Wait for It

“Oh my God, Joshua! Would you hurry up for the love of all that is holy in this world?” I called out from the living room where I was pacing. I’d already been hollering for him for at least ten minutes, and he still hadn’t come out.

What the hell would make an eleven-year-old take so long to get ready for a tournament? He didn’t have to shave or put on makeup. He didn’t even have to shower. His stuff was already packed because I’d made sure he did it the night before. I didn’t understand how hard it was to put on his clothes and shoes.

“Five minutes!” he yelled back.

I groaned and eyed the clock on the wall. We were going to be late. There was no avoiding it now, much less five minutes from now. I didn’t know what it was about these kids that had them thinking we could teleport places, or maybe they thought I drove NASCAR on the weekends I didn’t have them and could go 200 miles an hour to get from point A to point B.

The thought had just entered my brain when I realized what I had thought. My mom had said those exact same words to me in the past when I was a kid, except I thought she’d referred to Knight Rider instead of NASCAR.

Jesus.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the night before, I’d had the same thing happen. Josh had been on the couch while I’d been folding clothes next to him, and after listening to him moan for half an hour about “how bored he was” I’d finally given him the stink eye and said, “Then start cleaning, homeboy.”

It was official. I was turning into my mom. How many times had she told me back when I was younger and had whined about not having anything to do, “ponte a limpiar”?

It was horrifying.

Pinching the bridge of my nose, I cast a glance at the kid who was leaning against the wall with his tablet and sighed. He already had his backpack on the floor and his jacket on. The weather was supposed to be chilly today, and when I’d gone outside to load the cooler into the car, I confirmed it was definitely jacket weather and told both boys to be prepared. At least one of them had listened to me. “Louie—I mean, Josh, we’ll wait for you outside! Hurry up! I’m not getting a ticket because of you, and if you don’t warm up, they’re not going to let you play!”

All he bellowed back was “Fine!”

“Josh—damn—darn it, Louie, I’m sorry. Let’s wait for him outside. Maybe we’ll drive a few houses down and make him run after the car,” I told him.

The five-year-old grinned and nodded. “Yeah!”

That was way too enthusiastic and it made me laugh. “Hey, don’t forget to tell Dallas thank you for building your quarterpipe for you.”

I’d helped him, but with only one hand, I had been more like moral support. Plus, I didn’t care if he was going to give Dallas all the credit or not. He might not trust using it if he thought I had too much to do with it.

“Okay,” he agreed.

Tipping my head toward the door, we made our way outside. Thankfully, Josh was out soon afterward and was settled in by the time Louie finished buckling himself into his booster seat. I didn’t say a word for a long time as I backed out of the driveway and drove five miles over the speed limit, already imagining myself blaming Josh for why I was speeding to the cop that might pull us over.

“Can you drive faster?” the eleven-year-old asked.

Through the rearview mirror, I shot Josh a look I hoped would make him look away.

It worked.

Decked out in his Tornado uniform and surrounded by his bag and all his stuff, he was ready to go for the game that was supposed to be started in… twenty minutes. We were running so late that Trip called ten minutes after we were supposed to get there to make sure everything was fine.

By the time I pulled into the lot, Josh was flying out of the car before I’d even put it into park and yanking his bag out, running to the field like he was on fire. I couldn’t see where the boys were warming up but didn’t worry; Josh would find them. Louie and I had just made it to the field when the game started. We were the last ones to arrive, despite half the bleachers being empty because no one went to an early game unless they had to. The people who were there were all huddled in their jackets and blankets. The cold front was kicking everyone’s ass.

I was honestly not surprised to find that Josh wasn’t playing catcher. They’d stuck him in the outfield. A part of me was relieved Dallas and Trip had done that. Hopefully it would teach him a lesson since me yelling at him almost daily did nothing to make him rush. The Tornados barely scraped by with a win.

