She nodded.“I’m trying not to offend you.Or worse, insult you.I know you’re a grown-ass woman.I’m only two years older than you.I don’t even know if my concerns are valid.I just think this is ripe for misunderstanding.What if one of you catches the feels?”
“Both of us have already caught the feels.That’s why we aren’t just screwing.”
She let me go and backed off verbally too.“Okay.It does sound like your eyes are open.”
I wanted to say,That’s because they are.
But I was shook.
Abigail was not like my take-no-shit, tell-it-like-it-is Mona.She was also not like my I-took-off-the-rose-colored-glasses-and-crushed-them-under-my-own-boot, all-men-are-dicks friend Kacey.
She and Brett had been married for five years.
She was a wife, a mother, a store manager.She’d been a stay-at-home mom, then she’d put Emma in preschool because she realized she was losing hold on herself and the woman she was, not to mention the wife she was, to become nothing but a mom (yeah, we broke the friendship seal so it all spilled, she knew about Bryce and my name change too, though she didn’t know about my uncle, my mom or the man who sired me…yet).
She had it going on, and shewaswise.
She liked to attribute that to being a mom.
But I knew it was just Abigail.
She drifted away from the counter, and I looked to the door Nadia, Cicely and Lillian just walked through.
Did sexy friends go have dinner or babysit together for one of the friend’s friends’ baby?
No.
Yes.
No.
But…in Hutch and my case…yes.
He was Hutch.It wasn’t lost on me that he could easily find another woman, a good woman, and I didn’t have my head buried in the sand.That would hurt.It would even kill.
One thing I knew, I’d survive.
Another thing I knew, I wouldn’t survive not having Hutch in my life.
If I could grow up the way I grew up…
If I could get bounced to the nightmare that was the years I spent with my uncle and aunt…
Then bounced back to live with a mom who seemed unable to grasp that the gravy train had left her behind, and she thought she could live in a woo-woo land of crystals, pot, patchouli and acid trips, only to learn in the worst way she couldn’t…
And finally endure the outing of my fiancé being married with children.
If I could survive all of that.
I could survive making a friend of Hutch’s woman if he moved on from me.
If it meant I didn’t lose Hutch.
In fact, I was coming to learn I’d do just about anything.
If it meant I didn’t lose Hutch.
TWENTY-THREE
