by Pippa Grant
My pants would be tight tomorrow, but it’d be worth it.
I slide my mom a please leave look.
She smiles like she’s just getting warmed up.
Shit.
“Ingrid you said?” Mom says. “Lovely name. You run a book store?”
“It was my grandmother’s. We’ve remodeled it and started new programs to be a community gathering place for frazzled modern women, mostly because that seemed the smartest way to not lose customers who’ll see me in my natural habitat, but yes, our primary focus is books.”
“And you have a daughter?”
“Two daughters and a son.”
“How old?”
“Nine, seven, and four.”
“Married?”
“Divorced. My ex was—is a photojournalist. Traveled too much. Not the family type. Which you’d think I would’ve learned after the first kid, or possibly after the second, especially since he was gone even more after Piper and her—and I really didn’t need to go there, did I?”
“Oh, honey.” Mom squeezes Ingrid’s arm. “You are far from the only woman that’s ever happened to. And if we’d all stopped after the first kid when we were married to worthless shitheads, Levi wouldn’t be here either.”
They both look at me, Mom smug in a gotcha and you’re welcome kind of way, Ingrid mildly perplexed.
I shift uncomfortably. “Why are you both looking at me like Mom should’ve stopped after Tripp?”
Ingrid shakes her head as she lifts her hands, then twists her fingers together again. “No! No, it’s not that. I’m trying to picture Hudson eventually being an actual grown-up, and it’s not working.”
Mom laughs. “Oh, I had my doubts with this one too.”
“Did he shove marbles up his nose when he was four?”
“No, but he did try to play his penis like a guitar every night at bath time.”
For fuck’s sake, she did not. “Mother.”
Her eyes twinkle.
Ingrid’s gone pink in the cheeks, but she slides Mom a look. “Do they grow out of that?” she whispers. “After two girls, my boy has been…enlightening.”
“They reach an age where you voluntarily quit wondering about the answer to that question. But you should know I’ve moved into his guest room to take care of him. So maybe it is hopeless that they ever reach full maturity.”
Jesus. She didn’t just go for the jugular, she used a rusty hacksaw on it. “I don’t need a full-time babysitter. I’m fine. And I want a cookie.”
“Apologies that you have to see him like this,” Mom tells Ingrid. “I raised him better.” She peels the foil back and hands my guest one of her own cookies. “Sit. Make yourself comfortable. Do you like coffee?”
“I—yes.”
“If you’re anything like I was when my boys were seven and nine, I’d bet you live off the stuff. Levi, sweetheart, go brew a pot.”
I gape at her.
But Mom hasn’t been a mother for almost forty years without still being three steps ahead. “You’ve been insisting you’re not helpless. I’m sure you can push a button in the kitchen.”
Ingrid glances at me and smiles with those gorgeous curvy lips and kind hazel eyes, and my breath evaporates out of my lungs.
Poof.
Just gone.
And then she tucks her hair behind her ear, and I remember a Goldfish falling out of it the other day, and I couldn’t resist smiling back at her if the fate of the world depended on it.
Do I want to get seriously involved with a woman with three kids?
Not really.
But do I want to see Ingrid smile again?
Damn right I do.
There has to be middle ground here. Hell, over half my relationships the last ten years have been fake for one reason or another. Surely, I can find a way to take a lady out to dinner with no strings.
“Where are your kids now?” Mom asks her.
“Birthday party, gymnastics class, and with a friend hiking outside the city for the afternoon.”
“So you have thirteen minutes?”
Ingrid laughs again. I get a cramp in my gut realizing that take a lady out for a simple dinner probably won’t be nearly as simple as my brain is trying to convince me it will be. Her schedule is probably tighter than mine, and mine’s busy enough that I sometimes wake up in Japan in the summer and still think I’m celebrating Mardi Gras in New Orleans two years ago.
Mom makes the go on, go make us coffee, the lady doesn’t have all day gesture to me.
