Chapter Six
Alexei
It’s been three days, and we have a system.
Nobody planned it. There was no sit-down, no chore chart taped to the fridge, no awkward conversation about who handles what. It just appeared one morning, fully formed, like it had been waiting for us to catch up.
She cooks. I handle Ella.
My alarm goes off at seven, and by the time I’ve brushed my teeth and pulled on shorts, she’s already in the kitchen.
I can hear the click of the gas burner, a pan hitting the grate, the fridge opening and closing.
And underneath it all—humming. She hums while she cooks.
Never a full song, just these soft little melodies that drift through the apartment, and I don’t think she knows she’s doing it.
Sometimes it’s whatever was on the radio yesterday.
Sometimes it’s nothing I recognize at all.
Sometimes it stops mid-phrase and I know she’s tasting something or adjusting the heat, and I hold my breath until it starts again.
Every morning. Like clockwork.
I go to Ella first. She’s usually awake by the time I get to her, lying in the crib—a real one now, not the Pack ‘n Play, because I had one delivered and Ryleigh fought me on it for eleven solid minutes before caving.
Ella kicks her legs when she sees me and makes this gurgling sound that Ryleigh swears is gas but I know is recognition.
“Morning, princess.” I lift her out, check the diaper situation—catastrophic, as per usual—and get her changed. She grabs my fingers while I’m doing the snaps on her onesie, trying to shove my pinkie into her mouth. I let her have it. She hums around my knuckle, satisfied.
By the time I carry her into the kitchen, there’s coffee on the counter. My mug. The big dark blue one without a handle. Ryleigh knows which one I use. I never told her.
There’s also a bottle of formula measured and ready, water already the right temperature.
“Morning,” Ryleigh says without turning around. Spatula in hand. Hair in that bun. Bare feet on marble. She’s wearing an oversized T-shirt that I’m about ninety percent sure is mine—a Hawks practice tee that vanished from my laundry pile yesterday. We haven’t discussed this.
“Morning.” I grab my coffee and take a sip while Ella squirms in my arms, impatient for her bottle. I shake it one-handed and settle onto my stool, and she latches on like it’s been days instead of hours.
“Eggs are almost done.” Ryleigh glances over her shoulder. “Also, I used the last of that good cheese. The white one.”
“The gruyere?”
“Sure. The fancy one.” Half-smile. “Add it to my tab.”
“Your tab’s getting long.”
“My tab is imaginary and we both know it.”
She plates the eggs—mine first, bigger portion, then hers—and sets my plate next to my coffee. I eat one-handed while Ella works on her bottle, and Ryleigh takes the stool beside me with her own plate. Close enough that I catch the scent of her—warm skin, sleep, my shampoo.
This is our morning. Every morning for three days.
And what scares me, what actually keeps me up at night if I’m being honest, is how fast it became ours.
How the rhythm clicked into place without effort, without negotiation, like we’d been rehearsing for this in separate rooms our whole lives and finally got put on the same stage.
I catch myself watching her. She’s eating, scrolling her phone, head tilted so that one strand of honey hair has slipped loose from her bun and is resting against the side of her neck.
She tucks it behind her ear without looking up.
Her bottom lip catches between her teeth while she reads—a text maybe.
She looks up. Catches me.
I redirect to Ella’s bottle with the speed of someone who’s been getting caught all week and is developing a reflex.
“She’s almost done,” I say, like that’s what I was staring at.
“Mm-hm.” Back to her phone. But I see it—the twitch at the corner of her mouth.
She knows. She absolutely knows.
After breakfast, she reaches for Ella so I can eat with both hands. The handoff is practiced now, smooth—she slides her palm under Ella’s back, I pull my arm away, and for maybe a full second our fingers overlap. Her hand against mine. Warm. Small.
Neither of us acknowledges it.
I pick up my toast. She burps Ella on her shoulder and stares out the window at the skyline, and the quiet between us stretches.
