A lousy father who has no good options. Either you stick around, stay in your job, and you could get killed, ruining her even more. Or you stay the hell away and be out of her life, but at least the pain won’t be as bad if something would ever happen to you?
“I suppose,” I said.
“Give it time when you’re sober,” she said. “Let’s talk lighter, shall we?”
“Lighter, like lighter alcohol?”
The bartender laughed way too hard. But I appreciated she was trying to not let me be a shitty face in the midst of my most brutal moment.
“What do you do for work?”
Ah, DOM. Scott and Burke, my technical boss who kept wanting to hand the agency off to me and my co-partner. I could just picture how the conversation would go with the three of them. “Hey, guys, how’s this for a new one? I took on a job to find a baby daddy for a friend of an old client, only to find out it was me. I was searching for myself all along. How’s that for some metaphorical shit?”
Scott would probably just laugh and say something like, “See? Sometimes your jobs can put you in personally difficult spots.” Burke would say something like, “Do what you have to do and detach, move on.” Of the three of us, Burke was the one I knew the least. I knew he had military experience and a better sense of certain skills like flying helicopters and jets, but even by the standard of DOM, he kept to himself quite well.
But both of them probably would have asked the same question. Why did you take a job like that? Are you that broke?
“I’m a private investigator,” I said.
“Ohhh, so like for a police station? The FBI?”
“Kind of,” I said with a self-aware grin. “Surprise, I can’t talk in detail about it.”
Mostly because I’m too embarrassed to admit to having to investigate myself.
“Well, what can you say about it?”
I smirked. I was feeling a little dizzy from the alcohol, but not to the blackout point by any means. Then again, sitting down had a way of masking such alcohol effects.
“It’s brought me to some odd, odd places. Like most recently, the person I’m working for is not even the person that set me up.”
“Ohh, intriguing. I’m into those mystery novels. You should read some.”
I chuckled and silently thanked the other customers pulling her away. The last few bits of conversation had made me think that I needed to call Emily, though. There was no way I was taking fifty grand from her. One, the job had happened so quickly that it didn’t justify five grand, let alone fifty.
Two, how the fuck was I supposed to charge for something like this?
I was pissed at Emily for getting me into this, but I could have said no. I was pissed at Kelly for tracking me down, but I understood any woman’s desire to find the father of her child. I was mad at myself for not wearing a condom that night, for not at least pulling out when I came, for not at least doing any one small thing that would have prevented this spiral of chaos…
All during some of the best sex of my life.
Yeah, it was easy to say I should have done those things in the moment. When you were fucking someone who never had so willingly and skillfully played the role of sub, when you had just complete control of the moment, you weren’t exactly thinking, “OK, five seconds before I think I’ll come, I will pull out.”
And on top of that, Kelly did look hot when I saw her today. She had more curves, flashy new hair that was different than most—wonder what her actual natural hair color is—and, fuck, that moment when I thought that I was about to hate fuck her again…
Maybe I owed it to Kelly to give this another shot.
It was probably going to end as disastrously as today’s did, or at least have roughly the same outcome of us going separate ways. For as tied together as we were, yesterday was only the second time we’d ever hung out. And yet…boy, that sexual chemistry was off the roof. Boy was she fucking hot. Boy did I fucking want her.
Boy…did I want to meet my child.
I stood up. The alcohol, sure enough, had laid in wait until I got up, as the instant that I stood on my legs, it felt like someone had taken all the muscles out of them, leaving me wobbly and swaying. I pulled out a hundred-dollar bill, added a twenty to it, and threw it on the counter. I thought about being “that guy,” who announces loudly to the bartender that he was leaving, but I kept to myself. It was more me, anyway.
And it was about damn time, I thought to myself, as I left the bar and headed for the motel, too drunk to drive home, that I stopped letting the demons of my past control my actions and instead took control of what I wanted like a fucking man.
Chapter 11: Kelly
I barely slept that night.
I alternated between a lot of emotions, and more than any one emotion keeping me up, the rocking back and forth ensured that I didn’t pass out until my body literally was too exhausted to keep my eyes open.
I got two hours of sleep before Charlotte woke me up. I could never get mad at the little angel, but I sure would have appreciated her sleeping in just a tad longer.
“It’s OK, baby, it’s OK,” I
