still. I didn’t want to make her anxious but until we found our way to some kind of new normal with each other, this was how it was going to be. I felt cut open and raw, she was fidgety and unsettled. I’d never realized how deeply we’d relied on each other to keep our worst traits at bay from the rest of the knowing world. She held me together and kept all my jagged edges smoothed out and less dangerous, I kept her calm and quieted all the restlessness in her that made her so volatile and needy.
“I have a doctor’s appointment next week. I wanted to see if you would come with me.” She was heading into the second trimester, so the baby was starting to seem very real. Soon she would be showing and we would be to the point where we would know if we were having a boy or a girl. I’d gone with her to one doctor’s visit but her mother had been there as well and it was a terrible afternoon for all of us. She’d asked me to go a couple more times and I’d refused thinking it would be easier for all involved. Seeing the nervousness on her pretty face right now, I understood that wasn’t the case.
“Did you ask your mom to go this time?” My tone was flat because she could make this all better if she just stepped up to the plate for once in her life. If she took care of someone else instead of expecting everyone to take care of her.
“No.” The word squeaked out and she jolted. “Uh … I talked to Dixie and she sort of mentioned that it’s our baby and that we’re the ones who are going to raise it, not Mom and Dad, so we needed to figure out how to coparent without them in the middle of us. I don’t want to go alone because it’s scary, but Dixie is right. It should be you and me.”
Dixie was a fixer. It’s what she did. She also had the annoying habit of seeing straight to the heart of a situation and knowing the best way to get everyone involved on the right path. Even more, she was the only person in the world that could make Kallie see beyond her own selfishness.
I groaned a little as I nodded in sullen agreement. “I’ll go with you. Just text me the date and time.”
Her lips quivered into a tiny grin. “Thanks.”
I finished my coffee and pushed back from the table. I stopped and went still as stone when her fingers touched the back of my hand. I expected it to burn or for a familiar tingle to shoot along my skin. There was nothing. There was no jolt like the one that had almost taken me to my knees when Poppy’s shaking fingers lightly grasped mine yesterday.
“Um … I know it’s none of my business and I have no right to pry, but Dixie mentioned you’ve been dating a lot recently.” A tight expression pinched her face and her eyes narrowed. “I … ugh … I just want to tell you to be careful. You’re a really nice guy, Wheeler. There are a lot of women out there that will take advantage of that.” She should know. She was one of them.
I shook her hand off. “I’m fucking … not dating.” She recoiled, which made me soften my tone when I told her, “You’re right, it’s none of your business.”
“Rebounds never work out.” There was some of the old Kallie shining through.
I rolled my eyes at her. “I gotta go.” I turned my back on her and headed toward the door only to be brought up short when she called my name. One of these days all those years of conditioning to heel at her command would break. I couldn’t fucking wait. I looked at her over my shoulder, impatience clear in every line of my body.
“I was the wrong one, but the right one is still out there.” Maybe she really did want me to be happy, or maybe she simply wanted me to find someone so that I was less likely to screw up trying to raise our kid on my own. Either way her words weren’t ones I wanted to hear.
“When you figure out where you want to live, you can have all the furniture in the house. I’ll put it in a storage unit and cover the cost. If you plan on staying with your parents for the long haul, or get to the point where you’re playing house with Roni, you can sell it all and use it for whatever we need for the baby. I’ll see you at the appointment, Kallie.”
I heard her quiet gasp as I pushed out the door into the bright Denver sunshine. That meeting had gone as well as could be expected and I was surprised that spending time with her wasn’t as awful as it had been the first few months after we’d split up. She still wasn’t my favorite person to be around, but seeing her and sharing the same air as her didn’t make me feel like I was suffocating and bleeding to death from a broken heart anymore. Things between us had been rocky before the split, so I think the reason everything felt so exposed and sensitive after the breakup was more the loss of what I’d thought I had, rather than the loss of what I’d actually had. She took my stability with her when she walked away and left me with something totally shakey and unsure. She ripped the foundation I’d steadfastly built out from under me, and that left me in the wind … exactly how my mother had. Exactly how the child welfare people had left me each and every time they had to place me in a new home with a temporary family.
Feeling restless and uneasy about just unsteady everything in my existence currently was, I pulled my phone out and pressed a finger to the name of the single thing that put a stop to all the questions and uncertainty. All I had to do was picture Poppy’s wide, timid eyes and everything that was screaming and thrashing around inside of me went quiet. It was so much easier to focus on overcoming her aversion to closeness than it was to think about straightening out my own mess. I was convinced I could prove to her that there were men in the world she didn’t need to be afraid of, that there were men who would do right by her even if that rightness came with a little bit of maneuvering. She said I moved her without using my hands and she was correct. Everything I did around her was me trying to get her to move closer to me. I pushed her to take steps that she needed to take in order for her to be comfortable around me. I wanted to see if there was any way she would be open to something more than our current tense friendship.
I wanted her, but I wanted her to want me back even more. Partly because I knew I was a safe bet for her once she was ready to jump back into the dating pool. I wouldn’t take advantage of her and had every intention of handling her like I did one of my classics that was on the verge of falling apart. I would tread lightly and deliberately until all the parts were in working order and then I would prime her and make her purr the way she was always meant to. I wasn’t scared of the work and I had every confidence that the end result would be a thing of pure beauty and something that was priceless.
The phone rang for a long time, and just when I was about to hang up and send a text, the call connected and her breathless voice rushed out a quick “hey.”
I frowned at my reflection in the side of my car and trapped the phone between my ear and my shoulder as I unlocked and opened the door. “Are you okay?”
She gave a brittle-sounding laugh. “Uh … I’m fine. I ended up alone in an exam room with a male patient for a little longer than I was comfortable with because the doc had an emergency in another room. The guy’s dog could sense my anxiety and had a little meltdown. You actually called at the perfect time.” She exhaled and I could practically hear her entire body shaking in the way her voice quivered. “You gave me an excuse to get out of the room. I don’t usually freak out so badly at work. I guess that near miss with the guys from the apartment yesterday has me a little on edge. My therapist is going to have a field day with me during our next session. I always think I’m getting better, but then the universe decides to show me that I’m not.”
I heard a dog bark and she called to someone that she needed five minutes. I hated that she was so hard on herself when her reactions were totally normal considering everything she had been through. “You let me into your apartment last night even after those guys scared the piss out of you. You voluntarily stood in the kitchen with me and you shook my hand. You wouldn’t have done any of those things a couple months ago when we
