“This is so good, Rox,” Jax told me with warm blue eyes, taking a bite of turkey and dressing.
“Raina is the real hero here,” I told him, though the woman herself was absent. “She stayed up late while I worked last night and prepared everything so all I’d have to do was toss the turkey in the oven at the proper time.”
He touched my hand. “You always were too humble. You’re the one who basted this until it melts in my mouth. You’re the one who found the time to bake the cake with Callie. It’s amazing, even though I’m concerned about you.”
“Concerned about me?”
“Yeah. You work way too hard.”
“You work hard, too.”
He shrugged. “Yes, but I work one job and have the freedom to step away sometimes. You go nonstop. And when you’re not working or taking care of our daughter…” He ruffled her hair as she stuffed a buttered roll into her mouth. “You’re going to school. I don’t know how you do it.”
The truth was that I’d had to do it. I’d had to secure a future for Callie somehow, and no matter how many hours of work this might require, I’d do whatever I needed to do to make certain that happened. The mantra I’d always used came to mind then.
Callie is worth it.
She totally was and forever would be. After lunch and dessert, our little girl spoke up, addressing Jax.
“Will you take us to the park, Daddy?”
“Which park do you want to go to?” he asked her, his features soft.
“The one with the unicorns.”
“There’s a playground a few blocks from here with a unicorn merry-go-round,” I translated for him.
“Well, we can’t very well do without that, can we?” he said, and Callie cheered.
Fighting tryptophan drowsiness, we meandered down the sidewalk to the park, our daughter between us. I kept taking peeks at the picture of the three of us walking hand in hand, trying to memorize the image. I’d gone years without letting myself imagine this scene ever coming to fruition, yet here we were, together and smiling on Thanksgiving.
It was a dream come true; one I’d been too afraid to even allow myself to have.
We watched Callie run around with a couple of other children, shrieking with joy. Everything went great until somehow our daughter’s feet got wrapped around another little girl’s and both of them fell down. The other girl jumped up and hopped on the nearby swing set, but Callie stayed where she was, her face crumpling.
“You okay?” Jax asked her, sitting beside her on the mulch and pulling her into his lap.
“It hurts,” she whimpered, pointing to her knees. With a gentleness that brought tears to my eyes, he carefully pushed up first one of her pant legs, then the other, inspecting the damage.
“It’s bruised but she didn’t break the skin,” he said quietly, aiming his words at me while continuing to focus on Callie. “You know, I think I have a cure for this, something to make it all better.” He leaned down and kissed each of her knees. “How’s that?”
“Still hurts,” she said. My daughter had never been anything but honest.
He kissed them again. “How about now?”
This time she smiled. “Can you kiss it again?”
“Uh huh,” he said, “This appears to be a difficult case. Let me try one more thing.” Then he lifted her shirt, exposing her stomach. Pressing his lips to the spot right above her belly button, he blew, making a loud raspberry. She squealed and giggled, and when he continued on, chortled out loud. “Are you cured yet?”
Her grin took up half her face, which was flushed with laughter. “No.”
“Oh, well, better try again, then.” He blew several more raspberries on her tummy. I’d never heard Callie express such unadulterated jubilance. Her laughter made the other parents smile. “Do your knees work now, or do we need to get you some new ones? Walk over to Mommy so we can be sure.”
She darted over to me, no worse for wear. “Okay, run back to Daddy,” I told her, going misty-eyed. He’d only known he was a father for a few months, and yet he was so fantastic with her. It took my breath away.
We allowed her to play for another hour, then Jax picked her up and plonked her on his shoulders, giving her a piggy-back ride all the way home. At the beginning of the ride, she hooted and hollered with elation, but near the end, her eyelids drooped.
“Someone’s ready for her N.A.P,” I whispered, wondering if she might drift off right there on his shoulders. And sure enough, by the time we entered the apartment, she was out. Jax put her in her bed deftly, not even waking her, and for several moments, we both stared down at her, soaking in the blissful expression on her features.
“I can’t believe we made something so perfect,” he said, his voice low.
