Can't Fight It - Kaylee Ryan Page 0,24
It’s probably for the best. I would have spent the entire night in a trance. Thinking about tracing that bare shoulder with my tongue. Then again, I still might.
“All right, I think we’re good. You ready, buddy?” I ask my son. He smiles up at me and kicks his legs. “Let’s get you covered up.” I grab the soft baby blue blanket and place it over him, making sure his face and head are covered. His little hands and legs squirm as he tries to pull it off. This is a game I play with him, hiding behind the blanket, peekaboo of sorts. I might want to rethink that now the weather is getting colder.
I pull the blanket off and say boo in my non-scary, silly dad’s voice, and he laughs. His little laugh warms my heart. “You have to keep this on, you little stinker. It’s getting cold outside, and Daddy doesn’t want you to get sick.” I place the blanket back on him, tucking it in around him, and lift his seat into my arms. I throw the diaper bag over my shoulder and check to make sure I have my phone. Good to go, I look up to find Hollis watching me intently.
“You have this single-dad thing down.”
“It’s all an act,” I tell her as we make our way out to my truck. “It’s more of a ‘fake it until you make it’ kind of situation.”
“I don’t see that at all.”
“No? I’m a better actor than I thought.”
“Stop.”
I load Milo into the truck and pull the blanket back from over his head, his eyes are already getting droopy. My boy can’t resist a ride, puts him to sleep every time. “Really,” I say once I’m behind the wheel of my truck. “I’m constantly worrying if I’m doing enough, taking good enough care of him. I don’t want to mess him up, you know?”
“First of all, that’s absurd. Do you love him?”
“Of course I do. What kind of question is that?”
“Sorry, it wasn’t meant to sound bad. What I mean is that you love him. It shows through with everything that you do. The way you hold him, the way you talk to him, the way you take care of him. No one is perfect, Colton. But at the end of the day, if you’ve done your best and you can say without a shadow of a doubt that he knows you love him, I’d say, you, sir, will have passed with flying colors as a father.” My chest inflates from her praise. I’m learning as I go, going at this mostly on my own, and it’s nice to know that someone outside my family can see that I’m trying and that I love my son with everything in me.
“I hope you’re right. It’s not just being a single father, but it’s molding back into civilian life. I graduated and enlisted. That’s been my life. Short visits home, then back into the barracks, or the field. I feel so… out of place. That’s really the best way that I can explain it.”
“I can imagine that would be hard for you.”
I nod. “Yeah, my brothers, those not by blood, but by duty, they were my closest allies. They’re all still enlisted, fighting and standing tall without me. Sorry, I don’t mean to drop all of this on you.”
“You have to talk to someone. It might as well be a stranger.”
“I’d hardly call us strangers.” She’s consumed my life for the last week that she feels like anything but a stranger to me at this point.
“We’re more strangers than friends, maybe acquaintances.”
Glancing over, I see she’s staring out the passenger-side window. She looks sad, lost in her own thoughts. I reach over and place my hand on her arm, returning my eyes back to the road. “We should fix that.” Sure, it’s selfish of me to offer an olive branch of friendship, but something tells me she needs it just as much, if not more than I do.
She glances over and offers me a shy smile. “Yeah. I think I’d like that,” she agrees as we pull into my parents’ driveway. “I’ll help,” she says once the truck is parked. She climbs out and opens the back door, reaching in to grab the diaper bag.
I make sure the blanket is tucked in close around Milo as he slumbers in his seat, and we head inside. I don’t bother knocking. I grew up here, and Mom would give me all kinds