Chapter 22
PETTY IN PINK
Heath
I half expect Cricket to bail on monitoring Lav and the cat the next morning, when I wish I didn’t need her but I do since I have to make up the job I missed yesterday, but I find her in the kitchen with her head high and a spring in her step, wearing jeans and a soft pink T-shirt and smiling like she wasn’t recording herself naked and yelling in the barrel cellar yesterday.
“Morning,” she says brightly. “Thank you for understanding where I was at mentally yesterday. I won’t yell at you again.”
I liked it.
I liked her yelling at me.
I liked knowing she felt comfortable enough with me to let it all out.
“Sure.” I can barely look her in the eye.
And not because I jacked off in the shower while imagining her in there with me, wet and warm and lush and gasping my name and all of the words I don’t say around my daughter.
Okay, fine.
That’s a massive part of why I can’t look her in the eye.
The other part—the other part’s because I’m terrified.
I’m terrified at how much I liked every single second that I spent with her in the past two days.
“Elizabeth’s leaving Monday.” Cricket gestures to a new bag of coffee beans on the counter. “She sent these over as a thank-you gift. Apparently one of her cousins owns a small coffee farm in Hawaii. I used them to make coffee this morning.”
“Thank you.”
“I meant downstairs. Just for me. I know you’re attached to your dark roast from that place in Foxwood, so I didn’t want to assume I know better than you on what you want.”
If that wasn’t going for the kill, I don’t know what was.
And the way she delivered it with a friendly smile and not an ounce of snark in her voice for calling me out on being terrified of what I want—she’s fucking good.
“Lav’s still sleeping, and Fluffy’s behaving herself.” She points into the living room, where my cat is sprawled under the coffee table, looking like she found a stash of catnip overnight and needs to sleep it off now. “I’ll leave you to it. Hope you have a nice day today.”
“Cricket.” Shit. Shit.
I don’t want to talk about it.
But now she’s looking at me expectantly.
Not rambling.
Not fidgeting with her hands.
Just—just poised.
Confident, like she is in all of those lifestyle segments I watched on my phone until I fell asleep last night.
Waiting, letting her own silence pressure me.
And now I’m sweating. “Have you left the winery since you got here?”
“Nope.”
Say it, I order myself. Just fucking say it.
But I don’t want to.
Except I also do.
Did she give me her nervousness? What the actual hell is wrong with me today?
I swallow hard, and then I shut off my filter, and my words come out in a rush. “Whenever you’re ready, there’s this bar in town. You’d like it.”
She leans a hip against the counter and folds her arms over her breasts—dear god, the gorgeous way they jiggled yesterday—nope, not going there.
“When you’re ready to leave the property,” I repeat.
“Are you telling me to go there, or asking me to go there with you?”
Why is it so hard to swallow?
And where’s Lav?
If she came in, I wouldn’t have to answer this question the way I need to.
The way I want to.
The way I’m terrified to.
Cricket’s studying me while I struggle to look her in the eye.
Mabel’s right.
My problem was never Cricket.
My problem was always that I don’t know how to be attracted to a woman anymore.
There’s guilt. Guilt that I’m moving on.
There’s fear that I’ll make a fool of myself. That I don’t know how to read signals anymore.
There’s shame that I’d think of my own wants and needs when I have a daughter who lost her mother so young that she sometimes thinks her mother was always just a picture and not a real person.
And then there’s the naked vulnerability that comes with her knowing that I’m afraid I’m doing this dad thing wrong.
That if anyone finds out I’m fucking up this parenting gig, my in-laws might hear, and they might try to take Lav from me again. Or that the person I date would do something to give them fuel for the fight that I’m still not convinced is over.
“I ask because I was thinking of hitting the dating apps,” Cricket adds. “Not that you need to know. But I didn’t want to send mixed signals and confuse anything.”
“You’re—you’re what?”
“I’m thinking of hitting the dating apps,” she repeats slowly.
Like I’m still hungover.
“The fuck you—”
She cuts me off with a simple lift of her brows.
It’s a challenge.
Why do you think it’s your business?
Are you going to stop me?
“Let me know if you want me to walk Lav over to the house,” she says. “I have to go see if my chicken left me overnight.”
She slips back downstairs before I can make myself say a thing.
I manage to get eggs and bacon going despite the way my hands are shaking, which isn’t normal.
Dating apps.
She’s hitting the fucking dating apps.
