us stare. Her hair, identical to Sheila's, hung down unrestrained.

"Hey Elle," I said, "What's up?"

She glanced at my picture and then at me. "Can we talk?"

I pushed the chair opposite from me out. "Please."

Elle sat down, her impenetrably dark eyes looking at the sketch. "May I?" she asked.

I handed her the sketchbook slowly. "Sure."

I didn't know what she was going to say or do. I'm a fairly good artist, and I know how to capture a likeness. Hell, that's what got me into the Art Institute. She looked it over, an odd smile on her face. She tilted her head and sat the book down between us.