Midnight Sommelier - Anne Malcom Page 0,70
thinks she can tell me what to do, and I’m good at winning arguments. And no way am I letting the life I’ve managed to create slip through my fingers. You’re not leaving me again. Not for your own good, not for mine. We’re here for each other’s worsts and we’re going to create good out of that. Want to argue?” I challenged.
He regarded me. His lip twitched. “No. I do not want to argue.”
Six months Later
“You nervous?”
I’d seen his shadow in the mirror, so I didn’t jump at the voice seemingly coming out of nowhere. Hands settled at my hips and I did my best to focus on finishing my hair and not the way his touch tempted me to abandon primping to have Zeke fuck me on the bathroom counter.
Yeah, his touch still did that to me after almost a year of us being ... whatever we were. Well, for the past six months we’d been a little more defined, having told our respective children the truth about us.
And everyone took it well.
Incredibly well. All three of them.
Well, Ryder just grinned knowingly and pretended that this was the first time he was hearing of it.
It went against the law of probability that three different teenagers would react so positively to news that rocked their respective worlds.
Ryder was happy because he wanted his mother to be happy, because he’d already done whatever teenage boy test he was going to do on Zeke, and he’d passed.
Jax was happy because he idolized Zeke a little. He missed having a man around the house. He was handling this all as well as an eight-year-old could, better than any normal eight-year-old in my opinion, but he still felt lost with a significant force in his life gone forever. He had room for Zeke. Not to replace his father, but for something else.
Luna, of course, was ecstatic. She was the hopeless romantic out of all us, which, with her past just made her that much more extraordinary.
“Are they going to live with us now?” Jax asked in the only way an eight-year-old could, with the innocent thought that such a thing was the next rational step.
My stomach curdled with the question. With the thought. It was far too soon. But some part of me liked the thought of our crazy families under one roof.
But I wasn’t keen on erasing David so quickly. To have another man on his side of the bed.
“No, sweetie,” I said, rubbing his head. “It’s far too soon for anything like that. We’re taking it slowly and we just wanted to let you know because we’re planning to spend a lot more time together.”
His eyes lit up. “Does that mean you can come for pizza night? And chocolate cake for dinner night?” he asked Zeke.
Oh no, I could see it, my child was latching on. And if all this went to shit then we’d have more broken hearts around here.
What was I doing?
It was too late to backpedal.
“I’m sure Zeke has a lot healthier eating habits than having chocolate cake for dinner,” I told Jax.
“Hey, you’d have to be inhuman to not like chocolate cake. Don’t try and speak for me,” he said, teasing in his tone.
My heart hurt seeing this. Seeing another man make my boy beam like that, knowing his father would never do it again. Absolute agony mingled with a soft kind of satisfaction.
And that’s what it had been these past six months, a mixture of pain and happiness. Guilt over that happiness. Trying to find my rhythm.
No one else outside the family knew, especially not my mother-in-law. Things between us had been tense enough. We had scheduled, monthly dinners at a neutral battleground—one of the few snobby restaurants scattered around Black Mountain and beyond—and we did our best to stay polite for the boys’ sake and say as little as possible to each other.
I made sure to get a good buzz on to get me through it, since I had a son who was now old enough to be the sober driver.
Not the best mom decision but whatever.
Zeke was always happy for me to come home from such dinners because I was pissed off and tipsy and looking to have some angry sex.
He was more than happy to oblige.
We spent every night together, but we were not living together, not technically, even though I had doubles of all of my skincare and beauty products lined in his bathroom. Even though he had his lined up in