BIG MAN

by Penny Wylder

  For my family.

  I’ve never felt so whole as I do in this moment.

  “She’s beautiful,” I breathe. Sasha turns to face me then, and I have to catch my breath, stop myself from pulling her against me and kissing her until we’re both out of breath. “You’re beautiful,” I add, and she laughs and groans and leans back against the bed, eyes back on our beautiful baby once more, our little miracle.

  “Bullshit,” Sasha says, her voice soft and weak. “I just pushed out a damn baby, I’m not beautiful right now.” She laughs.

  But I cup her chin gently and turn her to face me once more, shaking my head hard. “Sasha,” I say, my voice low and serious. “You have never been more gorgeous than you are in this moment, right now.”

  She swallows hard. Smiles, a little half-smile, my favorite kind. The secret ones she saves just for me. Then she lifts her arms, and my gaze drops to the other most gorgeous woman in the room.

  “Do you want to hold her?” Sasha asks.

  And my whole life begins, right now.

  THE END

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  Excerpt of Falling for the Babysitter

  Want another hot and dirty read? Check out the first chapter of Penny’s other book, FALLING FOR THE BABYSITTER. Available on Amazon now!

  The trash smells disgusting. “God, did something crawl in there and die?” my friend Clara says beside me as I wheel the trashcan out to the curb. She’s stayed over for horror movie night, a monthly tradition we’ve held since we were twelve.

  I hold my breath, face scrunched up tight. “Yeah, whatever that thing was my mom tried to feed us last night.”

  “What was that?” Clara says.

  “Tofu.”

  “Is that some kind of bird, because if it is, it should be hunted until it’s extinct.”

  I laugh. Poor Clara. Her family is strictly meat and potatoes. She never even saw a Brussel sprout until we met. She thought it was the cutest little baby cabbage until she actually tried it. Now she calls them devil warts.

  “It’s made from soy beans, I think.”

  The sun has just risen. There’s a mist curling off the cement as the day warms up. The sky, with its layers of vibrant orange and yellow, looks like candy corn. A beautiful fall day.

  The sprinklers come on with a hiss that startles me at first before I realize what made that sound. We have to sprint across the lawn in bare feet to get to the newspaper before it’s ruined. No matter how many times my mom complains, the guy who delivers our newspaper always tosses it onto the lawn instead of the front porch.

  I’m shaking off the water droplets when I hear the deep rumble of a pickup truck. I watch as it pulls into Sam’s—my neighbor’s—driveway. But my neighbor drives a Toyota Prius, so I know it’s not him, unless he got a new car. With his office geek appearance, he doesn’t really seem like a truck kind of guy, so I doubt it.

  The engine turns off and it takes a minute for the driver to exit the vehicle. Then Deacon steps out of the driver’s side and my heart explodes in my chest.

  “Oh my god,” I say, standing there, dumbfounded.

  Clara turns toward my neighbor’s house. “Holy shit, is that—”

  “Yes, it is. Don’t stare!” I grab her by the shoulders and twist her body to face me.

  “Pretend we’re talking,” I say.

  “We are talking.”

  “Just stand there so I can stare without being obvious I’m staring,” I say as I watch him over her shoulder.

  She grumbles. “Fine. But hurry up. It’s freezing out here.”

  Deacon is Sam’s brother. He used to own the house, then sold it to Sam after he married. I remember sitting in my old tree house, watching as he loaded his boxes into the U-Haul, half tempted to go next door and put each box back in the house so he couldn’t leave. That was a couple years ago. I haven’t seen him since. Until now.

  He still looks just as amazing as he did back then. A little more mature, maybe, and thicker with muscle than I remember. Clearly that confident swagger never went away. That’s easy to tell even at this distance as he goes to the back door of the truck.

  What’s not easy to see is what’s in the back seat of the truck. I squint to see better. Is that the top of a car seat I see in the back window?

  “Is that …” I start to say, but get distracted and don’t finish the thought.

