“No.” Her face doesn’t change. “Why?”
I realize I like the kid when she tells me my dinosaur looks stupid.
Not the first day. Not even the second. It sneaks up on me the same way everything involving Raven and Lexi seems to now, slipping past my better judgment while I’m busy pretending I have this situation under control.
The clubhouse is in one of its calmer stretches that afternoon, which only means the noise is contained instead of absent.
Music plays low from the common room. Somebody is laughing near the bar.
One of the old ladies is arguing with a brother about whether the grill needs cleaned now or later, and judging by the volume, she’s winning.
The kids have turned one end of the common area into their own little kingdom of crayons, blocks, books, toy trucks, and enough stickers to permanently damage every piece of furniture in a ten-foot radius.
Lexi is sitting cross-legged on the floor near the coffee table with Bunny tucked under one arm and a coloring page spread out in front of her.
Jason is nearby with a handful of blocks he keeps trying to stack on the page until she glares him into moving them.
Amy and Casey are on the couch, supposedly helping Gio with a card game, though from what I can tell they’re mostly cheating with enthusiasm while Gio complains about it like a much smaller old man.
I’m not involved.
That’s what I tell myself while I stand in the kitchen doorway with a bottle of water in one hand and watch Lexi squint at a green crayon like it personally offended her.
Then she looks up, spots me, and lifts the paper in one small hand. “Joker.”
I should keep walking. Instead, I stop. “What?”
She holds the page out farther. “You do one.”
“No.”
Her face doesn’t change. “Why?”
Because I’m a grown man with actual things to do. Because I have no business sitting on the floor with crayons in the middle of the afternoon while half the clubhouse watches. Because I need at least one line left between myself and whatever slow, domestic ambush this whole mess has become.
None of that sounds like something I’m willing to say out loud.
“Because your artistic standards are brutal,” I tell her.
She blinks once. “What’s art… art…?”
“Judgment,” Casey offers from the couch, without looking up from her cards.
“Standards,” Amy corrects, equally distracted.
Gio, who’s losing and bitter about it, mutters, “He means you’re bossy.”
Lexi points at him with the crayon. “You shush.” Then she looks back at me and pats the carpet beside her like we’re not discussing this anymore.
I stare at that tiny hand on the floor for half a second. Then, because I’m clearly losing my mind, I set the water bottle down and sit.
From the couch, Casey says, “Wow.”
Amy snorts. Gio just looks vindicated, like he knew all along that the giant biker had no defense against a determined toddler.
Lexi pushes the crayon box toward me with great seriousness. “You do this one.”
I look down at the page. It’s some kind of cartoon dinosaur standing in front of a volcano, smiling like it doesn’t understand what a volcano is.
“Looks fake,” I say.
“It’s coloring.”
“Still fake.”
She leans closer, frowning at the page. “No, it’s not.”
“Dinosaurs don’t smile.”
“You don’t know.”
That one gets me.
A laugh slips out before I can stop it, low and brief and enough to make Amy and Casey glance over like they’ve never heard the sound before. Fair. I probably don’t give it away often.
“Alright, menace,” I mutter, taking the green crayon. “Which part am I ruining?”
She points at the dinosaur’s tail. “There.”
“Specific.”
“I know.”
I color the tail. Badly on purpose at first, just enough to make her suck in a dramatic breath and snatch the page closer.
“No, not like that.”
“It’s green.”
“It’s messy.”
“It’s art.”
She stares at me.
I stare right back.
Then she huffs a sigh so exaggerated it belongs in a soap opera and scoots closer, Bunny still hooked under one arm while she corrects my coloring like I’m a very stupid employee she’s trying to salvage.
And somewhere in the middle of letting a three-year-old bully me over a dinosaur’s tail, it hits me.
I don’t just tolerate this kid. I like her. That realization lands with enough force to be deeply irritating.
Because tolerance is one thing. Tolerance is manageable.
A child attached to her mother in a guest room next to mine, a little wary and clingy and too quiet for her age, is something I can factor into a situation.
Something I can work around. Something I can keep in the category of “not my problem but currently under my roof.”
Liking her is different. Liking her means I notice when she’s not in a room. It means I know Bunny is usually tucked under her left arm when she’s tired and dragged by one ear when she’s not.
It means I know she only really eats the cereal from the purple box unless Emma talks her into eggs.
