Between Me and You by Scotch Allison Winn

Author:Scotch, Allison Winn [Scotch, Allison Winn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance, Contemporary, Adult
ISBN: 9781503941229
Goodreads: 32604360
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Published: 2018-01-09T00:00:00+00:00

19

BEN

DECEMBER 2007

I am being polite to Ron; I can feel myself being polite, trying too hard. He is perfectly nice, perfectly innocuous. I realize that I’m thirty-three years old, and stewing over my mother’s new relationship puts me at the emotional maturity of about, say, a nine-year-old. Also, it has been six years since my dad died. She’s had her time to mourn. So have I.

“He’s so nice,” Tatum said in the car last night after we met for dinner at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where they were staying for the visit. “And your mom seems really smitten.”

I cornered too sharply around a turn on Sunset.

“Hey, Jesus, Ben!” Tatum’s hand flew to her belly, the way that a mother’s arm would fly toward the back seat if the car stopped too abruptly.

“Sorry, sorry.” I slowed and put my own palm atop her stomach, which has the perfect curvature of a beach ball. The baby wasn’t exactly planned, and its inception wasn’t exactly the stuff of true romance, maybe a romantic comedy if I were to write that type of thing. While back in Ohio for Piper’s wedding, and after a stop at IHOP for a pancake special, Tatum and I got busy in the back seat of our rental Ford Explorer (sorry, Hertz) like we were high schoolers. Afterward, she said: “Yeah, I think we’ve pretty much re-created my stellar high school sexual experience.” And then, as I climbed into the front, she said: “Oh shit,” upon realizing she had left her pills at home. Then a few weeks later, from behind our bathroom door, she said, “Oh shit” again. I sat at the foot of the bed and shouted back, “Really? Oh my God, really?” and hoped that I sounded at least 50 percent less terrified than I was. When she emerged from the bathroom, I swept her into a hug so high her feet left the ground, and I wondered if she could feel my hands shaking as I did.

God knows I haven’t yet found the right tenor for fatherhood with Leo: I’ve been too steely and too hard-nosed, much like my own dad had been, and though I want to let down my guard, just be his brother, I know that boundaries are there for a reason. My dad was never my friend (I can envision him cringing at the notion), and now, with Leo, I can’t quite find the balance either. Who knows what sort of dad I’ll be? How I’ll manage?

“Daddy issues,” Tatum says from time to time. When I fall silent in Walter’s presence, when I grimace in Ron’s. But is it so wrong to mourn the man my dad could have been—he was only fifty-two when he died—the relationship we could have had, the ways I could have proven myself to be the son he knew I was capable of, and not wanting to open myself up to the men who could replace him? Not Walter. He doesn’t try to replace him. He just inserts himself into our lives, into our business, without ever really asking.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.