Page 1 of Ruthless Mafia Daddy

1

LILA

Why am I even here? Why do I keep letting other people make the decisions for me? Rule my life? Hurt me?

Like Sam.

It’s been a while now, but the wound is still there.

I’m not ready for this at all. I’m not ready to get back out there. Not ready to open myself up to love again. Because love will chew you up and spit you out.

Again, like Sam.

I thought I’d be engaged to the man of my dreams by now. Maybe even happily married.

The joke is on me, I guess. Who knew that dream would turn out to be the nightmare of all nightmares. And after this long, I’m still waiting to wake up.

What’s the one good thing to come out of what happened?

I wish I could say this date, but unless the dude sitting opposite me has a personality transplant in the next twenty seconds, this is a colossal waste of my time.

As I knew it might be. As I told my best friend it would be.

But did she listen? Did it stop her from forcing me to be here?

No.

His nasal voice pulls me out of one bad place and into another.

“It’s fun because people consider the game a slightly more complex form of rock/paper/scissors. But in actuality, it is more like chess. You get a team preview, and you have to determine how your team matches up against the other and you control a handful of the stats so there is a lot of ways you can throw off your opponent by making a Pokémon more defensive or faster or something along those lines.”

Pokémon? All I know about Pokémon is that there is a cute little yellow rat that shoots lightning from its cheeks and has Ryan Reynolds‘s voice.

Do I even care?

Apparently, it doesn’t matter either way. He doesn’t need my input on it anyway because he doesn’t even stop to look at me.

“Did you know speed is an important stat in Pokémon? So, training them to be just the right speed to out-speed one of its weaknesses can be a major boon in a battle.” He takes a sip of his beer. “At least for a best of one battle. If it is best of three, then you might want to preserve some of those secrets for a later game if you think that will give you the upper hand.”

Speaking of speed, I can’t believe I spent a good three hours getting ready for this. Cassi owes me big time.

And it feels like I’ve been here forever. I look at my phone. Two minutes to eight. Almost one hour into this date, and I’ve been ready for it to end from minute one.

“And now with newer games, there is a thing called "tera" where you change your Pokémon’s typing in the middle of a battle. You can only do it once per battle, but if you have a Pokémon that might be quad weak to a fairy move and then have it tera-steel, then it suddenly resists fairy moves.”

I smile and sigh. I wish I had a tera thingy or even a fairy move, whatever that is, so I could just fly out of here or poof out of thin air.

“Oh?” I check my phone. Again.

Come on, why is time all but frozen?

My best friend, Cassi, is the reason I’m on this shitty date, and she better keep her end of this deal and give me an out in…one minute and forty-three seconds. She promised.

Then again, she also assured me the guy was nice, and that we had a lot in common.

So far, he’s not living up to my very low expectations.

That’s okay. I can endure one minute and… thirty-six seconds.

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