Total pages in book: 64
Estimated words: 62095 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 310(@200wpm)___ 248(@250wpm)___ 207(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 62095 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 310(@200wpm)___ 248(@250wpm)___ 207(@300wpm)
“Grrr.” I hesitated and eyed my phone.
Oh, fuck it.
I called Ethan. Knowing full well it wasn’t part of our deal.
He picked up pretty fast, though. “Good evening, foot fetishist.”
I smiled and sat down on the edge of the bed. “Hi. Are you busy? I have a quick question.”
“Am I busy?” he chuckled. “Tell me what the coolest response is. I’m watching shrimp defrost, or I’m cleaning my kitchen?”
“Oh, they’re both badass,” I replied soberly. “Especially on a Saturday night. Or afternoon, in your case.”
He laughed under his breath. “In my defense, I didn’t crawl into bed until five this morning. My sister pushed the envelope for what can be considered a midnight workout.”
I scrunched my nose, confused. “You lost me. Your sister was at the gym, or…?”
“Yeah, I join her way past my bedtime once a week because she doesn’t do well with working out in the day around people.”
Ohhh—and his sisters were autistic, I remembered him telling me.
“But she usually shows up around eleven PM,” he went on. “Last night, she asked if we could meet up at two AM instead, and I guess she’s been carrying around a lot of frustrations, because she was at it for almost three hours. The last hour, I dozed off on a treadmill.”
“Aww,” I chuckled. “And I’m guessing she can’t be there on her own?”
“Eh, she probably could, but I wouldn’t be comfortable knowing she’s there alone.”
Easy to love…
I suppressed a sigh and pinched an olive from my salad, and I popped it into my mouth. “You’re all kinds of sweet, aren’t you?”
“It’s family.”
I could practically hear a shrug in his voice.
“So, what was your question?” he asked.
Oh, right. I looked at the cart. “How do you say no to bread that’s served on the side so prettily?”
He chuckled. “Let me guess. You’re standing there looking at your food, and you’re debating whether you’ve earned the bread, if you’re going to pour some dressing on your salad after all, and if you can use just half the butter packet.”
Jesus. This wasn’t his first rodeo.
“You’re totally wrong—I’m sitting down,” I deadpanned.
He chuckled again.
“I was gonna skip the butter, though,” I added. “And they didn’t give me the dressing I specifically said I didn’t want. If I had, maybe you’d be right about that one too.”
He hummed. “It’s natural to bargain with yourself. We do it all the time. But in the grand scheme of things, a piece of bread won’t make any difference. However, if you have a piece of bread with every meal, it’s going to rack up.”
He was right.
“Carbs are so hard,” I admitted.
“They are,” he agreed. “What have you eaten today?”
I blew out a breath and thought back. “I had a banana and a sugar-free yogurt for breakfast. Then I had a work lunch, and I ordered grilled chicken with roasted vegetables.”
“In other words, very few carbs,” he noted. “Your brain is probably signaling to you that it wants carbs because you’ve barely had any, and you usually eat more beans and whole grains—right?”
“Yessir.”
“There you go,” he said. “So the craving is perfectly understandable. The question now is if you feed the craving with what I’m assuming is white bread.”
“Yeah,” I sighed. “Delicious, delicious white bread. Not even the sourdough kind.”
He laughed through his nose. “Honey, you’re overthinking it.”
Oh. Honey?
“But do you want to know a secret?” he went on.
“Uh-huh.” So I was just gonna let that slide right by me, the fact that he’d called me honey?
Because it was probably one of those things—like, my sister and I called everyone darlin’ or honey or sugar if we were close enough.
“Make your decision after you’ve had your shrimp,” Ethan told me. “We make choices out of desperation when we’re hungry. It’s why you shouldn’t grocery shop on an empty stomach.”
When he said it like that, the answer was so obvious. I’d heard that since I was a kid, never to go to the store when you were hungry, but it hadn’t occurred to me to apply the same logic when I was eating.
“Sometimes, I feel so silly around you,” I confessed without thinking twice. “I mean, I’ve always been bigger, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve researched diets and lifestyle changes. I’d like to think I’m fairly well-read on health and whatnot, and still…” I grabbed my salad and got comfortable against the headboard, and then I put Ethan on speaker.
“It’s like our vocabulary,” he replied. “We know the words, but we still struggle to find the right ones at times.”
True.
I stabbed a shrimp with my fork and stuck it in my mouth.
It was good. Lemony and garlicky.
“Lack of knowledge is rarely the problem for women in your position,” he continued. “I’m more inclined to blame Big Food Corp for being allowed to lie and manipulate on the packages. Corn syrup labeled as natural and low-fat is a big problem. Getting caught up in trendy diets pushed by influencers with good genes is another. It adds pressure and stress on you, both of which trigger insulin release.”