pressed my forehead to his and tried to take a deep breath.
“Rick. Rick Dirksen.” His eyes were closed. “It was my dad’s name. I hated it my whole life. The day they started calling me Sledge was the last day I ever thought if myself as Rick.” Sledge laughed flatly. “What’s funny is my mom named me after him because she thought it would make him stay. She thought if she named me Rick that he would be a man and stay.”
“Oh, Sledge,” I whispered. I couldn’t imagine being named after a man who didn’t want me. Flesh and blood and he walked away.
“It’s okay, Queenie. It sucked for a while, but in the end, it helped me. It made me be the person I am today. A shitty fucking lesson to learn when you’re so young, but at the end of the day, I know my mom and grandma did the best they could. I fucked it up for a while, but now I’m pretty sure I’ve got a handle on life.” His eyes opened, and all I could see in them was peace.
Right now, Gunner was set up to never have a dad in his life. Hell, I didn’t know if I was even going to be a good mom. He had the cards stacked against him for sure. “I don’t know how I’m going to make Gunner’s life good for him when I didn’t have a good life, Sledge. I know that he’s not home safe with me yet. I can’t help but be terrified even when he’s back home with me that I’m going to completely fuck up and give him an even worse life than the one I had.”
Apparently, it was confession time, and I wasn’t leaving anything out.
“Remember how I said I knew you without really talking to you?”
I nodded and bit my bottom lip.
“Because even though you were terrified and weren’t ready to raise Gunner, you took him with no question. You were there without anyone telling you to be there. You didn’t get a lot of unconditional love the past few years, but you sure as hell know how to give it, Queenie. You’d have to be blind and deaf to not see that.”
“Do you have to look so closely at me?” I whispered. He was speaking right to my heart, and he was telling me exactly what I needed to hear for so long. “I’m really not that great.” As a disclaimer, I needed to tell him all of the things that weren’t so great. There was a lot. “I get mad at dumb things and then I apologize two seconds later. I sometimes run when I shouldn’t, but I don’t know what else to do. I hate cleaning the fridge. I haven’t done it since I moved in and that was about five years ago. In the back corner, I’m pretty sure there is a science experiment any fourth grader would be proud of. I say I want Gunner, and I do, but there was a second where I wondered if he would be better off without me. If he truly had a chance at a good life that I wouldn’t mess up.”
The last one was a dousy. I had never dared speak that thought out loud. I held it in the pit of stomach and knew the second I spoke it I would be anything but a good person to raise Gunner.
Sledge laughed.
He. Laughed.
I just poured out all of my bad traits to him and then bared my deepest, darkest secret, and he laughed.
LAUGHED.
“You ass!” I slugged his shoulder and tried to push him away.
“Queenie,” he laughed. “Stop.”
“No,” I insisted. “I just told you something I have never breathed a word of before and you laughed.”
“Because it was funny, Queenie.”
I struggled against his hold, but he pulled me close. He leaned in for a kiss and I turned my cheek to him.
“It’s funny because you think a normal human response isn’t to wonder if you’re doing the right thing. If you’re the right person for the job. I would think you were Superwoman if you sat there and told me that you were born ready to take care of Gunner.”
“Normal, right,” I scoffed.
“It is,” he insisted. “We’ve all felt it before. I can tell you without a doubt, I would feel it every second of every day if I were in your shoes. But it would also drive me to do everything right. It would make me better.”
“You laughed