by Amy Lane
“So glad you approve,” Nina said, sounding surprised and a little pleased. “Don’t forget gymnastics.”
“Have I ever?” Usually he could take her baiting, but gah! Tonight he’d felt wanted. Was that it? After two and a half years of dealing with someone who hated his guts, someone had literally stopped him dead, grinned at him, and said, “I want you.” Or, well, something along those lines. Tenner had been wanted. Someone had put hands all over his body and tried to please him.
And Ten had to admit—even in the midst of all that adrenaline and testosterone, Ross McTierney had worked hard to please him.
Tenner wouldn’t mind taking his turn, actually, but… but hookups like that didn’t happen twice, did they? Was there like a call-back process for a hot angry screw against a wall?
“There’s always a first time,” she said. “I mean, you pretended to be straight once.”
God. This. “I tried to be straight because this really fun girl I knew in college wanted to hang out with me. And then we were having a baby, and I didn’t want to leave her alone. Nina, I’m sorry. I am, but some of this was on you. And now we both have a great kid and an obligation to at least be civil to each other. I mean, you’re going out on a date, and you look fantastic. Go, have a good time. I’m planning to play with the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Have a nice weekend, okay?”
She looked away. “You too,” she muttered. “Email me your schedule. I… you know I hate last-minute stuff.”
It was true, and while it wasn’t “I’m sorry for being a bitch,” it was as close as she’d come in almost three years.
“I do.” He grinned. “But hey, if nothing else, this guarantees her Sunday in the park while we practice.”
“Better you than me,” Nina said in complete sincerity. “She does love to play.” Nina had loved sitting in the stands, with a beer and vendors who would sell her water and frozen ices, but actually being out in a field had never been her thing.
“You know it. Have a good weekend.” He took the win then and turned toward where Piper was waiting for him in the car.
Piper chattered on the way to his house like she’d been let off a leash. He heard everything—from what she’d learned in school to how much she liked doing summersaults in gymnastics, to how much she really wanted an I-Spy toy so she could look at bugs.
Especially that last one.
He got her to his three-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath house in Empire Hills in Folsom, loving it more as he pulled in. Nina had chosen something larger—but then, her job paid better—in a more upscale neighborhood, but Tenner’s place had… well, Tenner.
It had rich furniture with hardwood floors and deeply colored area rugs and a giant floor-to-ceiling condominium for the cat he’d adopted pretty much the minute the ink was dry on the sale.
He’d loved pets, had grown up with several of them, and while Nina was very frank about hating the cleaning and the mess that came with them, Tenner had vowed he wasn’t going to deprive himself of a creature that would love him, just because he had to clean a litter box. The result was Joe, the big long-haired black cat with one white sock, who ran up to Piper as soon as she walked in, rubbing his face against her legs hard enough to knock her off balance. After they said their hellos, he shooed her upstairs to take her bath while he fed the big furry food vacuum on the enclosed porch that overlooked the backyard. He listened to her singing in the bathtub wistfully—she was almost too old for baths now, she told him, and someday she’d take a shower like Mom. In another twenty minutes, she came downstairs in her cartoon-themed pajamas, and he sat her down for dessert.
As she ate her two-cookie allotment with a glass of almond milk, because it made her tummy feel better, she began to wind down, her eyes going half-mast, her chatter stalling.
“How come you were late, Daddy?”
“I got to play softball,” he said, and the happiness radiating on her face almost undid him.
“Like the pictures you used to have over the fire?”
Nina had put up their wedding picture, Piper’s most current picture, and one picture of Tenner, a candid one of him crouching at first base and looking young and fit and happy.
“Yeah,” Tenner told her. He didn’t tell her that Nina had thrown the picture across the room so the frame shattered on the wall the day he’d told her he wanted a divorce, but he did miss that picture.
“I liked that picture,” Piper said, yawning. “You look like a hero in it.”
