Page 43 of For The Weekend
“Yeah.” I huff a sort of laugh.
“Not many spots left.”
“Lucky you already have one,” I say, and she agrees, dragging her thumb back and forth over my knuckles.
“So you haven’t talked to your dad at all?” she asks, and when I shake my head, she quirks her brow, thinking for a second. “None of you have?” I shrug as she tips her head to the side. “None of you care to find out about him? He’s your dad.”
“So? He’s our dad, but that doesn’t automatically make him worthy of our respect. Is that why you let your mom talk down to you?”
I know I’ve made a mistake the moment she rips her hand away from mine, and I lean forward.
“I’m sorry, Eloise. I shouldn’t have said that.”
She bites into her lip, and I’m about to apologize again when the server sets down our food. I thank her then turn back to my date. Her green eyes have a glassy sheen.Fuck me.
“I’m so sorry, sunshine. I’m an asshole. Please, don’t?—”
“You’re right,” she interrupts, barely a whisper, and I nearly dive across the table to hear it. “I don’t know how to talk to her. I don’t know what to say to any of them. I’m not a confrontational person, and I don’t…” She peers up at me with watery eyes, and yeah, I might commit a felony.
“Don’t cry. It kills me to see you cry.”
She blinks a few times and dabs at the corners of her eyes with her napkin before sniffling and taking a gulp of her iced tea. “I’m thirty years old, and I don’t know how to tell my mother that she hurts my feelings. It’s pathetic, right? I’m pathetic.”
“You’re not pathetic.” It’s her mother who’s pathetic. Everyone else in her life who’s ever made her feel this way. When she still doesn’t brighten, I make an attempt. “I don’t think I’ve ever talked this much in my life at one time. Might have said more words to you tonight than I have all year.”
“Yeah?”
When I nod, she smiles, and I breathe a sigh of relief, gesturing for her to eat. She picks up her fork to stab a few vegetables next to her salmon. I dig into my steak frites, and we eat silently for a few minutes before she asks me to go on. “So, how’d you end up here?”
“Mazie.”
“You moved back for Mazie?”
I swallow a bite of food and wipe my mouth, using the time to consider how much I should tell her about Amy, if anything at all. It’s been so nice talking about all of this with Eloise, but I feel like that might be a step in the wrong direction. “When I found out I was having a child, it was like a switch was flipped inside me. All the years of falling into and out of sobriety, it all suddenly coalesced. I thought about my mom and how much I loved her. I knew I could never be as perfect as she was, but I needed to try. So I spent the last few years trying to give Mazie the kind of life my mother gave me, but I needed my family to do it, so…”
“So here you are,” Eloise fills in, grinning like she’s actually proud of me.
“Here I am,” Irepeat.
“With me.”
“With you,” I confirm, and she takes a deep breath that I feel in my lungs too.
It’s as if my whole life has led up to this moment, to this woman, the opportunity to make her happy, win her smiles, and, if given the chance, protect her from anything that might hurt her.
So that makes it all worth it. That I can be the man here with her.
While we finish our dinner and a shared creme brûlée for dessert, she takes over the conversation, telling me more about Sloane, and Eloise’s theory about how every relationship—romantic or platonic—has to have a grumpy or sunshine person. I don’t get it, but then she points out that I’m her grumpy, and I like that, so I don’t argue.
Anytime I can be her anything is okay with me.
I pay the bill, even though she tries to argue, but quiets when I grumble her name, and we walk out of Tabby Cat with my hand on her lower back. At my SUV, she waits for me to open the door for her, but before I close it, she holds out her hand. “We never got to talk about the rules.”
“The rules?”
“About…touching or kissing,” she finishes, cheeks flaming.
“You can touch me anywhere,” I say without hesitation, and she giggles. I take her hand in mine and put it on the center of my chest then let my hand fall to my side, testing her. Seeing what she’ll do.
