This just had happy-happy written all over it. It’s gonna be awesome watching Daddy and his career grow.
Thank you fates, you’ve made more than one life whole.
Chapter Eighteen
Stone
Twenty minutes.
I was not nervous.
Bullshit, I was as nervous as the night I played my first stadium show. Tens of thousands of people.
In twenty minutes, I just had two to face. While they weren’t the most important people I’d ever met, that distinction would always belong to Payden’s parents. They were a close second, since they held the power to ensure that I could contribute to the household and spoil my boy, which he more than deserved.
Yard to play in.
Special play space.
A wall we could fill with photographs of our life together, the way he had at the home he’d grown up in.
An office where he could let his creativity flow. After seeing the pictures of him holding the stories he used to create, I felt like he should have a space where he could let that side shine through.
In short, I was thinking about the house we talked about, close enough to his parents for random barbeques and board games. Several of the pictures on the wall have been of them playing together, or Payden playing with his cousins. Card games were easier to carry when you were on the road, so the guys and I always kept several around. I hadn’t seen any on Payden’s shelves, which we’d have to remedy. I wondered if he’d never gotten any because he hadn’t had anyone to play with?
We’d have to fix that too.
Research the right club to join, with a littles room and lots of friends my boy could have playdates with. Just thinking about him being lonely and longing, waiting for some piece of shit pretend Daddy to disappoint him over and over again, left me seeing red. If I ever met the son of a bitch who had abandoned him at the depot, he and I were finding a private alley, and he wasn’t walking out.
Fifteen minutes.
Fuck.
The butterflies in my belly had morphed into four-inch grasshoppers hyped up on sugar and caffeine.
My surprise for Payden was laid out in pieces on the coffee table. Everything was waiting to be assembled. I’d washed my hands four times, and there was still a purple streak on my wrist from where the marker had slipped. And a faded aqua dot on the tip of one finger. These markers had staying power, that was for damned sure.
Straightening everything into perfect piles gave me something to do with my fingers. There would never be a more important job interview in my life.
Ten minutes.
At this point, I was positive that a herd of rampaging wildebeests was stomping the fuck out of those grasshoppers. I’m talking about total carnage. Utter and complete decimation. I needed to sit down before I started assembling ingredients for another batch of cookies. I’d already made two dozen chocolate cookies with mini peanut butter cups one of regular chocolate chips while I was waiting for the glitter glue to dry on Payden’s surprise.
My ass wasn’t in the chair for two minutes before I was up and pacing again. Fuck it, I pulled a roll of ground beef from the freezer and set it out to thaw before rummaging through the cabinets until I’d found all the ingredients I'd need to make spaghetti and meatballs. We had bread, so I’d be able to make garlic toast too and a small salad to go with it since we had everything for one.
Shit, shit, fuck, one minute.
I dropped into the chair, woke up the screen, and hit the button to join the Zoom call.
“Stone,” Easton said by way of greeting. “Thanks for agreeing to talk to us. Shadow has a lot of impressive things to say after he heard you play the other night.”
“Um, thank you,” I managed. “I’m still thrown by you wanting to talk more after I turned down your last offer.”
“That offer was to tour with a new band,” Easton said. “But at Masterson, family comes first, so I get why you said no. After seeing your post on social media talking about the places you’d reached out to for work, I started thinking about how you might fit into the new management model we launched last year. When we created the band Imminent Danger.”
“I’m afraid I’m a bit out of touch with the scene.”
“No worries, you’ll catch up,” Shadow said.
