CHAPTER FORTY
Reader’s Note: These are EXCERPTS from Joanne Swift’s Journal for October 11th (Tuesday), Taylor has gone to babysit and Joanne has searched the house top to bottom for Antioch the butt-plug and not found it.
I spent about 45 minutes looking all over the house for Antioch and couldn’t find it. I assumed it was some kind of practical joke one of the kids was playing on me. It wasn’t funny, though – Tom would be livid if he discovered Fart Face’s plug was missing. Tom wouldn’t just be angry at her, he would be fuming with me for allowing this to happen. I still had plenty of time to find it, though, as he wouldn’t be back until at least Friday. But I was definitely worried that this kind of joke would get me in hot water. The kids had absolutely no idea how seriously Tom took the care and handling of his toys and how carefully he inspected them to see if I had used them without permission.
I made macaroni and cheese for Janie. She even helped me look for Antioch before losing interest and heading upstairs to play in her room. She has a very narrow attention span and I really didn’t expect her to be too concerned about it. Janie would have had no idea that her father would never tolerate my losing one of our sex toys this way and that I faced a very harsh punishment for that when he got back.
I probably deserved punishment for a lot of things at this point, but I was doing my best!
I knew I should take some time to start emptying out Taylor’s room and setting up my sewing equipment. I have a Husqvarna DESIGNER DIAMOND Royale™ sewing machine that cost my husband a pretty penny. It was a gift from several years ago that I shamefully left in the box and never actually used.
I’ve had a lot of fantasies about getting back into sewing; but, even though I had no job, I just never seemed to find the time. I should say that I could never seem to find the desire to actually bother with it, but I didn’t have any projects.
Once I had things moderately set up the way I wanted, and all of Taylor’s things stored in the garage, I sat down with her other gym shoe and started working on making it function as a lunch box. I lined the shoe with some microbial orange rubber from an old placemat I chopped up. I took the straps from an old purse I no longer used and sewed them to the shoe and made it into a nice purse. I planned to give this to her, along with her new collar, when she reached a point in her training that I felt she deserved them.
I was very proud of how far she’d come, but still in a strange way skeptical that she wasn’t just taking me for a ride and doing some of this to see if she could shock me. I know that seemed very unlikely, given how far she’d gone and what she’d done in front of friends and family, but a part of me was still hesitant to give her those things.
Then I admired the modifications I’d made to the ‘purse’ and cleaned it up for her a little. I could have probably shown Janie what I was doing and taught her how to sew, but I decided it may be better to let her be.
My reason for leaving her in her room wasn’t for Janie’s benefit, though. It was because I was still feeling extremely horny after watching Taylor play with herself so shamelessly in the kitchen. I texted my husband to ask permission to play with myself and tell him I loved him, but there was no response. I knew he was busy today and didn’t want to bother him anyway.
Eventually I had to abandon my search and walk Sandor. I could have made Janie do it, but she seemed preoccupied in her room and I wanted a little fresh air.
My neighbor Van Pewterschmidt was outside washing his red sports car when I walked past.
He waved at me and I waved back. I thought he was going to say something about my naked daughter, but he just grinned. I wondered if he had seen her running to the truck and he was just waiting for the right time to bring it up. I wanted to say something to find out what he knew, but if he hadn’t seen her flashing then saying something would surely tip him off. Her bare-ass run had only been for a brief panicked thirty seconds from the kitchen door to the driveway, and the chances were pretty slim he’d noticed.
I finally got a good look at him, though. I’d only ever seen him smiling as he drove off waving in that hot little MG roadster he was polishing up. He was tan, clearly worked out and looked an awful lot like Kevin Costner in his prime. He wore those classy Ray-Ban sunglasses and looked really good rubbing that car down with his chamois.
I briefly pictured him rubbing me down the same way.
“Bad, Joanna! Bad!” I muttered to myself that I shouldn’t be fantasizing about the neighbor. Tom had been away for only a few days, but I was so embarrassingly horny that I admit I allowed myself a fantasy of being taken by him.
“What’s that?” he asked as I walked Sandor back to the house.
“Oh nothing, I was just talking to myself,” I smiled at him. I found myself gushing like a high school sophomore the first time a handsome popular senior boy notices her. “I see you’re washing your car. Do you like washing it?” I asked and instantly regretted the stupid nervous question.
