you! I’m dying!!” She continued to laugh until another thought hit her that she had to share. “You’re not even capable of breast-feeding her, yet you still have sore nipples!” She slapped her thigh and looked toward the sky. “Oh, thank you, Goldie! I needed that!”
“You’re not welcome,” I grumbled. I wouldn’t be ready to laugh about it until my nipples didn’t feel like they’d been rubbed with sandpaper.
Leigh returned later that afternoon with more than “a few others” for us to try. “Did you get every bottle they had on the shelves?”
“Technically, no. I got one of each kind on the shelves,” she smirked. “Before you say anything, I can take back whatever we don’t use, and maybe even some of the ones we do try if they guarantee satisfaction.”
“Fair enough,” I agreed. “Let’s start with the kind you used with Judge.”
And that’s what we did. At first, I thought we were going to be facing a long period of trial and error, but Leigh changed the nipple to one made of a different material and told me to try again. My jaw dropped in delightful surprise as Blue emptied the contents of her bottle without one single problem. “Holy shit,” I breathed.
“Watch your mouth around the baby,” Leigh scolded.
“That is physically and physiologically impossible, even if I had a mirror,” I retorted proudly.
“You’re the essence of ‘being too smart for your own good,’” she said and gave me a pointed look, complete with an arched eyebrow.
“Is there a Guinness World Record for the person who can arch their eyebrow the highest? Because we should really check into that. I think you could win.”
“Just wait until you’re not holding that baby,” Leigh said in a low tone.
Luckily, that was the last major hiccup we had while adjusting to our new world. That’s not to say that things went smoothly. Far from it. But it was the usual stuff that happened to new parents and nothing that affected her health or well-being. I still experienced my fair share of having outfits ruined by a shitty diaper that overflowed up the back—which usually happened within ten minutes of me putting the outfit on Blue—or her wanting to eat or be changed the moment I sat down to take a bite of whatever meal I’d just prepared. Parenthood was exactly what everyone who had kids said it was, and nothing like what most people without kids believed it to be.
After the initial shock, I handled things well for the first couple of weeks. But as time passed, my pent-up emotions festered inside of me. I needed to find an outlet before they exploded into a mess of hurt feelings and damaged relationships. I was angry about so many things—Heidi’s death, raising Blue without her mother, raising Blue without my own mother, and if I was being honest, I was still mad about almost losing my life when Dez’s punk ass little brother stabbed me.
I could feel Copper watching me like the hawk he and our father were named after. Thinking it was best if I brought it up before he felt the need to, I stopped by his office to talk to him.
“I need to fight,” I told him without preamble.
“So fight,” he said as if it were that simple.
I sighed and pinched the bridge of my nose. “I don’t mean sparring at the gym, Copper. I mean real matches,” I explained and paused for a moment before I dropped the detail I knew he would have a problem with. “Underground matches.”
“No fucking way!” he roared and rose to his feet.
“I’m doing this with or without your permission. The only reason I’m telling you now is because I don’t keep secrets from my club brothers, and I don’t want there to be any blowback on the club. Meaning you and the guys can’t come to my matches.”
He released a string of curse words under his breath and started to pace the short length of his office. “Fuck, Bronze. I get it. I really do, but this isn’t the way to go about dealing with your shit.”
“It might not be the way you’d choose, but it’s the right way for me. Fighting in the Marines is what got me through losing Mom and Dad. I’d be dead or in prison if I hadn’t enlisted and started boxing. It’s what I know, and it works for me.”
He glared at me, but I knew I would need to make some sort of concession before he