“Oh, buddy. Hang on.”
TJ was flat on his back, staring up at Jett with freshwater-blue eyes that contrasted deeply with the red, almost purple, splotches covering his face. His cries were hoarse, cracking at each tail end, and his small fists pulsed up and down with what little fight he had left in him. Half of his sleeper was covered in a dark-yellow stain.
Jett put one hand gingerly on his bottom as he picked him up.
“Trina?” Jett stepped down the hall. “Trina?”
The door to his bedroom stood ajar. He knocked once, then pushed it fully open.
His gray comforter lay crumpled in a heap in the middle of the bed. The blinds were shut. Each of his dresser drawers was opened, looking the same as when he was late for work and had to quickly rifle through. His watch—hardly worth the fifty dollars he’d paid for it—was gone.
“Trina!” he bellowed. He threw open the door to the bathroom, giving in to one last blind hope she’d be in there. But instead, all he found was an open medicine cabinet, toiletries fallen into the sink.
“Uh, Jett.”
Jett heard Sunny’s footsteps down the hall, saw him stop behind him in the medicine-cabinet mirror.
“I think you’ve got a problem.” He handed Jett a piece of paper.
Jett read the words hastily scribbled across the Pack ’n Play’s manual:
I’m sorry. I can’t handle it anymore.
Jett stared at the words. Squeezed his eyes shut.
Gave himself one deep breath.
And threw the manual against the shower wall with a force that would break glass.
“Annnd let’s give Uncle Jett a minute.” Sunny took TJ from Jett’s shoulder. A definitive squish sound came from the area of TJ’s diaper now placed firmly on Sunny’s forearm. “Abort. Abort.” Sunny started to push the baby back toward Jett.
Jett turned his murderous gaze on him.
Sunny pulled back. “I mean, I totally got this. You just have your moment.” Sunny repositioned both hands beneath TJ’s armpits, holding the baby as far out as possible from his chest. TJ’s scrawny legs kicked as Sunny walked him down the hall. “Oh, little man. This is serious.”
Jett shut the door to the bathroom, raked a hand through his hair. All of a sudden the world was collapsing, thoughts and emotions whipping by so fast it was hard to specify any one thing. He forced himself to take a breath, tried hard to focus on one aspect at a time.
His sister had come back. That was good.
But then she was gone again. She’d left, and in leaving had left her three kids. Three kids. All left . . . to him. For today. The next day. The next. How long?
He took another breath, the bathroom suddenly confining.
Trina. What have you done?
He pulled out his phone and dialed the last number she’d had. The familiar recording, stating the number was not in service, played. He shut it off midsentence.
He turned on the sink.
He slapped icy water over his face.
This was good, though. Better than at least one very real alternative.
Because how many times had his heart stopped beating over the past year whenever Dakota and Drew crossed his mind? A hundred? A thousand? Late at night when he’d looked up at the ceiling, wondering what kind of ceiling they were under at that moment. At least she hadn’t left with them, making him worry all over again. At least right now he didn’t have to worry if they were fed, warm, remembered. Safe.
Three kids.
Jett looked at himself in the mirror.
His own niece and nephews. Carrying, Sarah had said, the same wavy hair as his own. He was their uncle, and they had nobody else in the world.
He was their uncle.
They had nobody else in the world.
He was their uncle.
Nobody else.
Ten minutes later, he opened the door.
His niece and nephews were safe, and that’s what was important right now.
Well that, and the minor fact that he had no idea what he was doing.
* * *
“You got this, man? Because I’m here for you. I just also gotta get some sleep.”
“Yeah, Sunny, you go on. Sarah will be here any minute.” He checked the clock again, ignoring the stress level rising with each passing second Sarah was not there. Without kids, he would’ve thrown his shoes on and been out the door—sometimes not even worrying about the shoes part. Now, if his neighbor didn’t get here in the next three minutes he would definitely be late.
Jett slapped pickles on five turkey slices. He squirted each with ranch. Dinner a la mode.