“I suppose so.” He offered me a warm inviting smile. I wanted him to tear off those sunglasses and stare into my soul the way Tom could. If I was being honest, I wanted him to BE Tom, and I would have opened his car door and sucked his dick right there in the driveway where no one could see us. “It may be nice to have someone else wash it for me,” he flirted back.
I knew from what little rumors I’d heard that Van was considered one of the most eligible bachelors in Cherry Lawn Estates, but he was also very unlikely to settle down.
“I’m married,” I told him from the sidewalk in front of his house awkwardly, but added that, “I’d still like to wash your car sometime.”
Why in the fuck did I say that? It reminded me of when I was in an all-girls Catholic school growing up and they finally brought some boys over for a dance. We all made total fools of ourselves trying to get them to notice us.
“Well, that would be fantastic!” Van had an amazing smile as he stood there watching me gush over him. “I notice you like gardening sometimes in the afternoons.”
Had he seen me naked outside? How would I explain that to him? I was panicked about what he may think. I nodded dumbly that I did, and blurted out a slow, “Uh-huh”.
“You could weed my begonias out in the front here too.” Van was clearly kidding as he pointed to the various spots on his lawn he would like touched up.
I fantasized about doing it for him completely naked like I did my own gardening in the backyard.
I even imagined sending Taylor over to do it, but then I became a little jealous of him watching her – even though this was MY fantasy about the neighbor.
I excused myself and scurried back to the house. I checked my phone to see if Tom had texted permission to play with myself. He hadn’t, and I cursed the luck. I really just needed a little relief. I decided I’d go upstairs and do it anyway, so after putting Sandor away I ran up to my room.
On the way to my bedroom, I heard Janie in her room playing with her Barbies and I decided to check in on her despite my cravings to touch myself.
I cracked open the door to say hello, and noticed her lying flat on her stomach playing with several completely naked Barbies. That wasn’t entirely surprising – she had long since stripped most of them of any clothes and/or lost the clothes. What I found interesting was that she was supergluing black pieces of plastic to each of their asses and talking to them.
“C’mon, Fart Face,” she said to a Barbie doll with black hair – yes, they make them. “You need to be kept naked so that people can see the real you. This will teach you to appreciate clothes and the freedoms you gave up,” she told it lovingly.
“Oh my gawd,” Janie imitated her sister when she talks like a valley girl who’s stuck up. Speaking for the doll, she said, “You totally shouldn’t do this. This is permanently going up my butt. I won’t be able to poop if you glue it you know where.”
“Fart Face, you have to call it an asshole from now. That’s what it is, and you aren’t allowed to sugarcoat your gross little hole by calling it a ‘you-know-where’. This is for your own good. Look, I’m getting one and you don’t see me complaining about it,” she answered her doll, and held up a red-headed Barbie that I assumed was her.
“Why does it have to be glued on, though?” Janie asked as Taylor’s doll.
“Duh.” Janie informed the doll that she would take it in and out whenever she wanted if it wasn’t glued on. “You can’t be trusted, you little you-know-what!” she told it, and then corrected herself by calling her doll a “cunt.”
She made the doll pretend to shave its own pussy while walking another doll up behind it. The Barbie was already quite hairless – I suppose I should envy the fact the plastic doll never needs to actually shave.
“Hi, I want to be a house pet too
because I love it,” she said as she peeled off a green football
style jersey with the number 84 on it. I was going to stop her so I
could talk to her about the play she was performing with her dolls,
but I was fascinated. “I want to get plugged up, too, because
it’s good for me and I’ll learn to be honest,
trustworthy, humble, and brave.”
Those weren’t quite Tom’s values, but I was equally amused and slightly shocked at the game she was playing with her dolls. I remained quiet and watched things play out.
“Not you too, Mom!” Janie spoke as Taylor’s doll protesting my joining her. I raised an eyebrow – I should have known the redhead was supposed to be me. I’d love to have a figure like Barbie, but I am definitely a lot more top-heavy.
“Oh, yes, me too! What’s good for you is good for me.” Janie began picking up our dolls and making it appear that we were hopping while we talked and she acted out a little argument between us over serving.
“What about me though, guys?” Janie introduced a third doll into her play. This time it was an actual naked blonde Barbie whose hair was all over the place, and she spoke in Janie’s natural voice standing off to the side of the other two dolls – it was naked, but had nothing glued on to its ass.
“No, not you! Never you!” Taylor’s doll and mine rejected her inclusion. “Get your clothes on! You can’t learn anything from what we’re doing! Put that away and stop being dirty! It’s nasty when you do it!”
