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I admired it at the very same time I feared for her safety.
Back on track, I let the gate swing closed behind me as I moved up and into the courtyard of the building. It took me a minute, but I finally found a door and climbed the stairs to the second floor. Lola’s door came pretty quickly, the second on the right, and I didn’t hesitate to rap on the wood with my knuckles.
Music drifted under the gap at the bottom and up to my ears, louder than what most people considered an appropriate volume, and when no one answered the door after a full minute, I feared she might not even hear me knocking over it.
So I did it again, louder and with more zeal this time, so much so that the door gave a healthy shake in the frame.
“Coming, coming!” she shouted through the door on her approach, and I couldn’t help but look down at the tiled hall with a smile.
She sounded like she expected it to be someone she liked. Boy, was she in for a surprise.
The door swung open in a rush, and the transfer of air nearly sucked me inside with it. Once I saw the look on Lola’s face, however, I was glad I held my ground.
“What the fuck are you doing here?”
“Hey,” I greeted. “It’s nice to see you too.”
“How do you know where I live?” She searched the hallway behind me as though it might hold the answer.
I shook my head, because I knew better than to answer that, and reached behind my back to pull the folded paper from my back pocket. “I just thought you might like to get a jump on gaining some perspective.”
Her face harshened as she inferred the meaning of my words.
“Excuse me, I have perspective down pat, you no-good mother—”
I smiled and leaned in to place a kiss on her color-ripened cheek. “Have a good night, Lola,” I whispered there.
And with one last glance in her eyes, her mouth opening and closing like a gulping fish, I turned and made my way back out of her building just as I’d come.
Truth was, I’d have liked to hang around, but I was already late. And as much as I played by my own rules and bucked convention, my mother didn’t—and she controlled the food.
God, I hate him.
That had been my mantra for the entire fifteen-minute bike ride to my parents’ house.
I hate him. He may be really sexy, and the instant his lips touched my cheek, my nipples went into a full military-style salute, but I hate him. Yes, I definitely hate him. Obviously, my boobs just haven’t gotten the memo yet, but that’s to be expected. They’re boobs. They don’t have special talents like feeling feelings and picking up Reed’s weird radio frequency—they just react to cues for arousal.
I mean, was he trying to ruin my life?
And how in the hell had he known where I lived?
I still couldn’t believe he had the audacity to show up at my apartment, unannounced and definitely unexpected, and hand me an advanced copy of his column—one that consisted of a diatribe about penis pressure and how some people don’t want or need sex and blah, blah, blah.
Just like before, he’d read my column and twisted my words into something ridiculous. I wasn’t penis pressuring anyone. I had merely written a fun and entertaining piece about how it was okay to just want sex for the act itself sometimes.
Fucking penis pressure. Give me a break.
After reading his response, you’d think I’d told my readers to grab a ruler and a stopwatch and administer an elementary-style timed sex test to their significant others. If I didn’t dislike him so much, I might’ve actually applauded his ability to make magic out of mist. The fucker.
My family chattered around me at the dinner table, but I had nothing to contribute. I was too caught up in conjuring ideas for future columns and then disputing their validity as solid ideas based on how I thought Reed might twist and turn my shit to contradict me.
If I said, “The Golden Gate Bridge is huge,” Reed would take that comment and have a goddamn field day redirecting it into an existential discussion on what defines the word huge. Hell, he’d probably toss in an absurd argument based off of polynomial-time algorithms, and then I’d probably fall asleep because no amount of college algebra would help me understand polynomial time.
I groaned out loud and took the serving spoon for my mom’s famous mashed potatoes and scooped some onto my plate. And then I scooped another helping just for good measure. Hating someone was hard work, and my body needed to carbo-load if there was any hope of plotting my revenge.
“Uh, Lola?” my sister Annie called from across the table. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, Lo, you’re really getting at your mom’s mashed potatoes,” my father interjected. “Mind sharing some with the rest of us?”
