Page 36 of Offside Angel

He lets me go like I’m on fire and grins at his son. “Mornin’, little man. What’s going on?”

“Mira is gonna make pancakes! Mouse pancakes. With lots of syrup. And whipped cream. And chocolate chips. And?—”

I whip around and tickle his side. Aiden squirms away, giggling. “You’re going to get me in trouble with your dad.”

Zane leans over and kisses the back of my shoulder. Awareness zips down my spine. “That all sounds good to me, actually.”

Aiden grins. “We can do it?”

Zane gives him a thumbs up. “We can do it.”

Aiden bounces around like a jackrabbit until Zane scoops him up and wears him like a scarf down to the kitchen. I help Aiden crack his first-ever eggs and Zane lets him pour an ungodly amount of chocolate chips into the pancake batter.

Half of the pancakes come out looking like birds that smashed into a window, but Aiden calls them all mice, anyway, and gives each one a whipped cream smile.

“Because we’re all so happy,” he explains, beaming down at his handiwork.

I bite back yet another completely inappropriate sob. It was so easy to enjoy time with Aiden and Zane before, because I knew it had an expiration date. I didn't need to sort through the sewage of my childhood trauma or overcome any demons because I was always, always going to leave. That was the plan.

Now, the plan is…

Well, we don't have a plan. Not explicitly. Not one that extends beyond stuffing ourselves with pancakes and spending at least an hour cleaning flour out from between the tiles on the floor.

It's hard to have a plan for the rest of your life.

The rest of my life. If I'm out here treading water, those words are a life preserver. They're a little break in the storm.

I want to do this for the rest of my life.

But I’m not sure I can.

After breakfast, Zane runs Aiden a bath. It always takes twenty minutes to convince him to get in the water, then an hour to convince him to get out. By the time Zane walks back to the kitchen, I can hear Aiden splashing and doing different voices for all of his plastic sharks.

“I don’t think any of the syrup made it into his body. It’s all on his face.”

“That might be for the best. His sugar crash is going to be epic from the chocolate chips alone,” I point out.

Zane leans against the counter next to me, arms crossed casually. He’s wearing sweats and a plain tee and I’d slap him on any fitness magazine in existence. Actually, I’d rip him out of said magazine and tape him to my wall.

“I should’ve skipped the chocolate chips,” he muses. “After pizza and ice cream and barely working out this last week, practice tomorrow is going to kick my ass.”

“You’re going back to practice?” I don’t mean for my voice to sound so panicked. I’m not panicking.

I knew Zane would go back to work eventually. I just thought we’d have a little more time before real life came knocking.

He turns towards me, and I slap on a smile. “Good for you, I mean,” I say hastily. “I’m glad you’re getting back into the swing of things.”

His brow arches. “‘The swing of things’?”

“Yeah. Routine, sleeping, practice. It’s good. Really good.” I look down and realize I’ve been scrubbing the same sparklingly clean pan since Zane walked into the kitchen. “Great, even.”

“Sure. I can tell by the way you keep saying it. It’s very convincing.” Zane gently pries the pan out of my hands and flicks the water off. I’m reluctant, but there’s no way to resist when he pulls me against him. “One truth per day?”

“We already did one for today.”

He wrinkles his nose. “The sun is up, so it’s a new day. Do you have one?”

I chew on my bottom lip and try to pull something out of the tangled-up mess in my head. “I had fun this morning. This was nice.”

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