Tenner laughed softly. “I sure did love to play,” he conceded. Then he booped her nose. “But not as much as I love you. You ready to go to bed, champ?”
She yawned. “I need a story.”
She really didn’t. She was reading chapter books already. She’d told him so. But he loved to read to her. “Go brush your teeth, and I will be up in a minute.”
While she was in the bathroom, he ran into his bedroom to change. It wasn’t until he was pulling the blue shirt over his head that that entire interlude—that eight-minute breathless fuck in the dark—rushed back behind his eyes.
He paused, taking a deep breath, and assessed.
His ass was a little sore, a little used, but that was almost pleasant. He went into the other bathroom to splash some water on his face and groaned. Oh, wow. It’s a good thing he’d hung out on Nina’s porch, because in the brighter light of her foyer, nobody could have missed the beard burn on his neck, his cheeks, even his temple.
Or maybe some of those scrapes were from having his face mashed up against the cinderblock.
Ross’s hand on his forehead, cushioning him from the roughness. His lips on Tenner’s temple, turning this blatantly carnal act into something more.
He swallowed. Wow. It would be great—great—if he could blame that entire interlude on the irritating asshole who’d been yanking his chain during the entire game. But what had happened in that alcove had been between two consenting adults, and one of them had been… considerate. Tender. Mindful of sex and the fragile humans having it.
As much as Tenner would love to hate the guy for making him face— He flailed his arms at the mirror. This. Making him face this sex-blossomed, relaxed, fairly satisfied version of himself, the fact was, Ross “Blows Like a God” McTierney hadn’t been the bad guy here.
And Tenner hadn’t either, really. Besides being late to pick Piper up—and he’d communicated as much as he could—he’d been… well, at the very least, a guy having a good time.
“Daddy!” Piper called, and Tenner forsook any thoughts of taking a shower before he read to her and trotted to her bedroom.
He’d seen Piper’s room at Nina’s house, but even when they’d lived together, he’d understood the importance of canopy beds and stencils on pink walls. He and Piper had decorated her room. She’d picked furniture of pale wood, without the canopy, so she could look out the second-story window and see the people on the street. She’d asked for her walls to be done in simple cream colors, with little rainbow appliques of ponies and butterflies and caterpillars all over, and a shelf that she kept her two soccer medals on, as well as her certificates for mastering units in school. She saved those throughout the week, because that side of the wall was papered with them, and he wanted her to be proud.
He’d put a stuffed chair in there, adult-sized, so she could sit on his lap when he read to her, but she’d gotten into bed and had an assortment of large, brightly illustrated books on her blankets.
Old favorites. Comfort books. He knew most of them by heart.
A few of them were even the cardboard books that she’d loved as a toddler, and he picked one of those up and gave it to her.
“You ready?” he asked, and she nodded excitedly. They had a rhythm here, and they read it together, pausing at some points, squealing in delight at others. So much fun. The next thing she picked was a book of poetry. He read four of those, with all the voices and the enthusiasm and the theatrics that he could muster, and Piper yawned at the end.
“One more,” she slurred.
He kissed her forehead. “Tomorrow night. We have to be up in the morning for gymnastics.”
“Okay, Daddy. Can I watch you play baseball?”
“I’m practicing on Sunday. I thought you’d want to play in the park.”
“I’ll watch you. I want to see you look like the picture.”
“Night, pumpkin.”
“Night, Daddy.”
He got up and turned off the light, making sure the caterpillar nightlight was still on. He didn’t even want to think about how his own daughter wanted to see him happy again.
It felt like too much of a lie.
THE THING about being a dad on the weekend was you spent a lot of time trying to make every moment count. But in real life, kids had their downtime just like adults did, and as Tenner hit Kipp’s gamely pitched balls into the outfield to give the rest of the team fielding practice, he had to admit this was a good compromise. Piper had spent the day before at gymnastics and at a local park, flying a kite Tenner had picked up from the grocery store. She’d fallen asleep in the car on the way home without their milk-and-cookie ritual, and had slept long that morning. After running around the backyard while Tenner cleaned up the house, she was perfectly happy sitting in the sandpit and playing with Hanford’s sister’s kids, building sandcastles while she paused every so often to wave to him.
