“Uh, two actually. My dad was blessed with all girls.”
He huffed out a laugh. “Well, my parents were blessed with all sons. I’m not sure which is worse.”
“I don’t know. Can you imagine three teenagers in the house all at once?”
“Yes, but not girls. That…doesn’t sound like fun at all.”
“Well, apparently it wasn’t fun for my dad. He walked out when I was sixteen.”
“I’m sorry. Do you still talk to him?”
“Yeah.” I shook my head at myself. I was being a little dramatic. “It wasn’t the worst thing in the world that could have happened. I mean, my parents did the silent fighting thing. You know how you know that they’re pissed at each other, but they won’t argue in front of the kids?” He nodded. “It was usually about money. I’m not even sure what happened. They just told us one day they were getting a divorce. Of course, because my dad was the one that moved out, I was pissed at him. It wasn’t until years later that I finally understood that sometimes things just don’t work out. My dad’s a good man, but I came to realize that they probably never should have gotten married.”
He stared down at the table for a moment, like he was thinking about something important. Then his eyes shifted to mine.
“I know your feelings about getting married, and now that I know about your parents I won’t push the issue. But I also want you to know that I want to be an every day part of my child’s life. I don’t want to be one of those part-time parents that only sees his kids on his days. I want to be there for everything. I don’t want either of us to miss out on any of those firsts. I just…when I pictured having kids, I had this whole family and we were together, always supporting each other, and it was happy. I still want that, Katherine. I know I’m probably not your type. I know I can be an asshole and I’m not as loose as some other guys, but there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for my family. So, I’m asking that you give me a chance…give us a chance to see what could happen between us.”
I was a little shocked by his speech. I hadn’t been expecting that, not after how hard it was for us just the past few times we met. But the way he was looking at me, begging me to give him a shot, how could I tell him no?
“Okay.”
“Is this weird?” I asked Chrissy. “This is weird, isn’t it?”
“Which part? Where you start dating your baby daddy to see if you can have a relationship after you both basically tore each other down? Or maybe you mean the part where you’re talking about going out on a date with him, but you haven’t once mentioned if you were attracted to the guy?”
“Both.”
“Then you’re right. This is weird. I don’t understand why you’re doing this. I thought you didn’t like him.”
“I know,” I sighed, plopping my head down on my dresser. She had come over to help me get dressed for my date. “I went over there just to try and bury the hatchet. He showed up here the other night to talk and I was a bitch to him. So, I went over there, thinking that we would just find some kind of common ground. But then he told me that he wanted to be there full time for his kid, and that if we could make this work, he really wanted to try.”
“Aww,” she sighed holding her hand over her heart. “That’s so sweet.”
“I know! How was I supposed to say no to that?”
“I mean, it probably won’t work, but I think it’s sweet that he wants to try.”
I plopped down on the bed beside her with a sigh. “I just have to make it through tonight. I’m sure that after one night on a real date, he’ll see that we’re just not compatible.”
“That’s giving it the good old college try,” she said, slapping me on the back.
“What? It’s so obvious that we would never work together. We’re just too different. Even his brothers were shocked when they found out he had slept with me.”
“Have you told your parents yet?”
I ran my hand over my stomach and grimaced. “I wasn’t really looking forward to the conversation. I mean, my dad’s gonna flip out and my mom’s gonna purse her lips in disappointment at me.”
“So, you were planning on telling them when?”
I shrugged. “When they meet the baby?”
She rolled her eyes at me. “Brilliant plan.”
The doorbell rang and I glanced at the clock. “Shit. That’s him.”
“But you still have ten minutes,” she shrieked.
“Not with him. He’s super responsible, and apparently, very punctual.”
“Doesn’t he know that women are never ready on time? He can’t just show up unannounced like this!”
“It’s not unannounced,” I reminded her as I pulled my dress over my head. “We had plans.”
“But not for ten minutes,” she reiterated. “In the female world, that’s unannounced.”
I shook my head and pulled on my shoes, trying to hurry up. I hadn’t even done my makeup yet. “Can you get the door for me?”
Her eyes bugged out. “You want me to answer it?”
“I’m still getting ready!”
“But then I have to sit there and have the uncomfortable conversation with him until you’re ready. You’re asking me to give up like twenty minutes of my day for him.”
“Chrissy, please,” I begged as I ran into my bathroom and started rushing through my makeup. I heard her sigh and then stomp off downstairs to the living room. I heard him walk in, but then it was just silent. Like, dead silent. I strained my ears to hear anything, but there was nothing. I finished putting on my mascara and took a final look in the mirror. That was as good as it was going to get.
I turned to run out of the bathroom and ran right into Chrissy. She yanked me back into the bathroom and slammed the door.
“You didn’t tell me he was hot,” she hissed.
“What?”
“The man, standing in your living room at this very moment, the one that says he’s your baby daddy-“
“He said that?”
“No, but that’s besides the point. He’s in there right now and he’s so fucking gorgeous. How the hell could you leave out crucial information like that?”
