Stacy's Dad Has Got It Going On

Chapter One

Chapter One

Savannah took the stairs by twos. Her shoulder bag whacked her thigh all the way to the third floor, but she was too excited to feel any pain. Stacy should be home by now, right? Savannah couldn’t wait to tell her roommate the good news: Chris, the scruffy hottie with the kick-a*s orange dreads, had invited her to Kingsley’s on Saturday night!

“Stacy?” she called as she kicked off her shoes and dropped her bag at the door.

“In the kitchen, Sav.”

Time slowed to a crawl as Savannah turned the corner. It stopped altogether when she realized there was another person in the apartment. And that person was...a man.

He was tall, built, and blond in the extreme. Aside from his superior taste in Italian suits, Savannah couldn’t make out much about him. He had his back to her, like he’d been talking to Stacy across the kitchen counter while she prepared dinner.

When the finely haberdashered gentleman spun around, his good looks caught Savannah by surprise. He was younger than she’d anticipated, judging solely by the cost of his suit, but his vague familiarity didn’t help her cast aside a sense of impending doom.

Is he the landlord? Are we being evicted? s**t! And right in the middle of our science term. Like we’ll have time to look for a new place now!

“Savannah?” The man offered a sympathetic nod. “Nice to see you again.”

“Uh...hi...” She glanced back and forth between the man’s chiseled jaw and Stacy’s encouraging gaze.

Stacy clicked her teeth. “It’s my dad, Savannah. You’ve met him before.”

Oh yeah.

She felt like a total i***t, but tried to cover it up by saying, “Right. I know.”

“Thanks for taking care of my little girl,” he said, giving Savannah a playful punch in the shoulder.

Savannah rubbed the spot where his fist made contact—not that it hurt, she just wanted to touch it for some reason.

“Hey, no probs,” Savannah said. What is his name? She couldn’t very well call him ‘Stacy’s Dad’ to his face. “Stacy didn’t mention you were coming to town.”

“I didn’t know,” she said as she sliced cucumber. Stacy gripped that knife like she could throttle the thing.

“Am I missing something?” Savannah asked.

Shaking her head, Stacy brushed platinum blond bangs from her eyes with the back of her hand. “Sorry, Sav. It’s just...” She looked up at her dad and then set down the knife. “Would you give us a minute, please?”

As Savannah looked from Stacy to Stacy’s dad, she felt out of place in her own home. Grabbing her bag from the front hall, she scuttled to her room.

Savannah sat on the carpet with her back against the bed. She preferred to study on the floor—it was more comfortable than the straight-backed wooden chair at her desk, and it gave her room to sprawl. With a notebook in her lap, she looked at her lab notes, but all she could concentrate on were the whispers emanating from the kitchen. She didn’t want to eavesdrop, but she did want to hear what they were saying.

It wasn’t like Stacy’s parents to drop by unannounced. In the two years they'd lived together, Stacy’s dad had never come for a visit. Savannah met him when she and Stacy first moved in, but neither Savannah’s mom and dad nor Stacy’s lived anywhere nearby. An out-of-the-blue visit must mean something terrible had happened.

Wait, where was Stacy’s mom? Why had her dad come over alone?

God, what if Stacy’s mom had been in an accident?

Savannah tried to hear without listening. Then, she tried not to hear. Then, she turned on the radio and tried to forget there was anything going on at all. When Stacy was ready, she would tell Savannah what had happened. Until then, Savannah had lab results to type up. The diagrams were always fussy when she tried to do them on the computer, but she’d procrastinated long enough.

By the time Stacy knocked at the door, Savannah was writing her conclusion. She reached up to the radio and turned down the volume. “Come in.”

Stacy slipped inside, falling like a ghost into Savannah’s bed. “Looks like we’ve got company.”

Setting her laptop on the floor, Savannah got up and sat on the edge of the bed. She could see Stacy’s red nose and bloodshot eyes in her closet mirror. “You mean your dad?”

