Total pages in book: 95
Estimated words: 91864 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 459(@200wpm)___ 367(@250wpm)___ 306(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 91864 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 459(@200wpm)___ 367(@250wpm)___ 306(@300wpm)
When I saw it was him, I was thrilled…too thrilled about a guy who I’d only seen twice.
When are you going to let me beat you at air hockey again? Although I knew the air hockey he was talking about didn’t involve a Dave & Buster’s.
Mom snatched my phone from me the way she would have when I was in high school or when I’d come home from college.
“Seriously?” Mom asked. “You see your parents how much and you’re going to get on the phone while I’m trying to get you to help me with something?”
“I saw you three days ago, Mom. We had lunch at the California Pizza Kitchen.”
“Yes, and it was three days too long.”
She knelt down and set the phone on a beam behind her.
As she started to find her place in the book again, I was relieved she didn’t take a sneak peek at the message as she was prone to do.
“Air hockey, huh?” she asked.
Fuck.
Dad eyed me peculiarly. “Air hockey?”
“Sounds like someone went on a date,” Mom added.
“A date? What are those? Barbara, I’m not familiar with any child of mine going on these dates, are you?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s something that we did once upon a time, but I suppose we did a better job explaining the birds and the bees than we did explaining dates.”
I laughed because I knew neither of them really cared. They just loved giving me a hard time. Maybe that was part of why I was so adept at handling the attitude Ethan gave me.
“Guy or girl?” Dad asked Mom.
“It said ‘Straighty,’ ” she replied, “so it could go either way.” A wicked grin overtook her face. Oh, she was loving getting to tease me about this secret lover she’d discovered.
“Straighty?” Dad said. “I’m going to go with a dude.”
Mom looked to me before sliding her reading glasses down the bridge of her nose, clearly trying to make this interrogation as overdramatic as possible.
“Yes, that message is from a man,” I confessed. “But not like someone I’m dating.”
“So you haven’t played air hockey with this person?” Mom asked.
“No, I have.”
Dad’s brows pushed together. “Where did you play air hockey?”
“At a Dave & Buster’s. Can we not get into this?”
Mom’s eyes lit up as she glowed with excitement. “You went to a Dave & Buster’s with a man?”
“I can’t take you both teaming up on me like this.”
Mom ignored me and turned to Dad. “Johnnie, what do you think I should wear to the wedding?”
“I don’t know. I think something simple,” he replied.
“I was thinking something white,” she teased. “I mean, there won’t be a bride, after all. I could just wear my wedding dress.”
Dad laughed. “You looked beautiful in that dress.”
“Do you still fit into that dress?” I teased.
Mom’s jaw dropped. “Oh, he’s catty about it. This one must be real special.”
They burst out laughing together, reveling in their moment at getting me going. But I knew they were really enjoying it because that was more interest than I’d shown in anyone since I was in college—when I’d dated because I thought that was the only way I could get people to sleep with me.
“I don’t know if I want to come back into a house where you two are going to gang up on me,” I said.
Mom rolled her eyes. “Whatever. We do it out of love. So tell us the deets.”
“Mom, no one’s saying deets.”
“Yes, they are. Everyone’s saying deets. I see it on Twitter all the time. You’re the one who got me to up my social media game for my company, so don’t tell me what people say. I will hashtag the deets out of whatever I want to.”
“He’s just trying to avoid the subject,” Dad pressed, “which is this man that he’s falling in love with.”
“Shut up, you guys. No one is falling in love. I’ve seen this guy once…or like three times now.”
“And played air hockey?” Mom asked. “So at least one date.”
“A sort of, kind of date.”
“Keep going, Barbara. You already got him to crack a little bit.”
It wasn’t until they ganged up on me that I realized…it kinda was a date.
I figured I’d be meeting him at a bar or his place when he suggested going out, and Dave and Buster’s seemed like fun, but damn if that wasn’t a datey thing to do together. Like…high school datey. To make it even worse, he was messaging about air hockey.
Nothing about that night had weirded me out. Ethan Harris was not the dating kind, but it still was a lot more than anything I’d done with anyone else in a long-ass time.
“When do we meet him?” Mom asked, pulling me out of my own thoughts. “What can I call him? Straighty seems like an odd name for me to call my son-in-law.”