by P. Dangelico
Looking down at me, he flinches, his blue eyes going wide. “Hey, not cool. Don’t body shame me. I’m already dealing with a lot right now for you to add this on top of it.”
Shit. I blanche at his hurt expression. I was joking, at least somewhat. It never even occurred to me that he was touchy about his looks and that the exhibitionism was masking feelings of inadequacy.
“I’m… I’m sorry, Aidan. I wasn’t body shaming you. I just… I was kind of joking. There’s nothing to be ashamed about. Your body is perfect in every way. Literally, it’s perfection.”
A wicked smile spreads across his face. “So you noticed?”
Gospel truth, I’m gonna kill him before his time is up here. Mona’s property is five hundred acres last time I checked. They’ll never find his perfect dead body.
“Start the engine before I’m the one forced to wear an ankle monitor.”
“You find me charming. Admit it.”
“I’m morbidly fascinated with your ability to take rejection and turn it into a win.”
“I’m an actor, Tweetie. I’ve had plenty of practice with rejection.”
I highly doubt he’s ever faced rejection. The sunlight catches his eyes at the right angle and turns them into glittering pools of Caribbean blue.
“Wait, don’t move. You look great sitting up there. Let me take a few pictures for Cruella.”
He gives me a lopsided grin and tips back the rim of his straw hat, squinting one eye into the light. “Cruella?”
“Jules…” I flash a tight smile. “Please don’t tell her.”
He laughs. Then he strikes a serious pose and I snap away. Aidan looking pensive. Aidan looking off in the distance. Aidan laughing as he pulls the rim down over his eyes. The camera loves this man, this much is true.
“Aidan,” I hear Shane call out behind me. I turn to watch him cross the distance between the guesthouse and the place next to the barn where I park all the equipment.
He’s wearing one of his fertility outfits again. Tightish retro USMC t-shirt. Dark jeans. Red Wing boots. The name is fitting since my uterus starts spring cleaning every time she sees one, removing cobwebs and fluffing pillows, diligently preparing the place where his children will live for nine months. If he continues looking this good, she’ll start naming all ten.
He holds his cell phone up when he reaches us. “Jules needs to speak to you about an offer…”
I’d forgotten that Aidan doesn’t have a phone on him, per the judge’s order. His face brightens, his excitement barely contained. As fun as this has been, it was only a matter of time before Aidan would get bored on a farm. Monkeys like adventure. Collies not so much.
He hops down from the tractor and takes the phone from Shane. “Thanks,” he says, and walks away for privacy.
Shane looks down at me and the tension escalates. I climb the tractor and sit in the seat, ready to do what I always do: a “man’s job.”
“Hazel looks like she’s doing better,” he says out of the blue.
I stop what I’m about to do––start the engine––because…did he just admit to checking on Hazel?
“You checked on Hazel?”
He places a boot on the tractor tire and leans. “Seemed like the decent thing to do,” he tells me, all blasé. I have to bite my bottom lip to stop myself from smiling. It takes serious effort.
“Billy, my one-eyed dwarf goat, has stolen her attention now that Pepper’s gone.”
“How soon they forget…” he says drily, musing out loud. A smile follows and I nearly jump him right then and there in broad daylight.
Needing something to do, I turn the ignition on the tractor and it makes a strange sound.
Donkey dung.
“Try it again,” he tells me and I send him some serious side-eye. What are we back in 1920? I’ve been doing this alone for far too long for him to show up and give me orders. He walks around to the front of the tractor and pops the hood like he owns it.
“You know what you’re looking at or should I call my guy?” Dexter knows how to fix this thing. I pull my phone out of the front pocket of my short overalls, ready to dial. Shane pokes his head out from under the hood and scowls at me. “Sorry, Colonel, had to be sure you weren’t a poser.”
“Can you get me a tool box? Make sure you have a torque wrench.”
I jump down and head to the maintenance shed where I keep all the gadgets.
