It was too dark to tell whether he was staring me down or not. “You’re not taking advantage. I’m offering. I’ve been up since five, and I’m about to keel over. All I’m asking is that you don’t make me stay up all night and half tomorrow morning cleaning up. We’ll do it first thing.”
I must have taken too long to answer because he crossed his arms over his chest and tipped his chin down. I didn’t look at his big biceps. “I won’t bail,” he seemed to promise, making me move my gaze away.
A small, tiny part of me didn’t want to take his promise seriously.
That must have been apparent because Dallas kept going. “You look exhausted too, and Louie is already passed out on the couch. If he hears you doing stuff out here, he’ll eventually wake up and wanna come help.” I think he might have coughed. “I know you’re not planning on molesting me, okay?”
I was so upset I couldn’t even laugh. But in that moment, the exhaustion overwhelmed my inner OCD, and I nodded.
“You need help with anything else that isn’t….” He lifted a hand and vaguely pointed to the disaster zone I suddenly didn’t want to look at any longer.
“No. Not really. I have some food to put up, but that’s about it. Thanks.” Closing both eyes, I reached up to pinch the tip of my nose and thought for a second, opening one eyelid in his direction. “Did you forget something?”
Tipping his head toward the door, he answered, “No. I just got home from meeting up with some old friends in town and was in my garage about to go inside when I saw everybody had left. I wanted to check and make sure you were all good. Josh let me in.” He slid his gaze toward the yard again and winced.
For the sake of my mental health, I told myself I’d imagined it.
I also made sure not to make a big deal about him wanting to come over and make sure I was good. Nope. I wasn’t going to think about that for one single second more. How many times had he told me he owed me by that point?
“You have a shit ton of dirty dishes. You scrub and I’ll rinse,” he offered unexpectedly.
What the hell was happening? Had he backed into my car, felt guilty, and was now trying to make it up to me? “You don’t have to do that—”
“I haven’t eaten food that good in a long time, and I have two days’ worth of dinner in the fridge your mom made me take home. I can rinse some dishes, and if you got any beer left, I’ll take one afterward. Deal?”
Maybe he had hit my car. Or broken something. I didn’t get why he was being so nice. Two days of food didn’t seem like enough of a reason to go out of his way, especially when just about everyone had taken off with leftovers. But…
I sighed and made sure to meet his eyes. “You really don’t have to be this nice to us.”
Dallas’s head tilted to the side just a little, and I could tell he let out his own breath in what might have been resignation. “I know it’s tough being a single parent, Diana. I don’t mind helping,” he said. He shrugged those broad, muscular shoulders. “You three remind me of my family when I was a kid,” he explained, smiling almost sadly. “It’s no huge burden helping you out and getting fed at the same time.”
It was the single parent thing I had working for me. All right. I’d be an idiot not to take the help he was so willing to offer.
“Deal,” he said. The one word should have sounded like a question, but it didn’t. Not really. It was more like he was telling me we had a deal.
Which we did. “Deal. But knowing my family, chances are, there’s only a couple of beers left, but they’re all yours. I won’t drink them when I have the boys.”
Dallas nodded and followed me inside, locking the door behind us. I started organizing the dishes as he asked, “Mind if I get one from the fridge?”
“Nope, make yourself at home,” I called out over my shoulder, still arguing with myself about having him help me or not.
Soon enough, I had the plates and glasses organized on the side of the sink and partly inside of it, and Dallas came to take the spot right beside me. Like he’d suggested, I scrubbed and handed them over, letting him rinse and set them in the drying rack. Maybe in a few months, I could invest in a dishwasher, I thought. But all it took was a look at the floors to know that was a dumb dream. I would rather get new flooring put in than get a washer. I was just tired.
“Most of the people here today were your family?” he asked after a few minutes of silence.
“Yeah. Almost all of the adults. Half the kids are related to us somehow and the other half were friends of Josh’s from his new school and his last.”
“He looked like he had a good time,” he noted, probably remembering the image of Josh doing the Slip-N-Slide over and over again.
“He better have. I almost had to beg him to have a party to begin with. I hope Louie’s okay with us going to Chuck E. Cheese’s for his because I’d rather not ever do this again.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. You know, it was our first birthday here at this house….” I trailed off and shrugged as I handed him a plate. “The last two years we lived in an apartment and couldn’t do much there. We had to celebrate at my mom and dad’s house. When I was a kid, my parents always threw me a birthday party at home. I felt like I owed him since we have our own place now that isn’t tiny.”
The deep grumble in his chest said he understood.
“Next time, I’ll just save up more money to hire a cleaning crew afterward, or make my family stay and clean before I let them leave. I’ll keep their keys hostage or something. Even my mom and dad bailed.”
He laughed, and the sound seemed to travel right along the sensitive skin at my neck. It had a beautiful, deep ring to it. When he finally spoke again, it was to say the last four words I would have expected. “I liked your parents. I could tell your mom didn’t like my tattoos much, but she was still nice.”
“My mom, yeah, she is really nice.” And because I couldn’t help myself, thinking about the incident at the table with Sal, I muttered, “As long as you aren’t me.”
There was a brief moment of awkward silence, and I thought I had gone too far talking about my mom, but then Dallas said, “I kinda noticed she gives you a hard time.”
I hummed. “Thanks for defending me, by the way.” Did I sound as bitter as I felt? “What she doesn’t remember or tell everyone is how when I was younger, she would get mad when I’d go outside and get dirty. She’d say that’s what boys did, but girls weren’t supposed to do that kind of stuff. There was a brief phase when she didn’t let me wear pants, if you can believe that, but it didn’t last long.” Just thinking about that made a nerve somewhere on my face throb.
I sighed. “She just… thinks I do everything wrong. She always has, and for a long time, I did do a bunch of stupid stuff. I’m not my cousin or my brother, and I never will be. I think it’s her weird way of pushing me, but sometimes all she does is make me feel like I can’t do anything right and I never will.” I coughed, embarrassed I’d even said that out loud. “That was deeper than I wanted it to go. Sorry. It’s fine. We’ve always had a weird relationship. We still love each other.” When we didn’t want to kill one another.
God. Had I really told him all that? Why?