by Bethany-Kris
Messy, but memorable.
It wasn’t that she hadn’t wanted to do something for Junior’s birthday, but really, Karen didn’t know what to do. Outside of work, she didn’t have a lot of people that she spent time with on a personal level. She hadn’t made friends with any of the parents at J’s daycare center, and the one-year-old boy didn’t have much interest in other kids.
What exactly could Karen do for a party or something of the sort?
No, she had just planned on getting Junior a cake, some balloons for him to play with, and a gift or two for him to open. Just him and her together.
That’s what their whole life had been, anyway.
Corrine quickly lit the candles on the cake, and then shooed Karen toward the studio room where Junior was waiting with Kathy, the other photographer they worked with.
Instantly, the baby’s eyes found his mother when she walked into the room, and he lit up with a wide, toothy grin. He still wasn’t walking quite yet, but he got around just fine by crawling, so that was what he did. The toys and Kathy, lost his attention as he scrambled toward his mother and the cake she held.
“Momma!”
“It’s your happy birthday,” she told him.
Junior grabbed onto the legs of her dark-wash jeans, using her body to steady himself as he stood. “Ma, Ma, Ma.”
Each one of his crows was punctuated by a small tug of his hands to her jeans, and he bounced on his heels. The cute little red bowtie he wore helped to set off the dress pants and white shirt ensemble that was about to be stained and ruined.
Karen smiled, unable to help the joy she always seemed to feel whenever she was in the presence of her son. He had a way of making her feel like she was the most important thing to grace his presence. As though she was the one person in the world who made him happy, and he didn’t need anything or anyone else.
“Okay, J,” Kathy said, snatching him up, even when he howled at her for taking him away from his mother. “Time for a sugar high, little man.”
Karen laughed. “I doubt he’ll eat that much of it.”
“Never give kids enough rope to hang themselves, as the saying goes.”
She wasn’t quite sure that was how the saying went, but then again, Kathy didn’t have kids so she was the type who spoiled everyone else’s children and then gave them back when she’d had enough.
Kathy sat Junior in front of the large birthday backdrop, and the baby instantly tried to go back to where his mother was standing. The baby and the adult wrangled back and forth for a good minute before Corrine came into the room, her camera already at the ready to catch the action first hand.
“We ready?” Corrine asked.
“I don’t have to clean the mess after, right?” Karen questioned.
Corrine shot her a look from the side. “You clean the baby. We’ll handle the rest of the mess.”
She could do that.
“Ready.”
“Ouch, he bit me!” Kathy said as she put Junior in front of the backdrop once more.
Karen wasn’t surprised, if only because that was a new thing for her son, and she’d had a couple of complaints from his daycare about it over the last week. “It’s a thing he’s doing.”
“Should bite him back.”
“Step back,” Corrine muttered, “he just wants his mom and his cake.”
Karen squatted down to Junior’s level, and all over again, his tantrum was seemingly done, his pearly white teeth flashing in a grin at the sight of his mother. She sat the cake in front of him, helped him to blow on the big number one candle resting in the very middle, and then waited to see what the baby would do.
Junior did nothing.
“Come on, J,” Karen said. “It’s cake, baby.”
He stared between the cake, and his mother, never moving a muscle.
“Stick one of his hands in the frosting and then move out of the way,” Corrine suggested.
“But—”
“Trust me, it works every time. They just need a taste to understand.”
Karen went ahead and grabbed Junior’s chubby little hand in her own, and then dragged the tips of his tiny fingers through the top of the cake. Then, she put his hand close to his mouth, his pink lips opening automatically at the sight of something colorful on his fingers that he might be able to eat.
Babies were a lot of things, but constant and predictable were the most common traits they shared. Junior was no exception to that rule. At a year old, he was still smack dab in the middle of the stage where if he found something on the floor that even looked remotely edible, it was going into his mouth. And if someone put something in his hand that looked like it might taste good, he was going to try and eat that, too.
Karen found herself on her knees, trying to coax Junior to open his mouth, far more than she wanted to admit. This was one stage in her baby’s life she would be glad to see go. It scared her sometimes.
“See,” Corrine said, a smugness to her tone.
Sure enough, the second Junior had gotten a taste of the frosting on the cake, his brown eyes widened, and he grabbed for more. Karen took a step back, giving Corrine lots of room to take shots of the baby and his first year cake smash. Junior no longer cared that Karen was more than a few feet away from him because his focus was only on shoving as much cake and frosting into his sweet face as he could.
By the time he was finished, he was covered in pieces of chocolate cake, and his skin and clothes were stained from top to bottom with blue and red frosting. The floor looked like someone had stuck a bomb inside the cake and it had blown up spectacularly.
Junior sucked happily on his fingers, his other hand smacking the chocolate mess he’d made on the floor, as Corrine took her final shots.
“These are going to be great,” she told Karen.
Karen had no doubt. They would certainly be fun to hang up once she had the prints. The hard part would be deciding whether or not she was going to hang them in the apartment, or the lake property.
