“What is it doing in the sink?” Her hands land on her hips.
He shrugs.
“We do not put things down the drain. Is that clear, Tucker?”
He nods.
“I can’t hear you.”
“Yes, Mommy.”
“Okay, then. Go on.”
When he runs off, I wipe the car off with a rag, grab a tissue, and hand the car wrapped in the tissue over to Heather. “You might want to run that through the dishwasher.”
She makes a face when she takes it from me. “Definitely.”
I reattach the pipe and blast the water. It drains perfectly. “There you go. Good as new.”
“Thank you so much, Cody. Really.”
I squirt some soap into my hands and wash up. “It was no big deal, and hey, don’t be too hard on the kid. You wouldn’t believe what little boys can get into. I remember putting an entire bucket of army men down the garbage disposal.”
“What happened?”
“I was grounded for a week.”
She passes me the hand towel. “Raising boys is definitely an adventure.”
I grin, drying off. “Yep.”
She leads the way back to the living room. I scan her bedroom again as we pass through and notice the bottle of perfume on the dresser. It has a distinctive bottle shape of a high heel, and I tuck the knowledge away, hoping to remember it later.
“Hey, buddy. Ready to go throw that ball around?”
“Yay!” He jumps up and down. “Can I, Mommy?”
“Yes, baby.”
The three of us ride down in the elevator, and I drink in Heather’s perfume. It’s light and fruity, like pink grapefruit, and I’m instantly addicted.
I long to pull her body against mine, bury my face in her nape and breathe it in. Thoughts of elevator sex fill my brain, but I content myself with just looking at her.
Tucker is jumping up and down excitedly, and I can’t help grinning.
We find a grassy area at the back of the parking lot, and I squat, showing him how to hold his mitt.
“Keep your hand up like this and I’ll throw it to you, okay?”
I only step about three feet away and toss it into his mitt.
It falls to the ground. We keep at it until he learns to close the mitt around the ball, then I move back a few feet more, and soon he’s actually catching it.
“Now you try throwing to me.” I show him the proper technique and back up a few feet. His throw bounces on the ground, then on the next one goes over my head.
“We’ll have to work on dialing that in, buddy.”
We toss the ball for about an hour before Heather calls an end to it.
