“I can deal with that.”
Tyler was probably right: her walls are a defence mechanism. She wants to test me, to work out whether I’m capable of breaking them down, or whether I’ll give up at the first hurdle.
“Your sister called me earlier.”
“Rian?”
“She asked me if I wanted to go out with her tonight.”
“Oh,” I exclaim, shocked. I really wasn’t expecting that.
“And what do you think?”
“I don’t know. She seems okay.”
My sister gets an ‘okay’ from my daughter, while I get an ‘I hate you’.
“I might go.”
“If you want to…”
“Is that okay with you?”
“Are you asking my permission?”
She raises an eyebrow.
“Sure, no problem.”
I imagine my sister will be good company for her. Even though Skylar is fifteen, she needs to be around people her own age – although maybe she shouldn’t be spending Saturday nights with an eighteen-year-old. Or maybe she should? I know fuck all about teenagers.
“Shall we go back upstairs? I want to get at least two walls finished. I don’t want to sleep on the sofa for longer than I have to.”
I get up from my stool. “Ready.”
She gets up, too. “If you want to go out tonight, too…”
“Me? Go out? Where would I go?”
Skylar rolls her eyes.
“You’ll have no hope if you carry on like this, Kerry.”
“Are you talking about…?”
“How the hell did you manage to get all those women?” She shakes her head, leaving me standing in the kitchen as she bounds upstairs.
To be honest, I don’t know how I got all those women. Maybe I’ve forgotten all my moves, or maybe my moves simply have no effect on some women. Women like Jordan.
So what do I do? Do I drop it and move on?
I wish I could forget about her, but she’s soexciting, the way she’s making me work for it. She’s so sexy when she puts me in my place. It’s fun, too, trying to make her give in to me. I’m not the kind of guy who accept rejection – I won’t be put in a corner.
And she’s definitely not the kind of woman that you leave in a restaurant on her own on a Friday night; or the kind of woman you leave to eat alone on a Saturday night, in her apartment.
“Are you coming or what?” my daughter calls from upstairs.
I join her in her room, thoughts bouncing around my mind. When she passes me a paintbrush, implicitly telling me to move my arse, I find myself asking her: “Are you saying all this because you want me out of your way, or because you really care about your lame old dad’s love life?”
