Muffin Top

“He’s got the look,” Lucy said, setting Gussie down on the rug and stared adoringly up at her.

Her dad nodded. “That he does.”

“What look?” he asked.

“The one where people are trying to mesh two very different decorating styles into one home,” she said.

Okay, he was guilty there.

“The front is my dad’s office. He’s a sex therapist, and the warm, calming colors tend to help his clients relax.”

“It’s true. There have been studies about the power a muted green can have on the psyche,” Tom said.

“And in here, nothing’s changed since Mom left, so it pretty much looks exactly the way it did twenty years ago.” She cut a knowing look at her dad. “Not that a psychologist would have anything to say about the meaning of that.”

“What it says,” Tom answered as he walked to the open kitchen and pulled a trio of mugs from the cupboard, “is that I hate to redecorate and your mom did a great job, so why mess with perfection?”

“You should go sit on your couch and answer that one,” Lucy said and gave her dad a hug before turning on the stove to heat the kettle already on it. “Hot cocoa or chamomile?”

The question just hung out there while Frankie stood staring at the two of them, feeling a lot like he’d walked in on the middle of a conversation that those two had been having for years.

“Frankie,” Lucy said, snagging his focus away from trying to unwind the dynamics between father and daughter. “Which one will help you relax more after the drive? Taking a mug out onto the back deck after a hell drive like we had is a family tradition.”

“Hot chocolate,” he said without hesitation, because chamomile tasted like a rookie firefighter’s damp socks. Not that he’d actually eaten a rookie’s socks, but that tea was exactly what he imagined them tasting like.

A few minutes later, he was out on the deck, standing next to Lucy and her dad and listening to the bugs chirp or whatever it was out there making that noise—he was from the city, even if Waterbury wasn’t Harbor City—and drinking hot chocolate that hadn’t been made from an instant packet, and wondering how in the hell he’d been missing out on this fucking fantastic drink for his entire life.

“It’s a family secret,” Lucy said as her dad gave him the evil eye over the top of his mug of…wait for it…chamomile.

“What is?” he asked, wondering if he could get away with licking the inside of his mug just to get every last drop.

“The hot chocolate. It’s my mom’s recipe.”

There was something in her voice when she said it that made him want to reach out and…what? Hug her? He didn’t have the right. They weren’t friends, despite the strange circumstances they were in. They weren’t lovers. They inhabited some weird space adjacent to all of that, and it didn’t have a name or solid boundaries. So he kept his hands to himself.

They sat in silence for a while—or as close to it as you could get while all of the insects in the entire world, at least that’s what it sounded like to his city ears, chirped and buzzed—before collecting their mugs.

“I’m sure you two are tired from that drive today,” he said. “Muffin, your room is all ready for you.” He turned to Frankie. “I’ve got you set up in the room above the garage.”

“Dad, that’s not even in the house,” she said with a gasp, her big eyes going round. “We can’t put a guest out there.”

The older man shrugged. “I turned the spare room into a workroom for my fishing lures. There’s magnifiers, threads, and bobs everywhere. No one wants to sleep there.”

Lucy looked like she was about to argue, but Frankie took her hand, trying—and failing—to ignore the spark of attraction that sizzled up his arm when he did. Where did that come from?

“It’s okay,” Frankie said with a smile, ignoring the pang of disappointment. “That gives you some privacy to visit. It’s not like you see each other all that often.”

One of her eyebrows went skyward, but she didn’t argue. No doubt she saw right through his bullshit, because she always seemed to.

“Dad, we’re not having sex,” she said. “In fact, Frankie is temporarily celibate because he thinks his man-whore ways have limited his ability to form relationships.”

If the bugs or frogs or whatever they were in the woods were still chirping, he didn’t hear it anymore over the rush of blood in his ears. “I never said that was the reason.”

“You didn’t have to. But it’s true, isn’t it?”