“Why would you tie this to his football dreams?”

“As a strong deterrent, that’s why! I plan to nip this in the bud.”

Jake snorted and shook his head.

“What? You don’t think I should?”

“You don’t want to know what I think.”

Dominique turned and crossed her arms. “Maybe not, but tell me anyway.”

“I think you’re making too much of this.” As if to underscore this panic that Dominique had fully embraced, Jake leaned back on the couch and began flipping through the magazine he’d been reading when she arrived.

“My eleven-year-old son is viewing porn and you think I’m overreacting?”

“Yep.”

Never at a loss for words, Dominique was temporarily speechless. “So,” she began once she’d found her voice, “you think I should do nothing, act as if what he did was okay?”

Jake placed the magazine on the ottoman and closed the space between him and Dominique. “I think,” he said, moving behind her and massaging shoulders that were tighter than drums, “that you need to understand the dynamics of a growing male. Wet dreams, hard-ons, jacking off, and sexual preoccupation are all a part of coming into manhood.” Jake’s hand moved from Dominique’s shoulder and began to massage the base of her neck. “In looking at those pictures online, your son was simply satisfying a natural curiosity. Are there other ways of gaining this education? Of course. And that’s where your reaction comes in. You can either use this as a teachable moment or you can punish him and close the door on your awareness of this part of his life. Because, trust me, he won’t stop doing whatever he’s doing. He’ll just learn how to effectively hide it from you.”

“It’s obvious you don’t have kids,” Dominique retorted, even as she relaxed under Jake’s expert ministrations. “I’m not down with all of that modern-day psychobabble. There are some things a child just does not do. I was hoping that you’d perhaps cosign my position, but I guess that was wishful thinking.”

“You guess correctly. I’m not going to tell a boy to stop doing what comes naturally. I actually empathize with your son,” Jake continued, running a strong thumb up the length of Dominique’s spine before massaging her arms and the top of her head. “I want to focus on what comes naturally, too.”

“Well, I’m not having it,” Dominique insisted, though her mind was now less on Justin and more on the effect Jake’s fingers were having on her body. And even though she didn’t for one minute agree with him, and was upset that he wasn’t more supportive of her point of view... she still didn’t leave his house until morning.

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