weird things, none of which were on the realtor good-behavior list either. Damn. She held out Thea's list like a weapon. Maybe a guy who knew about onions could be useful. "Where's the belly butter?"
His eyes clouded in confusion.
She waved at the dairy case. "They've got twenty-five kinds of butter here, but none of them says anything about bellies."
He stared at her, still perplexed. And then he started laughing. The kind of big, shoulder-jerking laughs that had half the store looking at them.
"What is so damn funny?" She fought off the urge to stomp her feet or kick his shins. Barely. He wasn't laughing at her, that much she could read - he just couldn't contain his amusement.
He wrapped an arm around her shoulders, still chuckling - and dropped a kiss on the top of her head. "Belly butter's just a fancy kind of lotion for pregnant bellies." He steered her away from the dairy aisle, body still shaking with mirth. "It works well on babies too - sometimes they have dry skin when they first come out."
A big cave in the middle of the grocery store was probably too much to hope for. Lizard tried to cling to her last shreds of dignity, and finally gave up. It was hopeless. Other realtors just didn't end up in these kinds of messes. Just the stupid ones.
Josh glanced down, frowned, and pulled them to a stop. He just looked at her for a minute - and when he spoke, all traces of laughter were gone from his mind and voice. "I'm sorry. I guess this is one of those things that won't be funny for you for a while."
He'd be a lot easier to deal with if he was an obnoxious rich dude. Lizard could feel her punk face sliding into place. "No big. I just don't know much about babies."
His smile didn't seem to see her defenses at all. "And I don't know how to cook scrambled eggs." He grabbed her hand. "How about a trade? I help you find belly butter and whatever else is on that list, and you show me how to cook something decent for breakfast."
He didn't know how to cook? Lizard tried to fit that in with her mental picture of Josh. It didn't compute. "You asked for a house with a big kitchen."
"Yup." He turned left down the shampoo aisle. "Cooking's just following directions, right? I figure I can learn. If you help me, I might not have to eat burnt cheesy eggs again." He grinned. "The first attempt this morning wasn't so good."
If he'd added cheese and eggs in the proportions in his shopping cart, that wasn't a big surprise. And she wasn't falling for his whole "see, there are things I don't know either" routine. They lived on different planets - she knew it, even if he didn't. He lived on the kind where he could probably afford to hire a live-in chef to teach him how to cook. Not a mostly-ex delinquent.
Josh reached out and pulled down a jar. "This is the belly butter."
Sure enough. It said so in great big letters on the side of the jar, along with a woman who looked like she'd swallowed the world's biggest pumpkin. It didn't look anything like butter - and for reasons she couldn't fathom, Lizard suddenly found that funny. The slightly panicky kind of funny that meant she needed to get the hell away from Josh Hennessey before she did something really, really stupid.
Lizard reached for the jar, giggles bubbling to the surface. Rich dudes aside, she was never going to be able to buy butter with a straight face again. Thea owed her seriously big.
It had felt like the journey of a thousand steps. Elsie put her hand on the door of Spirit Yoga, yoga mat under her arm and heart in her throat.
Vero had said she needed to come.
Elsie had mostly managed to quiet the screeching protest in her mind. The quaking of her soul was a lot harder to manage.
Barely able to breathe, she pulled the door open. And saw Nat, sitting quietly against the opposite wall, smiling in welcome.
Elsie stood in the doorway, her ability to put one foot in front of the other entirely gone, her reasons for coming totally opaque.
Nat uncurled gracefully and stood up, hand out in invitation. "I was just about to do some gentle opening yoga. Join me?"
Somehow, that unglued Elsie's feet. Slowly she followed Nat down the hallway into Spirit Yoga's