When I return, automotive tool kit in hand (thank you very much), he’s removed his t-shirt and hung it on the waistband of his jeans. These Hughes boys sure like to get naked.
“Got it,” I announce, very proud of myself, and hold up the kit. Taking it from me, he places it on the top of the tire and opens it up. Meanwhile, I watch him like I’m getting paid to do it properly. Grabbing a few tools, he ducks back under the hood and starts working.
“How long you gonna stand there and watch?” drifts out from under there two minutes later.
“Why? Is there a time limit? Do you charge by the minute?”
I can’t help myself. I really can’t.
He ducks out again from under the hood and finds me sitting on the tire. His lips twitch, almost risking a full-blown smile, eyes narrowing as he scrutinizes my blank expression. “I think I liked you better when you were stuttering around me.”
“That wasn’t stuttering. That was breathing in between letters.
“That was stuttering.”
I shrug. “First impressions eventually wear off.”
Amusement fills his big brown eyes. Shane doesn’t want to have fun, but he can’t help himself either. God, why fight it so hard?
“Yeah? What happens after that?”
“Reality sets in.”
This is beginning to look a lot like foreplay. Better yet, am I the only one who thinks this feels like foreplay? Probably.
He’s taken, you dipshit! my conscience screams.
He watches me for more time than I’m comfortable having that level of scrutiny directed at me. No doubt to remind me why I should be intimidated. But we are way past that point. Or are we? I’m definitely starting to sweat.
“I charge by the second,” I tell him. Then he laughs. A strong burst of laughter that resonates deep in his chest.
“Start the tractor, wise ass,” he murmurs once he’s done. I try turning the key again and the tractor turns on.
“Woo-hoo!” I shout with my arms raised. He comes around to my side and I hold out a fist to bump. “Fist bump! C’mon Colonel, don’t be such a downer.” Which he doesn’t. “Okay, never mind.” I laugh (at myself) and the grin he’s been fighting since I’ve known him breaks free.
Is this our turning point? I hope so. But the question is… is it a good one?
Shaking his head, Shane grabs the t-shirt from his waistband and pulls it over his head. In the meantime, I try to remind myself that he’s taken.
“Blue Baldwin, it’s your mother speaking—Athena Baldwin,” she says as if there was any doubt. “I’m in town and I’m dying to see you. Call me.”
She’s in town? So soon?
This is not how I like to start my day, but I wasn’t given a choice. My phone is never on silent, just in case Mona has an emergency and she needs me.
Kicking the covers off, I drag my now-annoyed self to the bathroom. As I’m passing by the window, however, I catch sight of something I thought to never ever see in my lifetime. A full moon courtesy of Shane Hughes.
It looks like Shane has set up an outdoor shower and is, in fact, showering outdoors… outdoors where no one ought to be able to see him in his naked glory. And yet here I am, seeing him. All of him. Every muscle. There are too many to count. Every dent in his butt. Exactly two. Every hanging dick surrounded by dark hair. One, thank God.
Lord, why do you test me so?
My conscience debates this for all of a second. I grab the binoculars and, in Mona’s exact words, spy on the man. Unfortunately, by the time I focus, he’s wrapped a towel around his w
aist and is heading inside. Major missed opportunity. Damn you, conscience.
I’m downstairs walking into the kitchen twenty minutes later. After my mother’s cryptic and rather unsettling phone call, I know it’s time to pay my father a visit.
“Go, sweetie. Go see your father. Darby and I will look after the animals today,” Mona tells me after I explain what happened. Not the part about me spying on Shane. The part about me not knowing what to do about my mother and asking my father for advice.
I don’t doubt the animals will get looked after; Mona is nothing short of brilliant in that regard. She taught me everything I know, and she learned everything she knows from her father, a storied horseman, who owned and operated a working cattle ranch for five decades. Mona’s the one who decided to stop breeding red Angus for human consumption.
