Page 10 of Ward
“Are you going?” Ward asks.
“No. Ditra invited me, but I won’t feel right. It’s their family time.”
Ward refills our sake cups from our shared carafe, pointing his toward me before taking a sip. “It sounds like that includes you.”
“I know I’d be welcome. I know it wouldn’t be odd if I wasn’t there, though. So that kind of lets me know I’m not truly as much their family as blood sisters are.”
“Spark…” Ward says, his tone becoming soft and earnest, “…of all the things I’ve ever heard you say or seen you do,thatsounds the craziest.” He ticks his finger at me.
I can’t help but smile, but it’s less than full. “It does, doesn’t it,” I agree, and then I confess, “I don’t want to go.”
“Thereit is.”
I lift my sake cup to my lips and blow gently before I sip it. The meal is finished, but the chefs stick around to clean up and talk to the guests. The chatter from around the table picks up a little, enough to drown us out but not so much we can’t hear each other. This feels like a private conversation, and Ward feels safe.
“He was my dad,” I tell Ward. “Maybe not biological, but in every other sense. He looked after me. He listened. He was always there for me, even when he had to be everywhere else. He was some kind of magic, Ward.” My throat tightens around a sob, and for a moment I put my attention right on that spot, feeling the constriction, the heat. The whole entire hurt.
Ward drapes his big honkin’ arm around me, and immediately, the weight of his arm is all I can feel. It’s heavy, and for no reason at all, so settling. “Where was your biological dad?”
“He left when my mom got pregnant with me. She didn’t know, but he was married, with a whole other family. He told her she could do what she wanted, but that he couldn’t stay and help raise me. He gave her some money and vanished, back into his real life I guess. When I was twelve, my mom got sick.”
“Oh, Spark. Damn.”
“Ditra’s family had already been like a second family to me. But after Mom died, I was fourteen then, they took me in. They weren’t like my godparents or anything, not officially, but there was no one else—no other family members on my mom’s side,and I don’t know the first thing about my dad, nor want to. I never even wanted to know his name.”
Ward’s warm hand scopes up and down my arm, soothingly, sending chills up to my neck and down into the veins of my wrist. “You werenevercurious?” he wonders.
“I mean, curious, but not enough to ask. I knew I never wanted that energy. Some people feel like they need to know where they came from, their roots. I get that. But I just don’t feel like there’s a space in me that needs that—there is nothing empty or missing that needs to feel more whole. I’m good with just here and now. I am entirelymewithout knowing him.”
Ward is quiet for a long moment, the strokes up and down my arm slowing down, then quickening, then becoming languid again. He’s thinking. He’s thinking hard. Finally, he looks right into my eyes, and a broad, handsome grin spreads on his face. “Can I be like you when I grow up?”
That warms my cheeks right up, even more than the sake did.
“Seriously, Spark. You’re somethin’ else,” Ward adds.
“You are.” I shake my head, feeling a little embarrassed, but at the same time, free. There are so few people I can tell things to. Real things. No one ever asks.
Except Ward. Ward asks all the things—and then after I answer, he asks more. It’s strange, it’s weird. “I’m curious though, Yv… With that kind of childhood, how’d you get to be so good with kids?”
“You think I’m good with kids?”
“I saw you with Laney. How you look at her, how you talk to her, like she’s a full person already.”
“She loves you the mostest though.” I give a playful eyeroll and lean into his side for a quick little shove, but his arm instantly cinches me there, annihilating my insides with all kinds of feelings. His woodsy cologne and confident hold and the way my body fits snugly into the grooves of his.
Being silly, Ward flexes the bicep of his other arm. “I’m big and strong, that’s why.”
“All the girlies love that,” I manage to tease, practically flirting as I’m dying inside of the onslaught of warm fuzzy feels. He chuckles, but then I say seriously, “She knows you’re a safe place. It’s really sweet.”
He loosens his hold enough to gaze down into my face without it being an awkward smooshed position. This is oddly comfortable; unexplainably easy. “You love her. I mean like, you have a connection.” Ward says it like there’s a question after.How, orwhy.
I straighten up a little and clear my throat. “When I was little, like really young, I went so deep into myself, it was like an escape where I just explored my mind and my heart, my being. For years. So now in some ways, I still have that little girl I was, with me. I still know her. I still am her.”
Ward blinks a couple of times, then goes into a headshake. Releasing a slow breath, his eyes go to the chefs, the guests, the walls, the who-knows-what for about ten seconds, and then they find mine. “Sometimes you say things that sound a little crazy, but then actually make sense when you think about it. That’s…really beautiful, Yvette. I’m jealous?”
“Well, thank you, I think.” I smile at him. “What about you,Lieutenant? What’s your story?”
Once again his gaze goes rogue, dropping onto the randomest things. I’m starting to realize it’s what happens when his thoughts are also going rogue. A waiter comes by, reminding me we had a waiter at the very beginning, who took our drink order and made themself scarce for the rest of the evening—though our drinks always remained full.
