Just in the Neighborhood

"Okay," she says again. "We're starting with mostly walking today. Warm up with five minutes. Then I'll check in, and if things are good, we'll try two minutes jogging. Then back to walking."

I nod, and start heading down the street. We've probably got an hour or more left of daylight, though we'll have a little less every day. The vests were a good idea. For the first minute or so, Erika tracks me, though she's kind of bouncing in place, too. Now, suddenly, she seems like a basketball player. The vertical lift she's getting just casually is impressive. Man, am I old.

"At some point we'll need to do it first, then have dinner after."

"Mind-reader."

"Later lunches, maybe, if they'll let you."

I shrug. "Maybe. Some of the guys will be disappointed."

"Maybe a different lunch shift will have fewer weirdos."

"It will not."

She laughs. I don't, because I know I'm going to need every single molecule of oxygen.

"Four more minutes," she says. "Everything okay?"

"You're gonna bolt away and then come back, right?"

"Only if you're okay."

"I'm okay."

With one more nod, my little bunny rabbit is away. I'm proud of her and ashamed of myself. I'm envious. I'm old.

She's back in two minutes. "Doing good?"

I shrug, and have more water. "Surviving."

Away she goes; back she comes.

"Be real, Dad," she says. "We don't have to do the jogging. It's your first day."

"I want to try," I reply. "Stay with me, though."

She nods seriously. "I will."

"You have your crappy 'I'm grounded' phone, right?"

"I do."

I take a deep breath. "Okay. Here goes."

I pick up the pace gradually. I feel like an idiot; I have no idea what counts as jogging, rather than walking. I feel like a fraud as my gait gets bouncier. I feel like I'm pretending to jog -- poorly -- while still being the same slow, old dad I was a moment ago.

Erika's right there, bouncing higher, but keeping most of her attention on me. "How's that feel?"

"Terrible," I wheeze.

"Thirty seconds in. Ninety to go."

I try; I really do. I'm sweating like a pig that they forgot to kill before roasting it. I'm the fat kid in gym class, with asthma, who forgot his inhaler. I'm regretting literally everything I have ever done, and not done. That's not an exaggeration. Shouldn't have had kids a snarky little voice inside me says. No kids, and you're not here right now, failing and dying in front of one of them. You're somewhere else. Has to be better than this.

Fuck you, I tell myself. There's no force behind it. I lack the necessary oxygen.

"Sixty seconds!" Erika exclaims. "Halfway!"

The morale boost spurs me on for another five seconds. I stop jogging. My head is pounding. My chest -- no, everything -- is on fire. Erika withholds all judgment. That makes it worse.

"I can't..." I wheeze out. "Gotta..."

Erika's there, trying to support my weight. I lean on her.

"Keep walking just a little longer, Daddy," she says. "You have to cool down a little, at least. Never do an abrupt stop."

After another six million years of pure, burning, humiliating agony, I'm somehow sitting down on the sidewalk. I'm not even sure how it happened. Erika's right there with me. She's rubbing my back. I just want to go to sleep -- you know, forever. How does one do that when one's heart is pounding its way out of one's chest and everything is on fire? The answer, surprisingly, is: easily. The concrete is calling to me like the just-cleaned porcelain of a bathroom floor. Oh, puking! Puking would be so wonderful.

My arms still work, which is good. I douse myself with water, then squirt some into my mouth.

"We're gonna do walking for a few days," Erika says. "I know it might"

"Good," I say, cutting her off. "Walking."

She pats my back. "So," she says. "Mom seems like she's doing good."

I turn and find her eyes. They're bright and searching.

"She is," I wheeze out.

"You do, too."

I give her the best are you fucking serious? face I can muster.

She laughs and rolls her eyes. "Yeah, okay," she says. "But I mean it. Something's different."

I shrug. I wouldn't tell her anything even if I had the spare oxygen.

"So, um..."

Here it comes: the ambush.

"You guys like Steph -- Ms. Brown, right?" she asks. "I mean, Mom seems to, so I guess I'm asking you."

I shrug again. "Nice. Little odd." That was three words. That's a victory.

"She's a little spacey sometimes, I guess," Erika agrees. "I think that's how she was, you know, before, so sometimes it comes back. She works really hard."

I nod, and have more water. If exercise is about getting the heart rate up, then, well, I'm still exercising. My head hurts so much. Erika's voice is assaulting my ear drums, but I can't tell her to be quiet. That would be going too far.

"I just hope me and Sophie didn't ruin it for you guys," she says. "I think it'd be cool if you guys were friends."

