Dear Daddy, Please Spank Me - Chara Croft

1

Andy

“Shoot,” I said, tripping over Ellen, the one-eared stray cat who’d come with the house, when my phone pinged with an incoming text just as I walked in the door from a first date that definitely wasn’t going to lead to a second.

I stepped around Ellen when she refused to move and hung my coat in the coat closet. If there was someone out there I was going to click with, it definitely wasn’t the cute guy from my Economics class. I couldn’t actually say what it was that hadn’t worked between us, but I hadn’t been all that upset when he’d ended the night by telling me I was “a little too intense” for him.

He was probably right, but I didn’t really know how to be anything else.

During previous dating fails, I’d also heard “overbearing” and “too focused” and been accused of being twenty-one going on forty-one… none of which turned out to be what most guys my age were looking for, but all of which were probably fair, since I’d spent my too-serious, slightly geeky high school years practically raising my two younger sisters instead of having anything like a social life.

Not only did I have no game, but I was also used to stepping in and taking charge, and sometimes—okay, most of the time—I had a little trouble turning those instincts off… which didn’t always go over well, based on how tonight’s date had reacted when I’d ordered dinner for him.

I sighed, then lined my shoes up on the shoe rack and slipped my phone out of my pocket to check the message that had come in. It was my youngest sister, Lizzie, sixteen now and far too invested in my non-existent love life, in my opinion.

Lizzard: How did the date go???

I grinned at the excessive use of punctuation, then sent back a thumbs down.

My phone immediately rang.

“Seriously?” Lizzie said the minute I answered. “What was wrong with him?”

I laughed. “I’m pretty sure it was me, Lizzard.”

“No way,” she said, insanely loyal, as always. “If Mom could find someone, you can, too.”

“No rush,” I said, tossing my keys into the little bowl I kept by the door for that purpose. “I don’t want ‘someone,’ I want the right one.”

“Wellllllllll,” she said, drawing the word out and sounding a little too gleeful for comfort. “Maybe I can help with that.”

I snorted, shaking my head even though she couldn’t see me. “I don’t think so.”

I may not have had the most successful dating history, but I was pretty sure that following advice from a teenager wasn’t the answer.

Both Lizzie and Kate, our other sister, had gotten it in their heads that they owed it to me to help me have some fun since I’d missed out on so much when I’d been their age, but they were wrong. That wasn’t a debt, it was just family.

Our dad walked out on us just as I’d been starting middle school, and since Mom had gone from a pampered trophy wife to taking on three minimum-wage jobs just to keep food on the table, I’d been the one who had to step in and take care of my sisters, the house, and basically everything else.

When Mom had finally remarried a couple of years ago—to William, a man who’d restored my faith in the institution of fatherhood when he’d stepped up and then some to take care of her and the girls—Lizzie and Kate had both become obsessed with the idea that I’d finally have a chance for the “real college experience”... which, according to them, meant going to parties, loosening up, and getting laid.

The last activity was one I categorically refused to discuss with my sisters, and the first two… well, it just wasn’t me. Not that I couldn’t see how some people might want to go a little crazy with that kind of thing after being freed from all the responsibilities I’d been stuck with at such at a young age, but I was the opposite. For one thing, I had academic standards to keep up if I was going to keep all my scholarships, and no way was I willing to lose those since I was and always would be more interested in building the kind of stable life that we’d lost when my dad had left us—building it on a firm enough foundation that no one could ever rip it away from me again—than I was in partying on campus or going out to clubs to look for casual sex.