Bliss and the Art of Forever - Alison Kent Page 0,75
know you love your Grammy, and Grammy loves you, but it’s okay if you just eat one cookie and save the rest for after your dinner.”
“If I eat my dinner I’ll be too full to eat them.”
“Yeah. That’s the point.”
“What is a point? Like a pencil?”
“Nothing, sweetheart. Never mind.” Then he puts his hand on my forehead again. “Does your throat hurt when you swallow?”
“I don’t have anything to swallow. If I had a piece of ooey gooey cake I could swallow it.” I really, really want a piece of ooey gooey cake.
“You can swallow your spit.”
“Daddy, you are just yucky.”
“Here. Drink some water.”
I do, and it hurts a little bit, but I don’t want him to know because then he won’t help me make an ooey gooey cake.
“That’s what I thought,” he says, when I open my eyes after the hurt stops.
“Are you going to make me stay home from school tomorrow?”
“I am. Because it’s Saturday.”
“Does that mean I don’t get to see Ms. Harvey?”
“Saturday is the weekend, pumpkin. It’s Ms. Harvey’s day off.”
“Is it my day off, too?”
“It is.”
“And Grammy’s? She’s going to take me to look for an Easter dress.”
Daddy shakes his head and tugs at my hair. “You’re not going anywhere if you’re still sneezing.”
“I won’t be. I promise. Can you come with us, too?”
“I would love to come, but I have to work. This week I don’t get a day off till Sunday.”
“How come you have to wait till Sunday?” I don’t like it when Daddy works so much.
“Because people who don’t have to work on Saturday like to come buy chocolates. I have to be there to sell them.”
“But Lena sells them. You just make them.”
“You make it sound so easy.”
“It’s just candy, Daddy. Candy IS easy. It’s not hard like ooey gooey cake.”
He moves my hair away from my face and touches the end of my nose. Then I scoot down so he can pull up my covers and tuck me in like a cozy bug in a rug before he reads me a Pete the Cat story. “If you’re running a fever in the morning, you’re staying home.”
“That’s okay, Daddy. I don’t mind.”
But I would mind if I had to miss school and not see Ms. Harvey.
FOURTEEN
Rather than sitting on Addy’s bed and leaning against the brick wall at the head as he usually did for story time, Callum perched on the edge of the mattress, figuring as bad as she felt with her allergies, and with the medicine due to kick in, he wouldn’t be here long. He was right. He didn’t even make it through half the book before she fell asleep.
Leaving her with a brush of his lips to her brow, then lingering at her doorway with a prayer that he not screw up this parenting thing, that he help her become a well-rounded, decent, and productive member of the human community, he headed for the kitchen and the small offset pantry where he stored his chocolate-making supplies.
Since opening Bliss, he rarely made candy at home. He didn’t keep any but the most basic of ingredients in the loft, and his best molds were at the shop. But there was just something about going back to his roots that settled him. And tonight he was feeling the need to be settled. Plus, he’d be seeing Brooklyn tomorrow. He’d been terse on the phone with her earlier, concerned about Addy, and he made his best apologies with chocolate.
Okay. Brooklyn didn’t date men whose kids she taught. He got it, and he could respect it, though it made for a bit of a hurdle; by the time Addy was no longer one of her students, Brooklyn would be on her way out of town. She might return, she might not, meaning he had to make sure she knew his interest went beyond last weekend’s kiss. A kiss that had thrown him far enough off-kilter he’d been afraid to touch base all week: afraid he’d gone too far and she wouldn’t want to see him again, afraid seeing her again would have them going even further when sex at this stage of the game wouldn’t be smart. She wasn’t ready, and, he feared, she was too hung up on the past.
No, the best thing to do would be get her to change her mind about leaving for good—though that wouldn’t be fair to either of them. She had to do what she had to do; he knew without a doubt she’d regret