“That can’t be true. I know Ridge, and he has a longtime girlfriend,” David shared.
“What does your friend do?” Margaret asked.
“He’s the starting first baseman for the baseball team,” David admitted.
“See a pattern?”
“Maybe she likes athletes,” David ventured.
“Maybe,” Margaret conceded.
They spent the rest of their lunch going over each of David’s classes, and she quizzed him on how he was doing. The plan was to meet at least once a week to touch base, and when he started to need her help, they would get together more often.
Before working out, David stopped Ridge to get a better idea of whether he needed to talk to Andres about Crystal.
“I understand you know Crystal Knaggy.”
The scowl on Ridge’s face told him a lot.
“Make sure you never mention her name around Penny,” Ridge warned.
“Did you two hook up?”
Ridge flipped him off.
“Fortunately, no. But she did make a play for me at a party at the end of last year, and Penny heard about it. Let’s just say it was bad and leave it at that,” Ridge shared.
“She is hot.”
“You should go after her,” Ridge suggested.
“I might have done that already, but one of the guys on my baseball team beat me to it.”
“Her hotness only goes so far,” Ridge warned. “She messed up the last guy she was with.”
“You think I should give him a heads-up about her?” David asked.
“If the shoe were on the other foot, would you listen?” Ridge asked.
David wanted to say ‘yes,’ but he doubted it. Andres was a big boy. He didn’t need David to hold his hand when it came to his personal life. If nothing else, the drama might be fun to watch.
Cassidy was giving them a dirty look to tell them they were slacking off when his phone chirped. He quickly checked it and was glad he did. It was a text from his daycare informing him that he needed to come pick up Carol.
He did some mental gymnastics to figure out how many people they’d had to go through before they landed on his name as a contact. He sent one back, letting them know he was on his way.
Ridge found it funny when Cassidy made David show her the text before she let him leave.
Even though it wasn’t rush hour, it took David over an hour to get to the daycare. He was sent to the office, where he found Carol playing with another little girl. All was fine until Carol saw him, and then she broke down in tears, which set off the other little girl.
He scooped them both up, and they quieted down. The young lady sitting with them, who at first glance looked like she couldn’t be old enough to be working there, looked at him in wonder.
“You want a job?” she asked.
“It’s my superpower. Somehow, I can get them to stop fussing,” he explained. “What happened?”
“We’re not really sure what started it, but Emma and Carol got a little rough with each other. We gave them timeouts, but they were at it again as soon as they were allowed back with the group. When that happens, they have to go home for the day,” she explained.
“They seemed to be playing just fine when I came in,” David pressed.
“Sorry, but those are the rules.”
At one time or another, all the moms had commented on how much they liked the place, so he kept his comments to himself. He handed Emma back to the girl and left with his daughter.
When he got to the car, David realized he had a problem: he didn’t have a car seat. He’d passed an ice cream place a couple of blocks from the daycare. Someone would be coming by the daycare to pick up the munchkins in an hour, so he decided that ice cream would be an excellent way to kill some time.
Peggy
As Peggy left her last class of the day, Mrs. Nguyen, the daycare’s director, called her in a panic. It seemed two of the children had gone missing, one of whom was Carol. The police were there, and they were in the process of issuing an Amber Alert.
As she ran to the parking lot to get in her car, she called David’s mother.
“What’s up?”
“I got a call from the daycare. Carol is missing,” Peggy said.
“Have you called Manaia yet?”
He was in charge of their security today.
“I called you first,” Peggy said.
“I’ll call him and have him find her with the tracker. I’m leaving right now and will meet you there.”
As a security measure, they’d sown tiny trackers into the kids’ clothing for instances like this.
David
“We are in so much trouble. Wait until your brothers find out what a little pig you are,” David said, chuckling.
Carol was a giggling mess. She was getting one-on-one Daddy Time and had melted ice cream all over herself. David picked her up and headed to the bathroom to try to hide the evidence of what they’d been up to as best as he could.
He was about to enter the men’s room when police cars came screaming into the lot. David figured some high school kids must be messing around in the parking lot and ignored the excitement.
Carol was sitting on the sink as David used a paper towel to try to wipe up the worst of it when the door banged open. He was suddenly looking down the barrel of a gun.
“Police! Hands where I can see them!”
Carol was startled and began to cry. David picked her up to protect her.
“You better have a damned good reason for all this. I don’t appreciate you pulling a gun with my daughter present.”
“Jim! Holster your weapon,” an older officer ordered.
David and Carol got to ride in a police car back to the daycare.
When David got out of the back of the cruiser with Carol, his mother was there, waiting.
“Where have you been?!” she demanded.
David was a touch irritated by now.
“They had an afternoon special at the Red Tie Club.”
That was a local gentleman’s club. His retort did not sit well with his mother. The young officer who had drawn down on David nearly lost his life when he barked out a laugh.
David quickly explained how he’d come to pick up his daughter. Once he did, they discovered that Mrs. Nguyen’s teenage daughter had been the one to contact David. Instead of going down the list of contacts, she’d called him first because she wanted to meet him. She’d also neglected to log out both girls when they’d been picked up. To add to the confusion, the daughter had gone home to share with her friends that she’d met David.
He suspected that after his mom got done chewing on Mrs. Nguyen, young Miss Nguyen was going to be on the receiving end of her own ration of crap. Such tongue-lashings inevitably followed the trickle-down theory.
The boys spotted Carol and David, and all wanted attention. As punishment, he had to go home and play with them until dinner time.
Luckily, by then, his mother had found the humor in the accidental Amber Alert and his quip about the gentlemen’s-club outing. She pointed out that once Carol figured out that she could act out and get her daddy to take her for ice cream...
Parenting was hard.
Chapter 15
David
He’d been about to go on his morning run when Mr. Happy protested. Instead of trying to run with a boner, David pulled his cock from his shorts and slowly stroked himself.
’Frick!’
That felt good. Thank God for Internet porn because the only action he’d gotten recently was from his hand.
Last week, he’d taken Kat to another Goth party. This time, David had passed on dressing up again. He’d discovered that most Goths were just like everyone else when you got to know them. Of course, they would probably be mortified if he ever said that out loud to one of them. But when a group looked like that it was just something they did to fit in with their friends.