Page 72 of Rent Free

Again with that inward wince.

“I’ll do what I have to do,” I said carefully.

“I’ll help you for a little while,” she said softly, pushing her plate toward me. “I’m not sure if you want to give this to him since I ate off of it. But I’m gonna run to the bathroom before I head outside with Garrett. I don’t want to bring anything unclean in here.”

She got up without another word and slunk off.

If she’d been a dog, her tail would’ve been tucked underneath her back legs.

I wanted to shoot myself in the face.

Fuck.

I hadn’t meant to hurt her.

“You just totally cock blocked yourself,” Garrett muttered as Pepper slid into the bathroom and closed the door.

“I didn’t mean to,” I admitted, “but I wanted her to stay. By any means necessary.”

Garrett got up, cut up the pieces of spaghetti on Pepper’s barely touched plate, then dumped the whole thing onto Forest’s plate. “There you go, buddy.”

“Tanks.” Forest patted Garrett’s arm with a spaghetti hand.

Garrett didn’t seem to notice the spaghetti as he twisted to look fully at me.

“How are you going to get her out of the friend zone, though?” he asked. “It’s obvious you have feelings for her. After what you just did…”

Yeah, I’d really shot myself in my own foot, hadn’t I?

“I’ll figure it out.” I left it at that.

He grumbled something underneath his breath. “Fix it, dummy.”

I gritted my teeth, forcibly stopping myself from saying ‘fuck you’ in front of my son.

That would be perfect. Teach him curse words so when we went in front of the judge, the court-appointed lawyer for Forest could tell the judge all about Forest’s new vocabulary.

“I’m gonna go grab Boss,” he said. “Try not to break her heart anymore while I’m gone.”

I gritted my teeth.

He was out the door just as Forest said, “Done!”

“You have a pretty good vocabulary for a two-year-old,” I said to my kid. “At least your mama did something right.”

I picked him up and lugged him, arms outstretched so he didn’t get spaghetti all over my clothes—and failing miserably because Forest thought it was the funniest thing in the world to touch his hands to me as we moved—to my bathroom.

I had a sunken shower that also acted as a bathtub.

I turned the water on while I let Forest explore.

“Can you get naked, son?” I asked him.

He could.

And he was standing there, arms outstretched overhead, showing me his accomplishment in less time than it took me to undress.

“Good job,” I said as I gestured to the shower. “You want to hop in here?”

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