Practice runs long. Coach is riding everyone because Sunday’s game is against San Francisco and they’ve been on a tear, and apparently the best strategy for facing a hot team is to run wind sprints until someone’s lunch makes a reappearance. Doug takes one for the team during the second set.
“Nice commitment, Douglas,” Coach says without blinking.
Weston catches up to me at the water station. He’s been giving me looks all week. Pointed, curious, increasingly annoyed that I’m not volunteering information.
“You’ve been in a suspiciously good mood,” he says.
“I’m always in a good mood.”
“You’ve literally never been in a good mood. You yelled at a vending machine last Tuesday.” He caps his bottle. “You’ve been whistling in the locker room. Since when do you whistle?”
“Maybe I’m just a happy guy, Wes.”
He stares at me. I stare back. He shakes his head and jogs back to the field, and I’m relieved, because if he’d pushed I would’ve had to tell him something, and the truth—that I rearranged my entire morning around a woman and a baby who aren’t mine and I’m happier than I’ve been in years—isn’t a sentence I’m ready to say out loud.
I shower. Change. Drive home.
The apartment is quiet when I step inside. Kitchen spotless—she always cleans, every surface wiped, dishes put away, like she’s trying to be invisible. She’s the least invisible person I’ve ever met.
I drop my bag, kick off my shoes, and pad into the living room.
They’re on the couch.
Ryleigh’s on her side, one arm tucked under a pillow, the other draped around Ella, who’s curled on her chest with her fist clutching a handful of Ryleigh’s shirt. A bottle sits half-finished on the coffee table next to Ryleigh’s phone. The TV’s on—some cooking competition, volume almost off.
They’re both asleep.
I stop walking.
Ryleigh’s face when she sleeps is a different face entirely.
The tension in her jaw—the one she thinks nobody sees, the constant clench that says I’m fine, I’m handling it—is gone.
Her lips are parted. Her lashes rest against her cheeks.
She looks young and soft and unguarded in a way I’ve never seen from her while she’s awake, and standing here watching her, I feel like I’m seeing something I wasn’t supposed to see.
Something private. Something she keeps hidden under all that armor.
Her hand cups the back of Ella’s head, fingers spread through the baby’s fine hair. Protective. Even unconscious.
I pull the throw blanket from the armchair and drape it over both of them carefully—Ryleigh’s bare legs, Ella’s tiny body—pulling it up to Ryleigh’s shoulder.
My hand hovers near her face. One strand of hair has fallen across her cheekbone, and I could brush it away so easily. Just a touch. She’d never even know.
My fingers twitch.
I pull my hand back and stand up straight.
After a second, Ella stirs. Her face scrunches—the pre-cry warning, the thirty-second countdown—and I scoop her up before the real thing starts.
She blinks at me, disoriented, her lip already going.
“Hey, I’ve got you.” I settle her against my shoulder and carry her down the hall. “Ryleigh’s sleeping. Let’s let her rest, okay?”
Ella grabs my shirt and yawns.
I change her, give her a pacifier, and rock her in the chair by the window until her body goes heavy and her grip on my collar loosens. Lay her down on her back in the crib. She’s out within minutes, one arm thrown overhead, tiny chest rising and falling.
When I come back out, Ryleigh hasn’t moved. I sit in the armchair and watch her for another few minutes that I’ll never tell another living soul about, and then I make myself get up and heat leftovers.
She pads into the kitchen around eight, barefoot, hair flattened on one side, a crease from the pillow running across her cheek.
“Hey.” Her voice is rough from sleep. She rubs her eyes. “Guess I fell asleep.” She blinks, looks around, registering the quiet apartment. “Where’s Ella?”
“She’s in her crib.”
She leans against the doorframe and stares at me. “Alexei.”
“What?”
“You need to stop doing this.”
“Doing what?”
“This.” She gestures vaguely at the kitchen, at me, at the apartment in general. “Handling everything. While I’m passed out on your couch like some kind of freeloader.”
“You’re not freeloading. You’re exhausted. Big difference.”
“Still.” She crosses her arms. “I don’t want you to think I can’t—”
“I don’t think that.”
