Page 14 of Pregnant By the Playboy
“You certainly seemed to experience a lot of pleasure.” She’s smirking.
I feel like she’s stolen my line.
I rack my brain for something else to say. I’m usually pretty good at opening my mouth and having words spew out, but right now, I’m struggling.
This was the best weekend I’ve had in a long, long time. I’d been a little bored with my life of lazy luxury. The parties, the women...I don’t do it as much as I used to, and it seemed a bit routine, like I did it because I didn’t know what else to do with myself.
But the weekend with Marissa?
This was different.
I felt alive.
Yesterday evening, we ordered Vietnamese food—we didn’t go outside all weekend, ordering in whenever we got hungry—and as I looked at her over my steaming bowl of pho, I had the fleeting thought that life couldn’t get any better than this.
Curious, that.
Afterward, we had some of my special cherry gummies, and getting high with Marissa was pretty great, too.
A part of me wants to ask to see her again, but I told her that I only wanted two nights, nothing more. In fact, I don’t even know what more would look like. I haven’t had a girlfriend since university, over a decade ago.
“Hope you enjoy your dinner with your family,” I say.
“You, too.”
And then she’s gone, all five foot two of her.
I’m always clear about what I can offer, but sometimes women get ideas and think they’ll be the one to change me, and they hang around. Marissa didn’t do that. Stupidly, I kind of wished she had.
But this is for the best.
* * *
“What were you doing when I called yesterday?” Po Po asks.
I’m sitting at the dining room table in my childhood home. My parents, my grandmother, my brothers, and my sister-in-law are here. Baby Evie is sleeping.
I shrug. If it was just me and my brothers, I’d tell the truth. I was naked in bed with a woman. Julian would roll his eyes in exasperation, and I always enjoy making him do that. Or maybe I’d play it up a little and say I was in the middle of an orgy.
But I wouldn’t say in front of my grandma, who is ninety-one years old and already thinks I’m enough of a shit disturber.
“Just reading in bed,” I say.
Julian snorts.
“Lying is a sin,” Cedric says.
“Who, me? Lie?” I say, as though I’ve never heard a more insulting thing in my life. “Yeah, you’re right. I would never do something as mundane as reading a book.”
Cedric is a writer. Or was a writer, as he keeps saying now, since he hasn’t written in a few years. His first book was pretty successful, but he has yet to produce a follow-up. He teaches at one of the colleges in the city now.
The truth is, I do read a little, but I keep pretending I don’t so that I can say I never read Cedric’s book.
I did, in fact, read it.
I did not, alas, like it.
It was boring and had too much navel-gazing for my liking.
