Knox
“Oh my God, Dad. Dad, she’s so cool. Her name is Avery and she just moved here from Cincinnati.”
“You’re not supposed to leave the house when I go out.”
I’m around for Piper as much as I can, I even built a fully functioning garage in my yard and moved a lot of my tools here so I can work from home and be here when she gets home from school. But on one or two evenings a week, I have to go out. Not that Piper cares. She’s more grown up than most adults I know.
“I needed help with my homework.”
“No, you didn’t. Don’t lie.” The kid breezes through school, her biggest complaint is how boring it is.
“Fine. I wanted to meet our new neighbor. Besides I texted you where I was. You’re so anti-social. You should’ve gone over and welcomed her to the neighborhood by now.”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” I say, but can’t help smiling. If there’s one person in the world who can make me smile, it’s Piper. She’s the only person who can make me smile. It makes everything I do for her worthwhile.
“Oh my God, Dad…”
“Stop saying, ‘oh my God,’” I say as I open our front door.
We sit in our living room, on the denim couch Piper picked out. Piper talks and talks, relaying everything about her evening, but that’s nothing new. The kid talks non-stop. But right now there’s one thing I can’t get one thing out of my head.
My new neighbor is definitely the YouTube video woman my buddy Marcus showed me earlier tonight. The one who talks about sex, and how a man is supposed to please a woman.
Marcus said she’s the most famous person who has ever lived in town.
I’d never heard of her.
Maybe Marcus needs to look on the internet for sex tips, but I sure as hell don’t.
It explains why I noticed a webcam pointing at me out of her upstairs window earlier. She’d damn well better not plan on using me in one of her videos.
“Dad? Dad!” Piper shouts, drawing my attention.
“Yeah?” I start listening to her again.
“Avery’s so awesome, we should totally have her over for dinner.”
“I’m not sure about that. I don’t even think you should be going over there.”
Do I want my thirteen year old hanging out with a woman who posts videos about sex online?
“What? Why? She’s so much cooler than Mrs. Coupland.”
“Of course you’d say that.”
Mrs. Coupland was our old neighbor. An eighty-year-old widow who happily watched Piper for me when I had to work in the evenings. When her daughter convinced Mrs. Coupland to move in with her, and they sold the house to Miss I-know-everything-about-sex, I lost my free babysitter. At least the move happened near the end of eighth grade.
“She’s really pretty, you know,” Piper says.
I noticed. “So what?”
She shrugs, “Nothing.”
“Want to watch Law & Order?” It’s her favorite show. I’ve come to hate it less since she started making me watch it.
“Yes, but can we watch the original?”
We watch one episode, and Piper yells and talks to the screen through the whole thing. She wants to be a lawyer when she grows up. Which should be a good job for her, given how much she likes to argue.
“Okay, bedtime, kid. Go brush your teeth.”
“Night, Dad. I love you,” she says as she bounds up the stairs.
“Love you too, sweetheart.”
Piper doesn’t want me to read her a bedtime story and tuck her in anymore. She says she’s too old for that. It seems like my little girl is gone. And I’m supposed to be okay with that.
When she’s upstairs in bed, I clean the kitchen. Our supper mess was left because I had to go out. I rinse and load the dishes, and put the rest of the stew in the fridge for tomorrow.
I made the stew from scratch. I make as much from scratch as I can, always one-pot wonders because it’s all I have time for or know to do, plus they last for three meals. Chuck shit in a pot, put in a different type of flavoring and let it simmer. Though, in the summer I barbeque Piper and I nice steaks.
Exhausted, I lie on the couch and stretch out my legs. I flick through the channels for a while, before giving up on finding anything to watch and settling on some movie that’s halfway through. It had a car chase with shit blowing up when I flicked past, and that was good enough for me.
A ’71 Dodge Charger rips onto the screen in another car chase and makes me think of work. Marcus just bought one online for us to restore, I haven’t seen it yet and hope there isn’t too much wrong with the interior. He promised there isn’t, but I don’t trust the fucker.
Normally I vet all the purchases, but sometimes with Piper, I don’t get the chance. When you buy things at auction you have to be able to move fast.
Marcus does all the bodywork and I rebuild the engines. Though we’re both skilled enough to do both jobs. We buy classic cars online, fix them up and flip them for a tidy profit.
It works for me because it’s on my own time, and I’m able to rebuild an entire engine in my garage at home so I can be here with Piper. I even get her to help me. Not many kids her age know what a carburetor is, let alone how to repair one.
Marcus swore this Charger is solid, but last time he bought a car without me, the entire inside looked like it’d been lived in by a family of racoons for years.
Fucking Marcus.
The man who apparently needs sex tips.
Curiosity gets the better of me, and I grab my iPad. It doesn’t take me long to find her YouTube videos, which she’s called Getting Avery’s Girls off. Give me a fucking break.
I click on one titled How to Eat Her Out in the Shower. I half expect her to be naked in the shower and demonstrating, but she’s fully dressed in what looks like a bedroom.
Avery’s dark flowing hair and makeup are perfect. She must be one of these annoying women who take forever to get ready. Though there’s no denying she’s easy on the eyes. And her voice. She might be fully clothed in her videos, but her voice is rich and expressive enough that it’s pure sex.
She’s confident and radiant as she speaks about how to get between a chick’s legs without making her slip. At least she had the sense to say the guy needs to be strong enough to hold her up.
I sure as hell don’t know any women who’d be able to stand after I got through with them. There’s no way they wouldn’t fall down in the shower. And it’d be a long time before they could stand up and walk out of it.
Watching a few more videos, I’m mesmerized by my new neighbor. I go through An Intro to Clits, Clamping Nipples, and Pulling Her Hair before I realize I’m getting hard.
There’s no way I’m even going there.
Not with my next door neighbor. I keep my fuck toys and my real life far apart. And I definitely won’t do anything with anyone Piper knows.
When I became a single father at twenty two, I swore I wouldn’t date women, only fuck them, until Piper was all grown up.
I close the app, and put the news on TV.