“Uh….I guess I didn’t notice.”
“You didn’t notice that the future father of your child is so smoking hot that he could light this whole place on fire? You didn’t notice that his eyes are so piercing and gorgeous that I could melt just looking at them? I was captivated! Do you know how stupid that sounds? Me, a happily married woman, was captivated by a man the moment I opened the door. And you didn’t notice?” she shrieked.
“I mean…I think he’s good looking, but-“
“No, there are no buts. That man out there is something that every woman wishes she could wake up to every morning, and you’re too blind to see it. Who cares if he’s not as loose as you’d like! You can be the fun one and he can make up for it in looks!”
“So, you want me to be with him for his body?”
“Uh…am I having this conversation alone? Hello! Hot man alert in your living room. Yes, you should go along with this whole thing, and if he even mentions sleeping with you, you take him up on it because your vagina isn’t getting any action for at least the next year.”
“See, I thought you would be the rational one about all this. What happened to the woman that sat here just ten minutes ago and told me she thought it was ridiculous for me to go out with him?”
“I hadn’t seen him then!”
I shushed her, sure that he could hear everything she was saying because she was being so loud. “Would you quiet down? I’m not sleeping with him again just because he’s hot.” When she opened her mouth, I added, “Or because I won’t get laid for a year.”
She closed her mouth and pouted. “You know, ever since you got pregnant, you really aren’t any fun.”
Eric
I knew I was early. Hell, it had taken me fifteen minutes to pick out what I was going to wear. I felt like a damn chick, standing in front of the mirr
or and trying to decide what tie to wear. Finally, I decided on a gray tie. I wasn’t sure if she liked a man in a suit, but this was what I wore on dates. I wanted to make a good impression for my date and let her know that I cared. If I showed up in jeans and a shirt, that sent the wrong message.
Originally, I was going to shave before I picked her up, but then I saw that I only had five minutes left before I had to leave. Technically, I had longer than that, but I had to plan for anything that could go wrong. A flat tire would make me late. I could run into traffic, though that was highly unlikely in our small town. Either way, I was not going to be late. I told her I was committed and wanted to be the best father. How would it look if I showed up late for our first date?
So, here I sat, waiting in her living room as her friend argued with her in the bathroom upstairs. I could barely make out what they were saying, but I smirked when I heard ‘hot man alert’. I glanced around the room and noticed that all the pictures she had up were of her with her friends out having fun. One was at a bar, some kind of party. She was dancing with her head thrown back and a carefree look on her face. In another, she was getting ready to go bungee jumping. Didn’t she know how dangerous that was? In another, she looked like she was about to go drag racing.
I shook my head as I continued around the room, looking at all the pictures. The woman was clearly insane, and I was trying to convince her that we should be together. How the hell was I going to do that? I would never do any of the shit she was doing in those pictures. Even when I got into trouble as a kid, it was well thought out trouble. If there was the slightest hint of something really bad happening, I was out. And as I got older, and the consequences of my actions became more clear, I became more rigid. I couldn’t help it. It was like something flipped inside me and told me to always do the right thing.
Now I worried that I was never going to be able to make this work with this woman. She was sexy and fun, and I was…a wet blanket, just like my brothers always said. I heard her heels on the stairs, and then she appeared. My mouth dropped open. Holy shit. She was wearing a black dress that wrapped around the front her body, accentuating her tiny waist. The v at her breasts showed just enough cleavage to tempt me, but not enough to be slutty. And those damn heels, I swallowed hard as I watched those sexy legs make their way toward me. How had I not seen this before? Had I been blind? She was a knockout.
I felt like I swallowed my tongue as I stared at her. Clearing my throat, I stepped forward and held out my hand to her like an idiot, like I hadn’t met her before. She glanced down and then her eyes flicked to mine in amusement. I dropped my hand and chuckled nervously. God, I had never been so nervous on a date in my whole fucking life. And I wasn’t sure if it was because she was the mother of my child or because she was really that hot.
“You look…amazing. Beautiful.”
“Thank you,” she said, her face blushing slightly. I didn’t miss how her eyes trailed over my body and lingered on my chest and arms. Good, that was a good sign. She was checking me out too. I just had to hope that she liked what she saw as much as I liked what I was seeing.
Her friend leaned over and whispered, “See? I told you, so fucking hot.”
She slapped her friend and I pretended like I hadn’t heard.
“Should we go?”
“Yeah.”
Her friend walked out ahead of us, whispering something about seeing at the end of the night. I led her over to my truck and helped her in. I shook off my nerves and got into the driver’s side.
“So, I thought we’d try that restaurant over in Cedar Lake. I made us reservations for six.”
“The seafood place?”
“Yeah, but I know you can’t have seafood. They have other things there.”
“How did you know?”
I looked at her funny. “How did I know what?”
“That I can’t have seafood.”
“I read it.”
She stared at me curiously for a moment. “Okay, well, that sounds good.”
