"Fine. Five."
He tipped an invisible hat my way and pulled off toward his apartment. I sat in my truck for a minute longer than necessary, watching his taillights disappear around the corner.
Dinner with his mom.
Like a girlfriend.
Because Iwashis girlfriend.
Still felt a little like wearing someone else's shoes.
But here I was, not running. Sitting still and not hating it. Maybe even liking it a little.
Or a lot.
At 4:58,I heard the crunch of tires on gravel and grabbed my jacket off the hook by the back door. Cat watched me from the kitchen floor as though I planned on abandoning her for life and she would not be forgetting about it anytime soon.
"I fed you. Twice." I pointed a finger at her. "And you got treats."
She blinked.
"You're fine."
Another blink, slower this time, designed to inflict maximum guilt.
I closed the door behind me just as Brody was coming up the walkway. He'd cleaned up—dark jeans without a single smear of grease, a white button-down with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, cowboy hat sittin' just right. He'd even trimmed the golden scruff along his jaw.
Sexy as hell.
He stopped dead in his tracks when he saw me and just… looked his fill. That long, unhurried look that made me feel like I was the only thing worth seein' in a whole big sky's worth of mountains.
"You look beautiful," he said.
"I look the same as I always look."
"Exactly."
I shoved past him toward the truck, but not before I caught the corner of his grin. I'd swapped out the usual chew-you-up-and-spit-you-out red lipstick for a tinted lip balm and gone easy on the eyes—just mascara, no war paint. Clean black V-neck and my one pair of jeans that didn't have dirt or hay ground into the knees. No Docs tonight; I'd dug out a pair of black ankle boots from the bottom of my duffel that hadn't seen daylight since Austin.
Softer than usual. On purpose.
Not for him, exactly. But for this. For the fact that I was meeting his mother as his girlfriend, and I wanted her to see someone worth keepin' around. Because I liked her son. Because I wanted to stay. Because, for the first time in my adult life, I gave a damn about what somebody's mama thought of me.
But I wasn't about to say any of that out loud.
"Let's go before I change my mind," I said and headed for the truck.
The drive took all of five minutes. The white house with the red shutters came into view at the end of a long dirt drive, and something about seein' it—small and sturdy and well-loved, set back from the road with a wide front porch and a garden that was tryin' real hard despite the summer heat—made my heart clench.
This was where Brody grew up. Where his mama read him bedtime stories and packed his lunches and probably put bandaids on his knees a thousand times. Where she still lived, in a house with a ghost she loved too much to leave.
Brody squeezed my knee once before putting the truck in park.
"She's gonna love you."
"She's gonna interrogate me."
"Probably, but she'll do it in a lovin' way."
