After the baby goes to sleep, I’m going to...
Drew slapped his hands over his eyes like a kid who’d seen his parents kissing. Obviously Sean had left that note for Emma, who he’d thought would be following after him. But she’d gotten sucked into a conversation and Drew was the recipient of the square yellow sexual promise instead.
Lucky him. Nothing like a written reminder he wasn’t having sex with anybody.
He turned the shower on lukewarm and spent a few minutes rinsing the surface grime off. Then he lathered his hair and scrubbed the hell out of his scalp to get rid of the sweat and grit his helmet seemed to grind in.
When it came to soaping his body, it was tempting to linger below the waist. Maybe just take the edge off his sexual frustration a bit. But it was weird, since there was a sex note from Sean to Emma a few feet away and, since he’d read it, it felt weird to now take matters into his own hand, so to speak.
Instead he cranked the knob over to cold and almost yelped when the water turned icy. He finished rinsing off and then leaned his head against the shower wall, letting the cold seep into his body.
Kissing Liz has been a stupid thing to do. He’d known it. She’d known it. But his wanting her was like a runaway train and, even though he knew the whole thing would derail on them, he was helpless to stop it. No matter how often he tried to apply the brakes, even if only mentally, they didn’t stick.
Once he’d dried off and dressed, he braced himself for a visit to the campfire. It would be burning low, with the kids either in bed or allowed some quiet electronics time, and the adults would be sitting around talking.
He took the sticky note with him when he left the bathroom. The Kowalskis didn’t really need that kind of reputation if one of the few campers not with them wandered in.
After dumping his stuff in his tent, he grabbed a beer and wandered down to the campfire. As he got near, he started scoping out which empty chair was best to sit in, and then he saw Liz. She was holding Johnny and the sight made him stop in his tracks.
An electrified cattle prod couldn’t have moved Drew from that spot. She cradled Sean and Emma’s son against her chest, singing to him in a soft voice. There wasn’t a Kowalski born who could carry a tune as a rule, but there was something about her singing to a sleepy baby that made it a beautiful sound.
It made his chest ache, the way Liz looked down at Johnny. He’d been waiting to be a dad his entire adult life and seeing the woman he was in some crazy, undefined not-quite-a-relationship with holding the infant made him feel as though his world was shifting. He wanted that—the visual in front of him—and he had to remind himself that not only was that not his baby, but Liz wasn’t even really his woman.
“Hey, Drew.” Sean was leaning back in a chair, waving him over.
Drew shook off the emotions threatening to show all over his face and walked over to take the empty chair to the left of Sean. Emma was on the other side.
Sean leaned close so he could whisper, “So, uh, you went in the bathroom after me?”
Drew chuckled and slipped him the sticky note, which he’d folded into quarters. “Thanks for the offer, but you’re not my type. I also don’t have that body part.”
“I didn’t even see you. Emma was waiting to go in after me because she didn’t want both of us away from the baby at the same time, but she started talking.”
Drew laughed, then turned toward the conversation about tractors Leo and his dad were having because they were in the opposite direction of Liz and the baby and he wouldn’t be able to see them.
He saw them when it was time for bed, though, and he was stretched out on the air mattress with his eyes closed. He tried not to, but nothing else on the planet mattered enough to replace that image in his mind.
That’s what he wanted. Not some faceless woman whose most important trait was wanting to be the mother of his children. He wanted Liz. He could picture those kids now, with her blue eyes and their dark hair, running wild with their cousins playing games that involved no rules but always doom.
But even if he manned the hell up, looked Mitch in the eye and told him he was falling for his sister, his gut told him Liz wasn’t lying in her tent, imagining what their children would look like. She had bigger things in mind for her life, apparently.
And he knew what he wanted well enough to know a relationship with a woman who didn’t want kids would be, as the Kowalski kids would call it, a romance of doom.
Chapter Ten