Bad Habit (Bad Love 1)

t the Dairy Queen around the corner—where I reluctantly quit once I found out I wouldn’t have time to work when school started. When I need to be somewhere, I walk or ride my bike. Like I said, I despise being dependent on anyone, but if there’s one thing I hate more, it’s mornings. Specifically, early mornings. And to get to school on time, I’d have to wake up at an ungodly hour.

I want to say no.

I should say no.

But as his rock-hard erection grinds into me violently, I say something else entirely.

“Fine.”

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Scandalous by L.J. Shen

Check out Chapter One of L.J. Shen’s Scandalous!

Chapter One

Trent

She’s a maze with no escape.

An ethereal, steady pulse. She’s there, but just barely.

I love her so much I sometimes hate her.

And it terrifies me, because deep down, I know what she is.

An unsolvable puzzle.

And I know who I am.

The idiot who would try to fix her.

At any cost.

“How did you feel when you wrote it?” Sonya held the whiskey-ringed paper like it was her fucking newborn, a curtain of tears glittering in her eyes. The drama levels were high this session. Her voice was gauzy and I knew what she was after. A breakthrough. A moment. That pivotal scene in a Hollywood flick, after which everything changed. The strange girl shakes off her inhibitions, the dad realizes he is being a cold-ass prick, and they work through their emotions, blah blah pass the Kleenex blah.

I scrubbed my face, glancing at my Rolex. “I was drunk off of my ass when I wrote it, so I probably felt like a burger to dilute the alcohol,” I deadpanned. I didn’t talk much—big fucking surprise—that’s why they called me The Mute. When I did, it was with Sonya, who knew my boundaries, or Luna, who ignored them, and me.

“Do you get drunk often?”

Chagrined. That was Sonya’s expression. She mostly kept it schooled, but I saw through the thick layers of makeup and professionalism.

“Not that it’s any of your business, but no.”

Loud silence lingered in the room. I strummed my fingers against my cell phone screen, trying to remember whether I’d sent out that contract to the Koreans or not. I should have been nicer, seeing as my four-year-old daughter was sitting right beside me, witnessing this exchange. I should have been a lot of things, but the only thing I was, the only thing I could be outside of work, was angry, and furious, and—why, Luna? What the fuck have I done to you?—confused. How I’d become a thirty-three-year-old single dad who didn’t have time, nor the patience, for any female other than his kid.

“Seahorses. Let’s talk about them.” Sonya laced her fingers together, changing the topic. She did that whenever my patience was strung out and about to snap. Her smile was warm but neutral, just like her office. My eyes skimmed the pictures hung behind her, of young, laughing children—the kind of bullshit you buy at IKEA—and the soft yellow wallpaper, the flowery, polite armchairs. Was she trying too hard, or was I not trying hard enough? It was difficult to tell at this point. I shifted my gaze to my daughter and offered her a smirk. She didn’t return it. Couldn’t blame her.

“Luna, do you want to tell Daddy why seahorses are your favorite?” Sonya chirped.

Luna grinned at her therapist conspiratorially. At four, she didn’t talk. At all. Not a single word or a lonely syllable. There was no problem with her vocal chords. In fact, she screamed when she was hurting and coughed when she was congested and hummed absentmindedly when a Justin Bieber played on the radio (which, some would say, was tragic in itself.)

Luna didn’t talk because she didn’t want to talk. It was a psychological issue, not physical, stemming from hell-knows-what. What I did know was that my daughter was different, indifferent, and unusual. People said she was “special”, as an excuse to treat her like a freak. I was no longer able to shield her from the peculiar looks and questioning arched eyebrows. In fact, it was becoming increasingly difficult to brush off her silence as introversion, and I was beginning to grow tired of hiding it, anyway.

Luna was, is, always will be outrageously smart. She scored higher than average on all the tests she’d been put through over the years, and there had been too many to count. She understood every single word spoken to her. She was mute by choice, but she was too young to make that choice. Trying to talk her out of it was both impossible and ironic. Which was why I dragged my ass to Sonya’s office twice a week in the middle of a workday, desperately trying to coax my daughter to stop boycotting the world.

“Actually, I can tell you exactly why Luna loves seahorses.” Sonya pursed her lips, plastering my drunken note to her desk. Luna would sometimes speak a word or two when she and her therapist were all alone, but never when I was in the room. Sonya told me Luna had a languid voice, like her eyes, and that it was soft and delicate and perfect. She had no impediment at all. “She just sounds like a kid, Trent. One day, you’ll hear it, too.”