With an hour break between games, Louie and I waited on the bleachers for Josh, partially watching the other game going on in the field next to the one the boys had just played on. There were eight teams in this tournament from what I could remember. I wasn’t paying attention until Josh was standing in front of me, shivering and asking for a dollar.

I blinked at him. “Where’s your jacket?”

He had the nerve to look sheepish. “I left it at home. Can I have a dollar for hot chocolate?” Silence. “Please.”

“You forgot your jacket even though I told you twice to get it?” I asked, looking at him while I stuck one hand in my bag for the pocket I kept all my small bills from tips at.

“Yes.”

“You didn’t bring your long-sleeved undershirt I bought you for cold weather either?”

I was pretty sure Louie, who was leg to leg beside me, let out a “heh” as he tried to make it seem like he was paying more attention to the show he was watching on his tablet than our conversation, but I let it go.

“I’m sorry,” Josh whisper-hissed. He shivered again. “Can I have a dollar, please?”

Why did this always happen to me and why wasn’t I prepared enough to leave two jackets in my car for occasions like this?

A small part of me wanted to cry as I began pulling one arm out of my sleeve and then the other, eyeing Josh the whole time. The good thing was, I’d put on a sweater beneath my black fleece jacket that was a size too large—a present courtesy of my mom.

Josh rolled his eyes. “I don’t need it. I’ll be fine.”

“Until you get pneumonia.” I handed the fleece zip-up to him in one hand and two one-dollar bills in the other. “Wear it. If one of us is going to get sick, it’s going to be me. Stop looking at me like that. It isn’t pink and it doesn’t look like a girl jacket. Nobody will know it’s mine.”

He huffed as he took the jacket from me first, casting a look around to make sure no one was watching him, and then put it on faster than I’d ever seen him put on anything in his life.

“Take your brother with you and get him a hot chocolate too.”

To give him credit, he only frowned a little before he nodded. “You want one?”

I shook my head. “I’m good.”

He shrugged, pulling the zipper up. “Butt face, come on.”

The nosey child at my side was ready and pushed his backpack toward me before jumping off the bleacher and following Josh. The boys had barely turned their backs to me when I finally let myself shiver and crossed my arms over my chest, like that would help. Fuck, it was cold.

“It’s chilly, huh?”

Shifting in my spot, I watched as the divorced dad, who sometimes sat by me and always mentioned that he wasn’t seeing anyone, took a step down from the bench he was on to the one below it, the first one. The same one as me. If that wasn’t bad enough, he sat one body length distance away, his jacket zipped up, hands stuffed into the pockets.

I smiled at him, trying to be polite. “Very.”

“I might have a blanket in my car…,” he offered.

“You forgot your jacket?” an extremely familiar voice asked from my left. I knew it was Dallas without needing proof, but I still swiveled to take him in, shivering again.

In a worn leather jacket that looked like it had some kind of shearling on the inside, he had his usual Tornado collared shirt on and at the V-shape there, he had something white beneath it. But it wasn’t what was on his body that captivated me. “I did have a jacket. Someone else is wearing it now,” I told him, eyeing the green knit cap that was molded to his head.

The scowl on his face disappeared instantly.

“Do you want me to check and see if I have that blanket?” the dad asked, reminding me where he was.

“Oh, that’s okay. You don’t have to do that,” I told him even though, if he’d been just about anyone else, I would have taken it. I didn’t want him to get the wrong idea after I’d spent so much time keeping things casual between us.

Dallas was standing in front of me by the time I finished talking, so tall I had to tip my head back as I wondered why he was standing so close.

Before I could ask, or figure it out, he pulled one arm behind his back and peeled a sleeve off and then followed that up by drawing his arm out of the second sleeve. In the time it took me to ask myself why he was taking his jacket off, he crouched in front of me and drew one of my arms away from my chest, then slid my hand into the sleeve he’d just vacated, all while I watched him like a total idiot.

He was putting his jacket on me.

