Chapter 1
Life’s full of surprises, isn’t it? Some of them are really good—like surprise birthday parties; a new bike under the Christmas tree; three pineapples in a row on your scratch-off lottery ticket; and strippers jumping out of cakes. Some of them, however, are really bad, and if your life has been anything like mine, you don’t need me to list them. But, please, indulge me for a moment.
Once, I wore a white dress to a summer concert, and unbeknownst to me, my period came early. Although, it wasn’t until I got home and saw the red streak on the back of my outfit that I realized this fact. Another time, when I was in college, I wasn’t feeling well and decided to skip sociology class. I went back to the dorm and walked in on my roommate and her boyfriend screwing. They were both naked, sweaty, and squirming…on my bed.
When I was 19, I attended a house party that got busted by the police. I ended up escaping and wasn’t arrested, but it still scared me shitless. I wasn’t so lucky with the police a year later though—when I got a ticket for driving too slowly on the highway.
I could go on and on about all of the weird, uncanny, or unwanted things that have happened to me over the past 22 years, but most of them, like the ones I’ve already mentioned, are beside the point. What matters here is what happened more recently—and what happened more recently is ridiculously riddled with surprises.
I’ve been in a rather vulnerable place since graduating college, and it’s all because of awful surprises. My boyfriend, Jeremy, broke up with me out of the blue after getting into law school. I ended up moving back home with my parents, because an undergraduate degree in psychology amounts to nothing in the real world.
Once I got home, the surprises kept coming. My former nemesis, London, and I ended up getting along pretty well, though that turned out to be somewhat disastrous when we had an awkward sexual encounter where I couldn’t even give him a boner. Mom was dead-set on me finding a job and made me go at it more rigorously than I’d intended, and Dad wasn’t available to hang out with me a few times because of last-minute changes to his work schedule.
All of these recent things were pretty bad, and they put me on guard. I knew to expect the unexpected. Even with that motto in mind, there are some things you can never expect…and this situation with Anthony was one of them.
I never expected to meet a handsome, older man when I was out applying for jobs, and I never expected him to haunt my mind after our initial run-in. I certainly never expected to see him again, let alone to go on to play video games, drink, and swap spit with him. I also certainly never expected to make plans to go fuck him in a hotel room, only to have him bail on me less than ten minutes later. But of all the things that I never expected, I never expected him to show up at my parents’ 25th wedding anniversary party. I never expected to learn that he was my father’s boss.
But there was no mistaking it. The man in front of me was Anthony Swift. Mom had just introduced us, and my mind was still reeling from the fact that we’d already met.
“Kirby?” he asked. “What an unusual name.”
He’d said something similar to me a little over a week ago when I told him my name in the dessert shop. Now he was saying it to me after my mother introduced us, and I wondered if he chose to echo himself on purpose.
“We named her after my grandmother,” Mom said. That was another surprise. Mom had never told me this before, and I’d never bothered to ask either of my parents where my name had come from. I thought it was a result of them being kitschy and modern, not sentimental.
“That’s wonderful,” Anthony said with a smile. “Glad to hear she wasn’t named after the vacuum…or the video game.”
Okay. It was obvious now that Anthony was alluding to our conversation from our impromptu “date,” and it was
Life’s full of surprises, isn’t it? Some of them are really good—like surprise birthday parties; a new bike under the Christmas tree; three pineapples in a row on your scratch-off lottery ticket; and strippers jumping out of cakes. Some of them, however, are really bad, and if your life has been anything like mine, you don’t need me to list them. But, please, indulge me for a moment.
Once, I wore a white dress to a summer concert, and unbeknownst to me, my period came early. Although, it wasn’t until I got home and saw the red streak on the back of my outfit that I realized this fact. Another time, when I was in college, I wasn’t feeling well and decided to skip sociology class. I went back to the dorm and walked in on my roommate and her boyfriend screwing. They were both naked, sweaty, and squirming…on my bed.
When I was 19, I attended a house party that got busted by the police. I ended up escaping and wasn’t arrested, but it still scared me shitless. I wasn’t so lucky with the police a year later though—when I got a ticket for driving too slowly on the highway.
I could go on and on about all of the weird, uncanny, or unwanted things that have happened to me over the past 22 years, but most of them, like the ones I’ve already mentioned, are beside the point. What matters here is what happened more recently—and what happened more recently is ridiculously riddled with surprises.
I’ve been in a rather vulnerable place since graduating college, and it’s all because of awful surprises. My boyfriend, Jeremy, broke up with me out of the blue after getting into law school. I ended up moving back home with my parents, because an undergraduate degree in psychology amounts to nothing in the real world.
Once I got home, the surprises kept coming. My former nemesis, London, and I ended up getting along pretty well, though that turned out to be somewhat disastrous when we had an awkward sexual encounter where I couldn’t even give him a boner. Mom was dead-set on me finding a job and made me go at it more rigorously than I’d intended, and Dad wasn’t available to hang out with me a few times because of last-minute changes to his work schedule.
All of these recent things were pretty bad, and they put me on guard. I knew to expect the unexpected. Even with that motto in mind, there are some things you can never expect…and this situation with Anthony was one of them.
I never expected to meet a handsome, older man when I was out applying for jobs, and I never expected him to haunt my mind after our initial run-in. I certainly never expected to see him again, let alone to go on to play video games, drink, and swap spit with him. I also certainly never expected to make plans to go fuck him in a hotel room, only to have him bail on me less than ten minutes later. But of all the things that I never expected, I never expected him to show up at my parents’ 25th wedding anniversary party. I never expected to learn that he was my father’s boss.
But there was no mistaking it. The man in front of me was Anthony Swift. Mom had just introduced us, and my mind was still reeling from the fact that we’d already met.
“Kirby?” he asked. “What an unusual name.”
He’d said something similar to me a little over a week ago when I told him my name in the dessert shop. Now he was saying it to me after my mother introduced us, and I wondered if he chose to echo himself on purpose.
“We named her after my grandmother,” Mom said. That was another surprise. Mom had never told me this before, and I’d never bothered to ask either of my parents where my name had come from. I thought it was a result of them being kitschy and modern, not sentimental.
“That’s wonderful,” Anthony said with a smile. “Glad to hear she wasn’t named after the vacuum…or the video game.”
Okay. It was obvious now that Anthony was alluding to our conversation from our impromptu “date,” and it was
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