by Zoe York
The young Miss Kingsley was colouring right now, but she kept fidgeting. Each time she got restless, Natasha would pull out something to redirect her attention. A little plastic pony, a sheet of stickers. Sometimes she just flipped the page of the colouring book to give Emily something new to focus on.
He couldn’t blame the three-year-old for being bored. This class had nothing on cupcake decorating.
If Natasha wanted to concentrate on the lesson, though, he could at least help keep Emily occupied. He hunkered down, bringing his head to her level. “Can I colour with you?”
She gave him a blue crayon. “Here. You can do the sky.”
He did, and then he was tasked with filling in a tree while Emily did the rainbow in alternating pink and purple stripes.
“I told Mommy you would be here,” she whispered.
Ah, shit. He could imagine how that would have gone with Natasha. “I can’t always come to cooking class. But I liked last week.”
“Me too.” She pursed her tiny mouth and scribbled harder.
He switched out green for brown and coloured the trunk of the tree.
Emily didn’t say anything else, and he wondered why she was so different today than last week. But she kept giving him colours to use, and smiling when he did her colouring-related bidding, so he didn’t worry too much about it.
Maybe she was trying to be good for her mom, who was taking the most diligent notes.
Matt was quite glad he’d decided to bring his own pad of paper. They could bond over food prep. It might be the start of a beautiful friendship.
After the lesson wrapped up, the hands-on task was a salad-assembly race. There were only eight trays assembled, so people needed to group up. Natasha gave Emily a nervous look, and Matt cleared his throat. “Uh, how about I hang out with Emily, and we colour, while you join a group? We’re good here, I swear.”
She looked at the red flower he’d just finished colouring in. “Yeah?”
“Promise. Go slay a head of lettuce.”
Emily turned the page and handed him the green crayon again. “Now this other tree.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
He got back to work as the class grouped up. Natasha wasn’t that far from them, and he could hear her taking the lead with their plan as the small Asian woman in charge gave them a two-minute warning.
Once the whistle went, she leapt into action, taking on the chopping, while the older women on her team made the dressing and ripped lettuce. By the sounds of it, there were three necessary steps, and Natasha was keeping track of all of it, even as she focused on her own task.
And she made time for good-natured smack talk to the other teams, too. He grinned as she raised her voice to comment innocently on the size of the onion slices at the next table. She was fierce, although her competitiveness had a distinctly kind edge to it.
The other table grabbed another onion and this time their slices were more consistent.
He caught her gaze with his knowing one. I see you.
She pinked up as she undoubtedly realized that he knew she’d just helped them a little, although now they were behind. So she’d helped her team, too.
Afternoon cooking classes were more cutthroat and entertaining than he’d ever have thought.
“Is Mommy winning?” Emily asked.
“It looks like she is,” he said, finishing his treetop with a careful line around the curved edge.
“Mommy likes cooking.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s your favourite thing she makes?”
“Pasghetti.”
“Nice.”
“Do you like pasghetti?”
“I do. With extra sauce.”
The three-year-old gave him a sideways look and echoed him. “Nice.”
He laughed out loud.
Of course Natasha’s team finished first, everything tidied up and the salad up to the exacting standards of the chef. For their efforts, they got praise and first dibs on the fortune cookies. Natasha grabbed three and brought them back to the table.
“Thank you,” she murmured as she sat down and handed him a cookie, then gave one to Emily. “Did you have fun colouring with Matt?”
“Yep.”
“Good.”
Emily turned to him. “Can you come to the park with us?”
“Uh…” He looked up at Natasha’s face, but her expression was carefully neutral. “You’ll have to ask your mom if it’s okay first. I can’t stay long today, though. I worked last night, so I need to get back home and grab some more sleep soon, because I’m working again tomorrow morning.”
“On the ambulance?”
“That’s right.”
“Okay.”
Natasha laughed. “Life is simple when you’re three. Okay is her new answer for everything.”
“I like it.”
She nodded. “Yeah, me too. It’s like, a reminder that some things just…are. Anyway, we don’t want to keep you.”
“Mommy, can Matt come to the park?”
Natasha laughed. “Okay, one of us wants to keep you a bit longer. Do you…?”
“Going from a night shift to a day shift is weird, but I’ve got twenty-four hours to re-arrange myself. Gotta stay busy for the afternoon anyway.” Which wasn’t exactly honest, but he’d driven an hour to come and see her. See both of them. He wanted to squeeze as much as he could out of this time, because he wasn’t sure if he’d get another chance. “If you don’t mind me inviting myself along.”
She shrugged, then grinned, a wide, unexpected smile he felt in his chest. “Sure. Why don’t you follow us over there.”
They made their goodbyes and he did just that, driving the short distance to the park behind the school. Today they had it all to themselves, and Emily sprinted ahead of them toward the climbers, scampering up the stairs and zooming down the slide before they stopped at the edge of the wood chip ground covering.
“I was surprised to see you today,” she finally said.
“Is it okay that I showed up?”
“Better to beg for forgiveness than ask permission?”
“Story of my life.”
