Stacy’s Dad Has Got It Going On by Giselle Renarde

Savannah took the stairs by twos. Her shoulder bag whacked her thigh all the way up to third floor and she couldn’t find her apartment key fast enough. Stacy ought to be home by now, right? She couldn’t wait to tell her roommate the good news: Chris, the scruffy hottie with the kick-ass orange dreads, had invited her to Kingsley’s Saturday night!

“Stacy!” she squealed, kicking off her shoes and dropping her bag at the door.

“In the kitchen, Sav.”

Time seemed to slow to a crawl as Savannah turned the corner. She stopped short when she realized there was another person in the apartment. And that person was…a man. He was tall, built, and blond to the extreme. Aside from his superior taste in Italian suits, she couldn’t make out much about him. He had his back to her, like he’d been talking to Stacy from across the kitchen counter while she prepared dinner.

When the finely-haberdashered gentleman spun around, his good looks caught Savannah by surprised. He was younger than she’d anticipated, judging solely by the cost of his suit, and his vague familiarity didn’t help her cast aside a sense of impending doom. Was he the landlord? Were they being evicted or something? Shit! And right in the middle of her science term. Like they’d have time to look for a new place now!

“Savannah?” The man offered a sympathetic nod. “Nice to see you again.”

“Uh…hi…” she stammered, glancing back and forth between his chiseled jaw and Stacy’s encouraging gaze.

Stacy clicked her teeth. “It’s my dad, Savannah. You’ve met him before.”

Oh yeah. She felt like a total idiot, but tried to cover it up by saying, “Right. I know.”

“Thanks for taking care of my little girl,” he said, giving Savannah a playful punch in the shoulder.

Savannah rubbed the spot where his fist made first contact—not that it hurt, she just wanted to touch it for some reason. “Hey, no probs,” she said. What the hell was his name, again? She couldn’t very well call him ‘Stacy’s Dad’ to his face. “Stacy didn’t mention you were coming to town.”

Stacy gripped the kitchen knife like she could throttle the damn thing. “I didn’t know,” she snapped as she chopped cucumber for the salad. She shook her head, brushing platinum blond bangs from her eyes with the back of her hand. “Sorry, Sav. It’s just…” She looked up at her dad and then set down the knife and lowered her gaze to the chopping board. “Would you give us a minute, please?”

As Savannah looked from Stacy to Stacy’s dad, she suddenly felt out of place in her own home. Their intense gazes forced her from the kitchen. What could she do but nod and back away? Grabbing her bag from the front hall, she scuttled off to her room.

Savannah sat on the carpet with her back against her bed. She preferred to study on the floor—it was more comfortable than the straight-backed wooden chair at her desk, and it gave her room to sprawl. With a notebook in her lap, she looked at her lab notes, but all she could concentrate on were the whispers emanating from the kitchen. She didn’t want to eavesdrop, but she did want to hear what they were saying. It wasn’t like Stacey’s parents to drop by unannounced. In the two years they’d lived together, her dad had never come for a visit before. Savannah had met him when she and Stacy first moved in to this apartment, but neither Savannah’s mom and dad nor Stacy’s lived anywhere nearby. An out-of-the-blue visit must indicate something terrible had happened. Wait, where was Stacy’s mom? Why had her dad come over alone? God, what if Stacy’s mom had an accident?

Savannah tried to hear without listening. Then, she tried not to hear. Then, she turned on her radio and tried to forget there was anything going on at all. When Stacy was ready, she’d tell Savannah what had happened. Until then, she had lab results to type up. The diagrams were always fussy when she tried to do them on the computer, but she’d procrastinated long enough. Time to work.

By the time Stacy knocked at the door, Savannah was typing up her conclusions. She reached up to the radio and turned down the volume. “Come in.”

Stacy slipped inside, falling like a ghost into Savannah’s bed. “Looks like we’ve got company.”

Setting her laptop on the floor and shuffling her papers into a neat stack, Savannah got up and sat on the edge of the bed. She could see Stacy’s red nose and bloodshot eyes in her closet mirror. “You mean your dad?”

Stacy nodded. When she hugged Savannah’s pillow, there was a thump against the headboard and then a muffled thud on the carpet. Savannah breathed a sigh of relief that the romance novel she kept underneath her pillow had fallen behind the bed before Stacy found it. She was always teasing Stacy for reading “that crap.” Far be it for her to admit she read it too.

