Ihad just finished wrapping up a meeting with the front office when my phone buzzed. Dani’s name lit up the screen, and I grinned like a damn fool.
It still caught me off guard sometimes—how far we’d come in the past few months. There’d been a time when it had just been me, hammering her inbox with texts like a teenager with his first crush, and now we talked every day. And that didn’t begin to cover all the hours we spent in my house, in my bed.
It felt easy in a way that nothing else ever had. Progress, sure, but the kind that made my chest ache with how much I wanted to keep it.
I answered with a smile already in place. That was, until I heard her voice.
“We don’t have a crib, Brooks.”
No hello. No breath. Just a rush of panic straight into my ear.
“Dani—”
“Or a baby registry. Everyone keeps asking me about my registry, and I haven’t even decided what website to use. Or what to put on it. There are like five thousand kinds of bottles, Brooks. Five. Thousand. What if the baby hates every single one? What if she doesn’t even latch onto my nipples?”
I froze halfway to the door, suddenly thankful that I hadn’t taken the call on speaker. I didn’t need any of the guys to hear about her nipples.
“And what if shedoeslatch but I don’t make enough milk? What if I forget to pack a diaper bag? Not that we even have a diaper bag. Also, have you seen how expensive diapers are?Fuck,I’m going to be the worst mother in the world and she’s not even here yet—”
“Kitten,” I cut in, sharper than I meant to because my heart had already started sprinting. “Are you hurt?”
“What? No. But I—”
“Are you bleeding, in pain? Is the baby okay?”
“No, she’s fine. I’m fine,” she snapped, but her voice cracked, thick with tears. “I just . . . I don’t know what I’m doing, Brooks. I was just getting used to being pregnant, and now there’s only a few months to go and—”
Relief slammed into me hard enough that I had to grip the doorframe. She was okay. The baby was okay. But still, her voice had that edge, raw and frantic, like she was circling the drain.
“Stay put,” I said, already moving. “I’m on my way.”
“Brooks, you don’t have to—”
“Too late,” I muttered, shoving through the door and jogging to my truck. “You called me, kitten. That means you’re stuck with me.”
I had a whole staff of coaches who could handle practice for the rest of the day without me breathing down their necks. Hell, they would probably prefer it that way. This time tomorrow, I’dbe on a plane to Miami for a nine-day road series, but right now, there was nowhere else I needed to be.
More than that, Dani had calledme.
Not Pink or Clarke or one of her Dungeons & Dragons friends, but me. I wanted to be the one Dani called when the walls closed in, the steady hand she reached for when she felt like she was falling. If she trusted me with that, then we could figure out the rest.
“Stay the phone on with me, kitten.”
For the next twenty minutes, I listened to fifteen more variations of the same spiral, everything from how she was supposed to know which stroller was safest, to whether the crib sheets needed to be organic cotton, to the horror of her friends planning some cringeworthy baby shower theme. Because these were the things that kept my blue-haired, goth girl up at night—some bullshit games where people guessed her belly measurements or licked melted candy bars out of diapers.
None of them were life and death scenarios, but that didn’t mean that to her, it didn’t feel like the sky was falling.
Don’t worry, kitten, I’ll hold it up for you.
About halfway through my drive, she ran out of stuff about bottles and breast pumps and jumped straight into the big-picture shit. How we were going to split time between her place and mine, how the baby would know which house was hers, whether she’d grow up confused or resenting us.
I didn’t tell her the part sitting heavy on my chest: that what Ireallywanted was for there not to be two houses at all. But that was a conversation for another day. Right now, she just needed me to be steady.
By the time I bound up her steps, I thought I’d heard it all. As it turned out, I didn’t even get the chance to knock.
The front door yanked open and there she was. Barefoot, red-eyed, shoulders sagging like the weight of the world was on her.
“I killed Doughy McIntyre,” she choked out.
