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“No, listen. I want to set you up with someone.”
I groan. “Aria, no. We’ve been over this.”
“Cal! Henry approved this one!”
I give her a stern glare as I remember the last three women Aria has set me up with. They were all disasters. One was a neurotic schoolteacher that treated me like I was one of her students. The other was thirty year old party girl who got so wasted on our date that she spent the night puking up the tequila shots she’d assured me she could handle. And the final, a preacher’s daughter that was currently going through her rebellious phase about seven years too late, and practically pulled her tit out at dinner and told me she’d suck my dick in the bathroom before we’d even ordered appetizers.
No, no, and fuck no.
Once upon a time, I would have fucked all three and not thought twice, and yeah maybe I did fuck that last one. But I never dated all that much, and I brought even fewer women around Maddie. I never wanted her to get the wrong idea about me, or that these kinds of women that felt disposable to me were the kind of women she should strive to be.
I wanted better for Maddie.
I wanted everything for her.
“Come on, Cal. She’s really sweet. We do yoga together.”
Since when did flexible become synonymous for sweet? “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Come on, Henry says you haven’t gotten laid in forever,” she points out.
“I hate you both, and I’d love if you could keep my sex life out of your pillow talk.” I slam the pen I’m holding down on the stack of papers and shoot her a look.
“You don’t have a sex life, Cal. I hate to break it to you, hon. And Margie wants grandchildren sometime this millennium.”
“Then you and Henry give them to her.” I feel a pang of guilt over my comment and Aria and Henry’s past, but luckily Aria doesn’t react, so I continue. “Besides, I already gave her one.” Even as I say the words, they bother me. Maddie isn’t your child.
“You and I both know, she doesn’t see Maddie like a grandchild. She’s like the daughter Margie never had.”
“She certainly treats her like a grandchild.” I recall every single time that my mother has let Maddie get her way. Every time Maddie would throw Margie lets me do it in my face when I told her no. The way they would talk on the phone for hours, the way her face would light up when she came over to babysit. I’m still slightly pissed at my mother for teaching her to play poker and then proceeding to give her a “Poker for Dummies” book that hustled me out of forty-five dollars and a week’s worth of ice cream for dinner.
She was nine.
“The point iiiiiis,” Aria drawls, “you need to meet someone. You’re a young, good-looking guy, with a good job and good credit and you own your house and you have your shit together! I see the way women fall at your feet. Why are you keeping everyone at arm’s length?”
“Why do you think, Aria?”
“I know and that’s the point I’m trying to make. You can’t keep letting Maddie control your life.” She tucks a hair behind her ear and looks at me with that signature look that pisses me off. Stop fucking momming me, Aria. I already have one.
“She doesn’t control my life, A, but I made her a promise. I made a vow to put her first.”
“And that’s admirable, but at some point, you have to put you first again. She’s almost eighteen and eventually she’ll be out on her own.” My cock stiffens and deflates in that one sentence. Hardens as it thinks about her being eighteen and then softens just as quick thinking about her out on her own. Away from me.
My mind floats back to a time when she’d told me that time would never come.
“Hey, Cal?”
I look over to where Maddie is doing her homework to find that she’s set her pencil down and is staring at me with a worried expression.
“What’s up, Mads?”
“Can I live here forever?”
“Forever?”
“Yeah, I mean…even when I go to college and get married and stuff?”
I chuckle at the ten year old at my table. “You don’t want to move out? Get your own place? Have independence and all that shit?” I wince. I’ve been trying to get better about not swearing so much, especially around Maddie, but it isn’t exactly working and now she’s swearing like a sailor too.
