Piper’s eyelids slowly fall closed. It’s just a moment, a single blissful moment, before they pop open again and she’s staring up at me like I’m about to perform a magic act. I don’t normally hold her as she falls asleep anymore, but I am tonight.
It’s been a big day for our little family. While Piper may be too young to understand who Wyatt is, she understands all the drama around her. She knows something is wrong when her brother is yelling and I’m yelling back. She hates it. As it is, she wasn’t sleeping well when her brother wasn’t home because Rig had kidnapped him. Now she’s very slowly adjusting to our new, albeit temporary, space. For tonight, she’s just not up for falling asleep on her own in her Pack ’n Play. At least not with the big scary biker staring at her. I don’t know if she’s actually afraid of him, or if she’s just curious. He looks at her the way he used to look at me. Like he’s looking at his entire world. It’s similar to the way he looks at Zander, but not quite.
She lifts her little head and turns to look at Wyatt. I can’t really see her expression from this angle, but whatever face she’s making is making him laugh. I smile. It’s probably the first happy, genuine smile I’ve had in weeks. Since before we came out to California and uprooted our entire lives. Long before Rig dared take my boy. I don’t know when last time was that I smiled like this, if I’m being truthful. But here I am, in my old bedroom, with my old man and our daughter. And she’s making him smile, and that makes me smile. I’m not a religious person, and I’ve never been the praying type, but in this moment, I feel blessed.
“What is she doing?” I ask. They’re having some kind of silent conversation that has Wyatt raising his eyebrows and making swoon-worthy faces at our daughter. No wonder I was a teen mom. The man’s always wanted kids, takes family very seriously, and can pretty much force an ovary explosion any time he wants. Asshole.
“She’s batting her eyes at me,” Wyatt says through muffled laughter. His voice is so quiet, and his body is so close. We’re just hanging out on my bed in my old bedroom like no time has passed at all. But it has. A lot of time has passed, and it kills me that I can’t just enjoy this shit.
“The sassy little flirt is trying to get out of bedtime,” I say. She learned to bat her eyes recently. I swear to Christ that I don’t know who fucking taught her that shit, but she picked it up and has been using it go get her way ever since. Sometimes she looks like she’s having a seizure, because she’s still a baby and doesn’t have perfect control over her movements just yet. Other times, it looks so practiced it worries me for her teenage years.
Wyatt leans in and tickles her chubby little neck. She squirms in my arms and giggles relentlessly before eventually subsiding into a frustrated yawn. Irritation spikes in me before I can stop it, and I lose my little bit of happy. I’m glad they’re bonding, but he’s riling her up, and that just pisses me off. It’s hard enough to keep her on a routine without this shit.
Because as surely as Zander is going to mouth off at some point, Piper will wake up at the ass crack of dawn. And that means she’s going to be grouchy. She’s going to be grouchy and miserable tomorrow, and if I don’t get her to bed soon, there’s nothing I can do about it. But I can’t deny either of them this moment. She deserves to bond with her dad, and he needs to learn how to be her dad. So I bite my tongue. No matter how much it bothers me, and no matter how much I’d rather not be the adult here, I stay silent and try to look happy.
She’s giggling and reaching out for him, but when he moves closer, she puts up her little hand and says, “No.” No is her favorite word. I should tell him that, so he doesn’t take it personally. But I don’t. Because now there’s light in her eyes that tells me she won’t go to sleep for at least another hour, and no matter how much I want to move out of this bed, she won’t let me. The only thing worse than sitting here for another hour while I wait for her to calm down would be to stick her in her mobile crib. If I take away her new friend and subject her to the inhumane task of soothing herself to sleep, she won’t let me hear the end of it. My girl is a fussy little thing, but thankfully she tires easily despite my fears. Obviously I’m a monster. After Piper finally falls into a soundless sleep, and when I know she won’t wake, I move her to her travel crib.