She holds my gaze. I watch the fight play out behind her eyes—the stubbornness, the pride, the refusal to need anyone for anything—and then it drains out of her, replaced by something tired and honest.
“Thank you,” she says quietly.
“You’re welcome. There’s pasta and chicken in the fridge if you want.”
“Starving.”
She pushes off the doorframe and moves toward the fridge. I’m at the counter, drying the last of the dishes, and the kitchen is enormous—designed for someone who entertains, which I don’t—but somehow we’re in each other’s way.
She reaches up toward the cabinet above the fridge for a plate. The shelf is high—built for someone my height, not hers—and she goes up on her tiptoes, fingers barely reaching the edge, shirt riding up.
“Here, let me—” I step behind her and reach over her head, pulling the plate down easily.
And then I’m just . . . there. Behind her.
My chest inches from her back, my arm still extended, the plate in my hand, and she hasn’t moved.
She’s standing on her toes with her back almost against me and I can feel the warmth of her body and she smells like sleep and vanilla and my shampoo, and neither of us is breathing.
She turns around slowly.
Now we’re face to face—well, face to chest, given the height difference—and she tilts her chin up to look at me. Her eyes are wide and very blue, and I watch her gaze drop to my mouth and come back up, and the air in the kitchen goes completely still.
I’m holding a plate with one hand. The other hand moves on its own, settling against the counter behind her, bracketing her in without quite touching her. Her lips part. I can feel her breath against my collarbone. My pulse is everywhere—my throat, my wrists, my temples.
I lean. Half an inch. Maybe less. A decision my body is making without consulting my brain.
Her phone buzzes on the counter.
Loud, vibrating against the granite, and we both flinch. She drops from her tiptoes. I step back, plate still in hand, and the six inches between us becomes two feet becomes the entire width of the kitchen island.
She grabs her phone. Checks the screen. “Desiree,” she says, and her voice is almost normal. Almost.
She turns away and opens the fridge, and I set the plate down on the counter and grip the edge of it because my hands need something to do that isn’t touching her.
I hear her open a container, put something in the microwave, close the door. Normal sounds. The beep of buttons. The hum of the microwave spinning.
By the time she sits down at the counter with her plate, she’s scrolling her phone and eating like nothing happened.
“This is good, by the way,” she says, fork in one hand, phone in the other.
“Yeah.” That’s it. That’s all I come up with to say.
She finishes dinner. Loads her plate in the dishwasher without being asked. Murmurs good night and disappears down the hall to her room.
Her room. Not the guest room. Not anymore.
It’s late now. I lie in bed staring at the ceiling and replay the kitchen. Her turning around. Her chin tilting up. Her eyes dropping to my mouth.
I press the heels of my hands against my eyes and exhale.
I’ve known this woman for a week. She lives down the hall from me. She sleeps in my guest room in my T-shirts. She cooks my breakfast while I feed her baby—not her baby.
Every morning she cooks and I handle Ella and we move around each other in the kitchen like we’ve been doing this for years, and it terrifies me. Not the domesticity. Not the routine.
The fact that I want it. All of it. Her humming at the stove, Ella’s hands grabbing my shirt, the coffee in my mug that she makes without asking, the hair ties on every surface.
I want mornings that smell like bacon and sound like her.
I want to come home to the light in the kitchen window.
I want to cover them with blankets on the couch and stand there like an idiot watching them breathe.
I want her to look at my mouth again, and next time, I don’t want the phone to ring.
I roll onto my side and stare at the wall between her room and mine. Twelve feet. She’s twelve feet away, probably asleep, her jaw soft, her hair across the pillow. I know how she sleeps now. I’ve seen it. I can’t unsee it.
I close my eyes and try to think about Sunday’s game. San Francisco’s defensive line. Coverage schemes. Anything.
All I see is blue eyes and bare feet on marble and a strip of warm skin above her shorts.
I’m in trouble. Real, deep, no-exit-strategy trouble.
And I don’t want a way out.