Finally I tumble into the shower. After that, I post on all the social media neighborhood pages.
I don’t like wiener dogs, and I still don’t. Terrence is definitely not my favorite.
I’m not even sure I like Molly all that much. She’s giving me a hell of a lot of trouble.
But damn, that ass.
Are you sure it has nothing to do with her sassy mouth, her brains, or the fact that you’re horny as hell and deeply inexperienced at sex for a dude your age?
I’ve never put this much effort into making someone like me, and I’m not totally convinced that what I’m doing now is because I like her.
But maybe that lack of effort is the entire reason I’m still alone.
Unlike most other guys at my high school, my body took a long time to develop. I wasn’t unpopular. I had friends, even female friends. None of them showed any interest in dating me, though. Not when our rural school was chock full of brawny athletes to catch their eye.
I remained a fairly skinny kid throughout college, and was too focused on my education to put any effort into women. After college, my parents fell ill with cancer — one after another — and I was focused on taking care of them while half-heartedly building my career at the same time. There was no time for my own needs.
It wasn’t until after my parents passed away from their illnesses that I started reluctantly focusing on my own needs beyond a career. I grieved, put my life back together, went to a gym, bulked up, and decided that real estate was a way to provide a stable income for a family someday. My parents were gone, and I wanted to be ready to start a family as soon as possible.
I don’t want to admit to myself now that I’m making an effort with Molly for any other reason than physical attraction, and the fact that I’m long past due to lose my virginity. Yeah. It’s true. I’m a 27-year-old virgin, if you can believe it.
As I drag myself out of the social media rabbit hole and back to my bed, I tell myself I’m only being neighborly. Any neighbor would do the same.
I wake a few hours later to the sound of banging. I roar and bolt out of bed and look out the window. It’s barely the break of dawn, and Molly is back there, on her side of the fence, working on something.
She’s got a sledgehammer, for fuck’s sake, and she’s trying to drive a pole into the ground.
“What in the Sam Hill, woman?”
I head outside, this time with a head of steam.
“Is this like hostage torture? Are you trying to keep me in a state of sleep deprivation?”
She brings down the hammer with a loud thunk. “Unlike hostages, you are free to pull up stakes and go back to Oklahoma or wherever you please.” Whack. “So please…go.” Whack.
I ignore her latest plea for me to disappear as I hop over the fence. When she rears back to bring the hammer down once more, I grab it while it is still in the air.
“What are you doing? Let go!” she says.
“No,” I say, wrenching it out of her hands. “Not until you tell me what you’re doing out here making yet another racket at six a.m.”
“I still haven’t found Terrence and I could not sleep. So I came out here to work. See? I already fixed the fence.”
She gestures toward the area where the gap was yesterday. I see that she’s added another layer of chicken wire and lashed it to the nearest post. In other words, she half-assed it. But I don’t dare say that to her.
I rub my face in frustration and then ask her what she’s doing with that hammer and the other pole.
She squares her shoulders proudly and points to a box on the ground. The picture on the box looks like a security camera from 1997. “I’m putting up a security camera to surveille the area where Terrence was most likely taken. I’m going to mount it on the post here. It’s one of those that swivels around.”
I rub my face in frustration. “Where did you buy that?”
“Pawn shop in town. Why?”
“I hate to tell you this, but you do know you have to wire that thing to a computer or a TV somewhere. You got cables out here?”
She huffs. “I got extension cords and I got a shovel.”
The wrongness of all of this punches me in the gut, but I’m also moved by her pluck and creativity.