Chapter 25 But I Won
TWENTY-FIVE
But I Won
Mabel
Ledger’s hand slapped on the massive pile of cards on the card table before I could get mine in there to gasp one last dying breath.
Defeated, I sat back and grunted.
“I win!” he crowed. “Again!” he rubbed it in. His head turned to the side to look at Nadia sitting on the couch by his dad. “I’m sorry, Nadia.” He came back to me. “But you’re more fun to play with. Nadia always just lets me win.”
As any good stepmother would when your birth mother all but abandons you to go play house with her latest baby daddy, after a string of “surprise” pregnancies that were essentially ruses to either trap a man into taking care of her and their baby (emphasis on “her”) or get money out of him to support the child who was a result of you poking holes in his condom.
Yeah, Doc Riggs’s fling with a local gal got him a great kid, albeit unplanned.
And Hutch had been very forthcoming on our drive to the Riggs’s for dinner.
Also, hearing this story, I might have some clue as to why Hutch didn’t bring up the topic of birth control.
We were exclusive. I was on the pill. He’d seen my pill case.
But he’d never broached it, even though I knew sex was better for a man if that barrier wasn’t there.
And I’d never broached it because he hadn’t.
But seeing a friend go through that?
You’d be ultra careful.
The Riggses were probably about as far away from town as we were, but it was in the opposite direction, so it was quite a drive from one place to another, and this was good, because the story had been long.
I looked from Ledger to his father, Doc, slouched on his couch with his baby daughter lying on his broad chest.
Seriously.
What was it about a hot guy and a baby?
I looked to him because he asked his wife, “She out?”
Nadia tilted her head to check, and Ledger scooted back to do the same.
“She’s out, honey,” Nadia said, at the same time Ledger confirmed “LeeLee’s asleep, Dad.”
“Right,” Doc said. Hands secure on his girl, he leaned forward and angled up to take his feet. “Gonna put her down.”
He then walked up from the sunken living room to the wood-panel-encased spiral staircase, where he disappeared.
“That was the best lemon cake I’ve ever tasted, Nadia,” I told her.
And it was.
Though I reigned supreme with my chocolate pudding cake, since Hutch just gave her a kind smile and a shake of his head when she offered him some.
“Gail, my mother-in-law, and I have kind of a cake war going on,” Nadia explained.
“And it’s awesome,” Ledger unsurprisingly declared.
“So awesome, I’ve made them sign a contract that, even when I’m in college, they have to FedEx me a big slice of whatever they make.
And Nadia can FedEx stuff. She’s loaded.
I tried to make them sign it in blood so they can’t wiggle out of it.
But Gramme said, one day I’d get that a grandmother’s vow is unbreakable.
But I don’t need that one day. I already believe her. ”
“As you should, she tells no lies,” I replied, even though I’d never met any of my grandparents.
He grinned, not understanding they made those cakes mostly for him, so when he was gone, the cake war would probably fizzle out.
Or he’d get those FedEx boxes, and in them would be the entire cake.
It felt good to be around a kid (or kids, including Liam and Emma) who had good parents, and even with rough patches like whatever Ledger had to deal with regarding his mom, he had loving adults to fall back on.
At the same time it sucked that, for the rest of my life, I’d wonder how that felt, but as I was all grown up, I’d never know.
“Get May’s chocolate pudding cake recipe from her,” Hutch advised Nadia. “You’ll blow Gail out of the water.”
“Chocolate?” Ledger said holding one hand up. “Pudding?” He held the other hand up. Then he squeezed them together and said in utter disbelief. “Cake?”
Jeez, I liked this kid.
I laughed and turned to Nadia. “I’ll get you the recipe.”
“Thanks,” she replied. Then asked, “Are you going trick-or-treating on Lillian and Harry’s street?”
“Oh yeah,” Ledger bounced on his knees. “You gotta. It’s sick.”
“I stopped trick-or-treating a little while ago, my man,” I told him.
“They have stuff for adults too. Hot cider.” Nadia smiled.
“Hot alcoholic cider. Beer. Wine. I hear Susan and Allen are going to have a haunted house that goes from the front yard, through their house, to the back. Ronnie, that’s Lillian and Harry’s neighbor, is beside herself.
She has no idea how she’s going to one-up a haunted house. ”
“Whoa. Like, just two people are going to put on a whole haunted house?” I asked.
“Susan and Allen are enjoying retirement. And Susan’s got more energy and verve in her than a kindergarten class.”
Nadia would know, she was a teacher (now on maternity leave), though, not a kindergarten teacher. Still.
