“Okay, lay it on me.”
“Will you let me take you out again?” I asked.
“Seriously? Do you mean that?”
“I do, although your answer isn’t all that encouraging.”
“No!” she said quickly. “I mean, I’m just kind of surprised. I figured the no sex thing would be a deal breaker.”
“It doesn’t look like it. You’re based out of Seattle, right? Isn’t that what you said?”
She nodded. “That’s right.”
"Good. So am I. When we're home, and things have calmed down some, let me take you out. We'll get to know each other better and see what happens."
“That sounds wonderful. Really, Drew. It sounds perfect.”
She stood and kissed me once on my forehead before letting herself out of my room. I sat in my chair for a long time after she’d gone, trying to figure out what the hell had just happened. Even by the time I fell asleep, it was something I couldn’t figure out at all.
Chapter 9: Jess
“Mama, come on!”
“Come on?” I asked. “What are you talking about, sweetie?”
“I mean come on and pay attention! It’s no fun when you aren’t really trying. I don’t want to just be playing by myself.”
I looked at Emma across the coffee table, feeling more than a little bit sleepish. She was right. The two of us had been taking advantage of one of my rare days off by spending the time playing board games. It was one of those rainy days that made you want to stay inside forever, and Emma had always been a huge fan of anything competitive.
Personally, I had never been all that into competitive games, but for her, I would do pretty much anything. It wasn’t like it was her fault that board games weren’t so much my thing, and it definitely wasn’t her fault that she had such a competitive streak in her. She was exactly like her father.
That man had been able to turn everything into something competitive, even seemingly normal things like going to the grocery store. In that way, Emma was exactly like him, which made my heart both heavy and light at the same time. Even after five years, I was still being surprised by the ways in which Emma could still bring me back to Matt. It had been five years already since his death, and I was past the part of mourning where every little part of everyday hurt. But there were still so many surprises.
Emma was growing up more and more every day, and from everything I could see, she was almost a perfect blend of her two parents. It was hard sometimes, but I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
“What’s with you, Mama?”
“What’s with me?” I laughed, reaching over the coffee table and ruffling Emma’s blonde hair. “That’s a very grownup question, little girl.”
“I’m not so little. And you’re acting funny. Are you sad?”
“No,” I answered with a frown, surprised to have such an astute, if not completely accurate, question coming from a ten-year-old. “I’m really not. What makes you ask that?”
“I told you,” she insisted, her own frown mimicking my own. “You’re acting funny. You’re acting kind of far away.”
“Am I? I’m sorry, I don’t mean to. I guess I’ve just got something on my mind.”
“Duh. What is it?”
I laughed and wondered to myself if I was ready to tell her. Drew had told me that night in the Dallas hotel that he wanted to take me out again, but I hadn’t really believed him. It had seemed more likely that he was trying to find a polite way to get me out of his room as quickly as possible after realizing that I really wasn’t going to sleep with him that night.
Imagine my surprise, then, when a couple of days after we had returned to Seattle, I received a call from him. I hadn’t even answered it because I never answered numbers I didn’t recognize, but when I had listened to the message he left me, I had actually squealed with excitement.
It hadn’t even occurred to me that I’d never given him my number, something that would have put an end to the possibility of dating with most men. Drew just wasn’t most men. He had convinced somebody, he still wouldn’t tell me who, to give him my number and had asked me to go out with him again just the way he’d promised.
Finding the time to go on those dates wasn’t exactly easy for two people with such strenuous, strange schedules, but somehow, we had made it work. We had gone on two dates since that first strange evening, and each one had only made me like Drew more. I knew things were getting to the point where I would need to tell Emma that something was going on. I just wasn’t sure how to tell when that point really was.
In the five years since her father’s death, I had never dated a man seriously enough to want to tell Emma much about him. Now that I was pretty sure that Drew was different than the other men, I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to proceed.