Chapter 21 - Brooks
Brooks
Ihad just finished wrapping up a meeting with the front office when my phone buzzed. Dani’s name lit up the screen, and I grinned like a damn fool.
It still caught me off guard sometimes—how far we’d come in the past few months.
There’d been a time when it had just been me, hammering her inbox with texts like a teenager with his first crush, and now we talked every day.
And that didn’t begin to cover all the hours we spent in my house, in my bed.
It felt easy in a way that nothing else ever had. Progress, sure, but the kind that made my chest ache with how much I wanted to keep it.
I answered with a smile already in place. That was, until I heard her voice.
“We don’t have a crib, Brooks.”
No hello. No breath. Just a rush of panic straight into my ear.
“Dani—”
“Or a baby registry. Everyone keeps asking me about my registry, and I haven’t even decided what website to use. Or what to put on it. There are like five thousand kinds of bottles, Brooks. Five. Thousand. What if the baby hates every single one? What if she doesn’t even latch onto my nipples?”
I froze halfway to the door, suddenly thankful that I hadn’t taken the call on speaker. I didn’t need any of the guys to hear about her nipples.
“And what if she does latch but I don’t make enough milk? What if I forget to pack a diaper bag? Not that we even have a diaper bag. Also, have you seen how expensive diapers are? Fuck, I’m going to be the worst mother in the world and she’s not even here yet—”
“Kitten,” I cut in, sharper than I meant to because my heart had already started sprinting. “Are you hurt?”
“What? No. But I—”
“Are you bleeding, in pain? Is the baby okay?”
“No, she’s fine. I’m fine,” she snapped, but her voice cracked, thick with tears. “I just . . . I don’t know what I’m doing, Brooks. I was just getting used to being pregnant, and now there’s only a few months to go and—”
Relief slammed into me hard enough that I had to grip the doorframe. She was okay. The baby was okay. But still, her voice had that edge, raw and frantic, like she was circling the drain.
“Stay put,” I said, already moving. “I’m on my way.”
“Brooks, you don’t have to—”
“Too late,” I muttered, shoving through the door and jogging to my truck. “You called me, kitten. That means you’re stuck with me.”
I had a whole staff of coaches who could handle practice for the rest of the day without me breathing down their necks. Hell, they would probably prefer it that way. This time tomorrow, I’d be on a plane to Miami for a nine-day road series, but right now, there was nowhere else I needed to be.
More than that, Dani had called me.
Not Pink or Clarke or one of her Dungeons & Dragons friends, but me. I wanted to be the one Dani called when the walls closed in, the steady hand she reached for when she felt like she was falling. If she trusted me with that, then we could figure out the rest.
“Stay the phone on with me, kitten.”
For the next twenty minutes, I listened to fifteen more variations of the same spiral, everything from how she was supposed to know which stroller was safest, to whether the crib sheets needed to be organic cotton, to the horror of her friends planning some cringeworthy baby shower theme.
Because these were the things that kept my blue-haired, goth girl up at night—some bullshit games where people guessed her belly measurements or licked melted candy bars out of diapers.
None of them were life and death scenarios, but that didn’t mean that to her, it didn’t feel like the sky was falling.
Don’t worry, kitten, I’ll hold it up for you.
About halfway through my drive, she ran out of stuff about bottles and breast pumps and jumped straight into the big-picture shit. How we were going to split time between her place and mine, how the baby would know which house was hers, whether she’d grow up confused or resenting us.
I didn’t tell her the part sitting heavy on my chest: that what I really wanted was for there not to be two houses at all. But that was a conversation for another day. Right now, she just needed me to be steady.
By the time I bound up her steps, I thought I’d heard it all. As it turned out, I didn’t even get the chance to knock.
The front door yanked open and there she was. Barefoot, red-eyed, shoulders sagging like the weight of the world was on her.
“I killed Doughy McIntyre,” she choked out.
I blinked. “Who?”
“The sourdough starter, Doughy McIntyre.” Her bottom lip wobbled, another tear sliding down her cheek.
“Carolina trusted me to keep it alive while she was at camp, but I left it in my car, forgot all about it, and now it’s dead.
How can I be expected to take care of a baby when I can’t even remember to take care of a doughy blob? ”
My hand dragged over my face, and when I looked back at her, she was sniffling so hard I couldn’t even laugh.
“Kitten,” I said, stepping inside and cupping her damp face with both hands. “You’re crying over bread.”
