I smile as the still-foreign affection rushes through me. I’ve never given much thought to parenthood or being a dad. A baby is a baby; they all look pretty similar, and they cry a lot and poop a lot and throw up on everything.
All of that is still true, from what I can tell. But since meeting Nessa for the first time, I’ve realized it’s not that simple, either. There’s no other baby like my niece. Her fingernails are the size of pepper flakes. Her cheeks are impossibly squishy.
I don’t know. I guess I might like to have kids someday, if it feels anything like what I feel when Denice passes Nessa gently up to me and she settles in my arms, still snoozing happily, her little hands bunched up by her face where they poke out of her swaddle blanket.
A thought pops into my mind, one I ignore at first but then look at more closely:I’m not sure I would recognize myself if I looked in the mirror right now.
This isn’t me—the guy who might want kids someday, the guy who wonders about asking a woman out instead of just pickingher up at a bar. The guy who’s getting itchy with the life he’s been living.
But it could be me. I feel that somewhere deep down, a place in myself I rarely visit because of what I might find there, truths I might have to deal with.
That place is the home of the little voice that whispersYou’re better than this.
I tilt my face down to look at Nessa, settling on the couch next to Denice. She rests her head on my upper arm instead of moving out of the way, and because she looks a bit like a zombie, I don’t shake her off.
“Isn’t she cute?” Denice says sleepily.
“She really is,” I admit. “She’s perfect.”
“She eats fifty times a night.”
I grin down at the pink-faced infant in my arms. “Getting big and strong like your uncle.”
Denice scoffs at this. “So modest.”
“I’ve never been modest,” I point out, “and I’ve never claimed to be.”
“That’s true.” Denice lifts her head from my arm and shifts herself into an upright position, looking over at me sternly. Based on this expression, I know exactly what’s coming. “By the way,” she says, “tell me exactly what you’re doing with one of my best employees.”
Yep; I was right.
“I’m not doing anything,” I say. When Denice raises one skeptical brow at me, I add, “I’m not…yet.”
“Mm-hmm,” she says with a nod. “That’s what I thought. Listen up. Don’t mess with her. I will not have your hit-it-and-quit-it self affecting my relationship with?—”
“Hey,” I cut in, and I’d be lying if I said that doesn’t hurt a little. “You make it sound like I sleep around with everyone I can find.”
“Fine,” Denice says, rolling her eyes. She pushes a few strands of hair impatiently from where they’ve fallen over her face. “I know you don’t. But I like Aurora, and she’s not a prize to be won or a game to play. Plus she’s already had bad luck with men.”
“It’s not bad luck,” I say with a snort. “It’s bad decision-making skills. She chooses that kind of man.”
Denice doesn’t respond to this.
“And I don’t need you to lecture me,” I go on. I guess I don’t blame Denice for having no faith in me, but it doesn’t feel great. “I know perfectly well what I’m doing. I just don’t?—”
But I break off here, because I’m not sure what I’m trying to say. I don’t know how to ask a woman out? I don’t know if Aurora would ever go out with me anyway? I don’t want to be rejected, and the idea of not even trying holds its own appeal for that reason?
I could walk away—leave her life and remove her from mine, casually and easily, and I’d probably be fine. I’m not hooked on her.
But I don’t like that idea. And although I don’t hold much regret in general, I might regret that decision.
“Anyway.” I clear my throat and look down at Nessa, mostly so I don’t have to look at Denice and see her too-perceptive eyes on me. “I don’t have any concrete plans. I’m just feeling things out. She’s got a lot going on right now anyway. I’m not sure I’d want to add anything to her plate.”
As I say these words, Aurora’s situation swirls more fervently around my mind—her cowardly ex; Barf and Mindy walking around holding hands in front of her; and there’s something strangely depressing about the thought that Aurora ever trusted someone enough to cosign a loan with them, only to have that trust yanked out from under her feet like a rug.
“Just don’t be a jerk to her,” Denice says, and I roll my eyes.
“I know,” I say. “I won’t, all right?”
