Free How to Love by Katie Cotugno Page B

a lobster roll, so he takes me to this divey place on a pier in Lauderdale, picnic benches and beer in plastic cups. Souvenir shops glow white and neon along the beachfront. Tourists wander by in various stages of sunburned undress.
    “This is a Maine thing, though!” I protest, pulling a handful of napkins from the dispenser on the table. “Aren’t lobster rolls a Maine thing?”
    Aaron shrugs. “Maine, schmaine,” he says, then laughs. “I mean, yes. These are probably Yankee lobsters, which means they hauled their slow crustacean selves all the way down here so that you could have this experience, so
probably
you should quit complaining.”
    “I’m not complaining,” I tell him, and smile. There’s a pile of onion rings on a plate between us. The last of the sunset catches the gold in his hair. “Actually, I’m happy as a clam.”
    Aaron groans. “Was that a seafood pun?” he asks, and I cackle dorkily. “Really?
Really?
”
    After Aaron finished high school in New Hampshire, he worked on fishing boats in Gloucester, Massachusetts, for a couple of years before he moved to Florida at the beginning of the summer. He picked up Shelby from work every night for two weeks before I realized he wasn’t doing it to make Shelby’s life easier.
    “You realize I’m not fun,” I told him, the first time he asked me out. “I have a kid. I’m not fun. Even before I had a kid, I wasn’t fun.”
    “You’re totally boring,” he agreed, nodding seriously. We were standing on the sidewalk outside Antonia’s after eleven, the smell of heat and car exhaust and the ocean somewhere underneath. “Definitely.” Then he laughed, and it felt like something warm and liquid cracking open inside my chest. “How’s this weekend?” he asked, and that was that.
    Tonight we finish our sandwiches and wander down the beach for a while in the dark. The sand is gritty and familiar beneath my feet. I chat to him for a while about the classes I’m taking, lit and art history and accounting at the community college in Broward, a last-ditch attempt to keep my brain from turning to soup inside my head.
    “We still on for Saturday?” he asks, when we’re back at my car. We kiss up against the side of it for a while, the faint zing of peppermint gum behind his teeth, but Cade and Stefanie have the baby, and I promised I’d pick her up by ten.
    “Absolutely,” I say with a grin, though in truth I totally forgot until right now. There’s a barbecue at his mom’s house, a family thing with Shelby and everybody that he told me about last week. At some point I’m going to have to make a salad. “Pick us up around one?”
    “Will do.” Aaron kisses me good-bye and knocks twice on the roof before I go,
Get home safe
. The lights look like a carnival in the rearview.
    *
    Hannah fights me on her nap the next morning, and we’re already running a little behind by the time I get her changed and make it down to the kitchen to finish packing the diaper bag. I bump the swinging door open with one hip and find Sawyer standing there, dressed in his work clothes, looking at the baby pictures on the fridge. I freeze. “Wha—?”
    “I didn’t know you were here,” he says immediately, trying to head me off at the pass before I can lay into him. “My dad just needed to drop some paperwork off for your dad. Your car wasn’t—I didn’t know you were here.”
    “It was making a noise,” I say. I stop in the doorway and watch him for a second, remembering: I used to find him like this all the time when we were together, just hanging out in my house as if he lived here, or wanted to. I swallow, hold the baby a little tighter. “Cade took it in this morning.”
    Sawyer nods. “You said stay away from you.”
    “I did.” I bounce Hannah on my hip and rummage around in the fridge for the lidded cups of juice I put therelast night, her pudgy hands rooting through my hair. It feels claustrophobic in here, like the walls are closing in.