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Chapter Twenty-one
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“Please tell me youhave ice cream,” Emma announces, not even bothering to knock before she pushes her way inside the front door.
“I have ice cream.” I laugh, looking up from my laptop that’s resting across my legs just as she appears in the mouth of the hallway.
“I swear to god I’m going to weigh five hundred pounds by the time this baby is born.” She drops her keys on the kitchen island before heading directly toward the refrigerator.
“I highly doubt that,” I tell her as she rifles through the freezer, reemerging with a half-gallon of Cherry Cordial ice cream moments later.
“I’m serious, Len. Look at me.” She holds her arms out, showing off her growing belly.
“Pretty sure that’s all baby.” I laugh, watching her grab a spoon from the silverware drawer before joining me on the couch.
Plopping down on the opposite end, she props her feet up on the coffee table and peels the lid off the ice cream before settling the tub on her belly.
Emma is about half way through her pregnancy and I swear she only gets cuter as the weeks go by. Though it’s clear she doesn’t see it that way.
“That’s what you think.” She digs the spoon into the creamy goodness before shoveling a large bite into her mouth. “Oh my god.” She groans around the bite. “I swear ice cream tastes a million times better now. I can’t stop eating it. I go to bed thinking about it, dream about it, and then wake up wondering how pathetic I would be if I had a big bowl for breakfast.”
“That’s me on a normal day and I don’t have an excuse. Guess that’s why I’ve never been able to get rid of my ass.” I laugh, snapping my laptop closed before sliding it onto the coffee table. “What are you doing here anyway?”
“I had a few errands to run this morning. Drove by and saw your car in the driveway, so I decided to stop in.”
“So you came to see me or you had a sudden craving for ice cream?” I ask, my voice riddled with laughter.
She thinks on that for a long moment. “Both. I feel like I never see you anymore. Seriously, what’s it been, a month?”
“I saw you last week,” I remind her. “Remember, you and Robert came to the birthday dinner that Starr and Mark had for me.”
“Oh yeah. Now I remember. The dinner where you moped all evening because your hot country singer couldn’t come.”
“I did not mope.”
Though if I did, I totally had a right to. Starr had planned a special twenty-eighth birthday dinner for me and she’d scheduled it around Hudson’s availability, but he ended up canceling the day of the dinner saying he got tied up. And of course, Starr told me all of this thirty seconds after I had walked in the door, instantly putting a damper on my mood.
It means a lot that she tried, I just wish she hadn’t told me because I ended up spending the whole evening disappointed that he couldn’t make it and wondering what he was tied up doing that prevented him from coming.
He did somewhat make up for it the next day–my actual birthday–when a man showed up at my front door, serenaded me with ‘Happy Birthday’ while holding twenty-eight long stem roses. It was totally something Hudson would do. I can’t help but smile when I think about it.
“You totally moped.” Emma pulls me back to the present. “You played it off well but I could tell.”
“I can’t ever get anything past you, can I?”
“Nope.” She smiles, shoveling another bite of ice cream into her mouth. “How’s all that going anyway?” she asks after swallowing.
“What do you mean?”
“What do you mean, what do I mean? With Hudson, duh.”
“It’s good.”
“It’s good,” she mocks me. “It doesn’t sound good.”
“I miss him.” I blow out a breath. “A lot.”
“Is the show you and Starr went to the last time you saw him?”
