Going Down Easy (Boys of the Big Easy #1)(25)
She didn’t let on how affected she was, though. She gave him a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me look. He simply grinned. Which only intensified the swooping in her stomach.
And she realized that she should have been expecting this. Gabe Trahan was not the type of guy to give up on something easily. Knowing him only a short time had already showed her that. He came off as laid-back and just out for a good time, but there was an intensity below the surface. A drive that showed in his bar . . . and the bedroom. Even in how he ate beignets. He insisted that standing in line and people watching was a part of the experience at Café du Monde, and he’d soaked it up each time. Even though he’d had hundreds of them in the past, he’d dived in as if every one was the first beignet he’d ever tasted, and he asserted that if you didn’t leave with powdered sugar dusting your clothes, you hadn’t done it right. He was all about getting the whole experience out of something—every last ounce of pleasure.
Why she’d thought he might let go of the idea of happily ever after between them just because she’d asked him to, she had no idea.
“Hey, everyone,” Gabe greeted, scraping a chair back out of the circle and dropping into it. “Sorry I’m late.”
“We have a new member,” Bea told him brightly. “Addison, this is Gabe.”
Addison lifted a brow at Gabe. Were they going to let everyone in on the fact that they knew each other and that he was the reason she was here?
“Hey, Addison, welcome,” Gabe said. “What’s your story?”
She narrowed her eyes. Okay, so no. “Got knocked up by an idiot six years ago, and now my life is peanut butter and crayons and wondering where I put my brain and if it’s too early to drink. You know, the usual.”
There was a beat of silence, and then Gabe grinned and the rest of the group started laughing.
“I like you,” Roxanne told her.
Addison smiled, too. But the thing was . . . it was all true. And a thought occurred to her. Gabe had gotten her here. And now that she’d met everyone else, she kind of wanted to stay. But she couldn’t go soft with him. She couldn’t let him talk her into thinking that their being together was a good idea. She couldn’t let him get too close. So she needed to show him exactly what she was like as a mother so he didn’t get this fairy-tale idea going strong.
“Well, I have to be honest,” she said to the group, meeting Gabe’s eyes in particular, “at least with other parents who might understand. I didn’t sign up for this Mom thing. I hadn’t really given motherhood a thought. I was only twenty-four when I got pregnant. I had a lot of plans and dreams, and none of them included cleaning up another person’s poop. I looked at moms with kids throwing tantrums at Target and pretty much thought, Well, that’s your own fault. I had never actually thought about how I tie shoes, and certainly never thought about how to teach that skill to someone else. And I definitely never realized how damned frustrating it could be watching another human unable to make loops out of shoestrings. And I swear, if I never hear the words goodnight moon again in my life, I’ll be very, very happy.”
Several of the eyes in the group were wide and round. But Roxanne and Bea and Austin were all nodding.
“So I guess I need to know,” Addison said, looking around the circle but again landing on Gabe, “is this the kind of group where I can say that stuff, or is it the kind of group where we only talk about how amazing our kids are and how great we’re doing?”
No one said anything for a second. Then Caleb said, “I hate The Very Hungry Caterpillar.” Everyone looked over at him, and he shrugged. “I know that’s probably a huge insult to all children’s literature or something, but I hid the book last week for a few days because I just couldn’t read it again.”
“I would really love for someone to explain to me why you can put cheese on a burger and it’s fine, but if you put hamburger in macaroni and cheese, suddenly the world is ending,” Austin spoke up.
“I didn’t even feed my kids dinner for two days last week,” Roxanne said, sitting back with her arms crossed. She looked around the circle. “Oh, come on, they’re fourteen, twelve, and ten. There was food in the house. I just didn’t make it. They had to eat sandwiches and canned soup. Big deal. But they were being horrible brats about the food I was making, so I decided to make them think about what I do for them a little bit.”
“But they’re our kids,” Dana interjected. “We’re supposed to do stuff for them, right? And yes, they take us for granted, but that’s just kind of the way it is, isn’t it?”
Roxanne nodded. “Sure. I mean, of course we’re supposed to do stuff for them. But I think it’s perfectly fine to teach them to be thankful for it. I don’t need praise and glory all the time, but I also don’t need to get shit from them when I’ve been working all day and then rush home to make dinner for them.” She shrugged. “And mine are older than yours. I don’t know if you can expect a four-year-old to totally understand, but a fourteen-year-old? Oh yeah, he can learn to be a little appreciative.”
“I agree,” Bea said. “We have to teach them to consider other people’s feelings, and that should include ours.”
“I don’t know,” Lindsey said from beside Dana. “We’re their parents. I mean, even if they don’t say please and thank you, we still have to take care of them.” She looked over at Addison. “But I did sign up for this, so maybe that’s why it’s different.”