I had to laugh. “Save a horse and all that.”
He smacked my chest, then kissed it. He tilted his head back and looked at me, eyes soft. I dropped a kiss on his chin, on his nose, and then finally his lips. “You okay?”
“Yeah. I’m…I’m good. That was…Crew, that was everything.”
It would be wrong to be smug right now but I couldn’t help it.
Chapter 21
Malachi
“Daddy, is your back hurting?” Payton asked as I shifted to get more comfortable on the couch next to him.
“Yeah, bud. Not bad though. I’ll be better in a day or two.”
Back. Backside. Same difference. I snorted softly.
“So, now that you know all about my day, what did you do today?” he asked seriously, turning to sit sideways so he could look at me expectantly.
“Well I went with Crew to pick up an order from the feed store, and we had lunch at the diner.”
“Oh! The one we wanna go to sometime?” He looked so hopeful that it made me smile.
“Yeah, bud. It was nice.” If you didn’t take into account the librarian, damn it. “We should go when we have our next library day, because it’s close.”
He nodded rapidly. “Okay! What else?”
“Pretty much all the regular work stuff. But I do have something we should start tonight. A project of sorts,” I told him as I reached for the iPad and a notepad with the pen stuck through the spiral so I wouldn’t lose it.
“Ooh!” Payton’s eyes grew big and the enthusiasm was radiating off him. “Like when we were about to move?”
“Yeah, exactly like that. Except this time we’re not moving.” I smiled as I gave him the iPad. “I’ve bookmarked a few sites, if you want to open the first one.”
“Okay, okay….” With his tongue sticking out a little, he navigated to the browser and scrolled up and down the page. “What am I looking at?”
The tone was such an adult one that I almost burst out laughing. This kid, I swear.
“So you know how Crew came here and we had that movie night?” At his nod, I continued, “Well I thought of that kind of like a family date.”
Payton looked at me and nodded slowly. “Like… like you two are dating and then…?”
“Well there’s this thing that happens when someone who has a kid like I do starts to date someone new,” I explained slowly so he could keep up. Despite being the smartest four-year-old I’d ever met, he was still only four. “If you meet someone you really like, then you got to think about the future, right?”
He squinted at me, then brightened. “Oh like getting married and stuff?”
I chuckled. “Yeah, buddy. That might or might not happen though, because not all people who want to be together get married.Buteither way, if it’s a relationship where the people stick together for a longer time, then when one or both of them have kids, that’s a bit different from if they don’t.”
“How come?”
And this was the tricky part to explain, but I felt like I could maybe do a decent job about it. I hoped. “Let’s say I really like Crew, which I do, and he really likes me. And we want to be together.” Again, Payton nodded. “But what if you didn’t like him, or he didn’t like you?”
“But I do like him!” he exclaimed, then looked worried for a second. “Does he not like me?”
“He does, buddy, and that’s a great thing. We all like each other. But we need to be sure about that before we can say we want to become a family.” We’d had conversations about family and what it meant before, so his next words didn’t really surprise me.
“If we’ll be a family, does that mean he’ll be my other daddy?”
“Yeah, buddy. And we’ve also talked about how serious it is to be someone’s parent, right?”
