The sun peeked over the top of the Jefferson Memorial as my feet pounded the concrete of the Tidal Basin, early morning runners jogging in packs around the popular tourist trap.

Except this early in the morning, six a.m. to be correct, it is still a place for the residents of this city. A quiet, treaty-like calmness falls over the two mile loop, all of the regulars who use this trail to exercise forming a pact not to disturb the peace.

I've been running it for five years now, ever since I realized that if you don't work out after college and only drink beer, that you'll get a gut. It's a morning routine, one that gets me out of my head and also keeps me in shape. What no one told men was that they had a little anxiety attack when they turned thirty as well, it wasn't just women. I'd hit that milestone birthday and wanted to rewind time to when I was eighteen, hanging out in the local Applebee's parking lot trying to pick up girls.

My phone beeped, and I slowed to a walk, coming to the end of my second loop, the sweat from the humid morning making my shirt cling to my back.

Annoyance burns along with exhaustion in my veins, and I shove my phone back into the armband I wear. It dings again, the sound coming through my earbuds. If I just turn my music back on and plow through another loop, will they go away?

I want to tell my brother to fuck off, but it would only make them more annoyed. And it’s not like they understand anyway, they never have. My two brothers never left the family womb, going right into the family business after earning their associate’s degrees. My sister left briefly for college, and then she and her husband moved back, Hugh taking a position within the family fold. My stepmother did the books for the Buffalo dealership, and some of my cousins worked on the sales floor.

They didn’t accept my decision to break out on my own, to try and make something for myself in a city that I loved and felt at home in. Even after I’d drawn up my business plan for Cones & Corks, and started to become really successful, they still treated my business like a hobby or something that was impermanent.

My mom would understand if she were still alive. The thought wasn’t a new one, but it still stung as I headed down through the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, smiling as a dog that someone was walking barked at the fake statue sitting next to our thirty-second president. Even though she’d died when I was ten, I remembered how she’d encouraged my dreams, all of the imaginations of a little boy lighting up her smile.

I typed the answer back, walking the blocks towards my apartment and stopping for a large cup of Compass Coffee. While I was at it, I took my phone out again.

Staring at the screen, I will her to type back. I know she’s busy, but I’m not used to not being able to see a woman I’m, well, I guess courting was the word but it sounded so stiff. Samantha’s unattainableness kind of makes her more attractive to me, but it’s starting to become more frustrating than it is a game of mystery. We haven’t been able to see each other in a week and a half, not since she slept at my place. And rocked my fucking world.

I’m jiggling the key in the lock of my apartment, my cock hardening thinking about plunging into her sweet folds on the chair in my kitchen, when she finally texts back.

Our interactions for the past ten days have consisted of text and picture messages, with a few funny memes thrown in. I especially like to send her Leslie Knope GIFs to tease her about her job. And I’ve been trying to ease into the subject of her daughter after our disastrous first date, and after basically telling her at McFlannery’s that I wasn’t looking for responsibility or fatherhood.

Because … maybe I’d change my tune if it meant I could spend more time with her. I mean, I was good with kids, I knew how to handle them … kind of? Samantha was sexy and capable, a real woman, and I was thinking it was time for this bachelor to, excuse my language, shit or get off the pot. Spending that night with her, her soft, natural body under mine, flipped a switch in my brain. I had the business, I loved my city … but I needed more. I probably had for a while, but had been wasting my time with recent college graduates and girls who were nearly certifiable.

I started the shower, hoping she would agree. Thinking that the third time might be the charm, since our first date ended in tears and the “second” finished … well, inside her, I really wanted to show her just exactly what something between us could look like. I could sense, when I’d put her in a cab on the sidewalk of my building the morning after our sex session, that she wasn’t considering me a serious bet. And while I knew that this body and hair and dimple could make me seem like just another fuckboy—I was very humble—there was also substance behind this pretty face.

Why now? Why this woman? I didn’t know, but I wasn’t going to fight it. I’d learned, from my family especially, that I couldn’t fight or fake something I wanted, or I’d be miserable in life.

Plugging my phone in to charge, I jumped in the shower.

And may have taken a little extra time with my hand under the hot spray imagining the curvy brunette who’d ridden me like I was her prized stallion. Showing up to the office half an hour late didn’t matter when you were the boss.