“I want you to tell me what you want for your birthday. What have you been asking me for since September?” Charlotte asks her.
A wide grin unfurls across Lana’s lips while her thoughts of her shitty dad melt away. “Ummm, a bike?” she squeals.
“Lance, could you grab Lana’s gift?” Charlotte had asked me to help her with the bike and I obviously said yes but when she never followed up, I assumed she went in a different direction. Now, I realize, she just had Lance-a-lot help her.Douche.
“Sure, babe.”Is that all he says?
Lance stands up, pressing his chest out to make a show of it, and groans as he pulls his chair away from the table. He points a finger at Lana and winks. “Wait until you see this, little girl.”That doesn’t sound creepy at all.
Lance slips out the front door and returns a minute later carrying a turquoise bike with a big hot pink ribbon on the handle bar. Lana lets out a shriek that could be confused for a pterodactyl screaming.
Olive looks excited for Lana because I just bought her a bike for her birthday, too, and the two girls have many plans to go bike riding all summer.
“Sweet ride, kid,” AJ says in his tough guy voice. “How many different speeds you got on that thing?”
Charlotte thwacks AJ in the chest, forcing him to choke with laughter. “Do you like it, sweetie?”
“I love this so much, mommy!” Lana croons. With her arms flung around Charlotte’s chest and Charlotte’s head resting over hers, my heart warms up from the past hour of coldness. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” Lana releases her arms from Charlotte and hops over to Lance, giving him the same hug. And that hurts me. It shouldn’t. I’m not her father and I’m not her mother’s boyfriend, I’m only the person she is staying with right now. But I love her, regardless.
“Olive, you should go get Lana’s gift now,” I tell her.
“Yay!” Olive shouts while skipping up the steps. I hear her wrestling with the wrapped package in her bedroom before she returns.
“What is it? What is it?” Lana asks, gleefully.
“Two-way radios!” Olive spills the beans before Lana can open the gift but it doesn’t seem to take away from the excitement. The two girls have been asking for these for the last couple of months so I thought it might be a nice gift.
After the gifts are opened and the girls have settled back down, we’re digging into our cold dinner. Everyone seems content for the moment so I think we’re all okay right now.
I scrape up my plate first, looking up at Charlotte just because she’s sitting across from me. I catch her looking back at me with a small, almost unrecognizable grin. AJ, Ari, and Lance are all caught up in a conversation about flowers and Ari’s shop, the girls are in the living room playing with their radios and Charlotte and I are lost in a staring contest. “I never wanted to cause you any more pain, Hunt,” she says softly. “When you first told me Ellie’s full name, I did put two and two together but with the amount of pain I saw in your eyes after so many years had passed, I didn’t see the purpose of telling you who my ex-husband was. I wasn’t withholding the information for any reason other than not causing you more stress.”
I want to reach across the table and take her hand but that would be inappropriate right now. I believe what she’s saying. “I know,” I tell her.
“This town is so small it’s hard not to come across someone who you haven’t had some degree of connection with.”
“Oh,” I laugh, “I know.”
I stand up from the table and collect as many plates as I can hold at once. Charlotte does the same on her side of the table and we meet in the kitchen.
“This all feels wrong,” she says to me, once behind the wall between the kitchen and dining room.
“What does?”
“This whole situation tonight. I don’t like Lance and I think I’ve come to realize that I need to fix some algorithms on my dating site because it matched us together.” She looks somewhat embarrassed, and yet, humored at the same time.
“Yeah, you might want to get on that,” I say, placing my hand on her shoulder. Charlotte looks over at my hand as if it is strange for me to be touching her at all. Which it is, once again, considering our current status.
“Are things still in limbo with you and Ari?” she asks.
I close my eyes briefly, unsure how to respond. “Yeah, pretty much. But she has Ellie’s heart. I’m in love with that heart and I don’t know if it has anything to do with Ari but I’m in no shape to push her away after wondering who she was for so long.”
Charlotte places her hands on the outsides of my arms and looks up at me. “I get it,” she says, her eyes squinting slightly with the sense of understanding. “I really, really get it.”
“You do?”
“Yes, just be fair toyourheart too, Hunt.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
