Chapter 1
Clare
“Regular flow or heavy?” Clare pursed her lips and regarded the selection of care products in front of her. “What a total crock of shit.”
No matter how bright and attractive companies made the packaging, a period still felt like a sucker punch to the uterus.
By a bear.
With a fucking jackhammer.
There was no way to make that shit cute. Period productslied.No one was that chipper when Aunt Flo came to visit. And if they were, they were probably a serial killer... Because they had their fucking period.
If they offered a “swamp witch” variety of Tampax, however, she’d hand them her PIN number in a flash. A haggard woman shoveling a gallon of ice cream into her pimpletastic face while crying over every teeny tiny little thing and shitting through the eye of a goddamn needle. Period poop was no fucking joke.
She swiped a packet from the shelf and waved it high above her head. “Cat? Regular or heavy?”
Silence. Her nineteen-year-old daughter was nowhere to be seen. Maybe she’d gone back out to the car. Or maybe she was hiding behind a display of Lindor chocolate balls, pretending she was in no way related to the wild woman muttering to herself about periods and pads.
Fine. If her dearest darling daughter was embarrassed by her, she’d double down. She grabbed one of each, regular, heavy, and overnight pads, and snagged regular and heavy tampons for good measure.
HummingSisters Are Doin’ it for Themselvesby Eurythmics, she inched toward the end of the aisle.
The benefit of having the Leaning Tower of Period Products stacked high in her arms was that she couldn’t reach the shelf of Lindor balls. Or carry any chocolate at all for that matter. A fact her fast tightening jeans would thank her for.
She’d let herself go since the divorce. She wasn’t one of those women who’d caught her husband cheating on her and used it to drop twenty pounds and fuel some rage-filled magic makeover.
The only thing it had fueled was depression, self-loathing, and a need to buy bigger pants. And the only thing she’d dropped was her self-respect.
“Asshole.” She glared at the Lindor chocolate like it was the one who had banged their secretary on the family dining table and not her piece-of-shit ex.
Rounding the end of the aisle, she crashed into something, her body tensing as the collision knocked the air out of her. The pads and tampons flew from her arms like someone had pulled out a wooden Jenga block from her carefully crafted and precariously balanced tower.
“Oof! Sorry.” Her muttered apology was aimed at the sneakers of the person she’d bumped into as she bent over to pick up her fallen spoils with a weighty sigh.
That’s what she got for trying to embarrass her daughter. Apparently Karma worked fast when it was against her. If only it would work as quickly on her ex—maybe give him a raging case of crabs, or remove all the labels from the cans of food in his pantry.
Ha! If only.
The body in front of her didn’t move, so she abandoned the period product recovery plan in favor of shooing off the person looming over her. She’d said sorry, what else could Mr. Bootcut Jeans want?
As she straightened, the back of her head connected with something hard and she winced. Pain rippled across her scalp. She hadn’t even planned on stopping at CVS on her way home, but Catriona was desperate and now it was a thing.
But based on how the pharmacy was going, dinner would be drive-thru Panera. Relatively healthy and minimal people-ing. If the car found its way into the drive-thru at Taco Bell, she wouldn’t be mad about it.
“Sorry. Here. Let me.” A gravelly voice that sent tingles all the way to her toes instantly cured her brewing concussion. A firm grip banded around her bicep, helping her straighten up. All the oxygen evaporated from her body.
“Elliott.” His name caught in her throat, croaking like it had been trapped there for decades. It kind of had.
The boy she’d once loved was all man now. Square jaw covered with a neat, dark, salt-and-pepper beard that her fingers itched to reach out and stroke. Small crow’s feet crinkling the corners of his eyes. Brown, wavy hair, still styled with gel but with a dusting of gray at the temples.
He’d aged well. Too well.
Clare knew those hazel eyes. She’d stared into them when she’d pressed a sweater against his face after he’d taken a stray puck to the eyebrow in a game of street hockey when he was a kid. She’d stared at them over numerous games of cribbage in her backyard. It had taken her a while to get used to the card game with the little peg stand, but once she’d mastered counting points in combinations of fifteens, it was on likeDonkey Kong.
She’d pleaded with them when he’d told her he was going to be leaving and pursuing his dreams. Those hazel eyes were burned into her memory forever.
She’d heard he was coaching the local college hockey team. Sure, he had a little squish around his middle underneath his solid black t-shirt—probably from moving into coaching rather than still playing—but he was still every bit Elliott.
