“Doing what?”
“What?” I shook my head. I was halfway up the tree. “Oh… video chatting.”
“Porn?”
“None of your business.” I huffed. No. No was the answer. Why didn’t I just say no? Did I want him to think I liked porn?
Resting his shoulder against the door frame, he sipped his drink again, then smirked. “Now I’m curious.”
My chin jutted forward as I narrowed my eyes. “Are ya, Apollo? Are ya really curious?”
“Apollo?” A boisterous laugh rumbled from his chest. “As in Creed?”
“What?” My eyes narrowed. “Creed what?”
“Apollo Creed. Rocky?”
“Rocky?” My head tilted to the side, eyes still narrowed.
“For fuck’s sake, Stick. Please don’t tell me you’ve never watched Rocky.”
“Boxing movie? No. I have not.”
“Then why the hell are you calling me Apollo?”
“Well, you have not told me your name. And you’re well… um… fit of sorts. Strong looking. Not exactly ugly. So Apollo came to mind. You know… mythical god, son of Zeus?”
He fisted his free hand at his mouth.
“You’re laughing at me?”
He shook his head, but his massive fist still wasn’t big enough to hide his grin. “See the color of my skin? Do I look Greek to you? If you must call me Apollo, let’s go with Creed, even though I’m not a boxer either.” He chuckled a little more.
“That’s it!” I pointed a stiff finger at him. “I’m not going to stand here and take this.” My stubborn personality grasped for a phantom shred of dignity. Pivoting, I returned to my apartment with as much confidence as an amputee wearing Angry Bird boxers could have.
“Hope this isn’t your way of playing hard to get, Stick. It’s not happening between us. You’re not my type.”
The nerve of him…
“I’m not playing hard to get, and I never implied I wanted anything to happen.” I may have thought about his tip, but nothing beyond that. “It’s very arrogant of you to assume I thought something was going to happen between us. AND I don’t have astickup my ass!”
I slammed my door and opened it again two seconds later. “And just to be clear… why exactly am I not your type?”
He finished the last of the blood drink and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “ ’Cause you’re a skinny-as-a-stickwhite girl without a damn thing to hold on to.”
I slammed the door again.
I landeda dream job two years ago—a dream job because when I had two complete legs I never would havedreamedof being a “subject” or “tester” of prosthetic legs. However, using the label “prosthetic leg” around my boss was off limits.
A designer in England made me several pretty legs with painted nails. They looked freakishly real. My boss hated them. He said they were as ‘fucking impractical as a pair of high-heeled shoes.’ Those legs were ‘prosthetics,’ and wearing them only revealed my vanity. He designed robotic legs, and comparing them to the average prosthesis was the ultimate insult.
“Hey love, tell me about my baby.” Thaddeus “Thad” Westbrook wasn’t British, but he always called me love. Why? No idea. I was not his baby, but I think his baby ranked higher than his love. The “smart limb” aka my bionic leg was his baby. I had a lot of his babies, yet we’d never had sex.
Thad was my first date from a matchmaking site. And for the record, he was not one of the “ones.” We should have had sex. He took me to the brink of an orgasm, yet he had no clue what he did to me. I was open about my disability on the dating site, he was not. Thad lost one hand and two fingers from his other hand in a farm equipment accident when he was twelve.
He invited himself into my apartment after dinner, and then he removed my leg. It wasn’t exactly a first-base move, but as his hands skimmed over my flesh, inspecting my residuallimb. I shivered, heart racing. At first it tickled my knee, but then it shot tingling goose bumps up along my skin while the much neglected area between my thighs screamed,YES!But, no—we never happened.
I put him on speaker phone and combed through my wet hair after a long run and a shower. “I like her… a lot. In fact, I think I’m keeping her. She’s not sexy, but she’s smooth. No limp, not even when taking the stairs. I got caught in the rain the other day and worried about the sensory electrode shorting out, but?—”