She still hadn’t made a choice on whether or not to move.
The place was hers, sure, but still …
Karen just didn’t know what to do.
“Now comes the fun part,” Kathy said.
Karen shot her a look over her shoulder. “The cake wasn’t fun?”
Corrine snorted. “No, now we have to clean.”
Ah.
Yeah.
That.
Karen couldn’t find a clean place on her son to kiss, except for the very top of his head. “Happy birthday, J.”
His sticky hand smacked her cheek gently, probably leaving a chocolate and frosting J-sized print behind. Karen didn’t even mind. The happiness in her son’s eyes was the highlight of her day, and seeing how much fun he’d had doing a simple cake smash to celebrate his birthday helped to ease some of the sadness she had been feeling that hadn’t quite let up. She’d wanted to share this day with someone else, but it was impossible, and that left her a little blue.
Junior’s smile made it all okay.
At least for a little while.
After all, reality was never too far behind.
“No, you have to keep that on, J,” Karen told her son, fixing his hat for the tenth time since they’d arrived at the park.
The baby scowled up at his mother as she tied the strings down around his chin in an effort to force him to keep the hat on. The mid-November air was chilly, and while there wasn’t snow on the ground just yet, she could feel it all around her. It wouldn’t be long before the white flakes started falling, covering Chicago in ice and cold for months.
Karen wasn’t looking forward to that very much. It would mess up her schedules, and probably take Junior’s outside time down to practically nothing at all. Sometimes, the baby caught a cold at the slightest winds, so she wasn’t too keen on taking him out very much in the coming winter.
Junior liked the park, though, so she was trying to get him there as much as she possibly could before the snow start
ed coming. He didn’t do much except crawl around and try to climb on the play equipment, but he still enjoyed it. Sometimes, he would let his mother push him in the swings if he was in the mood for it, but mostly, he crawled off to find whatever sticks or stones looked appealing enough for him to stick into the pockets of his coat.
Karen leaned against the metal fence, tucking her own coat closer to her body to combat the chill. She watched J as he pushed himself up to a standing position, and tried to take a step forward. In his heavy boots, he struggled and fell, catching himself easily.
He didn’t try to walk again, though, instead crawling to where the sandbox was.
Another one of his favorite spots in the park.
Knowing her son would be fine to play, and seeing as how the park was mostly empty of children, given it was a school day and not even noon, she found one of the park benches to sit on and try to relax.
While her attention was on her son and making sure he didn’t wander off or stick something in his mouth, her mind was somewhere else entirely.
He should be out.
His sentence is served.
Is he out?
Those questions plagued her as she watched J throw a handful of sand up into the air.
Karen had asked one thing of Dino’s lawyer, and that was to let her know the official date of his release. She had never gotten that phone call, and for good reason. When she called the office where Mike Hardy had worked, she learned exactly why she hadn’t been contacted by the lawyer.
He was dead.
Murdered, apparently.
It made her sick all over.
“Careful!” Karen shouted to her son as Junior balanced on the edge of the sandbox and leaned forward, trying to grab something from the ground. “Sit down, J!”
The baby plopped down on his butt with a laugh, but didn’t turn to look at his mother. So was their routine when they came to the park—he was always trying to get into some kind of trouble, and Karen damn near had a heart attack every time. She was sure the older he got, the worse it would be for her.
She still loved him for it.
He was far more adventurous than she had remembered being as a child.
Karen wasn’t quite sure what it was that made her feel like someone was watching her, but the hair on the back of her neck prickled. Strangely, it wasn’t a bad thing. She didn’t feel … unsafe like maybe she should have.
She didn’t even get the chance to turn and see if someone else had parked in the park’s lot before she felt his presence. And she knew in an instant exactly who it was.
Maybe it was the way his shadow fell over hers, the sizeable shape swallowing her whole. He had always been larger than her, making her feel so small but so important in his world.
Maybe it was the sound of his throat clearing, something he’d done time and time again when he felt like he was inserting himself into her time and life and didn’t deserve to be there, so he tried to give her warning.
Maybe it was the way her heartrate picked up.
Or the shaky breath she released.
Karen couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was that explained how she knew, she just did.
Dino.
“I met a girl once,” he said behind her, “and she only had to talk to make me smile.”
Karen didn’t know what to say, but she knew he was talking about her. “Oh?”
“Fascinating woman, really.”
“I bet.”
“I fucked it up, though.”
Karen blinked, her vision cloudy from gathering wetness. “You don’t know that.”
“Don’t I?” he asked softly. “I’m still trying to figure out how to tell her I’m sorry.”
Jesus.
Karen patted the seat beside hers on the bench. “Sit.”
Dino didn’t make her tell him again.
Dino
SETTING the small Styrofoam package at his side on the bench, Dino settled into his seat, torn between giving the woman at his side all of his attention, and looking out at the toddling baby playing at the edge of the sandbox.
