by Caro Carson
Toss, thunk. Toss, thunk.
Matthew shifted from foot to foot until the anticipation got to him. “Aren’t you going to throw it?”
Evan assumed a correct throwing stance. “Hold out your glove. Keep your arm straight out to the side. That’s it. I’m going to throw full force. Keep that arm out, so if you can’t catch the ball, it won’t knock you over.”
“Wait. What?” Matthew started to drop his arm. Held it out again, confused. “You’re going to do what?”
Evan dropped his stance and walked in a little closer. Not too close. He wasn’t trying to tower over Matthew and make him feel helpless. “You don’t want me to throw the ball at you as hard as I can?”
Matthew shook his head no immediately. He kept his arm straight out to the side, the glove as far away from his body as he could get it.
“Then what makes you think I want you to throw the ball at me as hard as you can?”
“You’re big. It’s not like I can hurt you.”
“Sure you can.” You already have. You won’t let me sit at the cool kids’ table with you. “I’ve got a nose that can get broken, same as anyone of any size. If you don’t hurt me, then you might hurt that car over there. I don’t think General Snow will appreciate it.”
Matthew dropped his arm. He looked at the toe of his sneaker as he kicked at the street.
“We’re out here to get better at baseball, maybe even enjoy ourselves a little before it gets dark and you have to go in to start your homework. This out-of-control clown act wastes our time, so here’s the deal. You know that you can’t control an adult. We talked about that yesterday. You can’t make me stay out here and teach you, right?”
Matthew nodded silently at the street.
“It works both ways. I can’t force you to stand out here and catch a ball, either, can I?”
That stopped Matthew’s toe-scuffing for a moment.
“So, we each have to make a decision. Go inside now, or stay and practice. My decision is that I want to play catch with you. What’s your decision?”
Matthew looked up at him warily. “Play catch.”
Two whole words. Evan felt ridiculously relieved. The emotions these Graysons were churning up...jeez.
“All right. Keep your eyes open this time and concentrate on your target. What’s always your target, every throw?”
“My teammate’s chest.”
“Correct.” Evan rubbed his chest. “You hit me right here, kid. Right here.”
Chapter Twelve
“Because I said so.”
Juliet sent her son back to the living room to finish his homework now that supper was over. He stomped away with mutiny in his eyes.
She looked down at the sink, at the white suds that hid her hands, as she listened to Matthew’s stomping end with the scrape of a chair. He’d sat back down at the table then. She kept her hands in the water.
“I am so sorry.”
Beside her, Evan paused in the middle of drying a frying pan. “I don’t think the dishes are going to forgive you. You’ve been scrubbing with a vengeance.”
She couldn’t laugh. She wanted to, but that just wasn’t how life worked. “I was apologizing to you. Evan, I’m so—”
“You really need to stop apologizing. You keep saying you’re sorry when you haven’t done anything wrong.” He said it lightly as he spun the dish towel like pizza dough and caught it. “You’re too slow. I’m drying faster than you’re washing.”
Juliet was glad that the floor plan of the house was a little outdated, not truly an open concept design. The kitchen was mostly walled off from the living room. They could talk without Matthew eavesdropping or glaring them down.
Matthew, of course, was the topic. “I’m sorry you have to put up with my son’s attitude. I knew better. I should have waited until he was in a better frame of mind before introducing you, so you two wouldn’t start off on the wrong foot. I knew I should have waited.”
“Waited to do what?”
“Waited to let you know I’d come to Fort Hood, that I’d been promoted, because...” She looked up at him.
He blinked at her innocently.
She knew that innocent face. The pest was teasing her. Honestly, it was like being nineteen again.
“Are you seriously going to make me spell it out?” She gave a knife a quick, soapy swipe, rinsed it and tossed it into the drain board.
Evan smiled at being caught, the same sexy and charming smile he’d always had. Maybe sexier, because he wasn’t nineteen. No longer Mr. Casanova. He was this man with responsibilities—and the shoulders to carry them. She watched the muscles of his shoulders move as he picked up the knife and began drying it.
He took his time. “The deal was ‘when you get promoted to lieutenant colonel.’ It wasn’t ‘when you get promoted unless you have a preteen in the middle of a tough phase.’”
“Preexisting children.” She’d made him laugh with that term.
“Preexisting children do not nullify the pact.” He seemed so relaxed as he put the knife away, as if the last time he’d done dishes with her had been yesterday instead of a lifetime ago, after a party at Tana’s new off-campus apartment. Falling back into their old rhythm of washing and drying and talking was as easy as riding a bicyc—No. She wasn’t going to go there.
“Cheer up,” Evan said. “Tonight’s dinner was not that tragic. I’m fine with giving Matthew some space to get his sulk on. He’ll come around when he gets bored of pouting in silence all by himself.”
She washed a wineglass and thought that over. It was simple, but it was probably true. Somehow, Evan had gotten not only sexier but wiser. The wiser part just made him sexier.
