Page 40 of Carry Me Home
She looked up. “Can we get pie again?”
He looked at me. I nodded. “Sure,” he said.
“Okay.”
“Okay.” He rapped his knuckles on the wood next to my sketchpad. “See you then.”
And I watched my childhood crush turned one-night stand turned manny walk out the door.
What the hell just happened.
16
JANIE
Essie
Stop me if you’ve heard this joke before. A cowboy, a Navy SEAL, and a manny walk into a dive bar…
Janie
I take it Jack told you the news.
Essie
I can’t stop laughing.
I was an anxious mess.
I waited on my front porch, my hands wrapped around a steaming mug of coffee. I paced the length of the house. I sat on the swing and promptly stood up again. I paced some more.Maya sat on the third step, her knees snuggled to her chest, completely unconcerned that her mother was falling apart at the seams. She liked to give her whole being to whatever activity was at hand.
Waiting, in this case.
In about fifteen minutes, Jack was going to pull into the driveway, and everything would change. From the moment I’d discovered I was pregnant, it had been me and Maya against the world. We were a team. My whole life was built around her. I had no idea how Jack would fit into any of it. Our house, our routines, our lives.
But I was about to find out because Jack’s blue pickup truck was rolling up my driveway ten minutes early. Of course he was early. The man had probably never been late to anything in his life.
He pulled up next to my eight-year-old Subaru and got out. Suddenly I had a whole new problem to consider. I gawked as his black work boots emerged first, followed by long legs and thickly muscled thighs encased in faded denim, and an ordinary white t-shirt that must have been made from literal magic because it had that perfect easy fit that somehow still managed to showcase every square of his six-pack.
Black aviators highlighted the way his nose crooked slightly, like it had been broken more than once. As if that wasn’t hot enough, he’d added my own personal kryptonite: a backwards baseball cap, glints of silver peeking out near his ears.
Goddammit.
This man was going to live in my house. Eat, sleep, and shower mere feet from me. I couldn’t even console myself with the comforting lie that men that hot were inevitably selfish in bed because I already knew that didn’t hold true for Jack.
I was fucked.
Jack leaned over the truck bed and hauled two large suitcases over the edge like they weighed nothing. I suspected they weighed at least forty pounds apiece. I pressed my fingertips against my coffee mug like it would keep me from melting into a puddle of goo.
“Morning,” he called.
I gurgled unintelligible babble back at him.
“Good morning,” Maya said.
He made his way up the walk with a loose-limbed gait that reminded me of a lion, all casual strength and one-hundred-percent certainty of his place at the top of the food chain.
“Ready to have some fun?” he asked Maya as he reached the porch steps.
