Page 1 of Wrestling with Daddy

CHAPTER1

ken

As Ken scrubbedat his face, the same thought kept running through his mind: this had been a terrible idea.

Not coming to the club, mind.

Blue Underground was his safe haven, his number one place to decompress or simply forget about the stress and contracts and files that kept piling up on his desk.

He was a regular, too, there almost every week he was in town. Sometimes more often, although he tried to make an exception out of those—lest someone start spreading rumors about his character.

Not that he got drunk or overdid himself.

He didn’t even remember doing that when he was in his twenties.

Today, though, after blowing the candles that announced to the world he’d hit the big forty, he wondered if he should give it a try.

He shouldn’t have come here.

The club wasn’t the problem—celebrating his birthday, something he usually avoided as much as humanly possible, was.

It was Lee’s fault.

Well, Ash’s, really.

Lee had always been good at respecting boundaries. It was how they’d remained friends through the decades. If it had been only Lee, his friend would’ve knocked on his door with a discreet present, most likely something in leather, and takeout that would last for a week.

Lee’s pup, however, was more impulsive, still figuring out how to navigate boundaries even if he’d come a long way in the past year.

“Come on!” Ash whined as loudly as he had for the last half an hour. “You really aren’t taking anyone home with you?”

“Amazing someone can do that, huh?”

Lee rolled his eyes beside Ash, one hand on his lower back. Ken shared a small smile with his friend as the latter shook his head.

He was truly happy for Lee. Even though he hadn’t always shown it, Ash leaving eons ago had done a lot of damage. Seeing him truly smile again for the past year since the boy had come back to his life was a treat in itself.

Ash was good for Lee. He just wasn’t so good for Ken’s incoming headache.

The pupper had good intentions. He’d been on a mission the past couple of months to set Ken up with someone, to be a real-life matchmaker of sorts. He was apparently convinced that Ken would be oh-so-appreciative.

Ken had stopped bothering telling him why it wouldn’t work, and how love wasn’t in the cards for him, right after the first week of non-stop pestering.

He truly didn’t know how his friend had the patience to handle Ash 24/7.

“Can I say something you’re not going to like?”

If it had been Ash, Ken would’ve been either telling him to shut his mouth, or getting Lee to do it for him. It was his old friend who had posed the question, though.

“It’s your funeral.”

“Sure.” Lee shook his head, an exasperated sigh barely leaving his body. “Ash went to the bathroom. You don’t have to keep the grumpy act on.”

“You think that’s what I’m doing?”

It wasn’t.

Lee’s face, though, meant the things he wouldn’t like hearing were coming sooner rather than later.