Page 28 of The Surrogate Mother
“That doesn’t sound right.”
“It’s right. Trust me.”
No… is it?
I whip out my phone to Google it and… wow, it turns out tomatoes really are fruit. Damn. “I can’t believe it! How could tomatoes befruit?”
“What I can’t believe is you didn’tknowtomatoes are fruit.”
“Yeah, well.” I give his shoe a gentle kick under the table, which makes him smile. “There’s a lot of thingsyoudon’t know. Like, I bet you don’t know what IYKYK stands for.”
He thinks for a moment. “It’s… I yell, kiss your… cousin. Wait, that’s a C…”
“No.It’s ‘if you know, you know.’”
“Okay, so I don’t know all the most recent internet acronyms. So what?”
“That’s not even recent! People have been using that for years. Years!”
“Gosh, you sure know a lot about internet slang,” he says as he kicks me back under the table.
And then we’re kind of playing footsie under the table. I slide off my shoe and get it up his pants leg, and he reaches down to grasp my bare calf. Our eyes meet across the table, and the smile he gives me makes me tingle all over. Shelley always talks about how her husband doesn’t “excite” her anymore, but I can’t relate. Sam still gets me all hot and bothered. I can’t imagine that ever changing. I’m even looking forward to him getting old because I think he’ll be sexy with lines around his eyes and silver hair.
As soon as we’re done eating, Sam wants to exchange presents. He’s more excited over this than an adult should rightfully be. I’ve got his present stuffed into my purse, and presumably, my present is in his jacket pocket. Which means it’s something small. Maybe jewelry.
I hope it’s jewelry.
Sure enough, he pulls a rectangular box from his coat and slides it across the table to me. He smiles when he sees the square box I hand him. He lifts it, evaluating its weight.
“This doesn’t feel like electronics,” he says.
“It’s not.”
“Is it… socks?” He grins. “You know how much I like socks.”
He’s joking—referring to a time when we went to my parents’ house for Christmas, and their gift to Sam was a pair of fancy socks. This was, I suspect, my mother’s not-so-subtle way of saying she wasn’t excited about our upcoming nuptials. I was mortified by that one, but he thought it wasfunny. He still wears them. He calls them his Christmas socks.
“Yeah, but they’re nice socks,” I say. “Prada socks.”
“Ooh, Prada socks. This I gotta see.”
He rips off the wrapping paper and pulls off the lid to the box. His eyes widen when he sees what’s inside. “It’s… a tank top?”
“It’s an apron!”
“Oh…” He pulls it out, holding it up in the light. The apron contains a bunch of mathematical symbols, including the square root of negativei, two to the third power, a summation symbol, and pi. I would never know this, but the website assured me that this reads… “I ate some pie?”
“Right.” I beam at him. “Cool, right? For all the… you know, cooking you do.”
Not that I want to encourage him in his cooking or anything. But since I can’tdiscourage him, I may as well buy him an apron so he doesn’t have stains on every last piece of clothing in his closet.
“Yeah, this is great,” he says, although it’s hard to tell if he means it. “I’ll be like Euclid meets Martha Stewart.”
“You hate it.”
“I don’t hate it.”
“You obviously do.”