The last twenty-four hours had been a marathon. After the surprise visit to Cassie’s house, he’d made the regularly unscheduled visit to Donna Gene’s and worked a 2:00 a.m. wreck. It had been a long night, a particularly bad night. Yet neither he nor Sunny had anticipated coming home to spend the next eleven hours watching the twins bounce on couches, narrowly miss a stabbing after Drew got hold of a knife, and clean up after the successful breaking of a lamp. And a glass. And a plate from Sarah’s cookies with a label on the bottom stating it was fine china.
He had a hundred things on the mental to-do list that took form the moment Trina walked out the door—somewhere before midnight, from what he could gather by the twins’ shaky accounts.
His blood pressure started rising whenever he thought too long about it, knowing how terrified the twins would’ve been watching their mother push away from them, shut the door, and abandon them in the dark. Alone. Eight hours. Ten. However long it had been was long enough to make the twins anxious whenever Jett so much as stood up. Just trying to go to another room was an ordeal, and thanks to today, he could now say he knew what it was like to have two pairs of arms wrapped tight around his legs while in the bathroom. It’d been an eventful day.
Still, nothing was going to stop him from seeing Cassie tonight. Not even this.
The knock on the front door came, and Jett called out before she could knock a second time. “Come on in!”
“Well, well, well, what do we have here?” Sarah stepped into the kitchen and placed a tote on the counter.
Jett cast a glance over to the breakfast table, where the twins were sliding ice cubes on it until they took the three-foot plunge to the kitchen floor.
He shrugged. “All I know is they have a thing for ice cubes. They’ve been doing that for half an hour.”
Sarah dodged TJ, who was lying on a towel in the middle of the floor. She looked down at the puddle of ice water with bobbing, melting ice cubes. “Now I see why the landlord is just super thrilled about renters with kids. You got a towel?”
Jett took an orange-and-white T-shirt and tossed it to her. “We ran out of towels two days ago. Down to T-shirts now.”
She stretched it out and raised an eyebrow at the college intramural print. “Badminton? Somehow I didn’t see you as a badminton kind of guy.”
Jett grinned as he threw the sandwiches on a plate and set the stack between ice cubes on the table. “Never underestimate the power of a girl’s persuasion. Particularly spicy redheads in Spanish class.”
Dakota and Drew snatched at the sandwiches.
Sarah’s brow raised. “I see. And how did that relationship turn out?”
“I’m using the T-shirt as a floor wipe right now. That just about sums it up.”
Sarah smiled and turned away. “Speaking of your very . . . innovative use of towels, I thought you might want this.” She turned the corner of the kitchen and came back with a large box. On the cover, a baby about TJ’s age was smiling in some sort of reclining contraption, several colorful objects dangling overhead.
Sarah set it on the ground. “Unless you like the towel-in-the-middle-of-the-floor deal. I just thought TJ here would like it.”
Impossible. After a mere eight hours of this parenting thing, he felt a strange stirring as curiosity moved him closer, an unfamiliar enthusiasm toward items devoted to house and home.
“Wow, Sarah. TJ will love this. Thank you.” He picked up TJ and smiled gratefully, looking into her eyes. “Thank you so much.”
That was interesting. He’d never noticed her wearing so much mascara. She blinked, her green eyes softer than he’d ever observed before. He wondered momentarily if there was something different about her eyebrows. Less . . . hairy.
Her smile reached her eyes. “If you want, we can put it together right now. I’m pretty handy with a manual.”
Just then TJ spit up, for the fifth time that day, on his shirt. “I would. I really would. But I’m about to be late as is.”
He handed TJ over, now very aware of how important it was not to disappoint the woman who had agreed on a whim to watch the kids. “But that would be great when I get back. TJ is going to love it. Aren’t you, buddy?”
“And where are you going again?” she began just as he spoke loudly over her to the kids.
“Guys? Remember Sarah? She’s going to hang out with you for a little while.”
