Old Flames

Old Flames: Chapter 9

Chapter 9

Two days later, Aaron stood on Lainie's front porch, feeling about as nervous as a long tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.  Usually on Tuesday nights when he wasn't at the station, he'd veg out in front of the television with cold pizza and watched reruns of Star Trek.  Being invited to dinner at Lainie's was a sight better than his normal routine. 

Bowser plopped his bottom on the wood slats of the porch, sniffing the front door for the source of the delicious smells coming out from the interior of the house.  Honestly, he couldn't believe that Lainie allowed Chloe to invite his dog over as well.  But he'd seen the love in her gaze as she smiled down at her daughter.  She really wouldn't deny her kids anything.

Which was one cause for his nervousness.  He truly didn't know if he was standing here because her kids asked him, or if Lainie wanted to renew their friendship.  It took a load of selflessness to set aside their past for the happiness of two little kids who'd forget all about the dinner invitation with the wave of a lollipop.  Aaron inhaled deeply, wanting with all the man he'd become, to not screw this night up...considering the last time he ate with Lainie she lanced him with a plastic fork.

As the memories of that night surfaced, he raised his knuckles to the door and rapped loudly on the window pane.

*****

Feeling bitter betray seeping through his bones, Aaron draped his letterman's jacket over the seat of the picnic table of the Dairy Queen and sat across from his girlfriend.

Girlfriend.  The word now caused a metalic, unpleasant taste to saturate his mouth.  Lainie Moon.  The girl he'd been seclusively dating for seven months.  The girl that stole his heart with a vicious slap across Bobby Michaels' face, and only the third girl he'd ever kissed.  Not to mention the fact that they lost their virginities together in the back seat of her Ford Taurus after the basketball homecoming dance.

Now, all he could see was the daughter of his father's latest conquest.

Lainie, not completely oblivious to his sour mood, stirred her chocolate shake with her straw.  Her Frito pie sat by her elbow uneaten, and she eyed him warily as he fought the bile that rose in his throat.  "What's wrong?" she asked.  "You look like someone just told you Santa Claus doesn't exist."

How could he tell her that he came home from baseball practice and walked in on her mother and his father, stripped naked and going at each other on the kitchen floor?  He and Lainie had never kept secrets from each other.  She knew about his mouse phobia, and he knew she got her period on every fourth Sunday, as gross and offensive as that tidbit of information was.  But this was a secret he didn't know if he had the guts to tell.

Genna Moon and Richard Dozier.  His stomach clenched with a nauseous heave.  He controlled it.  He swallowed and allowed the sickness to pass.  His father.  Her mother.  Granted, his parents had been divorced for three years, but hers were happily married...or so everyone thought.  He couldn't help it.  The emotion of duplicity from both their parents shook him.  Richard Dozier was a womanizer to the core, yet Aaron never in a million years would have thought his dad would be foolish enough to go after Genna Moon, all because Aaron loved Lainie.  His dad couldn't stand it that Aaron had something he didn't, that Aaron had a girlfriend that he loved and Richard Dozier didn't.  So, he seduced Lainie's mom, and from the look of things in his kitchen, Lainie's mother had gone into the adultery willingly.

"Hey," Lainie said, tilting her head to look into his eyes.  "What happened?  You look sick.  Are you okay?"

The anger, the pain, the treachery...all of it, all things evil inside him, burst out and he glared at Lainie.  "I just saw your mom screwing my dad," he seethed.  As to why his words implicated her mother more than his dad, he couldn't say.  All he knew was that he had to get the agony out of him.  He wanted to blame someone.  He wanted to lash out.  He wanted the spasms in his heart to stop.