Stacy nodded. When she hugged Savannah’s pillow, there was a thump against the headboard and then a muffled thud on the carpet. Savannah breathed a sigh of relief that the romance novel she kept under her pillow had fallen behind the bed before Stacy found it. She was always teasing Stacy for reading that crap. She didn't want to admit that she read it, too.

“My mom had an affair,” Stacy said in a hush. “Dad just found out. He came home early from work and caught her red-handed.”

“Oh my god!” Other girls might have wrapped their arms around Stacy and held her tight, but Savannah wasn’t touchy-feely like that. It’s not that she didn’t care. She just wasn’t good at physical displays of affection. “Who was she cheating with?”

That probably wasn’t the most consoling question in the world.

“Some guy from her office,” Stacy said, lying very still and staring at her reflection in the mirror. “They had a big argument. I mean, not the guy—he took off, obviously. Mom was all like, ‘I’m sorry, it’ll never happen again,’ and Dad was like, ‘That’s right it won’t, because I’m leaving,’ and he packed a bag and came here.”

“Why here?” Savannah asked.

Stacy’s voice was hard when she said, “Because I’m here.”

As she watched Stacy in the mirror, Savannah started feeling uncomfortable. She had no idea what to say about all this. It bothered her that they were going to have a man staying in their apartment. Of course Stacy wouldn’t care—the man was Stacy’s dad—but to Savannah, he was a relative stranger.

And they’d all be sharing one washroom with an iffy lock. The place would start to smell like boys. And he would stare at her t**s, wouldn’t he? She’d have to wear sweaters every time she left her room.

“How long is he staying?” Savannah asked. “And where’s he going to sleep?”

“I offered him my bed.” Stacy spoke matter-of-factly now that Savannah had totally failed at showing any sign of sympathy. She felt sympathetic. It sucked that Stacy’s family was going through a rough patch. “But he insisted on taking the couch, so I guess the living room’s pretty much his.”

And sympathy jumped out the window.

It irked Savannah that Stacy hadn’t put the question to her: “Is it okay if we let my dad take the living room?” It was their apartment, after all. But no, it was a hard and fast statement. He would be sleeping on the couch that came from Savannah’s parents’ basement, by the way. That was that. End of story. No argument. Stacy’s dad would be living with them.

“How long is he staying?” Savannah asked.

Stacy’s lips pursed and she rose from the bed. “I don’t know, okay?”

In two shakes, Stacy was out the door. She grabbed the handle hard like she was going to slam it shut. After a moment, she snapped, “Dinner’s ready. Come eat.”

When Stacy left, Savannah looked at herself in the full-length mirror: the hip-hugging jeans were fine, but her white tank top was just a little too tight, a little too revealing, and a little too thin to wear in front of Stacy’s dad. He would spend the whole meal gazing into her cleavage, his eyes tracing the line where her light brown skin met her black b*a.

This outfit represented her skank limitation. Savannah didn’t dress slutty. She didn’t like people looking at her. She knew she had a pretty face and her curves could draw a crowd, but she didn’t let them. The only reason she wasn’t hiding under multiple layers today was that she wanted to catch Chris’s eye in lab.

Mission accomplished, by the way.

Savannah wasn’t really sure what she liked about Chris. He was the type of skuzzy indie rocker that usually opted for humanities, not science. Most students in her program were geeks and overachievers like Savannah and, to a lesser degree, Stacy. Maybe that’s what attracted her to Chris—the simple fact that, in a bio-chemistry lab, he looked different than everybody else. That made him less boring than all the other guys. At the same time, if he was in her program, he must have a few brains in his head.

So, today she’d made herself amply visible and he took the bait. Saturday night, she was going to Kingsley’s to see his band.

“Sav!” Stacy hollered from the hall. “I’m going to eat your kebab if you don’t get your aaa...uh...your butt in here.”

Chuckling over Stacy’s self-censorship, Savannah grabbed the grey Varsity hoodie off the back of her chair. She zipped it all the way to her chin before joining Stacy and her dad for what promised to be a ridiculously depressing meal.