by Amira Rain
He'd told me this while I'd been bathing him after he'd vomited, but I hadn't known what to say, other than everything was going to be all right. Now I still didn't know what to say.
Struggling to find the right words, I glanced up at Tommy in the rear view mirror. "You're right, sweetie, that something happened to you at daycare, and I know how scary it must have been. Everything's all okay now, though. We just have to go live in a different place now, and everything will be just fine. As long as Mama and Tommy are together, we're happy, right?"
"Yeah. But mine fishes all gone...and I still hungry."
Relieved that his focus was now only on goldfish crackers, I glanced up at him in the rear view mirror again. "Well, we'll pull the car over somewhere once we get a little further from town, and I'll get you something else to eat from our big bag we packed. How's that?"
"Okay."
"And your tummy still feels better? You don't feel like you're going to throw up again?"
"No...I no throw up. I hungry."
"Okay, sweetie."
With humid summer air rushing in the open windows of the rusty sedan, I pressed the gas pedal a little harder, having no clue that by the end of the day, Tommy and I would be face-to-face with his father, a man who was apparently a dragon shifter, a dragon shifter whose full name I didn't even know.
* * *
I'd met Gavin in a bar. The Sandstone Cockadoodle, to be exact. No one in town remembered exactly why the first owner had given it the name. It had been fifty-some years earlier. Now in the modern day, some people in town simply referred to it as The Cock. Others not quite so comfortable with vulgarity, like me, called it The Doodle. Many senior citizens in town called it The Sandy-doo Cockadoodle-doo, for reasons unknown.
My own maternal grandma had taken it a step further, calling it The Sandy-doodle-doo Cockadoodle-doo-doo, and when I'd asked her why at probably ten or eleven years old, she'd just laughed, waving a hand dismissively, and then had said that young folks just had no sense of fun anymore. The ladies in her bridge club had laughingly agreed, shaking their heads at me.
I normally didn't often frequent The Doodle, or any bars in town for that matter. Although I liked to have a drink or two with friends on occasion, drinking in loud, crowded places full of highly intoxicated men just wasn't my thing. One or two bar trips a year, just to remind myself why I didn't really like bars, was usually plenty for me.
And actually, being that I'd only been over twenty-one for a couple of years, I'd only ever stepped foot in The Doodle twice. I'd been in a different town bar, Harley's, twice as well.
However, two weeks before my twenty-fourth birthday, an old high school friend named Nikki had been back in town for the weekend from Indiana, where she'd moved for college and had remained, and she insisted that we make a Saturday night trip to The Doodle with some other former classmates to reconnect and celebrate my birthday early.
Sitting at a little table at an outdoor cafe where we were having lunch that afternoon, I sat back in my chair, saying that maybe we could just do something else. "Like, maybe we can get a group together at my apartment for some drinks and dinner or something. We could even grill. There are three community grills in the courtyard we could use if we wanted to do burgers or chicken, or whatever sounds good to everyone. We could eat at the tables outside. Or...."
I paused, certain that my next suggestion wasn't going to be well-received. "If everyone wanted to, we could even go to the fair tonight, maybe after grilling and drinks. The midway is open until one in the morning, so-"
"Oh my God. The fair, Alyssa? Seriously?" Wearing a look of pretty clear disgust, Nikki set her fork down. "What are we, still in high school? I want to visit with people from high school, but I don't want to do high school things. I honestly want to get kind of messed-up tonight and have some real fun."
"But the fair is fun."
Making her long, ironed blonde hair swing, Nikki shook her head. "No...not really."
"And besides...I never miss a year. Haven't missed a fair weekend night since I was probably thirteen. I was actually supposed to go with Lindsay last night, but her little girl got sick. And being that tonight is the last night-"
"Oh, it won't kill you to miss one year of the dumb fair."
"Well-"
"Besides, don't you want to meet some hot guys? I've heard the pipeliners were out and about at the bars last night, and they're going to be back tonight."
