by Cee Bowerman
She walked up behind me and put her arms around my waist.
“You’re so warm and snuggly. Let me brush my teeth and then I want some morning kisses. And some coffee.”
I reached up into the medicine cabinet for a spare toothbrush and handed it to her. I got my own out of the holder and then the toothpaste out of the drawer. We stood side by side and brushed our teeth. When we were finished, I walked over and turned the water on in the tub.
“Take care of that for me and I’ll go make us some coffee. We can drink it in the tub while we wake up.”
“Holy shit, it’s like you read my mind.”
4.
“It’s strange how drinking 8 cups of water seems impossible, but 8 cups of coffee go down like a chubby kid on a see-saw.”
Summer complaining about dieting to Drea
SUMMER
“This is the best way to drink coffee in the morning. I’ve decided I need to do this every day.” I was neck deep in hot water, bubbles up around my chin, my feet laid up over Bird’s lap. He was at the other end of the tub and his feet were down in the water beside my hip. “Your bathtub is to die for.”
“Small people could swim in this thing.”
“My boys would love this tub.” I jerked my head back when those words came out of my mouth. “So, tell me what exactly you do for a living.”
“Hold up. First, your boys? How many and how old?”
“There are three of them. The Three Musketeers. They are four, three and two years old.”
“Damn. Are they with your ex this weekend?”
“My husband died almost three years ago, as a matter of fact it was a month before I realized I was pregnant with my youngest son.”
“Damn. What happened?”
“Car wreck on his way home from work.”
“Were you married for long?”
“I was married for almost seven years. When I was twenty-four, we decided we wanted kids. A lot of them, eight actually, and luckily, I wanted them close in age. I got pregnant and quit my job. I had my first son in October right after my twenty fifth birthday. My second son was born the next October and then my husband died in January. I found out I was pregnant in March and my youngest was born that September.”
“Shit, babe. That’s rough. You’re raising three little ones all by yourself. Hard work.”
“That’s why I came to Rojo. My Mom moved here with her last husband. She stayed here when he died. She talked me into moving here so she could help me with my kids. I got here when I was about seven months pregnant. I had my baby, found a job, and here I am. So, tell me about you.”
“Never been married, no kids. Moved here when I was little. My Mom met my Dad when I was five and they got married soon after. Been here with my family ever since.”
“So, you had another Dad before?”
“I did. But Smokey took Clem and me in like we were his own blood and has been our Dad since he met my Mom. Mom said it was meant to be. Dad had always wanted four little boys and he got that when he married her. His two and her two. A few years later they had my little sister.”
“That’s awesome. I have always thought that no man would ever want me with three small kids that belonged to another man. My Mom says I’m crazy, but I just don’t know.” I shrugged my shoulders. “If it happens, it happens. I’m not holding my breath.”
“You don’t believe it might happen? True love? Destiny?”
“I’m a realist, Bird. I don’t believe in coincidence or destiny. If I did believe, then sitting here having this conversation with you while I am naked in the bathtub while we now talk about my three sons would be blowing my mind.”
“Why?”
“Is Bird your real name?”
“Yep. My Mom loves birds. She likes to sit on the porch and watch them. She can tell you the names of all the different ones that come around. It’s kind of cool.”
I laughed out loud as I shook my head.
“Do you believe in destiny, Bird?”
He sat there and thought about it for a minute while he sipped his coffee.
“I think I might. I didn’t used to, but last year something weird happened. My friends, Zeke and Sam, both belong to the Texas Knights MC. It’s a club my Dad started with their Dad years ago. Things happened, Dad branched out and started the Kings, but they still stayed friends. Zeke and Sam are twins, about the same age as my brothers and me. We’ve been friends since the first time I met them. Last year we went on a road trip for Zeke’s old lady, Lisa, to go see her friend. One night while we were there, Zeke and Lisa decided to go their own way rather than go out partying with me and Kale. They picked a random diner to eat in because Lisa wanted breakfast for dinner. Long story short, the waitress was her sister and needed Lisa to get in touch with her brother. She did, things fell into place, and Zeke and Lisa came home with a baby girl. Her name is Brighten, and before the adoption she was Lisa’s niece. Now, Brighten is their daughter. She’s Kale’s goddaughter, and the prettiest little girl in the world. One blue eye and one green eye. She has the cutest smile and fat rolls on her arms and legs.” Bird was looking down at his coffee mug while he talked about his friends, and then he looked up into my eyes. “If they had gone with us like they planned, they wouldn’t have their daughter. Lisa wouldn’t have made contact with her family, she wouldn’t have had the chance to adopt Brighten, nothing would be the same. It was meant to be.”
