Chapter 49
Chapter Forty-Nine
Jason
The front door of Theo’s house opened. I looked down to find Tilly dressed in a tutu and a tiara, with a star-tipped wand in her hand.
“Hey, Tillington, what’s shakin’?”
“Uncle Jason!” She reached for me, and I dropped my shopping bag to pick her up.
“You’re so big. How did that happen?”
“Fairy magic.” She shoved her hand in my face. “I have my bracelet.”
I touched my wrist to hers. “Me, too. So I heard there’s a party.”
I could hear the noise of party attendees, the collective oohs and aahs that accompanied gift-opening.
We were two days off from Game 1 of the Finals, starting at home, thankfully.
I wasn’t sure throwing a baby shower in the middle of all that was such a good idea, but my mom and Elle were determined that it should happen before Super Kid was born, and not the week before, either.
No longer were baby showers considered the sole domain of the mom-to-be and her female friends. I had attended enough of them over the years to know the expectant dad and the male spouses were welcome—no, required—to show their faces.
“Franky has a baby in her stomach.” My niece sounded both horrified and fascinated.
“Yep, she does. That’s my baby. I’m going to be a daddy.”
Tilly twitched her nose. “Like my daddy?”
“Yeah, just like that.” I moved forward, still carrying my niece, and stood near the entrance to the great room.
The place was packed with family, teammates, spouses, and boxes of every shape and size.
I hadn’t even realized we were registered anywhere.
I had assumed I’d buy all that stuff when we needed it.
Franky was seated in a wing-back chair, one of the firmer ones that I knew was probably better for her back pain. My mom was passing her gifts, like she was the lady-in-waiting to her queen.
“Finally, he shows,” Cody Jacobs said, which turned everyone’s head in my direction. I heard congratulations and best wishes, but it barely registered. All I could see was her.
She lifted her hand and gave me a small wave. I waved back. So did Tilly.
This morning, Franky had texted me.
They’re throwing a baby shower for us.
I’d love if you can make it.
Only if you want to.
Try to keep me away.
My mother approached me with Elle. “I was a little worried you weren’t going to show!” Mom was so excited about the baby, and I suspected she secretly hoped that Franky and I were more than just co-parents. Apparently, we all did, except the baby mom herself.
I set my niece down and turned to my mom. “Franky is over eight months gone, Mom. This is tiring for her.”
My mother smiled knowingly. “Oh, we’re taking care of her.”
“Don’t worry, Jason,” Elle said as she smoothed Tilly’s hair. “She’s doing fine. And if she wasn’t, she’d say so.”
Would she? Franky was outspoken and forthright with her opinions, but she also wanted to fit in.
“Excuse me.” I moved toward her, stepping around diaper pails and baby baths, until I loomed over her.
She looked up, blinking large, blue pools behind those sexy glasses. “Hello.”
“Hi, Doc. Need a break?”
Her eyes lit up with amusement. “I’d love one.”
I called out, “Okay, folks. Let’s take ten and give my baby mama a moment to pee and accept a daddio belly rub.”
A few people clapped, the usual idiots who thought a man looking after the mother of his child was “cute,” I supposed.
I held out my hand, and she accepted, gripping hard for leverage to pull herself to a stand.
Damn, she was huge, and with another month to go, I didn’t see how she could grow that baby to term and still remain upright.
“Thank you,” she murmured as I navigated between strewn wrapping paper and boxes and unopened gifts.
“You need the restroom?”
“No, I’m okay for now. Could we talk?”
“You bet.”
I led her to Elle’s office, which I knew had a nice, comfortable sofa. As I closed the door behind me, I took a breath and figured out my plan of attack.
When I turned, she was seated on the sofa. “I thought you might not come.”
“Elle asked me to stop by Sweet Mandy B’s for cupcakes, and the traffic was hell.”
She nodded. “I worried you couldn’t bear to be in the same room as me.”
“We had an argument, Doc. That doesn’t mean we’ve stopped talking, does it?”
“Generally, that’s exactly what it means.”
I’d had some time to think about this. To give her space. Typically, I resisted thinking things through, but I figured I’d take a leaf from the doc’s big book of wisdom and wait until she came back to Chicago.
“Can we talk about what happened?”
She gestured to the sofa, and I took a seat at the other end.
I inhaled deeply. “I’ve never been all that interested in settling down.
Relationships seemed like such hard work.
I’d seen how my dad treated my mom and marriage looked like trouble.
But then I started thinking more about kids and what that would look like.
As I got older, panic set in, I suppose.
I knew the women I dated weren’t ever going to make good moms. Does that make sense? ”
She nodded.
“Then I met Everly, and she fit the bill. Hot, interested in hockey, young enough that I could see a Theo Kershaw-quantity brood in my future. I’m not sure we ever had that much in common, but it was easy to gloss over the cracks when you spend as much time on the road as I do.
You come back and it’s great sex and let’s party.
You’re never really talking about the deep stuff.
About six months in, I brought up the topic of the future, and she made it clear she didn’t see me that way.
And I was pissed. Here was this chick shitting on my dream, so when I was acquired by the Rebels, it was a good time for us to break up. ”
“And then she met someone else.”
“Pretty quickly, maybe even before we broke up. To be honest, I didn’t even mind that much, until I heard she was pregnant. Turns out she wanted the same things as me, just not with me.”
She rubbed my arm. “That had to hurt.”
“It did. I’m not gonna lie. I saw this dream I had of a family, slipping out of my hands.”
“And then you saw a chance to get part of it back.”
“Yep.” I stood, reminded of that first time I came over to her place to plead my case.
I was a nervous, pimple-scored kid trying to win the approval of his teacher.
