Midway through dinner, Daphne and I excuse ourselves to the kitchen under the guise of getting seconds. “Are the kids sick?” I murmur to her as we huddle in the kitchen beside the screen door, secretly spying on the men to see what they’ll say while we’re gone.
“You’re asking the wrong person. I know nothing about kids.”
“Hudson was only a little older when you moved in with us.”
“Yeah, and we hung out. I didn’t do the parenting.”
“You drove him to guitar lessons and took him to the pool in the summer when you were off.”
“Bea. You had toteach me to drivebefore I could take him places.”
“You knew how to drive. You just didn’t know how to do it without getting speeding tickets.”
She ignores me. “I didn’t parent. I helped to express my gratitude for your patience with the extra hot mess you took in to raise too.”
I roll my eyes.
She rolls her eyes back.
Her eye roll is decidedly more pointed.
Not the first time we’ve had this conversation, and it likely won’t be the last. “You know you saved my sanity?” I say to her.
“You saved my whole fucking life.”
I give her a shoulder-squeeze hug.
The men are discussing the farm. The minute anyone stops grilling Simon, he asks a question of his own about how Ryker runs things out here. They’ve covered the goats, the chickens, the honeybees, the greenhouse, the barn, how the CSA operates, how old the farmhouse is, and a few other things I can’t specifically remember now.
“I’m done doing parenting,” I murmur as I glance at Simon’s boys again.
Charlie’s in a hoodie despite the temperatures, though he doesn’t have the hood up, and Eddie keeps looking at his plate like he wants to eat, but won’t.
“I’d do it,” Daphne says. “Maybe. One day. With my own. If I get enough therapy to overcome my own childhood.”
“You don’t think they’re refusing to eat to make some kind of statement about me and Simon dating-not-dating, do you?” I ask her.
“Psh. You’re not looking for long-term. He can tell his kids that.”
“You know that. I know that. Simon knows that. But still—his kids aren’t eating. And they usually eat everything.”
“Ooh, you’re nervous. Like youlike himnervous.”
“Am not.”
Okay, I am. But what he did to me in my bus—of course I like him.
Wouldn’t mind a little more of that.
Yep.
It’s all physical.
Nothing at all to do with how much watching him smile now makes me want to smile too.
“It’s okay to be nervous around a guy you like, Bea,” Daph says. “He’s hot, he’s funny, and I think he really is that happy all of the time. That’s good for you.”
“So you’re Team Simon now?”
