Chapter 4 #2
“That’s your kid?” I demand, then wince when her face goes red.
I’m not sure why I feel so betrayed by this discovery—we only spent a few stolen moments together, and we didn’t dedicate a whole lot of that time to talking.
Yet it still stings, this feeling that she was keeping secrets from me.
Here I was thinking we’d had this amazing connection.
“I’m Lucas,” the kid says, giving me that gap-tooth smile. “This is my mom.”
“Well that was unexpected,” Sawyer mutters under his breath.
“Mom, they’re twins,” Lucas tells her. “They play basketball and they like comics, just like me. Isn’t that cool?”
“It’s very cool, sweetie.” But her attention has returned to him completely, eyes scanning his face, once again reaching for his arms. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Overdoing it, El,” the other woman says softly. Ellie takes a deep breath, visibly pulling herself together. But I can see the way her hands are still shaking as she reaches for the kid again. “Just don’t do it again, okay? You really scared me.”
Lucas’s face falls, something like worry filling his own eyes. “I’m sorry,” he says, much more seriously. “You don’t have to worry, Mom. Daddy won’t find us here.”
The embarrassed pink tinge fades from Ellie’s face so fast I actually reach for her, afraid she’s going to faint.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a woman turn so pale so quickly.
That seed of an unknown dark emotion in my gut triples in size.
Why in the fuck would they be afraid about his dad finding them?
“You know what I think?” Ellie’s friend says, her voice overly bright. “I think it’s time we went to check out that food truck we saw when we got to the park today.” Her hand comes down to rest on Ellie’s shoulder, and I see her give a little squeeze. “Wouldn’t that be nice, El?”
Ellie shakes herself, but she still looks like she’s about to throw up. She presses a hand to the side of her kid’s face, her eyes so heartbreakingly sad it hurts to look at her. “You’re safe, Lucas,” she whispers. “I promise.”
“I’m sorry I scared you. I won’t run off again.
” I may have only just met this kid ten minutes ago, but I hate the sound of his voice right now.
It’s way too mature, way too wise, all his earlier overexcited eagerness gone.
He no longer looks like a carefree, cheerful little kid.
He looks like someone who knows things no child should know.
Ellie takes a deep breath and plasters a smile on her face. From the kid’s expression, I get the feeling he can see how fake it is as easily as I can.
“What do you say? Ready for lunch?” she asks brightly. “I think I saw corndogs on the menu.”
“Sure, Mom,” he says, and I’m not sure which one of them is trying harder to make the other one feel better.
“Sorry about this interruption,” Ellie says to me and Sawyer in that same fake bright voice. She doesn’t meet my eyes. “Thanks for keeping him entertained.”
“Hang on,” I say, reaching for her arm. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
“We really should go,” she says, sounding shrill. “Lucas is probably hungry.”
She still won’t meet my eyes. “Ellie.”
“You can come with us!” Lucas says, like it’s the best idea he’s ever had. “Do you like corndogs? I bet they have other stuff, too. This one time, we went to a food truck back in Georgia, where we used to live, and they had fried oreos. Can you believe that?”
Ellie looks down at him, her expression so tender it hurts my chest, and brushes some hair out of his face. “We don’t want to interrupt their game, sweetheart.”
“Oh,” he says, visibly deflating. “Right.”
“We were just about done,” I say. “I wouldn’t mind getting some lunch.”
Ellie shoots me an annoyed look. “Oh, I don’t think that’s—”
“The man has to eat, El,” the friend says, looking gleeful. Then her eyes go to my brother. “What about you? Are you hungry, too?”
Sawyer grins at her very obvious innuendo and I do my best to send him twin vibes. Do not fuck with the friend, man. The situation with Ellie is complicated enough.
“I could get some lunch.”
Lucas looks up at his mom. “Can they come, Mom? Can they? Please? I promise I’ll remember my manners and I won’t talk the whole time.”
I smother a laugh—I have a feeling that’ll be a hard promise for the kid to stick to. Then I meet Ellie’s eyes and try to give her a reassuring smile. Do I plan to grill the shit out of her at the earliest opportunity? Hell yes. But that doesn’t mean I can’t be pleasant for one little lunch.
“Don’t you always tell me kindness is a gift everyone can afford?” Lucas asks in that wide-eyed innocent way he’d tried with Trisha earlier. “I think it would be kind to invite new friends to lunch.”
Damn, this kid is good. And Ellie knows it. I can tell from the exasperated smile as she looks down on him. “You’re right, Lucas.” She squares her shoulders before facing me and Sawyer. “We’d love it if you would join us for lunch.”
“Sounds great,” Sawyer and I say in unison, and Trisha laughs.
“Does that happen often?”
“More than you can imagine,” my twin brother grumbles.
“We left the wagon over by the swings,” Ellie says, and she still won’t meet my eye.
“We can meet you over there,” Sawyer says smoothly. I raise an eyebrow at him, not understanding why we wouldn’t just walk over with them. Then I want to groan, because it’s obvious from his expression that he wants to talk to me first.
The moment the others walk away, I turn to him. “Say whatever you wanted to say.”
“This situation seems a hell of a lot more complicated than a bar hookup, brother.”
“You think?” I snap.
“I take it you didn’t know she had a kid.”
I run a hand through my hair, that sting striking my chest again. “She failed to mention it.”
“Jonah—”
I cut him off. “Look, I’m not saying I’m going to get involved with her.” He gives me a skeptical look and it’s well deserved. I haven’t been able to get this woman out of my head for days. If she wanted to spend time together, we both know I would jump at the opportunity.
“I just want to talk to her,” I argue. “I want to know why she took off that night without telling me.” And why the hell she didn’t tell me about her kid.
“I get that,” Sawyer says. “But you need to be careful. A single mom is not someone you fuck around with.”
I kind of want to punch him. I had no plans to fuck around with Ellie even before I knew about the kid. Pretty much from the second she let me touch her, I was already planning ways to get to do it again. I don’t know why she has this effect on me, but I can’t ignore it.
“And it sounds to me like her situation might be complicated,” he adds.
My hackles go up. “You caught that, too, huh?”
He nods, looking grim. “The way she almost fainted when the kid brought up his dad? Yeah. I caught that. And I have a pretty bad feeling about it, too.”
He’s not alone. Something passed between the two of them in that moment that I hadn’t liked at all. “Daddy won’t find us here.” I figure there are a couple reasons a kid wouldn’t want to be found by their father, and none of them are good.
“Isn’t that all the more reason to check in with her?” I ask. “If there’s a problem there—”
“You don’t need to go making it your problem,” he insists.
I glare at him. “Seriously, man? I remember a few times in our childhood when it would have been real fucking nice if someone noticed our problems.”
His jaw clenches as he looks away, and I don’t need any twin intuition to know what he’s thinking about. The Barlowe brothers are no strangers to shitty parents and the shitty things they can do to their kids.
“I just don’t want you getting in over your head,” he mutters.
“And I appreciate that.” I smack him on the back. “But it’s just lunch.”
He eyes me and I know I’m not fooling him. Time with Ellie won’t be just anything, and I think we both know it.