Home.
I placed a kiss on her head and let the word percolate. A huge part of me wanted to agree with her. My apartment wasn’t a home. Merely somewhere I slept. There was nothing warm or friendly about it, and most of all, she wasn’t there.
Heath leaned on the porch rail watching the two of us. When he caught me looking, he gave me a nod. “Good to have you back, Banks.”
I couldn’t even answer him. I was too wrapped up in the feel of Mae. “I’m sorry,” I whispered in the darkness.
She shook her head, her loose blonde curls bouncing around her shoulders. “It’s okay.”
It wasn’t. None of it was. She didn’t deserve the way I’d spoken to her last night. Or the way I was going to leave her tomorrow. I was selfish, coming here at all, drawing on her strength because I didn’t have the guts to go through with it.
God, she was beautiful, and holding her in my arms had always felt so incredibly right. I hoped Rowe and Heath felt the same way. I hoped they’d hold her, and tell her she was amazing, and protect her heart at all costs.
Mae stiffened and gazed up at me curiously. “Do you want to talk?”
I shook my head, brushing my lips over hers. “No. I just want you.”
She kissed me back, an urgent press of her lips that seemed to say more than her words did. But then she moved away and picked up my hand, leading me toward the house. “Come inside. Rowe’s not here, but Heath and I have been prettying the place up so it looks less like a bachelor pad.”
I followed her inside, nodding and making small noises of approval at everything she showed me. But all I could think of was her. We made the full lap of the house, which didn’t take long since it was essentially a living area with a kitchen, two bedrooms, and a bathroom. We found ourselves in the bedroom, Rowe’s king-sized mattress on the floor made up with a pretty floral bedspread I’d seen in Mae’s apartment. It was fluffy and smelled clean, and I just wanted to disappear beneath the covers with her and lose a few hours of the night until sleep took me.
Lights flashed through the bedroom window, though, and all three of us peered out.
“It’s Rowe,” Mae yelped. She dropped my hand and rushed through the cabin, throwing open the front door. Heath and I followed, but Mae stopped on the porch. “Did you get him?”
Rowe put a finger to his lips and went to the back seat, opening the door. He emerged with a blond-haired little boy I knew instantly was Ripley. He’d come with his grandmother to a couple of our baseball games.
“Holy shit, are you adding kidnapping to your list of crimes?” I asked, lawyer brain kicking in.
Ripley woke for a moment, a startled expression on his face until he pulled back and realized it was Rowe holding him. Then he laid his head down on Rowe’s shoulder and went straight back to sleep. Rowe smoothed his palm up and down the little boy’s back, encouraging him to relax.
“Didn’t they tell you?” Rowe asked me.
Heath went down to the car to grab something from the trunk. “He only just got here. We didn’t get a chance.”
My gaze bounced between the two of them and then finally back to Mae.
“He’s just bringing our boy home,” she said simply.
I widened my eyes at her, completely gobsmacked. “Our boy?”
Rowe smiled widely, and it was the smile of a proud papa handing out cigars in the hospital waiting room after his wife had delivered a healthy baby. He dropped a kiss on Mae’s head as he moved past her. “Our boy,” he agreed.
I watched him pass, shock still punching through my system. Rowe seemed…happy. I’d known him a few years now, and he’d never been one for smiling. He turned up for practice, did the job, and went home. If we socialized outside of work, he always let others fill the conversation, happy to sit back and just observe.
But he’d been different around Mae. That night we’d gone to the baseball game, and everything that had happened after, I’d seen a different side of him. And more of that, when he’d taken a beating for Heath.
Holding Ripley in his arms now, the man looked complete for the first time in years.
A hot spear of jealousy stabbed through me, sharp and painful.
He had the life I wanted. The life I’d been well on my way to claiming.
The life that had been ripped from me because nobody told me the truth.
I deserved none of it. Not if I wasn’t man enough to step up and do what needed doing.
Heath and Mae had followed Rowe inside, and the three of them spoke in hushed murmurs, Mae suggesting they put Ripley down on the only mattress in the cabin, and Rowe explaining about a foldout sleeping mat and blankets Norma had given him. Mae’s smile was soft as she raised a hand to brush a lock of hair off Ripley’s forehead, and Heath placed an arm around her, watching over all of them protectively from his taller height.
I let the part of me that desperately wanted to join them win, even though the louder part of my brain told me to leave now and avoid hurting them anymore.
If I was stronger, I would have listened.
I closed the cabin door behind me at the same time Rowe partially closed the door to Ripley’s new bedroom.
“When I woke up this morning, this was not how I expected the day to end,” Rowe whispered. “I don’t know whether to be terrified about Zye being out or just be fucking elated that Ripley’s with me again.”
The final piece of the puzzle clicked in my head. Nobody needed to explain it. If Zye was out, Ripley needed to be here where people could protect him. “Just be happy he’s here. Good to see you smiling, brother.”
“Feels good to smile. And to not have to kick your ass. You’re lucky I got sidetracked with Ripley. Otherwise, I would have been at your place this afternoon, ready to drag you back here by your ear.” He gave me a soft shove. “Don’t fucking disappear like that, okay? You had us worried.”
I knew he was trying to give me a pep talk, but it only made me feel worse. “Yeah, I know.”