Where strange men with fetishes about women who’ve been naked on the internet will try to get into her pants.
To see that gorgeous body naked.
To get firsthand what they’re probably buying off of GrippaBeav.
If they tell her there’s a single fucking thing wrong with her—
Fuck, fuck, fuck, I’m sweating and I can’t make my hands steady.
I text my sister to ask if she’s heard from our parents.
She immediately calls to ask if I’m okay.
But Lav comes barreling into the kitchen right after Natasha asks the question, which leaves me stammering that I need to get my daughter her breakfast and a little relieved that I don’t have to hash this out.
Natasha is good people.
I won the family lottery. I know I can talk to her.
But I just—I’m not ready.
Or I am ready—no, I need to be ready, and that’s terrifying, and I can’t let my little sister see or hear me scared of anything.
I don’t like being scared of anything. I’m the guy who runs to the danger.
Not the guy who hides from it.
The guy who fixes things for everyone else.
Not the guy who needs fixing.
And you know who I want to talk to about being broken?
Who’ll get it?
Who’ll tell me what to do in her normal, mildly chaotic way?
Cricket.
I want to fucking talk to Cricket about what to do about liking Cricket.
Just like I want to talk to Cricket about all of the reasons I’m afraid I’m not doing a good enough job with Lav.
And just like I want to talk to Cricket about how I feel like I always ask too much around here.
“Where’s Cricket?” Lav asks as I’m hanging up, her timing perfect as always.
“She had stuff to do this morning,” I lie.
It’s not exactly a lie, but it’s not the truth, which is she’s taking care of a runaway chicken.
Which is just as charming and attractive as the way she’s subtly inserted herself into my life, taking one little thing off my plate in the mornings that actually feels like a million little things.
The last time someone else was here, in my house, helping with Lav and the cat and making me coffee?
It was the last time my parents visited.
The time before that?
Also my parents.
For the past three years, it’s only been my parents when they visit.
Until Cricket.
My daughter squints at me. “Why are you acting weird?”
What six-year-old asks that? “I’m not acting weird.”
“Yes, you are.”
“I’m hungry,” I lie again.
I don’t want food.
I want—
Nope. Not going there with what I want. I have a job to do this morning.
“Does Cricket still have The Cockinator?”
“The Cluckinator,” I correct automatically, less because I care and more because Ginny told me everyone at the salon yesterday was snickering when Lav told the story and called the chicken by the wrong name.
I don’t like people laughing at my kid.
“That’s what I said,” she says. “I can help with the chicken if she still has her.”
“I’m sure Cricket will love your help once she’s figured it all out.”
“Where does the chicken sleep?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is she living in our house?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Cricket wouldn’t trap an animal like that.”
When she’s sober.
I wish I could remember if one of us brought the chicken into the house or if the chicken followed us.
Lav dashes for the basement door.
“Lavender—”
“I’m going to knock,” she tells me.
“Lav, stop—”
She ignores me, dashing down the stairs with her green-streaked hair sticking up at all angles like she fought dragons in her sleep and one leg of her pajama pants hitched higher than the other.
Doing her hair this morning will be an adventure.
“Cricket, are you in there?” she yells. “I want to help feed The Cockinator.”
“The Cluckinator, Lav,” I whisper.
She doesn’t hear me.
Because you’re a chickenshit and you don’t want to say anything loudly enough that Cricket might hear you, my brain helpfully reminds me.
I’m not a goddamn chickenshit though.
I’m a guy trying to remember boundaries.
Because if I don’t—
If I don’t, I’ll march down there and show Cricket exactly why she shouldn’t get on the dating apps.
Because I’m right here.
And that—that—is my real issue.
I don’t want Cricket on the dating apps when I can give her what she wants from the apps.
But I also can’t tell her that.
So much I can’t say to Cricket even when I want to.
The door clicks at the bottom of the stairs, and Lav’s voice gets softer.
“I’ve got her, Heath,” Cricket calls up.
She’s different today.
Confident.
Put together.
Not trying so hard.
Like yesterday helped her shed the layers of expectations of the world. Like she found her bravery, and in finding her bravery, she found a path back to herself.
To who she wants to be.
Mabel was right.
Cricket wasn’t herself when she got here.
Mabel was also right that I’m attracted to her.
That the way she plays with my daughter is intoxicating in ways that wine will never be.
That the way she’s finding her courage and herself again is inspiring.