The Hot Mess and the Heartthrob(49)

I flip him off behind the couch cushion I’m still using as a shield.

He smirks. “I’m telling Mom.”

“I don’t think either one of us are at the top of Mom’s list right now. But if you want to be the one tattling and making me look better, be my guest.”

“Leave your mother alone unless you want to just go have lunch or dinner with her or take her out for mother-son pedicures,” Sarah says. “She raised you. She let you both go off and tour the world. She’s earned some of her own happiness without judgment from either of you.”

And this is why I like Ingrid so much.

She tells me the same thing, but nicer.

“Dibs on the pedicure,” I tell Tripp.

“C’mon, Levi. Out.”

I look at my big brother one last time, and I know Sarah hit a nerve.

Mom would tell us about her boyfriend if she didn’t think we’d be assholes about it.

Tripp knows it too.

“Text me which nights you can get away for dinner, and I’ll coordinate with Mom,” I tell him as I head to the door.

His brows go up, and so does my guilt factor. He’s usually the one asking me for my schedule when Mom needs something or when I’ve been gone too long.

Time to quit taking them both for granted.





Seventeen





Ingrid



I’m asleep by the time Levi texts that he’s done with his charity event, and when he doesn’t respond to my text in the morning, I assume he’s sleeping now. Night owl, plus jet lag on top of it. I get it.

I’m still disappointed, but I also have a bookstore to run and kids to wrangle.

When he texts back and we try to coordinate schedules to fit something in, it turns out he has a family dinner, then a bachelor party, then business meetings in New York and a commercial to shoot in Germany early next week—and yes, I’m incredibly jealous that he gets to visit Germany, even though he insists his sightseeing time is limited.

But it’s a good reminder to concentrate on the friend part of our arrangement.

My ex traveled all the time too.

So much so that when he left, he barely knew his kids. When he was home, he wanted me to keep them quiet so he could recover from the stress of being gone.

Girl, what are you doing? Portia asked me when I told her I was pregnant with Hudson.

Guilt and shame had washed over me.

I wasn’t taking care of my marriage. I was barely hanging on to taking care of the two kids I already had, and now we had a third on the way.

Daniel was in Ukraine on assignment, and I hadn’t told him yet.

I didn’t want him to know.

I wanted this baby to only know people who loved him and were there for him.

Portia talked me out of the guilt and shame—don’t you ever apologize for loving other people, but you need to start taking care of you too, she’d said.

So when she shows up at Piper’s hockey practice Saturday morning with that no-nonsense, we’re having a talk look, I know what I’m in for.

“Zoe, watch Hudson.” I slip her my phone. “Text Aunt Portia if you need me.”

She takes the phone without looking up from her book.

I just got her started on the Aru Shah series, which means I also look to another mom, who nods and smiles to me.

Universal symbol for if your kid gets distracted from drawing scribble squirrels and his sister doesn’t notice because her head’s buried in a book, I’ll let you know.

“Everything okay?” I ask Portia as I join her in the hallway outside the practice rink.

“Shawn had a birthday party at that game place down the way, and I haven’t seen you much this week.” She pulls a mini-Heath bar from her purse. “Figured I’d bribe you to find out what’s going on.”

“Zoe told Eric I’ve had company?”

“That she did.”

“It’s casual. No strings. I don’t have it in me to take on strings.”

“Plus, he’s Le—”

“Shh.”

“Oh, Ingrid.” Portia clucks her tongue, points me to a small, round café table with blue plastic chairs outside the concession stand, and dumps half a bag of baby Heath bars on the Formica. “Spill.”

I give her the shorthand version of the phone flirting and making out on the roof and in my hallway while we both dive into the candy pile, plus the top secret part. I know Portia gets it—she doesn’t have the years of military operational security training that I did, but she has a cousin who went viral on Facebook for trying to make a homemade angel food cake while slightly inebriated and couldn’t go a single day for weeks without strangers asking about her floof cake and if her boyfriend liked the way she whipped him good too—don’t ask, you really don’t want to know—but I still emphasize the secret part multiple times.

When I’m done whispering, my friend nods. “One, good for you. Two, are you out of your mind?”

This is why I love Portia. She doesn’t pull punches, and she sees all the sides. “It’s just a little fling.”

“Did you set an end date?”

“No, but come on. He’ll find someone young and smart and worldly who can stay up past eight-thirty at night, and he’ll gradually quit trying to make out with me, and then he’ll gradually quit calling, and that’ll be that.”