“Miss Vivian, can you show me how to use a tampon tomorrow before my swim practice?”
I choked on my glass of water. “Uh, I’ve never reallyshownsomeone that. Maybe try reading the directions first and then call me if you have any trouble?”
Please don’t have trouble. Please don’t have trouble. Please don’t have trouble.
I held my breath, fearing the girl would ask for more hands-on instructions, but she shrugged and said, “Okay,” before taking a pad from the box and running upstairs.
“I also got these,” Parker said softly, holding up two chocolate bars.
“Oh, good call!” I said. “Mind if I take a picture and make a video about this?”
“About chocolate? Uh, sure? I guess?”
“No, about your adventures in the feminine-hygiene aisle.”
He didn’t say anything, and I could tell that he wasn’t pleased with the idea. “Well,” I continued, “I was just telling Cassidy about how some men would never do this in a million years, and I thought it might be important.”
Parker blinked. “Why wouldn’t men do this?”
My heart did a funny flip-flop.
Where wasthisman back in the late ’90s?
Middle school, you cradle robber.
And that was the image I needed. I may have picked the wrong man as my husband, but developing a crush on my neighbor would be a very stupid thing to do.
Stop it. No crushes. You have got to divorce Mitch and get your own head screwed on straight before you can even think about other men, especially not this one who is younger than you are and comes with a teen daughter who might not be keen on you as a stepmother.
“Seriously. What other men wouldn’t do this for their own daughter or wife?”
“You’d be surprised,” I said, my words tasting more bitter than I would’ve liked.
Parker shrugged. “In that case, take a picture or a video or whatever.”
I couldn’t bring myself to make another video, so I took some pictures that I could put into a video later. “How about I take a couple of pictures and don’t mention you by name.”
“That sounds better,” he said, his cautious tone betraying the breezy words. “And leave Cassidy out of this one.”
“Of course!”
I took a few pictures of Parker with the pads, tampons, and chocolate. I could easily crop the images so that only his torso and ridiculously attractive forearms showed.
Vivian, seriously.
Mind you, anyone who’d watched the video about the dress would quickly put two and two together, but no one was watching the video about the dress. Views of my viral video had leveled off, so I could be relatively certain that my fifteen minutes of fame had come to an end.
“Oh! Before you go,” Parker was saying as he put the remaining pads and tampons on the coffee table, “I got us both coffee.”
“You brought me coffee?” I asked with a tone of voice better suited to asking him if he’d finally brought me the pony I asked Santa for back in third grade.
“Well, yeah. It sounded like I woke you up. Let me go get it from the car,” he said before heading back to the garage.
Dammit, coffee was one of my love languages.
Fine. You can have a crush, Vivian, but you absolutely cannot do anything about it because it wouldn’t be fair to you or to him, and he’s probably just being nice anyway.
But he returned with two cups from the Bucks, and I couldn’t help but give a contented sigh after the first sip and wonder what my life would’ve been like if I’d waited until I found a man who bought tampons and brought coffee.
