Page 149 of You've Got Hate Mail
I rush through a shower, planning to get downstairs to ask Cricket to have coffee with me before my daughter’s awake, but instead, when I open my bedroom door, I hear both of their voices and smell coffee.
“So then I dreamed that Fluffy was a dragon, but she was a bad dragon, so I had to slay her with a magical toaster that turned her back into a cat, except then she was someone else’s cat,” Lav’s saying.
Her imagination is boundless, and while her stories about her dreams can go on and on and on, I’m frequently in awe that she can think up crazy things like this and also remember her dreams in such vivid detail.
She makes me feel like I have the imagination of a brick.
“Did you get her back?” Cricket asks.
“No, but I got a better cat named Snickersticks. He could talk. And fly. He flew me to see my mommy.”
I freeze in the doorway of the kitchen.
“That sounds lovely,” Cricket says, completely normal, like it’s not weird or uncomfortable when Lav talks about Ava. “Do you dream about your mommy often?”
“No. And it wasn’t really my mommy. It was some lady with an extra ponytail growing out of her nose. I just thought she was my mommy in the dream.”
“Dreams are like that sometimes.” She glances my way over her coffee mug, and her face melts into a happy smile. “Morning.”
My cheeks get hot as I feel myself smiling back.
How is she so pretty?
Truly, how?
She’s in a black tank top and pink satin pajama shorts, and her hair’s a little wild, one eyebrow too, no makeup, not even lip gloss, and she’s the very definition of gorgeous.
Plus, those pajama shorts are making my dick wake up like I didn’t jerk off after getting Lav back to bed last night and then again in the shower five minutes ago.
“Morning,” I say gruffly.
She bites her lower lip and smiles wider, then drops her eyes to her mug as she takes a sip of coffee.
I pause to kiss Lav on the head as I stroll into the kitchen. She’s eating scrambled eggs with a side of grapes and toast while perched on a stool at the high counter between the kitchen and living room. “Sleep okay?” I ask my daughter.
“I hate sleep. I want to be awake all the time and have more fun.”
“That’d be nice, but then your body wouldn’t function very well, and fun wouldn’t be as much fun.”
“Ugh. You’re such a grown-up.”
I don’t feel like one when I look at Cricket.
I feel young and carefree and impatient to get her to myself again.
For sex.
Not for anything like what this might look like with her making Lav breakfast in my kitchen this morning.
Daylight has brought the fear roaring back.
The memories of how hard relationships are.
The way life can rip the rug out from under you at any minute.
“I made the beans from Elizabeth today,” Cricket tells me. “Want a cup?”
It’s just coffee. “Yes, please.”
