My Dad's Best Friend Said No Daddy Jokes, So I Made Him Say Yes novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Dance
At the dock's fish fry Declan tells sixty people Mona can't be reached; she walks the length of the dock and asks her dead father's best friend to dance, and he takes her hand.
Declan stood on a cooler with a beer in his hand and told sixty people why we broke up.
"She goes somewhere else," he said. "You can't reach her. Ask anybody who's tried."
He smiled when he said it.
People laughed, but not many, and not long.
I was holding a paper plate of boudin and hush puppies at the far end of my aunt's dock, with the whole bayou going orange behind me.
It was the August fish fry, the night before the boats went out for the white shrimp.
My family had thrown it on this dock for forty years.
Declan had been invited because his father bought our catch, and because nobody ever knew how to uninvite a Marchetti.
"Three years I tried," Declan said. "Dinners, trips, a ring I'm still paying for. Nothing."
He tipped the bottle toward me.
"Mona's a great girl. She just isn't home."
Somebody near the ice chest said, "Come on, man."
Declan shrugged, generous about it.
I set the plate down on a piling.
I did not feel anything at first, and I noticed that, because noticing it was the whole reason we were here.
Six years ago I was twenty-one and he told me I was cold.
Every man after him said it a different way, and I had stopped arguing with the evidence.
My aunt Odette stood by the ice house door with her tongs hanging.
She was fifty-eight, five foot three, with a silver braid and a face that had never once made room for Declan Marchetti.
She looked at me, and I saw her decide to let me choose.
I did not leave.
That is what he expected, what everyone expected, what I had done at every party for six years: smile, find my keys, go.
Instead I walked the length of the dock.
It is a hundred and forty feet of old planks.
I walked every one of them in a yellow sundress with my curls coming down.
Sixty people moved their feet out of my way.
Declan watched me come with the smile fixed on his face, and I walked past him without turning my head.
At the end of the dock, past the string lights, the Odette D. sat low in the water with her riggings creaking.
Her captain sat on an overturned crate with a net across his knees, mending it.
Lucius Devine was forty-nine.
He had been my father's best friend since he was fourteen and his partner on this dock for twenty years.
He was the one man at the party who had never laughed at me.
He had taught me to mend a net when I was nine.
He had also not looked me in the eye since my father's funeral, when I was sixteen and reached for his hand.
He was big, grey in the beard, in a work shirt with the sleeves rolled and the top joint of one thumb missing.
He had heard every word Declan said.
I could tell because the needle in his hand had stopped.
He looked up.
For the first time in eleven years his grey-green eyes held mine, and they did not go anywhere.
"Monalisa," he said.
Nobody else called me that.
"Declan says I can't be reached," I said.
I said it loud enough that the dock could hear, because I wanted the dock to hear it.
"You've never tried."
Behind me, the whole fish fry had gone silent.
Someone had turned down the zydeco on the speaker.
I held out my hand.
"Dance with me."
He looked at the hand for a long time.
He put the net down on the crate and stood up slowly, and the dock creaked under his boots.
I watched his jaw work, and I watched him think of every reason in the world.
I did not take the hand back.
He took it.
His palm was rough and dry and warm, and it swallowed my fingers whole.
My breath went out of me.
I had been touched by a lot of men and I had not once felt it in my knees.
"Not like this, Monalisa," he said, very quietly.
Behind us, on the dock, Declan's bottle hit the planks and broke.
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend