Total pages in book: 131
Estimated words: 131387 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 526(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 131387 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 526(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
It might be time for a price reduction.
Moxie jumped into the seat, inspected that, then sat and licked her paw to clean her ear.
“Cats are fascinating,” Abigail observed. “But will you come back to me?”
I looked at her. “It’s not mine to share, but arguably, in Hutch’s history with women, Bree wasn’t the worst of it.”
She flinched.
“Not by a long shot.”
She flinched harder.
“I’m falling in love with him,” I whispered. Yes, saying the words out loud, putting them out in the world, God help me.
Her face lit up. “That’s great!”
“He took Saturday off from us,” I shared. “He had a bro day.”
“Okay,” she said slowly.
“I think he did it to cool us down.”
“Or, maybe he did it because he needed a bro day. Guys need guy time just like girls need girl time. What did they do?”
“Trail running. Fishing. Gutting fish or whatever you do to them before you grill them or however you cook them. Eating them. And I’ve never seen Hutch scratch his balls, but metaphorically, they probably did that.”
“Do you trail run?”
“Lord no.”
“Do you fish?”
“Boring,” I sang.
“You have no balls, so who is he going to do those things with? Things he wouldn’t do if he didn’t enjoy them?”
I looked to the back door again.
“Honey,” she said, and I returned to her. “Just talk to him. Albeit give it a few days for this Lion and Lamb thing to settle down before you do that.”
“What if you’re wrong?” I asked. “What if he isn’t where I’m at?”
Her expression morphed to understanding. “Marriages are marriages. People are people. It doesn’t happen often for me because my guy is the best guy ever. My children are the best children to ever be born. But I do hark back to the days where I was free and breezy. When Emma’s snotty and cranky with the flu. Or Liam adamantly refuses to eat his green beans and crosses his arms on his little boy chest, and I know the battlelines have been drawn. I sometimes miss those days when it was girlfriends and going out for drinks and planning weekend trips to Spokane to get up to no good. But one thing I don’t miss is how tough it is to like a guy and not know where he’s at.”
Yeah.
I wouldn’t miss that either.
I wished I wasn’t experiencing it now.
“Though, the only way to know where he’s at is to talk to him.”
It stunk, but she was right.
And I already knew that, so that meant it stunk even more.
“I know it’ll take a lot to find the courage to do that,” she went on. “But I also know you will.”
“I think it’s safe to share that there were a lot of communication breakdowns with his previous relationships. So one way or another, I think he’d appreciate it.”
She tipped her head to the side. “Are you needing to prove you’re not them?”
“Oh, girl,”—I went back to bapping the tablet—“absolutely. When I say he was burned, I mean he was burned.”
“Ulk,” she forced out.
“Yeah,” I agreed, still bapping, and beginning to feel angry that those bitches not only gave him that heartache but also put me in this place. “And I think it’s safe to say they seriously misrepresented themselves. I can see with Hutch, twice bitten, seven million times shy.”
“Uh, Mabel, did you hear me earlier?”
I turned from the tablet. “Which part?”
“Sister, you both think you’re FWBs, you guys don’t live all that close to town, and he just dropped you at work when, now that cooler heads are prevailing, including mine, it didn’t seem like you were really in any danger. He may ask you to take it slow. He has every right to take time to make sure. Right now, you two are still very new. But none of that negates the fact the man is in deep with you. And I may be wrong, and I will accept your friend divorce if I am, but he’s in that state and he likes it.”
Since my breath had stopped coming and my heart had exploded again, she reached out and took both my hands, held strong and kept on.
“Now, I can see your play in delaying this discussion, because other heads are cooling, but his isn’t, and you need to give him time to shake off the fact that he experienced a Saturday night where the woman he loves, or the woman he’s falling in love with, same thing, was in danger. You might have been more like…danger adjacent. But danger was very close to you. Now isn’t the time to broach it. But you have to let him off this FWB thing. You have to tell him where you’re at. Again, I might be wrong, but I’m guessing, for Hutch, it would be a relief.”
She let me go, started separating tags, doing this still talking.