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Dylan might be a creature of the film industry, but children’s movies were not his area of expertise. He’d been approached once to do a voice in a Pixar film, but the job had conflicted with his Galaxy Force obligations, so he’d had to pass. He knew and admired folks who worked on animated features, but liking them didn’t mean he was obligated to sit through their movies, so he skipped them.
Sky High wasn’t bad, though. The story, which had something to do with a little girl who sailed through the air on a magic kite, was loud and colorful, with the sort of catchy songs that threatened to lodge permanently inside his skull. The theater in the multiplex was noisy with the babble of the dozens of children in the audience, and the air was dense with the cloying aroma of popcorn.
Gwen had allowed Annie to sit between Dylan and herself. Maybe he was reading too much into that, but he viewed the seating arrangement as an indication of trust. She wouldn’t stand between him and his daughter—or sit between them at the movies.
Annie clearly found the movie enthralling. He’d bought her a small popcorn—movie-theater small, which meant the tub was almost as big as her head and he’d wound up eating more than half. His tongue felt greasy, and salt caked the corners of his mouth. But sharing popcorn with Annie struck him as a very father-daughter thing to do.
He needed to remind himself that fatherhood was a lot more complicated, and a lot more challenging, than simply taking his daughter to a kiddie matinee and munching on popcorn with her. In the movie’s few scary scenes, she invariably leaned into Gwen’s shoulder and squeezed Gwen’s hand. Dylan was not the person she’d turn to when she was afraid.
Not yet.
Hell. What did he know about being a father, anyway? He’d watched enough sit-coms as a kid to know there were two kinds of fathers: the wise, steady fathers popular in the black-and-white shows from the fifties and sixties in perpetual reruns on TV Land, and the incompetent, goofball fathers popular in the shows from his own childhood. He would much rather be the first kind of father, but wise? Steady? Those weren’t exactly words he’d use to describe himself.
Gwen seemed to have the monopoly on wisdom and steadiness. Every now and then, he’d glance at her over Annie’s head. She kept her face forward, and the light from the screen outlined her profile. When he’d met her six years ago, he’d thought she was cute. Now she struck him as...
Beautiful. With her hair pulled back, he could see the elegant lines of her jaw and throat, the delicate hollows below her cheek bones. Her eyes were like blue topaz, clear and glittering, her lashes long and thick. Her body... She was as slender as he remembered, but more solid somehow. That body had carried his child.
He felt a sharp tug in his groin, totally inappropriate while watching a kiddie-flick with a five-year-old girl seated next to him. Totally inappropriate in any environment, he warned himself. Gwen had a lover, that guy he’d met on her front porch yesterday. Dylan was causing enough turmoil in her life without adding lust to the mix.
It had been good with her six years ago, though. Much, much better than good. What if they had another one-night-stand? Another touch-my-cheek-and-walk-away night? Could they do that without messing up Gwen’s relationship with her boyfriend? Could they do it without messing up Dylan’s relationship with Annie?
Was he sitting in this dark, cacophonous theater, watching a cartoon girl soar through the clouds on the back of a kite, because he wanted to be with Annie, or because he wanted to be with Gwen?
Not that Gwen particularly wanted to be with him. She was only tolerating him because he’d convinced her his disappearance from her life when she’d needed him all those years ago wasn’t his fault.
It was his fault, of course. He’d made love with her every way he knew how that night, and then he’d walked away. She’d let him walk away. She’d seemed to feel the same way he had. She’d touched his cheek as much as he’d touched hers.
But she’d borne the consequences. He hadn’t—until now.
The lights came up in the theater, startling him. One final ear-worm song blasted through the air as the credits rolled. Annie sprang from her seat and bellowed, “That was so good! Wasn’t it, Mommy? Wasn’t it so good?”
Gwen exchanged an amused look with Dylan over Annie’s head. Her cool gray eyes seemed to communicate that she didn’t think it was quite as good as Annie did, but that sitting through animated flicks about kites that sang and transported little girls through the sky was a parental duty and needed to be accepted with grace.
Gwen’s knowing glance affected Dylan as much as her casual beauty did. It was a moment shared, a brief mind-meld. For that one instant, they were partners.
Then she looked down at Annie, clasped the kid’s hand, and led her up the aisle, not even checking to see if Dylan was following them. He kept them in his sights as other children spilled into the aisle, bumping into him, squealing and shouting, jostling one another and tripping over the soda cups and candy wrappers littering the floor. The crowd dispersed once they entered the lobby. Dylan almost lost Gwen and Annie when he detoured to toss the empty popcorn tub in a trash can, but he spotted them near the exit and jogged past the food counter and the arcade to join them at the glass doors.
They were deep in conversation. “So you liked Maggie?” Gwen asked Annie. It took Dylan a second to remember that Maggie was the name of the movie’s heroine.
Annie nodded. “She was so cool.”
“What made her cool?” Gwen asked, pushing open the door. When Dylan reached behind her to hold it for them, she acknowledged him with a quick nod. At least she hadn’t totally forgotten about him.
“She was very brave,” Annie said. “She saved the kittens.”
“I found that interesting,” Gwen said, still holding Annie’s hand as they crossed the parking lot to her car. “Maggie struck me as more of a dog person than a cat person.”
“I’m a dog person,” Annie said.
“Believe me, I know.” Gwen laughed, and Dylan wondered what the joke was. “But she taught the kittens to sing.”
“No,” Annie corrected her. “The kite taught them to sing. She was just there.”
“You’re right. It was really the kite more than Maggie.”
“But she was brave. The kite made her brave.”
Gwen unlocked her car. Dylan had offered to drive to the theater, but Gwen had insisted on taking her car, since it had Annie’s booster seat already set up in the back. He watched as she helped Annie onto the booster. Annie fastened the belt herself. Then he and Gwen climbed into the front seat and she started the engine.
Their discussion excluded him, but he appreciated the opportunity to eavesdrop. He couldn’t imagine analyzing a simple children’s movie so thoroughly with a five-year-old. Yet this was what parents did—good parents, anyway. They asked questions. They listened. They respected the opinions of their children. They knew how to do this.
He didn’t. Sure, he talked to his nieces and his nephew, but not the way Gwen talked to Annie. Not with such deep, honest interest. He was an actor. Most of the time, when he talked to his sister’s kids, he had to pretend he really cared about their soccer games and their homework assignments.
What made him think he could do this? What in the whole freaking world made him think he could be a father to Annie?
Her wildly curling hair, so much like his. That was what. Her hair and her big brown eyes, and her intensity. She was his.
He eyed Gwen, her attention on the asphalt ahead of her as she maneuvered the car through the parking lot. He couldn’t hope she would ever open herself to him the way she had that one crazy night so long ago. But if he was lucky, maybe she’d teach him how to be a father.