Dino had so many questions.
He had so much he wanted to say.
Right then, all he could do was stare.
“When did you get out?” Karen asked.
Dino cleared his throat, getting out of his head and back to the present. “A couple of days ago.”
He didn’t offer the rest of the story, because frankly, there wasn’t much to tell. That was probably the saddest part. He’d come out of the prison in a sort of haze with a brown paper bag under his arm of all the possessions he had gone into the prison with. It’d taken him an entire ten minutes of standing outside the gates, staring down the walkway, before he realized no one was waiting there for him.
No one to pick him up.
No one to take him home.
He’d come out entirely alone.
Much the same way he had gone in.
“You didn’t think to call?” Karen asked. “Maybe let me know you would be coming around?”
Dino chuckled. He heard the annoyance in her voice, but the relief was far clearer to him. She wasn’t mad—not about him showing up like this. Of that, he was most sure.
“Had to find you first,” Dino explained. “You changed your number, and then you moved. I didn’t have that new info.”
Karen passed him a look, her brown eyes holding his gaze strong for the briefest second before she dropped it. “It didn’t take you very long.”
Understatement.
He’d actually found Karen quite quickly.
It’d only taken a look in the phone book, then a call for an address, and finally, a drive. Of course, nothing was ever simple, and while he had found her and his son easily enough after being released, Dino still had to be careful.
Especially now, he had to be extremely careful.
Karen was only now finding out Dino was released, but she was the exception to the rule. The Outfit—his family and uncle—already knew. He hadn’t gone home yet, not in the proper respect, and he hadn’t shown face to his uncle or his boss, but that would happen.
Soon.
Or … when he felt like it.
Dino made a special effort to disappear after he’d come out of the prison, not wanting to make much of a fuss or draw too much attention from the police, FBI, and especially not Ben DeLuca. He had more important things to be doing, rather than playing pretend for those people.
Things like Karen.
And his son.
So he disappeared, but he had zero doubt that Ben wasn’t already demanding someone find him.
Dino was hoping for a couple of days.
A little bit of time …
Anything.
“Why that name?” Dino asked. “JD Martin. Why that, Karen?”
She looked over at him again, and he stared right back at her, not letting her drop his gaze that time around. He’d waited so long for her, hoping all the while that she had been out in the world, waiting on him, too. Seeing her, being close to her, brought up all those feelings and memories he had suppressed while in prison.
Things that he felt would have led him down a rabbit hole of pain.
The way her eyes sparkled—how her soul shined.
The slight curve of her lips, and her brilliant smile.
Her heart—how it beat; how he’d broken it.
All of that rushed through his emotions like a wrecking ball, never giving him enough time to think one thing over before the next was smashing through his veins, too, ready to devastate him with the impact.
Dino didn’t care.
He never minded.
He let each one of them crash into him, and take him under.
“I still love you,” he told Karen softly. “I never realized just how much until I didn’t have anything to do but think about how much I love you. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you properly, and that I left it just hanging there for so long, Karen.”
She blinked, sliver
s of wetness coating her bottom lashes before the tears fell down her cheeks, making track lines for pathways on her skin. Still, she didn’t make a move to wipe the tears away; she didn’t hide her emotions.
It was such a foreign sight to Dino.
He’d spent his whole life hiding his emotions and the way he truly felt from others. He had been taught never to be seen as weak by those around him; he’d been taught to hide the weaknesses someone else might exploit for their own benefit.
He’d had no other choice.
And then Karen had come into his life like a spring shower—fresh, new, and revitalizing. A spectacular life, the most beautiful soul. She was so entirely innocent to the things he was and the actions he committed. So, he had held on to that innocence, liking how the brightness of her life colored up the darkness of his own.
She wasn’t like him.
She was so much better than him.
Dino couldn’t ever let her go.
Not when she was as perfect as she was.
“You didn’t even let me answer your first question,” Karen whispered.
Dino shrugged. “We’ve got some time.”
“Do we?”
“A couple of days, maybe.”
Karen frowned. “And then what?”
He’d spent a lot of time lying to her before. And not necessarily purposeful lies meant to hurt her, but he’d omitted facts, simply to keep her naive to the other side of his life and the mafia business he didn’t want her getting mixed up in.
Dino knew that probably wouldn’t fly with Karen this time around.
That was, if she gave him another round.
“Then I have to make face with the important people in my business and get back to life,” he explained honestly.
Karen folded her hands onto her lap, but not before Dino saw the tiny tremor rocking through them. “And what about us? Aren’t we important people to you?”
“Hey.”
She didn’t look at him.
In fact, she turned a bit, angling her body farther from him.
Dino couldn’t have that. “Karen, hey. Look at me.”
Not waiting for permission, Dino slipped his hand around her clenched fists. Silently, he worked through the knot her hands had become, until he had her palm pressed to his and their fingers woven tightly together. The warmth and softness of her skin soaked into the rough coldness of his, another one of their stark contrasts that he adored.