"Hmmmm," I groan skeptically. She's trying to spin it as selflessness. That's weak sauce.

"Sophie says her mom -- stepmom -- is going to let her come to my track meet next Tuesday. Obviously you guys don't have to sit together, but, you know, if you wanted, you could join them."

"Private box?" I wheeze out. There would have been more words. You get the idea. It was sarcastic.

"Oh," Erika says. "Right. Crap."

I don't reply. I just give her a look, and keep trying not to die.

She looks genuinely uncomfortable. "We'll talk at home. Let's get you up and moving again."

She pats my back and offers her arm. I take it, and let her help me up. It is neither an easy nor a dignified process.

"Home?" I ask.

Erika shakes her head, then thinks better of it. "We'll head back in that direction, but we really should try to walk longer. I'll stay close."

I manage ten more minutes. Erika tries really, really hard to pretend that she's proud of me. Who knows? Maybe she is.

*******

"What do you think?" I ask Carla. We're both in bed and we're both dead tired. The lights are off. There will be no stripteases or role playing. Carla's in panties and a light tee again, but I just can't think about sex, and I doubt she can either. I think my cock is traumatized from that pathetic attempt at jogging, though honestly, it's probably the least traumatized part of my body. Carla's had more time to recover from her gym excursion, but it hit her hard.

"It breaks my heart," she answers.

"Convenient timing for that to happen."

Carla bristles. "Erika's not like that."

"I'm not saying she's lying. I'm saying she's playing her cards well."

"They're not her cards, Ben," she says. "Sophie's issues are real. Don't you dare minimize them."

I believe Erika about Sophie. It makes perfect sense. I can even think back to our first meeting and put the pieces together: the weird hitch when I offered my hand for the first time, our respective seats around the dining room table, and the fact that Sophie picked the spot on the sofa that would end up being farthest away from my usual chair -- a little insider info from Erika, there, I'm sure. I even wonder if she told Carla when Carla caught her -- them -- in Erika's room. I wonder if she begged her to make sure I didn't barge in. That does actually break my heart a little. I remember Stephanie slinking into our house, looking like she was scared I'd hit her. Fuck Frank -- and, sadly, all the many others like him.

Men trigger her. She's done work on it, but, according to Erika, it's still pretty bad. Her firm handshake grip is a coping mechanism. School is hard. If she comes to the track meet, she and Stephanie will be scoping out some place as far away from the crowd of parents and siblings as possible. It's too many men. Apparently, I'm just special enough that she could handle me with a two-woman buffer. Erika made quite sure to pluck at that heartstring.

"I'm not doing that," I insist. "I'm still the parent of a grounded kid. I'm thinking about Erika, first and foremost. Sophie's still on my shit list too, though. Her issues don't give her an excuse to lie and manipulate people."

"You're right," Carla sighs. "Sophie was a bad house guest. She does owe us an apology, but she's also still a kid."

"She's nineteen."

"Erika's eighteen. They're still in high school, and they still live at home. If she's an adult when she screws up, she's an adult about other things, too, Ben. If they're adults about other things, then what did they actually do wrong?"

Thank the Lord for ibuprofen. I can feel the headache it's keeping at bay. It's still mostly about the exercise, but Carla's poking and prodding at it, too.

"What's going on, Carla?" I ask.

"What do you mean?" she asks back.

That makes me a little mad. I can tell she knows what I'm asking.

"Something's not right, here. God dammit, I cannot believe these words are coming out of my mouth: how are you so horny all of a sudden? How are you cumming so much? And why are you suddenly so sex-positive about our kids?"

Carla sighs. "Do you really want to know, Ben?"

I, in turn, know what she's asking. I squint my eyes and grit my teeth. "Yes."

"I caught them," she says. "I caught them, and it was... shocking, at first, but it was beautiful."

"The fu"

She steamrolls me. It's so unlike her. "The second thing I thought, Ben -- after 'oh my god!' -- was that I wanted it to be us. I wanted to be Erika. I wanted you to be... doing that. To me. With your real one. They were so happy. They were so in love -- lust, anyway. But they were young, and happy, and beautiful, and free... I woke up, Ben. I just... woke up."

Why are their tears in my eyes?

"She's our daughter," I say, but I'm already scooting up to spoon her. "We're responsible for her."

She lifts her head to let my arm through. She accepts me. My hands wander, and hers follow them around. She's so warm, and so soft.