The issue, as I sit at the kitchen counter and stare at the two of them over the rim of my coffee cup like a suspicious parent at a couple of errant teenagers, Mona with a silly smile on her face and her I-just-got-nailed-to-the-wall hair and Darby looking like he could take a ten-hour nap, is that I’m afraid they won’t make it outside, let alone to the barn.
“You know how they get if lunch hay is late.”
Mona throws Darby a conspiratorial smile before her attention returns to me. “We’ll be fine. Don’t you fret.”
I pull into the parking lot of my father’s station house a little before noon. Black and whites are parked side by side, next to unmarked sedans. A man, tall and lanky, with the same shoulders I see every time I look in the mirror, exits the glass double doors. His silverish blond head tipped down. His hands stuffed into the front pockets of his dark navy suit pants. His full mouth set in a grim, straight line.
It’s an expression I know all too well, the same one I would see across the small round kitchen table on the rare occasion we had dinner together when I was growing up. He’s in deep thought over a case, unavailable to anything or anyone else.
I don’t speak to my father often. If you have a parent obsessed with their career, you understand why. Because even when we speak, he’s not really present. His mind is held hostage by whatever case he’s working on. It gets tiresome having to keep repeating the last sentence because he isn’t really paying attention.
Then again, do I have a right to complain? Not really. He was warm and affectionate when he was around and always gave me anything in his power to give.
He gave me my first car, a used Jetta I drove until the wheels fell off. He paid for my education so I could become a paramedic. We didn’t have a house; we lived in a two bedroom apartment. But I didn’t have any financial debt coming out of school. That’s a lot more than most people have.
“Dad,” I say before he runs me over.
I used to joke that he’d walk into oncoming traffic one day. I never realized how much truth to it there was.
His head snaps up, and when his warm green eyes meet mine, he smiles.
“You’re here already?” he says clearly surprised to find me standing before him.
“We said noon.”
Expression confused, he takes his phone out of the inside pocket of his jacket and checks the time. Five to twelve. “Wow. Where does the time go?”
My back stiffens. It’s the same uncomfortable feeling I always get when he acts forgetful. Like I’m imposing. Taking up too much of his time. “Can you still do lunch or––”
“Of course,” he says, jumping in before he sees the disappointed look on my face, the same one I used to wear on the regular when I was a kid. “C’mon. I haven’t seen you in weeks––”
“Months,” I’m quick to correct him.
“Months,” an embarrassed smile lifts his lips but not his eyes, “Give your old man a hug.” He opens his arms and I walk straight into them.
Standing on my toes, I wrap my arms around him and can’t help but notice that he’s thinner than last time I saw him. “You lost weight.”
“You know how it is––I forget to eat sometimes.”
We’re so much alike in so many ways. I inherited my mother’s beauty mark and her dark blue eyes. But my work ethic, my blonde hair, and the strong vein of responsibility coursing through me comes from Alan Baldwin.
We walk to our usual hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant around the corner from where he works. The food is top notch and we spend less time traveling and more time talking. Inside, he waves at a table full of cops he knows.
“Hey, Cap, who’s your lovely lunch companion?” a young attractive guy at a table of four asks, all of them uniformed LAPD.
“My daughter, you filthy animals. Behave yourselves,” he jokes back.
The guys laugh.
“Blue, meet Hernandez and the guys,” Dad says.
“Hi.” I wave.
“Hi, Blue,” says Hernandez, the first to speak.
“Nice to meet ya,” the rest answer as well.
“Are you single?” one shouts and they all laugh again.
Dad greets the owner of the restaurant before we order our food and then grab a table in the back.
“How’s the rescue business going?”
He jests, but he’s been supportive of it. Not once has he asked or pushed me to go back to working as a paramedic.
Dad was a rock after the attack. Always by my side when I needed him. Always a steady calm presence. The opposite of Jaime who was constantly wearing an expression of dread and concern and even had trouble making eye contact at times. Not exactly reassuring when you’re laid up in bed and everyone refuses to give you a mirror.
“Good… good.”
