Page 85 of More, Daddy
I think she is a naturalDaddysGirl.
I take her chin in my hand and hold her gaze with mine, our breathing synced. “My house. Tonight. We need to talk.” I look her up and down before releasing my hold on her face. “Eight.”
She leaves my office, knowing better than to give me some lingering over-the-shoulder look on her way out.
Briar’s been trying to come clean to me about things. She’s been trying to make things right. I think she is sorry about pretending to be Cadence, and I actually do believe her reasoning. Still, she lied. She lied about who she was, she’s been pushing for my attention, she let me take her virginity without so much as a word about it.
I glance over at my desk as I stand at my office door, ready to leave for the day. What would Leah have said if she walked in on me railing and spitting in the mouth of a junior coach? I pull at the back of my neck, finding tension and nerves knotted up back there.
All of this has been a mistake.
Sheis a mistake.
A mistake I can’t get enough of.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
I’ve never felt morelike a fucking creep than going into a pharmacy alone on a Monday night to buy Plan B, all because I lost control with a nineteen-year-old girl who thinks she’s in love with me and fucked her bareback over my desk at my place of work.
I can’t stop fidgeting as I wait in line, and after receiving what feels like the most judgemental look ever from the guy working the pharmacy counter, I pay and leave.
When I pull up to my house, a few minutes before the time I told Briar to arrive, I’m surprised to see hersitting on my old wooden porch, her ten speed tipped onto its side in my lawn.
I look around as I click my door closed, making sure no neighbors are outside. I nod to her as I approach with the little white paper bag from the pharmacy. “Are you alright?” I didn’t know I was going to ask that, not first at least. I thought I’d say, you’re early, or, why are you early, or, don’t leave your bike out front like that.
But when I make my way across the lawn, to the porch, and she gets to her feet, I find my hands on her shoulders as I guide her inside. Briar holds herself, arms wrapped around her torso, as she stands aside while I roll her bicycle up the porch and into my foyer. Closing and locking the door, I pass her the white bag.
“That’s for you and–” this part feels so hard. I can’t shake from my mind that she lied to me, so apologizing to her for anything feels so imbalanced. Still, what I did today—losing control with her in my office—was wrong. And I need to make it right. “I apologize for losing control today. It won’t happen again.”
She doesn’t look inside the bag. “I want it to happen again.” She takes a step, and we’re chest to chest, only her chest only comes up to the bottom of my ribs, because she’s so small. “I want you to stop giving me these impossibly small windows of time to explain myself. After what you did to me on your desk today, it’s the least you can do.”
Our eyes lock, and the tiniest of smiles lifts the corner of her full lips. She’s got me. I just apologized for what happened, so she knows that I feel bad. She’s using that to manipulate me into listening to her, when I invited her here tonight so that she could listen to me. Not the other way around.
The pink tip of her sultry little tongue swipes between her lips as she blinks up at me, cheeks rosy, likely from riding her bicycle to my house.
I glance over at her old ten speed, and the worn leather seat and imagine Briar splayed out on my training table, her thong ripped off and shoved into her mouth because around her I am a helpless heathen.
She will not manipulate me. Not anymore. Not again. I shake my head.
“I invited you here to apologize for today, to give you that,” I say, nodding my head to the unopened white bag in her hands, “and to ask you to get rid of that fake Cadence Caine Instagram account. And show me that you got rid of it.”
I want to ask her if she deleted the photos of me that I know she either saved or took off her computer screen. And I can’t even be mad at her for doing it because I did the same damn thing. But I don’t ask. As much as I don’t want her having them, I know that my face is not in them, nor are any other identifiable features.
Briar blinks up at me, and it's then I realize she’s got on a tiny crop top, her midriff exposed and silky. Her lower half dons black leggings and an old pair of running shoes on her feet. She has no pockets, and there is no purse or backpack in sight.
She finally peers down into the bag, and even though I know the signals are toxically mixed, I can’t ignore the anger, red and frothy, stalking through my veins as I peer over at the bike. I take her jaw in my hand and the paperbag falls to the floor.
“You rode over here on a bicycle with no bag or phone? What if a chain broke? What if you had an accident? Do youknow how foolish it is for ayoung girlto go out in the evening without at least a phone and a few dollars?”
Her expression calcifies as she blinks up at me. “I don’t get this. I don’t understand you,” she breathes.
Her words make me angry. Her questioning me makes me angry. We wouldn’t be in this fucking predicament if it wasn’t for her. “Pick up the fucking bag, Briar.”
Slowly she nods, and snatches the fallen bag from the ground.
“Open it.”
