“Wow,” I said. “That was… a hell of a talk.”
It was meant as a joke.Haha. A kind ofholy shit, I just had sex with my husband, what does this mean?icebreaker… not that, you know, anyone else in the universe felt this level of unease about sleeping with their spouse.
But Gideon looked at me and nodded once, like I’d confirmed something I totally hadnotmeant to confirm. He gave me a lopsided smile and reached out a finger to brush my cheek. “You have a good night, Liam. I’ll see you in the morning.”
And then he walked out the door and left me shivering and cold.
Chapter Seven
Liam
Gideon pulledhis truck into a spot a few doors down from the bakery Friday morning with a giant smile on his face, and I resisted the urge to scowl in response.
The phone in my pocket had pinged with a text as soon as I’d put the Volvo in park a minute ago, but I hadn’t checked it. It could have been my mother, still awake in California and sending me some article about how children needed to listen to organic tantric goat sounds, but also telling me she wouldn’t be coming for Christmas. It could possibly have been my editor checking to see whether I really needed threefulldays off, like that was the kind of thing a person joked about. Either way, not something I felt equipped to deal with that morning. My car was low on gas, my body was low on caffeine, and I was very,verylow on patience.
Hazel ran over to Gideon’s truck the second he’d parked and started chattering to him in a light, happy voice, like they’d been separated for years instead of mere minutes, and he rumbled something in response.
Theyseemed to be in afinemood. Gideon seemed lit-up from the inside out, his golden-brown eyes shining like he’d had a delightful orgasm the night before followed by eight solid hours of rest, and tiny fucking fairies had come to wake him from slumber, sprinkling him with just a littleextrasexy-dust today. Meanwhile, Hazel hadn’t stopped talking about how she was going to eat “a mountain of frosting, oh my gosh!”and reminding me that she’d spent the night cuddling with an “actual, real, livecat, Daddy!”
I rolled my eyes. It didn’t take a psychic to predict the hot topic on the ride home, and I was planning to launch an offensive Kiddie Bop attack before we’d even reached the O’Leary border. Painful as that might be, at least with Kiddie Bop I wouldn’t be scooping kitty litter for the rest of my natural life.
Bah fucking humbug.
I slid my phone from my pocket finally and frowned down at the screen.
Scott: Morning, sunshine. Will you be home in time to meet for drinks tonight?
I frowned harder. Was he kidding?
There were three things wrong with this text.
One, since when did Scott and I meet for drinks? Maybe I’d binged too muchSex and the Citywith Livia back in the day, but coffee consumed during the day near your office was one thing, and meeting for drinks on a Friday evening, outside my normally scheduled babysitter times, was something else entirely. If I’d had a Carrie or a Samantha in my life, I’d have called to discuss, but the closest I had was my sister, and I was too tired to do the math on what time it was in Ulaanbaatar.
Second, and continuing in the same vein, since when the fuck was I “sunshine”? Was I reading too much meaning into a single word in a single text? Or had I not been reading enough meaning into all the words in all the texts up to now? Or did it only matter because I’d had my dick in Gideon’s mouth a matter of hours ago, and the idea of being Scott’ssunshinefelt extra-specially wrong?
Third, while it was technically morning, I personally ascribed to the belief that if you hadn’t closed your eyes the night before, it was still one very long, very bright night, and Scott’s perkiness offended me on a deep, personal level.
“Daddy! Hurryup!”Hazel called from halfway down the block, where she was walking with her little hand in Gideon’s larger one, their arms swinging in a way that would have been adorable if it wasn’tfreaking me out.
Then again, everything was low-key freaking me out. First and foremost: the way I could still feel the heat of Gideon’s body pressed against mine, despite the chill in the air. See also: the way I’d tossed and turned all night, pissed at myself for falling back into something with Gideon, even though it was no more responsible now than it had been five years ago, and probably even less so.
What if he got the wrong idea and thought us being…intimate… meant we were back to beingtogether? What if he decided to contest the divorce, or fuck around with finances, or bring upHazel?
And no, okay, if I was being real, I didn’t think there was any way in the world that Gideon was going to make Hazel’s life difficult even if hedidget the wrong idea, but… the whole point of being a parent was that you didn’t take chances with shit like that.
And yet, here I was.
I blew out a breath and slid my phone back into my pocket without replying. Scott could wait until I’d had enough coffee to make sense of my life.
Gideon held the door open for me and winked when I passed him, which hit my stomach like a bolt of adrenaline, the same way the scents of vanilla and butter and cinnamon hit me as soon as I stepped inside.
The bakery wasmobbed—Cal, Ash, and a curly-haired woman I hadn’t met the day before were working behind the counter with a coordination that almost seemed choreographed, and at least twenty people stood in line, all talking, chatting, and laughing amongst themselves. But nobody was pushing, tapping their foot impatiently, staring at their phone, or huffing. In fact, there weremaybetwo people on cell phones in the whole place, whereas at least a dozen people were wearing Santa hats, and what kind of Narnia was this where the ratio of cell phones to Santa hats was that low?
Even more miraculously, Cal spotted the three of us standing by the door, stopped what he was doing, andwaved.
“Liam! Gideon!Hazel!Have a seat!” He pointed to the one empty table in the place.
“Don’t we have to order?” I whispered to Gideon. “And, like,pay?”