I felt pretty guilty if this play reflected how she actually felt. I had no interest in offering her discipline because she was such a good-hearted kid who, while she had a short attention span and liked to get into mischief, was far from needing the extreme kind of correction Taylor did.
I wondered if maybe we should just not have let her see and participate in so much downstairs.
“You can be a fluffer, though!” my red-headed Barbie counterpart offered her, as if I were being grumpy.
“What’s that, Mom?” Janie’s naked doll asked enthusiastically.
“You get to help me do stuff and take pictures, but you can’t watch your sister because you’re too stupid. You can’t wear the same clothes we do either. You don’t have big enough boobs and you don’t know that guys like looking at girls and how to deal with that. You won’t ever learn that because you’re a baby!” Janie’s imitation of me was pretty bad, but I got the point of what she thought I meant.
“Yeah, you’re just a silly-billy, Princess Janie! I only call you that because I have to, but If I could I’d call YOU Fart Face!” She made Taylor sound like she was cruel again when she spoke as the raven-haired doll that represented her.
“That would be fine! I want to be Fart Face too! I want to learn like you are and be nice! I don’t care if people laugh at me. I just want to be a good daughter too! I’m not a baby. I’ll be in high school next year.”
I decided it was time for me to make a ‘harrumph’ noise and announce my presence. I clearly scared her when she noticed I’d been standing there watching.
I asked if I could play too.
“Really?” Janie seemed shocked I would offer to sit down and play dolls with her. I felt even guiltier that it must seem like a rare treat to her.
“Sure, I haven’t played with you in years. I’ve been pretty bad and I guess now I’m being taught a little lesson on how to be honest, trustworthy, humble, and brave!” I picked up the red doll that was supposed to be me, and noticed it had wrist cuffs drawn in magic marker and a collar around her neck.
“You’re making fun of me?” Janie asked if I was patronizing her.
“Not at all,” I told her, saying that I was just trying to play the game with her.
“It isn’t a game.” Janie threw her Taylor on the rug and pouted. “You think I’m a baby because I play with Barbies, but who else do I have to play with?”
Wow, that was food for thought. I was shocked but not completely mind-blown that she felt this way. She is my youngest and I probably did coddle her more than the others.
“You have a ton of friends, don’t you? You just spent the night at your friend’s house on Sunday,” I reminded her.
“They just want to do Snapchat and Minecraft and other video games!” she pouted angrily.
I spoke as my naked red doll and asked her what was wrong with those things.
“Nothing,” Janie admitted ruefully, but added that she meant no one in the family wanted to hang out with her. “I’m the ONLY one who has to go to middle school. Everyone else is in high school! Donny and Scotty have dates! Fart Face has a date! They don’t want a baby like me hanging around. You didn’t want me out in the backyard watching you train Fart Face. I thought I was supposed to learn how to be a better person and not turn out like Taylor!”
I hugged her close to me and told her that I wouldn’t let her turn out like Taylor.
“You won’t?” Janie dried her eyes, and then looked up at me with her pretty blue eyes and revealed the glint of her braces as she smiled. “You’ll train me like Taylor if I become mean? I mean like Fart Face?”
“I don’t think you’re in danger of being mean like your sister used to be,” I assured her honestly. “I think you see her getting attention from us now and want some too, but she’s going to have a real hard night. I’m taking away her room when she gets home. While you think it may be exciting, I assure you I’m going to put her to work as soon as she’s done with this babysitting. This weekend she’s going to clean out the gutters, do all the yard work that your father and I usually do, and that’s just for starters. I’ll probably send her to the neighbors if I run out of things for her to do around here!” I promised.
“I’d like to do that too!” Janie begged me to put her through the same regimen that Taylor was going to do.
“Oh, I think one house pet is enough for now. Can we discuss this when you’re a little older and have had some time to watch?” I felt bad for her because I knew she wanted to do this very badly.
I also knew she wanted to do gymnastics, ballet, horseback riding, breed unicorns, become an artist, own her own fashion salon, design computer games, invent new words for a living, become a celebrity on Instagram that makes her living promoting new products, become a school teacher and about a half a dozen other things she has begged me to let her do.
There was a time when we tried to actually accommodate these requests, but usually within a few days she had forgotten them and moved on to the very next thing. It was usually after we went out and bought about 400 dollars’ worth of materials and supplies so she could start her new “life-long dream”.
