“Get it dry cleaned,” she suggests. “It’s my favorite dress. Although it’s doing more for your boobs.” She looks down at her chest and sighs heavily. “Forever flat-chested. I was so sure I’d grow into them in high school.”
I laugh as she heads out and then grab my bag and lock the apartment before heading downstairs as well.
The evening air hits me as I push through the building door, cool and carrying the faint smell of pine from the mountain range sitting behind the city. I’m calculating the bus route in my head, timing it, when a car rolls up to the curb and stops.
I look up.
It’s Grayson’s car. The window is already down, and there he is, one arm resting on the door. In the passenger seat, bouncing slightly with his seatbelt already half twisted around him, is Ethan.
“Miranda!” Ethan shouts, waving both arms.
Grayson says nothing. He just looks at me, and then his gaze drops, slow and very deliberate, and travels the full length of the blue dress.
When those amber eyes come back up to my face, something in them has changed.
“What are you doing here?” I ask with a frown.
“Miranda!” Not wanting to be ignored, Ethan has clambered clean across Grayson’s lap to get his head out the driver’s window, both arms waving. Grayson looks like a man who has fully accepted this as his life.
“Come to dinner with us! Dad said we could go get burgers!”
“Ethan.” Grayson’s hand comes up to grip the back of his son’s shirt, less out of irritation and more, it seems, to stop him from falling out entirely. “Seatbelt.”
Ethan ignores this completely.
I step toward the window. “Hey, Ethan. I can’t tonight, okay? We’ll do dinner another time, I promise.”
His face falls completely. Four-year-olds have no interest in subtlety. “But why?”
“Because she has somewhere to be.” Grayson’s voice is calm, but his eyes are narrowed. He’s looking at me over the top of his son’s head, and his eyes haven’t moved. Not once. “Where are you going dressed like that?”
I look at him. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
“I don’t think I like your tone.” I cross my arms over my chest.
“I don’t think I like the dress.”
The audacity. I stare at him. He stares back, and there is something simmering behind those amber eyes that makes my mouth dry, not that I’m going to let him know that.
“I have a date,” I say because clearly bluntness is the only language available to us.
Something shifts in his jaw. Subtle, barely a flicker, but I catch it.
“With who?” he demands.
“None of your business,” I say with great relish. Sometimes it feels nice to have the upper hand.
“Miranda.”
“Grayson.” I say his name back at the exact same pitch. I lean toward the window and press a quick kiss to Ethan’s cheek. He grabs my face with both hands, the way children do, completely unselfconscious about it, like they have every right to you.
“We’ll do the burger place soon,” I tell him. “I promise.”
He makes a sound of protest. “But—”
“I really can’t today, Ethan.” I gently detach his hands and squeeze them.
