I close my eyes and pull my blanket under my chin, embracing the darkness behind my eyelids.
“It’s not Holly who’s going to wake me. Those boys haven’t slept past six since birth. But don’t worry, my eyes are programmed to pop open at five-fifty-five every day. It’s like magic,” I say, feeling the pull of slumber take me under.
“A constant five a.m. sounds like a curse to me, but I love that you see it as a blessing.” He chuckles. “Good night, Lindsey. I hope you get to finish your dream. And I hope whoever he is in there, he woos you.”
I hope you do, too, Brooks.
NINE
BROOKS
Somehow, Lindsey and I have managed to fall into a comfortable friendship, and it only took a week of living together to get past the thick tension that filled the room whenever we were alone together.
Of course, Holly has been waking up a lot at night, and Lindsey’s boys have been running to her bedroom in the middle of the night to sleep with her because they’re scared, so our alone time has been drastically limited. Those few moments when I’m not at the ballpark, and Lindsey’s not at the table taking her online classes, have been filled with unpacking boxes and figuring out the many quirks of this place. Like after dinner last night, when we tag-teamed locating which light switch kept causing a full-house power outage every time we touched it. It’s the downstairs bathroom light. Roddy and his son, Jake, are coming over later to take a look at it with me.
It’s all been a lot—finishing the legal process for Holly, getting established with a pediatrician, moving, house repairs, parenting, and stressing out over this new blended-family situation I chose. Oh, and baseball. Yeah, the thing I need to be great at if I want to give my daughter the best life I can. I need to get the rest of my shit in order so I can focus again.
Despite my scattered brain and chaos-ridden life, I’m somehow getting it done on the field. I made some highlight reels after my game last night—first with my diving stop that I turned for a double play to get out of bases loaded, then almost hitting for the cycle. I was one triple away. I swear they’re harder to hit than homers. I need to really bear down on my speed work. I can be faster on the bases. Every skill I dominate gives me an edge. Play hard this season, get to Texas next year. That’s the plan.
But first, I need to get this paperwork approved, make my custody official, and order a certified copy of Holly’s updated birth certificate. Until I have every single dot dotted and T crossed, I simply don’t feel settled. Even if I hadn’t grown up the way I did, I would still feel scared about losing her. But the stakes seem escalated when I try to calm my worries and chase sleep at night. It has been elusive and rare. It’s going to catch up with me, for sure. But not today.
“Lindsey?” I have tried to knot this tie around my neck a dozen times. I give up.
I saunter out of my bathroom and head downstairs, where she is camped out at the table with a dozen books open around her laptop. She’s trying to knock out three college courses online so she can enroll in the university’s advertising school and finish her degree. I wish I could help her, but she needs to complete three of my worst subjects—biology, algebra, and some course that surveys the world’s religions. I only hope she’s better with a tie than I am with parts of the cell.
She pushes her reading glasses up on top of her head, and they get buried in the hair she’s tied into these crazy-looking buns on either side of her crown. She’s cute in her glasses—and with the hair knots, to be honest—something I have kept to myself because things are going well. We’ve found a groove, the kind that throwing out words like “cute” can mess up.
“Come here,” she says, twisting in the kitchen chair and uncrossing her legs. I don’t know how she sits like that on a wooden chair. I can barely sit cross legged on the floor.
I step in front of her as she stands on her toes to reach the tie I’ve butchered around my neck. She unfurls my attempt at a Windsor knot, and her mouth is bunched with her concentration. That’s another cute thing I keep to myself.
“So first, you need to make this side twice as long,” she explains, tugging one end of my tie lower along my chest. I drop my chin to watch her work, and her fingers thread through the gray silk, wrapping one strip of fabric around the other until suddenly she’s pushing a perfect knot toward my throat.
“Now you try,” she says, reaching to undo her work.
I flatten my hands over hers and stare directly into her eyes.
“If you untie this thing, I’ll scream like Riggs and Deacon do when you force feed them broccoli.”
Our stare-off lasts about three seconds before she relaxes her hands under mine and we both let go.
“Fine,” she says, blowing up at the loose hairs in her face, then dropping her reading glasses back down the bridge of her nose. “But if you don’t practice, you’re never going to learn.”
She sort of sings that last part, and it makes me chuckle. I bet her mom talked to her and her sister a lot like that, at least when she was around. I’d take a part-time mom like hers over the addict I was stuck with.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you? I can help with Holly,” she says while I grab a protein drink from the fridge and shake it. I’m too nervous to eat anything, but I have a game tonight. I’m going to need to pack away some energy.
“I can handle it. Plus, if she gets fussy, I want to show off that I know what to do.” I shrug and gulp down the rest of my shake before tossing the empty bottle in the trash.
“Unless, of course, she has one of those epic meltdowns that leaves you utterly helpless.” She laughs for a second, then snaps her mouth shut and draws a line across her lips when she realizes the effect of her words probably missed the humorous target.
“You’re going to be fine. You have everything ready. And this part is basically the formality. You’re her dad. You have the DNA to show it. And you’ve been doing great. I mean, look at the nanny you went out and found for her?”
She breathes on her nails, then rubs them on the center of her T-shirt before heading back to her seat. I roll my eyes, but her confidence does calm my nerves some. I wish I could help with her anxiety in return.
Her ex picked up the boys for the day, for some behind-the-scenes thing for the monster truck rally out at the fairgrounds. Lindsey said things like that are completely out of character for the guy, which I can tell, even from only meeting him once. He doesn’t strike me as the type who’s into motors, or sports, or outdooring.Academicis the word Lindsey uses to describe him, but from where I come from, the guy’s basically a snob.
She threw herself into her studies the moment the boys left this morning. She does this thing when she begins to daydream, though, where she hooks a strand of hair around her index finger, then wraps it around her first knuckle until it nearly cuts off her circulation. I’m pretty sure she does that when she’s stressing over her boys being gone.Gone with her ex.
