Page 6 of Fundamentals of Being a Good Girl
The back door slams just as I shout, “I love you!” There’s, of course, noI love youback, orgoodbye. Teens.
In the silence that follows Fern’s exit, I reorder the day’s tasks in my mind. I need to clean, find the frog, and look at Fern’s old Honda... and get Hester Prynne... and finish my proposal.
First, though, I go upstairs to start a load of laundry, finding my button-down shirt from last night and getting ready to sort it into the cold-wash pile. There’s a smear of pink lipstick on the collar.
The brat’s mouth on my throat, nipping at my earlobe.
Her jaw in my hand and those green eyes on mine. Her mouth was wet and open, shining in the shadows of the empty apartment above the bar.
“Someone needs to teach you some manners.” I barely recognized my own voice. Low and heavy and stern.
She shivered and shivered, a brat in a blizzard of her own making. “If you say so,” she whispered, and then opened her mouth like she wanted my fingers in it.
I press the heel of my palm to the fresh hard-on swelling behind my zipper, irritated. I’m thirty-five—inconvenient boners are supposed to be a thing of the past! Especially since I need to map sea tides and chart lunar cycles just to find a few minutes of time alone as a single parent.
But god,her. Her too-full mouth, her too-large eyes. Her cunt like liquid silk when I’d finally gotten inside; so hot that I thought my skin might catch on fire as I moved between her legs.
My phone rings in my pocket, and I wince as I dig it free and the fabric pulls against the raw but endearingly hopeful erection I’m sporting.
“Loe,” I answer as pleasantly as I can while 90 percent of my brain is still fucking a parking-space thief above The Dry Bean.
“Bram, it’s Ali,” says Dr. Ali Darwish, my department chair—and then, not waiting for a response—“the butterfly perverts from Oregon are saying they still don’t have the website copy you sent over for the pollinator seminar series, and I told them Iknewthat you’d sent it over because you’d cc’ed me, but they’re probably too busy drinking microbrews to check their spam or whatever, so do you mind sending that again, because you know they’ll want to Track Changes the entire thing before we can put it on the website, and I want to go live before we meet with the dean next week.”
I take in a belated breath and mentally revise today’s to-do list to include dealing with the visiting lecturers from Oregon.
“Of course,” I say. “That’s no problem at all.”
“Great! Then I’m going to archive that email and forget it exists. Hey, congrats on Sara’s grant, by the way, that’s amazing.”
A side effect of being married to a fellow academic and having worked at the same institution for more than a decade is that people still think of us as a unit, even though we’ve been divorced for five years and Sara’s been engaged to someone else for two of them. Our accomplishments are still funneled into the joint bucket ofSara and Bram, and I’m not generally bothered by it, except when people offer me praise that rightfully belongs to her.
“Ali, I had nothing to do with it, it was all her. But I’ll pass on your kind words.”
“Behind every great glacier scientist is an ex-husband with an air fryer and crumb-covered booster seats,” Ali says distractedly. “Okay, the rest of the inbox awaits. Talk soon, Bram.”
I hang up, but before I put my phone away, I see a text from Sara.
Arrived safely in Fairbanks! Do you think I can FaceTime the kids later?
I arrange a time that I think will work—with as much as Sara’s research takes her away from Mount Astra, we try to prioritize her connecting with the kids at least every other day—and then I put my phone away and take a deep breath.
On the bright side, my erection has settled down.
I put a load in the washer, change into a worn Astra University Copperheads T-shirt in anticipation of getting under the hood of Fern’s car, and then take the lovingly restored stairs two at a time.
Clean, frog, car, dog, Oregon, phone call. Proposal.
I can do all of that, right? And make sure the twins and Fern eat something resembling real food? And not think about the fact that I fucked a stranger in a bar last night and wish I could do it again?
Clean,frog, car,dog, Oregon,phone call—
The doorbell rings.
I pause at the foot of the stairs, consider the warren of cardboard and fabric between me and the door, and admit defeat. I drop to all fours and crawl through a cardboard tunnel, my shoulders knocking against everything. The doorbell is ringing again by the time I reach the door and swing it open.
And then I feel like I’ve been lit on fire.
The brat from last night stands on my front porch, wearing a floral sundress and pearls like she just came from Sunday brunch at the Congressional Country Club, her sinful mouth painted in a demure shade of pink.
