Her mouth kicked up in a small smile.
“I was such an asshole back then that if you had looked up the definition in the dictionary, my sixteen-year-old graduation picture would be there right beside it.” I poured the yellow Gatorade into the bottle and screwed the lid on, handing it to her as I continued. “I got back into town and came straight here. I walked up to the front door, slid my key in…and nothing. It didn’t work. I couldn’t get in, and when I knocked on the door—loudly because I was pissed off—your dad answered. I hate to admit it, but I was a complete and utter dickhead to him.”
Her mouth twitched. “Dad doesn’t like to be bothered.”
I gave her a wan smile. “Yeah, I figured that out.”
She took the bottle I handed her, and then thought better of it.
“I have to go clean up that throw up before it starts to permanently attach itself to the shower wall…” she handed Tallulah over and waited for me to get her situated before she handed me the bottle.
Before I could even give the bottle to Tallulah, Tally was gone, and seconds later I could hear the shower going.
“Your momma’s so pretty,” I told the baby in my arms.
Tallulah didn’t even toss me a smile, which made my heart hurt.
Placing the bottle to her lips, I hooked my foot around the bar stool that was pushed under the overhang of the counter and pulled it to me, taking a seat once I had it in place.
Tallulah started to slowly take her bottle, and she was about halfway done when her eyes started to flutter closed.
I leaned the bottle against my chest and reached my free hand up to rub along her head, running my fingers along her messy hair.
“She looks so small in your arms.”
***
Tally
“She looks so small in your arms,” I said to the man who was making my ovaries quiver.
Tommy’s head snapped up, and he grinned, making my heart melt.
I was still pissed.
Actually, I was beyond pissed.
This man that was standing in front of me was the reason that my father had freaked out over so many incidents throughout the years.
I’d thought my father’s irrational anger at Tommy when he’d dropped me off the day after all the flooding had been because Tommy was older, tattooed and in a motorcycle club.
But, apparently, it hadn’t been just about that. No, it had been about a heck of a lot more than that. Stuff that I had no way to control my father’s reaction to.
I couldn’t even ask my father to try.
He had tried.
I knew my father.
He wouldn’t have gotten a restraining order against Tommy had he not done something bad…repeatedly.
But seeing him standing there, his tattooed arm gently cradling Tallulah’s sleeping body, her hand and cheek pressed up against the leather cut that Tommy never left the house without, I knew that I couldn’t let my father push Tommy away.
Seeing him with Tallulah tonight, I knew that I was in love with him, despite his admissions.
He’d walked right into the bedroom, ignored the puke that was not only all over Tallulah, but me and the floor as well, and had taken her from me. Slipped her right into his arms like she didn’t stink to high heaven.
He’s insinuated himself into my life and hers and didn’t appear to have any qualms about doing so.
Then he’d dropped a bombshell on me. Slayed me, making me think that it was all a big lie for a few long, tense moments.
But when he’d started to explain, and as I started to recall some of the memories from that time, I remembered my dad saying something about a troubled kid.
And in later years, I knew for a fact that Dad thought that the kid who he got the restraining order against had just been a troubled young man that needed some time to cool off.
What I hadn’t remembered was hearing anything about us taking that kid’s family home…and I wasn’t sure if my father even knew that part. I know that if he had taken the time to understand why the kid had been acting the way that he was, he would’ve done things differently.
Like not getting a restraining order against a kid who was pissed about his family’s house being foreclosed on by the bank and someone else buying it all without his knowledge.
Tallulah started to rock her head back and forth in her sleep, and then reared back just long enough to flip her head to the other side.
“Her face,” I started to snicker.
Tommy looked down to see the imprint of one of his patches on her cheek, and he started to shrug out of it.
“No,” I stopped him. “Leave it on. She likes it.”
And she did. She loved his cut. She loved running her hand over the patches, loved chewing on the snaps—something that I’d thought he would have a coronary over the first time he held her in his arms and she went right for them.
However, he did nothing but hold her and watch her.
Just like he was doing now.
“So you’ve been through the stomach bug and an asthma attack…what do you think?” I took a seat on the couch, and he followed me, taking the seat directly beside me. “Are you ready to run yet?”
He snorted.
“No,” he disagreed, taking a seat beside me. “My niece is about six months older, but weight wise, these two are like night and day. Tallulah is so small…she makes me feel like I’m going to break her.”
“She was five and a half pounds at birth and has always been on the lower end of the scales. She’s something like ninth percentile in her weight, and fifth in her height,” I murmured, reaching forward to grab the TV remote off the coffee table.
Flipping it on to a movie that I’d seen hundreds of times, I tried to control the butterflies in my belly at having Tommy in my home, knowing that it was once his.
“Does the place look different?” I asked him suddenly.
He knew exactly what I was talking about.
“Yes and no,” he murmured. “Furniture is different. Some of the paint is different. But the majority of it isn’t. Looks like it did when it was still my parents’ house.”
My heart started to throb.
“What else happened?” I turned slightly on the couch to I could see him more clearly.
“My parents finally realized what had happened,” he sighed. “I kept coming home. Kept going back. Kept threatening the judge—your father—with harm.” He groaned and let his head fall back on the couch. “I want to punch myself for all the stupid shit I did and nearly ruining my life in the process. I’m just lucky that your father never pressed charges against me. That he only resorted to getting a restraining order instead of sending my stupid ass to jail.”
“I remember some of what had happened…”
The toilet paper that had been in our trees every weekend for weeks. The broken plastic forks in the ground that were nearly impossible to get up. The spray paint incident.
“I tried to apologize,” he murmured, eyes staring at the ceiling. “Sent letters after I got my shit together. I couldn’t very well visit him when I could get arrested for being within five hundred feet of him.”