“I know. When she was a baby, I used to just stare at her. At each of her teensy little toes and her skinny fingers. Back then, it almost felt like she wasn’t real.” I didn’t mention how sad I’d felt at the time. As much as I loved her, and as much bottomless fulfillment being her mom offered me, her looking so much like Jax had been an agonizing reminder. And as if my forlornness had somehow rubbed off on him, his next words echoed how I’d felt.
“I wish I could’ve been here with you. Seen her like that. Helped you with her.”
I looped both my hands around his right arm, leaning into him. “Me, too. But you’re here now.”
He took my hand and led me out of Callie’s room. “That’s right. And I’ll never leave either of you again.”
I kissed him as we stood there in the hallway, overcome by my need for him. Watching him interact with our daughter today made me want to show him what he meant to me. Taking his hand in mine, I pulled him toward my bedroom, but he paused as I stepped over the threshold.
“Are you sure we should do this with her right next door?” he asked, looking concerned, and I smiled. When we’d been at his place, the sweeping size had allowed us to put some distance between us and our daughter, but this apartment was too cramped to allow for such luxuries.
“Parents do this sort of thing all the time,” I told him, nipping sharply at his bottom lip. “The key is to be quiet.”
He hissed, his eyes darkening significantly. “So, can you be quiet, Roxy?”
“I can if you can.”
By some miracle, both Jax and I had the next day completely off. This already would’ve been the best thing ever, but since I also woke naked in his arms, I decided I must’ve died and gone to heaven. He’d spooned me from behind, one hand on my hip while the other was tucked possessively between my breasts, his steady inhales and exhales letting me know that he remained asleep.
Feeling naughty, I rubbed my backside against his front, and while he didn’t come fully awake, one part of his anatomy seemed more than ready to welcome the new day. He groaned but his eyes stayed closed, so I squirmed my body around until I faced him, moving the covers aside so I could see what I was doing.
Sliding my hand around his erection, I held one hand tight around the base of him while the other pumped him up and down, slowly at first, then with a much faster rhythm. One thing about my sexual proclivities was that I couldn’t come unless I saw his pleasure. It didn’t mean I had to see him come – though I loved doing that, as well – but I needed to witness some sort of evidence that I was pleasing him.
Still, doing things this way was tricky. Normally, he was in charge and made sure I met all of his demands, leading us both toward inevitable bliss. But I wanted to give him this, preferably before he realized what I was doing and stopped me halfway through. So I monitored my motions, slowing when I thought he might wake and speeding up as he settled back into a doze. He moaned continually as I did, the sounds giving me an indication of how to proceed.
He was so rigid in my hands as I fondled and rubbed, and I stared at him, watching as the tip of him grew visibly darker and harder. It was such a turn-on seeing him like this. It gave me a sense of empowerment, one I wanted to revisit again and again. I needed him to come now, I craved to feel him give me his release where I could not only feel the proof of his pleasure in my palms but also see it with my own two eyes.
I increased my pace, maintaining just enough pressure around him, then his moans deepened and he grunted, his body pouring itself on me, coating my hands and his lower abdomen. God, it made everything inside of me ache, it was so hot.
“Roxy?” his voice was gravelly with sleep and surprise. “Did you just—”
“I did,” I said, lifting up my hands to show him. I’d never done something as specifically wanton as this before, and it aroused me so much I had to clench my thighs together to try to instigate some friction. I hoped what I’d done hadn’t annoyed him or turned him off.
“Come here,” he told me, the bossiness of his tone making me comply immediately. Changing positions so I was beneath him, I noticed that he was still hard. Then, without hesitating, he took me in one quick stroke.
Guess it didn’t turn him off after all.
After sharing a lazy and lovingly satisfying morning together, we watched Callie play in the yard all afternoon. We’d bundled her up against the November chill, her pink fleece hood decorated with pointed cat ears. Her dark hair shone bronze in the sunshine and her round face seemed lit from within as she drew different shapes into the sand with her miniature shovel.
I heard a car door slam out on the street, but I didn’t pay it much mind. The apartment complex was large enough that people came and went all the time, and I didn’t expect Raina to return until later that evening. It was only when I heard a familiar woman’s voice that I stood, my chest filling with dread.
“Come to Grammy, Calliope. Come on, now.”
Callie glanced up but didn’t obey her grandmother’s wishes. Instead she said, “Hi,” waved at her, and went on scratching in the sand.