He grabbed the T-shirt towel and began swiping at his shirt.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a shift in the twins’ postures that made him look up. They wore that same forlorn, don’t-leave-us look Sarah also seemed to be wearing. It made him uneasy. “And you can show her all the things you can do with ice cubes. Won’t that be fun?”
Dakota dropped her sandwich.
Jett dropped the T-shirt on the counter, sensing the beginning of the battle. “And you can jump on Uncle Jett’s bed as much as you want.”
Both of the twins hopped down from their chairs and headed toward him.
“And Sunny’s! He has a great big giant king bed! Wake him up and go crazy.”
The kids kept coming.
Backing up, Jett bumped into the wall, his hand fiddling for the fridge. He opened it quickly. “See this?”
They stopped just before clutching his legs.
“Ice cream! Ice cream for everyone!”
He was yelling so loud that Sarah’s eyes widened. When the twins started jumping with him in enthusiasm, however, her lips upturned.
It wasn’t too hard to get out the door after that.
With lucky green lights and a sprint from the parking lot, Jett managed the easygoing stroll into the gym a mere four minutes past six. He stripped off his jacket. Cassie waited at the three-point line—void of pine needles—of the old gym, a ball in her hands, her chestnut hair pulled back into a playful ponytail. She was just as beautiful as the day she’d stood on the same court fifteen years ago.
“Why, you look stunning, Miss Everson.”
Cassie laughed, looking down at her athletic pants and T-shirt. “Man, your bar must be really low. And anyway, where’s all the trash talk you’ve been throwing down the past few days? Don’t tell me you’re going soft now when it counts.”
She bounced the ball toward him and he caught it with both hands.
“Oh, no. I’m not backing down. I just think it’s time we let actions speak for themselves.” He dribbled the ball to the three-point line, positioned himself, and threw it. The ball swished with such perfection through the net he could hear the angels singing.
Or rather, that’s what would’ve happened if he’d been in charge of the moment. In reality the ball soared through the air, missed the backboard completely, and slammed into one of the hanging blue mats on the back wall.
Her laugh wasn’t one of those sweet, jingly types that came off like a polite wind chime. No, as he jogged after the ball, she cackled at megaphone volume.
“I just need a warm-up,” he called back, searching for the ball now hidden among the bleachers. “You’ll be sorry soon enough.”
“You keep telling yourself that,” she said between laughs.
Already, the night was perfect.
Old metal halide lighting dangled from the forty-foot ceilings. Yellow walkways and blue bleachers covered the gymnasium where echoes of old memories lingered: the feel of the ball on his fingertips, the cheers in the stands, the shouting of his old coach.
The smell of spit-up on his chest.
Jett pulled down on his jersey, grimacing at the six-inch spot against the gray. Oh, perfect. Nothing said romance like spit-up tie-dye.
“You going to pass me that ball or what?” Cassie called.
“Yeah, I’ve, uh—” He turned his chest away from her and tossed the ball, making a beeline for his athletic bag. “Go for it.”
Cassie turned and made a shot, the ball swishing through the net. “Actions speaking yet? Or are we still warming up?”
“Once you get three in a row, we’ll be done warming up.” He unzipped the bag quickly. Several toys spilled out. Drew.
He heard the net swish again as he stuffed a boat—still dripping in bath water—and about forty-seven cars back into his bag. Yanking out his water bottle, he squirted a couple drops on his shirt. Began rubbing hastily on his chest.
The spot sucked the water up and—from his angle—took on the shape of a submarine headed directly for his armpit.
“What are you doing over there? You’re not taking a water break already, are you?”
“No, no,” he called back. “Just seemed to—” He rubbed fiercely. “—have something—” The submarine was morphing into a warship. “—on my shirt.”
He stared at the water bottle for a long moment. Looked to his jacket. Imagined what it would do to him if he tried to play basketball for two hours in a coat. Considered stripping off his shirt for half a beat and shuddered at the image of himself brazenly passing her the ball like he was The Rock and knew it.