The pipeliners were a group of a hundred or so union men up from Alabama for a few months to build a lengthy pipeline somewhere west of town. Some of them were married, and some had even brought their wives up with them to stay in short-term rental houses and apartments, but many of the men were single.
And some of these men were pretty attractive, with very well-built, muscular bodies from countless daily hours of intense physical labor. This intense, highly-skilled, union-contracted physical labor also made it so these men were flush with cash, which made them even more attractive to many women around town.
I personally wasn't interested in meeting any of the pipeliners, but not just because I made my own money and didn't want anybody else's. I really wasn't interested in meeting a single man who would be returning home to Alabama in a few months, then possibly soon heading off somewhere else, and on and on and on.
One of the pipeliner wives, one of several who'd recently started yoga classes at the gymnastics center, had told me that she essentially felt like a Gypsy, following her husband around the country, staying a few months here and a few months there, only getting to enjoy their home and family in Alabama maybe three or four months out of the year. She wasn't sure what would happen when their daughter was school-age and needed to live in Alabama September through June.
All this made me think that I probably didn't want to meet any of the single pipeliners in hopes of starting any kind of a romantic relationship. Not that romance of any long-term kind seemed to be what was on most of their minds anyway. I'd heard talk around town that many of them were primarily very interested in short-term fun.
Which seemed to suit some of the other women in town just fine, but short-term fun that had no hope of ever going anywhere really wasn't my style. I liked long-term relationships and had had exactly two, one that had been during my last two years of high school, and one of nearly equal two-year length that had just ended just a few months earlier.
Being that I wanted marriage and children someday, and maybe sooner rather than later, I was interested in starting a new long-term relationship with someone, one that would hopefully result in ultimate happiness and not disappointment.
If Nikki saw any wariness in my face when she'd mentioned the pipeliners, though, it didn't slow her down any. Picking up her glass of iced tea, she just kept right on going.
"Apparently, the pipeliners want to have real, adult fun, with alcohol, not mess around at the high school fair."
"Come on. It's not the 'high school-'"
"So, if you want to have some real fun, too, you should just come to The Cock with me and everyone else."
I fought a high school-esque eye roll. "Do you really have to call it that? You can't call it The Doodle?"
Making a faint groan, Nikki didn't even fight her eye roll, doing one even as she took a sip of iced tea. When she set the glass back down, she sighed, then sat back in her chair and folded her arms loosely across her chest, mirroring my pose. "Look. Can I tell you something, Alyssa? You are so weirdly 'high school,' yet so weirdly 'old lady,' all at the same time. You want to go to the fair with all the kids, yet you won't call The Cock The Cock. You've always been like this. And it's really...." Nikki paused for a deep inhale and long exhale. "I don't know. It's really something."
I was really starting to remember why the two of us had started drifting apart senior year after being very good friends since sixth grade.
"Just come to The Cock with us. Just come to The Cock and Balls with us."
"Now you're just trying to o
ffend me."
"You're 'offended' by the phrase 'cock and balls?' God. Do you have any knitting needles you want to bust out of your bag, or-"
"I say some bad language, you know. I say shit, and dammit, and other things. The other day when I stubbed my toe on a tumbling mat, I said shit and son of a bitch so loudly that Betty came flying out of the office. I just tend to steer clear of really vulgar words like cock."
"And balls."
"Look. I am going to the fair to get a caramel apple. You can-"
"No, you can get a damned caramel apple anytime, but I've missed you, and I want to take you out for some real fun. I want to get completely shitfaced with you. I want to meet some hot pipeliners with you, and hopefully swap some one-night-stand stories with you tomorrow."
"Never. Not in a thousand years would I ever pick up a guy in a bar and have casual sex right away, like-"
"Right. Because you're a grandma. You have been since sixth grade. I get it. But how long has it been since you and Eric broke up? A couple months? At least? With no action? And weren't you just telling me earlier that you've kind of felt stuck in some sort of a rut lately?"
