“Holly?” I hear Grace call out and there is nothing to do but plaster a smile on and step out of the way of the water rolling back in.
“Hi, Grace.”
“I thought I recognized that hair.”
Welp, it wasn’t space, but my hair had still managed to shine like a beacon across the beach.
“Oh, yeah.” I lift the hat still in my hand and plop it on top of my head. I’d left my sunglasses back home, so Grace notices when my eyes drift to her companion.
“Oh! This is my husband, Ben,” she gestures to the handsome fella who releases Grace’s hand to shake one of mine.
“Nice to finally meet you, Holly.”
I really hated it when people said stuff like that. It only leads one to believe that there have been multiple conversations regarding your very person and, while I generally didn’t much care what others thought of me, I disliked knowing that they had, and the curiosity they inspired in me about what had been discussed.
“We live right up there,” Grace says, pointing back the way they came. “We’ve barely lived there, what, a month now?” She glances up to her husband for confirmation, which he gives.
“Wait, do you live in that house that was just built?” I ask, having watched the progress on the beautiful new home over the last few months.
“Yes,” Grace seems pleased that I know the place. “Ben built it, in fact.”
“It’s lovely,” I tell them, envying the little smile Ben aims at her profile. “I didn’t know.”
“This is my favorite place in the world,” she goes on, talking about Mermaid’s Cove. “And now I can jog right outside my gate to go surfing every morning. I mean, it never actually works out to be every morning, but, still.”
“I didn’t know you surfed,” I admit further.
“Yup, all my life.”
I wondered if Dean also surfed. I mean, duh, their family owned a surf shop. Sometimes a thought can just smack you right in the face, you know? And the thought that just smacked me was that I have made absolutely no effort to get to know these people. I’d never felt more self-absorbed in my entire life. Lost in my own thoughts, I miss a question from Grace.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Oh, I just wondered if you had plans for Thanksgiving.”
Uh-oh. This is exactly what I’d been working to avoid.
“Oh, um, well, I, yeah, I have plans,” I stutter out, biting down on my lips to stop the madness.
“Oh.” I can’t tell if she believes me or not. “Good, that’s good. Because if you didn’t, or if your plans change, we’d love to have you join all of us at my mom and dad’s house.”
“That’s so nice, thank you, yeah…if, um, my plans change, I’ll call you.”
I do this thing when I’m lying (which I try really hard to never, ever do because, remember, sweating) where my hands move with my words, almost like I’m conducting my lie; it’s totally unconscious and if I could stop it I would (both the hand thing and the lying).
“Okay, good.” She takes that first step away from me and stops. “It’s good to see you, Holly.”
I smile, feeling just awful. “You too, Grace. And Ben, it was nice to meet you.”
He dips his chin and smiles back at me. Yup, he totally knows I’m lying. Great.
I stay just a few seconds and watch them walk away, hand in hand, before cutting my walk short and heading back to my house, where I keep the door to the second bedroom closed.
My grandma was a great cook and every Thanksgiving she’d make a big meal for just the two of us. I was not a great cook; I was not even a decent cook. So there was no turkey, no mashed potatoes and corn, just me, chips, and dip. I was laid out on my couch in my comfiest pajama pants and my worn-to-perfection “Librarians Do It Quietly” t-shirt, a bag of gummy bears next to me for later, and the Pride and Prejudice movie was playing on the TV (the BBC version, obviously). In other words, I was in full vacation mode and it was glorious. So, naturally, when the phone rings, I don’t budge to get it; that’s what answering machines are for.
But then. That voice. I’d heard that voice say very dirty things to me in the dark. And now it was interrupting my glorious vacation laziness. Although, I gotta say the way his voice sounds through the old answering machine is deliciously reminiscent of how it sounded when he was-whoa. Hello, second trimester hormones, yeesh.
“…I just thought you should know and, uh, I’ll be in touch when I’m settled. Okay. Bye, Holly.”
Darn, I’d missed the whole message while adrift in my lust fog.
And now I have to get up.
His words sink in by the time I reach the machine. Wait, settled in? Curiosity piqued, I press play.
