Chapter 22
Emma
I feel like roadkill.
My dad’s a taxidermist. I’ve seen roadkill. I can verify it is, indeed, what I feel like.
So when I stumble downstairs to refill my and Bash’s water bottles around three a.m.—seriously need to go out and get Pedialyte today—and find Jonas camped out on my couch, I’m not sure if I’m hallucinating.
If I am, the hallucination is moving.
“Hey.” And it’s talking. “You feeling any better?”
I subtly pinch myself.
Still feverish, but also, that hurts. “Are you actually here?” I croak out.
His grin is illuminated by the glow off the oven light carrying in from the kitchen. “Actually here,” he confirms.
Did I say goodbye to him last night?
Or did I just run inside and toss my cookies?
Can’t remember now. “You should go. There are germs everywhere. We’ll get you sick.”
“Goes with the parenthood gig, doesn’t it?”
My heart absolutely cannot take this.
The hope that he means it. That he won’t disappear this time.
The fear that he means it. That he’ll disrupt our lives in a massive way if he stays.
“We’ll be okay. Honestly. Been here, done this a couple times. And Lucky’s popping in to check on us in the morning, which I couldn’t stop him from doing if I tried.” Having a friend who’s a nurse has come in pretty handy as I’ve navigated snotty noses and fevers and digestive issues.
No doubt he’ll arrive with—I am definitely hallucinating.
This time with what I’m seeing on the counters and floor in the kitchen.
“I tried not to go overboard,” Jonas says sheepishly, “but I didn’t want to leave, so I let my security team handle quantities.”
If there’s one box of crackers, there’s a dozen.
Same for bottles of Pedialyte and Gatorade.
Bunches of bananas.
Industrial size cans of applesauce.
Organic. Naturally.
“Did they think an entire football team was down with the flu here?” I ask. “Is there any left at the store for anyone else?”
“They said the store is fine. They hijacked a delivery truck.”
“ What? ”
“Kidding. Whatever’s left, Begonia and Hayes will take.
They run Razzle Dazzle’s summer camp program.
Most years. Not this year. My mother threatened to disinherit all of us if Begonia didn’t take an extended maternity leave.
And speaking of, I can’t go back to their house here.
Not if I want to live. Hayes would disembowel me if I shared germs with Begonia right now.
And I mean disembowel in the permanently dead kind of way. ”
I rub my head, still staring at the mountain of stomach bug supplies.
I don’t have to go to the store.
I don’t have to ask one of my friends to go to the store for me and then fight with them when they refuse to let me pay them back.
“Thank you,” I say quietly.
“Least I can do.”
I get Bash a sippy cup filled with Pedialyte and pick the clear Gatorade for myself, and Jonas shoos me back upstairs to rest.
“Here if you need anything,” he says.
He stays.
And I actually sleep.
When I wake up, the sun is streaming through my curtains, which are billowing in a soft, cool morning breeze. Birds chirp. The chickens are clucking. And Bash is chattering away downstairs.
Wait.
Wait .
How is Bash downstairs?
Fifty-fifty shot he climbed out of his crib. I’ve known this day was coming.
Or , Jonas got him up.
He’s still here. I can hear the rumble of his voice replying to whatever Bash is saying.
I stumble through pulling on clothes that don’t smell like the roadkill I resembled last night, my head still woozy but better. I’m definitely not eating anything today, but my stomach is steady enough that I can walk downstairs without the bonus extra nerves making me want to get sick again.
“Mama!” Bash is kneeling on a chair at my round oak dining room table, dressed in nothing but a diaper—clean, by the looks of it—and the applesauce that’s smeared on his chest. He holds up a cracker. “I eat!”
I bury my nose in his hair and press a kiss to his head, breathing in his little boy scent— clean , no vomit—and avoiding looking at Jonas. “Good job. How’s your belly?”
“Hungy.”
“Go slow, okay?”
As if that’ll be a problem. He bounces back from being sick like he’s a spring.
I take a little longer these days, but I do my best to keep up with him.
“Mama babana?” He shoves a mushed banana at my face, which I expertly avoid by kissing his cheek while I pluck it out of his hand.
“Mama will eat in a bit. How are your crackers?”
“Passable.”
Jonas chokes on air.
I smile and ruffle Bash’s hair. Passable is my favorite word that he says. He reserves it for special occasions though, just as he was taught by his favorite auncle. “Good. You’ll have to tell Zen later.”
“Mama have boobooka?” Bash asks.
I shake my head. “Mama has Gatorade. Kombucha is for later.”
“I feed dick-dicks?”
“You did already, or we still need to?”
He scrambles off the chair and dashes to the kitchen. “Feed dick-dicks!”
“We have not fed the chickens,” Jonas says. “And I didn’t get him up. I rolled over on the couch, and he was staring at me. And, ah, holding the chicken.”
“Dona falled.” Bash screws up his face in an expression I can’t identify until he adds the noise. “ Eeeee! ”
And now I’m choking on a laugh.
Which hurts my poor stomach this morning, for the record.
