Chapter 28
Grizzly
After getting all cleaned up, I threw on the comfiest non-pajamas I had—a bright, impossibly soft button-down with stripes in different colors and a pair of sweatpants.
Daddy put on a t-shirt and a pair of gray sweatpants, which was a crime, honestly.
The man was too good-looking. His shirt was an old NRU baseball shirt, which made me smile.
I loved seeing him in any of his sports-related stuff.
It was a reminder of how we had come to this point, how the two of us had met and found one another.
I'd be forever thankful to baseball. Even though my heart had always been impartial, I knew there would be some favoritism moving forward.
"What do you want to do now?" he asked me when we were back in the living room.
I glanced around, wondering what felt right. There wasn't any work to be done. We'd already had breakfast. Normally by this time of day, I'd be knee deep on a project or trying to get in touch with someone about a brand deal for a client. There were a million other things that occasionally came up.
But work could wait. I didn't want to think about it at all. I shrugged, not quite sure how to answer him.
Without missing a beat, Daddy took my hand and led me to the couch. "Have a seat here. I'm going to go get something." He walked down the hall towards my playroom, his stride confident. I watched him leave and wondered what he was up to.
When he came back, he had a book I was quite familiar with in hand.
It was solid blue with no title or author name at all, yet inside its pages was a host of fairy tale stories and little tales I'd collected through the years.
I'd had the book custom-bound because I had read the individual pieces so much that the binding had broken on them.
Daddy sat down beside me, then adjusted the pillows until he was happy with them and motioned me over.
"Come lean against me. I'm going to read some stories."
I blinked at him for a moment before my body got the message and did as he asked. With my back propped up on a pillow and my head leaning against him, he slipped his arm behind me and started thumbing through the pages.
"Here we go. This one's good."
He dove into a tale about magic and forests that came alive at night. It was one of my favorites. I had no clue how he would know that, but it seemed like with everything else between us, it just happened. Daddy could read me like he read this book.
Even with my glasses on it was hard to see the print, so I was happy to have him taking the time to remind me of something I loved so dearly but could no longer do on my own.
For a moment, sadness etched its way into my soul, thinking about the limitations that were headed my way.
My future was unknown. So many adaptations would need to be made simply to live the life I'd had before—accommodation after accommodation—to the point that I was frustrated by it, and I knew others would be as well.
As if he could sense my frustration, Daddy paused his reading to look my way.
"What's wrong?" he asked.
"I dunno," I grumbled as words failed me.
How could I explain to him that this was something that came so easily to him but was a struggle for me? That reading something I loved so much was now a challenge and would become even more so with time? The unknown of it all was just as frustrating as the reality I did understand.
He closed the book and set it down on the table as he turned to face me. "I can see you're in your head about something, and I don't like that." He booped me on the nose with his fingertip. "So let's play a game. You can ask me a question, any question, and I’ll answer honestly. Same goes for you."
When I didn't immediately jump to ask a question, he hummed.
"Well, since you have to go first because you're my precious boy, I'm gonna change the rules. How about I tell you one completely random and slightly unbelievable fact about me that’s true, and then you can comment on it? The only rule is you can't be mean."
"I no mean!" I scowled at him.
His encouraging voice and kind words had eased my spirit enough that the smaller side of me came through. He didn't comment on it. Instead, he curled up his legs on the couch and put his arm on the back as he faced me.
"Are you ready for the fact?"
I nodded, biting my lip before easing my thumb up and putting it there instead, since my lip was already tender. He watched me closely, then shut his eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. When he opened them again, I could sense that whatever he was about to say was going to amuse me greatly.
"Here's my confession," he said solemnly.
"Once upon a time, I had a secret dream. It was one I kept close to the chest—so much so that my father had no clue what was going on until it was too late. He got a call one day that I was down at the mall by myself, unaccompanied, which wasn’t okay in the town I grew up in.
When he got there, it was to discover I was at an audition to become a member of a boy band. "
I snorted before I could help it, then slapped my hand over my mouth. I winced at the pain that came. Only a second later, my eyes widened because I felt the familiar gush of a nosebleed. I pulled my hand back and yelped when I saw my fingers covered in blood.
Daddy, to his credit, sprang into action, jumping over the back of the couch and grabbing napkins.
He came over to me and pressed them against my nose.
"Hold this," he said. I pressed my other hand to the side of the napkins as he left.
I could hear him clanging around in the kitchen, opening drawers and the refrigerator.