“Hi, Holly, this is Dean. I’ll be back in the country in the next week or so, I’m headed to North Carolina for debriefing then I’ll be in California…but I just thought you should know and, uh, I’ll be in touch when I’m settled. Okay. Bye, Holly.”
I maybe played the message four or five times (okay, seven) because it took me a few listens to really comprehend that Dean is coming home (!) and then a few more because, and I will never admit this out loud, I like the sound of his deep, scratchy voice. I didn’t like that I liked it, that, despite my better judgment, it comforted some part of me…but I did.
“That’s your daddy, little corn cob,” I whisper, my head aimed down at my stomach. I wasn’t sure why I clung to the baby-food comparison, but until I knew the sex, it was the best I had to work with. I wasn’t going to call him or her an it.
Testing that word, daddy, out loud took my situation to a whole new level, kind of like the experience with the ultrasound. With Dean far away, he was an abstract player; but him being in the country, even on the opposite side, brought the possibility of actually seeing him and communicating face to face into reality. I touched a hand to my hair and glanced down at what I was wearing, feeling the sudden need to take stock of myself. Okay, I told myself, it’s not like he’s going to come knocking on your door tonight, so instead of letting the crazy-thought-spiral-train take me away, I opted to go back to my couch, back to my chips and dip, and back to Mr. Darcy, and to save the whole navigating-a-relationship-with-my-baby’s-father thing for another time. There was no sense in worrying now about something that hadn’t even happened yet…right?
The next day was all about getting work done on my side job. I had this little editing gig that I did in addition to being a librarian; it started out as a favor to a former coworker who’d written a book and he liked the job I did so well that he recommended me to someone else who then did the same, and so on. Now I had a decent sized number of regular authors who I worked with, a cute website, and honestly, more editing requests than I could complete if I wanted to have any life outside the home at all. Mostly, it was great-I got to read a lot of books and correct people’s grammar and spelling, all while earning a second income. However, sometimes it wasn’t great, because sometimes the books were hot, steaming piles of poo. My work day had started around 9:00 this morning, it was now creeping up on 4:00 in the afternoon, and I realized I’d worked through lunch and was starving and if I didn’t get food in my belly in the next three minutes, there was a good chance I’d start snacking on my own arm.
The book I was editing today was good, it wasn’t a romance (so not what I needed right now), it was a thriller and both its storyline and infrequent grammatical errors had kept me engrossed. Even so, I save my work-after the whole crib fiasco, I’d opted to work from the couch in my living room-grab a granola bar from the kitchen, my hat and sunglasses from off the kitchen table, and my bike from off the front porch and begin my journey into downtown. I have the cutest baby blue beach cruiser with a luggage rack over the back tire and a brown wicker basket on the front, and my town is small enough that I could ride it most places. I head down Cherry, hang a left on Mussel, and five minutes later, boom, I am downtown. I park my bike out front of my favorite sandwich place, The Yellow Subs-Marine, and head
in, lured by the smell of freshly baked bread. Oh, how I wanted to eat all the bread.
“Hey, Lil’ Red.” I turn, my eyes about to roll, because ‘Lil’ Red’? Really? But it’s Grace and Dean’s Uncle Red and, somehow, coming from him, the nickname feels affectionate instead of trite.
“Hey, Big Red,” I greet back, really, truly feeling glad to see him-I just desperately needed to order a sandwich, so I turn away to quickly put in my order.
“Put it on my tab, Mona,” Red tells the woman who’d taken my order.
“Oh, no, that’s not necessary.” I had the cash out and everything already.
“Sure, it is.”
The desire to pay for my own sandwich warred with the need to be polite and appreciative when someone did something nice. Guess which side won.
“Thank you, Red, that’s very nice of you.” I put my money back in my wallet, after first tipping Mona generously. “I ordered a big sandwich because, well,” I gesture towards my curved stomach, “I’m starving.”
I don’t know why I felt the need to clarify my sandwich order, but I did it. I had, in fact, also been eyeballing the big, just-out-of-the-oven cookies.
