What I Love About You by Rachel Gibson

Author:Rachel Gibson [Gibson, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062247391
Amazon: 0062247395
Publisher: Avon
Published: 2014-08-26T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

His brown eyes melted her heart in middle school. The first time Michael Cooper kissed her, she’d fallen in ooey-gooey love. From her head to her toes, Natalie had loved Michael. She’d loved his hair and the color of his skin and how tan he got in the summer. She’d loved his chest and long legs and that his middle toe was shorter than the others. She’d even loved to watch him breathe in his sleep. Then he’d broken her heart and ruined her life. It had taken years to heal, and now he was back, standing in front of her. His brown eyes watching her and their child, and she felt nothing. No heart-cramping love. No gush of joy, and most surprising, no urge to punch him in the forehead. Not yet.

“She looks like you.”

She stood in his parents’ living room with Charlotte by her side. “Yes.” Natalie helped Charlotte off with her purple coat. “She has your weird toe.”

“Oh yeah?”

Carla took Natalie and Charlotte’s coats and laid them across the arm of the couch. “And she’s smart as a whip. Just like you when you were at that age.”

Natalie felt a subtle shift in the Coopers’ support of her. It wasn’t anything she could pinpoint. Nothing specific, it was just a feeling.

“And she loves macaroni and cheese just like you did.” The joy of having her son home lit up Carla’s whole face, and Natalie could appreciate that joy, even if she didn’t share in it.

Most kids loved macaroni and cheese, Natalie thought as she and Charlotte sat on the old floral sofa that had been in the Coopers’ living room since 1999.

“Only in the blue box,” Charlotte said, and she practically sat on top of Natalie. “I don’t like the yellow box.”

Michael took a seat in his father’s leather La-Z-Boy a few feet away. As teenagers, they’d made out in that chair. “Do you like hot dogs cut up in it?”

“We never had that.” Charlotte looked up at her mom, color high on her pale cheeks. “I don’t like wrinkly hot dogs.”

Natalie smiled and took her daughter’s hand in hers. She rubbed Charlotte’s back and felt her relax a fraction. “Overcooked hot dogs get wrinkled,” she explained.

“And ice cream.” Carla sat on the end of the couch beside Charlotte. She had short brown curls and a round face, and Natalie could almost see her bubble over with happiness. Michael was her boy. Her only child. “She loves to have ice cream with her papa.”

Natalie thought Carla might be selling things a little hard. Charlotte was a good girl. She was kindhearted and loved animals and people. She could be overly dramatic, get struck deaf with convenient hearing, and had a freaky little fear of robots, but she was wonderful and irresistible all on her own. Natalie knew all mothers thought their children were beautiful, funny, and gifted. That couldn’t be true of every child, but it was, of course, true of hers.

“What did you do in

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