All of Me by Janet Eckford

pretty much a creature of habit when it came to food. Also, he was one of those people who ate to live, but being around Charlie, who lived to eat, he was discovering an entirely new appreciation for food.
    “I’m going to take your groans for approval versus disgust. Do you think your daddy likes the food, peanut? Um. I don’t know. Not as much as you like yours, huh. Yummy.” Charlie chuckled as she spooned another mouthful into the baby’s mouth.
    Taking a swig from his beer, Grant washed down some of the food so he could speak.
    “Does your mommy need to have people tell her how great her food is all the time?” he teased.
    Sticking her tongue out at him, Charlie softly chuckled and began spooning more food into their daughter’s mouth. Grant quickly refocused his attention on eating because if he didn’t, he would be swept away with how seeing Charlie’s delicate tongue caused him to think about a time in the past when she had stuck it out at him.
    Leaning over his plate, Grant let his mind wander to a morning they spent in his hotel room eating room service in bed after another one of their marathon sessions of sex. Charlie had a craving for pastries, and he had room service bring some up for her. As he watched her sitting in the bed naked, licking the cream from the pastry off her fingers, Grant found his body becoming aroused with every lick.
    As if sensing his physical state, she had begun to exaggerate the motions of removing the cream from her fingers. With each slow lick, he imagined her tongue doing the same thing to parts of his body rather then her own fingers. By the time she began to eat another dessert, Grant couldn’t take it anymore. Feeling as if he was going to burst, he pushed the plate of food to the floor in a crash. Grabbing the delicate dessert from her hand, he threw it across the room and flipped her on her back. For a moment he just looked into her laughing face and eyes. It was only now, while sitting at the table in Los Angeles listening to her coax their daughter into eating her food, that Grant realized that was when he began to love her.
    “A penny for your thoughts.”
    Grant startled when Charlie’s voice tore him from his memories.
    “I think they are worth much more then a penny,” he grunted before shoveling more food into his mouth.
    He was afraid to look up at her in that moment because he knew his eyes burned with desire. A desire he didn’t know how much longer he was going to be able to keep buried deep inside him.

Chapter Eight
     
    As she watched Grant eating his food with bent head, Charlie’s heart squeezed. When she’d gone to tell him dinner was ready and saw him sitting on the guest bed with his face cupped in his hands looking shattered, she didn’t know how to reach out to him. But now Charlie had the confirmation for something she had been feeling for quite a while.
    Grant was tired.
    Not the tired of a busy workload, nor the tired of having the baby being fussy and not being able to soothe her. Charlie knew Grant was tired of it all. She was actually surprised he had lasted as long as he did. She knew one of his main reasons had been Stella. Grant’s sense of duty and honor would never let him abandon his child. But she could see that the struggle to juggle his life was taking a toll. Yet every time Charlie tried to broach the subject, Grant became irritated or frustrated. Continuing to spoon the last bits of Stella’s food in her mouth, Charlie began to think of ways she could talk to him about revisiting their child-rearing ideas.
    After cleaning up residual food from Stella’s mouth, Charlie put a pacifier in her mouth and turned to her own food. Charlie had always enjoyed cooking, but it wasn’t until she had Stella that she saw the advantages of a home-cooked meal. One, it saved on money and two, the energy it took to have dinner out with a baby could easily be used preparing her own meals. Unfortunately, the more she cooked, the more Charlie