“That’s a good point.” Since this sexy Evan was still Evan, she could tease him back. “I don’t know if you are a genius at parenting, or if you’re just too dumb and inexperienced to know what’s what.”
“Do I get to choose which one?”
“No. Don’t even think about snapping that dish towel at my butt.”
He looked startled. “How did you know? What is that, some kind of motherhood spider sense? Is it one of those pregnancy side effects?”
“If I told you, my motherhood license would be revoked, and I’d be kicked out of the club.”
He was all smiles, so pleased with her. If he wasn’t careful, she’d get addicted to that approval and start making wisecracks to him all the time. It felt really, really good to hang out with someone and not stress about every little thing.
She was washing the second wineglass when Evan swooped in and kissed her, quick. “You’re a great mom, you know. You really are. I’m surprised you didn’t have a second child.”
She froze, just for a second, as the stress descended once more, the realities of life that couldn’t be laughed away. But she tried. “That’s just the way things worked out, I guess.”
“You guess, huh?” Evan leaned back against the sink, facing her, making it impossible to hide her face as she squeezed the sponge tightly under the white suds. “Remember when you thought we should sit around and talk about serious things instead of riding roller coasters? This is a serious thing. Why didn’t you have a second child? You were married for nine years.”
“He left after eight.”
“Eight years, then, and you loved being a mom.”
“How would you know that?”
“The tailgate, remember? Matthew was a baby. Even when you were wrestling with a stroller to get it into your car, you kind of glowed with this happiness. You looked so good with a baby in your arms.”
He knocked her out with these statements. Such a beautiful wife, you’re a great mom, you glowed with happiness. Knocked her out and made her heart hurt at the same time, because it felt like he was seeing a different woman than she really was, as if he saw some better version of
her.
She rinsed the wineglass and had to reach behind him to set it in the drain board. “That’s a nice thing to say.”
“That’s a nice way to not answer the question.”
“Okay. We talked about it. Rob got out of the service after four years, so Matthew was three. Instead of starting a new career, Rob was all excited to have another baby. He could be a stay-at-home dad, taking care of a preschooler and a baby. I didn’t have a good feeling about it, but if anyone should be open to switching gender stereotypes, it should be a female army officer, right? Nobody would think twice if a man was an army officer and his wife stayed home full-time with two little kids. Nobody would expect the wife to work, so why should I expect Rob to work?”
Evan made no attempt to keep drying dishes. His teasing smile had turned into a concerned, brooding sort of face.
“But then I got deployed. Afghanistan. It seemed like a blessing that Rob would be able to care for Matthew full-time.”
“You seemed very happy on that airstrip to be going home to your husband and son. You were going to see your son in twenty hours.”
“You remember that?”
“Every word.”
She stirred the suds a little. “We landed and deplaned and formed up in our units to march into the hangar where the families were waiting. Signs and balloons and kids everywhere, filling up that hangar. You could feel the energy practically explode when we were given the order to fall out and everyone raced off to find their families.” She fell silent, dropping the story.
Evan picked it up. “It’s incredible, isn’t it? My sister tackled me when I came back. I had no idea she would be there. She lived in another state and everything. She looked just so good to me. So good to see a familiar face.”
“I remember her—oh, my gosh.” She seized on the distraction. “I haven’t told my parents about Friday yet. You have to tell your sister and your parents. I think my parents are going to be angry I didn’t give them any notice. What do you think yours will say?”
“Mine will fall over dead from shock. Then they’ll be very happy that I’m finally settling down—that’s how they’ll put it—and then when I tell them I’m settling down with my friend Juliet from Masterson, they’ll be even happier. They liked you at school.”
“Too bad you’re going to kill them with shock, then.”
She got her reward for being a smart aleck, that flash of Evan’s boyish grin, but it didn’t last. He picked up his dish towel, picked up one of her hands from the water and started drying her fingers off. He looked at her hand as he worked, thoughtful but a little sad, the way he’d looked when she’d walked out of the master bedroom after telling him she’d try not to let sex destroy their friendship.
“Why didn’t you have a second child?” he asked, quietly persistent.
“I waited in the hangar, but they weren’t there. Rob wasn’t there, so Matthew wasn’t there. I looked for a long time, until everyone else was all paired off and grouped up. I thought maybe they’d gotten caught in traffic. I waited a long time. I wanted my baby.”
Evan took her other hand and started drying it, too. He was calm, only he wasn’t. The muscles in his arms seemed more defined. His chest, his neck—every muscle tensed, ready for action, but he just leaned back against the sink and tossed the dish towel on the counter.
“Where were they?”
“Rob had dropped the baby off with his mother. She lived in another state. Then he’d taken off for eight weeks, a spontaneous cross-country trip to deal with his emotions, supposedly. I took leave as soon as I could, so I could drive to his mom’s house and get Matthew. When Rob showed up again, we went to family counseling. I was told I had to understand that there is so much pressure on the stateside families during deployments. I had to expect our family dynamic to be different after being away for a year. I hung in there. Things got better.”