  “Is that what?” Clara says, starting to turn around, but I stop her.

  “Don’t look,” I say. “He’ll see us watching him.”

  “Then tell me what’s going on!”

  I keep watching, holding my breath. Does he have a baby? My heart is thumping so hard I can feel it in my teeth. I stand on the tips of my toes, looking through the mist of sprinkler spray. When I take a step closer, a stream of water hits me dead on in the face. I yelp, and Clara screams as we try to get out of way. Deacon looks over at us, and I pretend I wasn’t looking.

  When we’re out of the way of the sprinkler stream, I glance at him again. That’s when Deacon pulls a baby from a car seat.

  “Oh my god, he has a baby now,” I say.

  Clara gets this irritated antsy look on her face. “Can I please look now.”

  “Not yet.”

  Deacon was twenty-five years old when I first started noticing him as something more than just my neighbor like all the rest. I was thirteen. I had the biggest crush on him. It was his smile that first attracted me to him. Some neighbor kids and I were on skateboards out in front of my house. One of the boys I hung out with at the time—my first crush—had built a quarter pipe for us to skate on, and we’d drag it out into the street during the summer while most people were at work and we didn’t have to worry about traffic. I was too embarrassed to wear a helmet because I though it made me look stupid, and I wanted to look good for my crush, so I’d taken it off. Well, like a dumbass, I fell. Not in some big, epic way while doing a trick either. I was skating on a flat surface when my wheel caught a rock and I went face first into the cement.

  Deacon had been next door and had seen the whole thing. He rushed over and helped me off the ground. At first he looked terrified, his face all bunched up with worry until he saw that I was fine. Nothing hurt, really, except my pride. Just a little road rash. I was a tough kid and had experienced far worse falls. When he saw that I was okay, his face broke out into the most electrifying smile I’d ever seen. “You scared the hell out of me,” he’d said.

  All I could do was stare at that magnificent white smile. My other crush was a distant memory. Deacon had consumed my thoughts thereafter.

  Every day I would sit in my yard and watch him. Mostly from my tree house because I liked the bird’s eye view. He had an amazing body and was always out in the yard working without a shirt on or washing his car. He had an old muscle car back then and was in love with it. He would wash and wax it several times a week.

  I found all the different places in my house to watch him from. In the summer, when it was either too boring or too hot to be outside, I would sit in my house with the windows open, waiting to hear the creak of hinges whenever his screen door would open. I would then find any excuse to go outside. I even volunteered to weed my mom’s garden despite all the earthworms crawling around because it was right next to the shrubs where he parked his car.

  I would wear the skimpiest shorts I could find and a low cut top even though I didn’t have any boobs to speak of at the time. While I was watering the garden, I made sure to get my shirt wet so my bra would show through.

  I was just a kid so Deacon never noticed me despite my desperate attempts. To try and get his attention, I even went as far as going trick-or-treating at his house dressed as a sexy nurse hoping he would finally notice me. I was all knobby knees and straight lines. My makeup was on dark and thick. I thought I was so mature, bu
t thinking back, I probably looked like the Bride of Chucky.

  While at the door of Sam’s house, him standing in the doorway with his bowl of candy, some jerk kid came up beside me and pointed out that nurses wore scrubs and my costume was all wrong. Deacon had laughed without looking at me and dropped a Snickers bar in my jack-o-lantern bucket. That was five years ago and I still have the wrapper from that candy bar. I’d kept it as a souvenir. It’s kind of pathetic when I think about it.

  Soon after that he met someone. I don’t remember her name but I’ll never forget how jealous I was when I first saw her. It was on a weekend. I’d passed up an invitation from my friends to go see a movie so that I could wait up to see Deacon. He was out late, which wasn’t normal for him. It was almost one in the morning when his car finally pulled into the driveway. He opened the passenger side door and my stomach clenched, and I felt sick. The woman who got out was gorgeous and curvy. Two things I definitely was not back then. They went inside his house and I cried myself to sleep that night.