“You scared Jonas and he squealed in terror and fell off the couch?” I ask.
“Uh-huh.”
“That was a really good impression,” Jonas agrees.
No irritation. No embarrassment.
That’s pride.
Like he’s thinking Bash will be the next generation of Rutherfords to go into showbiz as a natural.
“Don’t,” I mutter before I can help it.
He holds up two hands. “Actively battling every lesson from my own childhood right now. Promise. I’m not doing what you think I’m doing. Swear I’m not. You need help with that chicken food?”
I’m not the stubborn independent type. I’m the it takes a village type.
Despite everything Jonas has seen since he got to town, my friends aren’t running the take care of Emma show .
I’m just as likely to stop at Theo and Laney’s place with cookies after Bash and I had fun in the kitchen all afternoon as they are to knock on my door with diaper cream when I let it slip that I’m out.
But I want to feed my own chickens this morning and not depend on Jonas.
My aching body, though, would prefer that I not be a stubborn ass about my independence.
“Dick-dick food here,” Bash says. He grabs Jonas’s hand and pulls him toward the kitchen. “Two soops. Two . No more or dick-dick get sick.”
Jonas looks at me like he’s waiting for permission.
I pretend I don’t see him blinking against his eyes going misty and his Adam’s apple bobbing. And also that I have no suspicion whatsoever that he’s having a reaction to Bash blindly accepting him like it’s normal to wake up with him on the couch.
I shrug. “Since you’re here, you might as well. Thank you.”
He nods and lets Bash tug him into the next room, the smile curving his lips as he looks down at my baby— our son—absolutely wrecking my heart.
What happens if he stays long enough for Bash—for both of us —to get attached? And then leaves again?
What happens if he stays, though?
If he walked away from Hollywood entirely to be here? To be a real dad?
I follow them into the kitchen, where Bash pulls Jonas to the floor, squatting and opening the lower cabinet where we keep the chicken food near the back door. “Mama, where Dodo Nono?”
“I don’t know where Yolko Ono is,” I tell him. “When’s the last time you saw her?”
“Dodo Nono aaaaahhh! ” Bash says, flapping his arms. “When Dona eeeeee !”
“She got scared and flapped her wings?” I ask him.
He nods. “Da hoe wows!”
“The horrors,” I agree. Second favorite on my list of things he says right now. And he’s saying more and more every day. “Do you think she’s hiding?”
“I put her in the laundry room,” Jonas interrupts. “She looked like she needed some quiet time to process her feelings.”
“Did you change her diaper too?” I ask.
“Not yet.”
“You know how to change chicken diapers?”
“That’s what YouTube is for.”
Why is it so natural to smile back at him?
Caution, Emma. Caution .
Bash shoves a scoop at Jonas. “Two soops!”
“Two scoops. Got it.”
Bash shows Jonas how to get the right scoop amount, then insists on carrying the scoop out and tossing the feed into the pen himself.
I let him tell Jonas himself that in order for this to work, Jonas has to pick him up and hold him over the top of the pen.
Takes them a few minutes to understand each other, but Jonas gets it before Bash needs help or loses his cool.
“Is Yolko Ono an inside chicken because she doesn’t play well with others, or because others don’t play well with her?” Jonas asks me while Bash squats in front of the pen and giggles at the show of the chickens fighting for the food that just rained down on them.
“She’s afraid of her own shadow and it stresses her out to be in the pen with them. She was a rescue a few months after the rest of the chickens. Theo keeps telling Bash that she’s hiding her badass side. And for a while, he tried to convince Bash that she was actually a cat in disguise.”
“You have your hands full.”
“All my life. I keep telling Laney he’s her problem now, but somehow, I still have to manage him too.”
“Unca Deo my fabowit. Eat, dick-dick! Eat!”
He’s running back for the second scoop when I notice a car door shutting out front.
Jonas frowns and looks to the side of the house.
He heard it too.
“Lucky’s stopping by,” I remind him.
“Mo food!” Bash dashes for the back door again. “Two soops. Two !”
“You’re using your cameras?” Jonas asks.
I know why he’s asking, and I hate that I can acknowledge that it’s necessary. “My phone goes off every time someone shows up.”
“Where’s your phone?”
“Inside. But I’m sure it’s Lucky.”
“Mo food, Dona!” Bash yells.
Jonas is still frowning while he follows Bash to the back door.
His hair is perfect. His clothes aren’t wrinkled. The five o’clock shadow he has going on is— would be sexy as hell if I were into that sort of thing.
Which I’m not.
Not when his clothes have the audacity to survive a night on the couch without wrinkling and his hair is still perfect.
And when you’re off men permanently for having awful taste , I forcibly remind myself.
For good measure, I add a quick And his life is entirely too public and complicated .
That last message to myself should be my early warning system going off with all of its alarm bells screeching.
But, unfortunately, it isn’t.
Which means when Bash and Jonas emerge from the back door the same time a tall, hefty, brown-haired man whose suit doesn’t fit quite right and whom I once thought would be my world steps around the side of my house and into my backyard, I’m not nearly on guard enough.