“Okay, that might be a stretch. But he wasn’t too bad by the end of the day.”
The sight of her leaning against the doorframe, a sharp curve from wide hips to a narrow waist, makes my head go empty. Whether it’s the sun or her piercing eyes that have me suddenly hot all over remains to be seen.
Whit grips the edge of the door like she’s more than ready to close it and put an end to my ogling. “I’ll mention it to him, but I’m pretty confident he thought today was a cruel and unusual punishment. Thank you again for making sure he got back in one piece, though.”
Whit
“Morning.” Blair’s raspy voice traverses the main floor shortly after seven a.m.
“Jonas!” I shout toward the ceiling, dragging my barely awake body from the couch while cradling a mug of life-sustaining elixir. “Auntie’s here.”
Nothing.
“Sorry, I forgot you said you had to come early today. Want some coffee while—” I shuffle toward the kitchen to find Blair already popping a coffee pod into the Nespresso machine, and my attention returns to my son. “Jonas!”
After another minute of utter silence, I make my way to his room, stepping in close to the thin paneled door and rapping my knuckles across it. I call his name out again, expecting a snarky response about how I need to exercise patience. There’s nothing he loves more than taking my canned “gentle parenting” phrases and throwing them back in my face.
When there’sstillno sign of life, I swallow hard and give a firm knock before pushing his door open. “Jonas?”
In yesterday’s clothes, Jonas is sprawled like a starfish across the top of his bed, chest rising and falling with the gentle wave of deep slumber. His soft snores are reminiscent of when he was a baby sleeping on my chest. Warm and snuggly, making tiny snuffling noises against my bare skin. I hold on to the memory like it still fits in my arms.
He’s right here. And I miss him.
I can’t help myself—my socked feet glide silently across the floor, until I’m reaching out to sweep the hair covering his forehead so I can plant a light kiss on my baby boy.
He mumbles something nonsensical through chapped lips, drool dried to his cheek.
“Morning, kiddo. Time to get up and go with Auntie B,” I say softly, raking my hand through his hair. “She’s downstairs waiting.”
After a minute of grumbling and groaning and acting too much like a sullen teenager for my liking, he peels his body from the mattress and shuffles toward the dresser. When I feel confident enough that he won’t flop back down, I head downstairs.
“Sorry,” I say to Blair, joining her at the kitchen table and picking up my white mug labeledMama. “It’s a fight to get him out of bed in the morning. Seems we’ve reached the teenager phase early.”
“Phase? You’restilllike that.”
I laugh. “Fair point. He’s been permanently exhausted since he went to the ranch the other day. I think he was asleep by seven o’clock last night…. Hope he’s not getting sick.”
“Did he have fun?”
“When I asked him, his answer was a grunt. Which is too bad because Colt said he was welcome back anytime.”
I knew Jonas wouldn’t enjoy hard manual labor from the moment Denny called me to ask, but I said yes because Denny was trying to take some weight off Blair’s shoulders. As somebody who, admittedly, asks a lot of my sister, I jumped at the opportunity to ease her load.
In theory, I can work from home and keep Jonas here with me. He’s ten. It’s not like he’ll toss himself over a balcony railing if I take my eyes off him for a second. But given the opportunity, he’d play video games for fifteen hours straight, day in and day out, all summer long. And mom-guilt eats me alivewhen he does that for more than a single day. So I bear the shame that comes with asking my family to babysit, telling myself it’ll be beneficial for him in the long run. But damn it, I wish I could afford a nanny. I wish I had a reliable baby daddy. And though it pains me to admit it, sometimes I wish I had an easier kid.
“Colt’s a sweet guy,” Blair muses into her coffee.
“Colt was…” I search for something nice to say about the man who showed up wearing an incredibly offensive T-shirt and bumbled his way through convincing me he was a responsible adult. “He got Jonas home in one piece.”
Just then, Jonas appears at the top of the staircase, thudding his way down each step with a resounding yawn.
“Morning, sunshine,” Blair sings. “Hurry up and eat. We’ve got places to be.”
“Mornin’.” He makes his way to the pantry to grab a box of cereal, then grabs a bowl and spoon and stumbles toward the fridge for milk. He may as well be a sloth in a zoo, the way Blair and I are intently watching every painfully slow movement.
Loose cereal topples over the lip of his bowl, littering the counter, and some of his milk doesn’t quite make it where it’s meant to go. If I don’t find a way to ignore it, I might actually lose my mind, and then he’ll only move slower.If that’s humanly possible.
Averting my eyes before I have a conniption, I ask, “Anyway, how’s Mom?”
