Page 48 of No More Hiding
They’d been on three dates if she counted the dinner at her house and she was. Her plan was to have him and Sammie over this weekend too for date number four. With any luck Sammie could entertain herself while she and Brent went to her room.
She knew she tended to plan things down to the last move and had to chill out and let this happen though.
Hadn’t she said she liked to be in control? That too many times the wheel was taken out of your hand?
Well, she had a firm grip on it now.
She texted she could talk and waited for him to call and break some kind of news to her. Maybe she wouldn’t be seeing him naked after all.
“Hi,” she said, answering on the first ring. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Just checking. Most times when someone asks if you can talk—especially from a person that doesn’t like to talk—it’s not normally good news.”
“You might not think this is either.”
She pulled the stool out and sat at her counter and prepared herself. “What’s going on?”
“My mother wants us to go to her house for a Labor Day cookout on Monday.”
“Okay,” she said.
“You’re okay with that?”
“I don’t know. I think I was expecting something much more dramatic. Is that the reason for this call? Don’t you get along well with your family?”
“I do. Or I did before she put me on the spot over this weekend,” he said drily.
She laughed. “I don’t have a problem going if you want to. If you don’t want me to, then tell me and make some excuse.”
“I’m not going without you. Now she knows about you and that’d be much worse if I showed up alone.”
She shook her head. “I’m trying not to get confused here, but I am.”
“Sorry. As my mother said, I’m thirty-five and she isn’t sure the last time I brought a girlfriend home. I’m positive she was dancing around her office while she was talking to me.”
“Wow. You’re old.”
“Not funny.”
“It was a little funny. I suppose we should know a few things like that if I’m going to meet your parents.”
“How old are you? You are legal right? Oh wait, you weren’t carded for a drink, so you have to be over twenty-one. Unless you broke the law? Did you break the law?”
Even when he was stressed he still made her laugh. “No to breaking the law. I’m twenty-nine. The big three-oh is looming faster than I’d like.”
“Phew. Good. My mother thinks you’re a saint so she wouldn’t care as long as you weren’t jail bait.”
She burst out laughing. “You’re on point tonight. Are you really upset or nervous about this?”
“No. It’s more that, as she said, I haven’t brought a girlfriend home in years.”
“A girlfriend,” she said. “Is that what I am?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “By my mother’s classification you are.”
“And what is that?”