Considering it’s the first thing she’s let me lift a finger for in the last two days, I silently obey. I try to steal a cookie on the way and get my hand slapped, which makes Ingrid snort with laughter.
“Don’t grow up to be like her,” I tell Ingrid with a chin jut at my mother.
“He’s only saying that because I can hear him and he’s upset that he can’t have a cookie,” Mom confides to her. “He actually thinks I’m the best person on the entire planet.”
“Not every day,” I mutter as I pass into my kitchen.
“I understand you talked Levi out of buying yodeling pickles for my grandchildren.”
Oh, good. Mom’s been talking to Giselle too.
I’m totally screwed here. No way around it.
I hit the button to start the coffee maker, realize I forgot to put a mug under the spigot, and miss hearing whatever Ingrid replies with as I fling open my cabinet and grab the first mug I can find.
It’s not until the coffee’s dripping into it that I realize I grabbed a mug that has two cartoon boobs on it and the phrase have you squished me today?
Where the hell did that come from?
I dig deeper into my cabinet and realize all of my mugs are either mugs about me, or mugs that my buddies must’ve dropped off as jokes. I’m waffling between a mug that just has my name on it, rather than a mug with my face on it, and a mug announcing that I don’t spew profanities, I enunciate them like a fucking lady, when I realize the original mug is overflowing.
“Fuck!” I yank the first mug out of the way, slosh hot coffee all over my hand, and toss it toward the sink while I shove the fucking lady mug under the stream.
“Levi?” Mom calls.
“Yes, you can eat more of my cookies,” I reply. I thrust my hand under cold running water and try to reach for the towel hanging off my oven handle to mop up the coffee, which is now dripping off the counter and onto my bamboo floor, but I can’t reach because my arms are four inches too short.
I need Beck-length arms.
“Oh, honey,” Mom sighs behind me.
“This is how I always make coffee.”
“Maybe you should cancel your plans on Tuesday.”
“I’m not canceling Tuesday.” It’s not just me in the studio. I’m doing a collaboration with Waverly Sweet, who’s basically the only pop sensation in the world bigger than I am, and her schedule is possibly worse than mine and Ingrid’s combined. “If this doesn’t happen Tuesday, it’ll be March before we can coordinate again.”
“Always so busy.” She tosses me the towel on the oven handle, then pulls a fresh towel out of a drawer and gets to work sopping up the coffee that my soaked towel can’t get. “Go on. Go sit and talk to your friend. I’ll finish up.”
“I can make a cup of coffee.”
“Maybe in a few days. I’ll go with you on Tuesday.”
“Mom—”
“It’s nice to have my baby be the one who needs me again for once.” She hip-checks me. “Go on. Don’t leave poor Ingrid alone. Do you know how starved single mothers get for adult company?”
I don’t, honestly, but the guilt trip is working, both about what Mom’s life must’ve been like thirty years ago when she was in Ingrid’s shoes, and what it must be like today. I thought she was always chatting with the other moms in the neighborhood when she wasn’t working or running Tripp and me to our various activities, but I was also a self-centered brat who wouldn’t have taken the time to pay
attention to what she was actually doing.
My objections to her dating now have nothing to do with me being a self-centered brat, though, and everything to do with the unscrupulous assholes who might take advantage of a lonely, inexperienced woman with two very rich sons.
I shut off the water, wipe my hand, which isn’t going to melt off, and Mom hands me the mug that’s only three-quarters full. “Try not to trip.”
No use scowling at her.
Not when she’s actually letting me talk to Ingrid for half a minute alone. Hopefully.
When I get back to the living room, my guest is standing at the wall of windows beyond the blue-and-gray sitting area that suddenly feels pretentious and not as warm and welcoming as I’ve always thought it was.
I have throw pillows and blankets and pictures of my family in here, but I also know my rug alone probably costs more than what her bookstore brings in during an entire month, and don’t ask about the artsy-fartsy chandelier that I like to stare at when I get stuck writing a song.
