Page 76 of Just This Once

We are not dating.

We’re hooking up. That’s it.

“You can fill us in when we get coffee,” my brother says when I offer him a quick hug goodbye.

“No, I won’t be doing that. ’Kay, thanks. Byyeeeee.”

We move on toward the hot chocolate stand as Jake whines that he’s hungry. What’s new? Dante throws his arm around my son’s shoulders. “Let’s go find something. We’ll give the girls some time alone.”

Jake nods, and Dante swings his gaze to me, making sure it’s okay. “We’ll meet back up here in thirty minutes?” I ask, and when the boys agree, they take off to the other end of the block where a band is playing and someone is grilling something. I turn to Maddie. “What are you hungry for?”

She points back to a small food truck. “Crepes.”

“Yes. Good call.”

We order a ham and Gruyère along with one that has cinnamon apple compote and caramel drizzle and share them at a small table, where I ask casually, “So, what do you think of Dante?”

“Love him,” she says without a second’s hesitation. “He’s so funny and really nice. Like, would trust him to stand guard outside of the porta-potty at a concert nice, you know?”

I bite back a laugh. I took my daughter to one OliviaRodrigo concert last summer, and you’d think she’d been to Woodstock with all her new, worldly knowledge. But I have to agree with her. Dante is nice. Too nice.

For me, at least.

I’m mean and prickly and don’t deserve him standing guard in some theoretical scenario where I have to pee in a broken porta-potty, and he’s outside of it holding my purse and keeping the door closed.

Because he would do all that and more.

He’s the type of guy who puts you on his shoulders without asking. Who makes friendship bracelets and acts as DD. He’s the one guy to trust at a bar to get you home safe. The late-night call you make when you need help.

He is everything “nice” guys pretend to be and looks like what every man behind a social media avatar image wishes he could.

“Do you like him?” Maddie asks, and I give her a slight nod. She tips her head to the side. “Likehim, like him?”

I narrow my eyes. She’s too smart. “Why would you ask that?”

“I don’t know.” She carefully scrapes up the last of the caramel from the plate with the final bite of the sweet crepe. “He’s around all the time, and I think he likes you.Likelikes you, I mean.”

“Oh. Hmm.”

She watches me as she chews, and I suppose she’s getting to the age where we can start having conversations on the same level. The kinds of conversations I used to have with my mother. About what it means to be a woman and share in the communal experience of it sucking a lot of the time.

My time with Dante doesn’t suck.

“Yeah, I like him,” I tell her honestly. “But we’re just friends. We’re going to stay friends.”

She toggles her head side to side. “Sometimes friends turn into lovers.”

“How do you know that?”

“I read romance books,” she says, as if it should be obvious. Neither one of my kids readsa lot, but Maddie enjoys a good shopping spree for paperbacks that will stay in the same tower next to her bed for the whole year until she spends two weeks over summer break obsessively reading. Only to start the routine over again.

“Is there sex in those books?”

“Not in all of them, and the ones that do have it don’t have a lot.”

I gather up our garbage to throw away. “I don’t know what a lot is, but you know that’s fiction, right? If you have questions about sex, you need to ask me.”

“I know.” She follows me up from the table with a smile. My mother let all of us kids read whatever whenever we wanted, and I don’t police what my kids read either. Maddie’s thirteen, and when I was thirteen, I readFlowers in the Atticon my own andFlowers for Algernonfor school, arguably both just as traumatic. So, if she wants to read romance with sex, I’m going to let her. As long as she continues to communicate with me.

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