“Opportunity knocked, this stroke of amazing luck just when I needed it. And I like to think it knocked for you, too. We both went into this with a baby as the only goal, Franky. But something changed along the way.”
She took a steeling breath. “I let my hormones start making the decisions.”
“Not just your hormones. Don’t tell me your heart isn’t engaged.”
She glared at me. “Is this why you’re here? To force a declaration out of me?”
“I’m here to tell you that I love you. It wasn’t supposed to happen. I didn’t come into this looking for anything more than—”
“An incubator.”
“If that’s how you want to look at it.”
“That’s how it is, Jason. I have no doubt you care for me, in your own way—”
“In my own way? What the hell does that mean?” Like ‘my way’ wasn’t good enough for her? I’d suspected this all along. My kind of love wasn’t what a smart, intelligent woman like Dr. St. James craved. She wanted it neat, tidy, and reasonable instead of messy and unpredictable.
“If you’d let me finish, I would tell you that we’re both guilty of getting swept up in the emotion of it all.”
“Are you saying you don’t love me, Francesca? Even in ‘your own way’?”
“I don’t know how to separate it. But it doesn’t matter if I can or can’t.
You want a big family, this idyllic life you imagined from the moment you figured out your dad was a jerk.
You would do it better than him. You wouldn’t make the same mistakes.
You would be the perfect dad. And I still think that can happen.
I know you’ll love our baby, but I don’t trust that you’ll love me the way I want. ”
She didn’t trust … I had just told her I loved her. I didn’t even tell Everly, and she was the woman I had planned to spend my life with.
Freakin’ intellectuals! Why couldn’t she just trust her instincts and believe what we had was right?
“Tell me how you want to be loved.”
“I-I don’t know.”
“Oh, I think you do. I think you know exactly how you want to be loved. You’ve seen it in action.
Big love, big gestures. Your dad and Violet, your aunts and their husbands, hell, every retired Rebel you know.
But you didn’t think that was in the cards for you because you’re a weirdo.
An egghead. A geek. Who would want Slug Girl with her dorky glasses and her very strong, but often incredibly incorrect, opinions?
That girl has her books and her snails and her family, and soon she’ll have a baby to fill the void in her chest. She’s like one of her snails that doesn’t need another snail.
She can self-fertilize or self-love or whatever it’s called, and get the desired result, but it’s not what she really wants. ”
Her eyes were round with fury—and a little fear. “You don’t know what I want. I can do this alone. I don’t need you.”
“So you keep saying, Doc. But I know something you don’t. Damn, even your snails have it figured out.”
“What’s that?”
“That it’s better with two.” I sat down close and cupped her jaw.
“I don’t mean sex, though that’s definitely better with an extra person.
I don’t mean parenting, though two responsible adults usually make things easier for everyone as long as they’re not at loggerheads.
I mean that my body is just a hollow shell when you’re not around.
My mind is fuzzy if I go a day without a text or message or the sight of your beautiful face.
And that includes your slutty little librarian glasses.
My heart doesn’t beat right when I can’t be with you.
All of it”—I waved a hand around—“is better with two.”
She peered at me, her eyes shiny with emotion. I was finally getting through to her.
“But I’m not what you had in mind.” Barely a whisper.
“Nope. And I wasn’t what you had in mind. Pretty sure we established that during the BFB.”
“BFB?”
“Big Fight in Boston. Trademarking that.”
She blinked away tears. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I was trying to be logical.”
I kissed her forehead. “My sweet, smarty pants, mistress of logic. So nine months ago, the idea of the two of us being parents—together—was incomprehensible. For us both, right?”
She nodded. “Snowball’s chance and all that.”
“But it’s happened. And yet you’ve gone this whole time thinking everything is carved in stone.
Feelings should stay the same. People should stay the same.
Any deviation is wrong or disastrous to the experiment.
You seem to think that people can’t change, but you see evolution all the time in your work, don’t you? ”
She looked at me like I was an idiot. “Over thousands of years.”
“So I can’t evolve into a man who loves you over thousands of seconds or minutes? What’s it going to take, Doc?”
A small sniff. “I interviewed for the job at Harvard.”
Of course she did. “And they’d be idiots not to offer it to you.” So I couldn’t compete with that, with all Harvard had to offer her. But neither was I prepared to give up.
Francesca St. James was mine no matter where the hell she ended up.
There was a knock on the door.
“Yeah?” I called out.
“We have more gifts to open,” my mom said. “Are you guys up to it?”
“Be right there, Mom.” I turned back to Franky. “I’ve got a gift for you. Not baby-related, or not really. Just something to remind you of where we started.”
I pressed the item into her hand. She looked down at it and gasped.
“You had it all this time? I thought I’d lost it.”
It was the “I heart Detroit” key ring, the one I bought in the hotel gift shop right before we conceived our baby. Along with that first ultrasound picture, I had carried it into every game since, except for the ones against the Motors because that would have been a fuck-you to the hockey gods.
“You said you weren’t superstitious, that you didn’t believe in good luck charms. But look how far we’ve come, Franky. If that’s not the universe on our side, what is it?”
She let that settle, then touched her fingertips to the side of my head. “You have paint in your hair.”
“I’ve been getting the baby’s room ready.”
“You have?”
“Yeah, the one in my house. I went with yellow. Nice and bright, and you can almost see the water from that room. Super Kid’s gonna love it.”
Her eyes filled again. “You’re such a dick.”
“I know.”
Her heart wasn’t enough. I planned to use every tool at my disposal to win this woman’s trust. But I wouldn’t press any further because she needed to keep her shit together for the rest of this day.
“Let’s get through this and the Finals,” I said. “Then you and I are going to have a reckoning.”