Ingrid’s not looking at my décor though. She’s peering out at the city and the soft mountains beyond, which are wearing a darker fog as the late afternoon sun dips low in the sky.
“Coffee?” Shit. I forgot to ask if she wanted anything in it.
She jerks her head like she’s been caught eating more cookies, then smiles softly at me. “Thank you.”
“I can get cream or milk or sugar—”
“Black is fine.” Her gaze flits over my face, and she grimaces again. “I can’t believe Zoe’s head hit you that hard. She doesn’t have a mark on her.”
“It’s makeup. Photo shoot later where my PR people are gonna tell it like I was the one who climbed the shelves to capture a squirrel in distress.”
“You’re a terrible liar.”
I grin. “I’m better when I want to be.”
“Again with the terrible liar.”
She’s wearing her own makeup today, along with ankle boots, tight jeans, a thick, dark gray cable-knit sweater that might or might not be masking ketchup and spilled milk, but the earrings, necklace, and subtle scent of something sweet but not overpowering suggests she would’ve changed if that were the case.
“I’m glad you stopped by.”
Her cheeks go pink. “I got Giselle’s number the other day so I could check on you, and she said you could use some cheering up and that I should come over. I feel awful—”
“When I was thirteen, I dared Beck to get on a trampoline with me to see if we could time it right so that we could both jump high enough to reach this tree branch in his backyard. Both our moms had to take us to the emergency room. I broke my collarbone. He sprained his ankle. Believe me, I’ve done a lot worse to myself.”
She chuckles. “Oh, I believe it. But I still feel—”
“A fan at a concert threw a box of Milk Duds at the stage, and I ducked because I thought it was a bat—don’t ask—and as I was standing up, I ran into my bassist and the two of us tripped over my feet and I sliced myself open on the rough edge of a snap inside my jacket.”
“Don’t forget the part where you just tried to maim yourself with the coffee maker,” Mom calls.
Of course she does.
Ingrid smiles over her mug, which she’s gripping with both hands, like she’s afraid of what she’ll do with them if she doesn’t. “Okay. Message received. I’ll stop feeling bad. But now I want you to know I’m refraining from asking why you wear a jacket on stage when you have to be sweating up a storm with as active as you are up there.”
“Thank you. Your tact is appreciated. If you said something about the dumbness of wearing heavy clothing on a stage that’s four hundred degrees, I’d have to tell you that fashion is important. And you’d probably tell me I could get up on stage just like this, and I’d have to be modest and argue that sweatpants and a tight T-shirt don’t do me any favors, despite the number of times gossip rags post pictures of me like this and sell out every time.”
She laughs. “Yes, I can see where you’re all kinds of modest.”
“Talent. It’s all talent.”
“Stories.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“The magazines selling out? Yes. But the part where you cut yourself on the rough side of a snap? I know you can do better than that.”
I lift my shirt and point to the scar under my ribs, and her eyes go wide, then dark.
Good dark.
I’m not the let-it-all-hang-out underwear model Beck is, showing off nearly everything on billboards around the world and causing car crashes on a daily basis, but I’m not a buttoned-up Hallmark Channel hero either.
Having a woman staring at my body isn’t new.
Feeling like she’s touching me everywhere her eyes rake over is, though.
Single mother, I remind myself. Complications.
“What about that one?” She doesn’t touch my skin, but her fingers hover just over my hip.
“Are you asking as the mother of a kid who’s gonna make the same mistakes I did, or as a woman who likes what you see?”
Her eyes lift to mine, and for the first time since she spotted me in her bookstore last week, I feel like we’re on even footing. She’s not flustered. Not in a star-struck way at the moment, anyway.
Turned on?
I hope that’s what I’m seeing in the way she’s biting her lip while her darkening eyes drift down to my torso again, then back up to my eyes. “What did you really stop by to ask me the other night? You could’ve had someone on your team call if you wanted to rent space to write songs. But you didn’t. Why?”