“And the movie star? He giving you any trouble?”
I called my father before I agreed to Aidan’s terms. I needed someone to give me sound advice regarding a “repeat offender.” Little did I know what I was dealing with. Frankly, it turned out better than I could’ve anticipated. Even with our bumpy start.
I think of all the ups and downs, all the drama since the Hughes brothers came to live with us, and I smile. It hasn’t been boring, that’s for sure.
A wave of sadness comes over me when I think of them leaving. It’s still not for a while, but I’m going to miss them all the same.
“Nothing serious… I kind of like him actually. He’s a good guy who lost his way.”
My dad nods. Then I recall why I needed to see him.
“Mom’s in L.A.”
He surprises me by nodding again. “I know.”
“You do?”
“I saw her.”
“You did?” I repeat, flat-out shocked at this point. He nods. “She didn’t tell me… that she was going to see you.”
He takes a bite of his steak taco. “She said she tried to call you about ten times but her calls kept getting pushed to voicemail.”
“Okay, yes, true. But––”
“We’re getting a divorce,” he continues nonchalantly. Like he hasn’t just dropped a stink bomb on me.
Something inside me comes loose. I don’t know why. They haven’t been living as a married couple for over two decades. I can barely remember seeing them together. And yet I’m almost on the verge of tears.
“Daddy…” I haven’t called him that in a decade.
She couldn’t bother to mention to me that this was the reason for her visit? Athena has done it again, pulled the rug out from under me. And I’m not handling it any better than I did when I was six, twelve, or twenty. I’m back to square one.
“Yes, Bluebell?”
“Why’d you marry her? You two couldn’t be more opposite if you tried. What made you think you could make it work?”
I have to know. Something dark is lurking inside of me—the fear that maybe I’m more like her than I want to accept. That my judgement is shaky at best. That I pick the wrong men.
I’ve never asked my father a personal question before. We just don’t have that kind of relationship. There was a period when I was a teenager that I got a little bold and pushed, but he always shut me
down. “Loose lips sink ships,” was the answer he always gave me.
“When you know you know,” he says dismissively.
“That’s not an explanation.”
He takes a deep breath and looks off for a moment, his suntanned brow bunching together making him look older than his age. “Your mother is the most exciting woman I’ve ever met. Nobody else has ever come close.”
He says it with such sincerity that I don’t doubt for a minute that he means it.
This explains why my father has remained single all these years. I know he’s dated women. Quite a few of them actually. He never tried to hide it from me. The ones who I accidentally met were always nice and polite. None of them lasted longer than a year, though.
“She’s exciting like a hurricane is exciting. Or an earthquake. She’s exciting because she’s destructive.”
He’s shaking his head before I even finish. “No. You can’t blame someone for being who they are, Blue. I knew she was not the type to stay home and raise a family and I ignored all the signs…” He sighs, wipes his mouth and hands with a paper napkin. This conversation is making him uncomfortable, but it’s been a long time coming. “I can’t blame her for her nature any more than she can condemn me for mine.”
“You mean like the scorpion and the frog?”
His mouth kicks up on one side. “Something like that.”
Then it hits me like a shockwave reverberating down to the soul. The realization that I’m not like Athena but I’m just like my dad, picking men for the wrong reason… hoping to domesticate a wild animal when everyone knows that bears don’t do well in captivity.
The look on my father’s face says he accepted his fate long ago. But I haven’t.
“What about her being an absolutely shitty mother? Can I blame her for that?”
His eyes fill with pity. “That’s for you two to work out.”
This has always been a bone of contention with my Dad. He won’t take sides. I needed him to take my side so many times when I was growing up. I needed it so many times I lost count. But he never threw shade at her. Not once.
“I know what you want me to say, Blue,” he continues, “But I can’t fix this for you. As much as I’d like to, I can’t. You’re going to have to do it for yourself. And after you do, come see your old man. I’ll give you a hug, tell you I love you, and listen when you need to talk.”
