A few months ago I would have laughed at the idea. How were we — three guys more interested in how much damage we could do than in how much good we could do — supposed to raise a kid?
I wouldn’t have been able to imagine it. Wouldn’t have even tried.
Except now I was imagining it without even trying. Imagining Cassie balancing a little redhead on her hip, kissing its chubby cheeks, making it happy the way she made us happy.
Making everythinggood.
Fuck.
After the games, we bought pumpkin funnel cake and hot apple cider, then headed over to the haunted house.
Creepy music blared from big speakers set up on the old house’s big porch, and the windows flickered with blue light, ghostly sounds mingling with screams — both recorded and from terrified patrons — from inside the house.
The chill in the air made it impossible to forget that it would be Thanksgiving in less than month, and I couldn’t help wondering what our lives would be like then.
Cassie had accepted the mask we’d had made for her, but for all I knew, she didn’t even think it was a big deal. Maybe she just saw it as a Halloween costume instead of the VIP invitation into our lives it was.
Jagger noticed Cassie was shivering in line and gave her his leather jacket as the line inched forward and I suddenly wishedI’d been smart enough to wear one just so I could be the one to get her warm.
I hadn’t had any time alone with her since the hospital, and as far as I was concerned that didn’t count.
After about twenty minutes in line, we stepped into the foyer of the Victorian where the haunted house had been set up.
The old furniture was covered in fake cobwebs and a skeletal doorman in bloody makeup welcomed us in a dramatic voice.
We followed the people in front of us up the stairs and through a series of bedrooms where various goblins and ghouls jumped out at us from closets and behind furniture and doors.
Cassie shrieked more than once, and even though I never wanted to see her scared in real life this was fun because when she got scared she inched closer to us, which meant we got to take turns putting our arms around like a fucking high school kids trying to score with our first crush instead of grown men who could totally see the strings holding up the ghosts that hovered in the corners.
We followed the line down a set of stairs at the back of the house and through an old kitchen where a man in a bloody apron was keeled over a butcher-block island with a fake butcher’s knife sticking out of his head.
We were plunged into darkness as we left the kitchen, forced to fumble our way along the pitch black hall as the creepy organ music continued to play in the background, screams breaking through every few seconds as someone got a scare.
We approached a bottleneck as the crowd around us funneled into the library up ahead. By then my eyes started to adjust to the dark and I spotted a closet in the hall.
I opened it on a whim, half expecting something to jump out at us, but nothing did.
It was just a big closet, an unused piece of real estate in the haunted house.
“What’s that?” Cassie asked next to me.
I pulled her inside and shut the door.
“What thefuck?” She said.
I laughed and backed her up against the wall in the closet where a single coat hung on the rod. “Come on, how many fake skeletons and creepy clowns can they throw at us?”
I turned my head so I could kiss her neck without jabbing her with my mask.
“What are you doing?” she asked. “What is this?”
“This is me trying to get in your pants,” I said, slipping my hand up her crop top.
I pulled down her lace bra and closed my hand around her tit.
“This is…we can’t do this.” I don’t think it was my imagination that she was a little breathless.
“Fuck in a haunted house?” I pulled my mask up on top of my head so I’d have full use of my mouth. “We totally can.”
