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“Well, doesn’t she talk like that?”
“Yes,” he admits.
“‘All I want to do is love him and give him hugs and kisses. Why won’t he let me?’”
Chase laughs so hard he snorts.
“It’s… embarrassing,” he manages to say between fits of laughter.
“Yes, it is. And she’s not going to stop! She’ll be trying to kiss you when you’re a grown man too. You’ll be going, ‘Mommmm!’”—I roll my eyes and use a less squeaky voice to imitate Chase—“when you’re fifty.”
Chase thumps me on the shoulder.
“Hey.” I pretend to almost fall over.
“Let me ask you something,” I say, when we’ve stopped laughing. “When you think about your favorite baseball player, is he alone on a field swinging a bat at nothing?”
Chase giggles. “No.”
“No. There’s other players there. There’s a ball. Maybe even fans.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So, it’s like that when you think about someone you love. You think about being with them, but you also think about all the people around you. You think about the other people that you love and being all together.”
“You’re saying that when Mom thinks about you, she’s thinking about me too?”
“Of course. And so do I. You’re the most important person in your mom’s life. You and her are a package deal. And I wouldn’t want it any other way.”
“Why?”
“Because I wouldn’t want to be with a woman who just abandons her son. One of the things I love most about your mom is that she’s a good mom. I like that she wants to spend time with you. It makes me love her more. When I think of my future with your mom, you’re a huge part of it. Okay?”
He smiles, a little more shyly than before. “Okay.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Blake
We arrive at the carnival early, and Chase somehow convinces me to go on the Tornado again. Twice. I might be getting too old for this stuff. I can feel my brain squishing against my skull as we’re flung around. I come out dizzy and sore.
I’m glad to see Ethan when he shows up, thankfully on his own.
“Dad!” Chase runs to him with a huge smile on his face.
And of course, the first thing he does is show Ethan his medal and tell him everything that happened in the tournament as if Ethan hadn’t been there watching the whole time.
But Ethan doesn’t seem to mind, he just adds on to it, asking Chase if he saw this or that play.
The two of them then go on the bumper cars, and I find a free table where they serve food and drinks. Sunday night is always less crowded than Saturday. I order myself a hamburger, fresh from the grill and a small beer. And I watch.
Ethan looks happy with Chase. I try to understand his position, I really do, but I can’t. I can’t fathom why he tore his family apart. And a certainty grows in my chest. I’m done being scared. I’m going to move forward with Amelia. And if she lets me, I’ll be by her side till the day I die.
It’s strange how such thoughts used to make me uncomfortable. They used to make me doubt myself. They used to make me want to take the easier road. But somehow, watching Ethan ruin his life has shown me what’s truly important to me.
Maybe it started even before then. The restlessness that pushed me to want to open a brewery is what’s driving me now too. I want more to my life than my single living-in-a-studio-apartment-above-my-bar existence. And maybe if the woman I want hadn’t been in a relationship, I would have come to that realization sooner.
Maybe Scarlett is right that I was purposefully dating the wrong women. But it’s just dumb luck that the right one became free, and I never want to be in that position again. I need to—no, I want to—commit to Amelia to get the life of my dreams.