She laughed. “Really? That’s honest.”
He grinned and tried to remember he’d had a noble purpose today. Okay, a noble-ish purpose. Come to the cooking class and give her a chance to feel comfortable around him in public again. Just as a friend, no pressure.
“Of course it’s okay you came,” she said before he could respond. “Although I’m surprised Mrs. Chan didn’t take you down for being late.”
“That would have been awkward. But worth it.”
Before she could reply to that, Emily ran over and tugged on his hand. “Can you lift me up?” She pointed to the monkey bars.
He looked at Natasha, who waved her hand.
“Sure.”
The three-year-old was light as a feather as he hoisted her into the air, arms wiggling to grab the metal bars. But even when she had a good hold, he wasn’t sure if he should let go. Loosening his grip, he waited to see if she had it, and he’d been right to be cautious. She let out a nervous yip, and he squeezed her sides again. “I’ve got you,” he said. “Get your legs up.”
She shifted back and forth until her legs were securely hooked over another bar, but then she couldn’t move on her own.
“It’s hard to figure out,” he told her. “Want to go up on top?”
“Yes!”
So they did that next, then they tried hanging again. Finally she figured out how to pull herself up between the bars, and slowly started to move back and forth on top.
The whole time, Natasha silently watched, her gaze locked on her daughter.
He leaned against the climber, keeping one eye on Emily as she scampered along the monkey bars, but also turned part of his attention back to her beautiful mother. “So, what’s next week’s class?”
Natasha burst out laughing. “Don’t you know? How did you find it this
week?”
Ah. He scuffed his heel against the wood chips under the climber. “I called the conference centre and had a clerk go and find the flyer for me on the bulletin board. I thought I’d be pushing my luck to ask for all the dates over the phone. I can stop there on my way out of town and take a picture.”
She held his gaze for a long, poignant beat, then pulled out her phone, waving her hand at Emily at the same time. “Watch her.”
With a deep inhale, she flicked her thumb across the screen, and a moment later his phone vibrated. He reached for Emily. “Come on down from there, Miss Monkey. I have an important text I need to check.”
She sprinted off to the slide again, and he looked at his screen.
A text message with a link.
“The schedule is online, too,” Natasha said, and he looked up in time to see her smiling at him. Laughing with him.
He gave her all of his attention now. “I’ll ask in advance this time. How would you feel if I showed up next week?”
“Mmm. My answer’s kind of complicated.” Her eyes softened and she gave him a smaller smile. “How’s that?”
“Sounds honest.”
“It is.”
“Good.”
Emily called his name and he turned to watch her go down the slide with a big squeal.
Natasha drifted closer. He glanced at her next, and found he couldn’t look away.
“You’re staring at me,” she finally said, her voice a low murmur.
But he could hear it because she was right next to him, and damn, he liked that a lot.
“Do you want me to stop?”
Another deep inhale. “No,” she finally said. “But I don’t know what you’re hoping to find.”
You, he wanted to say. He brushed his knuckles against the back of her hand instead.
She exhaled and swung her hand, touching him back. Each brush of her skin against his made it hard for him to think straight.
“I told myself I could come today if I were focused on just being your friend,” he said under his breath.
She smiled as she looked straight ahead. “Really?”
“Yep.”
She bumped her shoulder against his and grinned. “Come on. You aren’t usually this sweet, are you?”
“No.” He took a deep breath and winced. “Wait, I shouldn’t have said that.”
She laughed. “Yeah, you should have. It’s good. Honesty is good. We’ve got a healthy communication theme going on, it’s refreshing.”
Well, if they were being honest…
He gestured at Emily zooming down the slide for the dozenth time. “I’ve never dated a single mom before.”
“We’re not dating.”
“Fair point. But last week, I was…” He laughed. This was such a mistake. “You know what I was looking for? A hook-up. I thought, cupcakes in the middle of the day. Gotta be a single woman there.”
She stared at him, her eyes wide and her lips parted.
He kept going. “I haven’t had a great social life lately, to be honest, which is not something I’d tell you if I was trying to hook up with you. It’s actually not something I’ve told anyone else. I know that’s a weird thing to admit to a woman I’m trying to impress, but I want you to know that I may not have been looking for friendship, but as soon as I saw you, I wanted to know you. And anything else on my agenda immediately disappeared.”
“Just like that?”
“Yeah.” He let out a short laugh. “Surprised the hell out of me, I gotta say.”
“What about when I told you…I know Jake?”
He shrugged. “That didn’t change how I feel. It really couldn’t, because you’re not the only one with a history. I don’t care about yours, and I hope you could look past mine. I’ve made a lot of choices in the past you might not like, but they’re done now. That might not be the right thing to say, but—”
She reached out and took his hand, her fingers cool and small against his. “I don’t care about the right thing to say, Matt. I’ve dated players. I've had men say all the right things to me, and mean none of them. I'm not interested in that ever again.”
He squeezed her hand and then let it go. Too soon to linger, no matter how good it felt. “Then I'll do my best to blunder my way through this.”
