Page 135 of The Book Club Boyfriend
“You love it.”
She closes the laptop with a soft click, setting it on the nightstand along with her glasses. When she turns back to me, her expression is softer—unguarded in that way she only gets late at night.
“Today was good,” she says quietly.
I pull her closer until she’s tucked against my chest. “Your parents were... surprisingly functional.”
“I know, right? They got through an entire meal without a single passive-aggressive comment about the divorce.”
“Progress.”
“And what they said...” She trails off, her fingers tracing absent patterns on my chest. “About me proving them wrong. About building something they couldn’t.”
“They meant it.”
“I know.” Her voice is small. “That’s what made it so...”
“Scary?”
She nods against my shoulder. “I spent so long being angry at them, using their failure as proof that love wasn’t worth it. And now—”
“Now you write romance novels and wake up every morning next to a hockey player who can’t cook.”
She laughs softly. “When you put it like that.”
I press a kiss to her hair, breathing in the familiar scent of her shampoo. “You know what the best part is?”
“Hm?”
“We get to keep proving them right. Every day. Every burnt pancake, every deadline, every time Rip steals your spot on the couch. We just keep building.”
She’s quiet for a moment before she asks, “Even if you bring home a puppy?”
“Especially then. Think about it—Owen would lose his mind. The photo ops alone...”
She groans. “You’re not actually getting a puppy.”
“Forty-sixty chance.”
“Chase.”
“Thirty-seventy?”
She props herself up on an elbow to look at me properly. Her hair is messy, falling around her face. No makeup. That tiny scar on her chin from when she wiped out on her bike at eight—beautiful.
“I love you,” she says simply. “Even if you’re plotting to bring chaos into our perfectly functional life.”
“Our life is already chaos. We babysit with a foam hockey stick and use Rip as a pillow fort.”
“Valid point.” She leans down to kiss me, slow and sweet. “But still no puppy.”
“We’ll see.”
She settles back against my chest, her breathing already starting to slow. I trace lazy circles on her back, feeling her relax incrementally.
“Hey,” I whisper into the darkness.
“Mm?”
