The Hot Mess and the Heartthrob(55)

“Spa day.”

“When the fuck am I supposed to do that, Levi? When? WHEN?”

She blows another breath over the phone line as I trip over my own two feet retreating from my tactical error.

Single mom. No family. Friends just as busy as she is.

Right.

“Sorry,” she says. Swear I can hear her wincing. “Sorry. Not your fault. I shouldn’t yell. Sorry. Seriously. Bad time.”

“Hey, let it out. Can’t keep it bottled up all the time.”

“Are you serious?”

“Back in our Bro Code days, Davis used to get amped up when the local reporters would ask what his mom thought of all of his tattoos, or if it was true he was dating an actress as old as his parents. We had scream time on the bus to help him cope. All five of us. We’d yell like banshees, call each other names, fight about who used whose toothbrush and who kept putting dirty socks in whose bunk. Yell away. Thick skin. I can take it.”

“You have lived the weirdest life.”

I reach across the bed and grab my laptop. “If you ever need a babysitter, let me know. Tripp has one or two he trusts, which means they’re basically qualified to take care of royalty.”

“Thank you, but it’s not necessary. I’ve got this. I do. I have babysitters. I have friends. I just—some mornings I need to blow off steam. Zoe’s almost ten. Ten. I don’t have any idea how I’m old enough to have a child with a double-digit age, especially when she was born yesterday—and I don’t mean that in a she’s stupid way—but the next thing I know, even Hudson will be leaving the nest, and as much as they drive me crazy some days, I don’t ever want them looking back and saying I wasn’t there and that I didn’t do everything I could to help them find their way in the world.”

I pause in the middle of starting an email to my brother to ask for his favorite babysitters’ names. “Ingrid. You’re like supermom. They’ll know.”

“But will they?”

“Maybe by the time they’re forty.”

She laughs, but it doesn’t sound like she’s amused. “If I’m lucky.”

I wonder how many of these days my mom had when I was growing up.

Probably more than I want to know.

“You know what might help?”

“Traveling to a dimension where time moves in a way that I can have a full spa day in the three minutes before I need to go back out and face the monsters of my loins?”

“Phone sex has to be a close second, right?”

“Moooooom! Hudson showed me his penis!”

Ingrid sighs the kind of heavy sigh that settles on me like a blanket made of iron.

A guy who’s gone all the time, adding more things to her to-do list, demanding more of her time when she already has so little of it to herself, is not what she needs.

Or maybe I can be exactly what she needs for a little bit. “Next week. You pick the day and time. I’ll find you a babysitter, and then I’ll fix you dinner. My place. Stay as late as you want. Or leave as early as you want. Just—let me give you a night off. Or an afternoon off. Or—”

“WHAAAAA! ZOE HIT ME!”

I squeeze my eyes shut.

She needs someone who can be there. “Right. You need to go. I’ll text you later. No rush in replying. Sorry. Forgot it was breakfast time there.” Because I’m a self-centered asshole who wanted to distract myself from boredom with phone sex with my not-girlfriend.

“Did you just offer to find a babysitter for me?” she asks quietly while her kids keep yelling in the background.

There’s a landmine hidden in her voice. “I didn’t mean you’re not capable,” I sputter. “I just meant—”

“That you’d take it off my plate.” She’s getting quieter and quieter.

“Am I in trouble?”

“No. No. That’s—thank you. That’s incredibly thoughtful.”

“I don’t want to be a complication.”

A soft laugh carries over the miles, and she says something I miss over the sound of her kids all calling her.

I don’t know how she does it.

Some days I can barely handle myself, but she’s there running her life and three others’ like a boss.

“Text me later,” I say. “Whenever. You’ve got your hands full.”

“Thank you.” She says a quick goodbye, and then she’s gone.

It’s fine. She needed to go. Her kids are her life. I’m a side distraction.

So why do I want to be there to offer to walk Hudson to preschool and help put together a science experiment on non-existent mold?

I decide it’s because I’m a nice guy.

Ego? I can live with that.

Having my world turned upside down by a woman who’s filling in cracks that I didn’t even know I had?

When I’m everything she doesn’t need?

Not ready to face that yet.

So I tell myself I’m being melodramatic and go in search of a pretzel instead.





Twenty





Ingrid



Penny for Your Thoughts is decorated for Christmas. The shelves are stocked, staff schedules are set, babysitters are booked, and we are officially ready for the kick-off to the holiday season in four days.