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“The usual?” he asks, and I nod with a grin.
“You know it. And Sam and the boys will be here any minute, so I need a table.”
He nods and pours me a nice, steep glass of my favorite pinot noir, and I’m halfway through it and listening to Alex’s latest roommate debacle when the door opens and I spot Sam with the boys.
I abandon my wine and beeline for my kiddo.
I feel like I’ve hardly seen him lately, and he’s the very best part of every single day. I grab him into a hug, and he laughs even as he struggles out of my hold.
“Are you being good for Sam?” I demand.
“Always,” he says innocently, and I somehow doubt that.
I laugh. “Right, right. Who wants cheeseburgers?”
“Me!” both boys yell at the same time, and we head toward the booth Alex reserved for us. I detour to the bar to grab my glass of wine, and then I slide onto the end of the booth beside Jonah.
“How was school today?” I ask the boys.
“Fine,” they say together, and I laugh since that’s pretty much the standard response.
“What did you do in PE?” I ask, going the more specific route to glean any insight into what happened in the hours I was away from him.
“I don’t remember,” Jonah says, and I narrow my eyes at him.
“Cop out,” I mutter, and then Debbie comes by to take our order.
Sam eyeballs me from across the table and does some weird thing with her brows after we order. I know she’s trying to have some sort of private conversation with me but I can’t for the life of me figure out what it is.
“Cade, switch with me,” I say to Sam’s boy, and I hand Jonah my phone so the boys can watch whatever YouTuber they’re into this week.
“What was the look for?” I ask her quietly. There’s enough noise in the bar that the boys won’t overhear us, and besides, they’re focused on their video now.
“How’d it go with L?”
I blow out a breath and shake my head. “It was…” I search for the right word. As a journalist, words are sort of my thing. And yet…I can’t quite come up with the word to encompass how it went.
Frustrating, overwhelming, infuriating, comforting, and somehow…sexy? All at the same time.
There isn’t a word for that. Frust-whelm-infur-comf-sex-iating?
“Dangerous,” I finally finish. I pick up my glass of wine and ignore her intent gaze at me while she studies me for more.
“Dangerous? What the hell does that mean?”
“Can we just talk about it later?” I hiss.
She holds up both hands. “Fine, fine,” she says, and she lets a few beats of quiet pass between us because she knows I’ll just have to fill the silence with words to expand on that.
But I don’t want to talk about him.
It’s painful, and seeing him today was like ripping open an old wound and scrubbing the exposed nerves there with a Brillo pad.
“Did you hear about Nancy Claiborne?” she finally asks.
I turn toward her as I brace for the gossip. “No! What happened?”
One of our favorite pastimes is catching each other up on all the latest gossip about the moms from the group where we first met.
