Read Sunday Morning: A Damaged Novella for Free Online Page B

would be for your old man back to hang off that thing.”
    I gave her a side glare, but she only smiled wider.
“I’ll have to remember you’re an old man, so I don’t jump you.”
    Now I was smiling too. “Don’t want to break a hip
from you manhandling me.”
    Jodi’s eyes lit up in a way that made me think I
was done for. She was radiant in a town where nothing else was. I couldn’t
imagine sharing this woman with anyone else. No, keeping her was a done deal.
Keeping her looked to be more difficult.

8 - Kirk
    I wanted to stay away from Jodi. Well, want was the
wrong word. I needed to stay away from Jodi and allow her a chance to grow up.
Having her stay at my place made avoiding her completely impossible. I still
managed to minimize our time together.
    If I stayed at the club until after midnight, she
was asleep when I arrived home. If I slept long enough, I awoke after she left
for school. The weekends were trickier, but I knew I could avoid her if I
really tried.
    The problem was I didn’t fucking try. Not
really. Once I started imagining Jodi at my apartment, I could think of
nothing else. What was she doing right then? Was she reading or watching TV?
Was her long, wavy blonde hair up in a ponytail or loose against her freckled
shoulders?
    When I saw her asleep at night, I had trouble going
to bed. Sometimes, I ended up sitting in the living room and watching her for
hours. The light from the silent TV flickered on her serene face. I even found
myself wondering what she was dreaming.
    I’d lost my fucking mind over a chick too young to
vote.
    Once I began stalking my damn apartment, I gave up
and admitted I wanted to see her. That night, I returned home in time to
discover a recently showered Jodi eating mac and cheese in front of the TV. She
frowned at me, and I saw a flicker of worry in her eyes.
    “Is something wrong?” she asked before I could.
    “The club is boring after a certain age.”
    “Poor old bastard,” she teased, taking a bite of
her food. “There’s some leftovers on the stove if you’re interested.”
    This was how our new routine started. Me coming
home and eating cold mac and cheese while watching an episode of Jake and
the Fatman . We talked only a bit that first night. She said school was
boring. I asked why she didn’t quit. She said she had nothing else to do during
the day. That was it.
    We watched the show, and then she crawled under the
blanket on the couch. I waited until she’d gone to sleep before I took a shower
and went to bed. Unable to sleep after so many years of staying up until after
three, I rested in bed for a long time while imagining Jodi at school.
    The next day, I woke up when I heard her in the
kitchen. Even though we barely spoke, I ended up driving her to school. Jodi
liked the looks on people’s faces when they saw her get off my hog. I preferred
the look on her face when she saw me waiting for her after classes.
    “Are you claiming me in front of all these high
school boys?” she taunted, climbing onto the back of the Harley.
    “Do I need to?”
    “No. None of them have any interest in me.”
    “Fools,” I muttered.
    Soon, we got into the habit of not going to the
apartment right after I picked her up from school. We’d ride for nearly an hour
sometimes, never going anywhere particular.
    Often we ended up in Memphis, and I’d wonder about
leaving Chesterfield. There was a big fucking world outside of the shithole we
called home. I’d never cared to leave before. With Jodi in my life now, I was
thinking bigger.
    “What do you want?” I asked Jodi one day after we
stopped for dinner at a greasy spoon outside of Memphis.
    Somehow, she understood I wasn’t asking about the
food. I sensed we spent so much time together without talking that words
weren’t really necessary anymore.
    Jodi shrugged at my question. “I want to be able to
breathe the way I can’t at the trailer park. I’d like to have a decent library
nearby so I can check out