Correction.
She definitely has the advantage.
I drop my shirt to cover my stomach again, but I don’t step back. She’s one-handing her coffee while she studies me.
Her eyes are like a treasure chest. Gold wrapped in brown. And they’re asking a question I don’t have to answer.
I want to.
But I don’t know her well enough, and I’ve been in the limelight long enough to know that once I put it out there, I can’t take it back.
Telling someone she was my inspiration for changing my entire life?
I can’t do it. “I thought you’d say no.”
A pink stain comes over her cheeks again, matching the heat I feel rising around my ears. “To what?” she asks softly.
“Dinner.”
I swear she knows I’m not telling her everything. It’s in the subtle twitch of her eyes and the tightening of her lips.
Or maybe she doesn’t believe I’m serious.
She did just call me out on two very believable fibs.
“Let me take you to dinner.” Yeah. I’m doing this. “Whenever it works for you.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s what you do to clear the air after you bond over a drunk accidental pet squirrel.”
Her eyes narrow. “So dinner wasn’t what you were going to ask about before the squirrel interrupted us.”
Hello, hole. Let me dig you a little deeper. “When’s the last time you had a quiet dinner out, just you and one other adult?”
“Do you ever have quiet dinners out?”
“Out is a relative term. I can promise quiet.”
“So you’re asking me to dinner, just the two of us, at a secluded place where no one could see us, hear us, or possibly find us?”
My mother snorts softly in the kitchen and almost makes me wish I didn’t have top-notch hearing protection on stage so that I couldn’t hear her and didn’t know she was listening in.
“I’m a sucker for a woman who won’t pull punches when I’m being an idiot.” I roll my neck and jerk my head toward the kitchen. “Clearly.”
Ingrid’s entire cherub face lights up in a smile so big her eyes crinkle. “Now you’re cheating. How’s a hot mess mom supposed to resist an invitation from a guy who loves his own mother so much?”
“A lesser man would be very embarrassed right now.”
She laughs.
It’s music. Fucking gorgeous music.
“On my honor as my mother’s favorite son, I’ll take you to dinner somewhere safe, keep my hands to myself, be a pleasant conversationalist, not judge you if you fall asleep halfway through dessert, and get you back home at a decent hour so that you’re not paying for a night out for the next three days.”
The offer hangs in the air between us like the blue mist that hangs over my favorite mountains, and I know my mother can hear every word, and I don’t care.
I want to take this woman out to dinner.
But she’s watching me like she’s waiting for me to add a punchline. “One, have you been spying on me? That’s an oddly specific version of a grown-up dinner out that might match exactly what I was telling my best friend I need. And two, why me?”
“One, raised by a single mother and watched my brother be a single dad for a couple years, and I do occasionally have observant moments. And two, I could use a few more friends to keep me grounded. Not often anyone tells me when I’m making bad decisions anymore. At least, not friends who aren’t keeping secrets from me about what my mother’s been up to. And I might need advice on dealing with that too.” I nudge her arm with mine, and a crackle of energy passes between us.
I pretend I don’t feel it.
Her lips part and she straightens, but she also looks away. When her phone rings out a shrill alarm bell, she seems relieved for the distraction as she balances her coffee with digging her phone out. “Time to get the first kid. Thank you for the coffee.”
“And dinner?”
“You’re very persistent.”
“It’s a youngest child thing.”
That finally earns me another smile. “I’ll think about it.”
“Good. When you’re ready, text me.” I slip her phone out of her hand and program my number in while she watches me with surprised eyes. I shoot myself a message so I remember not to block her number, then hand it back to her. “Stop by anytime.”
“Bring your kids next time.” Mom steps into the doorway, making no secret of just how closely she’s been listening, which isn’t a surprise to me, and I expect Ingrid’s been aware of her too. “It’ll serve him right to have them wreaking havoc on his furniture instead of him wreaking havoc in your store.”