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Immediately, I felt like terrible. These comparisons were unfair because small doesn’t have to be bad, I reminded myself. This is home. This is where I grew up.
“Come into the dining room, sweetie! You’re right on time for dinner.” Mom rushed back into the living room without the bread or wine, moving faster than her round figure seemed capable of. “I made meatloaf!”
Snobbery is not the right way to think of things, came the voice in my head. Mom and Dad deserve better than that.
I had been so caught up in my own thoughts that I hadn’t even noticed my father. He looked up from the iPad on his lap and pushed the glasses up onto his nose.
“Oh good!” he grumbled cheerfully and struggled to his feet from the ancient Lay-Z-Boy. The cracked olive leather flexed as my paternal figure got up. “I’m glad you’re not late, Kate. I’m starving! I was just about to tell your mother to serve dinner if you were even one minute late.”
He was joking, but also as serious as a heart attack. Even though he was the skinny one out of my two parents, the man loved food. Come between him and a pot roast and risk losing a limb.
Bernard shuffled toward the dining room with me and Mom close behind. We were all hungry. The long flight and horizontal activities had given me quite the appetite.
“Let’s wash our hands and eat,” Mom chirped. “If your father waits a minute longer he’s gonna start chewing on his arm. Or mine!”
We tidied up at the kitchen sink and then sat down at the small table for four. I could smell all of my favorites: meatloaf, creamy mashed potatoes, and green beans. Meaty and starchy. Was she hiding German chocolate cake someplace in the kitchen too?
The thought rumbled my stomach and made my mouth water.
Yummy!
On the way towards the east coast, I didn’t think too much about food, but smelling my mother’s cooking reminded me how hungry that I really was.
“Mom, you didn’t have to make all this.”
It was one thing to eat food from the finest restaurants around the country, but there was nothing like a home-cooked meal. If only my guys could share this with me at my parents’ house.
Yeah, right.
Because it wasn’t going to happen. I was just their assistant, and not a real match for them. Besides, what was I even thinking? There were three of them and only one of me, so how would that work? More likely, I would end up in a small, cruddy New York apartment writing novels that I prayed would become bestsellers. They probably wouldn’t. Trying to hide my sudden sorrow, I gave a small, fake smile.
“I didn’t have to, but I wanted to.” Mom bustled around the dining table making sure everything was right. “Who else is going to spoil my baby but me? You’ve been gone for so long!”
She served me, then Dad, and herself last before sitting down.
It all smelled terrific, and forgetting my gloomy thoughts for a moment, I dug into the food, so happy to be back with my parents and their simple life. Silence and the clicks of knife and fork against plates sounded in the dining room for a long time.
Once the edge of hunger had been satisfied, everybody relaxed a little bit.
“So, Kate. How is your new job with your rock stars going?” Mom asked.
Did she say “my” rock stars?
A blush stained my cheeks.
What was I supposed to say? Hard Fought had been claiming me over and over again, making me moan at night, tingling and pleasured to the ends of my toes?
Surely, I can’t say that.
My mother’s eyes twinkled but she didn’t say anything else. I risked a look at my father’s face, but Bernard just looked happy to have food in his mouth.
My face was burning. “Umm…uh… Good, I guess. Being with them has been nice,” was my lame reply.
Say something else. More descriptive. Anything was better than my ho-hum sentence.
So I took a deep breath.
“I’m getting a lot of experience as a flight attendant slash personal assistant. Being a babysitter didn’t prepare me at all for this job. The guys are very demanding.”
Mom looked happy enough to burst out singing. “Living the good life now is all that’s important, sweetie. Enjoy it.”
Dad grunted.
“We’re very proud of you for taking on such a big job and especially with no experience,” he said when he looked up briefly from his plate. “But what happened to your idea of becoming a published novelist? Are you still planning on pursuing that?”
Mom’s smile faded away and she looked between Dad and me.
Oh no!
Alarmed that she would actually start to worry about what I was doing with my three alphas, I rushed to reassure her and Dad.
“I do still want to be a novelist one day, but this job takes up so much of my time. Right now, my novel’s on hold. I’ll pick it back up, though,” were my reassuring words.
