IF YOU WANTED THE MOON by Mallory Monroe

something to prove. He even wore reading glasses like he was some old man, when her research of him placed his age at thirty-eight. Which meant he wasn’t young, and that he had a lot of years on her, but it didn’t exactly mean out-to-pasture time for him, either.

    But that was Chandler. Al about business. Al about the Benjamins. Not once in al of the articles she’d read on him was there a wife mentioned, or children. He had women, always there was a
    different woman on his arm. But they were the usual suspects, the tal blondes and other beauty queens, folowing him around to this charity banquet or that charity auction, trying to make a name for themselves on Chicago’s social scene. But those women were just business props for a man like Chandler. Tori didn’t know much about him, but based on how his manhood reacted to her body when she
    sat (fel) on him in that stairwel, she would like to think that she knew his taste. And his taste, if she wasn’t mistaken, wouldn’t be for some Miss Virginia who wowed the judges in the swimsuit competition, but somebody like her, somebody with spunk and life, not to mention serious brains.

    Although, she’d admit, she wasn’t showing much braininess around him now. But what could she do? She did the math. She tried to figure out if there was any way, any way at al that she could quit this job and stil afford her parents’ mortgage and her own bils. But there was no way under the sun. She even caled around, to her old employers Dow-Tate and Fitzgerald-Waterhouse, and even to some of the larger firms, but nobody was wiling to pay a twenty-five-year-old of limited experience no-where near what Chandler was paying her. He was, from what her checking around uncovered, paying her
    twice the going rate! How could she walk away from that?

    She couldn’t, she decided, and that was the bottom line. If people quit jobs just because their boss was an s.o.b., then there would scarcely be a soul employed. And so far that was the only mark Chandler had against him. He was tough, or didn’t play, as he put it. Hardly the kind of trait you’d hold against somebody.

    Her cel phone rang as she looked, once again, at her hard-working employer. So good looking, and, from those articles she’d read, maybe even an interesting person if he wasn’t so hard-driven. But he was hard-driven, she thought.

    “Helo?” she flipped open her cel and said. It was her father, with her mother yeling in the background. Tori leaned her head back. “What is it now?” she asked.

    “I live here too,” her father, Earl Warren Douglas, said into the phone. “Do I not live here too?”

    Tori could hear her mother yel out a resounding no in the background, but, thankfuly, her father ignored her. “Yes, Daddy,” Tori said and Ethan immediately looked up at her over his reading glasses.
    “You live there too.”

    “Then why do I not have a say so if this supposed to be my house too? Why I got to do everything Agnes say? Who made her the boss in a house the man supposed to be head of?”

    “Daddy, what are you talking about?”

    “The couch.”

    Tori leaned her head back further and closed her eyes. Ethan stared at her smooth, thin neck. “What about the couch?” she asked.

    “She won’t let me sit on it, Tori, that’s what!”

    “Don’t you tel that lie!” Tori’s mother, Agnes Douglas, could be heard nearly screaming in the background. “Don’t you dare get on that phone lying, Earl Warren! If you gon’ tel it, you tel it like it is
    ‘cause I’l be glad to tel it!”

    Tori shook her head. “Tel me what? I mean, what do you mean she won’t let you sit on the couch?”

    “Just like I said,” he said to Tori. “And I ain’t taking it back either!” he yeled, obviously to his wife. “She won’t let me sit on it. At least not how I want to sit on it.”

    Tori sighed. “And how do you want to sit on it, Daddy?”

    “Like normal people!” Earl Warren yeled. “Without