Evan crossed his arms over his chest, looking as deadly serious as a man could look. “Don’t even think about trying to change the subject.”
“I—I wasn’t going to.”
“You were.”
He was right. She’d been about to dust her hands off and head out of the kitchen. “What is that, some kind of motherhood spider sense that rubbed off on you? Am I contagious?”
He smiled a little. “Why didn’t you have a second child?”
She kept it light, kept it quick. “We decided to start trying. So, you know, there goes the birth control, and so, you know...when you catch your husband cheating and you’ve been having unprotected sex with him, then you have to go to the doctor and get tested for everything he might have picked up and passed on to you.”
Evan winced.
“Everything was negative. I hadn’t gotten pregnant, and I hadn’t gotten any diseases, either. I survived that round of Russian roulette. Whew. Close one.” But she couldn’t laugh, because she’d felt like she really had dodged a bullet.
“How old was Matthew?”
“He was five and a half. You’re going to explode, aren’t you?”
“Have I ever told you how much I hate Rob Jones?”
“I’m being serious.”
“So am I.”
She poked at his pectoral muscle, rock hard with tension. “You should shake out your arms or something. It’s okay.”
“It’s okay?” He did explode then, shoving away from the sink to cross the room, which only took one pace, so he turned around and scrubbed his hands over his face and then over his short hair. “It’s okay. Five and a half years old—so you stayed with Rob another two years? Three?”
It might have been longer, if Rob hadn’t left, but she wouldn’t tell Evan that. She felt stupid enough. “He was my son’s father. I agreed to couples’ counseling. He screwed another woman after that, and I got to sit next to him on a couch and be told I was partly to blame.”
Evan cussed like a soldier.
“Failure to align our goals. Bad communication. Marriage takes two. We failed together, and we could repair it together. Yada, yada, yada. It was my job to meet him halfway and fix our marriage after he screwed a girl he met at a barbecue that I couldn’t attend because our son was running a fever.”
She bit her lip and looked away from Evan. “I was more skeptical of the advice that time, but I’d made a vow for better or worse. My one great certainty was that Matthew adored him. Divorcing Rob would hurt Matthew. How could I hurt my baby?”
It was as if she’d popped a giant bubble of tension. The anger dissipated in an instant, and she was suddenly enveloped in Evan’s bear hug.
“I could have had another baby when Matthew was six. Rob would’ve been fine with it, and I would have known not to expect him to do any of the real baby care, but...”
“But?”
“My career was demanding. The timing was bad.” In the safety of Evan’s hug, she could whisper a terrible truth. “A part of me didn’t think Rob deserved to have another perfect little human being worship him, not when he barely made room for Matthew in his day. I think—I think I was punishing Rob.”
“Because he didn’t deserve another baby, you didn’t get to have another baby.”
It sounded so final, as if that ship had sailed. She’d thought so, too, until she’d walked into Evan’s office just days ago. How many children are we going to have before we retire?
She’d said she already did that part, and he’d been fine with her answer. Which was a good thing, wasn’t it? She wanted to get Matthew through some trying years, not add even more to juggle.
“Evan...?” Do you still want to marry me if we don’t have children?
She couldn’t ask. He might say no.
“Juliet...?” He gently imitated her, this man who was her friend.
Her friend. Having a child was the most rewarding thing she’d ever done. She couldn’t deny her frien
d that chance. She forced herself to ask.
“I’m not sure I’m ready for another child. I’m thirty-seven, so I don’t have a lot of time to be ready. It’s not realistic to think I’d really be able to have more than one baby before I’m forty. Neither could you, if you married me. You shouldn’t limit yourself like that. Unless you’re... I don’t know. Sure? Sure that you can be unsure whether or not you’ll ever have a child?”
Evan let go just enough so he could look at her. “If we never have another child, you’ll still have given me one.”
“Matthew?”
“Of course. He’s a great child.”
She felt weightless and wobbly. She had to make herself laugh, because she didn’t want to melt into a puddle of tears. “I don’t know about that. Matthew hasn’t been much of a prize lately.”
“It’s just a phase,” Evan said.
“I hope,” she said. “I have to be honest and tell you I don’t really know what a phase is. I’ve never had an eleven-year-old before.”
“Me, neither.”
“You’re sure about this? You’ll feel like you got to be a father if, if, we don’t have a baby?”
“I get to play baseball and ride roller coasters and have my authority challenged daily. If that isn’t fatherhood, what is?”
I love you.
She loved the way his arms held her like a shield against the stress that was always pecking at her.
I love you, and I’m dragging you down. I have so much baggage.
But she rested her cheek on his shoulder, because she didn’t want to let go.
The quiet was broken by the stomping of a child barging into the kitchen. Matthew made a sound of strangled indignation. Juliet peeked in time to see him throw up his hands in disgust and stomp back out of the kitchen.
“Oops,” she said.
Evan sighed. “I definitely feel like a parent.”