Goldie narrows her eyes on me. “You’re getting some sick pleasure from me being worried about you?”
I shake my head.
“Then why are you smirking?”
Immediately I strip my face of the recollection. I’m glad she doesn’t know the warmth in my stomach.
“Why is it so dangerous to drive forWheel Get You?” I ask, veering the conversation back to where it started. She gives me a skeptical look and I know I’m not off the hook for good, just for now.
“You’re a beautiful young mom with a dangerously large rack,” she deadpans.
I smack her in the arm. “They won’t be bruisers for long.”
She snorts, and I laugh because laughing together is what I need, even if it is at the expense of my insanely large boobs.
When our giggles fade, I look at her with seriousness in my expression. “It helps me clear my head, that’s all. It gets me out, I get to bring Jett…” I shrug. “I’m not ready to open another studio but I can’t just sit at home, I couldn’t just sit at the apartment.”
Before I’d found this perfect house around the corner from my parents, Jett and I had been staying in an apartment in town. Because the idea of living under the same roof ashimstopped being an option that fateful day seventeen months ago.
“If it makes you happy,” she lets the sentence hang because she will never agree to me being a rideshare driver.
I don’t want to be a thirty-something single mom taxi driver. But for now, I need this because I need something that isn’t completely depressing and tainted.
“It’s not forever,” I concede, wanting to give her something, knowing I can’t give her what she really wants. She wants me to open a new studio and go back to creating and loving my job and my life. I know she only wants that because it’s what's best for me.
I’m just… not ready. I have no energy.
For some reason, Beau pops into my head again and I can’t help the grin that curls my curious lips.
Goldie pulls Jett into her lap as he coos and gurgles, holding a plastic slotted spoon to his drooly mouth. I ruffle his hair.
“What?” she bumps her elbow to mine. “You’re smiling again.”
This time, I come clean.
“There was thiskidat the shop where I took my car last week.” I chew the inside of my mouth to prevent an inappropriately sized smile from painting my face. I don’t know this kid well enough to be grinning like a damn fool. He’s just the kid from the damn auto repair shop down the street.
“Kid?” she questions, her voice lifting on the i. “What doeskidmean to you?”
I wrinkle my nose and volley my head, considering her question. “Twenties. Early twenties, if I had to guess.”
She tips her head forward as Jett takes a wet fistful of her smooth dark hair. “Just a beeb,” she coos in her baby voice.
I laugh. “See? A kid.”
“Anyway,” she says, egging me on as she pries her hair from my son’s little fist. I smooth his hair again and smile at watching the two of them together.
“Yeah, anyway. He was a disaster the first time I went in.” I consider Beau the first time I met him. He couldn’t even get logged into the computer. He was sweating and irritable. He freaking puked into a trashcan. He was not okay.
And the beautiful dark-haired girl at the desk. She said he was suffering from BHS.
Broken heart syndrome.
“Just what you don’t need—a work in progress,” Goldie says. She’s not wrong.
“I know,” I say, surprisingly defensive of this virtual stranger. “But I guess he’s going through something. The girl at the front desk said so.”
Goldie cocks an eyebrow. “This an auto repair shop or a soap opera?”