Marisa de los Santos - Belong to Me Read Online Free PDF

she felt a twinge of pleasure.
    She walked Tom over to the long table at one end of the room and poured him a cup of wine. Tom thanked her, took the cup, and was about to sip from it when he noticed the poster hanging over the table. An illustration of two pigs in party hats and a parrot hovering between them against a yellow background.
    “I recognize that,” he said, quietly. “I think my kids have that book.”
    “Toot and Puddle,” supplied Piper. Probably every woman in the room would recognize those pigs, she thought. “And Tulip. The parrot’s name is Tulip.”
    Tom knitted his brows, then shook his head mournfully. “Doesn’t ring a bell,” he said with heavy consternation.
    Piper resisted a strong, sudden urge to punch Tom in the stomach or at least give his upper arm a hard, twisting pinch the way her mother had done whenever Piper had acted up in public. A grown man getting maudlin about a pair of pigs and a parrot. Lighten the fuck up, thought Piper.
    “No worries,” said Piper, with a light laugh. “Kyle wouldn’t know Toot and Puddle from the Cat in the Hat. And he might not know the Cat in the Hat.”
    Tom turned his sad eyes on Piper. “Elizabeth does most of the reading out loud around our house,” he said, bleakly. “She does voices and everything.”
    Piper would’ve socked him then, she was sure of it, but at that moment the headmaster, Rupert “Roop” Patterson, a short man with a thunderous voice, bellowed cheerfully, “I hate to interrupt this good time, but the prekindergarten teachers have put together a short presentation on what your children can expect over the next year. It’ll make you wish you were four years old again, I guarantee it!”
    Tom looked at his watch. “How long is this supposed to take?” he asked Piper. “The sitter needs to be home by nine o’clock.”
    Piper was the one who felt socked. “You got a sitter?” she said, biting out the words, one by one. “Did Elizabeth ask you to?”
    There was no sign that Tom had picked up on her tone. “No. I just called her. Abby Lau. We usually use her sister Lauren, but she broke a tooth this morning. She was playing tennis. It’s Abby’s first babysitting job, but she seems very mature for her age. Has to be home early though.”
    Grimly, Piper took hold of Tom’s elbow and steered him toward the seats.
    “How do you break a tooth playing tennis?” mused Tom, shaking his head.
    With an intense concentration of effort, Piper loosened her grip on his elbow. “I cannot imagine,” she said.

    It happened again in the middle of the pre-K presentation. Just as the teachers were beginning to describe the road to reading readiness, the ophthalmologist’s back reappeared, pushed its way through years and years to arrive still damp, the muscles finely articulated and breathtakingly symmetrical. So breathtakingly symmetrical that, before she could stop herself, Piper gasped.
    Oh, God, thought Piper, trying to shake off the memory with a slight shake of her head, what is wrong with me?
    This was her first official night as a Tallyrand parent; on one side of her sat her husband in the blue-verging-on-purple shirt she’d bought him for his birthday; on the other side sat the drooping scarecrow who was once the handsome, capable husband of her sick best friend, the drooping scarecrow who had hired a thirteen-year-old to care for his children, as though their mother weren’t right there, at home, with them. “You can’t be trusted anymore,” he might as well have told Elizabeth. “You’re already gone.” And here Piper sat, almost shaking with longing to touch a man she’d slept with a handful of times ages ago, a man she’d barely known and had never, not for one second, not even in her imagination, loved.
    Leave, she told the back, you have no business being here.
    “Resist the urge to push,” one teacher was saying—not Carter’s teacher, Carter’s was the younger, curly-haired one. Distractedly, Piper