When he came back he had a bag of ice, which he gently pressed to the top of my nose over where my hand held the tissues underneath.
"You've got to be more careful," he said, staring at me intensely. "I won't have you hurting yourself just because I told you a silly story. Is it really that unbelievable?"
I shook my head as much as I could, given the limited movement from him holding the ice and me trying to stop the nosebleed. Still, he smiled in understanding.
"Since you don't need to be talking right now, I'm going to explain a bit more about what actually happened."
He went into a long, drawn-out tale of how he had seen the advertisement on the late-night news when his dad was cooking dinner one night, and how he'd gotten it in his head that if he could become boy-band famous, they would automatically want to sign him as a baseball player too.
He could be this mega-famous guy who would take care of everything and spread the love to all the people in the world through song and sports.
It was really cute, and part of me pictured a younger version of him running around with a microphone in one hand and a baseball glove in the other.
While it was also hilarious, my heart warmed knowing how pure his was.
He didn't say he wanted fame and fortune for himself.
He wanted it so he could take care of others, so that the people around him would be able to have a good life and not want for anything.
He and his dad had enough for their family.
It was his teammates who couldn't afford their equipment yet refused to take a handout, and the students in his class who he knew were in bad living situations and didn't necessarily have food when they went home at night that he saw needing a hand.
The list went on and on as we waited out my unfortunate injury.
By the time I pulled the napkin away—the flow of blood having stopped—his voice had shifted to an almost hoarse rasp. I motioned for him to move the ice, then said "drink water" somewhat forcefully. He coughed in what was probably meant to be a chuckle but instead came out dry and hacking.
"Noted," he grumbled before standing and slowly walking around the couch to get a drink.
When he returned, he had two glasses and a clean napkin to wrap around my bloody one.
He took it away as I grabbed what was clearly my glass and took a sip.
I hated the taste at first because that copper feeling from the nosebleed lingered, but soon I was greedily gulping down the refreshing water. Daddy returned and did the same.
Then it was quiet, just the two of us seated there as if the events had not just played out.
How do you recover from smacking yourself in the face so hard you get a nosebleed after your partner tells you he tried out for a boy band illegally?
The short answer is that you don't. Not without laughing to the point of having a stomachache, which is exactly what we did.
Eventually, Daddy picked up the book again and finished the story.
I lay beside him, eyes closed, as I pictured the tale he wove together.
I'd read the story probably hundreds of times at that point, yet his version felt new and fresh.
Eyes closed, it was like a movie playing in front of me.
I was helpless to do anything but follow along, even though I knew the tumultuous parts were coming.
When he got to the big plot twist of that particular story, I covered my ears, not wanting him to read it aloud. When his hands tugged at mine, I shook my head. "No, is bad," I told him.
He peeled my hands back and whispered, "I'll skip the bad parts."
I blinked one eye open. "You promise?"
He pressed a kiss to the tip of my nose, and though it didn't feel the best because of the ache there, it was still nice. "I promise," he agreed.
I gently moved my hands away, then listened as he flipped several pages past, his eyes skimming over the words until he felt he had gone past the worst of it.
He did a good job guessing, too, because when he started up again, it was in the section where things were coming back together and heading towards happily ever after.
It was my favorite part, and also the one that made me the most emotional.
I fought back tears hearing about how happy the characters were and how much peace they’d found. I never imagined I would have something similar, yet the man seated beside me was giving me just that—my own version of happily ever after.
Or at least something close to it.
We would be navigating all kinds of trials together; changes that neither of us could predict, and even the ones we knew about would probably change along the way. Still, I was confident that it would be okay, that in the end, Daddy had my back.
It wasn’t a long shot to think that we could really be each other's forever, and if that was the case, then I kind of wanted to get started on that now.
Was it too soon to ask him to move in? Was that too forward?
I didn't want to force us into any kind of box, but at the same time it felt like wasting time to put it off simply to fit society's standards.
I grumbled to myself, pushing down the questions because they were only serving to bring me down.
When he closed the book and set it down, this time because the story was over, I looked up at him.
I knew he could see the tears streaming down my cheeks and that he probably wondered if I was upset.
In typical Daddy fashion, though, he simply wiped them away and pulled me close to his chest. He grabbed the remote and turned the TV on to something soothing—a classical station, or one of those videos where people studied together online.
I couldn't really see it, given how blurry my vision had gone from the tears.
Even so, I felt okay. Like we could sit there and I could cry and everything would still be normal afterwards. No pretending or second-guessing myself.
I was right where I was supposed to be.