Possessive Baby Daddy

“Yeah,” I say. “Okay. Sure. Let’s do it.”

“Great.” He grins at me and starts walking.

I hurry to keep up. “So what do you do?”

“I’m starting a production company.”

“That sounds exciting.”

“Yeah, well, it’s a lot more work than you’d think.”

I laugh at him. “Uh, I know how much work it is. My father owns a reality TV production company called Truth Hurts.”

“Oh, yeah, I knew that. From the Divas show.”

“Right. He has a bunch of other ones too, but Divas is our big hit.”

“Must be fun, right? Producing reality TV?”

I shrug. “I guess. He likes it at least.”

“You don’t?”

I hesitate, not sure how much I want to get into this. “Let’s just say that I would take the company in a different direction.”

He laughs and leads me through a maze of turns before we end up out on the parking lot. I stand there and gaze up at him. “What?” he asks.

“I’m not kidding when I say that I never would’ve found this parking lot again in my entire life.”

He laughs and puts an arm around me. I don’t know this guy at all but he does it so effortlessly that it’s no big deal.

“Fortunately, you’re with me. Now, do you want to take one car?”

“I took an Uber here, so.” I grin at him. “You’re in luck.”

“Actually, I think you’re the lucky one.” He leads me to a parking spot with a black sports car. It’s a convertible with a big dent in one door. “Here she is.”

“Nice,” I say and laugh. “Cool dent.”

“That dent is special to me,” he says. “Jack Nicholson hit my car with a golf cart when I first moved here. When I yelled at him, he told me to go fuck myself, called me a pussy, and drove off with his middle finger in the air. It was amazing.”

I laugh and nod at him. “Oh, yeah. Nicholson is a dick. Everyone knows it.”

“He was intense. Not gonna lie. I thought I was going to have to fight him.”

“He’s all bark, no bite. Plus, he’s like eighty or something.”

“Still. I don’t want to have to punch a real celebrity, you know?”

I shake my head, still laughing, and climb into his car. He starts the engine and pulls out. We chat about the business, about the people we know in common, and I’m surprised to learn that we run in generally the same circles.

Although I only know these people through my father. I don’t know how this guy has connections. My father built Hard Truth from the ground up over the last thirty years, but Shaun seems like he just flew into LA last week and suddenly knows half the town.

We drive for twenty minutes, mostly sitting in traffic, before we end up out near the beach. He stops at a little rundown food truck and gets out. “Trust me,” he says. “It doesn’t look like much, but it’s good.”

I frown at the chipped paint and the sign hanging on by a single nail. “I don’t know,” I say.

“Trust me.” He grins and tilts his head. “Live a little.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I grumble. “You’re paying my hospital bill if I end up with food poisoning.”

He puts his arm around me again, and again I find myself drawn closer to him. “Klara, if you end up sick, I’ll hold your fucking hair.”

I grin as he leads me to the truck. He orders in barely passable Spanish without asking what I want. The guy grins and disappears for a few minutes before returning with two containers. Shaun takes them, gives me one, and leads me down a path toward the water.

We end up on a bench just off the sand. He takes off his shoes and kicks them aside like they’re nothing, which makes me laugh, then opens his container and digs in.

I follow suit. There are rice and beans, some kind of greenish avocado sauce, fried eggs, chorizo, and tortillas. It’s absolutely amazing and I stare at him for a long moment.

“You should’ve told me this was so good,” I say.

He grins. “I did, you were just too busy judging Jose’s truck.”

“Jose’s truck looks like the set of a murder flick.”

“Yeah okay, fair enough, but his food is fantastic. I keep trying to hire him away, but the guy loves his crappy truck.”

We eat together and talk about the town. It’s strange, how comfortable I feel with this total stranger. I’m not the kind of person to go out to lunch with a man on a total whim like this, especially when that would mean skipping a business meeting.

Really, this feels crazy to me. But I’m angry with my father for giving me bad directions and for being totally unreliable.

“So why were you lost back there at the studio?” he asks me after we finish eating and toss our containers in a nearby trash can.