“Wow. That does seem a little like destiny.”
“Yep. Why does my name make you think about destiny?”
I shook my head, at this point there wasn’t a chance in hell I was going to answer that question. If I did, the man would jump up and run out of his own house, bubbles trailing on the floor behind him.
“I don’t know that I believe in destiny. Looking back on my life, was it destiny that made my husband wreck his car, so I had to move to Rojo? Was it destiny that the night before he died, I conceived our youngest son? I wasn’t even really in the mood that night, but I just went with it, and it gave me my baby. I don’t know. It’s kind of odd though.” I laughed out loud and looked from my coffee to Bird’s face. “Pretty deep conversation to have in a bathtub with your weekend fling.”
“I like talking to you, Summer. Tell me about your family. How did you get your name?”
“Deep inside, my Mom’s a hippie of the highest order. Moon beams and sunshine. That’s what she wanted to name me. Sunshine. My Dad nixed that, so she compromised and named me Summer instead. Thank God.”
“That’s it. From now on I’m calling you Sunshine.”
“Don’t you dare.” I poked him in the chest with my toe.
“Oh, Sunshine. I’ll dare.”
I rolled my eyes and then squealed when he sucked my big toe into his mouth.
“So, I have a bunch of siblings. We range in age from my brother who is twenty-nine to my youngest sister who is just five.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah. I know. Two separate sets of kids. She had the first set, then waited sixteen years and had the second. She had us when she was way too young though, so she tried again later and had the next four.”
“There are seven of you?”
“Yep. Seven kids. I wanted eight kids of my own. Must be a mental disorder.”
Bird threw his head back and laughed. “Nah. You want what you want. No explanation needed. So are their names Moonbeam and Sunray?”
“No, but close. Atlas is a year older than me at twenty-nine, Willow is a year younger than I am. Spruce is eleven, Jewel is nine, Terran is seven and Petra is five.”
“Whoa. So, you have a son that is one year younger than his Aunt?”
I nodded my head.
“How old is your Mom?”
“She had Atlas when she was fifteen, me when she was sixteen and Willow when she was seventeen. She’s forty-four now, almost forty-five.”
“Holy shit. Fifteen? She had three kids before she could vote?”
I nodded
again.
Bird’s eyes were wide, but he didn’t say anything else. He leaned over the edge of the tub and got the carafe to refill our mugs.
“I thought I’d never have kids, but here lately I’ve changed my mind, I think.” Bird took a sip of his coffee as he leaned back in the water to rest against the end of the tub. He pulled my foot up to rest on his chest and rubbed the top of it as he spoke. “I don’t know what it was, but I feel like I am missing something. The club is calming down, or trying to, our different businesses are doing great, we’ve got a big thing coming up in a few months that’s going to give me enough money to not have to worry again. But it’s still doesn’t feel like enough. Maybe I need a dog.”
I stared at him for a second and had to take a deep breath. There was something about him, something electric. Just looking at him made me weak, his touch made me wet, his voice and conversation engaged my brain. I wanted to offer up my body to have his babies and complete my big family.
Whoa. Nope. Not going there. I’ve got three boys to raise and he is not the kind to take that on.
Or is he?
I shook my head and Bird stared at me.
“What’s running through that mind of yours? I can see the wheels turning.”
“Nothing at all. I’m getting pruney. Should we get out and forage for food?”
“Food’s not here yet and we’re not done with our coffee.”
“Food is being delivered?”
“Yep. I sent a message to the prospects and they are running to get some things for us. They’ll call out to me when they walk in the door downstairs.”
“So, tell me, what exactly is a prospect?”
~*~
Bird and I got out of the tub after we heard the men downstairs leave. He dried me off and gave me a clean t-shirt and a pair of boxers to wear for the day. As we walked down the staircase to go have breakfast, I asked him if he wanted to take me home later and he refused.
“You said I could have you until Tuesday morning. Don’t renege on our deal.”
“Okay. I haven’t had a lazy weekend like this in my life. Or this much sex. I’m not going to argue, I just wanted to put it out there in case you were tired of the company.”
“You’ve never had this much sex? But you were married.”
I laughed out loud, but when I saw the actual confusion on his face I stopped and bit my lip.
“My marriage wasn’t like that. I loved him and he loved me, but it was a comfortable kind of love. Not a passionate one. We were best friends more than anything, really.”
“Well, if you’re going to pledge your life to someone, I guess you should be friends too.”
“I’m not speaking ill of the dead, Bird. Not at all. I still miss him, but we weren’t really passionate. He was not a passionate man. He had his head in books or at work most of the time. He wanted to be part of my big, loud family. He was an orphan who grew up in foster care and group homes. He just wanted stability and a family. I gave that to him.”
