Total pages in book: 64
Estimated words: 63601 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 318(@200wpm)___ 254(@250wpm)___ 212(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 63601 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 318(@200wpm)___ 254(@250wpm)___ 212(@300wpm)
They were definitely going to tease me but it would be the aww isn’t our little boy so cute kind of torture.
“I’ll…I’ll ignore it and you’ll change the subject?” I wasn’t sure if I could do it but it was at least a plan. “And if I die of embarrassment just know that the past two weeks have been amazing.”
“You’ve grown up to be just as dramatic as you were when we were kids.” His delight as he said that made me wonder if I could strangle him and claim justifiable homicide. “But I clearly think it’s just as cute as I did back then.”
He’d thought I was cute?
Finally opening my eyes, the first thing I saw was his grin. “You thought I was cute?”
“Yeah.” Kissing my cheek, his smile got wider. “You were so cute and short with those chubby cheeks and you had so many stories about your family and you had no idea they were so weird. It was awesome.”
No, the awesome part was how he hadn’t told anyone else.
I’d just wanted to impress the older boy who was so cool and I hadn’t realized telling everything I’d heard around the house wasn’t a good idea.
“I’ll try to keep how cute you were back then to myself, though.” His wince made me laugh. “We really don’t need that coming up every holiday going forward.”
Eventually he was going to realize that he had to explain he was keeping me, right?
“No, that would be…frustrating.” We could be boring, though. We could do it. “We just need to be a regular boring college couple for a couple of days.”
Then we could go back home and be ourselves.
For whatever reason, that had Levi rolling his eyes before he gave me a look like he thought I was a few crayons short of a box. “Your family is nuts. Nothing we do will seem normal to them.”
Oh, I forgot.
Levi hadn’t.
“Your mother thought us possibly wanting to sleep in separate rooms over Christmas was weird.” He sighed when I shrugged. “We haven’t even been dating a month, Chipmunk. She shouldn’t be thinking about us living together or that kind of stuff yet. She should be wondering if we’ll last through the month because holidays are hard on new couples.”
His family was hard on new couples, Christmas was not.
“You’re right.” I just grew up with it, so I didn’t always see how odd they were. “She likes you, though.”
I was pretty sure he needed that reminder and I knew I was right when he seemed to force himself to take a deep breath. “She does. She supports our relationship and she thinks we’re good together.”
Because our energies complemented each other…or something like that.
“We are.” Looking cute, I kissed his cheek. “And we’re going to be boring compared to them no matter what we do.”
Finally back to smiling, he nodded. “And then later after we’ve spent the afternoon being boring, we’re going to hide in your room and we’ll color or watch cartoons.”
Daddy had brought my toys in his suitcase and he said they were all safe but it was a surprise.
“Yes, big and boring…then we’ll have fun.” It was going to be fine.
And I kept telling myself and him all the way to the house.
The last mile somehow felt the longest, but we made it in one piece and were both in fairly good spirits as he pulled in the driveway. “Remember, Daddy, our spirits are fine and we don’t need cleansing.”
“Right.” He chuckled as he finally parked the car beside my mother’s VW bus that she said would last forever. “We’re both feeling light and cleansed but maybe something for focus and clarity would set us up for next semester.”
Yes, I wasn’t allergic to those and they actually smelled nice.
“I might not be confident about everything, but I can bullshit my way through it.” Daddy slipped into his Levi the grad student look and suddenly he really did seem more confident.
“That’s kind of weird.” Cocking my head, I studied him. “What did you do?”
Laughing, he shrugged. “It’s how you stand…or sit in this case…and how you look…your expressions. My mother made me take a class about it a couple of years ago. It was framed as basically learning to look like a CEO before you were actually at that point, but it wasn’t complete bullshit.”
His mother was weird.
“Mine sent me to a psychic to make sure I had a clear picture of my future and to those manners classes where they show you all the fancy forks and stuff.” It’d been painful at the time because I was the definition of awkward when I was in high school, but he hadn’t been a bad idea. “My father made her realize we didn’t do that kind of stuff enough and he wanted me to be prepared just in case I did something horrible like go into finance and become the Wolf of Wallstreet.”