Page 12 of Mom-Com
Gabby was staring at the side of my head. I could feel her stare, but I refused to take the bait. If I showed any type of interest she’d be marching next door to rope Jameson into a date with me. Nope. Not gonna happen. I had my own plan.
The doorbell rang out and we both jumped.
“I’ll get it.” I was all too happy to escape the kitchen and Gabby’s hawk-like attention.
I swung open the door to find Jameson standing there, his frown gone, thankfully. It was replaced by a smudge of dirt on his cheek. My hand lifted a few inches before I realized what I was doing and forced it back down to my side. His dirt smudge was none of my business and my fingers certainly did not need to swipe it away.
“Hi.” He waved from two feet away. “I found something else I thought you might need for your apple pies.”
He handed me a blue and white ceramic pie cutter, clearly older than both of us. It looked like an antique, charming and yet still useful so many decades later.
“It was my grandmother’s.” He shrugged.
“Oh. Thanks. I actually could use that.” I hooked a thumb over my shoulder. “I’m taking these pies to work tomorrow. All the single guys there devour desserts, so I’ll have to show them how to slow down and cut a proper piece.” I laughed, but he didn’t join in. Instead, the frown was back full force, the eyebrows nearly puckered into a unibrow.
He didn’t answer, so after a beat or two I tried to fill the silence. “So, how about I have you and your son over sometime this week so our kids can meet?”
He nodded, a quick jerk of the head, no warmth in the movement whatsoever. “Sure.”
“Okay. How about Wednesday?”
Another head jerk. “Wednesday it is.”
I smiled and slowly closed the door while he just stood there. When the door was finally closed, I grimaced from yet another ungainly conversation.
“Who was that?” Gabby joined me, peeking out the front window like the nosey woman she is.
“Never mind.” I headed back to the kitchen, needing to divert her as quickly as possible.
Those two could never meet.
6
Jameson
“I probably could have handled that better.”
I was mumbling to myself as I got ready for our dinner over at Lily-Marie’s house on Wednesday night. Nodding to myself in the full-length mirror, I eyed the new jeans I’d bought for the occasion, feeling like my reflection was a stranger. I couldn’t remember the last time I wore jeans or had an easygoing conversation with a woman.
As soon as Lily-Marie shut the door in my face on Sunday, I’d gone back to my house and berated myself for my lack of social skills. I’d been elbow deep into my lecture planning for microbiology when she rang my doorbell. I’d gone from fungal pathogenesis to staring at Lily-Marie’s beautiful face, her long hair up in a bun with strands escaping to frame her face perfectly. Could anyone blame me for stuttering and stammering like a mute middle schooler in the presence of a blond angel?
By the time I’d reengaged my brain, she was gone, off to bake pies at her place. The list specifically said not to be a bookworm and I’d failed that task miserably. Then I remembered another item on the list and how it encouraged men to do nice things. Unexpected things. So I dug through my kitchen boxes until I found my grandmother’s pie cutter I’d never had the occasion to use but still schlepped around from house to house. It was time to redeem myself.
That second conversation should have gone so much better. I was prepared with my nice gesture and I’d gotten out all my awkwardness in the first conversation. I even remembered to lead with a smile. But then she’d said something about single men at work eating her pies and my brain had taken the ride with my stomach when it dropped down to my feet. I didn’t want these coworkers eating her pie or anything else.Iwanted her pie.
Or, I wanted her to at least offer me her pie. I didn’t even really like pie, but the offer would have been nice. You know. For the sake of my experiment.
My grandmother had written her list of fifty ways with a more natural conversationalist in mind, I was sure. It wasn’t her fault the list wasn’t working; it was mine. And tonight was my opportunity to get it right. I owed it to the entire field of science to really give this experiment a fair try. My bumbling beginnings could be smoothed over as quickly as tonight when we had dinner at her place.
I had on my favorite forest green sweater over a tan striped collared shirt. My hair was actually cooperating and my shoes had undergone a fresh buffing that morning. I even dug out my trusty bottle of cologne from a box of toiletries I hadn’t gotten around to unpacking yet. I said trusty, but I didn’t know that I’d ever relied on it to do anything more than make me smell like an Abercrombie model. I didn’t look like one, but maybe I could smell like one and, as such, catch the olfactory senses of a beautiful lady. From there, it was up to my conversational skills to keep her head turned my way. And those were definitelynottrusty.
“Dad!” Stein skidded into my room, his socks sliding along the wooden floor. “Can I wear my favorite T-shirt?”
I loved that boy with all my heart, but he had zero fashion sense. Which, coming from me, said quite a bit. His favorite T-shirt was from three years and ten growth spurts ago. It was snug, to say the least, causing his arms to jut out at a ninety-degree angle from his body.
Tilting my head, I tried to come up with placating words that wouldn’t send him stomping to his room with hurt feelings while I also wondered why that shirt hadn’t gotten “lost” in the move. That had been the fate of a few other items and I was disappointed in myself that I’d missed that one.
“When meeting new friends for the first time, you should always put your best foot forward. Now, that is a really nice shirt, but something a little newer might be a better choice for tonight.” There. That was nice.
