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Her mouth roots around on my chest a little on the parts not covered by my tank top, the top of her head brushing against my cheek, her soft hair rubbing me. What is it about babies that smell amazing?
My head rears back, trying to figure out what she’s doing against my skin, then it comes back to me that Sayler just quit nursing cold turkey like a week ago.Oh . . .“None of that, little lady. This cow doesn’t have milk.”
She cries again, causing my anxiety to rise a little from lack of experience with babies. Maybe I got in over my head. I lightly bounce her, my hand cupping the back of her head so that my thumb can rub it. It’s not the cry from earlier but she’s still not happy.
“She’s probably wet,” a deep voice says, making me jump and tightening my hold on her at the same time from the scare.
I turn around, my body still doing this weird baby-bouncing thing that I can’t seem to stop. My eyes meet Riggan’s from where he’s leaned against the doorframe with a bottle in one hand and twisting his lip ring with the other. Awkward. “Uh, sorry. I wasn’t trying to overstep. Her crying woke me up, and when I went to get water, no one was in here. Your door was shut. I wasn’t sure if you guys were in the middle of something. I was already awake, so . . .”
He smiles at me. Any outward expression of emotion seems rare for Riggan; at least in the times I’ve been around him. “That type ofsomethingseems to come a little less with such a tiny human around. Enjoy your freedom to fuck whenever and wherever you want while you can,” he says, but more in a joking manner than the way that phrase would make a parent sound if taken the wrong way.
My cheeks heat. I don’t know why it packs a bigger punch when a guy in his twenties talks so freely with sexual innuendos than a high schooler, but I swear, it’s the only thing I can think of to date that makes me slightly uncomfortable in a shy way.
He comes into the room, walking toward us, that smile he had bigger now. “Didn’t know you had a shy side.” He laughs. “Makes so much fucking sense now.”
I clear my throat, trying to avoid ducking behind my invisible armor. I don’t want to hide who I am forever. I’m tired of pretending that I’m superficial when there is a lot I care about. Miami is my safe place.Theyare my safe space. Landon made me want to embrace who I am: a little good and a little bad. I can be a raging bitch at times, but I can be the opposite too.
I just now realize that Chloe isn’t crying anymore, almost as if hearing Riggan’s voice has settled her. “You said she’s probably wet,” I say, changing the subject and positioning my arms to give her to him.
“Yep. The one that gets her out has to change her. It’s a rule.”
The humor is evident in his tone. I deadpan with, “Really? Says who?”
He smiles again, as if he’s enjoying this. “The parents.”
I humor him with a roll of my eyes and carry her to the changing table I spotted when I turned around. As I lay her down on top of the pad, Riggan comes closer. The second she sees him, she starts kicking her little legs again and smiles in a way that lights up her whole face. She must be a daddy’s girl.
I unzip her sleeper, hoping this is something that a female knows how to do naturally since I’m a girl and she’s a girl. Something dawns on me when he leans over one side by her head and places his finger in her hand, waiting for her to latch on. “Wait a minute. What took you so long to come in here if you weren’t banging your wife? If it was loud to me on the third floor, it had to be loud in your room on the other side of the wall.”
He laughs. “We always wait. Sayler is sleep training to have her sleeping through the night by the time she goes back to school. Sometimes she puts herself back to sleep if we give it a few minutes. We weren’t considering that there is someone on the third floor now. That was our bad. When I saw you in here on the camera, I got up to make and warm the bottle. She won’t take it room temp since she was breast fed.” My brows bunch and I blink at him. “Tit milk is heated by the body.” The lightbulb goes off in my head, my face surely showing it, making him chuckle.
I unlatch the tabs on the diaper, already reaching for a wipe in the box on the small table next to her changing table. I can’t believe a guy is schooling me on this shit. I pull the diaper back and wipe her through her wiggling.
“Figured I’d save you,” Riggan continues, looking at Chloe like he’s completely smitten with her. It’s weird how tiny little girls can bring a grown man to his knees. Seeing Landon like that would be hilarious. He may be too over-the-top for that to happen, though. He’s not like that with his niece. Riggan hands me a diaper from the shelf under the changing table. “Once she’s up it takes her a while to go back to sleep. That’s why she has overnight diapers for bedtime and an entire bath routine that involves lavender shit—to avoid waking her up. You’re lucky I like you.”
I side-eye him as I open the new diaper, suspicious. I’ve never had this much interaction with Riggan. He’s mostly quiet unless he’s just with the guys. “Why on earth would you like me? I was pretty much a brat in the beginning.”
He stares at me, all serious-like, his free hand grabbing both of Chloe’s feet at the ankles and pulling them up, lifting her bottom off the changing pad. “Because you brought my best friend back; the version of him most have probably forgotten.”
I look away as I tear up and pull the wet diaper out from under her, tossing it in the trash next to me, already putting the dry one underneath her. He lowers her bottom back down on it and releases her. I can’t look at him with my eyes this blurry, so I let the process of putting her back the way I found her become natural. “He’s been in mental Hell since his senior year. Hasn’t written a note since that shit happened with his parents. Not only did everything he knew about a solid relationship fall apart, but he was also embarrassed at a peak age in his life. He took a lot of heat from some of the other players since it involved the head coach. After the split, he didn’t give a fuck about anything anymore, and that kind of headspace is hard to come back from. I’ve been there. Everyone wants to get back what we had, be who we were when we were just a few kids with a music dream. That’s why Maddox gave him so much hell when he realized you made him care about something, anything. Most of the finished music we have, we wrote in high school when everything was good, before the shit hit the fan for all of us. I was always good with lyrics, while Landon had a gift with creating a melody for it. Maddox knew exactly where to fall in and how. We were unstoppable until life hit us in the heart.”
The damn tears I was fighting so hard fall anyway. I don’t let just anyone see me cry. I zip up Chloe’s sleeper and pick her up, hugging her to me like a teddy bear, because my emotions are fragile at the moment, and that’s usually when it’s easier to be a bitch.
I finally look at him. “Lyrics are just words without the music. Don’t let his silence fool you. Landon may be the bassist, but regardless of anything he thinks or says, he carries this band. He’s the reason we have a song. The night I got that recording, I knew his block was gone, and that’s all because of you. If we keep going like we are, by the end of the summer we should have enough new music to release an EP—extended play. I hope it’s the first step to a full album. Thank you.”
Chloe starts crying in my arms, probably ready for that bottle now, and her dad. Despite her feeling like my shield, I hand her to him. When he takes her, I wipe my eyes. “You make me sound like a superhero. I don’t deserve that kind of credit.”
“When you breathe life into the dead, you kind of are. Konnor set every bit of it into motion, which makes him godlike. I owe him everything for dragging me out of Hell when I was still on fire, and all he wants are free tattoos.”
I glance at Chloe in his tattooed arm, the bottle already in her mouth, and wipe underneath my eyes again on a huff, trying to get ahold of myself. “If you tell any of them you saw me cry, I’ll taint your food with laxatives.”
He chuckles. “Same goes for you and this little heart-to-heart we’re having.”
I smile at him. “Deal. I’m gonna go to bed since you have this handled.”
“Paxtyn,” comes out of his mouth when I make it to the door.
I turn around one last time. I need distance from this heavy conversation before Landon wakes up and finds me crying in a room alone with Riggan. “Yeah?”