I explained to her that Taylor wouldn’t be allowed to stop when she gets bored or wants to do something else and, if I were to let her do this, she wouldn’t either.
“That’s fine!” Janie promised – as she so often had in the past – that she would never lose interest in this as her sole passion. “I’ve been rotten and cruel and mean so many times – you have no idea. I don’t want to be that way! That’s why I drink the almond milk. I want to be like you.”
I honestly believed she initially drank it quite by accident and had no idea what a boy’s ejaculation even looked like. I think once she drank the glass and saw I was shocked, she either enjoyed seeing that look of surprise on everyone’s face and the attention we gave her for drinking the milk, or she thought it was a way to be ‘cool’ and had glamorized drinking the milk in her mind.
She probably glamorized drinking it the same way she did wearing tight leggings because her idols on Instagram liked to show off their bodies as well.
I told her that she was so much better than she thought she was and that she had nothing to prove to me.
“I get angry and start fights and do mean things sometimes without any reason! “ She scolded herself for being bad.
“I find that hard to believe,” I told her as my naked doll, but I was talking in my natural voice.
She gave me examples of blocking and
unblocking a boy on Instagram who made her jealous because he liked
her best friend and then told her he liked her and then changed his
mind again. She told me about how she got impatient and yelled at
someone for not helping during a class project. She told me basically
about a dozen things that sounded very common to every normal teenage
girl just entering puberty.
I assured her that Taylor’s
behavior had gone well beyond this and that we were going to need to
address that for a while, but I promised to involve her more.
“If there was a magic potion that would make you sweeter than you already are, I would let you drink it. I don’t think the milk works that way. It has a subtle effect on attitude, but I think only if you actually milk it yourself. Donny and Scotty could drink two gallons of the stuff and still be the exact same. I don’t want you to feel you have to change to impress me.” I assured Janie that she was reading too much into the benefits of the milk.
“Then let me be trained too. I’ll do anything! I’ll be a better fluffer-nutter, if that’s what it takes!” She swore she would be the best at whatever I let her be.
“If you really want to learn and be my helper and a fluffer-nutter-butter-whatever, then I’ll think about it and make that happen. If Fart Face doesn’t mind, then I’ll let you take her for walks around the neighborhood and help watch her for me,” I promised her.
“Really? Can I take her to the mall and make her spend the day with me?” Janie’s eyes became huge with anticipation.
“I think we can arrange that, but you’d have to text me if your sister tries to run off with her friends or is rude. You’d have responsibility over her,” I warned her.
“Oh thank you, thank you!” she said, and offered to even take some almond milk with her in case Taylor gets thirsty and needs something to shut her up.
“Well, that’s kind of funny.” I chuckled at Janie’s creativity and told her we’d make sure to fill her belly before I dropped the two of them off.
I smiled and played dolls with her a little longer before doing one more walk around the house looking for Antioch, and planned to go to the store. I would definitely need more almond milk now that three of us were drinking it.
I futzed around the house looking one more time for that damn butt-plug again, and waited for Tom to text me – even a solid and firm “no, you may not play with yourself” would have been appreciated so that at least I knew I had closure. It took a lot of willpower, but I kept my hands out of my pussy and away from my tits and got dressed to go to the store.
October 11th, 2016 – TUESDAY EVENING – An hour or so has passed and Joanne is at the same grocery store she was around the same time on the previous day.
Janie had given me a lot to think
about. I didn’t take her request to train seriously, for the
same reason I hadn’t taken her request to get on American Idol
or to learn equestrian skills seriously – it seemed so far out,
and she had the attention span of Dory from Finding Nemo
sometimes.
The best possible reaction was to listen to her,
empathize, and then do as I always did when she wanted to do
something new, like adopt a puppy or start a new hobby: tell her why
we should wait and then let her forget all about it.
I admit I had put on something skimpy and told myself it was because it was comfortable. I had on a short miniskirt and a tank top. It wasn’t anywhere close to the kind of tiny micro-skirts that Taylor wore, but I wanted a little validation, and a wink from a handsome guy or bag-boy after checking out my tits or legs would suffice.
I could see the outline of my nipples through the brown tank top reflected in the windshield of my Prius. I smiled and straightened my shoulders so that I walked straight, with my tits out like I’d been trained. I was also wearing my actual BDSM collar and some ‘fuck me’ pumps with the skirt. The collar was made of boiled black leather and decorated with lace, and the stilettos were black with ankle straps that matched.