  It wasn’t long after that that they wed and moved away. The rest is history.

  I feel the sting of that night like it’s yesterday, all those old emotions rushing back to me. I watch as he takes his child out of the car seat. I want to say hello, but he probably doesn’t remember me. It would just make things awkward and I would have to explain who I was when the look of confusion crossed his face. I’ve changed quite a bit since the last time we crossed paths. I’m a few inches taller. I’ve grown out my blond hair, which once was a bob. Now it reaches to the middle of my back. The glasses I once wore have been exchanged for contact lenses. My hips and breasts have filled out, my A cups are now Cs. Gone is the flat chest I once loathed.

  I was worried there for a while. Afraid my body would never develop. Luckily, when I turned seventeen, it was like someone dunked me in Miracle Grow. Now, at eighteen, I finally look like the woman I’ve always wanted to be. The kind of woman that makes men stop in their tracks just to watch me walk by.

  Maybe Deacon will notice me now.

  I quickly put that thought out of my mind. He’s a married man, a father, and I’m not a home wrecker.

  With a sigh, I watch him and his child disappear into his brother’s house.

  “You can look now,” I tell Clara.

  All excited, she turns to find an empty yard next door with no Deacon and no baby.

  “You’re such a jerk,” she says.

  I smile and take the paper inside for my mom.

  I drop the wet newspaper down on the kitchen table where my mom is having her morning coffee. She’s been making breakfast, and the room smells of cinnamon.

  “Sorry. I tried to save it before it got soaked,” I say.

  She frowns and picks it up with two fingers. Gray droplets fall from the paper and pool on her placemat.

  “Maybe you should subscribe to the news website instead,” I suggest.

  Clara sits at the table and pours herself a cup of coffee.

  “I think I will.” My mom tosses it in the trash. “There are pancakes on the counter if you two want any.”

  Clara gives me a questioning look. If they’re anything like last night’s dinner monstrosity, she’s out. But luckily it’s just whole wheat pancakes. Healthy but edible.

  I put two on each of our plates and smother them with butter and syrup. Then I grab a glass of orange juice and a cup of coffee and sit next to Clara, across the table from my mom. But instead of eating, my mind starts to wander, and I find myself staring out the window. All those feelings I’d harbored for Deacon as a young teen come rushing back. They’re all consuming just as they had been back then. It’s like they’ve been lying dormant, awaiting his arrival.

  Back when Deacon still owned the house next door, I used to get home long before my mom. I’d lie in bed and picture him knocking on the front door. When I would answer it, he was there with no shirt on and a bouquet of long stem red roses cradled in baby’s breath. He’d tell me how beautiful I was and how he couldn’t live without me one more second. Our twelve-year age difference never mattered to him in my fantasies. I was all he could ever want or need. In my daydreams he was a hopeless romantic.

  I even used to tell people at school I was dating an older man. Because in my heart he was mine. And though I knew it wasn’t true and being together would probably never happen, I felt that if I said it out loud, tossed it up in the universe, that somehow—like wishing on a star—it would come true. I never said his name or told them he was my neighbor for fear my lies would get back to him, or get him trouble. But I sure as hell hinted at it. Not that anyone actually believed me. Most people thought I was lying. Or, on the off chance I was telling the truth, that the older ‘man’ I always talked about was some freshman in high school.

  Sometimes, at night, I would look out my bedroom window and watch him dress. I didn’t think much of it back then, but now I realize I was a total stalker. His window wasn’t large enough to show his whole body when he would change. Just from the waist up. But I had a wonderfully vivid imagination.

  “Remy?”

  I startle at the sudden sound of my name. “What?”

  “Did you hear me?” my mom says. “You were spacing out.”

  Clara smirks, and bumps my shoulder. She knows exactly what’s distracting me. She was the only one I ever confessed to about all of my Deacon fantasies.

  “Oh, sorry. I was daydreaming. What were you saying?”