He’d usually wave back.
Hanford’s sister, a tall woman with faint ocher tones to her skin and eyes as wide and brown as her brother’s, had assessed Tenner boldly, and then shaken her head a little at Hanford.
Tenner could swear she mouthed “Too old,” at him, and Hanford had looked a little crushed. A part of Tenner wanted to roll his eyes and cock his hip and give her some attitude for that. Too old? He wasn’t even thirty yet! Too goddamned old for Hanford Birmingham? Was she kidding?
But looking at Hanford holding his nephew’s hand with a sort of dewy expression on his face brought Tenner up short. Even if Hanford was exactly Tenner’s age, Tenner had a kid and an ex-wife and baggage Hanford didn’t know how to deal with yet.
The thought depressed him a little.
Right up until he was sizing up Kipp’s gentle lob—up, up, up—and choking up on the bat. Then, from right behind him, came the now familiar chant.
“Hey, batter batter, sha-wing, batter!”
He ignored it and hit the ball deep into center, watching in dismay as Hanford and Charlie Saylor and Greg Nemensky all headed for a collision as they tried to catch it.
“Call it!” Tenner yelled. “Goddammit, somebody call—”
Charlie and Greg connected first, bouncing off each other, and Hanford tripped over Charlie’s prone body in time to watch the ball drop right in front of him.
“Oh my God!” Kipp looked at Tenner in chagrin. “Are they okay?”
Tenner looked over his shoulder at Ross and narrowed his eyes. “You just had to, didn’t you?” he asked.
He didn’t even stick around for Ross to hold up his hands in honest confusion. “What’d I do? I swear, Ten, it wasn’t me!”
Tenner didn’t hang out to listen to the rest of it. He was trotting across the field to see how bad it was.
HANFORD HAD grass stains on his knees and chin, and that was fine, but Charlie had twisted his ankle when he’d stumbled back from the collision. Greg offered to call his wife, then take him to the doctor, and that effectively ended practice.
Greg and Charlie left, and Hanford’s sister took her little brother and her kids home with a sniff in Tenner’s direction, as though he should have known better, and the rest of the team had begged off. They’d been pretty close to ending practice anyway. Just as Tenner turned to Ross to ask him what in the furry hell he was doing there, Piper wandered over from the playground.
“Daddy, those other kids left. Can we go home and watch TV now? I want mac and cheese for dinner.”
Tenner gave Ross a sideways look, not sure what to do with him there. “Sure, baby. Mac and cheese sounds good—”
“And you can bring your friend,” she said as though she were the Queen herself, making a huge concession. She yawned. “He can watch TV with me.”
Tenner opened his mouth to say, “Oh, honey, this isn’t my friend. This is some loser who’s here for no discernible reason that I can see,” when Ross squatted down in front of Piper and offered his hand.
“Hi, honey. I’m Ross, and I’m a friend of your dad’s. Did you say mac and cheese? That sounds outstanding. It’s the best offer for dinner I’ve had in months. I would love to have mac and cheese with you and watch TV.” He looked up at Tenner, his eyes direct, without bullshit. “Right, Ten?”
Tenner opened, then closed his mouth, trying to think of a reason, any reason, not to invite this guy over to his house when his daughter was all but begging to go home. It wasn’t that Ross wasn’t appealing—look at him, treating Piper like a human being and making her smile like that. It was just… God, was it even responsible to talk to the guy he’d banged in the park two nights ago?
“We live at 420 Union Street, Folsom, California,” she said wisely, and while Tenner gaped at her and cursed an apparently very effective school system, she threw in their zip code for good measure.
Ross stood up and winked at him. “Smart kid,” he said. “I’ll follow you there.”
