The Sex Education of M.E.
Read The Sex Education of M.E. Online
Authors: L. B. Dunbar
The Sex Education of M.E.
L.B. Dunbar
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
© 2016 Laura Dunbar
Cover Design – Shannon Passmore/Shanoff Formats
Edit – Kiezha Ferrell/Librum Artis Editorial Services
Format – Brenda Wright/Formatting Done Wright
Other Works by L.B. Dunbar
Sensations Collection
Sound Advice
Taste Test
Fragrance Free
Touch Screen
Sight Words
Legendary Rock Stars Series
The Legend of Arturo King
The Story of Lansing Lotte
The Quest of Perkins Vale
The Truth of Tristan Lyons
The Trials of Guinevere DeGrance
Paradise Stories
Paradise Tempted: The Beginning (a novella)
Paradise Fought: Abel
Paradise Found: Cain
Stories in various anthologies include:
“The Red Dress Affair”
“Chance Encounter”
“Rekindled” –
Hook&Ladder 69
Dedication
For my readers, especially those in Loving L.B. Thank you.
And for women over forty everywhere: you still got it, girl.
Table of Contents
Headaches are a poor excuse, or are they?
Coming clean…and not just in the laundry room
Listen with your heart before other body parts
Line dancing or crossing the line
A mother and a widow. These things defined me. Forty-something, I stopped counting once the second digit rolled past another zero. It’s funny … as a child, I couldn’t wait to get to double digits. Ten seemed so important. Thirteen entered another realm. Eighteen, twenty, twenty-one. The counting slowed down when I got closer to thirty, but the years sped up. I wanted time to stand still at forty.
Whoever said forty was the new twenty clearly didn’t live in my body. It was curvy, but not in that seductive, luscious, twenty-something way. There were no toned abs and sculpted thighs on my body. These were the lumps and bumps of a woman who’d bore children, nursed them until her breasts sagged, and carried them until her back spread. Each child added pounds, and each decade refused to remove them.
It has been one year since my husband’s death. This isn’t a story about the dead, however. It’s about re-birth. After my husband died, I had two choices: I could continue to sleep away each day and feel sorry for myself, or I could get my ass out of bed and take charge of my life. The life that remained after my husband’s ended. A difficult year followed after the loss of a man I’d been married to for nineteen years, but I had two children, and they needed me. The past year was a blur of firsts I didn’t wish to recall.
What I wanted to recall was sex. More than recall it - reinstate the practice of it. To be perfectly honest, I hadn’t had sex in the last year either. The desire just hadn’t existed. I remembered it, but guilt kept me from doing anything about it. I didn’t want to dishonor the memory of a man I’d been with for twenty years. One man. It was no small feat. People wanted to glorify him after death. Nate Peters was a good man, but he wasn’t an angel. At times, I was angered by people’s praise of him; at other times, I wallowed in self-pity that I had lost a respectable man. Then one day, I snapped out of it. I still had a life to live.
So here I sat at a Fourth of July block party, a few streets over from my home. My best friend, Gia Carlutti, asked me to attend. The theme was screaming children and drunken fathers letting off fireworks, but what the hell, I had nothing better to do. Besides, Gia had been a huge source of support during the last year. Divorced long ago, she’d been gently encouraging me to date — something I’d refused to do.
“It will be good for you,” she said. “Meet some people. Go to a club. Be wild again.” She swung her large hips back and forth, fluffing out her hair like a teenager. She acted like one, and I loved her for it. I’d lost track of all the men she was dating at once. She lived the life, according to her, and I needed to live mine, too. I wasn’t convinced yet that living life meant sleeping with seven different men, one for each night of the week, but what did I know? The last time I’d dated, I had gone out each night of the week. With one man, who became my husband.
Sitting on her front steps, we sipped Moscato while her two young children rode up and down the block on their bikes, dodging laughing groups of adults and narrowly missing toddlers on tricycles. Admittedly, Sam and Sara were out of control, but Gia didn’t pay them much mind. A single mother of a six- and eight-year old, she did the best she could. According to her, their father was the one who made them unruly. He’d disappeared after only a few years of marriage. Parenting tips were not shared between us — what Gia offered was man advice.
“Here,” she said, reaching out for my phone that lay on the stoop next to me. I don’t know why I carried it with me. I was only a few blocks from home, but it became more and more of a security measure for monitoring my teenage daughters. They were both out on this crazy night. Mitzi went to the northern suburbs with a group of friends to watch the fireworks. Bree wandered the neighborhood with other teenagers not yet old enough to drive. The phone was mischief control.
Before I knew it, Gia had my phone in her hand, downloading an app. Another thing I hardly understood in the modern mode of communication. Other than maps and messaging, and of course, calling someone, I didn’t see the use of a variety of apps my children and Gia told me I needed. In seconds, she had something loaded and then began a litany of questions. Muttering to herself, she stated my name, birthdate, eye color, and hair color.
“Weight?” Side-glancing at me and pouting her lower lip while rocking back and forth, she answered her own question. “Ahh…let’s say one-fifteen.”
I snorted into my plastic cup of wine.
“One-fifteen? Unless you are discussing the time for a meeting, that is clearly not my weight.”
“You can’t be much more than that,” she mumbled, continuing to type.
“I can. And I am. What are you doing anyway?” I reached over her arm, attempting to retrieve my phone. She held it just out of my reach, but faced my direction, and I was able to make out the logo, if I squinted. That was the other thing about age. Slowly, my eyesight was failing. I refused to give into the need for an optometrist visit and be diagnosed with reading glasses. This over-forty-thing was the pits.
Narrowing my eyes, I read the blue swirl:
MatchMe
.
“Oh no.” Leaning into her, I reached for the phone again. “No, Gia, absolutely not. I’m not that desperate.” As soon as the words escaped me, I was apologetic. MatchMe was the dating site where Gia got all her men.
“I didn’t mean…”
“It’s fine.” She cut me off with the wave of a hand, manicured with red nails for the holiday. “I am desperate, and actually, so are you.” Her eyebrow rose at me. Gia knew some of my deepest secrets, one of which was I hadn’t had sex since my husband’s death, and I was getting…horny. As a college professor, the profession did not provide much mingling with other adults my own age very often. Other than the fellow faculty members, most of whom were either married, too old, too young, or gay, I didn’t meet many potential candidates for my pent up frustration. In a drunken stupor one night, when I learned I couldn’t drink like a college student any longer, I confessed to Gia I wanted someone to sleep with. Just that. No dating. Just sex.
“Friends with benefits,” I suggested.
“Fuck buddy,” Gia said.
“I don’t even know what that is.”
“It’s someone you call, and if he’s available, you get together for sex. Not friends. No dates. Just sex,” she explained. I laughed, but Gia was serious. Her dark eyes danced with pleasure at teaching me my first lesson in modern sex.