  She blows at the steam rising from her coffee cup and says, “I was asking if you remember Deacon who used to live next door.”

  I try to wipe away any signs of recognition or swooning at the sound of his name off my face.

  “Who’s Deacon?” Clara says with that same mischievous tilt of her lips.

  I glare at her.

  “Vaguely,” I say to my mom.

  “Didn’t you used to have a crush on him?” my mom says with a teasing lilt in her voice.

  I hold my finger up to keep Clara from making any more comments.

  How does my mom know about my crush? Was I that obvious? Or maybe it’s because everyone in the neighborhood had a crush on him at the time and she’s just assuming I was one of them.

  “Probably. I was thirteen. I had a crush on everyone,” I say, hoping I sound as nonchalant as I do in my head.

  “I talked to him yesterday when he first arrived in town.”

  He’s been here an entire day and I’m only now seeing him?

  “What did you guys talk about?” I ask, trying to pry more information out of her.

  My mom puts her elbows on the table, looking out the window toward the house his brother now owns. “Poor thing got divorced a while ago. His wife left him and the baby in order to go party.”

  My eyes open wide. Luckily she doesn’t notice.

  That’s so horrible. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to leave Deacon to go party, or for any reason, actually. And who leaves their baby? Deacon and his child are better off without her as far as I’m concerned. While I do feel bad that Deacon had to go through all of that, I can’t say I’m too upset about him being single now. Maybe I actually stand a chance with him …

  I shut that thought down again. Best not to get my hopes up.

  “He has a job here in town,” my mom continues. “He’ll need a babysitter he can trust. I volunteered you for the job. I hope that’s okay.”

  Clara glances at me, a playful twinkle in her eyes. It’s not hard to tell what’s on my mind, I’m sure.

  My heart leaps into my throat. Me babysitting for Deacon? The man responsible for all my sexy teenage dreams, the only man I imagined giving my virginity to. I don’t think there’s a number high enough to count the amount of times I pictured myself in his house, on his bed, spread open for him. What it would feel like to kiss him, to have him inside of me. What do his sheets smell like? What does his skin feel like?

  Could I really stop myself from acting on the feelings I’ve had for him since puberty?


  I’m bombarded by so many questions that my mind starts spinning. I push my plate away, my appetite gone.

  “That’s fine,” I say. “I could use the extra money.”

  Clara leans over and whispers in my ear so my mom can’t hear her. “And a good lay.”

  That night I hardly sleep. I wanted Clara to stay another night to keep me company, but she has to go to work in the morning. My stomach is in knots. I’m up at four in the morning, wide awake and excited. I shower, do my makeup, make sure everything is perfect, and think about all the things I might say to him. When seven o’clock finally rolls around, I go over to meet Deacon, even though, in my head, I already know him. I stand on his front porch, in front of the door, my entire body shaking. Though it’s fall, it’s still a warm morning. The sun is bright, birds chirping. Not exactly sweater weather, which normally I’d be bummed out about. I love colder weather. The scarves, boots, hats. But at least, when it’s warm, it’s easier to dress sexy.

  Sexy but not too slutty because I still want Deacon to give me the babysitting job. It’s a fine line between the two. I decide on a loose tank top and a bra a size too small to give me more cleavage, and shorts. The more skin the better, but at the same time, it’s what any other girl my age would be wearing.

  I knock on the door. Blood rushes in my ears when I hear the thump of footsteps on the other side. When it opens, I’m nearly knocked back by the rush seeing him up close gives me. He’s more handsome than I remember. Age has been kind to him.

  When I was younger, he’d reminded me of someone, but I could never place the face with a name. Then one day Clara said he looked like Ian Somerhalder, and I was like YES, because that’s exactly who I’d been thinking about.

  “Remy, wow, you’ve grown up into a beautiful young woman,” Deacon says, looking genuinely surprised to see me standing at his front door.

  “Oh,” I say, taken aback. “I didn’t think you knew who I was.”

  “Of course I know who you are. I was always admiring your garden.”