Valentine Next Door by Willa Edwards

Chapter One
     
     
     
    “You need to get out of there, buddy,” Brett declared.
    Jeremy huffed into the phone. He didn’t need his best friend to tell him that. He’d been back in his childhood bedroom for three weeks now, while the damn bone in his leg healed. Being waited on by his mom, unable to even leave the house, was driving him stir-crazy. After years of moving from place to place searching out the next great photo, sitting still was taking a serious toll on his mental state.
    “Are you offering to let me stay at your place?”
    “Fuck no. I like you, dude, but not that much.” Brett chuckled into the phone. “I’m not giving you a sponge bath.”
    They both laughed. Best friends since elementary school, they’d done a lot for each other, but they had their limits.
    “I can bathe myself, dude.” It required a plastic garbage bag and a few strips of duct tape, but he could do it. “I’m not that handicapped. I just couldn’t get up and down the stairs to my place.” His third-floor walkup in the city had seemed cool and Bohemian before his injury. Once he healed, he’d be looking for a new apartment in a high rise with a doorman and an elevator. Maybe a condo in a neighborhood that would be good for families.
    He’d been thinking a lot about the future since his injury, not that he’d admit it to his buddy. Maybe it was the staying still, or maybe it was the injury itself, but the call of the road had tamed down to a gentle breeze. The idea of coming home to someone was starting to sound appealing. If it was the right person.
    “Isn’t there somewhere you can go for a little while? Just for a break.” Papers rustling echoed over the phone.
    Brett must be at work. The man worked from dawn to midnight some nights. Not that Jeremy could say much. He put in a lot of hours at his job too. But at least it wasn’t in an office.
    Jeremy knocked his fist against the cast on his right foot. “Can’t drive with this thing, and I won’t get far walking.” All he could do was sit and think. About everywhere he’d been and where he might be going next. He’d never been much of a thinker. He was a doer. Whenever he’d seen what he wanted, he’d gone after it. Now, all he could do was spin his mind in circles.
    “There’s got to be something you can do,” his friend declared.
    But the words didn’t register with Jeremy. All he heard was the slam of a door. He stilled. His heart sped up and his cock perked to attention. It was a sound he knew well. A sound he’d waited for so often as a teenager and had now begun to anticipate each night since returning home. It was one of the few joys he’d had since he’d been stuck back in his childhood bedroom.
    Next door, Mrs Valentine, the school librarian and the star of his every adolescent fantasy and most of his adult ones, had shut her front door. He held his breath, waiting for her to walk through the house to her bedroom that stood across the small twenty-foot lawn from his own.
    “Mrs Valentine’s home,” he whispered, even though, logically, he knew she couldn’t hear him through the walls of two houses.
    “Are you fucking kidding me, dude? Mrs Valentine?”
    Brett groaned, and Jeremy understood his pain. Just the thought of Mrs Valentine had Jeremy’s balls tightening and his dick hard.
    “You were always the luckiest shit in school to live next to her.” Brett’s voice rumbled in his ear.
    The sound distracted Jeremy—momentarily—from the beautiful sight before him. Jeremy wasn’t the only one who’d had a crush on the school librarian.
    He waited with bated breath as she walked into her room then shut the door behind her. Mrs Valentine always changed as soon as she got home from the library, switching from her pumps, tight pencil skirts and curve-hugging button-down blouses, into more relaxed sweats or jeans.
    And he got a front-row seat for the action. As a teen, it had been one of his favorite times of day. As an adult, it was