Anything has to be better than stripping down to my boxers, flopping down into my bed, not tired enough to sleep, ordering myself not to rub one out to fantasies about my team’s owner’s daughter.
Again.
Anymore.
Fuck knows I’ve done it enough already. Mostly in Spain, when I’d get a text from her, picture those pretty blue eyes and the way she made friends with Jessica, and then let my mind wander to far more explicit situations that never happened.
And will never happen.
And that was before she told me about her cherry hand pies.
Cherry.
Hand.
Pies.
There’s not a word in that pastry’s name that doesn’t make me hard as granite.
You’re so fucked, Caden says cheerfully in my head.
He would’ve laughed his ass off.
And then he would’ve helped me come up with a plan to fix this.
My door is ajar, so I hear her moving around downstairs, letting Jessica outside.
She sings along to a Waverly Sweet album while she doesthe dishes, turning the kitchen faucet on and off, clinking plates and silverware into the dishwasher, and then I hear her practicing her language app again.
Spanish and Italian. She speaks both. Better Spanish, but her Italian greatly improved while she was working on the cruise ship, she told me when I asked what she was listening to one morning this week.
And it made me feel, once again, like she was out of my league, except then she made me buckwheat pancakes in the shape of smiley faces that were also phallic if you looked at them wrong, and we both laughed until she was crying.
Fuck, I miss that Ziggy.
The Ziggy who wasn’t Roland Keating’s daughter.
The Ziggy I was going to take on a date tomorrow.
The Ziggy I get to see cradling her small baby bump when she doesn’t realize I’m watching.
I stare at the cracks in the ceiling as the sun sets, wondering if she’ll watch TV or if she’ll come up to get ready for bed.
Long day.
Hard day.
For both of us.
“C’mon, Jessica. Bedtime.”
My pulse ticks higher.
She’s coming.
She’s coming up the stairs with the dog to get ready for bed.
She’ll be stripping down and changing into pajamas in mere minutes.