"How can I deny her what we found again, Ben? How can anyone, ever? Every chance they have, they should take it all the lust and love and failed experiments and everything else... I wasted so much time. Ben, I'm so sorry. I'm a hypocrite. I slept through so many years, and now I'm awake, and... I can do the two weeks. Erika hid things from us. She hurt my feelings, and yours. After that, though... I just don't know, Ben. I don't know if I could live with the guilt."

"What are we going to do?" I ask -- her, and myself. "Is... sex going to be something else we can take away from her if she gets in trouble again? That's so unbelievably fucked up, Carla. What else can we do, though? How do we let her be an adult about that one thing and still be her parents?"

Speaking of hypocrisy, I'm full-on fondling my wife even as we wrestle with fundamental questions of parenthood. She's not wearing a bra under her little shirt. I can smell her -- not her arousal, but just her natural, beautiful scent, plus her washed hair -- and it's making me want to kiss her everywhere. I think I'm going to -- right there on the neck.

She pats my arms. My hands find the edge of her shirt. I slide them under it. She sighs happily.

"Can't do much tonight, Ben," she says, "but I'm yours to play with."

I nod into her, and kiss her in a place that's only safe because we're both half dead.

She sighs again. I feel the smile. "I think this is just how it is," she says, not sounding too upset about it. "Being parents to teenagers is just weird, creepy, and gross."

She chuckles. So do I. I think she's right. I don't think there are any good answers. We're either going to be the unreasonably strict parents or the creepily permissive ones. Erika got caught before she left for college. Hank didn't, so Carla and I remained -- and can remain -- blissfully unaware. His high school career will fade into memory and blur together with the rest of his childhood.

It's like that box with the cat in it. Hank's stayed closed. Erika's got opened, so now the cat has to either be alive or dead. Go ahead. Call it a pussy. Ha-ha. Fuck you. Oh, hey, 'box,' too. It's a double. Fuck you more.

"I love you," I say.

"But?" she asks.

See? She's very smart. That's how I knew she was playing dumb before.

"How are you cumming? I mean, so much? With so little... you know."

She chuckles. "Making up for lost time."

I think she's lying, but I honestly don't know what else to ask or say. I'm not the kind of guy who goes on the internet searching for stories about magic boner pills for women. I'm not about to start. I've seen where that goes. Frank Walker isn't the only brand of male fuckup out there.

"Can't do much tonight, either," I tell her. "Let's call it an early night."

"Mmm," she says. "Just hold me. Love you, Benji."

"Love you, too, Carlita."

*******

It's five of us in the living room. Sophie and I are as far apart as we can be, each on one of the stuffed swivel chairs. Erika, Stephanie, and Carla are on the couch, in that order, roughly between us -- a little farther back from the big TV up on the wall.

Day Fourteen was yesterday, so we can't put it off anymore. Erika was perfect. Stephanie claims the same about Sophie. We didn't get the details of how, exactly, she was punished. Maybe I should say "if."

"So," I say, "given the circumstances and the subject matter, I'm going to make a suggestion: cussing is allowed. For everyone. Just don't abuse it. We're here to talk seriously."

Carla nods. So does Stephanie.

"I object!" Erika says. We all look at her, and she mugs. I give her a smile. It was pretty good.

"So," I say again, "this whole situation is pretty fucked up."

There are nods all around.

"Stephanie," I say, "can you be honest with me and Carla about what you're comfortable with? I have a feeling that we -- well, okay, I am the odd man out here." I let them appreciate the dad joke. They don't. It's fine. I'm the only man? Anybody? No?

Stephanie's bouncing her crossed leg. Carla takes her hand and squeezes it. Stephanie doesn't take the hint to stop bouncing, if that's what it was.

"Honestly?" she says. "I think I'm fine with it. And, sorry, but if there were a boy involved, maybe I wouldn't be. Okay? I'm a sexist and a hypocrite, and... is there a word for reverse homophobia? I don't even know. I'm that. There's no boys, so nobody's going to get pregnant, so it just doesn't bother me."

"So either we force you to play by our rules somehow, ban Erika from your house, or... whenever she's over there with Sophie, the two of them are going to fuck."

"Ben!"

"Daddy!"

Stephanie just sinks down into the couch and blushes. I catch a glimpse of Sophie out of the corner of my eye. She gives me a silent, respectful nod. Well, at least somebody else is willing to cut the bullshit. Of course it would be her. The expert bullshitter knows when she doesn't need to bullshit anymore.

"Well? You wanted me to be able to talk about it, so I'm talking about it. Am I wrong? Have I missed an option?"

