Of course, she sounds surprised by the proposition. She wouldn’t be Mabel if she weren’t a little hard-headed.
“Dating was one of the rules, wasn’t it?”
“I believe you said it was more of a request.”
“Mabel.”
She pulls her bottom lip between her teeth, nibbling as she tries and fails not to let her enjoyment of my suffering show.
“Tacos sound amazing. Mission Taqueria is a few blocks away. Let’s go there.”
She turns on her heel, and I watch in awe as my graceful wife saunters away, headed towards our very first date.
14
TALK TO DADDY
MABEL
The air blasting from the vents of my car is finally warming up just as I pull into the parking lot of Mission Taqueria a few minutes later. Ryder was riding behind me in his truck when we left the gym, but somewhere along the two-mile drive, I lost him. While there is a tiny part of me that hopes Ryder changed his mind and isn’t going to show up for the tacos he promised, a bigger part is anxiously expecting his arrival, hoping he finds an excuse to touch me again over dinner.
And that scares the absolute shit out of me.
I throw my car in park and absentmindedly run my thumb over the pulse point on my wrist,shivering when I remember the way Ryder’s fingers felt pressing into my sensitive skin, and?—
“AGH! No. Call Danny!” I yell, tapping a button on my phone to activate the voice control. It connects to the car’s Bluetooth, and the ringer bleats through the speakers twice.
“Hello there, Mrs. Finch. How’s married life treating you?”
I can practically hear the sadistic grin on Danny’s face through the phone.
“Please don’t call me that. I’m freaking out here, man.”
“Madame Ryder Finch, what perhaps could you be freaking out about?”
“Danny!”
My best friend snickers, and I blow out a long breath, sending the flyaway hairs falling out of my ponytail to flutter off my forehead.
“Alright, alright, I’m done teasing. Talk to Daddy. Tell me what’s wrong.”
Ignoring the disgusting way Danny refers to himself as ‘Daddy’—that’s a thread I have no interest in tugging at—I sigh.
“I’m sitting outside my favorite restaurant, waiting for my husband to show up and buy me tacos. My husband, Danny. I’m dating my husband. Imean, what kind of bizzare-o, backwards world is this?”
“It’s the kind of bizzare-o, backwards world where you become one with the bottom of a bottle of tequila and start letting your vagina do the thinking for you.”
I sputter, absolutely affronted by his accusation.
“I do not let my vagina do the thinking for me. What does that even mean?” And now it’s Danny’s turn to sigh.
“You know, I really should get paid more for being your fairy gay mother, Mabes. Ten minutes before you go out with Ryder in Vegas, you spill the worst-kept secret about your crush. Then you go out with the guy?—”
“Because you told me to.”
“You get blackout drunk?—”
“Again, because you told me to.”
