Page 212 of Buy Back My Love

“You’re beautiful.”

Her smile widened. “Thank you, husband.”

I liked hearing that.

“Say it again.”

She laughed softly. “My husband.”

I pulled her closer, and she rested her cheek against my chest.

“I love you,” she said.

I kissed the top of her head. “I love you too, baby.”

We kept moving with the music, and standing there with her in that yard made me think about the first time she walked into this house during the estate sale.

Lee had come in with Maisie wearing all that damn pink, looked across the living room at me, and neither one of us did much to hide the fact that we liked what we saw. My daddy noticed. Skye noticed. Maisie definitely noticed because she started trying to set us up before Lee even got those lamps out of the house.

Back then, I knew she was fine, funny, and I wanted to take her out. Then she told me she had somebody. Complicated, she called it. So I left it alone. Didn’t mean I stopped being intrigued.

After that, we kept running into each other, then started talking more, and somewhere in there I realized how easy it was to lose track of time around her. I could stop by to bring her a pumpkin pie and end up standing in her kitchen arguing about football. She made me laugh. That mattered more than I probably realized at first.

So did the way she cared about people. Lee could cuss somebody out in one breath and be trying to figure out how to help them in the next. She remembered birthdays, appointments, people’s kids, little things they told her weeks ago. Once she cared about you, she cared hard. Sometimes too hard.

I had seen what that cost her.

But I also watched her learn how to do all that loving without handing over every damn thing that belonged to her.

I looked over her shoulder toward the edge of the dance floor. Myles stood there watching us, his tiny black tux still holding on from the ceremony even though his bow tie was crooked and one knee already had grass on it.

He had done better as ring bearer than I expected. Before Lee ever came down the aisle, Myles started toward me with the ring box in both hands. We had practiced it enough times that he knew exactly where he was supposed to go. He made it halfway. Then he looked up and saw me.

“Daddy!”

The rings stopped mattering. He took off running, and I caught him with one arm before he dropped the box.

Myles had never really known me as anything but Daddy. His first word was “da-da,” and he was looking dead at me when he said it.

Lee tried to tell me babies made sounds like that all the time and it didn’t necessarily mean he was talking to me. I didn’t care. He was looking at me.

I had been his goddaddy before he was born. I cut his cord, held him right after he came into the world, got up with him at night, changed diapers, fed him, cleaned puke off myself, sat through cartoons I couldn’t stand, and learned the hard way that giving him the wrong cup in the morning could apparently ruin his whole day.

By the time he was old enough to know what Daddy meant, he’d already been calling me that for a while.

My family made the whole thing funnier. I had told Mama before Myles was born that he wasn’t mine, but once Lee and the baby moved into the house with me, everybody went right back to believing what they wanted to believe. Somewhere along the way they decided me and Lee must’ve gotten a DNA test and found out he really was mine.

Eventually I had to tell them again that no, we had not secretly discovered anything. Mama still called him her grandbaby. My daddy still spoiled him. Nothing about the way they treated him changed.

JB was his biological father, and that was something Myles would always know. When he got old enough to understand everything, he could decide for himself what kind of relationship he wanted with JB.

Me, I was raising him. I was his daddy.

“Too slow! Dance fast!”

I looked down and found Myles standing beside us, staring up at me like our first dance had gone on long enough.

A few people close by started laughing.