Ch. 06 - First Thing
Matthew managed to fall back asleep so thoroughly that he slept through his alarm, but he couldn't make himself care too much as he checked his phone and saw that it was already a little after nine. It didn't matter too much. It wasn't like he had to work today.
"God, I slept for shit," he told himself as he scratched his head and sat up. If he didn't get out of bed, he'd just scroll mindlessly on his phone for an hour, and then it really would be too hot to work outside. He looked over to his nightstand, past his phone charger and the bag of chips, and saw the red tome sitting there.
"Tome, huh? Why not book?" he asked himself as he picked it up, trying to remember why that word stood out to him. So much. As he started at it, two things happened. The first was that he started to remember some weird dream about a fortune-teller and a lewd deck of cards, but that quickly left his mind as he noticed that he'd written himself a note in the margin of the open page of the book. 'Mrs. Hale's yard before 9:30' in pencil.
"Shit," he cursed as he looked around for an eraser. She must have called him when he was half asleep, and he took the note without remembering it. What would have possessed him to use one of his books as a notepad, though? That was just dumb.
He felt dumber, though, when he remembered what time it was and quickly got up and started to get dressed. If she wanted him to do her yard first thing, then he would need to hustle. He put the book in his backpack to take with him. He wanted to do more research when he took a break later, and after a shower, he might even go to the library and see what he could dig up on foreign languages. After that, he put on a baggy shirt and a pair of raggedy cut-off jean shorts that ended below his knee. They were the typical trash clothes he did jobs like this in, but one look at his hair, and he knew he would need to do something about that. It was a complete mess.
With no time to grab a shower, he grabbed a black baseball cap and put it on backward to contain the rat's nest, which was his hair. He then went to the kitchen to steal a pop tart on his way to the garage. His dad and his stepmom were already at work, but when he went through the living room, he saw his sister lounging around, and for a second, his gaze lingered as he remembered her wearing some kind of lewd white outfit last night. He turned away as he remembered that, but not before she blurted out, "What the hell are you looking at, creep?"
"Just a particularly lazy specimen of couch potato," he quipped. They didn't have the best relationship, which made sense given that they'd been forced to live together for only the last couple of years since his dad had gotten remarried.
Matthew didn't wait around to hear her reply. He knew that his joke cut deep enough as their parents were always telling her how she needed to be a hard worker like him and get a job. It wasn't really a fair comparison in his mind, but if she was going to be a bitch, he was going to be a jerk right back.
He opened the garage door and pushed the mower right back. Even though landscape work was filthy, he much preferred it to his job in fast food. There, he had air conditioning, of course, but with his lawnmower, he could make almost double the money at two lawns an hour. The only thing that stopped him from doing more of this was that he didn't have a truck, and there was no way he was carting this beast around in the trunk of his hatchback.
As he pushed it over to his neighbor's lawn, though, he decided it could be worse. He had 8 customers across these two blocks, and it made for a good side gig mostly because of how easily it fit in with all his other side gigs.
It took three good pulls to start the machine, and then before he started, he put in his airpods and then his earmuffs over that so he could jam out while he worked. Unlike most of the lawns on the street, the Hale house took a while because they paid him to do the front and the backyard. Still, even though he had to edge around the back patio and garden at $50, it was worth it.
After that, time seemed to fly by. When he was doing this, no one bothered him, and the smooth lofi synthwave made time slide by as he focused on doing a good job. The sun beat down on him, but fortunately, he had a pretty decent tan from doing jobs like this all the time. Almost half an hour later, he was sweating like a pig, but the front yard was done, the area by the pool was finished, and he was on the last little stripe of lawn by the garden when Mrs. Hale stepped out of the sliding glass door with a couple glasses of ice water.
He immediately stopped the engine and pulled down his earmuffs to ask what she needed, but as he turned, for a moment, he was struck dumb by her outfit. Mrs. Hale was wearing another bikini top like yesterday, but this one was black, and this time, she had a semi-transparent wrap, giving her otherwise indecent cleavage the air of mystery.
Matthew swallowed hard and turned his gaze to the water in her hand to avoid staring.
"Thanks," he said, almost as grateful that his pants were baggy enough to cover his hardening cock as he was for the break. "I really appreciate it, Mrs. Hale."
"Oh please, I keep telling you to call me Maggie. Mrs. Hale is my mother's name," she smiled as she spoke to him, and Matthew couldn't help but feel that the look was almost predatory. "You keep working this hard, Matt, and you're going to give yourself heat stroke."
"Well, college isn't going to pay for itself," he answered, sitting down on the stoop, just at the edge of the shade as he gave her his canned answer. He'd done it to give himself some space from the beautiful older woman. At 35, she had a couple kids that were still in high school, but her body was still capable of making his cock throb with need. She was basically his main jerk-off fantasy, but that made her almost unapproachable to him.
His whole body stiffened when she started to sit down next to him, though. The patterned sarong that had up until now hidden most of her tanned legs and her thick, sexy thighs from him fell away, revealing a dangerous amount of skin that led right up to her black bikini bottoms.
"Being young is for living, Matt," she said, resting her hand on his leg. "You know. Having new experiences and making memories. Don't worry so much about the future that you stop enjoying today..."
Matthew swallowed hard, not sure if he was reading too much into what she was saying, but the way his heart was suddenly pounding in his chest made it hard to think about much besides how hard he was.
They talked a little bit after that. It was the usual conversation. When he was moving. What he was majoring in. How she was doing. How the kids were doing. It was like every conversation he'd ever had with one of his mother's friends, but he'd never felt like he was being sized up like a piece of meat before. As soon as he finished his water, he set the glass on the porch and started to stand.
