You Leave Me With a Dangerous Taste

Although summer was officially over, it was a strangely hot day. I smiled softly at my reflection in the mirror, running my fingers through my hair as I braided it. With the weather giving one last summer’s day, I took the opportunity to wear a nice dress that was going to hide out in the closet for a year after. A white dress with sunflowers perfectly complimented my mood.

I left the bathroom, softly closing the door behind me. Something in me had the urge to dance around in circles, the voices outside the bedroom being my soundtrack. My smile hadn’t faltered one bit since it sneaked its way onto my face. It only intensified when I opened the bedroom door to see my mom standing around the dining table.

She wasn’t the only one there, though. Jack and his mom were there along with her, all of them looking at whatever was on the table.

I skipped over to them, attaching myself to Jack’s side. He immediately threw an arm around me, bringing me closer and kissing the top of my head. I took a glimpse at the various magazines that our moms had collected on our table. Some were solely for wedding dresses, other’s based mainly on the reception, and most a generic mixture of it all.

“Oh, my Leigh-Leigh’s getting married,” my mom gushed, using the nickname she and my dad always used when I was a baby.

She held out her arms for me, making me leave Jack’s side and hug her. As she rocked me from side to side, I couldn’t help but think about how lucky I was to have her as a mother. Although she couldn’t give me the biggest and the best, she still did everything she could for me. Now she was here to help me get started on planning my wedding.

As soon as our hug came to an end, she brought my left hand up to her eye level and looked up a Jack. She sounded like she could cry at any moment. “Oh, it’s so beautiful, Jack!”

“I know it’s not much,” he blushed a little and tried to be humble, “but I wanted to make our engagement official.”

“Our engagement was already official,” I scoffed in a joking manner, “you didn’t have to get me a ring.”

“Shut up, Paisley,” my mom shushed, still overenthusiastic by the ring that had been called measly by a different second opinion.

I rolled my eyes, pulling my hand out of her grip and focusing back on the magazines. The women on the covers always looked so beautiful in the dresses they were modeling, making me wonder if I would look anything like they did. There was no question that the exact dresses were way out of my budget, but I always could get something very similar. The only thing that really mattered was that I got to celebrate my relationship with Jack, even if it meant not getting the higher end things.

We were going to do more than just make it work with what we were given.

“What actually made you guys want to start planning now?” Jack’s mom asked before I could open the magazine that had caught my eye. “Of course it’s not a bad thing--the opposite--but you guys said you wanted to wait a while.”

Jack and I shared a knowing look. We had always been so insistent on saving money for our wedding, that we wouldn’t even consider planning a little bit. If we had wanted, we could have been looking at anything just to make planning easier later, but we never did. However, a week or so after we had sex for the first time, we both changed our minds completely.

“Well…” I continued to look at him, hoping he’d come up with a lie for us. It wasn’t exactly acceptable to blurt out that sex made us change our minds. However, Jack looked just as lost as me… except that I had learned how to lie. “Jack proposed again. Not only was it sweet, but we can’t just keep proposing to each other the rest of our lives.”

Jack let out a sigh of relief as both of our mothers laughed at my joke. I quickly moved back to Jack’s side of the table, feeling stronger being next to him. If we were going to be asked any further questions, I couldn’t do it by myself. This was the first time I had actually managed to lie to my mom, and it felt horrible; the worst thing I had ever done. I needed some support.

“When did you get lying lessons?” Jack asked me in a hushed tone while our moms were still laughing.

“Oh, shut up,” I teased back, but also hoping he wouldn’t interrogate me. He just chuckled, shaking his head lightly.

“And that’s the only reason?” Jack’s mom joked, jesting that it hadn’t been a good enough reason for us before, but apparently was now.

She probably had fully accepted my lie, there was no reason not to believe it. However, Jack and I made the mistake of sharing another look. I didn’t know what it must have looked like to others, but our mothers definitely turned silent. They had their own eye contact before both their gazes fell upon my stomach.

“No,” Jack blurted out lowly, making their eyes snap up to him instead. “Pays isn’t pregnant. That’s not even possible.”

And there went my perfectly crafted lie. Usually, I was the one that managed to stutter out the truth by saying something so stupid. Jack and I had switched roles. He was always the one that hid it all so well, while I was just a mess and couldn’t deal with the pressure.

Although I was too shocked by Jack’s outburst to even wonder what it would be like to be pregnant, I still thought of a way to conceal the truth. Of course, our parents would assume that it meant we used condoms or hadn’t even had sex. But Jack had to panic about what he said and only made it worse.

“We didn’t even have sex until a week ago,” he felt the need to explain.

“Jack!” I gasped, wondering why I hadn’t intervened earlier. This could have all been avoided if I had jumped in as soon as I saw their eyes travel down.

This wasn’t something I needed to talk about with my mom, let alone with Jack and his mom around as well. All I wanted was to look at the magazines and get some ideas for my wedding; to start imagining myself in the perfect dress and create a color scheme. That was all. But our mothers looked at their respective child in shock. I didn’t need the sex talk again.

Due to my mom’s weird personality, however, there was something else she was more surprised about finding out. “All this time,” she shook her head in disbelief, “in high school, you weren’t lying?”

“No!” I exclaimed, now also shaken up about the fact that my own mom thought I had been feeding her lies about me not having sex with Jack. Didn’t she know how bad I was at lying? Granted, I always got flustered when she asked, but it was very different.

“You guys had countless of sleepovers to actually do nothing but sleep?!” she continued, now including Jack in her realization. “Oh my god.”

“Mom!” I cried, wanting her to shut up already. “Can we please discuss the wedding, and not what Jack and I used to or do now in bed.”

“In bed? Oh, honey,” she sighed and put her hand on my shoulder, shaking her head at my ‘innocence’. I knew exactly what she was talking about, and I had done it all, but nobody here needed to know.

“Please,” I uttered, knowing this would come to bite me back for months to come no matter what I did. “I was actually excited about today, but not if this is what we’re going to talk about.”

Jack pouted lightly at me, feeling sorry for me. He wrapped his arms around me from behind, pulling me into his chest and giving another one of his infamous head-kisses. His mom had no need to over exaggerate. All she did was give him a cocked brow to which he just had to shrug, and that was the end of that. My mom, however, loved making a big deal of whatever she could make out to be huge.

“Oh, maybe we should leave,” she now whispered not so quietly to Jack’s mom, pointing towards the front door with a jerk of her thumb, “give these two some time to make us some grandbabies.”

“Okay, no,” I refused, holding onto the back of the chair in front of me as Jack’s hug loosened significantly. “You guys are going to look through these magazines with us and give us horrendous suggestions that I will politely decline by saying that ‘we'll think about it and put it on our thinking pile’. I’m not letting you guys leave.”

“Awe, you’re going to be such a good mom one day,” my mom sighed with much enthusiasm yet again.

“Mom!” I yelled out one last time, finally getting her to focus back on what we were here to do.