I started the truck and pulled away from her house. The silence was uncomfortable. I glanced at the clock, noting we still had twenty minutes before we got there. That was the bad thing about living in this area. There was at least a ten minute drive between towns, and further if you wanted to go to one of the bigger towns where you could go to nice restaurants or the local Walmart. We had a really nice restaurant in town, but I wanted to keep things private until we saw where this went. I tapped my thumb on the steering wheel, trying to come up with something to say, but I had no clue. What was I supposed to say?
“So, have you been feeling okay?”
“Yeah, pretty good.”
“No morning sickness?”
“Not yet, but I hear that can come and go.”
I nodded, thinking about some of the other things I had read. “No constipation?”
I heard it come out of my mouth. I knew I had said it and how fucking stupid it was to ask it, but it was too late. It was out there now, just hanging between us like a smelly fart.
“You know, I’m all about getting to know each other, but I don’t think we need to know each other that well.”
I cleared my throat again, feeling like an idiot. “Right, sorry about that.”
Silence stretched thick between us. I felt like I was suffocating over here. This was torture. What would I say to any other woman on a date? It was like all the sudden, I didn’t know how to talk to a woman. Her job. I could talk to her about that.
“So, you’re a nurse, right?”
“Yeah.”
“ER?”
“No, I work with kids.”
“Oh, that must be fun.”
“I work in the cancer ward.”
Fuck, was there anything I could get right tonight? Seriously, this was going to be the longest night ever.
“That must really suck,” I went for.
“It does. I mean, it can be really great sometimes, but then there are other times that it’s really hard. Like, right now, I have this patient that’s seven and she’s been battling cancer for two years. She hadn’t been at the hospital in a while, so I thought she was doing better, but then she showed up two weeks ago. Her cancer is getting worse, and it’s really hard on the parents because they live so far away from the hospital.”
“How do you deal with that?”
She shrugged. “Every time I think about how hard it is to see it, I imagine what they’re going through. It kind of keeps things in perspective.”
“Huh.”
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“I was just thinking, it makes sense.”
“What does?”
“You know, that night in the bar. You were letting off steam. I mean, after what you see all day, you probably need to let loose.”
“So…I couldn’t have been letting loose because I liked to, but because I have a job that’s stressful?”
I did a double take, sure that I had mistaken the bite in her tone. She had an eyebrow quirked at me and her arms were crossed over her chest. Damn, I really thought I got that one right.
“That wasn’t really…I wasn’t implying that…” I sighed and settled further into my seat. “You know, I’m just going to shut up for the rest of the drive.”
Katherine
Okay, I may have been a little hard on him in the truck. He was trying to understand me, but it felt more like he was trying to find an excuse for my behavior so he could say that I fit his normal. And even if I was trying to let loose because of my job, I didn’t want him thinking that he needed to find a reason I was the way I was. Either he accepted me or he didn’t.
So, here we sat at the table, him with his perfect posture and me slumped over slightly in the chair. It seemed to reflect who we really were. He was rigid and unmoving and I was more malleable. Although, I had to admit, Chrissy was right. How had I missed how hot he was? Was it just tonight or had he always looked like this? When I saw him standing in my living ro
om in his suit, the first thing I thought was how sexy he looked in a suit. He still had a five o’clock shadow, but it looked good on him. And then I noticed how the jacket was straining across his biceps. I had never met anyone that had biceps that big. It made me wonder what the rest of his body looked like. I should have remembered from our night together, but unfortunately, it seemed like all the good stuff had slipped my mind.
Then we got in the truck and it was the usual uncomfortable presence that filled the air. Nothing clicked between us, and I started to regret coming out on this date with him. I had been hoping that something would come from tonight, but as of right now, it was looking like it would go down as the worst date I had ever been on, aside from the first one we went on where he got me pregnant. At least there was sex at the end of that date.
I watched as he cut up his steak. It looked so bland compared to my mushroom risotto. “Would you like a taste?” I offered.
He grimaced. “I hate mushrooms. It’s fungus.”
I huffed in irritation. “It’s delicious in this. Just try it.” I scooped up some and held it out for him. He pulled back, shaking his head.
“No, not a chance in hell.”
“Seriously, you won’t even try it?”
“No.”
“God, why do you have to be so rigid all the time? You know, try something new. Experience life.”
“Just because I don’t want to eat mushrooms doesn’t mean that I’m rigid and don’t enjoy life,” he shot back.
“Really? You’re sitting there in a suit for our date. A freaking suit, and while it looks good on you, who wears a suit anymore?”
“You’re wearing a dress. I don’t see what the difference is.”
“You’re just so stiff. I mean, you’re a good looking guy, but you dress like you’re going out for a business dinner instead of a good night out.”
“Wait, so I can’t have fun because I’m in a suit?”
“Tell me, when was the last time that you actually went and had fun?”
Maintenance Required: A small town romance (The Cortell Brothers Book 1) Page 11