I had told her that, because I had felt that way. I'd honestly been low-level feeling like that for a few years, although the feeling had recently intensified.
At high school graduation, my future had been bright. Club team gymnastics as a kid had led to me becoming high school state champion on balance beam and floor exercise, which had led to a full-ride, four-year athletic scholarship at the University of Michigan. I was going to study business. Once I got my degree, I was going to get a job somewhere exotic, or at least warm year-round. I was going to travel.
A badly broken ankle two weeks before I was set to leave for the university had put all those dreams on hold. The injury had been so stupid. It had happened when I'd just been doing a pretty low-intensity workout at the gym, just some beam work, just some simple round-off back tuck dismounts, a dismount I'd been just about able to do in my sleep since nine years old. I'd just landed funny. I was never able to understand or explain it. I'd just landed funny.
The university had told me that I wouldn't lose my scholarship; it would just be on hold until I recovered and was back in shape. I could even take a year off to recuperate and rehab, could even start fresh that next fall if I wanted. My scholarship would still be there, I was assured. No one needed to tell me that that assurance came with an if. My scholarship would still be there if I recovered well enough to regain the competitive form that had won me the scholarship in the first place.
I never did. In fact, by the following July, continued ankle pain despite physical therapy had made it so that I couldn't even work out most days. My skill level was about where it had been when I was twelve. Aerial cartwheels on beam made me nervous. Back handsprings on beam made me nervous.
I was always afraid of the inevitable ankle pain that came with doing nearly anything. Also, I'd begun to develop shoulder problems as well. My whole body just couldn't take the pounding anymore.
Take four more weeks before joining our workouts and starting fall classes, the university had said. We're going to pay for you to stay at in Ann Arbor, where you'll receive the best physical therapy daily at a nationally-renown sports rehab facility. Okay, I said.
Before I could tell my mom that the university hadn't given up on me just yet, she had told me that she'd finally went to the doctors. The nagging chest cough she'd had for months wasn't just a cough. It was cancer.
She was only fifty-five, although she'd had a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit from age eighteen until age thirty-four, when she'd gotten pregnant with DJ. Then, when we kids had become teenagers, she'd started up again, chain smoking outside, always promising to quit again.
But instead of quitting, I thought her smoking had even probably gotten worse during the two years since DJ had graduated high school and had moved to Hollywood.
I'd ended up telling my mom that the university had rescinded my scholarship. I wanted to stay with her and help her fight her cancer battle on a daily basis, which I couldn't do nearly four hours away in Ann Arbor, and I didn't want her to feel guilty about this, like she'd stopped me from doing something.
Two years later, after multiple rounds of chemo and complete financial devastation, she'd died, leaving me heartbroken and unsure of what, exactly, to do with my life at twenty years old. I had no grandparents to help guide me, because they were all gone by this point, too. DJ's and my dad had left our mom after nearly two decades of marriage when we'd been pretty young kids.
He'd then promptly moved to Texas with one of the secretaries from the steel plant he managed, and then he'd equally as promptly wrapped his new sports car around a tree while driving drunk, killing both himself and the secretary.
My mom had a half-sister somewhere down in Florida, but I'd only met her once, and she hadn't returned my calls when I'd left her two voice mails saying that her sister wasn't going to make it much longer and wondering if she'd like to come to Michigan to say goodbye.
Eventually, Betty had convinced me to go from working part-time at the gymnastics center to full-time. I started at the local community college and got a two-year business degree. Betty had said that she'd like me to take over the gym someday when she retired. I'd be about thirty then. I could pay her for the gym over a term of ten years.
So, I'd settled into life as a small-town gymnastics coach and fitness instructor, and I was happy- with my life, for the most part. I had good friends and a boyfriend I thought I loved. Which was why when his job ordered an out-of-state transfer and he asked me to marry him and move with him, I couldn't understand why I couldn't say yes. Something was just missing. I found I just couldn't see a forever future with him.
