CHAPTER 11 Dex Bradley
Violence Isn’t the Answer
“You gotta be fucking kidding me,” I mutter as I study the citation.
“Sorry, Dex,” Milton says.
I slam the piece of paper down on his desk. “It’s not your fault Jensen Bybee is a dickwad. The fucker had it coming.”
“I’m certain he did, sir,” Milton says.
I’m fucking livid, but there’s not much I can do. He wants to press charges like a little bitch, and he’s only doing it because my court date is in six weeks when the season will be underway. He’s doing it to get a rise out of me. I’ll pay him back by kicking his team’s ass on the field.
“It’s fine, Dex. Consequences, remember?” a soft voice by my side says tentatively. “It’s a misdemeanor. You didn’t hurt him, but he has the right to press charges.”
I clench my jaw. Her truth-telling skills are on point and also unnecessary at the moment.
“Let’s just get upstairs,” I huff, and I take the citation with me to hand over to my lawyer to see if there’s something he can do to handle it.
I shouldn’t be surprised that Coach has already texted me that he wants to see me in his office in the morning. I’ll be there. I don’t have much choice.
But tonight with Ainsley—after we left the event—just felt so fun.
It felt oddly…freeing. Like she grounds me in a way nobody else ever has.
Like she is holding me responsible in a way nobody else ever really believed I was capable of.
Like she cares about me and sees me. And that’s why it’s so strange that it feels freeing.
If anything, she’s trying to restrain me and get a handle on me. But it’s like knowing I can be myself and have her as the safety net I’ve never had.
I need to shake all this off. The lavender, the black dress, the neckline, the kiss on my cheek. All of it.
Except somehow and totally out of nowhere, I just agreed to be her husband, and that sort of throws a wrench into shaking any of it off.
I give Madison a couple hundred bucks for watching the kid, who’s sleeping soundly in his new room far away from my weight room, and we bid her goodnight.
I bid Ainsley goodnight, too, before I do something stupid like strip her out of that dress and see what she’s hiding underneath it, and instead, I head toward the shower to take it all out on my dick.
And I pretend like I don’t moan her name as I jizz all over my hand.
I don’t feel any better when morning dawns since I spend the night tossing and turning, though I must fall asleep at some point because a glance at the clock tells me I need to get to Coach’s office pronto.
I brush my teeth and throw on some clean clothes, and I bolt to the kitchen to grab a protein shake I can drink on the way.
“Good morning,” Ainsley says from her spot on the couch where she’s wearing glasses and reading a book to my son.
It should stop and give me pause. My son with the woman I agreed to marry last night.
I can’t pause, though. I need to get the fuck out the door so Coach can yell at me.
“Morning. I have to meet with my coach. I’ll be back in a couple hours.
” I rush out the door without waiting for a reply, in part because I’m having mixed feelings about how adorable (fuck, I hate that word no matter how fitting it is) the scene in the family room was, as I’m starting to regret our conversation last night.
I feel differently this morning, and I’m thinking about the consequences for once in my goddamn life. It’s a bad idea to marry a girl I’m starting to have feelings for.
I realize how little sense that makes, but it is what it is.
I arrive at the Complex, the name of our practice facility, and I navigate toward Lincoln Nash’s office. He’s standing outside the office talking with his secretary, and he waves me in when I walk up.
“Talk to me, Bradley. What went down last night?” he asks once he’s shut his office door and he’s sitting behind his desk.
“Jensen Bybee opened his stupid mouth and pissed me off, so I slugged him.”
“Anyone ever teach you that violence isn’t the answer?” he asks.
“Says the man who tells me to put the quarterback on his ass every week.”
“You think sarcasm is going to win you favors?” he asks.
“You literally once told me to choke somebody.”
He flattens his lips. “On the field, Bradley. Listen, you’ll likely get dismissed in court, maybe a fine.
Jack is pissed, but he’ll get over it. The team decided to fine you as well, and you’ll need to take anger management classes that we can probably work in if you stay an hour after practice for a few days. ”
I wince when he says the name Jack, and it doesn’t slide by my eagle-eyed coach.
“What? Why the face?” he asks.
I contemplate how much to tell him. He’s a father, a coach, a mentor. He’s here to support his players. He called me in to both check on me and inform me of my punishment.
He might have some insight as to what I should do in my situation.
I blow out a breath.
“What’s going on?” he asks.
“Last week, a woman came by my place to see me. She had a baby, a six-month-old, with her, and she claimed he’s mine.
” It sounds ridiculous as I say the words, and it only gets more far-fetched as I continue.
“She had to surrender herself to jail, and she’s going away for a couple years.
She signed the kid over to me and left him with me.
I don’t know what the fuck I’m supposed to do with a kid, and I’m trying to figure out the next step. ”
“Do you have proof he’s yours?” he asks.
“Not yet,” I admit. “We submitted a test and are waiting on the results.”
“Good first step. What will you do if it comes back negative?”
I hadn’t really thought about that. I guess the answer is pretty obvious. If he isn’t mine, he goes to the real father or to Tawny’s next of kin.
“It won’t,” I say. “The kid looks like me. He acts like me, too. Stubborn as fuck.”
“Whines a lot?” he guesses, and then he chuckles at his own jab. “Do you have help?”
“Yeah. My little sister’s friend happened to be in town and she’s good with kids. She’s helping me out for now, but I’m not sure how temporary that situation may be. She was with me last night.”