Instead, he doused half the bottle on himself. Water spread and covered the top half of his chest, turning the gravel-shaded shirt into one the color of Cassie’s cat.
Well, that solved the warship problem.
Finally, he turned around.
She saw him and stopped dribbling.
When he reached her, he could tell she was on the cusp of rolling over in laughter, yet again.
He tilted his chin upward. “I see sympathy isn’t one of your strengths.”
“Oh, I’m not saying anything. Did I say anything?” She threw him the ball. “Now, let’s play.”
Jett grinned, started dribbling, and hedged around her for the basket. She chased after, trying several times to knock the ball out of his hands before he reached the net. He made the shot.
The ball swooshed. He caught it with a grin. “Now warm-up’s over.”
For the next hour they dribbled and shot, dodged and blocked, and elbowed their way to the basket. Discreet fouls turned to overt ones as they started to snatch at the other’s shirt, take hold of each other’s shoulders. At one point Jett lifted Cassie—and the ball—completely off the floor, enjoying the feel of her wrapped inside his arms.
Three games later, and stomachs rumbling, it was time to call it quits.
“Not bad, Everson. You gave me a run for my money.” Jett wiped the perspiration from his eyes, his shirt so sweat soaked at this point all memory of the spit-up incident was gone.
Cassie, on the other hand—with that mysterious ability available only to women—managed to show no signs of exhaustion besides a damp hairline and a disheveled ponytail. She slid an arm into a long-sleeved maroon zip-up. “Not enough of a run, Bentley, if you still got me on that last one 21 to 8. Whatever happened to a little flirtatious losing? I’m the girl here. You’re supposed to drop a few shots so I don’t get too far behind.”
“Are you telling me that would’ve worked on you?” He held one hand out to the three-point line. “’Cause we can go right now.”
She zipped up her jacket and waved him off. “No, it’s too late now. I’m just going to have to throw a pity party for myself later. Where are we eating dinn
er?”
“Loser picks, if I remember correctly.”
“Have you been to Abram’s? Not the refined feel we’d get at Cobbler’s Steakhouse. More of a kid place. But seeing as you look like you went under a waterfall, I’d say we’re better dressed for fried okra and biscuits anyways. Don’t you agree?”
Jett nodded, all the while well aware of the way she had referenced the restaurant. It was a kid place. Given her tone, that wasn’t a compliment to the restaurant.
Kids weren’t in the cards for her, as she had made clear. What had been nice to hear a few days ago was now a point of concern. Should he tell her what was going on?
Absolutely not.
The girl was a flight risk. She even had her own escape door.
And besides, Trina could be back tomorrow. Heaven knew he’d keep calling her until she was.
So, the hazards of his current situation were most definitely not on the tip of his tongue as he watched Cassie let her hair down from her ponytail and reshape it again. She smoothed tendrils back as she started throwing out suggested dishes from the restaurant, her perfectly clear, carefree eyes dancing through the conversation. A night with Cassie Everson was even better than he could have imagined. Sensible, capably independent, yet with a streak of delicateness, he wanted to swoop her off her feet then and there without the poor excuse of going for the ball. The way she paused as she teased him, gauging with a sensitivity if he was still laughing too. The way she tried hard to show she didn’t care, and yet even in the old lighting he could see a bit of golden bronze highlighting her already naturally tan cheeks. She smelled of clean cotton fresh from the dryer, of marine mist drifting across a dawning beach.
Which couldn’t be said for him. He’d had better days.
And yet here she was, looking just as happy as he was to be here.
He took a step toward her. “You know, you are standing on the exact spot I stood at the end of regional championships my junior year.”
She stopped, looked down at her sneakers touching the three-point arch. “Is that so?”
“Yes. Thanks to the square foot of maple wood you’re standing on, there’s a trophy in the main hall.” He stepped a little closer. “Does the air feel cleaner where you are? Can you smell pure triumph?”
The Dating Charade Page 10