Streetlights glow above sidewalks and I happen to glance over in time to spot Dan pulling into his drive. Climbing out, his attention snaps our way. I give him a wave.
He offers a slow one in return.
“Who’s that?” Fabian asks.
“My next door neighbor.”
“Why’s he staring like that?”
“Probably because he’s asked me on a million dates and I told him I’m not ready—wait.” Embarrassment flushes my cheeks when I realize I’m giving myself all the credit. “No. I bet he recognizes you. Sorry—I keep forgetting who you are …”
Fabian chuffs. “Can’t remember the last time anyone said that to me.”
“Is that a good thing?”
He pauses, staring ahead like he’s lost in thought. “I don’t know.”
“What was it like before you were you?”
He gazes past my shoulder, staring at my front door.
“Quiet,” he says. But before I can ask him to elaborate, he climbs into the driver’s seat and starts his engine. A moment later, he rolls the window down, stealing one last glimpse of the raven-haired beauty in my arms.
“Good luck with your … match, or whatever, next week. Maybe we’ll watch. Will it be on ESPN?”
“Should be.”
Lucia yawns.
“That’s our cue,” I say. “Thanks again for … everything.”
Just like that, the world’s biggest tennis player (according to Google) and the most breathtaking specimen of man I’ve ever laid eyes on backs out of my driveway. I watch his red taillights fade to nothing in the distance, and then I carry Lucia inside.
Carina will be pleased as punch tomorrow when I tell her I’m ninety-nine percent sure he doesn’t have any custody ulterior motives. He’s simply a man curious about his only child. This was simply closure for him, I’m positive.
It’ll never be anything more—and it was never meant to be.
I prepare Lucia’s bedtime bottle and take her to her room, rocking her in the sea foam green chair by her window and watching as her lids grow heavy and she pushes the bottle away. When she’s finally out, I place her gently into her crib.
Lingering, I watch her dream, my sweet little legacy.
When I return to the kitchen, I pour myself a glass of red wine, grab my iPad, and draw a hot bath to wash this strange day off me.
I’m up to my neck in lavender-and-chamomile scented bubbles, ten minutes into the third season finale of Grey’s Anatomy when my phone lights with a call …
… from Fabian.
Chapter 8
Fabian
* * *
I’m halfway to the hotel when something feels … off. Like I’m lighter, but not in an emotional sense, in a literal, physical way.
Something is missing.
Shifting in the driver’s seat, that’s when it hits me. I reach into my back left pocket—and find nothing. My wallet must’ve fallen out at Rossi’s.
Groaning, I lean my head against the headrest and swipe my phone from the console, switching lanes before calling her.
“Hello?” she answers on the third ring.
“Hey. Think I left my wallet at your place,” I cut to the chase. “Can you check your couch?”
A whoosh of water fills the background—was she in the bath?
“Um, yeah. Two seconds,” she says. More water. The slap of wet footsteps against tile. A door swinging open. “Checking now …”
I stop at a red light, glancing up at my reflection in the rearview. A white Audi pulls up next to me, filled to the brim with girls and pumping with dance music. The front passenger rolls her window down, screaming my name. A rear passenger rolls hers down and the entire backseat yells at me. Just before the light changes to green, another passenger rises from the sunroof, flailing her arms.
“Found it,” Rossi says.
I acknowledge the girls with a quick wave that sends them screaming, press the gas, hook a right, and turn back around. “I’ll be there soon.”
Half an hour later, I’m right back where I started, trotting up to the happy yellow door of the pristine white bungalow, only this time the moon glows overhead and the house is a little less illuminated than it was when I left.
Assuming the baby’s asleep, I knock lightly. Three times, then I clear my throat and wait. Five seconds later, Rossi answers, her face clean and her curves wrapped in a pink satin robe. A mess of shiny chocolate hair is piled into a bun on the top of her head, and two damp, face-framing tendrils hang near her eyes.
“Come on in, it’s in the kitchen,” she says.
A glass of wine and an open bottle rest on the island next to my wallet.
“Hope I’m not interrupting anything,” I say.
Cinching the lapels of her robe, she laughs through her nose. “I was just unwinding from the day. I’m dressed under here. For the record. I have pajamas on.”
“Ah, so you’re not trying to seduce me.” I give her a wink as her cheeks grow rosy, and I slide my billfold into my pocket. “Glad we cleared that up.”
“If I were trying to seduce you, believe me, you’d know.” She reaches for her wine, taking a sip and staining her rosy lips a shade darker. “I’m sorry. This is weird, isn’t it? Like we’re not flirting but we are? And we shouldn’t be. I don’t mean to make this awkward. I should probably lay off the fermented grapes …”
She slides her glass away, burying her pretty face in her hand as she leans over the island.
The honesty is refreshing, the awkwardness endearing.
“Maybe we should make it ten times more awkward and have a toast,” I say. “To our beautiful masterpiece, Lucia.”
“I can totally get down with an awkward toast to Lucia.” She retrieves a stemless glass from the cabinet by the sink, dumps the rest of the wine into it, and hands it my way.
Clinking mine against hers, I say, “To Lucia. May she forever stay happy and healthy.”
