Page 54 of Endlessly Yours
“You really should be. Come on.” I held out my hand, and he took it, and all felt right. Or maybe, all felt as if I hadn’t taken a step that I wasn’t ready for.
We walked up to Alice’s room, and I quickly let go of his hand. I didn’t know what the girls knew, and frankly, I wasn’t good at dating, let alone dating as a guardian. When were you supposed to sit the girls down and explain what you were doing with another man? Let alone, when you didn’t know what you were doing. Being a parent was damn hard, and I hadn’t read a rule book about this. There had to be an outline or something, a how-to. Of course, there were probably a million books on it, but nothing about this situation.
“How about this one? We don’t need to read the whole thing.”
“You can’t read the whole thing in a night,” Cameron said with a roll of her eyes. She sat at the end of Alice’s bed, back to the wall. Alice sat with her back to the headboard, book in hand. They both smelled of mint, with fresh faces, and looked so sweet and innocent.
The same little girls who had cried the night before when each had had a nightmare and hadn’t wanted to tell the other. But each had held one another while I had held them.
We were navigating this space, and maybe I wasn’t failing completely.
Brooks pushed past me and took a seat at the edge of Alice’s bed. I scrambled into the small space at the edge next to Cameron and was grateful when she didn’t pull away. Instead, she snuggled into me as Alice lifted Brooks’s arm to sink into his side, and I wanted to take a photo, to snap a picture of this moment forever.
I listened with half an ear as Brooks’s deep grumble of a voice soothed Alice to sleep in his side, her bow-mouth parted as she slightly snored. Cameron dozed lightly, and as thirty minutes passed, and we went further than a chapter, Brooks set the book down on the nightstand, and I gently tugged Cameron off the bed as Brooks tucked Alice in, turning off the nightlight. I stood at the doorway, Cameron leaning into me, as we watched Brooks lean down to brush a kiss over the top of Alice’s head before he turned towards us.
I mouthed that I would be right back and walked Cameron to her room.
She yawned quietly and looked at me with an odd look on her face.
“What is it?” I asked, keeping my voice low.
“Are you and Brooks together?” she asked.
I swallowed hard and promised myself that I would never lie to her. “Yes, but it’s still new.”
She frowned and nodded. “I like him.”
And with that, she tucked herself in, and I knew better than to help her. It would just start a fight, especially when she had been so nice just now. But I turned off her light, grateful for this odd semblance of normalcy in a world that was anything but normal.
And then I was walking to my room, Brooks behind me. Throat tight, I closed the door behind both of us and let out a deep breath.
“That was weird,” I said with a soft laugh.
“Tell me about it. Although, I did get some practice by reading to Faith.”
“You’re better at it than I am.”
“I don’t believe that. You draw stories for a living. I bet you have more imagination than you think.”
I shook my head and took a step away from him, needing to breathe. It was hard to even think when he was around, Or perhaps that was just something that he did to me.
“I don’t know. I think the girls liked listening to you read.” I looked down at my hands. “So did I.”
“I am sorry, you know. For how it looked. And for blurting out in front of everybody that we were dating. Considering we hadn’t really said those words yet.”
A smile stretched over my face, imagining that. “Well, at least you had to deal with the awkwardness with that. As I ran away with the girls to the car.”
“You guys did scurry quite quickly.”
“We did not scurry,” I whispered, knowing that even though we were on the other side of the hall, we had to be quiet.
Brooks’s gaze went to my lips, and my tongue darted out as if it had a mind of its own.
“I don’t want to hide this. Whatever this is,” he said after a moment.
“I think blurting it out to your family sort of excludes the whole hiding it thing,” I said with a small half-laugh.
“True.” He stepped forward, his thumb tracing along my jaw. “I haven’t been very good about figuring out what to do with you, have I?”
