Shopping for a Billionaire 2(17)
Author: Julia Kent

“Kool-Aid?” I eye the clock on my coffee maker. 5:17 p.m. Damn. I want to talk, but…

“Yep! It looks great. Jeffrey says I’m the hippest grandpa around. And Amy agrees. Said I look like a hipster a decade ahead of my time.”

“Dad, I don’t think that was a compliment.”

He looks like I slapped him. “Why not?” The sudden look of insecurity on his face makes me feel so bad, like the day I took the car cigarette lighter to the new leather seats in his Mustang to make pretty circles. It was his first brand-new car. I was five then and didn’t know better. But now…

Mom touches his arm gently, with a great deal of pity, too. “Because ‘hipster’ means you’re trying too hard.”

“How would you know?” he growls at Mom, his eyebrows furrowing together into one big semi-gray caterpillar. He’s hurt. Why does this stuff mean so much to him? To me? Why do we change ourselves in an effort to get approval from other people? And when we don’t—or, worse, when we’re mocked—why does it trigger so much pain?

I look at the clock. 5:20.

Why am I analyzing deep philosophical questions when I have a billionaire to dry hump in forty minutes?

“Amy’s called me a ‘hipster’ more times than I can count,” Mom says. “Especially when I showed up for Parents Weekend at her college freshman year in an outfit from Hot Topic.”

That snaps me back to reality. “You didn’t!” Poor Amy. She never told me that story. Probably repressed it.

Dad gets a hungry look in his eyes as he combs over Mom’s body from toe to head. “She sure did. You looked like a sex kitten. Like a blonde Adrienne Barbeau. Sophia Loren. Raquel Welch.” His hand reaches for her and she steps in toward him. His palm lands on her ass. I turn away.

“Jason,” Mom coos.

Chuckles starts to gag. He’s back on the chair where Dad was sitting with him.

“See? Even Chuckles can’t stand it when his parents do this,” I mutter.

And then Chuckles vomits all over my recliner. Half a mouse’s body emerges.

“Oh, gross!” I shriek. Chuckles looks up and squints, like he’s asking me what the hell is wrong with me for not being grateful for the offering. If Clint Eastwood were a cat, he’d be Chuckles.

Go ahead. Make my day.

“Don’t you feed that poor cat?” Mom asks. Her hand is on my dad’s ass now, too, and they’re both massaging each other like asses are an endangered species and the only way to keep them alive is to rub them.

“I have a date,” I choke out. “In less than forty minutes. And if I have to watch you two making love to each other with your hands, I am going to join a convent and never touch another man for the rest of my life. But before I do that, I’ll take Chuckles’ lead and vomit.”

“We’re grown adults with a healthy sexual appetite,” Mom chides. Dad just gives her a look that makes Larry the Lounge Lizard seem prim.

But they stop touching each other. Whew.

“You’re my parents,” I snap back. “You have three kids. That means you had sex three times with a sheet covering you with a hole in it as far as I’m concerned. I can’t have images of you being all squishy and touchy-feely in my head when I’m kissing Declan!”

Dad has that insecure look on his face again.

Damn.

“Declan,” he chokes out. “Declan’s the new guy? The one your mother thinks will get her that wedding at Farmington?”

“You just don’t want to lose the bet,” Mom says. She pulls out a hand towel, shakes it out, smoothes every wrinkle, and starts unloading makeup from her kit. It’s like watching a surgeon get ready for a heart transplant. Her precision and focus is startling.

“What bet?” The words are out of my mouth before I realize I’ve just given her an opening the size of Rob Ford’s nostrils to talk about whatever calamity this bet involves.

“We have a bet,” Dad says with a sigh. At least he’s gone back to looking like my dad and not like a horny teenager.

“About me?”

“About Farmington Country Club. I bet your mother than none of you three kids will ever get married there.”

“What’s the wager?” I am really, really afraid to ask.

Mom is holding what looks like a giant pizza-oven paddle in her hand. She reaches into the bag and pulls out a jar of pancake makeup. Oh, crap.

“Your father gets to try something I’ve never let him do in more than thirty years of our being together.”

Amy happens to walk in just as Mom is explaining and asks, “Anal?”

Chapter Eight

Dad’s eyes bug out. Mine stretch so far across the room I think they’re going to fall out a window. Only Mom stays calm and waves the hand with the makeup paddle in it. “Oh, no, honey. We already—”

“MARIE!” Dad bellows. He glares at Amy like she’s a complete stranger who just accosted him. “And Amelia Langstrom Jacoby, what do you think you’re doing talking about…well…that around us?”

“She’s the one who lent me those Fifty Shades books, Jason,” Mom says in a sotto voce. As if we can’t hear her. My apartment is so small, Chuckles can hear her from the roof.

“Oh.” There are moments in our family where poor dad has to deal with being the only testicle owner in a field of ovaries. Having the toilet seat down nonstop for thirty-plus years is one of those issues. Learning where to park at the mall to get that perfect balance between being close to an entrance but out of our teen girlfriends’ sight is another. Dealing with four periods at different times took a kind of engineer’s calibration to get just right. And a lot of mad rushes to the grocery store to get the perfect ice cream to make our Medusa heads behave.

And this is another one—hearing his now-adult daughter, his baby, talk about anal sex. And having his wife join right in.

I—I have a ton of sympathy for him, because I. Do. Not. Want. To. Hear. About. This. At all. Ever. I could go my entire life without thinking about anal sex itself (or mostly not thinking about it…), but the thought of my parents reading my sister’s borrowed copy of Fifty Shades of Grey and then using that as some kind of blueprint to try out—

This is how desire dies. My formerly warm-for-his-form nether regions can’t think about Declan now without imagining Mom and Dad in a Red Room of Pain. No wonder Mom’s asking about helicopters and billionaires.