I loved the heck out of him too.
“Go on. Get in there,” I said when I caught him watching Sam and Caymen talking at the grill.
“I don’t grill.”
“Now is a great time to learn,” I told him.
It was all the permission he needed.
Velle moved in at my side, handing me a bottle of water instead of the beer in his hand.
“Figured this is the right route, given…” he trailed off.
“How the hell do you know everything?” I said, shooting him small eyes.
His smile was warm.
“At first, I thought the way you were watching Caymen with the kids was just some future yearning to see that with your own kid,” Velle said. “But then I saw you press a hand to your stomach. You should tell him tonight.”
“I don’t know if that’s exactly the right birthday present either.”
“It is,” he assured me. “Trust me, it is.”
He was right.
It was the second time in one day I swear Caymen was close to tears.
And I couldn’t wait to see him be the amazing father I knew he could be.
Caymen - 9 years
“You okay?” Noa asked, coming out on the front porch to hand me a coffee as she sat down beside me on the bench.
We’d bought the house when Noa was around six months along with our first. But only after Nathaniel fully vetted it to make sure it was ‘safe enough’ for his family. We had to pass on five houses we liked because he didn’t see them ‘protectable.’
We’d gone with a simple three-bedroom bungalow style. Not huge. But plenty of room for us. It had a nice backyard, and both back and front porches—something Noa and I decided were nonnegotiable. It was also under ten minutes away from the club, so Huck had been happy when we moved out of Miami.
“Yeah,” I said, taking a sip of my coffee.
I watched our two kids playing with their water table, which they were steadily filling with dirt and leaves, making a muddy mess that was all up their arms and down their clothes.
My father would have beaten me black and blue for messing up the water table. My mom would have slapped me for messing up my clothes.
And I just… couldn’t fucking fathom that. How you could raise your hand to a kid for chasing joy wherever they could find it? Even if it did mean ten extra minutes of work for me later.
Each time I watched our kids fearlessly doing something that a younger me would have been terrified to do, it both broke and healed me.
Broke, because… how fucking hard would it have been to give me grace? To love me? To not make every day of my life a living hell? How fucked up of a person were you that you despised your own kids so much? Loving my kids was the easiest fucking thing in the world.
But it was healing because I knew that these two would never know that feeling of walking on eggshells, of not being able to trust the very people who were supposed to take care of them. They’d never flinch when someone raised a hand. They’d never get a bellyache when someone yelled.
“It’s sad and happy, isn’t it?” Noa asked, knowing me too well.
“Yeah,” I agreed, snaking an arm around her lower back and pulling her closer.
Our son took that moment to grab a handful of the mud and smush it on his brother’s head, making him squeal.
Alright.