“To Lucia.” Her distracting blue gaze melts onto mine. “And to you.”
“Me?” I frown.
“Yeah, I’m glad I had a chance to meet you.”
“Yeah? Why’s that?”
“Because if I’d have spent the rest of my life believing you were some hotheaded zillionaire model chaser, I’d have been secretly disappointed.”
On some level, I suppose I am a hotheaded zillionaire model chaser—but I’d like to think my other qualities make up for that.
“What made you choose me in the first place?” I sip the sweet wine, letting it linger on my tongue until it turns velvet.
Blowing a tuft of hair from her eyes, she shifts in her spot. “Well. For starters, your moniker was Ambitious Athlete—very cute by the way.”
“Hm, can’t take credit for that. The clinic must’ve assigned me that name. Either way, it’s not wrong.”
“My family is laughably unathletic,” she says. “Like we tried this family bowling league one year, and none of us had an average above fifty. We literally got last place out of twenty-five teams. So right away, you were bringing something to the table that we didn’t have. And your bio said something about being adventurous, placing value on experiences over things.”
Ah, yes. I did write that back then—before I had money. When “experiences” were late-night road trips with no destination, hitting up a concert for some band I’d never heard of, and drinking Boone’s Farm with my closest friends in some middle-of-nowhere cornfield while a once-in-a-lifetime meteor shower lit the sky.
Those were the good old days—and I’d forgotten all about them until now.
Life was simpler then.
“Also, it said you were half French and half Italian,” she says. “Which is what I am. Not that I’m some kind of bloodline elitist or anything, but I took it as a sign. And then of course, we were matched by the clinic. Genetically, psychologically, all that.”
Now that she mentions it, I remember having to fill out a fifty-page personality questionnaire and hav
e an evaluation performed by a psychologist who asked everything from my sleeping habits to my earliest childhood memories.
“It’s funny though,” she continues, “because I don’t think we’d have ever matched in real life.”
Lowering my glass, I ask, “And why would you think that?”
Licking her lips, she tilts her head, laughing. “Do I really have to answer that?”
“Very much so.”
“Because you’re you … and I’m just a regular girl from the suburbs.” She does a quirky little jig with her arm, as if she’s trying to lighten her words, but when she catches the weight of my stare, her cheeks turn as pink as her lips. This topic obviously makes her uncomfortable. But the way she squirms under my hot lights gaze is undeniably sexy.
“What qualifies you as regular?” I use her words.
Her eyes widen, and her lips begin to move. “I … I don’t know … I think I’m pretty average in every aspect. Average height. Average weight. Brown hair. Mid-thirties. I’ve seen the women you date … plus, I’m all about the quiet, simple life and you’re this jet-setting mega athlete who probably doesn’t stay in one place for more than a week at a time.”
She isn’t wrong about that last part, but I disagree with her first statement.
The woman standing before me is anything but average, and I’d hardly call her regular.
“Does the self-deprecation schtick always work for you?” I ask.
“Schtick?” Her brows knit.
“When you talk to men, do you usually do the whole I have no idea how beautiful I actually am thing?”
“What? I’m not doing any kind of thing,” she says, jaw hanging slack. “You asked why I said what I said, and I gave you an honest, down to earth answer. We’re night and day. If you saw me on the street in jeans and a t-shirt, pushing a baby stroller, you wouldn’t think twice. You would not be rushing up to me and begging for my number. Which is totally fine. Not trying to be the most beautiful person in the room.”
She hides her chuckle with a generous sip of wine.
“That’s not true,” I say. “When I saw you earlier today outside the clinic, you stopped me in my tracks.”
Her ocean eyes roll to the back of her head. “Yeah, because I’d just tripped and I was making a spectacle of myself.”
“There’s nothing wrong with owning how attractive you are,” I say. In LA, women pay a lot of money to look like her—and it never looks natural.
“I think maybe you should slow down on that wine.” She nods toward my glass.
“I’ve had two sips.” I take another. “Three. I’m one-hundred percent of sound mind.”
She breaks eye contact, gazing toward her cozy, lived-in living room and back.
“Are we flirting? What is this? What are we even doing?” She squints, hooking a hand on the back of her hip. The lapel of her robe falls open, revealing a hint of a lacy black camisole. She’s one careless move from spilling out of that thing and I doubt she has a clue.
I restrain my focus and swallow a fourth sip. “Just getting to know the mother of my child while I can.”
“How’d you get into tennis?” She changes the subject, straightening her posture.
“My father used to play racquetball at this local club when I was a kid. I started joining him when he needed a partner. Used to love the sound the ball made when it smacked against the wall. So damn satisfying,” I say. “As I got older, my father used to bet me a dollar per game. Then I talked him up to five dollars. One summer I made over a hundred bucks beating him. Eventually tried my hand at tennis as I got older—making the state tournament team in high school, which led to a college scholarship, which led to being discovered by my coach my senior year. The rest is history.”
She cups her chin in her hand, perched over the island as she studies me. “Did you ever in your wildest dreams think this would be your life?”