“What did he give you?”
“Stability. My boys. The knowledge that I would never have to worry about him leaving me. But, then he did.”
“You had a Mom and Dad, brothers and sisters, but no stability? I don’t get it.”
“My Mom and Dad moved from place to place. Neither one of them had finished high school and they were both so young it was hard for them to find work. Sometimes we slept in the car. A lot of times we lived in a tent at a campground. When my Dad left, my Mom was lost. She floundered. She didn’t have an education or any work experience. She had three kids under the age of eight years old. We had no stable income and never knew where we were going to live when the rent was due. She busted her ass to work at the same time she got an education. She graduated at the top of her class and became a Registered Nurse. She met my stepfather when I was almost out of high school, and things changed for her. The damage was already done to me, I hated uncertainty. I didn’t like change. John gave me the permanence and stability I was searching for. He had lived the same way I had growing up, and we both made a vow to ourselves and each other, that it would never happen again.”
“Good for you two. Good for him that he could be that for you.”
“We were an old, boring married couple at twenty years old.”
“Well, you’ve blossomed then. You’re damn sure not boring now.”
I hopped up onto the bar stool beside his and reached for the box of donuts the men had delivered to us.
“What’s your poison?” I asked Bird.
“I want anything but coconut. If they brought me a fucking coconut in the mix, I’ll kill them.”
“That’s a little drastic.”
“Okay, maybe just maim them.”
I opened the box to see that luckily there was not a single coconut flake. I pulled out a cherry for myself, but I was eyeing the chocolate cake as a close second. I’d worked off enough calories having sex in the last sixteen hours, I could have two donuts.
“So, you never did tell me exactly what it is you do.” I licked the cherry icing off my finger and then picked the donut up for another bite.
“I own businesses with my brothers and my Dad. We share the responsibility for all of them, but I oversee one specific one. The one you came into yesterday.” Bird had already devoured his first donut and was looking over the rest of the selection. “I’m the President of the club, so I have a lot of stuff to do for that.”
“You’re the president.”
Bird nodded his head and then took a bite of his second donut.
“So, after what I did upstairs, does that make me Monica?”
Bird sucked in a breath and choked on the bite in his mouth. He dropped the donut onto the counter and put a hand on his chest as he covered his mouth with the other hand to cough. He wheezed when he tried to breathe in, and after a few seconds his face got bright red.
I jumped off the stool and smacked him on the back a few times until his coughing slowed down.
With a shaky hand, he reached for his coffee and took a sip.
“I’m sorry.” I whispered from beside him. “I thought I was the only one that was going to choke on something this morning.”
His coughing started up again, but this time it was half laughter, half cough, all at once.
“Okay. I’ll quit. Sorry.” He looked up at me and I had one hand in front of my mouth and my lips parted in a big O, trying to make it look like I was doing something naughty with one of his body parts.
“Shit, Sunshine.” He pulled me to him and kissed me hard on the mouth. “You damn near killed me, but that was the funniest shit I’ve ever heard. Good one.”
“I do what I can.” I tiptoed up to give him a peck on the lips and then walked around him to get back in my chair. “So, back to you, Mr. President. Hmmmm.”
Just then, the side door opened, and a very large man walked in, followed by the most beautiful woman I had ever laid eyes on. I was dumbstruck. Between the two of them, it was hard to decide who was more beautiful.
“What the fuck, man?” Bird growled from beside me.
“You didn’t hear us drive up?” The large man asked Bird.
“No. I was choking.” Bird turned toward me, I hoped to introduce me to the beautiful ones, but his brother spoke first.
“You were probably choking on a dick. Open your throat up, brother, breathe through your nose. I heard it helps.” The beautiful, dark-haired woman rolled her eyes as the man with her pulled the donut box to his side of the island and looked through the selection. He pulled out a cherry donut and stuffed half of it in his mouth in one bite.
Bird sighed and shook his head.
“I should have sold you to gypsies when you were still cute enough to get a good price. Kale, Terra, this is Summer. Summer, this asshole is my brother. Terra is his poor fiancé. She only stays with him because she feels sorry for the less fortunate, and I wouldn’t go out with her because she had a mustache. We’ve settled it betwe
en ourselves and there are no hard feelings.”
I felt my eyebrows go up into my hairline as I turned to look at Bird.
“Seriously Bird, choke on a dick.” Terra put her hand out across the table, and I reached up to shake it. “Nice to meet you.”
“It’s nice to meet you too.” I stuck my hand out to Kale, but he shook his head and walked around the island to grab me up in a tight hug. I grunted as he squeezed me and when he put me down and I saw Terra roll her eyes.
