Page 39 of Sweet Chaos
“Yes, I know. She’s half my age. But you know what’s funny?”
I couldn’t think of one single funny thing about any of this. “What?”
“She looks so much like me when I was her age.”
“Mom, you should stop following her. You can’t keep doing this to yourself. Ask him for a divorce,” I pleaded, knowing that my words would fall on deaf ears. But I still felt the need to say them anyway. “There’s someone out there who will love you for you.”
“I don’t want anyone else,” she whined.
I tossed the rest of my cone in a trash can and wiped my sticky hand on my black leggings. “Are you going to be okay? Do you want me to come over after work?”
“Your father and I are going to the club for dinner with Hank and Trudy.”
I rolled my eyes. Dinner with the mayor and his wife. Oh joy. My mother must be a masochist. Now that she’d unloaded on me, she felt better so we said goodbye and I tucked my phone in my denim jacket pocket.
I needed to sit by the ocean. Dig my toes in the sand. Breathe in the salty air. Clear my head and put everything in perspective. Which I sorely needed.
I was leading a double life. Surf shop employee by day with a side gig as a shameless hussy. It had been six days since the night I’d lured Dylan into the bedroom, like Eve tempting Adam with the poison apple. Come, take a bite, it’s sweet and forbidden. I’d never let anyone go down on me, and I’d been too turned on to be embarrassed. But I couldn’t believe I’d told him I didn’t give blow jobs. One of these days, I’d put a filter on this mouth of mine.
Three days after that night, Dylan had stopped by Firefly Surfboards. I was holed up in the stockroom, going through the inventory, and he’d closed the door, planted my ass on a stack of boxes and proceeded to torture me with kisses and an orgasm, his hand covering my mouth to stop me from screaming and alerting the entire shop.
Since then, we’d been texting, and I’d been fantasizing.
Speaking of the devil.
I stopped and watched Dylan from across the street. He was gesticulating with his hands, arguing with a construction worker outside The Surf Lodge. Whatever the guy was saying clearly didn’t make him happy. He planted his hands on his narrow hips and looked up at the sky as if his patience was being tested and he was about to lose it. The other man held up his hands and backed away.
I watched the guy climb into his truck—AJW Constructionpainted on the side—and drive away before my gaze returned to Dylan. His phone was pressed to his ear and he was pacing, jaw clenched and shoulders rigid. When he ended his call, he pocketed his phone and carved his hands through his hair, resting them on the back of his neck. Tentatively, I approached him and stopped next to him on the beach path.
“What happened?” I asked, looking at the three-story hotel in front of us. Weathered wood that had once been painted white trimmed in aqua blue. I’d always thought it was a cool hotel and liked to envision it the way it must have looked back in the fifties before time and the elements had worn it down.
Dylan shook a cigarette out of the pack, lit it and took a drag before he answered. “My construction crew quit.”
Before I could respond, a middle-aged woman in Lycra and running shoes shot Dylan a dirty look and hollered, “Smoking kills. We don’t need your secondhand smoke.”
Dylan ignored her and took another drag of his cigarette. She fanned away the smoke with her hand and coughed a few times, power walking past us.
I dragged my attention back to Dylan. “Why did they quit?”
He laughed humorlessly. “Because someone is trying to fuck with me.” I had a sinking suspicion that ‘someone’ was my father.
“Now what?”
“I’ll hire another construction company.”
If my hunch was right and he was going up against my father, it wouldn’t be as simple as hiring another construction crew. My father would use any means to get what he wanted or, rather, prevent Dylan from getting what he wanted. And the one thing my father had that Dylan didn’t was connections.
“Is this about my dad? Is he messing things up for you?”
“He’s giving it his best shot.”
I stared at the black and white checkered Vans on my feet, ashamed that my dad was such an asshole. After all these years, why was he still out to get Dylan? Why did he have to turn everything into a power struggle? “I’m sorry.”
“Why? Did you tell my construction crew to fuck off?”
“No. But I know how he operates. If he wants something, he’ll stop at nothing to get it.”
“Fuck him.” He looked at me more closely, the cigarette clamped between his lips bobbing on his words. “Why’s your tongue blue?”
