I completely ignored the first part of what she’d said, but the last bit was interesting.
“Teddy!” I called. “Time to go home with Momma!”
“Okay, I’mma run fast!” he shouted.
I grinned at him.
“How do I look?” Soph asked, smoothing down her hair. “I don’t want him to see I’ve been upset.”
I didn’t know what to say. Between the bloodshot eyes and her cheeks still being wet and flushed, I, uh… Yeah.
“Great,” she muttered to herself.
“You’re the most beautiful roadkill in the world,” I said.
I knew how to make her laugh. That had to count.
Seven
“Careful, darlin’. One might accuse you of being romantic.”
I wouldn’t want that, would I?
I was saved by the bell and evaded answering. “That should be the pizza.” I dropped the pillow on the sofa and made a move to head back inside, but Blake beat me to it and said he’d grab it. “There’s money on the hallway table!” I called after him.
“Interestin’ piece of information!”
I snorted and shook my head in amusement. All right, might as well finish what I’d started up here. I’d felt kind of bad for him. The past two days, he’d been stuck indoors because Teddy was on a board game kick and didn’t wanna go outside. So Blake had been looking forward to spending the evening on the porch tonight, maybe going for a swim in the ocean…and then it started pouring down.
I couldn’t give him a perfect sunset tonight, but I could at least bring our party outdoors. I’d extended the canvas awning above us as far as it went, and I’d draped the little sofa with covers and pillows. The rain pitter-pattering on the roof was a nice touch.
The candles on the table could be misconstrued—and probably why he’d joked about me being romantic—but I didn’t have any lights up here. When it was just me, I didn’t mind the darkness. I preferred it, especially on clear nights.
Blake returned a couple minutes later with a large pizza and two beers. “I don’t know what’s sweetest, watching you bottle-feed Lily or seeing her asleep on top of Mischa.”
I smirked. I’d vote for the latter. “He’s become her protector. I’m not exaggerating if I say I have over two hundred photos of them in my phone.”
“I believe you.” He chuckled and set the pizza on the table before we took our seats next to each other. “My buddies gave me a lot of shit after I adopted Oppy and Percy because I kept uploading pictures of the pups to Facebook. But what the fuck else was I supposed to do on there? All I got from them were constant strings of invites to games and—ding, Mark has sent you a life! Great, thanks…?”
I let out a laugh and grabbed a pizza slice. “I only have Facebook to stay in touch with my nephews. Apparently, texting is bad. It has to be Messenger.”
“How many nephews do you have? And siblings, for that matter. The only family member you mention regularly is your pops.”
“Because he’s the only one left in town,” I chuckled around a mouthful of food. Fuck, burning-hot food. But damn, it was good. Couldn’t go wrong with pepperoni and green peppers. “I have one sister. A year younger than me. She’s got two boys.”
“No parents?”
Well…sure. Them too. “I love them and wish them the best, but they’re strange people. Whenever someone says they’re scatterbrained or they easily forget things, I wanna say, you haven’t met my folks.” I wasn’t mad about it, far from it. But once upon a time, I had been. “Aside from our birthdays, there wasn’t a single date they didn’t forget at least once when we grew up. And we lived up in the woods in Westslope—remember where we went to the lake? Near there. So my sister and I relied on them. We needed them to take us to school and whatnot.” I shook my head. “Forget it. Most of the time, Marlene and I had to be their parents.”
I hoped that didn’t come out wrong. My folks were genuinely good people; they just truly weren’t meant to have kids.
Blake tilted his head at me. “How could they forget? They had to go to work in the morning anyway, didn’t they?”
“They worked from home a lot,” I answered, reaching for a napkin. “Dad’s an inventor, and Ma’s a writer. They can’t keep normal hours to save their lives.”
“Inventor sounds cool, though,” he replied. “Has he invented anything I’ve heard about?”
Un-fucking-likely. The mere thought was hilarious. “One thing you should know about my parents is that they’re hardcore into birds. It’s how they met—they studied ornithology. So everything they’ve done and continue to do is related to birds.” I picked up another slice. “Dad developed some kind of gadget in the eighties that registers and catalogues bird sounds, and the money he got from that lasted throughout our childhood. And every now and then, Ma sold an article to various wildlife magazines.”