Page 107 of When We Were Reckless
“Like me and Hayley,” Noah told Quinn. I knew all about Hayley. Everyone in Noah’s life knew about Hayley because he talked about her constantly. “She’s my best friend. Someday I’m gonna marry her.”
“Oh. Wow,” Quinn said. “You must really love her.”
“Yep. She loves me too. Daddy Jude says that me and Hayley must be soul mates. Just like him and my mom. He said he loved her ever since they were kids. And he loves her even more now. He even loves her when she’s covered in baby puke. He told her so the other day. She was crying so hard she couldn’t stop.”
“Your mom was crying?” I asked.
“No. Well, yeah. She was crying too. Because Gracie wouldn’t stop crying.” He sighed loudly. “Babies are no fun. All she ever does is eat and poop and puke and cry.”
I stifled a laugh. “Babies are a lot of work.”
“Yep. And Daddy Jude says stupid things sometimes.”
This I’d love to hear. Kids were so unfiltered, and I knew Noah would spill the beans. “Oh yeah? Like what?”
Noah sighed again. “Like how he wants more kids. That’s what made my mom cry. She was covered in puke, and Daddy Jude was saying what an angel Gracie is.” Noah snorted. “Sure she is. And he was saying he wants more babies, just like Gracie. Like,a lotof them. So Mom said that if he kept talking like that, she was gonna lock him out of the house and make him sleep on the back porch.”
Quinn and I exchanged a look, and we burst out laughing.
Levi kicked the back of my seat again. I could feel the impact of each kick, and the more he did it, the more annoying it got. “Yo, Levi. How about you take a break from all that kicking.”
Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. Should have known that would make him want to do it even more.
I reached around behind my seat and wrapped my hand around his ankle but not so tight that it would hurt him. “Stop kicking my seat, or you won’t be getting any ice cream.” It was an empty threat. I’d buy Levi as much ice cream as he wanted. But I could sure as hell do without all that kicking. It was hitting the exact spot where I’d broken those two vertebrae.
“I want ice cream,” he shouted, his kicks coming faster and more furious. I checked the rearview. He was thrashing in his car seat now, trying to break free of the straps. Lila had warned me he was going through “the terrible twos,” and tantrums were a daily thing, but he didn’t usually act up around me.
“You know what we should do?” Quinn turned in her seat to face Levi and clapped her hands together like she’d just had a brilliant idea. “We should sing a song.”
Levi was screaming now, his face an alarming shade of red, so I doubted that he even heard her. Noah plugged his ears with his fingers and shouted, “Be quiet, you annoying baby!”
“I’m not a baby!” Levi shouted.
“Do you know this one?” Undeterred by the screaming and crying in the back seat, Quinn launched into a song I knew, one that just about everyone knew, but she changed the words. “I see a silhouetto of a lamb, Scaramouche, Scaramouche, can you do the fandango?”
“A lamb?” I asked with a laugh.
Her brow furrowed, and she tapped her chin. “Actually, I think it’s supposed to be clam.”
“It’s not clam or lamb. It’s man,” I informed her.
She scoffed. “Try telling the Muppets that.”
Quinn was fucking hilarious. I laughed as she sang, using exaggerated hand gestures like an opera singer performing at the Met. “Thunderbolt and lightning, very, very frightening…. Galileo, Galileo, Galileo Figaro.”
I checked the rearview and watched Levi’s enraptured face. The kids loved Quinn. So much so that she got them singing along to her crazy version of “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
By the time I pulled into a parking space near the town square and the nature trails, Levi had stopped kicking, and that tantrum was a distant memory. All thanks to my little magician.
“I don’t think me and Hayley are gonna have kids,” Noah announced as I hopped out of the truck and freed Levi from the confines of his car seat. I pulled him out of his chair and held him in one arm so I could close the door. We met Quinn and Noah on the sidewalk outside a honey shop with bees painted on the white stucco.
“Bzzzzz,” Levi pointed at the wall, and then he pinched the skin on my arm between his thumb and forefinger.
“Ouch! I got stung by a bee.” I grimaced, making a big show of being in pain.
That made him laugh so hard he was snorting. Pain was hilarious to kids. Not that it had hurt. When he stopped laughing, he leaned down and kissed my arm. “All better,” he said, smacking my cheeks with both hands. So damn cute.
“Thanks, buddy.” I ruffled his hair. “It doesn’t even hurt anymore. You kissed it all better.”
