Chapter 21

Elle

“You can’t go,” Madden informs Sawyer and Jonah. “We haven’t had ice cream.”

Thank God for small boys and their ironclad memory for dessert, because I don’t want this evening to be over.

Playing Catan with Sawyer is six thousand times more fun than playing with Trevor ever was. Trevor is a grudging game player, fussy and nervous, and doesn’t have a competitive bone in his body.

Sawyer plays Catan exactly perfectly—like it matters more than anything and couldn’t matter less. I’m not sure how to explain it, but anyone who loves games knows what I’m talking about. In order for them to be fun, you have to invest yourself fully and you also have to not take yourself too seriously.

Maybe that’s true of other things, too, like sex and relationships and life itself, and that’s why I find it to be such an attractive trait.

Not that anything other than sex is on the table here.

“No, we can’t go before ice cream,” Sawyer says, and his eyes catch mine, and he’s smiling. Really smiling, not just the tipped-up cautious Sawyer smile that I am used to, and I swear, it almost breaks me. I want to tell him, You absolutely cannot smile like that in my presence if you want me to be able to do this sex thing with you without crossing the line and falling for you and all the things that neither of us wants to have happen.

I serve up four generous bowls of ice cream (the boys think it’s Christmas in June), and we sit back down at the dining room table and eat in near-silent ice-cream bliss.

“Do you pick the cookie dough out, or eat everything together?” I poll them.

“All together,” Sawyer says, digging in with a gusto that reminds me, pleasurably, of how he does certain other things.

“I pick the cookie dough out and eat that first, then the ice cream,” Jonah says.

“Me, too,” Madden says.

I take a dainty spoonful of all-vanilla. “I eat the ice cream first and leave the cookie dough for last.”

They all look at me like I’m crazy.

I shrug. “I like to have something to look forward to.”

“Do you have something you’re looking forward to right now?” Sawyer asks, so innocently that for a split second I don’t make the connection that he’s messing with me. Then I catch the look on his face and feel that glorious tugging sensation in my lower belly right down to my core.

I can’t really answer his question, because it’s not fair for me to say in front of Madden how much I’m looking forward to his dad’s wedding that he’s not invited to, or to getting to sightsee in Portland while I’m there, so instead I say, “I do, actually,” and match Sawyer’s dark-eyed look with my own.

I’m rewarded with a faint bloom of color across his cheekbones. I wonder where else blood is moving, and that thought brings a sweep of heat down my body. For reasons that I can’t completely explain, I put on a bra-and-panty set from my purchase today before Sawyer and Jonah came over. I wasn’t actually thinking there would be an opportunity to show it off, so I guess in a way it was just for me. Just so I’d know. And indeed, I’m hyperconscious of the thin strip of lace barely covering my swollen lips.

“Anyone want more ice cream?”

“I’ll take another small spoonful,” Sawyer says.

“Me, too!” two other voices chime in.

“Give me your bowls. I’ll get it.”

I take the bowls into the kitchen, drag the ice cream out of the freezer, and pull out my phone.

I’m wearing some of my new purchases. Unfortunately, the panties have suffered a little bit of a—setback. They’re such a thin scrap to begin with, not much absorption potential…

I can hear Sawyer’s phone buzz in the next room. I scoop ice cream and wait patiently.

You are evil, woman.

You were the one who started the “foreplay.”

“Mom! Can Jonah sleep over?”

I carry the ice-cream bowls back into the dining room. Sawyer’s eye catches mine. This is a parental moment, not the other kind, but I still register the buzz of intentional eye contact, and I smile involuntarily at him. He smiles back and shrugs, as if to say, Okay with me.

“Sure,” I say.

We finish up our ice cream, and it’s nine thirty now, well past the boys’ weekend bedtime, so we need to move the party along. “Boys, pj’s and teeth.”

The boys rush off. Jonah won’t need to get sleepover stuff from his house, because his things have gradually migrated over here. I have a pair of his pajamas that go through the wash with Madden’s, and his toothbrush and toothpaste live in our bathroom drawer.

“I’ll help you clean up,” Sawyer says.

We’d pushed all the Catan bits into the middle of the table to eat ice cream, but now he leans across the table and begins bagging up all the little wooden pieces. I work on collecting the cards. “It’s a really good game,” he says. “I’m not a game guy, but I actually liked this one. I haven’t played a board game since—”

He goes suddenly silent.

Right.

“—since Lucy died,” he finishes—because we both knew that was what he was going to say; there’s no use pretending it wasn’t. He shoots me an apologetic look.

“It’s okay,” I say, meaning it. Or at least really wanting to mean it. There’s a sore spot in my chest, because Sawyer’s so great, and it must have been lovely to be Lucy, to be the woman he talked about like the sun rose and set wherever she was. “You gotta be able to talk about her, right? And look at me, I’m the one blathering about my divorce when I’m trying to hook up with a stranger in a bar. Look,” I say. “You have been more than clear about what you want out of this, where you stand, all that, and I’m a big girl. So—let’s just be who we are, shall we? Battered and maybe in need of some TLC, and by no means ready to shake off the past and march undaunted into the future. It doesn’t mean we can’t have a little fun.”

He stares at me for a long moment, and I can’t figure out what he’s thinking. Then he says, “Are you sure?”

“ ’Course I’m sure.”

“You’re a good sport.”

“Why, thanks,” I say, and his praise is nice but I feel a flutter of regret, like seller’s remorse. Though I don’t know exactly what it is I think I’ve given up. Nothing I ever had to begin with.

We finish dumping the pieces into the sturdy Catan box, and I pull the cover back on. He rises from the table and shifts his weight from one foot to the other. I’m sure he’s about to tell me he has to go, has to get back to the house for whatever reason, but instead he sits down suddenly and says, “Hey. How about a rematch?”