Franklin, a former playmate

My mother knocked on the door a few times before someone greeted us. It wasn’t Aunt Susan. It was some guy I didn’t know, standing around in his pajamas. To be honest, he didn’t really greet us either. He just looked at us, dumbfounded at our attire. He squinted and blinked as if to fix his eyes. We stared at him in silence. I held my t-shirt tightly over my crotch. While I was already embarrassed, it didn’t help that whatever we were having with Susan wasn’t going to be ‘girls only’ like my mother said. I wanted to yell at her but I was too scared to talk.

Having convinced himself that we were real, the man calmly asked, “Can I help you?”

Mom stepped forward. She locked eyes with him then, quickly grabbed him into a hug. She almost lifted him off the porch.

“Franklin!” Mom screamed. I flinched at her voice. We were going to wake up the entire block at this pace!

Franklin couldn’t really reply for a while, probably because he was processing the fact that my mother’s boobs were right in his face. Unfortunately, he did answer back; “Mrs. Jones? Laurie? What’s going on here?”

He recognized us! A guy I didn’t know had seen my mother and I nearly naked and recognized us! I hated every moment of this.

My mother and the man struck up a conversation and I tried to follow along. It turned out that Franklin was a former friend of Michael, one of Susan’s sons. Franklin moved away in the second grade but came back because he had an internship at Aunt Susan’s work. Susan also decided to provide a place to stay: her place, of course. I met Franklin maybe once or twice when we were young, although, I can’t really remember our interactions. It was so long ago. Apparently, my mother took pictures of Franklin and I playing house: drinking imaginary coffee and cuddling plastic babies. Cringeworthy moments aside, it was concerning that this guy had slipped my mind.

I looked him over again to jog my memory. He had long locks of brown hair and freckles on his cheeks. He wasn’t buff but he was toned. His smile was perfect. None of this helped me remember but I now knew he was really cute and that made everything else worse! I hadn’t brushed my teeth, I smelled and I was wearing nothing but a t-shirt in front of a cute guy!

I snapped out of my dismay to hear Franklin state, “So, you’re Susan’s guests today? I thought she left a note on the door, saying she needed to supplies?” To answer his own question, Franklin checked the front side of the door. There was no note.

“Hmm,” Franklin knelt down and started searching the porch, “Maybe it flew off? In any case, she said she’d be back in an hou-”

He stopped talking as he glanced back at us. It took me a moment to realize what had happened. I was decent if people were eye-level with me but, at that angle, it didn’t matter how hard I pulled down on my shirt. Franklin was getting an eyeful of my exposed crotch!