Page 18 of Sleepover

Chapter 8

Sawyer

“How was the sleepover?” I ask the boys over my shoulder as we drive out to my favorite kid-friendly trail, the overlook from Mount Mocadney.

“Fun!” Jonah says.

I catch a glimpse of my son’s face in the rearview mirror. In place of his usual expression of pre-teenage boredom, he’s grinning. I can’t help smiling in response, although I know he can’t see me.

“What’d you guys do?”

“Played Battlefront. Played Jukem. Watched Cars 3. Had a pillow fight.”

“Ms. Dunning must have loved that.”

In the rearview mirror, the boys exchange quick, knowing glances.

“My mom was a little mad. But not really mad,” Madden informs me. “She laughed after.”

I try to picture what Elle must look like in a parental lather, but my imagination fails me. My brain serves up another image instead. The night I met her, the way she looked right after I kissed her. Her mouth was kiss-slick, her lips parted, her eyes hazy with desire.

Okay, then.

I wrench my mind back to the present. Pillow fight. “Nothing got broken, did it?”

“Nah,” Jonah says.

“So, Madden, your mom’s a writer?” I tell myself I’m just making conversation with Jonah’s new friend, that I’m not indulging my curiosity about the woman next door.

“Yup. She writes for magazines and stuff.”

“Pretty cool. She written any books?”

“Not yet, but she says she wants to someday.”

“Do you like to write?”

“Not really.” I glimpse the tail end of Madden’s shrug.

“So what do you and your mom do for fun?”

Madden appears to consider that at length. “We used to have more fun before my dad left,” he says.

Ouch.Of all people, I should have known better than to poke that wound. I’m sure similar words could have come out of Jonah’s mouth.

“I bet you still do fun stuff sometimes,” I prompt, trying to undo the damage I’ve done by opening this topic.

Madden thinks, then brightens. “We go to movies and play games. And Mom says we’re going to kayak this summer and hike and stuff. She says this summer will be funner than last summer because things were kind of messed up last summer. ’Cause you know my dad went to go be with Helen, who was his high school girlfriend, and it really, really, really hurt my mom’s feelings.”

I feel a sharp pinch of sympathy for Elle. It’s mingled with respect, too, because it sounds like she was pretty truthful with Madden, without flat-out making Trevor into the bad guy. That’s not so easy to do.

“My feelings were hurt, too,” Madden says, matter-of-factly.

“Yeah,” I say. “Really, really hurt feelings would definitely make sense in that situation. But I bet you and your mom take good care of each other.”

“We do!”

“And she seems like a pretty fun mom.”

---