My mouth had to be slightly gaped as he slipped my arm fully into the warm cocoon, drew the leather around my back, and then, his face and chest inches from mine, those hazel eyes catching my brown ones and keeping them there, he pulled my other wrist away from me and guided it into the other sleeve.

In a rare moment of my life, I didn’t know what to say.

I definitely had no idea what the hell to say when his fingers went to the bottom of the jacket resting on top of my thighs and engaged the zipper, pulling the tab up straight between the valley between my breasts, up until it notched right below where my throat started.

Dallas smiled at me a little as he leaned toward me—and for one stupid second, I don’t know why, I thought he was going to kiss me—but all I felt was a tug at the back of my hair and I knew he’d pulled my loose hair out of the collar. He narrowed his eyes and I narrowed mine right back, and the next thing I knew, he reached behind me again and tucked the rope of hair he was holding back inside his jacket.

And he still smiled at me, just a little, little, little thing, as he said, “Better.” His hand went to the red baseball cap on my head, and he pulled the brim down a half-inch on my forehead. “Nice hat.”

It was that, that had me smirking at him as I soaked in the heat his body had left in the soft material of the inside of the jacket. “It came broken in to the shape of my head.” I huddled into the jacket. “I don’t ever give things back. You’ve just learned that the hard way.”

He smiled, slowly coming to his feet from the crouch he’d been in.

“I like your cap,” I told him honestly. The emerald green made his hazel eyes pop like crazy. Plus, it was just fucking cute. “Did Miss Pearl make it for you?”

“I made it,” he said with a twist to his mouth. “She taught me how.”

The stupid smile that came over my face had me staring at him in awe. I even slapped my hand right over the left side of my chest. “Are you real?”

Dallas tapped my chin. “I’ll knit you one, Peach.”

“I could have given you my jacket,” the poor, poor dad beside me piped in, breaking my trance of love.

Dallas’s attention instantly moved toward the man, and as the words “She’s fine” came out of his mouth, he turned that tall, muscular body and parked himself in the tight space between both of us. He didn’t fit. Not at all. His elbow pretty much landed on my lap and most of his thigh and calf were pressed and aligned to my matching body parts.

I shifted to my left an inch and the length of his leg followed me, his elbow staying exactly where it was.

What the hell was happening?

“How’s it going, Kev?” Dallas asked the dad, still smothering me but somehow his attention elsewhere.

Hmm. Shoving my hands into the pockets of his jacket, the back of my left hand hit something crumpled. Paper. Making sure he wasn’t looking at me, I pulled what I figured were balled-up receipts out, being nosey and wondering what the hell he’d bought.

But it wasn’t recycled white paper I pulled out.

They looked like Post-it notes. Plain, yellow Post-it notes like I’d seen in his truck. That just made me more curious.

Both men were talking as I started opening the notes as quietly as possible, really not caring if he caught me in the act by that point. But he didn’t turn to look at me. He was too busy talking about who he thought the Texas Rebels were going to try and recruit next season.

The ball of paper was really two square-shaped notes stacked together.

I read one and then I read the other.

Then I went back and read the top one and followed it up by reading the bottom one.

I did it a third time. And then I balled them back up and stuffed them where I’d found them.

I didn’t need to look at them again to remember what was on each.

The first one, in small, neat handwriting that was crossed out with hard dashes across the letters, like he’d changed his mind, had said: YOU ARE THE LIGHT OF MY LIFE.

The second one… I sucked in a breath through my nose and made sure not to glance at Dallas even out of the corner of my eye.

It was the second one that had me feeling like a twitchy crackhead. The words hadn’t been crossed out like the first one, and there was a smudge on the corner of the Post-it that went straight to my heart. It was a smudge like the ones I always spotted on his neck and arms.

I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT YOU.

I can’t live without you.

The first time I read it, I wondered who the hell he couldn’t live without. But I wasn’t that stupid and naïve, even though my insides felt like they were on the verge of exploding.