I laughed, and doing it, felt Hutch’s eyes on me.
I looked to him.
“Love you’re having a good time, baby,” he said softly. “But it’s getting late, and we got a trek to get back.”
Nadia and Ledger exchanged goofy grins when he called me “baby.”
I ignored them.
“Right,” I said, pushing up from my ass on the floor.
Hutch pointed with one long finger to the arm of the chair he was sitting in, an arm that was opposite the arm where Gia was sitting, getting scratches on her head from her first daddy.
Yes, with all the good comes the bad, including as pertains to his testosterone levels.
I decided to dial back the sass in front of his friends and went to sit there to wait for Doc to come back.
He did, with a baby monitor, and as Nadia hustled to send a slice of cake with me (she didn’t bother with Hutch), and we said our goodbyes, I got the far more comprehensive BFF Auxiliary Eye Test from Doc.
I supposed I passed when he gave me a big hug inside my door and bid, “Stay safe.”
He spotted me up into Hutch’s truck even if, although it was high, I could pull myself up easily. But it was sweet he shut the door, slapped a hand on the roof and gave us a finger-to-the-forelock salute before he went to join Nadia and Ledger on their little front deck to watch us pull out.
“Nadia was a serious city girl when she got here,” Hutch said as he started us down their lane. “She couldn’t even hike herself up into a truck.”
He noticed everything.
“That explains that,” I replied.
He pulled out onto the road that would take us to the one to Misted Pines.
And I remarked, “Their house is wild. I’ve never seen a house so weird and interesting. Did Lincoln Whitaker really design that house?”
“Unsure. He wasn’t an architect. But he definitely had a heavy hand in it.”
“It must be strange to live there,” I noted, thinking of all the history.
“What built that place was love, loyalty and family,” Hutch returned. “What’s there now is the same. Unspeakable tragedy happened in the middle. But what that family built endures as it is today.”
He was also very wise.
“That’s a good way to look at it,” I mumbled.
“You’re really good with kids, May,” he remarked.
I smiled at him. “That’s because I’m just a big kid myself, Hutch.”
He returned my smile, but his was necessarily aimed at the windshield.
“You’re good with them too,” I said.
A small shrug and, “I dig kids.”
He did, very much, and I had to ignore that as well.
I was ignoring a lot lately.
Including the fact I was ignoring a lot lately.
“You got your shit?” he asked.
“You carried it to the truck for me,” I answered.
That “shit” being my overnight bag.
With the litter arriving, we’d switched things up.
Tonks had the same training schedule, but Monday and Wednesday of this past week, I spent the night at his.
Now, it was Friday and I was spending the weekend there too.
And Hutch told me this had to go on for several weeks, until the pups got older, just because they were young and shouldn’t be left alone for very long, but also because he’d already started training them.
Since I liked his house, and his pups, and him, I had no qualms with that.
Okay.
Yes, I knew we were skating close to the edges of a razor-sharp line we did not want to cross.
But I was happy.
Hutch was happy.
I hadn’t had a lot of clean, good, lasting happiness in my life.
And I was getting the impression Hutch hadn’t either.
So I determined we’d skim that edge.
We might get cut.
But some things were worth the pain.
“I cannot believe you talked me into this,” Hutch said in a whisper the next evening.
A whisper that should have been a whole lot quieter.
Or not come out at all.
“Shh,” I shushed him as two people turned to give us be quiet looks.
I shot them a sheepish smile, but inside, I was proud of myself because I could now easily identify tourists.
She was in a waterfall cardigan that was very pretty and stylish, but nowhere near warm enough in this chill. So the Misted Pines Ghost Tour had only started, and her arms were already wrapped around her, and she was rubbing them.
This was paired with a tee (she should have had a thermal on, at least), fancy jeans, and high heeled booties (the brochure said we’d be walking about a mile, so I didn’t know what she was thinking on the footwear score).
The man she was with was wearing a crisp, white and navy checked shirt, a matching navy puffer vest, also fancy jeans and boots with no scuffs on them. He was likely freezing too, but his dick, which had probably shrunk in the cold, wouldn’t let him show it.
Whereas Hutch was in his brown and black insulated flannel over a black thermal, faded, worn jeans and his scuffed boots.
And I was in Hutch’s cozy, massive fisherman’s sweater (because the dude got a taste of something he liked, namely me wearing his clothes, so when I had this spontaneous idea and told him I might need to go home to get something warmer, he’d offered it to me) under a long-sleeved shell, the new scarf I bought from Melissa, a beanie pulled over the tops of my ears, faded jeans, and my also scuffed boots.