I like it and I hate it.
He doesn’t get sick. Chandler doesn’t come back, which isn’t a surprise, since Chandler doesn’t tend to stop by often. The security team Jonas has with him is monitoring my house cameras from about ten minutes down the road, where his family is staying, but they’re nothere.
He offers to hang out in the garage if I don’t want him to be around Bash, but that would be weird.
Also weird?
He YouTubes how to change Yolko Ono’s diaper, and then does it so I don’t have to.
So that I can rest and relax and worry aboutme.
Just me.
As if I can help being near enough to monitor how he’s interacting with Bash.
All of my initial hesitation after he watched Bash from afar at the cookout has evaporated. He was letting Bash come to him on his own time.
And now that he’s here, Bash is going to him all the time.
Jonas might be the only man outside of family and honorary family to have spent any time in my house since Bash was born, but I refuse to get worked up over the idea Bash will be hurt if he gets attached.
Bash has so many people in his life who love him.
And it kills me to face this, but I know he needs to get hurt sometimes. My entire life, everyone shielded me from getting hurt.
My mom dying was the one thing they couldn’t protect me from.
Losing her when I was in middle school made me cling even harder to people who didn’t deserve it. I didn’t want to be the reason anyone else left me or abandoned me or gave up on me.
Anyoneelse.
Not that it was my fault Mom died, or that I thought she left us on purpose.
My brain just went there. To that dark place ofI could lose anyone, so I have to cling to everyone.
And it led me to almost making the biggest mistake of my life.
“Dat not dybobor,” Bash says early Monday afternoon in the living room.
I’m working from home in my office on the other side of the stairwell from the living room.
When I’m not napping, that is.
I donotbounce back like Bash does.
Jonas is hanging out and building stuff with blocks. We’ve had lunch, none of us have lost the content of our stomachs in nearly twenty-four hours now, and Bash is due for naptime very, very soon.
“It is too a dinosaur,” Jonas says. “Look. That’s its tail.”
“It nowings,” Bash replies.
“Not all dinosaurs have wings.”
“Do too.”
Uh-oh.
I start to rise, eyeball Jonas and Bash in the middle of a stare-down, then grab my phone instead.
