Page 381 of The Doctors Will See You Now

“Dad!” Lexi interrupted. “I chose the better slice. Eat your inferior one.”

“You sound busy,” Charlotte said in my ear. “I’ll talk to you later, okay?”

“Charlotte.”

“Bye!”

Ah, fuck. I sighed and pulled the phone away from my ear to stare at the blank screen and grind my jaw. That didn’t go well.

“Who was that?” Lexi asked frankly and without pause.

Internally, I groaned. I couldn’t lie to Lexi. She’d sniff that out faster than a police K-9 looking for weed, but I really didn’t feel like going down this road right now. I already felt like a Grade A jackass for embarrassing Charlotte unnecessarily.

I thought she was cute too, for shit’s sake. I was just…slow.

“Her name is Charlotte,” I said, hoping a vague answer would satisfy her curiosity enough to move this conversation along.

Of course, if anything was true about Lexi, it was that her curiosity was never, ever satisfied.

“How old is she?”

“Uh,” I mumbled, swallowing a surprised half laugh. “I honestly have no idea.”

“Are you having sex?”

“What?” I yelled. Everyone in the pizzeria turned to look at me at once. Averting my eyes to the table, I picked at the crust of my rapidly cooling slice and forced my voice back to normal. “What? No. Why would you think that?”

“According to Brice and Romlan’s latest study, male-on-female interaction, without familial relation, is seventy-two percent more likely to be sexual in nature than platonic. It’s biology. The male brain—”

Jesus Christ.

“Okay, yeah, I get it. But no, Charlotte and I are not sleeping together.”

She shrugged. “You don’t have to sleep together to be sexually active.”

I shook my head and looked to the ceiling, asking God why he made me have these conversations with my almost ten-year-old daughter. Part of me thought it might be penance for missing so much of her magnificent mind when she was younger, but the other suspected it was strictly for His entertainment.

“Sleeping together is an expression for sex,” I explained, rubbing roughly at my eyebrow as I tried to fight a blush.

“Oh.” She shrugged. “You should really find out her age. If she’s not eighteen, you could have a legal problem.”

I laughed, just one sharp bark, before biting into the flesh of my bottom lip. “She’s older than eighteen, and we’re not having sex.”

“I’m just saying.”

“Well, stop. I know Charlotte from work.”

She rolled her eyes. “Your smile didn’t say work.”

I pulled my face into a frown almost on reflex. “I wasn’t smiling.”

“Okay, Dad,” she allowed with a small scoff.

Dad. Every time she called me that, I swear, my heart contracted in my chest.

“She got off the phone fast,” she criticized.

“Lex,” I chastised.