The Hot Mess and the Heartthrob(30)

So I don’t.

My instincts lead the way, with me following them to grab him by the shirt, press my lips to his, and close my eyes.

I haven’t kissed a man in at least three years. I haven’t kissed a man I wasn’t married to in over a decade. Kissing Levi is unfamiliar and awkward, but only for the briefest moment before his fingers thread into my hair and he meets me all the way.

This is the chocolate chip cookie, rainbow at sunset, convertible parked on the beach, kiss of all kisses.

Or maybe I’m that starved for adult male companionship.

Whatever it is, when he tilts his mouth against mine and sucks on my lower lip, every cell in every dormant part of my womanhood wakes up at once. My nipples tighten. My skin flushes. My vajayjay pulses.

My kids could walk in.

A customer we didn’t realize was still here could burst out of the bathroom.

Giselle’s probably taking pictures.

And oh my god, what am I doing?

I break away, flustered and hot for so many reasons. “Sorry. I—you—I—no. You know what? I’m not sorry. I’m a grown-ass woman, and I wanted to kiss you, and I want to do it again, but I really can’t offer you anything in the way of a serious relationship, because hashtag kids, and oh my god, I just said hashtag in conversation, but the point is, I—”

Levi silences me with another kiss, and I surrender.

I want to kiss him.

I want to do so much more than kiss him. I don’t know when—he already told me over text that he has to be in LA for a massive list of events starting Sunday and then off somewhere else to shoot a video—but maybe that’s good?

He eases out of the kiss but tilts his forehead against mine. “I like you.”

“That’s very brave of you.”

His chuckle lights up my entire soul. It has to be the star factor. I know better than to actually fall for any man, much less one whose calendar is even more hectic than my family’s.

“I’m completely serious.” I squeeze my eyes shut, because I’m so close that his eyes are mushing together and it’ll make me giggle if I look at him cross-eyed much longer. “I really don’t have a lot of energy left for anything resembling a relationship.”

His hand settles on my thigh, and my entire body asks if we can send the kids to boarding school and run away to Tahiti with this man.

He opens his mouth, but before he can say a word, a giant glob of brown something falls between us and splatters on my skirt.

I stare at the dark wet stain soaking into the crinkled cotton, refusing to look up.

If I look up, I’ll confirm for myself that either my store is booby-trapped, or I have a plumbing problem.

What’s above us? I make a mental inventory of the apartment’s layout while another thick drop of brown water joins the first on my skirt.

“Uh-oh,” Levi says.

“The bathroom,” I gasp.

I leap up and dash down the stairs, into the back room, and up the other stairs to our third-story apartment. Mrs. Schneider bolts straight upright on the couch as I barrel inside. “Chicken nuggets! You scared the crap out of me!”

“Bathroom.”

“Oh, honey, don’t wait that long. If you gotta go, you gotta—whoa. Anyone ever told you that you look like Levi Wilson?”

“Stand down, ma’am,” Giselle says. “Plumbing emergency.”

I don’t know how she knows where the bathroom is, but she beats me to it, and she’s squatting in the gunk of an overflowing toilet, twisting the input valve to shut off the flow before I can blink.

Then she grabs my plunger, flips it upside down, and fishes out a white nursing bra that I may or may not still wear, which she flings into the tub, followed by two pairs of my granny panties, and finally, a black lace negligee that I haven’t seen in years and worn in longer.

Maybe no one else can tell what they are. There’s too much fabric or they’re too wet and stained or—or maybe I’m delusional, and this is how it all ends.

With me dying of mortification so that my children have to be raised around people who say things like it was for the best. God knows what more she would’ve subjected her kids to if she’d lived. At least Hudson was too young to understand it was his fault she was so embarrassed that she had a full-on humiliation implosion.

Giselle’s still fishing in my overflowing toilet.

And there’s one more nursing bra coming out, along with a towel with— Oh god.

I didn’t know I still had that.

Levi’s right behind me with a front-row seat to my delicates drawer and the prank towel that my ex had printed with his face for my birthday the last year we were together, when he said he was getting me the one thing I wouldn’t already buy for myself.

Skippy’s watching the whole thing from his perch on the shower curtain rod, nibbling on something that looks like my grandmother’s favorite ruby necklace.

I squeak, and that’s all anyone says for a very long time.

Or possibly ten seconds, but it feels like an entire lifetime.

“James, my nephew, got mad at Tripp and tried to flush his phone down the toilet once,” Levi finally offers in the relative silence.

I say relative, because Giselle’s actually plunging the toilet now, making those wet sucking noises, and oh my god, tell me that’s not my vibrator.