It's been over ten years since my wife Megan died from breast cancer. I'll spare you the details, but this strain had one of the lower survival rates. To make a long story short, we chose the most aggressive treatment first because there wouldn't be time for a second choice. The upside to this is that her suffering was relatively brief. If I wanted you to pity me, I'd say that it fell to me to take care of our teenage daughter Molly, but the truth is that we had already raised her to be relatively mature and self-sufficient, so most of that work was done.
Since then, Molly has finished law school and is presently an associate at a firm that argues a lot of cases in front of the state supreme court. (Credit Megan for the fact that we had created a pretty good college fund for Molly.) I was already successful at my job, assessing and developing new locations for franchise restaurants, and I've continued that success.
My success didn't come at the expense of my family, but it doesn't leave me many opportunities for dating. Molly is in a similar position. Between that and the tight housing market that our area has seen in recent years, it's just made sense for Molly to continue to live with me. Fortunately for both of us, our house is big enough that we were able to put her room far away from mine, so if she did bring a guy home, I wouldn't hear anything unless I stood directly outside her door.
This year, all of Molly's friends had places to go on New Year's Eve, so she went with me to a party that one of my poker buddies threw. She had a winter jacket on, so I didn't see her dress until later. One of the guests, Don, knew me because he used to work for us before he got a job with the company that handles our payroll. He commented that there was an impressive range of ages at the party, specifically that there were a number of nice-looking ladies not much younger than him.
"Still doing well with the ladies?" I asked him. When he was with us, he had a reputation as a ladies' man, but not in a way that would cause problems for him or us at work. At the time, I had recently decided that I was ready to date again, so he and I were the only eligible men in the office, and we joked about such things when we knew it was safe to do so.
"Just got back in the fray," he said. "I'd been dating this teacher, Barb, but she got a better job on the other side of the state, and neither of us was interested in a long-distance relationship." Before I could say anything, he turned his head and said, "Ooh, there's a nice-looking one, Scott!"
He was looking at Molly. She wore a blue strapless dress that left no doubt that she has an ample bosom, even though it didn't expose anything but her shoulders. I always thought she was beautiful, but I assumed it was just my fatherly prejudice. Now I saw it was for real. Remembering when Don and I used to joke about competing, I had an idea. "I bet I can get her to go home with me."
"Tonight?" he asked.
"Tonight," I said.
"What are you betting?"
"I've still got that ticket stub from the first Super Bowl. What have you got?"
"You remember the contest we had for the vintage Moët? Jeff won it, and I bought it from him. I've got most of it left."
I was only doing this for fun, so I didn't plan to keep whatever he offered. I took the bet and excused myself. I didn't go anywhere near Molly, but I sent her a text to meet me in the kitchen. I told her what was going on, and she agreed. She went to the punch bowl, and I came around a minute later. It was close enough to Don that he could see her, but far enough that he couldn't hear our conversation. I stroked her cheek while I asked her if she'd changed the air filter downstairs. She said yes and asked whether we needed to defrost the refrigerator, touching herself just above her cleavage. For the first time, I actually got aroused looking at her. I could see that Don was looking at us, so I motioned her to follow me.
I introduced them. "Molly, this is Don."
He glanced briefly at her chest and said, "You're much prettier than your TV namesake."
"If you're talking about 'Mike and Molly', Melissa McCarthy is quite attractive in her own right," Molly insisted.
Don attempted to recover. "Of course she is; I ... I didn't mean to say she isn't! I'm just saying, you're prettier."
I lied to present a cover. "If you're going to make a pop culture reference, go with 'unsinkable,' 'cause her name's Molly Brown. She's a lawyer that handles some of our contracts." In order to give her a chance to play the game, I said that I saw another old friend.
I was lying, but I actually did find one of Megan's old friends and caught up with her. Ten minutes later, I worked my way around to a dance floor. Molly and Don were dancing to a song that I knew was popular twenty years ago, although being a dad by that time, I had only a passing interest in current music. I asked Don, "May I cut in?"
"Of course," he said, and he walked away.
"How's it going?" I asked Molly, once he was out of earshot. "Is he making a fool of himself?"
"If you're expecting me to say, 'Thank God you warned me about him,' or something, no. He seems nice enough."
The DJ put on a song that my generation used to dance to. As a joke, I did the Batusi, where you make V's with your fingers at the middle of your face and pull them back, but Molly thought I was making a "Pulp Fiction" reference. Don had walked away by the time the song ended. I told her to enjoy herself and went to see who else was around.
I found Don, and he said, "I just thought of something. How will I know? Are you gonna take a picture? That'll be hard to pull off if you wanna get invited to any more parties."
I looked at his jacket. "Do you have a spare cuff link?"
He reached into his pocket. "Yeah."
"I'll slip it into her purse, and she can call you from my house to tell you she found it. When my name shows up on the Caller ID, you'll know where she is."
He handed me the cuff link, and then he wrote his phone number down for me. It was the only number I'd pick up that night. That was around eleven o'clock. I didn't see him and Molly together the rest of the night, until a few minutes before midnight. I made sure I was near Don when Molly found me. "There you are, Scott!" she said. "You promised me the midnight dance."
"Gotta go," I told Don. I kept an eye on him, making sure he saw us together. I didn't feel bad for him, since I saw a woman closer to his age taking his hand.
As the countdown started, Molly put my hand on her back. I could see straight down the front of her dress. I tried to stay far enough apart that she couldn't feel my erection, but to no avail. I just had to hope no one else saw it, especially anyone who knew who she was. At the stroke of midnight, I leaned down to kiss her. She surprised me by kissing me on the lips and putting one hand just above my butt. Don did not ignore his lady, but he could definitely see us kissing. Since I couldn't conceal anything from Molly, I pulled her closer and kissed her harder for his benefit.
After we finished our kiss, we let go. She stepped back and I waited for her reaction. When everyone was finished singing "Auld Lang Syne", I leaned in and whispered, "As your father, I could never let myself really notice how beautiful you are. Tonight I slipped. But I'm really proud of everything you've accomplished."
"It's okay," Molly said. "When I was in junior high, some of my friends thought you were cute. I said it was just because you looked like that one guy on 'L.A. Law', but I realized I had it backwards. I thought he was cute because he reminded me of you."
Fifteen minutes later, Molly went with me as I said goodnight to Don. "Don't forget to call!" he said. He tried to act like he was talking to Molly, but we knew he was talking about the bet.
As we left, I asked, "You let him give you his number?"
"I had to, so he won't wonder how I got it when I call him."
"You didn't give him yours, did you? Because then he'll know what's going on."
"Just my cell phone," she assured me.
We drove home, and waited about ten minutes, Molly in her beautiful dress, me with just a tiny bit of stubble grown back since I'd shaved before the party, and she called Don. I listened on the extension to hear his reaction. "Hi, Don?"
"Yeah ..."
"This is Molly Brown. I just got home. Did you lose a cuff link?" I had turned on some romantic music just so he'd think we were having a sexy time.