Jax had never particularly cared for my mother, I knew. Not that they’d ever had any knock-down-drag-out arguments or anything, but he’d told me more than once that she shouldn’t have been so neglectful. Of course, his parents had been neglectful, too, only in a different way. To his credit, though, he stood up and greeted her politely.
“Leona. It’s nice to see you again.”
She didn’t bother to return the favor. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
“Language, Mother,” I admonished her, not appreciating her cursing in front of Callie. But as per usual, she ignored me.
Maybe I shouldn’t have put up with my mother’s lack of respect, but she was the only grandparent my daughter had. I felt like keeping her away from Callie wouldn’t be fair to either of them, even though after what had just transpired, I felt sorely tempted anyway.
The problem lay in the fact that she remained as unpredictable now as she had when I was a kid. She showed up as a grandmother much as she had as a mother – whenever she felt like it. She was inconsiderate and selfish. But I felt confident that she loved Callie and me, even if she had a funny way of demonstrating it.
She turned her attention from Jax to me. “Why is he here?”
Frowning, he answered her. “I’m here to spend time with my daughter and Roxy.”
Mom looked horrified for a moment, then cleared her expression. “Just on a visit, then?”
“No,” I replied this time, exasperated enough by her rudeness that I purposely laced my fingers into his. “He’s back for good.”
Pivoting away from us, my mother knelt down to remove Callie from the sandbox. “But I’m playing…” my daughter cried. Jax stiffened beside me, and I grabbed at his arm to keep him from doing anything else.
“Come see Grammy,” my mother said again, making her voice higher pitched but still coming across as brusque as she turned her back to us. “Let’s see what I’ve got in here that you can play with,” she mumbled to herself, digging through her monstrosity of a purse.
She took out a lighter, a pack of cigarettes and even a flask that sloshed with God knows what. Jax tossed me a glance mixed with both incredulity and aggravation, but I shook my head at him. As much as the woman bugged me, she was my mother and had a right to visit her grandchild.
Finally, she located a plastic keyring like you’d throw in the freezer to soothe a teething baby. “Here, Calliope. You’ve always liked these.”
Well, sure, if by always she meant more than three years ago.
Callie, predictably, took what was essentially a chew toy and dropped it in the sand, forgotten. Then, she retrieved her shovel and resumed drawing in the sand. As if bored with my daughter, my mother lit a cigarette right there beside her.
“Mom, what have I told you about smoking around Callie?”
“Eh, I’ll blow the smoke away from her.”
“No,” Jax interjected, his outrage flowing off him in waves. “You’ll either put the cigarette out, or you’ll leave.”
She narrowed her gaze at him as if daring him to say or do more, but after a moment, she stubbed it out on the lid of Callie’s turtle before tossing the remains of her precious cancer stick back into her handbag. “You always were a little snot.”
Then, as if realizing that she was the only adult in the vicinity not standing, she rose grumbling and griping to her feet. Hoisting her purse to her shoulder, she padded toward her old clunker of a car. Apparently, she’d decided not to say goodbye, not even to her granddaughter. This wasn’t the first time she’d dispensed with the practice.
She’d almost reached her vehicle when she muttered, “Jesus, can’t believe we went to all that trouble and it didn’t even work.”
The corners of Jax’s lips turned down in confusion, but I had no explanation. “What are you talking about, Mom?”
“The Liddells. They wanted to… How they’d put it? ‘End your association’ with their son.” She opened the car and sat behind the wheel.
“What do you mean?” I asked, seeking clarification even though my stomach had frozen into a block of ice. Both Jax and I marched towards her.
“His folks. They paid me to switch out your cell phone number. It took some kind of special code or something, but it worked. Kept the phone itself the same, though, so you wouldn’t know the difference. And they did something fancy to block you from his.”
“What about my letters?” Jax spoke up, his body as tense as a guy wire.
“Oh, that was easy. I just threw ‘em into the garbage outside before she could check the mail. It was nice when you finally stopped writing. Took a load off my mind.”
Jax blanched, his complexion paling to an almost translucent shade of white before his hands curled into fists.
My mother revved the engine. “Mom, wait!” We needed more information, deserved it, even.
But before I could insist on her providing us with more answers, she stomped on her accelerator, disappearing down the street.