“Starter,” she corrected miserably, shoulders shaking. “It’s not just bread, Brooks. It’s like a pet—a yeast pet—and I killed it.”
This time, there was no way to stop the crack of laughter that shook my chest. She tried to swat me, but I was faster, dragging her to my chest and circling my arms around her waist. She collapsed there, sobbing and hiccupping, her fists knotting in my shirt.
“You scared the hell out of me,” I muttered against her hair, holding her tight. “Yeast pets I can handle, but I thought—” I broke off, pressing a kiss to the crown of her head. “Never mind what I thought. You’re fine. The baby’s fine. We can figure out the rest.”
She let out a strangled laugh that was half-sob, half-relief. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I admitted, rubbing slow circles over her back. “Now, sit down before you cry yourself into dehydration. You tell me everything that went wrong today, and we’ll fix them.”
“But the starter—”
“Fuck the starter. I’ll buy her another one. I’ll buy her whole a fucking bakery.”
That got a small laugh out of her, and I felt her start to unclench against me, the tension bleeding out of her shoulders.
“Come on,” I said softly, steering her inside and nudging the door shut behind us. I guided her to the couch and crouched in front of her, taking her hands in mine.
“I know what’ll make you feel better.”
Her watery eyes met mine, wide and searching. “Crying some more?”
I huffed a laugh and shook my head. “Let’s make a list.”
“A list?”
“You love lists,” I reminded her, squeezing her hands. “Let’s make a list of everything we still need to do. Anything we need to buy, build, or whatever—we’ll write them down and knock them out, one by one.”
Her throat worked as she swallowed, staring at me like I’d just offered her oxygen. “But there’s still so much—”
“We’ve got three-and-a-half months, kitten.” I leaned in, brushing a kiss to her temple. “Plenty of time. In fact, we can tackle a couple today. You know, baby steps.”
Her laugh came out watery, but real. “When did you get so corny?”
“Anything to make you laugh, kitten.” I reached for the notepad and pen sitting on the coffee table and pressed them into her hands. “Let’s start with a crib.”
She sniffled, looking down at the blank page. For a moment, she just stared. Then, she wrote in shaky but determined letters.
“Perfect,” I said, nodding like we were planning a championship lineup. “What’s next?”
Her gaze flicked to me, softer now, steadier. “Registry.”
“I’ll ask Allie if she has any recommendations.” I grinned. “Don’t you feel better already? And tomorrow, during my flight, I’ll research how to resurrect our yeast pet.”
“And what if it’s a lost cause?”
I shrugged. “Rest in yeast, Doughy McIntyre.”
That earned me a laugh so sudden, she covered her face with the notepad, shoulders shaking. The sound loosened something in my chest. “There she is,” I murmured, tugging the pad down so I could see her smile. “We’re gonna figure this out. All of it. Together.”
She muttered something under her breath.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
Her eyes darted around the room, catching on the plant in the corner that had overgrown its pot. I closed the distance between us, tipping her chin up with a finger. “Kitten.”
She groaned like a teenager caught sneaking out. “Fine, I can’t . . . shave my legs anymore, okay? I can’t even see my legs anymore.”
The flare in her eyes warned me that there would be hell to pay if I even cracked a smile. “That’s it?”
“That’s it?! Brooks, I’ve officially hit rock bottom. I can’t even handle the basics. I’m hairy, hormonal, and homicidal.”
I bit back a grin, but what struck me harder than the dramatics was the look in her eyes—wide, wild, like she was teetering on the edge of another spiral.
Maybe what she needed wasn’t a pen-and-paper solution.
Maybe she just needed to get out of her head for a while, to breathe, laugh, remember there was more to her than panic and planning. A distraction, not a strategy.
“C’mon,” I said, settling back on my heels. “Let’s get out of here.”
Her head snapped up. “What? Brooks, I look like a raccoon that lost a fight with a mascara wand.”
“You look perfect,” I replied, already hauling her up from the couch. “And trust me, where we’re going, nobody gives a damn about your mascara or your legs.”
Suspicion narrowed her eyes. “Where are we going?”
I only grinned, grabbing her sandals and tossing them at her feet. “Field trip, kitten. You’ll see.”
The bell over the door dinged as I pushed it open, holding it wide for Dani. Her eyes bounced around the nondescript room with peach and yellow accents, looking at it like it was another dimension, rather than the local cat rescue.
“Wha— You brought me to a cat shelter?”
“I brought you to the cat shelter,” I said around a nod.