He presses his lips together and nods. “Still, why the face before when I mentioned Jack?”
“Jack. That’s his name. The baby. His mother named him after her favorite football player of all time…Jack Dalton.”
He bursts out laughing.
“I think she was trying to make my life as awkward as possible, honestly.”
“Success. Listen, if you need a good babysitter, or even a nanny, Jolene and I can come up with some resources for you. And clothes. Joey has outgrown all his baby stuff, and my wife was just talking about wanting to pass them on to someone else. Lots of Aces gear in there.”
“I’ll take whatever you have,” I say.
“So the next step you referred to a bit ago doesn’t mean you’re trying to find someone else to take him on?”
I lift a shoulder. I’m still not completely sold on that, but reality is starting to set in. And the more I see Ainsley with my son, the more I see them both becoming more permanent fixtures at my place.
Or maybe I’m just nuts and bananas, as Ains would say.
We finish our conversation, and I end up confessing what Jensen said that made me punch him. Coach Lincoln doesn’t really blame me for what I did, and while he doesn’t exactly come out and say it, I think he even finds it slightly honorable that I was defending the woman helping me out with my son.
When I get home, Jack is napping and Ainsley is lying on the couch watching television. She sits up when I walk in as if I caught her doing something she wasn’t supposed to be doing.
“Sorry. I was just relaxing a bit after a long morning.” She smiles with a bit of timidness, and I shake my head.
“Taking care of a baby is hard work. Relax all you want.”
“How did things go with your coach?” she asks.
“Fine. The team is fining me twenty-five grand, and I’m required to take anger management.”
“Twenty-five grand? That’s steep,” she says.
“Could’ve been more,” I mutter.
“I’m going to go shower. Will you listen for the baby? He should be up soon, but I didn’t want to shower until you got back.”
I nod, and she heads out as I try not to imagine her getting naked and stepping into the shower.
It’s impossible.
I’m still imagining it a few minutes later when the kid starts crying. I get him out of his bed and set him on the floor in the family room while I make a bottle the way she showed me, which takes longer than it should. I don’t even notice how quiet it has gotten.
When I go back to grab him, he’s got this panicked look on his face, and I don’t think he’s breathing.
I spot a mess near him, and a little dish that held decorative dice on it on my family room table is on the floor.
It registers in the span of a nanosecond that there are only five dice on the floor.
My heart sinks into my stomach, and panic claws its way through me as I put together where the sixth one might be. He somehow reached onto the table and put one of the dice in his mouth.
“Fuck!” I yell, and I grab the kid, turn him over, and start to pound on his back. I’m not sure where in the recesses of my mind that CPR training kicks into gear, but I recall something about five blows between the shoulder blades in the class we were required to take in high school.
I may never have remembered that if the girl teaching the class wasn’t as hot as she was and was standing there talking about blows. I was an immature high school kid who grew into an immature adult.
On the fourth blow, the dice pops out onto the floor, and the kid lets out a blood-curdling scream.
I turn him over in my arms and pull him to my chest as I stand, adrenaline still coursing through me as the panic gives way.
The baby is crying, and I’m bouncing as I hold him and tell him he’s okay, and it’s the first time I feel like I’ve done something right even though the situation that landed us here was probably my own fault, too—leaving the kid unsupervised when babies put whatever shit they want to into their mouths.
Fuck.
“Is everything okay?”
I hear a voice behind me, and I whip around to find Ainsley with hair dripping onto her shoulders, wearing nothing more than a white towel around her body.
My eyes flick to the towel for a second. “He was choking on one of the dice,” I say.
“And you dislodged it?” she asks. She’s not as incredulous as I am about it.
I’m starting to think she really does believe in me.
“Yeah. I was making him a bottle, and he must’ve grabbed it off the table.” I nod to the rest of the dice scattered on the floor.
“We should probably get started on babyproofing. He’s been trying to crawl, and I think he’s not too far off from moving all over the place.”
I don’t know what babyproofing means, but the way I’m hugging the kid to my chest and the relief I feel coursing through me after that whole ordeal tells me one very important thing I hadn’t considered in the last week and a half since I met the boy.
I think I might be starting to fall for this kid.
Maybe it happened the moment I laid eyes on him and felt like he was mine. Maybe it’s an inherent thing. Maybe it was seeing him laugh in the swing at the park, or maybe it was the panic I felt at him choking.
Whatever it is, it’s a new and unfamiliar feeling that’s terrifying and wonderful all at once.
Sort of like the things I feel when I’m around Ainsley.
“I told you that you got this,” she says.
I nod.
“You’re more capable than you let yourself think, Dex.”
“I still need help,” I whisper, nearly afraid to admit those words aloud.
One side of her mouth lifts into a smile. “We all do from time to time. And that’s why I’m here. I’ll go get some clothes on, but you totally got this, Daddy Dex.”
Daddy Dex.
The words are flippant and light out of her mouth, but they do something to me I wasn’t expecting.
The baby is still crying in my arms as a jittery feeling rises in my stomach. It’s almost like this rush of feelings—the thrill I so often chase that causes my stomach to bounce and my chest to tighten.
Just from her calling me Daddy Dex.
It makes me want to drag her to my bed, strip her naked, and make her a slut for me.
All in due time. Hopefully.