The Truth

“Yeah. You, too.” Tiffany is stalling, standing in her open door, looking up at me from a couple of inches too close for propriety. Did she move there? Or did I?

“And thank you for dinner,” I blurt, willing to say whatever banalities come to mind if they’ll keep her right here, close to me for another moment. “I enjoyed it.”

It’s not even a quarter of what I want to say, but I have to say something. It feels important that I let her know that for some reason, for her to understand how valuable a simple black bean burger with no expectations is to me.

I need her to understand that I appreciate her.

“Me too. More than you know,” she replies, pushing her hair behind her ear. It’s a flirtatious move, but surely, she doesn’t intend it to be. It must be my too long denied brain that’s reading undertones into what have to be innocent behaviors.

She lingers, and I search for something to say to keep her here even longer.

But that’s a bad idea.

Because I want to feel those coal-black tresses between my fingers again, not gently soothing her to sleep but wrapping them in my fist to guide her head back and allow me to inhale her scent and bury my nose in the curve of her neck. I want to taste her skin, to treat her not as all the positions in our lives say I should . . . but simply as a woman.

Yeah . . . that’s a major fuckup waiting to happen on so many levels, Stryker.

I take a step back, putting a solid foot of space between us, and turn on my professional façade.

“I’ll see you at work.”

It’s a reminder to us both about our roles. But things have changed. I might not have noticed Tiffany at the front desk for the past few months, but I will most definitely notice her now. I might even stop by to say hello. Nothing wrong with that at least, right?

She grins a Cheshire Cat smile, the left side of her red lips a bit higher than the right, as if she knows something I don’t. And then she pats my chest . . . twice. “Yep, I’ll see you at the office, Daniel.”

Why does her saying my name send a jolt through me? And her hand on my chest feels like one of those paddles they use in hospital dramas, the kind that shock your heart back into action. Because I’m definitely well-aware of my racing pulse at the moment.

And why does it remind me of her calling me Daddy and asking me to ‘fuck her in’?

I clench my teeth, my brain locking away the memories my libido wants to stir up. It takes a fair amount of discipline to wrangle back control of myself, and by then, she’s already gotten in her car and pulled away.

It’s for the better. But even though I know I should just purge those memories of a gloriously nude Tiffany from my mind as I purged those memories of me in a ‘righteous’ mullet singing along to ‘Bed of Roses’ in the tenth row at the Meadowlands, it’s a hard memory to eliminate.

I watch the tail lights of the blue sports car for too long, fantasies of a long-lost youth and makeout sessions in the back seat of a Camaro similar to that one stirring in my mind.

With a sigh, I turn to go to my car, but Frankie calls out to me.

“Mr. Daniel!”

I look back, and he’s leaning out the walk-up window with a smile on his face. Frankie’s always got a smile, sometimes real and sometimes one of those fake customer service ones. But this one is the real deal, his cheeks puffed up and full like a happy Buddha.

“Hey, Frankie.”

“I like her. She’s not impressed by you.”

“Is that supposed to be a good thing?” I ask, not correcting his obvious assumption that this was a date.

“For most men, no. For you, absolutely. You need a woman who’ll tell you when you have lettuce in your teeth.”

My hand jumps to my mouth, covering my melting smile.

Frankie laughs, seeing he’s zinged me. “I can’t see from here, man. But you get my point. Woman like that” —he points to the road where Tiffany disappeared— “she’d tell you flat out. No tiptoeing around.”

“You sound like you know her.” I consider that Elle might’ve brought Tiffany here before. Just because I have only ever come here with Elle doesn’t mean the same is true for my daughter.

“Nah, just years of watching people interact,” Frankie says. “You get a knack for it after serving for awhile, ya know? Instincts.” He taps his head, nodding wisely. “I can tell the dates that are going well, the ones who are looking for an exit, and the ones who need help.”