“I did, actually,” I say. “Never felt more at home than I did on the court. This game … it came more naturally to me than anything I’d ever done—and I played everything as a kid. Baseball. Soccer. Basketball. Football. And don’t get me wrong—I wasn’t terrible at any of them by any means. But tennis brought out the rock star athlete in me. Kind of think it was always supposed to be this way.”
“Okay, so what’s with the sperm bank thing? What made you decide to donate?”
I tell her about my senior year of college, needing some quick cash to fix my car. My scholarship was academic only—the rest of my student aid went to cover room, board, and books. My parents sent what they could each month, a hundred bucks or so, but aside from selling every last possession I owned or making minimum wage at a yogurt shop, this seemed like the path of least resistance at the time.
“Twenty-one-year-olds are notorious for having a one-track mind. I was never thinking about the future—unless it involved tennis,” I say. “So what about you? What made you want to be a single mom?”
“I’ve always wanted to be a mom,” she says with an indulgent, sugar-sweet sigh and a slightly upturned mouth. “I was actually married in my twenties. Very briefly. To the man I thought would be the father of my kids. It didn’t work out—which was a blessing in disguise. But after the divorce, I moved here to be closer to family, and I sort of buried myself in my work and the next thing I know, my mid-thirties were right around the corner. It kind of felt like a now or never sort of thing. One of my friends told me about IUI using a donor, and how someone she knew had a bunch of babies that way and it was cheaper than adoption, so I thought I’d try it … never thought it would work the first time, but thank God it did.”
“Think you’ll have more?” I ask.
She bites her lip, silent for a beat, and then shakes her head. “There was a time in my life when I wanted five kids—a big, loud, crazy house. But that’s not realistic if it’s just me. It’ll probably always be just the two of us. And I’m fine with that.”
The tiniest hint of bittersweet is woven through her words.
“You can plan every aspect of your life down to the finest details, but it doesn’t always go the way we think it will,” I say. “Sometimes I think that’s the whole point.”
“Isn’t that the truth.” She takes a generous gulp of wine, finishing what remained in her glass.
“How boring would this be if we knew exactly what our lives were going to be like in our thirties, our forties, beyond? What would we have to look forward to?”
I let the gravity of my own words sink in, examining them in the context of our current situation. While the last sixteen years have been a wild ride, it’d be disappointing if the next sixteen were nothing more than a continuation of that.
The money, the blinding-lights fame, the all-you-can-eat buffet of sex, the glory of winning tournament after tournament—it’s a dream come fucking true.
But there’s got to be more.
Only what that “more” is, I’ve yet to figure out.
“There’s always, always something to look forward to.” She rinses her glass and places it next to the sink, alongside a row of used bottles with pink caps and a handful of pacifiers.
“I know I don’t have any say in how you raise Lucia,” I say. “But promise me something.”
Seriousness colors her expression and her eyes widen. “Okay?”
“Don’t let her believe a single thing she reads about me,” I say.
Rossi lifts a brow as she spins to face me. “Not even the good stuff?”
I chuff. “She’ll have to sift through the bullshit to find an ounce of the good stuff, and even then no one writes about half of it. The charities, the foundations, the youth camps I’ve held. The kind words I’ve said about my quote-unquote adversaries. None of that is printed. If she ever looks me up someday, she’ll find a highlight reel of my hot-headed meltdowns. A handful of unflattering interviews eternally preserved on YouTube. Some gossip articles chronicling a string of failed relationships with some of the most vapid humans on
earth. A collection of all of my stats and winnings. But I don’t want her to know me for those things.”
“To be fair, Fabian, I don’t even know you …” Her pretty face angles to the side. “There’s not much I could really tell her other than what’s transpired today. But maybe that’s enough? It says a lot that you wanted to meet her. You could’ve walked away completely and pretended she didn’t exist, but you didn’t. Maybe that’s all she needs to know?”
I gather a lungful of the vanilla-blackberry scent of her home and let it go. Would that be enough? I’m sure it’s more than most anonymous donors do for their progeny, but now that I’ve met her, now that I’ve seen her face and held this beautiful, tiny creature in my arms, now that I know she exists—is it enough?
Enough for her?
Enough for me?
For the rest of my life, a piece of me will be walking around out there in the world, and I’ll have no clue if she’s safe, if she’s okay, if she’s being eaten alive by this man’s world we live in. While I’m hardly dad material, I can’t deny this heavy protectiveness that floods through me when I think of her sweet smile.
“You’re quiet,” Rossi says. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah,” I lie. “Just thinking about how I’ll be walking out of here any minute, and I’m never going to see her again. I thought it’d be easier.”
“Was it easy the first time?” she asks. “When you did it an hour ago?”
“I didn’t really think about it then. Guess it didn’t hit me until just now.”
“You’re not having second thoughts, are you … about the custody thing?”
“God, no.” I speak louder than I meant to, and Rossi shoots a worried glance toward a hallway I assume leads to the nursery. Lowering my voice, I add, “Nothing like that.”
The last thing I need is to get embroiled in some legal situation—one involving a child, no less. It’d be yet another PR nightmare keeping me up at night when the only thing I should be worried about is killing it in the next tournament.
The Match - A Baby Daddy Donor Romance Page 7