Author's Note:
Hey there! Been a while. Some heavy personal stuff came up this year — I won't bore you with the details, but shit happened, so for the past year I've done nothing but binge-watch a couple of TV series and play games like Forspoken, Spider-Man 2, and most recently The Last of Us, which is a stunning piece of literary work by the way. I guess I'm ten years late to the fanfare, but to be fair I never really was a gamer until I had the money to be one lol
That said, while I don't know how I'm going to handle life, I do know that there are multiple stories waiting to be finished, and I feel like I owe you guys somewhat — especially the people who look forward to my stories and have left really nice comments that I still occasionally giggle over. So I say this to you: I'll really work on them this time. A rough outline already exists for all of them and it might take a while, but at the very least I'll make sure no new stories are written before the ongoing ones are.
Sometimes it's just more fun to pump out these kinds of stories that require no thought or set-up whatsoever, even though I find the ones that need it a lot more fulfilling to write in the end. Kind of like eating fast food.
So, this is me getting it out of my system until I finish the rest. Two chapters in one go. Enjoy!
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Nothing exists in this world that can't be quantified. As a kid, Joe knew exactly what he wanted.
One wife. One house. One kid.
Those were the numbers he aimed for his entire life. At 23 years old, he met Aisha. She was by far the smartest woman he's ever met. Funny and charismatic, he always thought she was way out of his league.
Looks-wise, his friends begged to disagree. Said they always just assumed he'd end up with one of those model-like girls. They insisted he could do better, but Joe couldn't wrap his head around it. Aisha
was
pretty. More importantly, she had substance.
He's had his time messing around in his earlier 20s, and although there were objectively prettier girls than Aisha, skinny or otherwise, he had never felt quite as fulfilled with any of them as he did with her, which seemed unthinkable for most of his guy friends at the time. To them, every sexual encounter he had with women were these legendary conquests. His friends thought he was crazy for complaining, but he didn't think so. Ironically, Joe wanted to leave that world precisely because of its "charm."
Non-stop drinking. Marijuana. Parties he couldn't even remember. The flirting and the grinding. Blurs of bodies.
Everything felt so climactic that... nothing really was.
With Aisha, it never felt like that.
Now married for 17 years, at 43 years old, their marriage was still going strong. The same guy friends who had told him otherwise were happily married themselves. Life was a funny thing.
The love he and Aisha carefully nurtured for one another had now changed into something a little more mellow. And though he missed the fire sometimes, the calm and relaxing evergreen wasn't half bad.
They had a daughter out of wedlock. Her birth name was Beatrice, but they called her Tricia growing up. She was headed to college in the next few months; he couldn't wrap his head around that. It seemed like only yesterday when the little bugger was crawling around and grabbing him by the foot. He could remember the sleepless nights when he held her as she cried too.
It wasn't easy, that's for sure. Their marriage had ups and downs, some unrelated to their daughter, some not.
But along with it, they changed little by little to adapt, merging into each other somehow. Like intertwining plants with shared roots. Like one cohesive team.
Isn't that what married life is supposed to feel like?
"Morning," Aisha greeted him in the kitchen along with a kiss in the cheek. That woke him up a little, along with his lower body — which was embarrassing. Can you blame him? They hadn't done it in almost a month. That sort of timeframe was normal now, but there were days when it was harder to accept that their libido — his wife's — had decreased exponentially compared to when they were young.
Otherwise a little drowsy in the morning as usual, he was in heat.
Looking at his wife for a semblance of sensuality, Joe noticed Aisha was wearing a turtle-neck she bought last week with long sleeves. He took a seat and grabbed some of the pancakes Aisha had made. Hotcake mix — probably the only thing she couldn't screw up in the kitchen, he hilariously thought.
"You look dressed up."
"Oh, yeah. I'm headed to the school for a meeting."
"It's a weekday. Aren't PTA meetings on Saturday?"
"Yeah, but apparently there's been more scandals involving the children so we're working to fixing that," she replied.
"Tricia's age?" Joe asked.
"Yeah."
"What scandals?" He took a bite and belatedly realized the pancake had maple syrup, which he hated with a passion. Aisha never seemed to remember that.
"Inappropriate sexual activities in the school."
Joe suddenly looked up, mildly interested. "Really?" he said with a smile.
"It's not funny, Joe. These are kids! They're Tricia's age."
"Oh, come on. We've all been teenagers once, Ai. We like to think otherwise, but they're not exactly kids anymore. It's natural to have a little fun at that age. Just teach them safe sex."
Aisha shot him a look of disapproval. "We are not going to teach them about sex! They should be studying, not gallivanting away irresponsibly."
Joe kept quiet. He highly disagreed, both morally speaking and in terms of practicality.
Fact: They're young adults. It's completely natural to want to have sex with people you're attracted to. Especially at such a young age where your hormones were raging in different directions. It's all the more important to gain experience and know which people you can trust and eventually form a bond, like he and Aisha.
Another fact: They're not going to stop just because some parents from a meeting said so. No teenager will listen to an adult. If anything, they're going to make it worse by speaking against it.
But he couldn't say that. Aisha felt very strongly about this, and it's not as if he didn't understand. Just thinking about Tricia doing it with some guy was enough to make Joe's blood boil. Irrational worries poured out of him whenever he had the chance to actually think about it.
What if she gets pregnant? What if the guy treats her terribly?
Just the thought of it was enough to curb his stomach. Sometimes, he even kind of wished Tricia was a lesbian. Sure, it might be a generalization, but women were a lot more decent after all.
Well, she could very well be, who knows? He didn't really know anything about his daughter in that aspect. She was a private person and Joe respected that.
Clearly, however, Aisha did not. And over the years, that only pushed Tricia further away from her bit by bit. Joe knew that because Tricia tells him stuff about her life she never tells Aisha. It was a shame. They were very similar in many aspects. He just wished they could both see that and grow closer.
"So what does the committee plan on doing about it?" he asked, trying to feign disinterest to slowly settle Aisha down.
It worked. She seemed to take a breather and answered, "We still don't know. But we've been talking about banning shops all around the school from selling condoms so that the students don't get an idea, you know?"
He cringed inwardly. As someone who's worked with numbers his entire life, interpreting statistics was basically second nature to him. Petitions against sex education were highly misleading. He had read several studies over the years about banning birth control, and not only did it prove ineffective in limiting sex as a recreational activity, it made teenage pregnancy even more prevalent.
