Page 24 of Undeniable You

Sounded like cutting back on her shifts had done wonders for Reid’s natural grumpiness. I personally couldn’t tell the difference, but I believed Sophie.

Hey, did you want to get brunch or something this weekend? You can bring Juniper. We’ll go to that place with the good kid’s menu.Sophie really was the sweetest.

I’d love to, but we’re with my moms all weekend. They’ve demanded we visit before Mama’s surgery.

It was a small lie and it made my stomach twist, but I wanted my weekend so badly. I needed it. If I told Sophie about it, I knew she’d understand, but I’d still feel like I was disappointing her in some way.

Got it. Well maybe I can drop into the bookshop next week? Need any help with anything?

That was a better plan. I could use her hand with a few things.

Deal. Let me know when you’re free.

Juniper mumbled something in her sleep, and I checked to make sure she wasn’t going to wake up.

I rearranged the pillows behind my back again and turned the volume down on the movie. I’d set my ereader close by, so I grabbed it and opened one of the Advanced Reader Copies that I’d gotten. Now that I was a bookseller, I had access to all kinds of things I didn’t as just a reader, and I had to admit I felt pretty spoiled. And also like someone was going to snatch it away from me at any moment. With that increased access also came pressure. What if I didn’t stock the right books? What if someone came in and when I didn’t have the right books, they decided to never come in again? So many of my fears were irrational, but they all boiled down to the fact that I was scared out of my mind to fail.

Crap. There I went again. Doom and gloom and disaster. Thoughts like that made me want to go back to my parents’ home and have them wrap me in a blanket on the couch and pet my hair and tell me that everything was going to work out.

If I called my moms up and asked them for that, they’d do it.

Instead, I looked over at my slumbering daughter and sighed.

Doom and gloom and disaster wasn’t going to get my bookshop off the ground.

If Gram saw me wallowing in negativity like this, she would have been ashamed of me.

“Buck up, lovely,” she’d always say when I was going through something. That could mean stubbing my toe or getting pregnant after a drunken hookup. Didn’t matter. Better buck up, lovely.

“Buck up, lovely,” I whispered to myself.

I was going to have to.

I also endedup lying to my parents and telling them I was catching up with my friends all weekend.

As soon as I got home, I just stood in the kitchen and listened to how quiet it was. Sure, I could hear a few sounds from the apartments around me, and street noise from outside, but other than that? Bliss. I didn’t know the last time I’d heard this kind of silence.

The first thing I did was to order my favorite meal for delivery and put on a thin tank top and shorts with no underwear. While I waited for my food to arrive, I applied a hair treatment that I’d been meaning to use for months and twisted my hair back into a clip.

On went the raunchy, trashy TV that I usually watched on my phone with my headphones on.

The food arrived and I absolutely stuffed my face with the best steak I’d ever had from a chain restaurant, mashed potatoes, and half of an appetizer sampler. The massive slice ofcheesecake was in the fridge for later when I got into the tub and I intended to enjoy every single bite.

I put on some loud music and sang in the shower as I rinsed out the hair mask and then gave the tub a quick scrub before digging through the closet in my bedroom for the contraband bath bombs I had that I didn’t want my daughter to beg for.

The tub filled up and I sang to myself and slid in, grabbing my plate of cheesecake.

“Fuccckkkkkk,” I said as I savored the first bite. As a general rule, I’d tried to cut a lot of swearing out of my life so I didn’t do it too much in front of my daughter and then have her pick it up and repeat it to other people and then I had the kid with the potty mouth.

But for this time when Juni wasn’t here, I was also going to let myself swear as much as I wanted.

I got so relaxed in the tub that I almost fell asleep and managed to keep myself from doing that through sheer will alone.

While I didn’t want to waste my precious time with a nap, a short one couldn’t hurt, so I put some fresh sheets on the bed and climbed in, sighing with satisfaction.

My phone went off with a new message. I grabbed for it, hoping nothing was wrong with Juni.

Saw this and thought of Juniper. The message was accompanied by a picture of a children’s T-shirt with purple glittery stars on it.

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