Page 81 of Sleepover

“Nice to meet you,” my mom echoes, smiling at Sawyer.

He smiles back. “You, too.”

“We met your in-laws earlier today. After the boys had run back and forth a few hundred times, we invited Jonah to come out for ice cream with Madden, so we stopped by and introduced ourselves to his grandparents and asked if they wanted to come with. How funny is this? We were all in Barcelona during the push for Catalonian independence, and we were probably all in the same square during a certain protest, maybe just a few hundred feet apart! Small world. How was the wedding?” she demands of me, without pausing for breath. Then, without waiting for an answer, she tips her chin up at Sawyer and says, “I’m sorry! I talk too much and too fast, but I get excited and can’t seem to stop.”

Sawyer laughs. “Now I know where Elle gets it.” He smiles fondly at me, which makes my heart skip a beat.

“The wedding was surprisingly fine,” I say.

“I didn’t think she should go,” my mother informs all of us. “I think it was classless of Trevor to invite her, and she should have turned down the invitation.”

“But tell us how you really feel,” my father chides her gently, but my mother just shakes her head and addresses me.

“Your father feels the same way, even if he wouldn’t say it out loud. Trevor was never good enough for you, Elle.”

Thank God for parents and their blind devotion. I so appreciate her saying that, even though I know she’s full of shit; they loved Trevor when we were together and felt as betrayed as I did when he ended up with Helen. Hindsight is 20–20…but again, thank God for parents and their willingness to back you even when you’re clearly the losing horse.

“No. He wasn’t good enough for her.” Sawyer’s voice is definitive. “He didn’t deserve her.”

I go a little gooey over that, and my mom shoots him an appraising look.

The boys fly back up the front path. “Dad, can Madden sleep over tonight? Pleeeeeeeease?”

Sawyer looks at me. I shrug. I’m thinking, If the boys are in the same house, Sawyer and I can be, too…

He sees it on my face, and he raises an eyebrow and smirks. He, too, shrugs. “Sure, bud.” He turns to me. “I’m going to head home for a bit, decompress, all that. I’ll text you and we can get some takeout for the boys and us, too, if you want?”

“Sounds good.” I say it nonchalantly, but secretly I’m all, he wants to keep doing this, he wants to keep doing this, we’re going to keep doing this.

“Very nice to meet you, Elena, Matthew,” he tells my parents.

“Very nice to meet you, too, Sawyer,” they say in unison.

When he’s gone, my mother turns to me. There’s an expression on her face I don’t like.

“Elle.”

She says it very gently. The last time she spoke to me that way was the day Trevor left. It’s the Concerned Mom voice. “His wife just died.”

“Two years ago!”

“Lucy’s parents seemed to feel that he was very much not over her. They said he’s still a wreck.”

“He’s doing fine.” My voice is brittle. Defensive.

My mother fidgets, wringing her fingers. “They said he adored her. Doted on her. That he was destroyed by her death. They said they worried more about him than each other or Lucy’s sister, or even Jonah.”

“Leave her alone, Elena,” my father says. “She knows what she’s doing.” He rests a hand on my mother’s shoulder.

I cast a grateful glance in my dad’s direction. “I know what I’m doing, Mom. I won’t get in over my head.”

But I’m remembering the wrecked look on Sawyer’s face as he thrust into me, the shocking sense of connection, and how much I wanted it to mean that he felt the same way I felt, and a voice inside me says, You’re already in over your head.

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