“This,” she whispered with a small laugh. “What exactly is this?”
He couldn’t say dating. She’d already shot that down. Wooing her, seducing her…none of that worked, either. “Truly no clue,” he admitted. “But I like it, whatever this is.”
That got him another smile. “Me too.”
He wanted to put an endless stream of those on her face. “So I’ll see you next week?”
“That sounds really good.”
“What if I showed up at the bar one night? I’m not working this weekend.” He knew he was pushing his luck, but he couldn’t help it.
She screwed up her face, then dragged in a tortured breath. “I thought I’d never want to see a Foster ever again.”
“Damn.” But he couldn’t help grinning. “And yet…?”
“And yet…” Did she know how beautiful she was when her feelings skittered across her face like that? “Yeah. Sure, if you want to come by the bar this weekend, I wouldn’t mind that. As a friend, right?”
“As a friend.”
“I’ll be working,” she warned him.
“I’ll be good. A paying customer.”
“Okay.”
It’s a date, he wanted to say, but he’d pushed his luck far enough for one day.
Chapter Eight
That night, Natasha lingered in Emily’s room after her daughter fell asleep. It had been a big day, a long day, and they’d butted heads over dinner.
Sometimes it was exhausting being the only parent, the only one to put her foot down. Meredith would back her up of course, but it wasn’t the same. So after two stories, she’d curled up and just held her daughter as she softly drifted into slumber, grateful for the gentle reconnection and a restoration of peace.
When she finally disentangled herself and headed upstairs, she found Meredith sitting at the kitchen table.
Waiting.
Her phone was in her hands.
Dan had flown to Ottawa that morning for an in-person interview.
Everything was happening so quickly, so naturally, it seemed like an inevitable turn of events she should have predicted long ago. Of course they couldn’t stay like this forever, a safe little refuge of communal living.
And yet…
Natasha took a deep breath. “Did you talk to Dan?”
Her sister nodded. “They offered him the job.”
Oh. “Wow.”
“Yeah.” Meredith’s face crumbled, and as one, they burst into tears.
Meredith stood up and Natasha leaned into her. “It’s going to be okay,” she said. “This is great news.”
“I know. Why am I crying?”
“Because we’ll miss each other, you dork.”
“Right.” Meredith squeezed her tight. “We’re not going to move until Christmas, so I don’t want to you to freak out. He’s going to work remotely until we find a house there. And this doesn’t mean we’re necessarily selling this place. You guys can stay here if you want,” she said, her voice hitching. “We could rent it to you…”
Natasha shook her head. No, she didn’t want to get into a complicated rental relationship. And Ottawa houses were expensive enough that she knew they would need the equity from this place if they wanted to buy there. “It’ll work out.” She hugged her sister back. “Emily and I will be fine.”
Hopefully.
God, her stomach twisted at the thought of house-hunting. She’d have to do that, too. She’d have to make a lot of changes—both her and her sister were losing their childcare arrangements. “We’ll be fine,” she repeated, this time making her voice firmer. They would be. She’d spent more than three years building a nest egg for just this kind of thing.
David will want you to move to the city.
Not happening. She couldn’t afford a house anywhere near the city. But up here, there was a chance she might find something.
A place for her and Emily to make a home of their own.
The training wheels period of being a single mom was over. No more protective sister, no more rent-free basement.
It was time for her to show Emily they were going to be just fine. Better than fine. They were going to be amazing. Just the two of them.
Matt woke up before his alarm early Tuesday morning. He crawled out of bed and tripped over his running shoes.
Glancing at the clock, he decided he had time for a quick run. Fast, hard, punishing.
After he showered the sweat off, he grabbed his duffel bag and headed to his truck. It was a short drive to the new station, and he was grateful to be posted there. It beat the hell out of driving up or down the peninsula like he used to, like he still did for the army.
Like he’d happily do to go and see Natasha, he realized.
But that was different.
He rolled into work with at least three minutes to spare before the start of his shift.
Maybe even four minutes.
“I’m here,” he said as Owen mock-glowered at him from the door of the supervisor’s office.
“Cutting it close.”
He grinned at his boss. Owen knew Matt always made it in, if sometimes by the skin of his teeth. And usually more than that. If he spent the night with a woman, he’d roll in early, because work was a good excuse not to spend the whole night. Always best not to linger.
Owen turned and nodded toward the break room. “You’ve got a ride along today.”
Shit. “O-kay.” Owen’s brows hit the roof and Matt heard the insolence in his voice a second too late. “Got it. We’ll make it a good one.”
“See that you do.”
He found the student, a bright young woman he’d met a few times before named Shawntelle, and had her come with him to do the prep work, checking over the rig.
It ended up being a good shift to take a student on, too. Two calls, the first an in-home assessment with lots of communication modelling, and the second a complicated leg fracture from a motorcycle crash with an equally complicated patient move from the accident site—a steep ditch—to the ambulance. They’d had to form a human chain to pass the patient on the backboard up the ravine, which was a first for the student. After they got the patient to the hospital, there was a lot for her to process as they prepped to go back on-air.