“My mom had an affair,” Stacy said in a tone so hushed Savannah almost asked her to repeat. “Dad just found out. He came home early from work today and he caught her red-handed.”

Other girls might have wrapped their arms around Stacy, but Savannah wasn’t touchy-feely like that. It’s not that she didn’t care, she just wasn’t good at physical displays of affection. “Oh my god.” She couldn’t think what to say to comfort her roommate. “Who was she cheating with?”

“Some guy from her office,” Stacy said. Savannah watched her lie very still and stare at her own reflection in the mirror. “They had a big argument. I mean, not the guy—he took off, obviously. Mom and dad had an argument, and she was all like, ‘I’m sorry, it’ll never happen again,’ and he was like, ‘Yeah, that’s right it won’t because I’m leaving,’ and he packed a bag and came here.”

“Why here?” Savannah asked. Right away, she registered how callous that question sounded. She only meant that he surely had enough money to go anywhere. He didn’t have to camp out in his daughter’s college apartment.

Stacy’s voice was hard when she said, “Because I’m here.”

As she watched Stacy in the mirror, Savannah started feeling uncomfortable. Firstly, she had no idea what to say about all this. She wasn’t very good at consoling people. Aside from that immediate concern, they were going to have a man staying in their apartment. Of course Stacy wouldn’t care—the man was Stacy’s dad—but to Savannah, he was a relative stranger. And, god, he’d be sharing their one washroom with the iffy lock on the door…and the apartment would start to smell like boys, and he would stare at her tits, wouldn’t he? She’d have to wear sweaters every time she left her room.

“How long is he staying?” Savannah asked. “And where’s he going to sleep?”

“I offered him my bed,” Stacy said. She spoke matter-of-factly now, after Savannah had totally failed at showing any sign of sympathy. She felt sympathetic. It sucked that Stacy’s family was going through a rough patch. How could she get that across? “But he insisted on taking the couch, so I guess the living room’s pretty much his.”

And the sympathy jumped out the window. It irked Savannah that Stacy hadn’t put that question to her: “Is it okay if we let my dad take the living room?” It was their apartment, after all. But no, it was a hard and fast statement. He was staying with them, sleeping on the couch that, by the way, was from Savannah’s parents’ basement. That was that. End of story. No argument. Stacy’s dad would be living with them. “For how long?” Savannah repeated.

Stacy’s lips pursed and she rose from the bed like a hasty specter. “I don’t know, okay?” And in two shakes, she was out the door. She grabbed the handle hard like she was going to slam it shut. After holding still for a tense moment, she snapped, “Dinner’s ready. Come eat.”

When Stacy had left the room, Savannah stood from the bed and looked at herself in the full-length mirror: the hip-hugging jeans were fine, but her white tank top was just a little too tight, a little too low-cut, and a little too thin to wear in front of Stacy’s dad. He’d spend the whole meal gazing into her cleavage, or tracing with his eyes the line where her light brown skin met her dark black bra. This outfit represented her skank limitation. Savannah didn’t dress slutty because, generally speaking, she didn’t like people looking at her. She knew she had a pretty face and her curves would draw a crowd if she let them, but she didn’t let them. The only reason she wasn’t hiding under multiple clothing layers today is that she wanted to catch Chris’ eye in lab. Mission accomplished, by the way.

She wasn’t even really sure what she liked about Chris. He was the type of skuzzy indie rocker she’d generally see across campus, not in her own classroom. They were usually humanities majors, not scientists. Most of the other students in her program were science geeks and overachievers like Savannah and, to a lesser degree, Stacy. That’s probably what attracted her attention in Chris—the simple fact that, in a bio-chemistry lab, he looked different than everybody else. That made him seem less boring than all the other guys, but, at the same time, she knew if he was in her program, he must have a few brains in his head. So, today she’d made herself amply visible and he took the bait! Saturday night, she was going to Kingsley’s to see his band play!

“Sav!” Stacy hollered from down the hall. “I’m going to eat your kebab myself if you don’t get your aaa…uh…your butt in here.”

Chuckling over Stacy’s self-censorship in front of her father, Savannah grabbed the grey Varsity hoodie off the back of her chair. She zipped it all the way up to her chin before joining Stacy and her dad for what promised to be a ridiculously depressing meal.