Page 21 of Inked Daddies

Sunday morningsalways start with a pang of guilt.

Apparently, no matter how old I get, if I’m in my father’s house, I will always wake up with the feeling that I’m about to disappoint him on his biggest day of the week. I hate it, but the only way it’ll change is if he changes. And that’s as likely to happen as the moon falling out of the sky.

My father never changes. It was a small part of why Mom left him. She always said he was too rigid, that he loved rules more than people. She appreciated that about him when they first met, but over the years, it became stifling. Being a preacher’s wife started to lose its appeal when he made comments from the pulpit about kids these days with their blue hair, how that was disrespectful to God.

At home, Mom pointed out that she dyed her hair blonde because he liked it, and he said it wasn’t the same thing. They went round and round about it, and he didn’t understand why she was so upset, which made her even more upset because he didn’t understand. After that, their arguments got worse, and it was a downward spiral to divorce, with Mom calling him adinosaur and Dad saying he didn’t understand why she hated him all of a sudden.

It wasn’t until we were in Boston that Mom admitted she was a lesbian. She had married Dad because she thought she wanted a traditional life, and she tried for years to make it work, but she couldn’t keep lying to everyone or herself. Eventually, she told Dad, and after a long time, they became something like long-distance friends who shared a daughter. Mom dated a few women, and Pamela was with her for the last two years of her life. I’d never seen Mom happier than when she was with her, and I still email Pamela every week.

I haven’t mentioned that to Dad. I’m not sure how he’d take it. I think he’ll always love Mom as more than a friend, even though that’s all she could ever love him as. Once he gets his mind set on something, that’s how it is for him.

When I walk through the house to get to the front door, I catch his judgy face sitting at the breakfast table. “Good morning.”

“Good morning. You’re working on a Sunday again?” Dad’s voice echoes. “You know, some people don’t forget the fourth commandment just because they have a job.”

“You’re working on Sunday,” I point out as I pull my bag onto my shoulder.

“I’m a preacher, smart-ass.” He says it every week like clockwork, shaking his head in mock disapproval but never pressing hard enough to actually argue. I’ve heard it so many times I could write his lines myself.

“It’s just a short shift, Dad,” I call back, straightening my clothes in the mirror by the entryway.

“Short shift or not, Marie, you should be in church.”

“I’ll pray on my lunch break,” I joke, hoping the humor will soften him.

It does. Barely. He grumbles something about lost priorities and the importance of keeping the Sabbath holy, but by the time I make it to the door, I can tell he’s already forgiven me.

Still, his words stay with me as I unlock the library and step inside. They always do.

Itdoesfeel wrong sometimes, skipping church to sit behind the library desk and write the kind of stories that would make my dad choke on his sermon notes. It’s not that I don’t believe in God or that I don’t care about what I was raised to value—it’s that I found something else I love too. Something that fills me in ways Sunday mornings in the pews never did.

Writing dirty books makes me happy. It’s an outlet for my imagination and makes me feel like more than an observer in the world.

That’s how I always felt before I started writing. I was in the world, but I wasn’t a part of it. I was always reading stories about interesting people, and the day I started imagining myself as an interesting person was the day I became a writer. I needed to tell the story of a girl like me who had adventures and did the crazy thing and met the sexiest men alive.

They weren’t based on my adventures, obviously, but writing about them made it feel like I had lived them. And that’s how I’ve written my books ever since. Aspirational.

And kinky.

The library is still and silent. That’s how it always is on Sundays. It’s just me here today. No Julie, no Dorothy, no patrons unless someone happens to wander in looking for last-minute inspiration or a homework assignment their kid forgot about until Sunday afternoon, even though it’s due on Monday.

And I like it this way. Being alone means I can write.

I settle in behind the desk, slipping my laptop out of my bag and setting it on the counter. The hum of the air conditioning is the only sound, a faint, rhythmic background noise that lets me sink into my thoughts.

I open a blank document and stare at the blinking cursor for a moment, letting my fingers hover over the keyboard. Every blank page is full of possibilities. I could continue the story I started last night, but my mind is already racing, images flashing in my head like stills from a movie.

The guys have been on my mind since they saved me, and no matter how hard I’ve tried to shake them, I can’t. Not that I want to.

Especially after last night. Trick…I still can’t believe that actually happened. I’ve never seen a man jerk off before. Not in person, anyway. Online, it’s one of my favorite things to watch. And in person, it was unspeakably hot.

I start typing, letting the words flow.

In the story, Scarlett is cornered in the library—because of course she is. Libraries are safe spaces for everyone except romance heroines, who somehow always manage to find trouble in the most mundane places.

In the last book in her series, she somehow found herself with three guys in a cornfield on Halloween. I like writing holiday specials, but they can be a little predictable, so I spiced it up by setting the cornfield on fire and making the three men into three firefighters there to rescue her.

The villains are nameless shadows, faceless threats who loom in the background just long enough for her tattooed protectors to come storming in. They don’t need much story—the Halloween special’s villain was a jealous ex-lover of Scarlett’s who set the fire.

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