Page 12 of The Single Dad Dilemma

“He’s hot, isn’t he? I can see it in your face.”

A deranged snort-laugh escapes me. “No, he’s… he’s….”

“He is!” she shouts, slamming the palm of her hand against the counter. “You always get weird when you’re talking about hot guys.”

“Look,” I say, huffing. “Fine, okay? He’s hot. He’s tall, with dark hair and darker eyes, and he’s got tattoos all over his neck and arms. And his dad bod looks like it was sculpted by angels. And he’s got just the fewest amount of gray hairs in his beard. And I thought about using him as a coloring book or letting him use me as a sex slave or maybe both if he’s down?—”

“Slow down,” Lyric says, her voice gentle and playful. A little giggle escapes her as I place my hand across my chest and take a deep breath.

“Are you laughing at my pain?”

“Look, after that asshat stole precious years from you and still won’t fully leave you alone, I want you to find someone to be this affected by. I want you to find someone who makes you hot and bothered, and the idea of touching them gives you heart palpitations.” Lyric pauses, running her fingers through the tangles at the ends of her hair.

“But?”

“But,” she says, “I think we both know that it can’t be this guy. It can’t be your boss. He’s a much-needed lifeline right now to your end goal, which is finishing school. You can’t afford for this arrangement to go sour. And nothing will make it doomed faster than complicating it with sex.”

Sometimes Lyric is my voice of reason. Sure, she’s a little weird and her purse is shaped like a bat and her hair is often a bright shade of pink and then green and then blue and then pink again. And sure, she describes her job as “playing dress-up with dead people all day,” but she’s not afraid to tell me the bitter-to-the-taste cold hard truth I need to hear.

And in this situation, going down any kind of rabbit hole that involves lusting for my boss is a terrible fucking idea.

“You’re right,” I say with a sigh. “From now on, he’s a blob.”

“A blob?”

“Yes. A genderless, sex-organ-less, faceless blob that’s going to help me graduate.”

“That’s the spirit,” she says before taking a bite of noodles from the container. “Now, go do that thing you do with that weird-looking sex toy you have, and get all those lustful thoughts about him exorcised from your body. Then have a nice shower and do your laundry and get ready for your first workday.”

Sometimes Lyric mothers me, too. I don’t mind it, though. It would have been nice to have an actual mom who did that for me, but my grandmother did the best she could. It’s not her fault that her daughter didn’t do a good job.

“It’s not a weird shape,” I say defensively. “It’s just a lemon.”

“I think most would agree that in the context of a sex toy, a lemon is a weird fucking shape.” She laughs.

She might be right. Maybe a lemon doesn’t make any sense. But I don’t give a shit about that because it’s the best thing I’ve ever bought myself and gets me from zero to screaming for God in like forty-three seconds. Maybe a full minute if I intentionally drag it out.

I walk back toward my room, already thinking about her Ridge ban, when Lyric calls out.

“What does he do, anyway? Like what’s his job?”

“He’s a tattoo artist,” I call back.

“Shit,” she says. “Maybe go two rounds with the lemon.”

I don’t tell her that some nagging emotion deep down is telling me I’m going to need to lemon myself on the daily to keep these lust demons at bay. She doesn’t need to knoweverything, after all.

Fuck, this is going to be a really long summer. I should probably get a backup lemon.

SEVEN

RIDGE

I’m up earlier than usual this morning, still frantically straightening and cleaning last-minute spots that people probably don’t think about. The bit of floor inside the pantry closet, for example, is now spotless. I spent ten minutes filling a bucket and wringing out the mop and so forth for a patch of floor that’s maybe two square feet. I also dusted the top of the doorframes and triple-checked that the toilet seat in the hallway bathroom was down. It doesn’t matter that, because of Lou, I always make sure I do it. I checked anyway.

Did I also second-guess my outfit and stare at my shirt in the mirror for several minutes? Yes, I did. Who the fuck knows why I did that, because I wear pretty much the same thing to work every day. Early in my career, I wore a crisp white shirt with my favorite band’s insignia on the back. It happened to be the same day that I got into a fight with a brand-new bottle of black tattooing ink and lost. After that, I stuck to black jeans and black shirts only. I save the good stuff for outside of work.

It’s not as if I go to work looking like a bum any other day, but today, I’m spending a few extra seconds trying to tame my hair into place and running a hand across the wrinkled fabric over mychest and checking my teeth even though I haven’t even fucking eaten anything yet.

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