Bleeding Out While He Said I Do novel · Chapter 28 of 32

Chapter 28: Home

I set the bottle down on the counter.

I didn't run to him.

I walked, because my legs weren't sure yet.

I put my hand flat on his chest, on the filthy hi-vis, the way I had on the morning Reece's car sat across the street.

His heart was going hard under it.

"You said you'd call back," I said.

"I'm calling back."

"That's not a call. That's a man in my kitchen."

"It's a very long call."

I laughed, and it came out wet.

He put his good arm around me and pulled me in, and the cast bumped against my back.

He smelled like truck heater and salt and sweat and eleven hours on the road.

I didn't care.

I stood there in my mother's robe with my face in his shirt for a long time.

Upstairs, Kinley started to fuss.

The monitor on the counter crackled with it.

"That's the bottle," I said.

"Give it here."

"You've got one hand."

"I've got one good hand. That's all it takes."

He carried the bottle up the stairs on the edges, where they didn't creak.

He'd learned which ones.

In the nursery, Kinley was standing up in her crib, holding the rail, red in the face and yelling.

She stopped yelling when she saw him.

She stared at the cast.

Then she put out both arms.

He lifted her out with his left arm and sat down in my mother's rocking chair, which I'd moved up there in the summer.

He fed her one-handed, with the cast propped on the arm of the chair.

She held onto the NINE on his cast with her fist and drank and watched his face.

I leaned in the doorway.

"Andie," he said quietly, after a while. "I want to ask you something."

"Okay."

"Not that. I'm not doing that with a hurricane on my shirt."

"Okay."

He looked down at Kinley.

Her eyes were closing.

"She's got a father," he said. "He's learning. Ruthann says he's learning. I'm not going to get in the middle of that."

"I don't want to be her dad."

He rocked once.

"I want to be her person. The one who shows up."

"The one she calls when her car's in a ditch at three in the morning, when she's twenty and doesn't want to call her mother."

"I want to be on her list."

I couldn't say anything for a second.

I'd made a list on a clipboard in January, alone, and crossed the only name off it.

"You were on her list before she was born," I said. "You were on mine."

He looked up.

"So that's a yes."

"That's a yes, Morgan."

Kinley was asleep.

He stood up slow, and laid her back in her crib with his one good arm.

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