Chapter 1

Henry fans a set of tickets under my nose. “Pac-12 championship. Fourth row courtside.”

We’re taking a break from the trim carpentry work we’re doing, sitting on a newly poured retaining wall in the watery Pacific Northwest spring sunshine. “Fucking A,” I breathe. “When?”

“Tonight.”

My excitement crashes. “Can’t.”

“You have Gabe?”

“Yeah.”

“Didn’t you have him last weekend?”

I shrug. “Maddie has some work thing to go to.”

“Can you tell her something’s come up? Something important?”

Henry and I have been friends since junior high school. He’s my wingman. He’s one of those guys that people say has “a great personality”—you know, code for a little overweight, dresses sloppy, but so fucking funny. And the kind of guy who always has your back.

He’s still got the tickets under my nose, close enough that I can smell the sharp smell of the paper and ink, and holy fuck, do I want those tickets. I can feel the energy in the arena, taste the beer and dogs, hear the crowd noise.

Henry sees me start to weaken. “Cheerleaders.”

My brain supplies: sports bras, short-shorts, tanned, toned flesh, tits bouncing, long shiny hair. My body reminds me that it’s been longer than usual since I last had sex.

“Hey, Jack, you in? College girls. Drunk, amped up on the smell of sweat, and hoping for a little Friday night excitement?” Clark plops down next to me, sub sandwich in hand. Henry and I, who’ve worked together for ages, met him on this job, and lately he’s been heading out with us.

“He’s got Gabe tonight.”

“Again?” Clark demands around a huge mouthful. “You had him last weekend. It’s always your weekend. Does she ever get him?”

“She has a work thing.”

“She has your balls in a vise is what she has,” Clark says, shaking his head in disgust. “The only good excuse for giving up a perfectly good Friday night for child care is if it’ll get you laid.”

“Does that mean you’re gonna start taking babysitting jobs?” I needle him. He’s been in a drought lately, and we don’t hesitate to give him shit about it. “Some of us don’t need to provide child care to keep ourselves in pussy.”

I don’t. Some of it’s probably just luck of the draw in the looks department; some of it’s manual labor, plus hoops and touch football with friends, and lifting when I’m bored at home. The rest is, I go in knowing that I’m going to close the deal, and that seems to open legs.

That logic, though, doesn’t and never will apply to Maddie, Gabe’s mom, so it’s definitely not why I agreed to take him tonight. I agreed because even though I may not be dad material, I’m also not a dick about things like child support and watching my kid. Plus, when I said yes, I thought my mom would be in town and my sister would be free, so I wasn’t picturing a whole evening of corralling Gabe by myself.

But now I’m wishing so hard I’d said no to Maddie’s request. It’s been a crappy week, with stupid shit going down on the job like a built-in bookshelf the client claims is the wrong width and no paper trail to back me up. I just want to wash the bad taste of that out with a few beers, not to mention the possibility of taking home one of those ready, willing, and able female fans Clark was sketching such a vivid picture of. Instead, I’m going to be fumbling through a night with Gabe, feeling like another guy would have this kid-care thing down to a science by now. And, obviously, there will be no hope of getting laid.

A moment later I wish I hadn’t thought that, because now I’m remembering the brief time Maddie was fair game, which never leads anywhere good.

Henry scowls. “What could Maddie be doing that’s possibly more important than the Pac-12 tourney?”

She didn’t tell me what it was, only that it was work-related. And even though I should be stuck on the image of college women in clingy Huskies T-shirts raring to go, I’m wondering about Maddie’s evening instead. What’s she up to on a Friday night? Is her asshole boyfriend escorting her? Will he be with them tonight when she drops Gabe off?

Just then, my phone buzzes.

We good?

It’s Maddie, and something shifts in the center of my chest.

And just like that, I realize: Clark’s right. There are lots of different ways to have your balls in a vise. Maddie might not be the kind of woman who’d give me hell for ditching out on her tonight, but that doesn’t mean I will ever do a good job of saying no to her. And it doesn’t help that our lives are permanently tangled up because of Gabe.

“Always use a condom, boys,” I say. “Let this be a lesson to you.”

Not that I’d undo Gabe. Never. But—if I’d been able to foresee moments like this five years ago when I barged past common sense and into Maddie, well, I might have slowed down and used the big head.

“So—that means you’re out?” Clark wrinkles his forehead.

“I’m out,” I confirm sadly.

They both shake their heads. “Sorry about your balls, dude,” Clark says.

Henry sticks the tickets back in his pocket and says they’ll find someone else. I have to practically clamp my mouth shut to keep from changing my mind and grabbing the ticket.

We’re good, I text Maddie.

Yeah. At least if I’m not the dad any woman would choose for her kid, neither am I my dad.

I’m still wanting to beg Henry for another chance at that ticket as I head home in my pickup a couple of hours later. The site where we’ve been building is three miles from my house, but the town where I live has changed a lot in the last couple of years. When the Seattle real estate boom went crazy, developers started buying up land everywhere, including places no one ever thought of as being Seattle suburbs, like the town where both Maddie and I grew up, Revere Lake. Five years ago, Revere Lake looked pretty much like it did when we were kids: a small main street with a market, a diner, a couple of coffee shops, and stores catering to lake tourism. Now there are new cookie-cutter developments everywhere and box retailers popping up, and the city council, in its infinite wisdom, decided it would be a good idea to widen the main drag and put in traffic lights. End result? It takes twenty minutes for me to make what should be a five-minute commute home.

So I’m late to meet Maddie again.

I finally turn off Route 132 and round the last couple of corners. Maddie’s little red Toyota Prius is in my driveway, and she and Gabe are sitting on my front steps.

I jump down from the truck and call out, “Hey.”