It means I have somehow started waiting for the little crease between her brows when she’s thinking hard enough to ask one of her weird, overly specific questions.
It means I’m now sitting on a clubhouse floor helping her color like I don’t have a shred of dignity left.
Problem. A serious one.
The crayon shifts in my fingers, and Lexi leans into my shoulder just enough to see the page better. The contact is casual, thoughtless, warm.
That’s new too.
The first day, she looked at me like I might be a monster wearing boots and a beard. Now she climbs into my space like she’s decided I’ve been cleared by whatever private little committee lives in her head.
I should probably be more cautious about that.
Instead, I hear myself say, “You know, if you keep bossing me around like this, I’m charging for labor.”
She looks up at me, scandalized. “No.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
She considers that for exactly one second. “Because you like me.”
I stop.
The kid goes right back to the coloring page like she didn’t just say the quiet part out loud in the middle of the common room.
From the couch, I hear Gio cackle. Amy makes a choking sound into her hand. Casey is openly grinning now.
I look down at Lexi. “That so?”
She nods without hesitation. “Yeah.”
The confidence in it is what gets me. Not hope. Not uncertainty.
Just absolute toddler certainty that this is a fact and everyone involved should move on accordingly.
I drag a hand over my beard and mutter, “That’s a dangerous attitude to have about people.”
Lexi finally looks up again. “What’s dattitood?”
The three musketeers on the couch break out in laughter.
I glance at the couch. “You three are real helpful.”
Amy shrugs. “You started it.”
Gio, still delighted, says, “It means you’re in trouble.”
Lexi thinks about that, then pats my arm once with all the solemn authority of a tiny queen. “It’s okay, Joker. I save you.”
That’s it. That’s what does it.
I laugh hard enough this time that Blaze, passing through the room toward the kitchen, actually stops and stares. “The hell is happening?” he asks.
“None of your business,” I tell him.
Lexi points at the coloring page. “He bad at coloring.”
Blaze leans over to look. “Yeah, I can see that.”
I lift my head slowly. “You’re real brave for a man in neck-breaking range.”
He grins. “Worth it.” Then he keeps moving because even Blaze knows when a room is not for him.
Lexi hands me a different crayon. “You do the fire now.”
I take it because apparently this is my life.
By the time I finally get up off the floor, my knees are stiff, my dignity is in shreds, and I’ve somehow ended up with a folded drawing shoved into my hand because Lexi decided I was “helping so it yours too.”
The paper is warm from her fingers. The dinosaur still looks fake. I tuck it into the inside pocket of my cut anyway. That should probably tell me something too.
Later, the thing that really gets under my skin happens in the hallway.
Raven is talking to Emma outside one of the downstairs rooms, something low and practical about bath time and extra towels, and Lexi is walking beside me on the way back from the kitchen with Bunny in one hand and a cookie she somehow talked Mac into giving her in the other.
I have no idea how I ended up escorting a tiny child down the hall like I’m on security detail for the world’s smallest, sleepiest criminal.
Actually, that’s not true.
I know exactly how it happened. She asked if I was going that way, and instead of saying no like a sane man, I changed direction.
Again. Problem.
We’re almost to Raven when Lexi stumbles slightly on the runner rug. It’s nothing. Barely even counts. Just a little hitch in her step because the cookie is more important to her than paying attention to where she’s walking.
Before I can react, she reaches out and catches my finger.
Not my hand. Not even my palm. Just one finger. Tiny fist wrapping around it automatically, like she didn’t think about it at all. Like she just assumed it would be there.
The world goes strangely quiet for half a second.
My stride shortens without conscious thought so I don’t pull away too fast or make her have to let go.
Lexi keeps walking, perfectly content, still chewing her cookie, Bunny dragging against her leg, my finger held in that tiny warm grip like I’m an extension of her route from one room to the next.
It should be nothing. It is absolutely not nothing. Because in one stupid, tiny, ordinary gesture, she hands me more trust than most adults manage in a year.
And it brushes right up against a scar I don’t like touching.
My sister used to hold my hand like that. Not when I was old enough to be embarrassed by it. Before that. Before everything went sideways. Before red lights in the rain and screaming metal and the kind of silence that follows something breaking too hard to be fixed.
The memory doesn’t hit cleanly. It never does. It comes in flashes. Not enough to relive it. Just enough to remind me the wound is still there under all the scar tissue.