“No, kid,” I said carefully. “He just got tweaked that guy was in our ’hood. Your mom and Merry are just friends.”

All right. Good. I got that out and none of it was a lie (ish).

“He was tweaked, so he spent the night?”

Fuck.

“Well, yeah,” I said, going for casual and thinking I was pulling it off. “He likes us. He just wanted to make sure we were all right.”

“By spending the night?”

God.

Maybe it wasn’t good my kid was sharp.

I hit pause on the game and looked to my boy.

He looked to me.

“Yeah, Ethan,” I told him quietly. “He likes us a whole lot. It freaked him out that guy was in our neighborhood. There are men out there who don’t like the idea of a woman alone with her kid with no man lookin’ after them.” I grinned at him. “We got ourselves covered, but Merry’s that kind of man, you know?”

He nodded.

“Sorry it went down like that this morning,” I told him. “Merry probably freaked you by wakin’ you up. But he was tryin’ to do your mom a solid, lettin’ me sleep.”

“He did the right thing,” Ethan declared. “You don’t get enough sleep, Mom.”

And maybe it wasn’t good my kid was so sweet. It made capping the gooey at one hit a week nearly impossible.

“And it sucks that Merry lookin’ out for us and holdin’ your hand and stuff doesn’t mean he’s your boyfriend,” Ethan stated. “He’s super cool. He’s almost as cool as Colt.”

And there it was again.

Ethan liked Merry, but more, Ethan liked Merry for me.

Honestly, there would never be a way to decipher the many varieties of how my life sucked. The suckage of my life was like pi—it went on endlessly.

“Yeah,” was all I could say, because my son was right.

Ethan stared at me.

Then, without warning, he leveled me.

“You need a boyfriend.”

I did a slow blink with the addition of a head jerk.

“It’s, like…totally crazy you don’t already have one,” Ethan continued. “All my friends think so and I do too.”

“Uh…” I pushed out, but Ethan was far from done.

“You’re, like, the coolest mom on the planet. I have to dole out sleepovers ’cause all the guys wanna come over here.” He gestured to the TV with his controller. “They can’t believe you play video games with me. Brendon’s mom only lets him play video games for half an hour a day. That’s totally crazy. And she’d never play with him. No way.”

“Perhaps she doesn’t have your momma’s awesome eye–hand coordination,” I teased, lifting the controller in my hands.

“No. She’s just got a stick up her butt,” Ethan returned.

“Kid,” I said quietly, liking he was sweet and sharp but not ever wanting him to be nasty. “Be cool.”

“It’s true,” he replied. “Thirty minutes, Mom? That’s just mean. And Everest’s mom lets him eat sweets, get this, only on a birthday. His or his sister’s or his mom’s or dad’s, and it’s only ever cake. They have broccoli every night. Broccoli looks gross, smells gross, and tastes gross. But he has it, like, every night. He says he reckons if that keeps up, he’s gonna turn into a broccoli.”