Page 20 of My Redneck Baby Daddy

He smiled a little. "You love her?"

"I ain't said nothing about..." I stopped.

I figured it might be to early in the relationship to go around spouting off that I was in love. I’d just met the woman a few weeks ago.

"Might," I said.

Danny Joe laughed, one short bark of it.

"Boy, you drove two hours to talk to a daddy you don't hardly speak to because her daddy hurt your feelings. You love that woman."

"Fuck you, Danny Joe."

He was still laughing when they took him back.

I drove home with the radio off again, and I didn’t think about one thing he had said about my past.

I could only think about Rue and how I wanted to be around her day and night. I was in love with her, wholeheartedly and somehow I had to let her know that without terrifying her.

Chapter 7

Rue

Igraded four essays on Tuesday, and I’d written the same note in red ink that glared at me from the white sides of the papers. “Needs stronger thesis…” Studying my handy work that was when I decided I had a problem.

Regina caught me in the hallway between third and fourth period near the water fountain and trophy case. She took me by my elbow and walked me right into her office without asking.

"You've been somewhere else all week."

"I've been here all week."

"Your mind has definitely been somewhere else." She shut the door with her hip. "What's going on?"

I sat down on the edge of the chair and looked at the poster on her wall about asking for help, and I decided that if I could not say it out loud to Regina Beharie, I had no business doing it at all.

"I'm ready."

Regina did not make a face. She did not shriek, and she did not reach for a joke, which is how I knew she had been waiting on this.

"You're sure?"

"I'm thirty-two years old, Regina. I don't need rose petals and a violin quartet. I want it to be with somebody I trust."

She studied me for a second. "And you trust Bobby Jo?"

That one came easier than the first. "Yes…I do."

Regina nodded once and went back around her desk, and that was the whole conversation, which I appreciated more than anything else she could have done.

I did not invite him over. That was deliberate.

He had come to my house every single time, and every single time he had been the one deciding what happened and what did not, and I was done being the woman who got things decided around her. So Friday evening I packed a “spindanite” bag, drove out to Miller Creek Road. Turning up a gravel driveway I found a white farmhouse with a wraparound porch, that had a light on over the door, and about four acres of nothing behind it.

A brown pittbull with cropped ears, came off the porch to meet my car like I was the best thing that had happened all year.

Bobby Jo opened the door in a T-shirt and jeans with no boots on, which was somehow more intimate than anything else I had seen him in. He looked at me. Then he looked at the bag on my shoulder. Then his eyes came back up to mine and stayed there.

"What's that?"