"You don't talk about your daughter like that," Carla says sternly, "but, given the circumstances, maybe we can forgive you. And yes, those do seem to be the options."

"And likewise with our house -- except, I suppose, that Carla and I could try to play policeman all the time."

The shock having worn off, there are nods and shrugs all around.

I lean back in my chair and sigh. "Okay. So, what do we do?"

Stephanie raises her hand. It takes an act of will to stop myself from laughing.

"Yes, Stephanie?"

"I don't really want to brag," she says, "and I'd also appreciate it if this didn't become gossip, but... I'm very comfortable -- financially. I could always get the two of them a little apartment somewhere."

I'm stunned. Erika gasps. Carla frowns. I don't see or hear Sophie's reaction, because Carla's monopolizes my attention.

"But..." Carla says. "Erika, honey, it's your last year..." She's already crushed.

The change in Erika is instant. She's reaching across Stephanie's bouncing leg to clutch at her mother's hand. "Mom, no!" she says. "I would never do that! No!"

"Aw!" Stephanie says. "I think that's the sweetest way one of my ideas has ever been shot down. You guys!"

Just like that, all is forgiven on the couch. Erika, Carla, and Stephanie are all best friends again. Even as I watch it happen over the span of three seconds, it's a little hard to believe. Women are weird sometimes.

"Well," Stephanie says, "just looking around your house and floor plan, you know... the master bedroom is upstairs, right? Erika's bedroom is down here." She pauses, maybe waiting for somebody else to jump in. When nobody does, she gives a shrug and a sheepish look. "Out of sight, out of mind?"

I deflate in my chair. "Oh, boy."

Then I remember the sex -- my sex, with my wife. It occurs to me that once we head upstairs for the night, nearly every night, I'm going to be well and truly distracted. The mystery of Carla's renewed sex drive has only deepened. She waxed herself bare from the brows down, and it drove me crazy. She's teasing me with sexy underwear every day, and not-so-subtly suggesting that she's running errands and even going to the gym with butt plugs inside of her. She's cumming five times a night, at least, and from practically anything. Two nights ago, she had an anal orgasm, and it was one of the hottest things I'd ever seen -- or felt -- in my entire life. She's practically force-feeding me her breasts whenever they're anywhere near my mouth -- not that she even needs to. I feel like she's trying to make me so stupid with sex that I'll forget that anything is rotten in Denmark. It's almost working.

She agreed to go get tested, and to get a referral if her primary care doctor suggests one. I'm getting tested, too. I heard a rumor that syphilis can rot your brain and turn you into a nympho. I don't feel like a nympho, personally. Most nights I cum once. Rarely, I can cum twice. The jogging is starting to help, for sure. Just in terms of bodies in motion, lungs not burning, and hearts not exploding, I can almost keep up with Carla. I'm not as sore the following days.

Carla looks back at me. "What if they have sleepovers here, Ben? Just on Fridays or Saturdays? No funny business until we're upstairs?"

"And then she disappears all week?"

"Home by curfew... two nights?" Stephanie suggests. "Home by eight three nights?"

"And obviously my grades and sports and everything," Erika adds.

"Oh!" Stephanie says. "Right. Sophie's grades would have to stay up, too, of course."

"Why do I feel like I'm late to this party?" I ask. "This is too easy."

"This is easy?" Carla asks dryly.

I shake my head. "You know what I mean, Carla. I'm really the only one in this room who's uncomfortable with all of this. I just... that's fucking bizarre."

"Hey," Sophie says. It's understated, but confident. It commands attention, and she gets it from all of us.

"Hey, Mr. P," she says, "I never got a chance to apologize to you, man to man -- well, you know. Guys? Would it be okay if I talked to Mr. P alone for a bit? I think he deserves to hear it from me."

"Honey," Stephanie says, "are you sure? You know... your..."

"Mr. P is cool," Sophie says. "He'll respect my boundaries. I'll stay over here, and he'll stay over there."

"Honey?" Carla asks me.

I shrug. "Okay. We're in the thick of it now anyway. Everything is weird, so nothing is. If Sophie needs to talk to me, then she can talk to me."

Carla stands up, walks the two steps to my chair, leans down, and kisses my cheek. "Thank you, honey," she whispers. "You're a good man, and a wonderful father."

I roll my eyes at her. She lets it go. Erika bounces over -- five whole steps -- and takes Carla's place as she walks away. She kisses me, too, right around the same spot. "I love you, Daddy," she says.