“Honey, I always order the big one and I got no excuse.” I turn away from the cookies and back to Red.
“Well, the sandwiches here are the best.”
“That, they are. Got a minute to join me?” He asks, gesturing out the back door to the tables set up on the small courtyard patio.
“Um, sure.” I mean, technically, yes, I had lots of minutes today.
He waves me forward, so my back is to him when he called out, “Hey, Mona, add a couple of those cookies, would ya?”
This makes me smile all to myself. Observant guy, Red was.
I pick a table with an umbrella and sit down, Red following in the only other chair at the table.
“So, I thought you might show up to the table yesterday,” he starts, referring, apparently, to the Thanksgiving dinner at the Slade family home.
“Oh, well, I-I had plans.” I did have plans, technically, and he didn’t need to know specifics.
But if Red is as observant about my fib now as he was about the cookies, he already knows.
Our sandwiches are delivered before I can form any more excuses and, since I immediately go to town on that turkey-avocado on white bread, there is a pause in conversation that lasts a good several minutes.
“Oh my god, I was really so, so hungry,” I say, half my sandwich gone. “Thank you, again.”
“Hey Lil’ Red, you live alone?”
“Yes.”
“You got any family in town?”
“Um, no,” I answer hesitantly, not sure where this line of questioning is headed.
“Friends?”
“Of course I have friends,” I scoff. Because, there’s Maya.
“Good, that’s good. I’d hate to think you were all alone in this,” he nods his head at my belly.
“Oh.” Being that I hated lies and I’d already fibbed a little today, I opt to keep my answers vague. “No, I’m good.”
Red leans back in his chair, nodding his head absentmindedly, and gazing across the table at me. I am reminded of Dean’s assessing stare via video call and wonder if all the men in that family have a staring problem.
“I remember your grandma, you know.”
My wandering gaze snaps back to his. “You do?”
I’m aware that I sound like an overexcited child, but…well, I miss her.
“She was a good woman, real kind.”
I swallow thickly, and not because of the bread. “She was.”
“Look, I’ve decided we’re having lunch, or if that doesn’t work, dinner once a week. Your pick.”
“What?” A slice of avocado slides out the side of my sandwich when my hand stutters on the way to my mouth.
“Lunch or dinner, once a week. You work, right? So maybe dinner.”
“Um. I do work, yes.”
“Okay. You like tacos?”
“Yes.” Another family trait, apparently was the mind swirl. We’d covered more random topics in five minutes than I would have previously thought possible.
“Okay, Taco Tuesday at Ramon’s, that’ll be our thing,” he decides, popping the last bite of his sandwich into his mouth. “You mind if I invite Babe? She’ll probably say no, but I feel like I should at least offer, you know? I don’t know much about this whole dating thing,” he says, air-quoting the word ‘dating’. “But I think women like to have choices, you know?”
“Uh huh.” Funny, because he isn’t exactly giving me a choice.
“And between you and me, I’m real glad there’s gonna be another redhead in the family, it’s been lonely all these years,” he leans in to say with a wink.
With those words, my confused expression changes to one of complete gratitude, because this man is good. I can’t even look at him, I am so blinded by his goodness, so I keep my eyes on my food.
“Alright, gotta go, Lil’ Red, I told Grace I’d take over so she could go be Mama again.”
“Bye, Red.” I look up just in time to catch his soft smile.
“Remember, Ramon’s, Tuesday, let’s say 5:30, I like to eat early.”
He grabs up all his trash and scoots both cookies in my direction before leaving.
Back at home, my hunger quenched, I settle onto my sofa and scoop Mr. Bubberchop onto my lap for a cuddle. I got the fluffy, little guy a month after my grandma died. I was sad and read an article about all the value a pet can add to your life, so I headed on down to the animal shelter to have a peek. At first, I thought about getting a dog, but when I saw a blue-eyed puff ball sitting in the corner of the cage, while all the other kitties were meowing and pacing, I knew he was the one. He had an air of I-don’t-belong-here that I could relate to. It was how I felt when I first moved to the Cove to live with my grandma. New home, new school, new people-back then, I was the blue-eyed puff ball that felt out of place. And now, we had each other, a pair of poofy-haired misfits who liked to cuddle.