“I have to get my equipment bag,” Tenner told Piper. “Ross, can you come help me?”
“Sure thing.” Ross gave him a big smile and cracked his gum, and Tenner realized he was dressed in baseball gear, same as Ten was.
“Did you come out here to practice with us?” Tenner asked, a little disconcerted.
“Yeah, well, a little bird told me you’d be here today,” Ross said blithely. He got to the dugout first and started throwing Tenner’s bat and practice balls into the big canvas duffel. “I wanted to stop by and see how you were doing.”
Tenner frowned at him. “A little bird…? You listened to us planning this Friday night!” he accused.
Ross gave him a lazy wink. “Guilty as charged. Are you going to use this as an excuse not to have me over for mac and cheese? Because I’ve got to tell you, I’m developing a craving.”
“Why are you coming over for mac and cheese?” Tenner asked almost desperately. “I mean, there’s so many better things you could be eating.”
“My sister’s cooking, are you kidding me?”
Tenner rolled his eyes. “I’ve eaten at Pat and Desi’s house many times. If it’s not her cooking, it’s his, and they’re both fantastic.”
Ross cracked his gum again. “You got me. I was both lying and stereotyping. Are you going to use that as an excuse not to invite me to your house?”
“I’m not looking for an excuse not to invite you over!” Tenner exploded, and Ross’s grin was wider than Bugs Bunny’s ever was.
“Good! Let’s get crackin’, hoss—your kid’s gonna eat her shoes if we don’t get a move on.”
And with that, Ross swung his way over to where Piper waited patiently for her father. “Okay, sweetheart, you gotta be honest with me. Is there dessert with this mac and cheese, because if there’s not, I can pick us up some on the way there.”
“Ice cream!” Piper squealed excitedly. “Daddy got us ice cream and fresh strawberries, and I get to mash up the berries and add the sugar and it’s going to be amazing!”
Ross glanced over his shoulder at Tenner and winked. “Did you hear that, Ten? It’s gonna be amazing!”
Tenner shook his head and rolled his eyes. It was going to be a disaster. He wasn’t even sure if he was allowed to date again. He watched Ross’s long legs eating up ground, his tight athlete’s body moving with that sinuous hidden power that Tenner had felt when Ross was pounding away in his ass.
A disaster, he repeated to himself. A hard-fucking, tender-kissing, sweet-touching considerate and amazing disaster.
His heart was speeding up already.
Amazing Disaster
He was good with that. Pat and Desi’s kids adored him. He smiled a lot, played games, took them places—he had lots of years being the fun uncle—and Ross wasn’t going to mess with that now.
He followed Tenner to his house, not because he doubted the address—and he could definitely get it from Pat if he got lost—but because he wanted Tenner to see that he meant what he’d said. He was there for a modest dinner of mac and cheese, and he wasn’t going to let that little girl down even if, as far as she knew, he was just a new and interesting friend.
He had the yellow shirt in his hand and a duffel over his shoulder, containing cargo shorts and a T-shirt, when he knocked on the door.
“Don’t let the cat out, Daddy!” Piper called, and Tenner grimaced apologetically.
“Joe—no!” Tenner opened the door and scooped up a cat nearly as large as his daughter, holding the indignant furry black thing looped over his arm like a furious dishtowel. “Hurry in, man. Sorry about the cat. He likes to greet people he doesn’t know.”
Ross grinned and dropped his duffel so he could hold out his hands. “Okay, so hand him over. If he likes to greet people, I’m here to be greeted. Hello, Joe.”
He held Joe up to face level and wrinkled his nose, inviting the cat for a whisker rub. Joe took the bait, rubbing his handsome white whiskers against Ross’s nose again and again, until Ross cuddled him up against his chest.
“Joe?” Ross asked, checking out Joe’s one white sock and white whiskers.
“As in Shoeless,” Tenner explained, pointing to the sock. “How else do you explain the one white foot.”
