But then I’d remember that I was having some sort of messed up affair with my fake stepfather, and then I’d remember all of the other stuff.
I didn’t have it to bad. There were probably a million girls that would have traded places with me. A couple weeks ago, I would have gladly done that, but not anymore. Not after everything that had happened, not after how Carter made me feel.
My mom came home around five-thirty, although she said Carter was still stuck in the office. She came to my apartment with me and started cooking while I showered off and got changed into fresh clothes.
I found her at the stove when I finally came out of the bathroom.
“How was work?” I asked her.
“Same old,” she said, smiling. “How was your day?”
“Oh, you know, the usual. Got followed by a strange man and then attacked by a drone.”
She nodded. “Of course. Don’t forget the decapitated dog.”
“Robot,” I corrected her. “It was a robot. A really, really convincing robot.”
She laughed. “Come here, keep an eye on this, would you?”
“Sure.”
I walked over and took the spatula spoon from her hand as she went over and started chopping vegetables.
“What are you making?”
“Arepas,” she said. “They’re like fat tortillas that you cut open and stuff.”
“Looks really good.”
“Flip those in a few minutes.”
I nodded, looking at the food. It had been a while since Mom and I cooked dinner together. When I was growing up, she was constantly trying new things, and I was always pulled in as her little sous chef. I could julienne carrots before I was eight, which was probably a little absurd, but she felt that cooking is a skill everyone should have.
“How are things with you and Carter?” she asked.
I groaned a little bit. “Mom, let’s not.”
“Come on. I want to know.”
“No, you don’t.”
She sighed. “You never tell me about your boys.”
“You never tell me about your girls,” I pointed out.
“Oh, please. You don’t want to hear about your gay mother’s love life.”
“I’m curious. You haven’t brought someone around in a while.”
“I’ve been busy,” she said softly.
I frowned and watched her chop for a second. I knew she’d been busy because of me, but she was never going to admit it. Maybe this whole fake marriage thing was a part of her scheme to finally get a personal life. It was hard enough being gay in America, let alone a single gay mom. That was part of what drove Dad away, all those years ago. Mom came out to him and he just up and ran away, leaving me and never looking back. I didn’t want to know the bastard, but he made her life so much harder than it had to be.
“Does he make you happy?” she asked suddenly.
“That’s a hard question to answer right now.”
“It shouldn’t be.”
I thought for a second. “Without all of the noise around us, yeah, he does.”
“And he’s good to you.”
I nodded. “He’s good to me.”
“Carter is a good person,” she said, carrying some onions and peppers over to the frying pan. She tossed them in with a satisfying sizzle. “He’s just distracted by all that life has to offer.”
“Boys and their toys,” I said, laughing.
“Something like that. He has a brilliant mind, but he doesn’t know what to do with it. I think he’s bored most of the time, and I think most of his media stunts have been ways to keep the boredom at bay.”
“Maybe,” I said, fascinated. Mom had never talked about her employer so much.
“Just be careful. He changes his mind a lot and quickly. I don’t want you to get attached and have him . . . “
“Leave?” I asked. “Like Dad?”
“Something like that.” She smiled at me. “Flip.”
“What?”
She nodded at the pan. “Flip.”
“Oh.” I quickly flipped the two arepas. They were a nice golden brown on the other side.
“It’ll be okay,” she said, putting her hand on my shoulder. “Carter might not seem like it, but he knows what he’s doing. I trust him with all this.”
“If you do then I do too.”
“Just be careful,” she said, and went back to chopping.
The conversation moved on to more normal things, but I couldn’t help but keep thinking about what she had said about Carter. She seemed genuinely in awe of him, extremely complimentary, but her warning mirrored exactly my greatest fears about him. I worried that I’d get too close and he’d get too bored.
So far, he hadn’t justified that worry at all, but he did have a pattern in the past. I just kept wondering if I really thought that I was any different from those other girls he was with before me. Maybe in that he was my stepfather, however fake, but otherwise I was completely normal and boring as far as I could tell, or at least compared to those girls. He dated models and actresses and musicians, there was no way he was interested in a boring normal communications major like me.