Chapter 10

The best thing about having a penis is sharing it with people who don’t.

-Coke to Cora

Coke

The next week was better than the previous week.

My daughter, after the visit from me and Cora, was starting to enjoy school a little more. She wasn’t pledging a sorority or anything, but it wasn’t as bad as it was before we saw her.

Cora and Frankie were texting each other back and forth in a group chat that for some reason they included me in, and I had to ask June how to turn off the notifications because they were constantly going off and driving me insane—to the point where I couldn’t concentrate.

Not that I was upset that they hit it off and were talking or even that they included me in the conversation. Mostly it was just problematic because I couldn’t have my phone on silent, and they seemed to send each other about eight million texts an hour.

Sometimes I’d scroll to where I’d last responded and reply. Other times I’d read the last five or so to try to get the gist of what they were talking about.

Which was what I happened to be doing at the moment.

Cora (11:30 AM): Do you think it’s possible that an egg could explode? The chicken sites I’m checking say that sometimes, in an incubator, a bad egg can explode.

Frankie (11:30 AM): I read that same post just a minute ago. They say it’s more prevalent toward the end of incubation. That you should candle all the eggs right before lockdown and make sure they’re all viable.

My daughter and Cora had bonded over chickens of all things, and from that point forward, the majority of their texts were about chickens.

Sometimes they strayed toward school or a funny meme that one or the other saw, but mostly their conversations were all about chickens.

Pictures of coops. Pictures of different breeds of chickens. Pictures of incubating eggs that looked like goddamn eggs—no matter what stage of incubation they were in.

Literally, it was all that they talked about.

And though I liked it—to an extent—there was only so much I could handle, and I had reached my fill of chicken trivia.

Which was why after I read the messages, I didn’t respond anymore.

And, maybe if I hadn’t been ignoring the messages, I’d have noticed that they stopped talking about chickens and had started talking about things that weren’t chickens—like boys.

While paying some bills, I realized I’d need my calculator, and I reached for my phone. My eyes snagged on their latest message on the screen, and one word stuck out. Sex.

I frowned and opened up the text messages, going back to the last text that I’d read, and followed their texts until I arrived at the one that mentioned sex.

Cora (11:49 am): Sex is the devil.

Frankie (11:49 am): WRONG MESSAGE CORA!

That was it. There were no more messages.

I frowned, and it took me all of two point five seconds to think it through before I had Cora’s name queued up on my phone and calling her.

“Hello?” Cora asked, sounding pleasantly amused.

“What was that message about?” I asked, sounding much calmer than I felt.

“Oh,” she paused. “You don’t respond to any of our messages, but you respond to that one?”

Yes. Yes, I did.

“Cora…”

She sighed. “Janie and Kayla added me to their group messages, and it’s getting to the point where I’m unsure what in the hell they want from me. They’re trying to fix me up on a blind date with this veteran speed dating stuff. It’s not that I don’t think that veterans shouldn’t have dates. It’s just that I don’t want to be the one dating them. I’m happy right where I am. But Janie seems to think that I need to have sex in order to be able to live a happy and fulfilling life.” She sighed. “To make matters worse, she wants to set me up on a blind date tonight, before the speed dating thing, at a bar where June sometimes works. She just wants to make sure that I won’t freak out during speed dating. Something about her coaching me. I’m gonna have to do it, too, because she’ll just give the man my address, and I’ll be forced to open the door without realizing that she told him where I lived. That, or she’ll get me to go somewhere and blind date guy will be there waiting for me…she’s done that before.”

Sad thing was, I kind of agreed with Janie.

Not about the fact that Cora should be dating someone, but about the fact that sex was one of the best things in life.

It just had to be with the right person—for her, anyway.

Call it sexist. I don’t care.

But, a woman like Cora deserved to have someone who treated her right. Someone she took the time to get to know first before taking that particular step.

Me? I was past all that.

I wasn’t looking for love—I’d tried that, and it didn’t work out.

I wasn’t looking for any more kids—I loved my kid, and now that she was grown, I wasn’t looking to start over.

I wasn’t even looking for a relationship beyond the occasional fuck. I’d spent way too much of my life trying to make something bad good. I didn’t have the desire, nor need, to make that happen again.

