I crawl into bed as though my sleep-warmed sheets can hide me. Click out of FlingIt and shove my phone under my pillow, muffling a groan with my hands.
Why am I so bad at this?
Because you haven’t tried.
Not really. We’ve been talking for a hot minute now. Surely I’ll get better?
Hope, curiosity, and shameless attraction have me retrieving my phone. Three messages—no,fourwait for me, and I read them so fast I have to go back to the start and read them again.
HotCraic97:We = you & me…
HotCraic97:Unless you’d want to invite someone else along?
HotCraic97:Hypothetically speaking
HotCraic97:Or not…ignore me. I get chatty when I’m tired xx
I feel that. Iamthat, if the rambling I treat Tam and Bhodi to on a regular basis counts for anything. And I’m here for chatty Galen, at least until Esme wakes up, if I can only wrap my head around what he’s saying.
LeLionDuBois96:I don’t know anyone to invite for…whatever we’re hypothetically talking about
HotCraic97:Not yet. That’s why you’re here, right? On this app?
I suppose so. Though it’s hard to remember I’m on FlingIt for any reason more thanhetold me to be.
LeLionDuBois96:I don’t know if I’ll ever find the nerve to meet anyone
HotCraic97:Do you want to?
Do I?
The evidence saysno. I have eighty-three unread messages in my inbox on this app, a bunch in the one I was browsing the night Galen caught me in my van, and I’ve ghosted anyone who’s ever pressed too hard for a meet. But what else am I going to do? Die wondering how it feels to wrap my legs around a man and?—
“Papa!”
I jump out of my skin, guilt and shame swamping me as I toss my phone aside and roll out of bed so fast I trip over my clumsy feet and stub my toe.
“Putain de merde!”
I hop across the landing to Esme’s room. She’s already sitting on the bean bag chair I got for her birthday, pulling books from the box under her bed.
“Storytime!”
“Before breakfast?” I crouch, my giant body dwarfing hers in ways that makes my heart clench and remind me she used to live in a world where Roidy Dwayne paid regular visits. “How’s your brain going to work without croissants, mon petit cœur?”
Croissants I now have in abundance thanks to our shopping expedition yesterday, but Esme doesn’t much care. She wants to read the Christmas books I bought in July and I live to make her happy, so we sit and do just that until the growling in my belly starts to frighten her.
“Bear in there.” She pokes my stomach. “Un ours,” she repeats in perfect French.
“Clever girl.” I kiss the dark waves on her head that make her look like Tam. “Can we eat now?”
She’s not that fussed until I break out the Nutella. Then she’s all in, and we eat in the living room, on the couch, which turns out to be the stupidest idea I’ve had for a while.
Croissant crumbs.
Brown stains that look a hell of a lot like something else.
With Esme bombing around on a sugar high, it takes me a while to clean up, and it’s probably the first time in the last week or so I forget Galen exists. It’s afternoon when I chase Esme into the garden and catch a flash of auburn hair in his kitchen window.