The six-inch heels forced me to walk with my ass stuck out and made me feel very sexy, and also quite vulnerable and slutty. I was actually enjoying the exhilaration of walking through the grocery store and getting checked out.
A decade ago they may have called the cops and told them a prostitute was walking the grocery store, but now with websites like ‘people of Walmart’ featuring women in far less than me shopping, I doubt I was even the most scantily clad woman shopping that night.
There was a raven-haired woman that looked like Sophia Vergara from Modern Family, with huge fake tits jutting off her chest, in sheer jogging pants that left absolutely nothing to the imagination. I noticed with amusement she had puffy pussy lips just like my daughter.
“What are you looking at?” she asked me scornfully, noticing I was checking out her crotch.
“Sorry,” I apologized politely for staring. “I was just thinking I needed to get some pants like those.”
The stuck-up woman ignored my apology and walked off with her snooty nose stuck up in the air. I smiled as she walked away and wondered if Janie was right, that a woman like that should have some kind of brick superglued up her ass until she was nice to people.
I chuckled at the mental image and continued shopping. It wasn’t long before I found myself at the familiar almond milk section and decided to go ahead and get several quarts for later. I was trying to figure out how I could indicate which one for the boys to use so they didn’t spunk too much in one and not enough in the other when I felt a guy reach under my skirt and literally finger my pussy.
I turned around in a huff. It felt good, but I was also shocked and horrified. Someone had sunk his finger in my admittedly wet pussy and hooked his finger up as if to diddle me right there in the store!
The gentleman who had “accidentally” grabbed me the night before was standing behind me, smiling like he had known me for years.
He saw I was angry and apologized quickly. “I thought we said that if you wanted me to do it again to be in the same place at the same time,” he offered as his excuse.
“No…” I told him that HE had said that, and I’d said nothing, before adding that he also told me he had a fiancée. He had actually told me he had a girlfriend that night, and didn’t say the word ‘fiancée’, so warning bells were going off in my head.
It wasn’t like I was planning
some kind of relationship with this guy anyway, but his calling his
fiancée ‘girlfriend’ was probably more of a
subconscious slip where he didn’t really see her as his fiancée
at all, and that’s why he felt he could flirt with me.
I
wondered if my being here tonight at this exact time was a
subconscious decision so that I would see him again because I’d
been so lonely and horny lately? I dismissed that notion immediately.
This meeting was mere coincidence, I told myself – I was simply
in need of almond milk and I shop at around the same time because
that’s when most of the kids are out of the house.
“I can see from your ring that you have a husband, so that makes us even, doesn’t it?” The man had the audacity to flirt back with me and introduced himself as Matt. I was beside myself that he could stick his finger to the first knuckle inside me and stand there smiling like that was how he greets strange women.
“Hi, Matt.” I told him that I was “Fuck off and stop staring at my tits” and sarcastically added it was a pleasure to make his acquaintance. I was still livid that he felt he had permission to grope me just because he’d seen me twice at the grocery store, and I wasn’t going to fall for his charming devil-may-care attitude about it.
“Well, that was clever.” Matt didn’t seem to mind my letting off a little steam at him, and that served to deflate my anger towards his unsolicited advances.
I used to own a whole host of clever
t-shirts and tank tops with clever captions like “My
Nipples get harder than your dick” and “This
text is here so I can have a reason for yelling at you as you read my
boobs.”
When your tits come in by 8th grade, you grow up with the understanding that guys are definitely going to look at your tits, and you may as well accept that with a sense of humor and be flattered by it. I also have a very shapely ass, and I’ve worn a shirt that says “If you think my tits are great – wait until you see my ass!” with matching shorts that read “Told ya so!” on the back.
Even though I came to the supermarket looking for a little attention, I am by no means an extrovert. If not for Tom making me feel like a porn star in the bedroom and training me to show off, I would never have done anything quite so racy.
If not for his having had his finger in my pussy I actually wouldn’t have minded Matt checking me out – I would have enjoyed it; and to be honest, he looked a lot like Tom, talked like Tom, and made a pretty passable surrogate for Tom. Oh, how much I missed my husband! I took his bait and flirted right back with him, although I was still wary.
“You sure do like almond milk,” Matt observed, commenting that I had been here buying it yesterday and now I had loaded up my cart with two more quarts.
