The tension in his body doesn’t ease, but he doesn’t try to move away from me.
Wanting to shift the conversation, I say, “What time are you going over to help Aurora?”
Our daughter moved into an apartment with two of her friends a week ago and has asked Scott to help them build some furniture and do some maintenance around the apartment.
“I told her I’d be there at eight thirty.”
I grin. “I bet the girls loved that.” None of them are known to be early risers.
He hooks a finger into my jeans and tugs me closer. Not that I can get much closer. “Tell me again why we let her move out.”
My grin shifts into a soft expression of understanding.
This man.
I don’t know many men who are harder than Scott, but he always gives me this side of him. He allows me to see the parts of him that struggle. And right now, he’s struggling to let our eighteen-year-old daughter go. Scott wants nothing more than for Aurora to spread her wings and find herself while standing on her own two feet, but the transition period has been rough for him.
I grip his waist. “She’s going to be okay, Scott.”
He exhales a long breath. “Yeah.”
I pull his face down to mine so I can brush my lips across his. Then, I say, “Invite her for dinner next week.”
“You wanna start a weekly dinner tradition?”
“Do you think we’ve got any hope of her agreeing to that?” Aurora’s current mission in life is to be as independent as she can be. I can’t imagine she’ll show up weekly for dinner.
“I’ll make sure she agrees.” The gravel and raw emotion in his voice makes me think he might just succeed because it’s clear this means a lot to him.
I smile at him. “I love you, Scott Cole.”
He kisses me one last time and then says, “I should be finished by lunch. Will you be done with shopping by then?”
I give him an amused look. “Have you already forgotten that time you took Aurora shopping for her Year Ten Formal?”
Scott stepped in to take her dress shopping for that formal after I got food poisoning. Afterwards, he told me in no uncertain terms that he was never taking her shopping for clothes again. There was never any fear of that happening, though, because Aurora also told me to never inflict her fatherupon her again, that she’d rather go naked than endure another shopping trip with him.
“Fuck, that was four hours I never fuckin’ got back in my life,” he says.
“Right, so I highly doubt I’ll be done by lunchtime.”
His phone sounds with a text and he pulls it out of his back pocket to read it. He then eyes me and says, “She wants me to pick them up coffee on the way.”
I smile again. “You’ll always be her dad and she’ll always need you, Scott.”
“Yeah, well she better listen to me today when I tell her she needs better security because I’m installing cameras and an alarm whether she likes it or not.”
As I watch him leave the kitchen to take a shower, a memory of the two of them flashes through my mind. Aurora was fifteen and had her first boyfriend. Scott was beyond protective. To say it was a period of hell for me is an understatement. The two of them argued their way through the month of that boyfriend. But what always struck me was that Scott was who she went to when the boy broke her heart. Sure, she wanted comfort from me, but her dad was who she searched for first.
It's always been this way with them. They’ve been inseparable from the moment she was born. And I just know, deep in my soul, that they’ll always be this way.
I also know that Aurora is going to give him hell over that security today. I almost want to cancel on Madison so I can see how my husband makes it through this morning.
Scott’s POV
9:00 a.m.
“Dad!No. We don’t want security cameras throughout the apartment,” Aurora says, hands on her hips, fierce stubbornness covering her face. “You can put them outside, but not inside.”
