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Forty-Seven
The man was like nothing she had ever seen before. In a good way.
After the worst of the water was sopped up, with Noah helping in the hallway, Nick was left to wait for his handy-dandy landlords to show up—who had the necessary equipment to solve the “toilet torpedo,” as her twins had so helpfully named it. It was better than Nick’s “poopy problem”—which was one of the other suggestions.
Nick…was holding up well. He’d been frustrated and angry that the mess had happened—but he hadn’t lashed out at her or the kids. Not even once.
No one had been just a convenient target. She’d waited for it. But…
But the lashing out never came. Not like it would have with Doug. Even her boys had been a bit tense at first. She suspected they remembered a similar incident with their own father. Or at least parts of it.
It had ended up with her yelling at her husband for how he’d treated the twins—something Robin hadn’t done very often. She’d been too afraid to. Doug had been so angry that day—she’d feared he would slap her, right in front of the boys.
He had never hit her in front of them, fortunately. She was experienced enough to know that would have eventually come with time. She’d been trying to find a way to end her marriage and keep her sons when she’d gotten pregnant with Becky. A month after she’d found out, Doug had died.
She’d been waiting for Nick to explode, just like Doug used to. Even though she’d known he wouldn’t, deep down. The memories of Doug…still had a bit of a hold on her sometimes. They probably always would.
Robin firmed her resolve as she ran a disinfectant wipe over the hall baseboard where the water had splashed.
Nick was not Doug. She was going to remember that.
Nick laughed at something on of her boys said, then suggested they call it the “geyser-of-gross event.”
He was nothing like Doug at all.
The man had just started singing a kids’ song about the great flood.
She made it back to the living room just as he started telling the kids about the various ways Martin and Chandler would have to possibly fix the toilet while they waited for his nephews to get there.
“I don’t have the right tools, or I’d do it myself,” Nick said, a sopping wet towel in his hand.
He promised to take Noah and the twins to the hardware store with him first thing after school Monday so they could stock him up on tools for the next time.
The girls, too. He told them they made pink tools now—and he’d make certain that when Nova and Becky were old enough, they knew how to use them, too.
“Why?” Philip asked. “They’re just girls.”
“Hey, I’m a girl. Aunt Rory is a girl, and so is Aunt Glenna.”
“Because girls are just as good at fixing things as boys—if they are all taught the right way to fix things from the beginning, boys or girls.” Nick dropped the towel in the plastic tote she’d found in his laundry room and wiped his hands with the wipes she’d provided. “I’ll teach all five of you, I promise. No…no! No splashing, Beckers. It’s messy. Eww. Potty water.”
He scooped Robin’s daughter up and kissed her right on the forehead before lifting her out of the last of the puddles. Looking absolutely perfect with his pant legs rolled up and her daughter held tightly in his far too perfect arms. He looked at Robin and grinned. “Never know what surprises life is going to bring, do we, babe? I’m glad you were here at my side. No one else I’d rather clean up toilet water with than the people standing right here.”
That was the moment Robin admitted to herself that she had fallen head over heels, hook line and sinker, for one Nicholas Tyler. With toilet water all around them.
She shocked the wet socks right off that man when she pulled him closer and kissed him for the first time. Right in front of the five people who mattered the most, Becky’s hands in her hair as her daughter giggled between them.
They both just ignored Philip declaring them kissing was even grosser than the idea of the toilet spewing poo everywhere, and Wesley was gagging.
Leave it to her sons to really gross a perfect moment right up.
