My Dad's Best Friend Said No Daddy Jokes, So I Made Him Say Yes novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: The Ring

He put the ring in my palm in the cab of the truck.

It was warm from his skin and heavier than I expected.

It was a plain gold band, worn thin on one side from forty years of rope, with a notch in the edge where a winch had once caught it.

"He took it off to wash his hands," Lucius said. "He always took it off. The night of the storm it was on the dash."

"You kept it eleven years."

"I kept it on me. I meant to give it to you the day you turned twenty-one, and I couldn't."

I closed my hand around it.

"Not tonight," I said. "Tonight I want to go home."

He drove us home.

We didn't speak.

At his house he undressed me slowly in the dark and laid me in his bed, and I slept with the ring in my fist.

I woke at nine to coffee, and the smell of his beard, and the sun on the sheet.

He was propped on one elbow beside me.

He was already looking at me, and he had been for a while.

"Good morning," I said.

"Good morning, Monalisa."

"What are you doing?"

"Looking," he said.

"At what?"

"At what I get to keep."

I smiled, and rolled toward him, and put my hand on his chest.

His skin was warm.

I traced the scar across his ribs, slowly, down to his hip, and he took a breath that shook.

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