Though I had a feeling, if I could do it for anyone, I could do it for Cora.

But, again, I wasn’t in the position to ever be what she needed. She was young. She wasn’t even in the same decade as me. She’d want babies, love, and a relationship.

All I wanted was a steady fuck and someone to share a beer with every once in a while.

But the idea of her getting set up on a blind date? Yeah, that rubbed me wrong.

I was also a fucking hypocrite.

If I wouldn’t allow myself to have her, then surely, I could find her someone that I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, was good.

“How about you let me handle Janie.” I hesitated. “And I know a guy that will play along.”

The sound of pure relief in her voice when she replied with, “Thanks,” had me smiling.

“Anytime. I’ll see you tonight.”

***

It was when I was literally walking into the bar later that night with Tyler Cree, the chief of police and a good friend of mine, that I realized that maybe she thought that guy playing along would be me.

If I’d had any doubts, seeing her face when I introduced Tyler was enough to make me feel like the biggest asshole in the world.

Her face, which had warmed at the sight of me, quickly fell when I introduced Tyler.

Tyler offered his hand to Cora, then gave Janie, Kayla, and June all nods. He’d met them before.

The woman, Reagan, who’d been there the night my ex-wife had her shit show in the fanciest restaurant in town just a couple of months ago, was sitting next to Janie.

She was chattering with Janie’s husband, Rafe, and discussing her thesis paper that she was doing for her graduate program.

Every once in a while, she’d turn to Cora to ask her for qualification on something, but then she’d turn back and keep discussing whatever it was she was discussing. Something about plants or something.

“Tyler, this is Cora.” Janie smiled. “Cora, this is Tyler Cree, the new chief of police that took over for the old chief of police when—”

“Nice to meet you, Cora,” Tyler interrupted, not wanting to get into why he’d taken over for the old chief of police.

Honestly, I wouldn’t want to get into that either.

It was a large clusterfuck that had to do with drugs, conspiracy, and things best not discussed in the light of day over dinner.

Cora, not realizing Tyler’s tension, only nodded her head and offered up a smile.

She didn’t say a word.

Which made me feel worse.

It was confirmed that she’d been expecting me—and not Tyler—to help her get through the night.

I hadn’t realized just how big of a deal it was that I was helping her out until I’d done the wrong thing and invited Tyler.

The rest of the dinner went like this: Janie would ask Tyler a question. Tyler would answer it. Cora would retreat a little more into herself. Repeat the process until at the end of the night, Cora was sitting about a foot and a half away from the table and looking anywhere but at the people at the table.

At one point, Reagan and Tyler started talking, and I gestured for him to switch seats with me.

He did, and they carried on a conversation with the others while I tried to engage Cora.

But she was so far gone in her own head that I had a feeling I’d broken the fragile friendship that we’d just started to form.

At one point, Cora got up to use the bathroom, and I had the feeling that if I didn’t follow her, she’d head out the back door and never come back.

I was right.

Therefore, when I was standing there, in the shadows, and saw her turn right instead of left that would’ve taken her back out to the bar and our table, I followed her.

She’d just pushed outside the back door and rounded the corner to the parking lot when I called out to her.

She froze at the sound of my voice.

“Cora…listen.”

She didn’t move. Didn’t say a word. Just stood there, stilled, and waited for me to say what I was going to say.

“I didn’t mean to make this awkward.”

She didn’t say anything.

“All I was trying to do was help. Had I known that it was that big of a deal, I would’ve just shown up myself…but Tyler is a good guy. I thought for sure you’d like him.”

With that, I reached forward to touch her on her shoulder, but she jerked away like my touch burned.

“It’s okay, Coke,” she said. “I know when I’m not wanted. You’re not the first person to disappoint me, and you won’t be the last.”

With that, she walked away and didn’t look back.

I made sure she got to her car safely, and then walked to my bike.

I didn’t bother to go back inside and say goodbye.

For some reason, Cora’s words kept replaying in my head, and each time the cycle finished, I felt like I’d done something really, really wrong—yet I couldn’t quite understand what.

It was then that I realized that this might be what she’d said was part of her depressive disorder. Maybe this was a side effect.

By not taking the fact that she had opened herself up to me into consideration, I got the feeling that I broke something in her that never should have been broken.