He wasn’t… there was no way….

What exactly was it that I had told him and Trip in my kitchen during Josh’s sleepover what felt like forever ago?

“Tia!”

I sat up and looked around, recognizing Louie’s voice instantly. Dallas must have too, because he shot to his feet and scanned the area. But I found the blond head instantly; beside him was Josh. It was the woman in front of them that had me zeroing in like an eagle on the hunt for an innocent mouse for breakfast. Of all the women it could have been, it was Christy.

Fucking Christy.

The notes forgotten for now, I swiped my bag off the bleacher and left the rest of my shit where it was, that second of hesitation giving Dallas a head start on the route toward the boys. He made it before I did, and that was when I noticed that Josh had his arm around his brother’s shoulder. The last time he’d made that kind of protective gesture had been at Rodrigo’s funeral.

Which meant someone was about to die because Josh and Louie should never feel threatened by anything.

“What happened?” Dallas asked immediately, his hand reaching out toward Louie. I didn’t miss how Lou took his hand instantly.

“She called me a brat,” Louie blurted out, his other little hand coming up to meet with the one already clutching our neighbor’s.

I blinked and told myself I was not going to look at Christy until I had the full story.

“Why?” Dallas was the one who asked.

“He spilled some of his hot chocolate on her purse,” it was Josh who explained. “He said sorry, but she called him a brat. I told her not to talk to my brother like that, and she told me I should have learned to respect my elders.”

For the second time around this woman, I went to ten. Straight through ten, past Go, and collected two hundred dollars.

“I tried to wipe it up,” Louie offered, those big blue eyes going back and forth between Dallas and me for support.

“You should teach these boys to watch where they’re going,” Christy piped up, taking a step back.

Be an adult. Be a role model, I tried telling myself. “It was an accident,” I choked out. “He said he was sorry… and your purse is leather and black, and it’ll be fine,” I managed to grind out like this whole thirty-second conversation was jabbing me in the kidneys with sharp knives.

“I’d like an apology,” the woman, who had gotten me suspended and made me cry, added quickly.

I stared at her long face. “For what?”

“From Josh, for being so rude.”

My hand started moving around the outside of my purse, trying to find the inner compartment when Louie suddenly yelled, “Mr. Dallas, don’t let her get her pepper spray!”

The fuck?

Oh my God. I glared at Louie. “I was looking for a baby wipe to offer her one, Lou. I wasn’t getting my pepper spray.”

“Nuh-uh,” he argued, and out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Christy take a step back. “I heard you on the phone with Vanny. You said, you said if she made you mad again you were gonna pepper spray her and her mom and her mom’s mom in the—”

“Holy sh—oot, Louie!” My face went red, and I opened my mouth to argue that he hadn’t heard me correctly. But… I had said those words. They had been a joke, but I’d said them. I glanced at Dallas, the serious, easygoing man who happened to look in that instant like he was holding back a fart but was hopefully just a laugh, and finally peeked at the woman who I’d like to think brought this upon herself. “Christy, I would never do that—”

The pain in my ass had some balls to her because, even though she had one foot set to the side like she was prepared to take off, she still managed to clear her throat and bring her attention to Dallas, her mouth pursed. “Dallas, I feel like that’s grounds for kicking them off the team. It isn’t sportsmanlike.”

“Neither is making someone cry, and we already addressed that, didn’t we, Christy?” he replied to her in that cool voice that now had me imagining him in his dress whites. “Drop it. It was an accident, he apologized, and we can move on from this.”

She blinked so fast, it was like she was fluttering her eyelashes. Seeing her up close again, Christy wasn’t ugly. She had to be in her mid-thirties, she was in good shape, and when she wasn’t making ugly faces, she wouldn’t be horrible to look at. A memory from the tryout nudged at my brain… had those moms said something about Christy liking Dallas?

“Drop it?” she asked in a squeaky voice.

“Drop it,” he confirmed.