I looked up and noted that everyone at the table—my mom, dad, Annie, brother-in-law Brian, even my nieces and nephew—was staring at me.
“I’m fine. Just hungry,” I muttered.
Annie quirked a concerned brow in my direction, but I ignored her. I knew if I made eye contact, she’d ask me a million questions about why I was smacking the mashed potatoes with the serving spoon. Sometimes sisters were a real pain in the ass.
This probably wasn’t the best night for me to attend family dinner at my parents’ house. And even though I always got bombarded with annoying questions about marriage and kids and renter’s insurance policies, I generally enjoyed our twice-monthly routine.
Thanks a lot, Reed. You’re even ruining family dinner night.
I slid the bowl of mashed potatoes toward my dad and settled into my plate. I was determined not to let that pretentious, know-it-all, newbie columnist fuck up the rest of my day.
Conversation continued around me, and I just tuned it out for the moment and focused on the baked chicken in the middle of my too-full plate.
But it didn’t help.
Bite after bite, I grew more and more angry. I had never really hated anyone in my life, but I really, really hated Reed Luca. With a fiery passion that made me better understand those women on that show Snapped—the one where they go off the deep end and kill their boyfriends or husbands. Not that I was plotting murder because, yeah, that was a bit over the top, but I could at least understand where those chicks were coming from.
“Henry,” Annie said in that disappointed yet irritated tone only moms use on their children. “Stop stabbing your chicken with your butter knife. That is inappropriate.”
“But…but…Aunt Lola’s doing it!”
I glanced up at the sound of my name, and then I watched Annie’s gaze move from Henry’s plate to mine. My eyes followed hers and, yeah, my nephew was right. I was currently stabbing my chicken with a butter knife. Mutilating it, actually.
Seriously, I swear I’m not actually plotting Reed Luca’s murder.
Fantasizing about him just disappearing to a safe place where he wasn’t injured but couldn’t bother me? Yes.
But actual murder? No.
“Okay, I’ve had enough,” Annie announced and dropped her napkin onto the table. “What’s going on, Lola? Even for you, you’re acting weird, and that’s saying something.”
“Nothing,” I lied.
“Lola, honey, you seem a little upset,” my mother added. “Are you sure everything is okay?”
“A little upset, Deb?” my dad chimed in. “Our daughter just took half the bowl of mashed potatoes, and now she appears to be performing some sort of satanic ritual on your baked chicken. Which is delicious, by the way,” he added with a mouthful of half-eaten poultry as proof.
“What’s a salantic ritual?” Lucy, my youngest niece, asked.
“Just a little something adults do when they’re thinking about taking a cruise, Luce,” Brian, my brother-in-law, answered.
“Ohh!” Emma, my oldest niece, exclaimed. “I want to do a salantic ritual!”
“You have to get it approved by the president first, sweetheart,” Brian responded, and Annie rolled her eyes. Her husband always used the most ridiculous scenarios to get out of difficult conversations with their kids. And “getting approval from the president” was one of his go-tos.
Emma wants a puppy? Sorry, sweetie, but we have to get the president’s approval first.
Henry wants to download the Pokémon Go app to his iPod? Sorry, buddy, but that has to go through Congress first.
Annie and Brian’s kids currently had 300 pending approvals from the United States government.
“Seriously, Lola, stop stabbing the chicken. It’s weird,” Annie said and I glared at her.
“If I want to stab my chicken, I’ll stab my chicken. You’re not the boss of me.”
Annie pointed her fork in my direction. “I’m about to stab you.”
My mother clapped her hands twice. “Girls!”
Uh-oh, Deb was getting angry. If her claps were the equivalent of a traffic light, we’d reached the yellow light seconds before it turned red.
“I want to stab someone!” Henry shouted.
“Gotta get that approved by the president first, buddy.”
Oh. My. God. I was one Annie glare and Brian “president approval” comment away from my brain exploding.
“Spill it, Lola,” my dad demanded. “Tell your sister what’s going on before she starts talking with that awful, high-pitched shrieking noise none of us can stand.”
