It was going to take a lot of hard work, but Baby wasn’t afraid of hard work.
The U.S. Army may not have deemed him a suitable soldier, but he knew how to battle. Once he took the first step and no longer kept this secret, it was going to lose the power it had over him.
If his friends and family wanted to pity him, then that was their own poor choice. Anyone who underestimated Baby Bollinger, learning disability or not, was a fool.
And God, she was falling in love with him. There was no way around that fact.
It was so ridiculous. There were so many reasons this wouldn’t work that she refused to list them for herself.
Again. She’d done that way too many times already.
It always came back to the same thing. Baby needed someone his own age. Not so much the number of years, but someone on the same place on life’s path as he was.
Someone who could provide him with the children he would make such a wonderful father for.
And then that little voice in her head would say that Baby would love children even if they weren’t biologically his. Maybe they could adopt.
She’d always banished that voice, not wanting to give it traction. Because she knew if she let it grow, let herself hope, and things didn’t work out, she would never recover from the inevitable heartache of losing Baby.
She lay in her bed and stared up at the ceiling. She should be exhausted. Evidently, she and Baby weren’t responsible enough adults to sleep in bed with each other and actually get sleep. They’d always found something else to do.
And the way the rest of her life was going, she wished she could just stay in bed with him.
Yesterday, her bank card had given her a fit once again when she tried to use her ATM card to take out the money to pay her rent to Mrs. Mazille. Fortunately, she had enough money in tips, but she’d been embarrassed to have to pay in a huge stack of ones like she was trying to offer unmarked bills or something.
In a couple more years, she would hopefully be out from under all this debt. She was making a lot less working two part-time jobs here, but it also cost a lot less to live.
She rubbed her fingers across her eyes and yawned. The teaching was going really well. She loved being in the classroom and interacting with students.
But then she’d somehow screwed everything up entering grades into the TSC system yesterday. When she’d gone in today to enter more, the previous grades, all of them for all her classes, were gone.
She’d learned enough from her mistakes at Harvard to have kept a paper copy of all the grades, but she’d still had to spend the entire evening manually reentering.
She never used to feel like such a computer failure. She considered herself pretty computer savvy, but this would’ve been a disaster if she hadn’t had paper backups. No doubt she would have been fired again.
That was the problem, wasn’t it?
She stared up into the darkness of the room. Now that she wasn’t around Baby, she could finally have some actual time to think.
Was she self-sabotaging?
While she didn’t hold Peter the prick’s opinion in much regard, she couldn’t ignore the possibility anymore.
She still wasn’t exactly sure what had happened with the computer stuff at Harvard—the lost grades and the research project. Had she subconsciously deleted all that information on purpose? Wash she now doing the same thing here?
Self-sabotage?
Was she dating Baby because she knew there was no possibility for long-term happiness?
She hadn’t ever really analyzed what had happened to her office or her house from that same framework. Had she somehow drawn that negative attention toward herself? Invited the universe to dump on her?
Jesus, had she subconsciously left Peter on that bank account on purpose?
But why would she do that to herself? She didn’t hate or have some need to punish herself.
Yet, looking at it objectively here in the dark, the lone common denominator between all the bad stuff that had happened to her over the past year was her.
“Shut up, Quinn.”
She was tired and needed sleep. Tomorrow was Thanksgiving, and she was supposed to go over to Linear Tactical for their Thanksgria celebration.
Maybe tomorrow everything would seem—
Grizzly barked from the living room; she bolted upright in bed. The dog had started sleeping inside the front door a few nights ago when the weather had turned colder. She waited