We'd parted ways, and at about the same time, Erin, my best friend, had moved from Sandstone to Germany, where her husband would be stationed with the military for the next four years. We promised we'd email, text, and video call constantly, but to my surprise, we just kind of hadn't.
There was the time difference, and Erin and I were both often busy, and she seemed to have quickly become very good friends with another military wife whose husband was also going to be stationed there for four years. I was disappointed, though I felt guilty about this. I just wanted Erin to be happy, even if that meant that our best friendship might cool a little while she was in Germany.
All this was how I'd arrived at the age of two weeks shy of twenty-four years old feeling a little dissatisfied with my life, or stuck in a rut, or something. I didn't even know what. It wasn't that I was exactly unhappy with my life, or my coaching career. Maybe I just felt like I was somehow stuck waiting for my career to advance when I became the actual owner of the gym. I really didn't know.
Looking at Nikki across the sun-dappled white cafe table, I actually began wondering if maybe she was right. Maybe I just needed a fairly wild night out at a bar to shake up my routine. Maybe I just needed to completely cut loose in a way that a person couldn't do at a cookout or at the fair. It seemed like maybe it was worth trying, anyway.
"All right. I'll go to The Doodle with you tonight."
Flashing her pearly white teeth, Nikki beamed in a way that could only be described as triumphantly. "Awesome. You're going to live a little. You're going to let go of your old lady ways a little. And you can start that right now by calling The Doodle The Cock, like everyone else your age does."
"I'm not calling it The Cock. Sorry."
"But it's going to be a cock kind of night. You, me, the other girls, and a whole bar full of hot, ripped pipeliners, all ready to whisk us away for some incredibly steamy-"
"I'm not having a one-night-stand with a pipeliner. Sorry again."
Picking up her iced tea, Nikki sighed, giving her head a little shake. "Okay. No pipeliners, specifically."
"No anybody."
"Well, what if an incredibly handsome dragon shifter strolls on in the bar? They say there are still a few here and there in
the Midwest. What then?"
Enjoying the feel of the warm sun on my face, I snorted, though smiling. "Ha. Yeah. That might happen."
Nikki shrugged, smiling a little herself. "Hey...you never know."
CHAPTER TWO
For maybe the first hour of our time at The Doodle, I actually enjoyed myself. It felt good to laugh and be a little wild with Nikki and three other former high school friends, Angie, Liz, and Abbey. After I'd had a beer, I even let them all pull me out onto The Doodle's tiny hardwood dance floor, where we all danced and laughed our way through a few songs that blared from the jukebox, all songs that had been chart-toppers our senior year.
Nikki, who was in fine comedic form after having done a couple of vodka shots, was making me laugh the hardest, and I was starting to remember why I'd become friends with her in the first place all the way back in sixth grade. She was just fun. Being around her was just kind of exciting. And she had a way of making me feel like I was fun and exciting, too, or maybe even that my life itself was fun and exciting. Whatever it was, I liked the feeling, and I wasn't sorry that I'd let Nikki talk me into an evening at The Doodle instead of at the fair.
However, around nine, some negative sort of shift in the evening took place. Instead of sipping her vodka shots like she'd done earlier, Nikki knocked one back, then another, and then started acting maybe a bit too loud and goofy. After screeching with laughter about some joke she'd made, she actually managed to nearly catch her hair on fire while leaning over the table to finish the last sip of one of Abbey's shots.
Apparently she didn't notice that she was directly leaning over a votive candle in a domed glass holder in the center of the table. The weekend bartender, who was another former classmate named Dana, liked to set candles out to give the place "more of a classy atmosphere," she'd told me earlier while I'd been up getting my beer.
Seeing the ends of a section of Nikki's long, flat-ironed blonde hair dip inside the glass dome and immediately start to singe, I leaped out of my seat and flung the section of hair out, then put out the singe by clapping that section of hair between my hands a few times, wrinkling my nose at the acrid smell of burned hair. "Nikki, look...look what you did."