If you’ve read my entire journal then you’ve observed by now that not only do I tend to overthink things, but I also have a tendency to overshare information. I could say that comes from being pent up in a house all day by myself and then having teenagers who ignore me when they get home, and so no one to talk to all day.
However, the truth is that I get that from my mother’s side of the family, along with my massive tits.
I was not, however, going to tell him what we did with the almond milk. I know what Tom said about ‘If we feel we need to hide things, then we probably shouldn’t be actually doing them.’, but I decided that in this case it would be better to show a little discretion.
“My daughters just took an interest in drinking my milk and we ran out,” I explained simply.
“With boobs like that I can’t see how you’d ever run out of milk in your house,” he joked.
He reminded me of Mr. Vulgus in how forward and raunchy he could be with his joking. I rolled my eyes – it made me feel a little like Taylor, but that was an awful joke.
“I’m kidding.” Matt apologized again and said that was a joke in poor taste. I agreed with him, and then he asked me how old my daughters were.
Questions like that tend to put me on my guard because I don’t know what sort of creepy guys are out there. Mr. Goldman had a tendency to ask some questions about Janie that usually made me feel a little like he was trying to find out things he shouldn’t.
Matt could sense my apprehension and said he worked in the school system now and he just wondered how old they were. “I used to work in IT, but the company I worked for laid me off. I moved here for a fresh start and to put that degree I thought was useless to work.”
“That’s commendable,” I told him; I was happy to change the subject away from my daughters.
“I don’t know about that.”
Matt told me he still had several resumes out there and was going to
keep looking.
We talked back and forth like that for a few minutes and he kept staring at my tits the entire time.
I know I said I flirted with him, and this conversation probably sounds pretty mundane, but all the while we talked he kept giving me the eye, and I kept reading into his tone that he was either bored and desperate for someone to talk to, or he just wanted to keep me there so he could stare at my boobs.
“If I show you my boobs one time, will you let me finish my shopping and stop grabbing my ass?” I smiled as I called him out on the fact that he’d been staring at my chest the entire time we’d been talking.
“Guilty as charged,” Matt admitted with a good natured smile when I called him out. “Did you ever dance at strip clubs in Atlanta?” he asked as he looked up at my eyes.
“I most certainly did not,” I chuckled. “My husband and I used to live there, though. He’s in technology. I could pass your resume on to him, if you like,” I suggested. Usually, when a woman mentions her husband in the conversation like that, it’s a universal sign that you’ve struck out and it’s time to stop flirting.
“Wow.” Matt asked if he could go back to staring at my chest because my eyes were too mesmerizing.
I have to admit that even though I knew that was pure 100% bologna, I liked having his attention and the way he flirted with me. He made me feel special and beautiful. This past week everything had been about Taylor and the excitement surrounding her transformation and education. I could definitely understand why Janie felt like she was in everyone else’s shadow.
I had been happy to be submissive to my husband and let him make all the decisions. I felt like I was making all these mistakes, and even though he told me I would make some, that I was going to let him down. It wasn’t just the lost sex toy either – I wondered if I had introduced Taylor to training that was far too advanced. Tom had been such a force of nature and he seemed to have a plan, and I felt like I was just reacting and flying by the seat of my pants down a road I had no business being on.
It was comforting not to have to think and to wake up every day knowing exactly what I was going to do. I wanted to just go home and have a glass of wine and play with myself.
“Cat got your tongue?” Matt had been talking about something this entire time, but I wasn’t paying attention. “I asked if you wanted to just grab a quick drink. You’re so easy to talk to and after the day I had I really need someone to talk to.”
“I really can’t.” I told him that I was married and that would be wrong.
“Look, I’m not going to try anything.” Matt said that he was perfectly harmless and just wanted to talk to me. “I’ve been so wrapped up in things lately with the new job and the move that I’m starting to question everything. I just feel like I’m no longer being proactive or choosing my own path. I’m flying down the highway about a million miles an hour and everyone else seems to be using Google Maps and know where they’re going, and I’m stuck using Bing and I’ve no idea where I’m going or how to get there.”
I felt sympathetic for his plight, and told him I actually could relate to that.
“Great, there’s an Olive Garden here at the Loop.” Matt suggested we grab a drink at the restaurant in the shopping center and I told him that I would do it on one condition. “I’m going to buy my groceries. That means I can’t stay long because they’ll be sitting out in my car, so this is not a date. We’re just two friends grabbing a drink together real quick,” I said, laying out my conditions.
“DEAL!” Matt’s eyes lit up.