Page 3 of Forfeits

“Hey, it’s okay. How about I just go?”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“No, no. Don’t worry about it.”

He shoved open the door, and he was gone in a flurry of stomping boots and glitter, and a muttered curse, as I sat there in the passenger seat with the car door open and my wet dick out.

I blinked back tears as I opened the glove box for a pack of tissues, fumbling with the lip of the opening. With shaky fingers I mopped at the wetness, then zipped my jeans and exited the car, throwing the soiled tissue to the ground. I went around the car and got into the driver’s side.

I stared at the steering wheel. I shouldn’t drive. I couldn’t. I was so drunk and so tired and so…fucking broken.

Instead of starting the car, I folded my arms on the steering wheel and sobbed, the sounds loud and unhinged in the closed space, and I felt bad for the twink and guilty for my behavior and angry at the whole fucking world.

Chapter One

Proof of Life

Two years later

There were times in my life when I’d had to put my foot down.

“No, Lucy. We are not getting a baby goat.”

“But, Dad! Come on! I heard they can live indoors, and you can train them to—”

“I said no. Not up for discussion.”

“But, Dad!” Lucy tossed her strawberry-blonde, shoulder-length hair and huffed a long-suffering sigh. Her blue eyes, his eyes, sent me an accusatory glare.

“Are you ready to go? The bus will be here in a minute, and I’ve got to get to work.”

Lucy side-eyed me as she grabbed her jacket and picked up her backpack. “You work from home.”

I shook my head. “Not today. I’m going into the office.”

“Fine. I’m leaving.”

“Patrick will be here when you get off the bus,” I said, ever grateful that my nephew didn’t mind spending a couple of hours with his younger cousin a couple of times a week.

“Cool. Hey, Dad, think about the goat idea,” she said as she opened the door and slipped out, shutting it behind her.

“Fuck,” I said. “No fucking goats. Jesus.”

I turned to look down at the dogs, who gazed at me with expectation in their eyes. “The two of you are enough.”

I slipped on my fall boots and leather jacket, then hitched the dogs to their leashes and we left. I took a direction opposite to where Lucy would be waiting for the school bus, since she’d probably start talking to me about goats again. It was a good thing that she was so tenacious. It would serve her well in the future. But right now, with only me to win over, it was annoying and exhausting. For about the hundredth time, I wished that Daniel were still here helping me to raise this spitfire of a girl that had many of his physical characteristics and his outgoing personality.

I didn’t regret being a dad. Lucy was my reason for getting up in the morning and for fighting against the grief that had threatened to pull me under those first couple of years. I loved her so much, and it would have been nice to have had someone to help me raise her.

But, yeah, sometimes the best laid plans go to shit. I pushed memories of Daniel and our life together out of my head and took the dogs over to the neighborhood park so they could do their business. This was my morning ritual, and it wasn’t a bad one. I had Lucy and I had the dogs—Cocoa, an overweight chocolate Lab just shy of being a senior, and Eddy, a younger, more energetic corgi cross. I had a job I enjoyed and only had to go into the office two days a week—and my twenty-one-year-old nephew, Patrick, who looked after Lucy for me when he could.

It wasn’t a terrible life.

I was an editor and copywriter at a Toronto-based publisher, and the Ottawa offices were located smack downtown in a sun-filled building on Slater Street. It wasn’t a hardship to be there, but the fact that I could spend most of my week working from home was a godsend, especially as a single parent. Even the two-day-in-person per week requirement could be adjusted if there were events at home that required attention. It did me good to get out of the house. Most of my life revolved around Lucy and the animals, so to be in an adult environment with no distractions was a good break from it all.

My day went predictably well. I was working on a couple of different projects so could switch things up if I got bored. The deadlines were still a couple of weeks away, and I was making good progress, so I wasn’t stressed about getting them done.

When I got back home at five-thirty, Patrick and Lucy were in the middle of a game of Monopoly.

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