“If this was anyone else, you’d at least suspend them—”

I knew she had a point, and suddenly I sucked in a breath, expecting the worse.

But all Dallas said was, “You’re right. But I’m not going to. You’ve been starting this mess with them, Christy, and we all know it. You and I already talked about this, didn’t we? I don’t want to suspend anyone, but if I do, it isn’t going to be them.”

Yeah, I could tell from the look on her face, she liked Dallas. And she liked Dallas a lot. “But you’re playing favorites!”

“I’m always going to be fair with the boys, but I will play favorites with everyone else who isn’t an active member of the team. Don’t put me into that position, because I know she”—he tipped his head toward me—“only bites when she has to, and I will always take her side. Are we clear on that?”

He would?

Christy’s cheeks puffed up with so much indignation, she literally squawked. Everything from her forehead down was red. “This is unbelievable. Fine! But don’t think Jonathan is going to be on this team much longer.” Her gaze stayed on Dallas for a moment, a dozen emotions flashing across her face before, just like that, she turned on her heel and disappeared into the crowd.

Why did I suddenly feel bad for her?

It wasn’t until then that I noticed half the parents of the team were sitting on the tables around the concession stand. What was probably half the parents of every other team playing in the tournament that weekend were, too. Great.

I cleared my throat and popped my lips. “Well, that was awkward.”

“I’m not a brat.” Louie was still hung up and outraged.

I pointed my finger at him. “You’re a tattletale, that’s what you are. Nosey Rosie. What did I tell you about snitches?”

“You love them?”

It was Dallas who laughed first, one of his hands already sliding into his back pocket where he pulled out his wallet and a bill. “Lou, go buy another hot chocolate.”

Louie nodded and took the five, heading back into the line as Josh, who was at my side, said, “I’m gonna go find my friends.”

“All right,” I said. “Careful.”

Josh nodded and disappeared.

Dallas looked down at me with a serious expression on his face, and I raised my eyebrows back at him. A sense of being overwhelmed filled my chest as I snuggled in deeper into the warm jacket, the backs of my fingers brushed against the Post-it notes in the pocket.

What exactly was going on?

“You’re always going to take my side, Professor?” I pretty much whispered the question.

He took a step toward me, his gaze still centered directly on my face. And he nodded.

“What did you guys talk about?” I asked him, still so low only he could hear.

Dallas took another step forward, the tips of his tennis shoes touching the tips of my boots. His chin was down to his collar as he took me in. And in a voice that was a lot louder than mine had been, he said, “I suspended her for two weeks after what happened, you know.”

I didn’t know. I was actually pretty damn shocked no one had told me.

The surprise must have been apparent on my face—or maybe he knew me too well, because he dipped his chin down even further in a partial nod. “I did. And I apologized to her if I’d given her the wrong impression that I was interested in her, informing her that I wasn’t and we needed to keep things professional.”

“I thought she liked you.”

He shrugged, the corners of his mouth indenting just slightly. “It isn’t the first time it’s happened.”

“What? Getting hit on by moms on the team?”

“Yeah.”

I snickered. “Are you sure you weren’t imagining it?”

Dallas made a face before this giant, beaming grin took over his mouth, so potent I could have taken his jacket off and been warm the rest of the day. “I’m sure, baby.”

Baby again? All I could say was “Uh-huh,” so that I wouldn’t sound like an idiot.

“I wanna ask if you really said you’d pepper spray her, but I already know the answer.”

Pressing my lips together, I shrugged.

He reached up toward me and brushed the backs of his fingers over my cheek, still smiling wide, and pinched my chin. “You’re fucking nuts.”

All I did was shrug again. “You know that, but you’re still here, aren’t you?”

His smile melted into a smaller one, and the deep breath he let out made it seem like it had weighed a thousand pounds. Then his fingers brushed over my cheek again, and Dallas moved to tuck a strand of her behind my ear. His voice was soft. “I’m still here, Peach.”