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It’s good advice. I probably needed to hear it. But… shit.
He catches me watching him, and grins. “So, I believe I still owe you a proper first date, Naomi.” He straightens and finishes buttoning his shirt. “What about this Friday? There’s a new restaurant that opened in town, a little Italian spot a few of my coworkers have been raving about. We could go there, maybe see a movie afterward… I’m sure we can find some terrible movie you’d like.”
I laugh and pretend to glare at him. “You can’t mock my taste in entertainment when yours is the same,” I point out.
“Sure I can.” He winks. “It just means I’m mocking myself, too.”
I snort. But in the back of my mind, all I can hear is Monica. You just have a tendency to leap in with both feet first… I can’t help thinking about what happened last time.
Last time, when I married a guy I barely knew in little to no time at all. Last time, when I wound up getting cheated on and saddled with a divorce under a year later. I fight to keep a grimace off my face. She’s right. I can’t move too fast. No matter how much I like spending time with this guy right now.
So when Jason tilts his head and says, “So, Friday then?” I force myself to shake my head.
“I’m sorry.” You have no idea how much I want to. I bite back that answer. “I just, er…” My mind races. Think of an explanation, quick. Because I do want to see him again sometime. Just not that soon, not until I have a little more time to clear my head of the past two days we spent glued to each other in bed. “I’ve got my cousin’s graduation, this weekend, so I’ll be busy with family stuff…” Not a lie. My cousin is graduating this weekend, and my family did task me with getting all the flower arrangements for it. Since I work in the floral shop with Monica, I am the natural choice for the job. If I really wanted to, though, I could probably sneak out Friday for a date night. But for once, I promise myself I’m going to take my friends’ advice. I’m going to move slow with this.
“Cousin’s graduation, huh?” He arches a brow. “Mm, sure, I can accept this ‘excuse,’ I suppose.”
My heart skips a beat. I don’t want him to think I don’t want to see him. “It’s just, uh, you know, they want me to help with the floral arrangements and all, since, well, that’s my day job anyway, and—”
“Naomi.” He steps over to me to bring both hands to my shoulders, stilling my protests. “I’m joking. Of course you need to be with your family for this.”
“Oh.” I blink up at him for a second, before we both laugh. “Sorry.” My cheeks flush. “I just, I do like hanging out with you, is all,” I confess.
“And I really, really enjoy spending time with you,” he replies, before he bends to kiss me again, slowly. “But if I have to wait a little longer to see you next time? Then, well, that will just make the reunion all the better.” He winks and kisses my forehead.
“Definitely,” I reply, smiling up at him, and wondering how in the hell I got lucky enough to stumble into this guy’s life. Doesn’t matter. I’m going to enjoy it while it lasts, and if it becomes something real? Great. If not? It will just be the best rebound of my life.
That’s what I tell myself as we part ways outside the hotel. But deep down, a little worried voice in the back of my mind can’t help telling me… I might be in trouble again.
8
It’s been 24 hours since I last saw Dr. Jason Robinson, and so far, I’m holding up fine. I’m definitely not counting the hours as they pass, or rereading his last text to me, a cute little Thanks for the date message he sent yesterday morning right after he left the hotel. Nope. I am being a sensible, perfectly reasonable person about this.
I am not rushing in.
I spent yesterday working at the shop with Monica, who did tease me incessantly and pry me for details about our hookup the night before. But then we moved on to talking about Becca and her latest preschool incidents (some boy in her class teased her and she put gum in his hair, which Monica had to scold her for even if she secretly approved a little bit), and we debated the hit-and-run driver, too.
“I seriously think you should file a police report,” Monica kept telling me, all throughout the day. “I mean, you could have been really seriously injured.”
“Not to mention if anything had happened to Becca, I would’ve had to find this woman and kill her myself,” I mumbled in response, still angry every time I thought about it. Who could do that? Hit a car—or at least, cause a car to hit a pole due to your bad driving—and then speed off like nothing happened?
“You’re sure you can’t figure out where you know her from?” Monica had prompted me over lunch, sharing the bag of chips she’d brought as we split a hoagie I picked up from the local deli.
“Trust me, if I could figure it out, I’d have tracked her down already and demanded at the very least an apology and some money for the car repairs. I mean, my insurance covers it, but that’s not the point. Her insurance should be the one to pay the damages.” I groaned. “But I don’t know. All I know is I’ve seen her around somewhere before, I think at Becca’s school, maybe?”
“Is she another mom?”
I shook my head. “A teacher, I think. Or maybe an aide. I don’t know, it all happened so fast.”
“You’ll figure it out,” Monica reassured me. But it wasn’t until today, the next time I drove over to pick up Becca, that I actually had a chance to confront the whole thing.
I arrive half an hour early to give myself plenty of time to scout. At first, I linger around the parking lot, trying to surreptitiously peek into all the other cars in the lot to see if any of the faces inside jog my memory. I find a few moms bent over cheesy gossip magazines, a couple reading on their Kindles, and a handful of dads listening to sports radio. But none of the women look familiar—or at least, not like the woman I glimpsed through the windshield on Tuesday, right before I spiraled into the pole.
I frown and head back up to the school right as the bell rings. The minute it does, I slip inside and pace the halls, peeking into each classroom I pass as the teachers ready the kids to leave. It’s a preschool and kindergarten rolled into one, with a few different age levels here, so there are a few classrooms to check. I don’t see the woman in any of those. Not until I reach the one next to Becca’s, the room the kids all file into for lunch and naptime. There, I freeze, staring through the classroom window, my eyes wide.
I recognize her. Same dark red hair, clearly dyed, because you can see her black roots. Same tortoiseshell glasses, with small, pinched eyes behind them and a mean tilt to her pursed mouth. She looks a few years older than me, but also like she tanned too much when she was younger, so she’s probably aging even faster than she really is.
She glances up and meets my eye through the window, as if she can sense me watching her. The moment our eyes meet, I see a brief flicker of recognition, before she hurriedly looks away.
Oh, hell no. She’s not going to run away from me again.
“Auntie Naomi?” Becca calls down the hallway. She breaks away from the aide who’s escorting their group outside. The aide reaches for her, frustrated, but I give a wave and jog toward Becca to indicate it’s all right. She reaches me and wraps my legs in a tight hug. “Want to come see my classroom?” Becca asks my knees, as I ruffle her hair, and duck to hug her back.
“In a minute, okay? I have someone I need to talk to first.” I take Becca’s hand and lead her back to the classroom.
The woman is still inside, gathering the kids together. She shoots a nervous glance at the door, and flinches when she sees me still standing there.
I check the name plate on the room. Mrs. Randall. “Can you wait right here for a second, Becca?” I ask as the classroom door opens and a few kids start to excitedly spill out. “I need to talk to Mrs. Randall for a moment.”
Becca shuffles her feet. “Okay. Then we’ll go see my classroom?”
“Then we’ll go and check it out,” I promise. That seems to placate her. She leans
against the locker and pulls a toy out of her pocket. I leave the door open behind me so I can keep an eye on her, and inch into the room around the flood of kids moving in the other direction. There’s an aide leading them out to the lot, and another one bringing up the rear. Mrs. Randall, for her part, is bent over her desk, trying to look busy with work, if you ask me.
“Excuse me.” I lean against the door after the last kid files out.
