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“Thanks, Rory! This has been the best day ever!” he says, causing my heart to completely melt into a big puddle of goo, as I return his hug.
“I’m having a great time, Ryan. I love making pancakes with you.” I tell him this while I’m hugging him tight and breathing in the baby shampoo scent in his hair.
“Me too!” Ryan says, jumping off the stool with the exuberance only a five-year-old could muster. He runs to his dad and gives him a hug too. He may have said something to him, but I can’t hear it because my head is buzzing in my head that I’m in real danger here.
Once Ryan leaves the room, I turn away from Noah, stacking the dishes in the sink, feeling even more uncomfortable, and pissed off that he put me in the position to hurt his son.
“I’ll get the topping thawed out,” Noah says and I close my eyes trying to figure out where the man was that laughed with me so easily last night and now he’s just an asshole.
Like all the other men in my life.
I took a deep breath and then turned to watch Noah open the freezer compartment in the bottom of his fridge. While I did this a stray thought ran through my mind.
Why would a single father keep whipped topping in his freezer?
The only people I knew who put those in the freezer were women who baked a lot. Then I remembered how he worked my body last night, how playful he could be when he got a mind to be, and I shut down the why. Then, I looked at the whipped topping with a whole other thought and none of it good. He had a drawer full of condoms too. I was probably just a woman in a long line of women. It didn’t matter that he made me feel pretty or that for a minute I felt special to someone.
It was just sex.
“You can’t microwave topping, Noah. It will just become like water,” I warn him. “I’ll just go to the house and get mine, then make up some excuse to Ryan as to why I’m leaving.”
“You can microwave it, Rory. You just have to do it slowly,” he says, plopping the tub in the microwave.
“If you say so, I’d say you have more experience with that than I do,” I shrug, turning to finish the dishes.
“Why would you say that?” he asks, sliding up to sit on the counter like he doesn’t have a care in the world.
“No reason.”
“Right,” he says, clearly not believing me.
“Whatever.”
“Never figured you for a wimp,” he says and that pisses me off.
“I’m not a wimp. I’m just trying to clean up the dishes so I can leave with a clean conscious after you and Ryan head out to the school.”
“You’re going with us,” he says. I snag a dish towel and dry my hands and then look at him like he has three noses on the center of his face.
“I’m going with you?”
“That’s what I said, Gorgeous.”
“Don’t call me that,” I growl, at my limit with him.
“Are you this pissed off because I know how to thaw out whipped topping?” he asks, having the gall to laugh.
The beeper to the microwave just keeps going off and he’s ignoring it. So, I walk over to take it out, trying to figure out how to get away with killing Ryan’s father without Ryan getting mad at me. Fortunately for Ryan, I can’t think of a way to do that.
“It’s still frozen,” I huff, knowing I was right.
“You have to stir it,” Noah says, as my body goes completely still. Noah is behind me and suddenly he’s pushing into me, I can feel his front to my back and touching everywhere that is physically possible.
He brings his arms around me, like he’s going to hug me, but instead one of them has a spoon and he stirs the topping with it, while resting his chin against my shoulder. Noah is taller than me, but he’s bending down to make this possible and he’s doing it while his warm breath fans out against my ear—which would feel good if he wasn’t such an asshole.
I try to ignore the shivers that move through me because Noah is so close. My head goes down and I look at my feet, noting strangely that I could use a pedicure, my toenail polish was starting to crack.
“What are you doing, Noah?” I ask him, my voice soft because I was still reeling from the hurt of having him treat me so coolly this morning. It’s a familiar pattern of course. There was no point in asking him. I’m not stupid. He is ice cold when his son is around, hot when we’re alone.
I’m such an idiot.
“Just helping,” he says. “It needs ten more seconds.”
