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A bolt of irritation slides through me. “It’s not kid duty,” I say. “Roxie is my daughter, and if she needs me, I’ll always be there for her.”
The pain that cuts across her face is so sharp that I freeze, instinctively looking around for a threat, then to her body, searching for evidence that she’s been wounded.
Only she’s uninjured.
On the outside anyway.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing,” she says, taking the container and her chocolate milk in hand and nodding toward the front door. “I’ll walk you out,” she says. “I need to eat and go to sleep.”
She doesn’t wait for me to answer, just starts walking—or hobbling rather—leading me out of my own fucking house.
Walking across tile I helped select, pictures I hung on the wall, a table we built together on a bleary-eyed evening when Roxie was sick and not sleeping.
“What?” I say again, the memories beating at me.
The chip in the corner of the opening when Blane—another teammate—and I were moving furniture in right after we bought the place. One I promised myself I would fix.
And clearly didn’t.
A row of hooks, plenty big for all of the Gold contingent to hang jackets and purses and diaper bags when they come over for our Christmas Pie Extravaganza.
Something Brit organizes and people love.
Something I won’t go to this year because?—
I try to shove the memories down, but they don’t stop lashing out at me.
Birthday parties and a couch stained red with frosting from a dropped cupcake.
Brit smiling at the crying kiddo, telling them not to worry, that it would come out.
Spoiler alert—it didn’t.
Roxie roller-skating through the halls, Brit holding her up, not caring about the finish on the floor, about the scratches that were the inevitable conclusion. Not when it meant that Rox was having the time of her life while making a core memory.
“What went through your head in the kitchen?” I ask—too loudly because she jumps. But I’m trying to drown out the sounds of those memories.
I have to.
I have to.
She straightens her shoulders, long blond ponytail swinging behind her, and reaches for the lock. But I move without thinking, snagging her arm, wrapping my fingers around her wrist, stopping her from turning it.
“What?” I say again, stepping close.
Too close.
So fucking close that our bodies drift together, meld in a familiar decades-old pattern that we’ve assumed a hundred, a thousand times before. Her hips shift to cradle mine, my thigh slides between hers, our chests brush, our lips part, breaths mingling.
So easy to close the distance. To taste her.
But…
That won’t solve anything.
That’ll—