Chapter 7
Dean
Our team was pulled out early because there’d been an incident. It involved an explosion and some small arms fire but, thankfully, no fatalities. Bosker took some shrapnel to the leg and was already out of the hospital and stateside, the rest of us were solid. Physically, anyway. It sucked to say, but this was kinda routine for us. The whole operation was pretty fucked from the get-go, from having to extend our deployment by nearly six months to hurry up and sit on our asses in the middle of nowhere, only to have the operation we’d finally been tasked with literally blow up in our faces.
Sitting in a plastic chair waiting my turn to be psychologically evaluated, I couldn’t remember ever being so fucking tired. I’d turned thirty-five in September and was the oldest guy in my unit-I don’t know when the hell that happened. My back throbbed, my left knee ached almost constantly these days, and I’d re-strained a shoulder while pulling Bosker out of the debris. The déjà vu was heavy today, having sat in this very spot, at this very base, just months ago to debrief an incident with a much worse outcome.
I was coming up on my seventeenth year in the service and I’d been deployed too many times to bother keeping track anymore and for the first time in forever, I’d put in for a vacation. Actually, I put in for leave back in September; I had a lot of time accrued and after that phone call from a certain, knocked-up redhead, well, my mind just hadn’t been in the right place. Finding out I was about to have a kid was fucking with my brain and making me think about the future. I think those of us who are deployed train our brains to focus on the present, not the future, to keep our focus on the job at hand. Maybe we do it because we’re trained to narrow our focus from day one of boot camp; there’s a reason we’re cut off from all distractions, after all. Or maybe it’s just a method we’ve learned to protect ourselves from the fear of not getting a future at all.
I was looking at four weeks of time off, which, once upon a time, wou
ld have scared the shit out of me, but I suddenly couldn’t wait.
But first, I had to get through this.
And after this, I was going to get on a plane to California where I’d probably sleep for two days, and then try and figure out a situation I had no clue how to deal with.
Chapter 8
Holly
How I managed to get myself talked into situations like this, I didn’t know. The last time I allowed someone to talk me out of the house, I ended up pregnant. Now here I am, in the backseat of Grace’s SUV, on the way to the airport to pick up one Dean Slade, whose mother is riding as passenger. Grace’s Dad, husband, and children stayed home setting up the barbecue for Dean’s welcome home dinner. I even got talked into leaving work early for this! God, what is wrong with me? Why can’t I just say no?!
I took extra care in getting myself ready that morning, all the while hating myself for even making the effort. I’d washed my hair last night after giving it a conditioning treatment, that way it was less likely to balloon out today; then this morning swept one side back with a pearly comb to hold it. I’d managed to corral my rebellious curls into loose ringlets that were softer than the norm, thanks to about an hour’s work in the bathroom this morning with a big, round brush and diffuser. I was wearing a cap-sleeve, navy blue jumpsuit with a deeper V in the front than I usually wore, but, eh, special occasion and all (attempting to impress your one-night-stand-turned-baby-daddy while being unwilling to admit it, being the special occasion). This jumpsuit was perfect for two reasons: it made my blue eyes pop and its waist was loose enough to fit the rutabaga (that one, I had to google) while also semi-camouflaging it in the gathers at my waist. My cream ankle-strap heels were already on the floor of the car, waiting to be put on upon arrival.
Grace and Lola sat upfront, engaged in their own conversation, so I allowed my mind to wander. We had about twenty minutes until we reached our destination and these are the thoughts taking up space in my mind: we’d been in the month of December for seven days now and I couldn’t believe how time was flying, I had a mere fifteen weeks or so until this baby became an actual, literal, in my arms reality; I had another ultrasound scheduled for three weeks from now and did I invite Dean?; I should really finish putting together that crib, practice changing a diaper and learn how to swaddle; and finally, a soft pretzel with cheese sounded really good right now, where and how could I get one?
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