“Sorry. I was just relaxing a bit after a long morning.” She smiles with a bit of timidness, and I shake my head.
“Taking care of a baby is hard work. Relax all you want.”
“How did things go with your coach?” she asks.
“Fine. The team is fining me twenty-five grand, and I’m required to take anger management.”
“Twenty-five grand? That’s steep,” she says.
“Could’ve been more,” I mutter.
“I’m going to go shower. Will you listen for the baby? He should be up soon, but I didn’t want to shower until you got back.”
I nod, and she heads out as I try not to imagine her getting naked and stepping into the shower.
It’s impossible.
I’m still imagining it a few minutes later when the kid starts crying. I get him out of his bed and set him on the floor in the family room while I make a bottle the way she showed me, which takes longer than it should. I don’t even notice how quiet it has gotten.
When I go back to grab him, he’s got this panicked look on his face, and I don’t think he’s breathing.
I spot a mess near him, and a little dish that held decorative dice on it on my family room table is on the floor.
It registers in the span of a nanosecond that there are only five dice on the floor.
My heart sinks into my stomach, and panic claws its way through me as I put together where the sixth one might be. He somehow reached onto the table and put one of the dice in his mouth.
“Fuck!” I yell, and I grab the kid, turn him over, and start to pound on his back. I’m not sure where in the recesses of my mind that CPR training kicks into gear, but I recall something about five blows between the shoulder blades in the class we were required to take in high school.
I may never have remembered that if the girl teaching the class wasn’t as hot as she was and was standing there talking about blows. I was an immature high school kid who grew into an immature adult.
On the fourth blow, the dice pops out onto the floor, and the kid lets out a blood-curdling scream.
I turn him over in my arms and pull him to my chest as I stand, adrenaline still coursing through me as the panic gives way. The baby is crying, and I’m bouncing as I hold him and tell him he’s okay, and it’s the first time I feel like I’ve done somethingrighteven though the situation that landed us here was probably my own fault, too—leaving the kid unsupervised when babies put whatever shit they want to into their mouths.
Fuck.
“Is everything okay?”
I hear a voice behind me, and I whip around to find Ainsley with hair dripping onto her shoulders, wearing nothing more than a white towel around her body.
My eyes flick to the towel for a second. “He was choking on one of the dice,” I say.
“And you dislodged it?” she asks. She’s not as incredulous as I am about it.
I’m starting to think she really does believe in me.
“Yeah. I was making him a bottle, and he must’ve grabbed it off the table.” I nod to the rest of the dice scattered on the floor.
“We should probably get started on babyproofing. He’s been trying to crawl, and I think he’s not too far off from moving all over the place.”
I don’t know what babyproofing means, but the way I’m hugging the kid to my chest and the relief I feel coursing through me after that whole ordeal tells me one very important thing I hadn’t considered in the last week and a half since I met the boy.
I think I might be starting to fall for this kid.
Maybe it happened the moment I laid eyes on him and felt like he was mine. Maybe it’s an inherent thing. Maybe it was seeing him laugh in the swing at the park, or maybe it was the panic I felt at him choking.
Whatever it is, it’s a new and unfamiliar feeling that’s terrifying and wonderful all at once.
