Page 76 of Daddy By Design

She rubbed her eyes, then she swore. “Fucking mascara.”

I laughed at the raccoon eyes she’d given herself. When she glared at me, I laughed again. “Sorry.”

She pulled a plastic stick out of her back pocket. “I was on my way to tell my husband that we’re having another kid.”

I cringed as she waved it at me. “Didn’t you have to pee on that?”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m a mom. I touch pee all the fucking time, but I washed it off, you big baby.”

I gripped the back of my neck. “So, wow.” Reeling from the quasi-forgiveness and now this, I didn’t know what the hell to say. “I’m going to be an uncle again?”

“So it seems. I think sometime in January. My damn husband just can’t get it right to knock me up so I can actually have a Halloween baby.”

“You were trying?”

“We’ve been trying. Michael was a hole in one the minute we decided to have kids. Bingo, bango, my face in the toilet and the whole deal.”

I swallowed down a lump in my throat. “God, I don’t need to know these parts of your life.”

She wrapped her arm around my waist and led me toward the side yard. “Oh, now you’re getting all the details, pal.”

“Just like that? We’re okay?” That kernel of hope felt like it was buried under sixteen layers of sheet metal.

“Life is damn short. I’d think that accident would have taught you that. It’s why you went looking for me again, right? Not that I was the one who was missing, you jerk.”

I slung my arm around her shoulders in that way that we used to. When we escaped the dank apartment that smelled of stale smoke and burnt pizza. The long summer days where we’d hop on our secondhand bikes and ride out of the shitty projects and try to pretend we were normal kids.

That our dad wasn’t a junkie and our mother a shell of a woman who took any scrap of affection from our dad in between the rages. Who made excuses and took him back again and again no matter how many times he stole from her.

Hell, stole from me.

When we were outside, we’d forgotten about all of that for hours and hours.

“C’mon back, No.” She slid out from under my arm as we got to my truck. “I know when that brain of yours is running into the past.”

I sighed. “Was a good memory.” At first. As always, I let it drag me into the muck. Even the good ones were linked with the bad.

She stood beside my truck with her hands on her hips. “LITTLE DICK?”

“Your friend’s handiwork.”

She frowned. “Who?”

“Dahlia.”

She threw her head back with a laugh. “She’s something. You must have pissed her off good.”

I sighed. “Not that time. Some guy she’d been dating was macking on another girl. I had the misfortune of owning a similar truck.”

“Well, that dude deserved it.”

I shook my head with a laugh. “I could have had her arrested.”

“I side with Dahl. Besides, Gideon knows that I’d burn all his businesses down if he cheated on me.”

“All of them? What, you gonna go Charlie McGee on him?”

She wrinkled her nose. “Stephen King wishes he had my twisted revenge plots. I’d be much more subtle.”

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