Page 24 of Tanner's Forever
“Are you sure?” She looks worried. “I just didn’t get the chance to grocery shop this week.
“Erin, it’s not a big deal,” I tell her. “Normally, I’m living out of a take-out sack, so anything you want to cook sounds just fine with me.”
“Wow,” she says, looking more than a little surprised.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing. It’s just that if I ever tried to feed my ex-husband dino nuggets and mac and cheese, I never would have heard the end of it. He would have thrown it in the trash right in front of me.”
I’m tempted to ask who the fuck she was married to, but I don’t want to overstep any boundaries.
So, I just say, “Believe me when I say that if you are willing to take the time to make me something to eat, I’m not going to be ungrateful enough to complain.”
She gives me a smile and asks if I want something to drink.
“Sure.”
She opens the fridge and stares inside for a moment before handing me a bottle of water. “Man, I really need to go grocery shopping. Pretty soon, the kids will start rioting.”
“Eh, I’m sure running around after three kids occupies most of your time.”
“You have no idea. They’re a handful.” She quickly realizes what she said could be taken the wrong way and adds, “Not that I’m complaining. I mean, I love being a mom.”
“I have no doubt that you are great mom.”
“What makes you say that?” She asks. “You don’t really know me.”
She’s right. I don’t. But as I slowly start to learn more, I’m liking all of it.
“True. But the fact that you worry about if you’re a good mom means that you probably are.”
She gives me a small smile. “I guess so.” As she arranges the dino nuggets on a cookie sheet, she changes the subject. “So, you said you have a job where you travel a lot?”
“Yeah, I do flooring for commercial buildings. Mostly supermarkets and things like that. I’m usually gone for a week or two at a time.”
“Have you gone anywhere cool?”
My shoulders shrug. “Depends on what you consider cool. Mostly, my work is all around Texas, Arkansas, and Arizona. I’ve been to California a couple of times. The beach was nice, but I was working too much to enjoy it.”
She gets some water boiling for the macaroni. “Traveling that much has got to be hard.”
“Eh, it can be. It used to really fuck with my sleep, but over the years, I’ve adapted. Now, I can start catching z’s pretty much anywhere.”
Her nose crinkles as she gives me a cute smile. “Oh, yeah. With three kids, I’ve mastered that particular skill.”
Looking at this woman, I still find it hard to believe that she’s a mother of three. Erin may be eight years older than me, but she doesn’t look like it. She’s drop-dead gorgeous. It’s obvious that her ex-husband has destroyed her self-esteem—which pisses me off because this woman deserves to be shown every damn day how sexy she is.
I know she said that she isn’t looking for any type of relationship, so at this point, I will take what I can get. If that means just spending a weekend trying to convince her that she’s beautiful, that’s fine with me.
“Yeah,” I say. “I imagine that with three kids, you’ve had a lot of sleepless nights.”
“When they were babies, it was the worst. Now the sleepless nights only really come when they’re sick. Or when I’m kept up by my own anxiety.” Immediately, after she stops talking, she once again looks embarrassed that she was talking about her kids.
Not wanting her to feel that way, I say, “Why don’t you tell me about your kids?”
Her cheeks blush a little. “You don’t want to hear about that.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”