I’ve decided I’m not going to apologize because some dumb politician has installed too many traffic lights in a couple-mile stretch of road. If she wants to turn the vise, that’s her problem, but I’m not going to offer her my balls so she can do it. I’m under ten minutes late, and that’s good enough. To be fair, she doesn’t call me out on it. She just looks at her watch and shakes her head.

Gabe comes running from her side. I open my arms and he jumps up. I give him a hug. “How are you, buddy?”

“Good! We gon’ play football?” He wriggles in my arms and I set him down, catching a whiff of the clean shampoo scent of his hair. How do little kids smell so good?

“Of course!” I tell him. There are about ten more minutes of daylight, but we’ll make it work. If there’s one thing I’m determined about, it’s that Gabe will know how to throw and catch every kind of ball there is before he goes to kindergarten. I’ve actually had to talk Maddie into signing him up for sports—soccer, T-ball, pee-wee flag football—which floors me. It’s like she just doesn’t understand that it’s Gabe’s ticket to Mandom. You can suck at anything else in life, but if you have a passable knowledge of sports, you can survive boyhood. I should know; sports was about the only thing I was ever good at. I’m hoping Gabe will turn out to have Maddie’s brains, but if not, at least I’ll give him the tools he needs not to get eaten alive.

“The football’s in the garage—you want to go get it?” I ask him, and he runs off.

That leaves Maddie and me alone, and I get my first real look at her. She looks good. Maddie cleans up great, anyway, but this is another level. She’s wearing skinny jeans and a scoop-neck red shirt that bares the tops of her breasts and shiny red boots with spike heels. My brain serves up a quick, dirty flash of what she’d look like wearing those boots and nothing else. Unfortunately, I have never been able to get out of my head how good she looks naked, so it’s a vivid picture, right down to how pink her cheeks get when she’s turned on.

That ship, however, sailed a long time ago, so I do my best to draw a curtain over the mental pictures.

“So,” she says, breaking the awkward silence. “Everything good with you?”

“Yeah. Good as it gets. You?”

No way I’m going to make a big deal of how much I’d rather be at a basketball game than babysitting. Especially because nothing gets Maddie pissed off faster than referring to watching Gabe as babysitting. Apparently it’s not babysitting if it’s your own kid. That said, when you’re as clueless as I am about fatherhood, it might count as babysitting.

“Things could be worse.” She shrugs.

We both shift our stances awkwardly. You’d think two people who have a kid in common would eventually find some comfortable way to deal with drop-offs and pickups, but I guess the water under our particular bridge is just that muddy. It’s pretty crazy when you think about all the history we have and all the talking we did, once upon a time. But we were just kids then, and the connection we had didn’t translate when it came to real life.

“Um, so, overnight bag—” She points to where it’s sitting on my stoop. “He’s been tough to get to bed lately. I have to read him a lot of stories.”

A flare of panic goes up in my chest. Usually when I have Gabe, my mom and sister are around. They’ll do anything to score time with him, which means that the tough stuff, like bedtime, is pretty much always their job. I just get to handle the Fun Uncle stuff. Tossing around the ball, teaching Gabe how to ride a bike (it’s a work in progress), buying his affections with ice cream.

But whatever, I’ll handle it. It’s one night, right? What can go wrong?

“He’s really liking Frog and Toad right now…” She looks worried.

She’d probably be even more worried if she had any idea how much I depend on my female relatives to deal with Gabe. I try to keep that under the hat. “We’re gonna be fine,” I assure her.

She bites her lower lip. That lower lip is a work of fucking art, and when she gets her teeth into it like that, I forget about the muddy waters and just want to soothe the spot she’s bitten with my thumb. Or my tongue.

Curtain on that, too.

“Don’t let him eat too much sugar.”

She says that every time.

“And don’t let him stay up too late.”

Ditto on that one. I give her a look, and she raises her chin obstinately. “I’m his mom. I gotta say it.”

I don’t say, And I’m his dad. Because although I am—never doubted Maddie’s word on that for a second, and if I had, one look at Gabe would have cleared it right up—I don’t often feel like I’ve earned that title. That’s why I always go with “fun uncle.” Although Gabe does call me Daddy. Even though I told Maddie I didn’t think it was a good idea…because what if, someday, she wants Jack to call some other guy, like Harris, Daddy?

This is not a thought I want to spend any time with, so I change the subject. “Where are you going?” I ask her. The heaped-up curves at the scoop of her shirt are distracting. Eyes up.

“My boss is retiring and we’re throwing him a party.”

“Is Big Dick going with you?”

“Don’t call him that.”

I’ve never actually told her this, but I call Harris that because I can’t think of any reason she’d be with him other than that he must have a big dick. Otherwise, he has no redeeming features. Well, maybe money. He’s a product marketing manager at a biotech company and he’s older than we are—thirty-three, I think—and they live together in a condo that’s, like, three times as big as my house. But he’s one of those guys that just annoys you right away, always knowing everything and having to explain it all, and he interrupts her, which I fucking hate.

“Harris is working.”

“Did he see you in that shirt?”

That slips out before I can think better of it. My better self, in general, fails me around Maddie, which is why I usually keep these meetings as short and sweet as possible.

“What’s that got to do with anything?” she demands. Which I know means he did.

This is another reason Harris is a Big Dick. What kind of guy could take even one look at Maddie—especially in that shirt, which is all over her curves like a second skin—and decide he’d rather be working? But if I say that to her she’ll just get pissed at me. I know from past experience. Harris the Big Dick is a nice guy, Maddie says. If I would just get to know him I’d see that.

Yeah, that’s going to happen. When the Cougs win the Pac-12.

Gabe comes back with the football. The small one. He can’t even really hold onto the full-sized one yet.

“Right here,” I tell him.

He throws it to me. For a guy who’s just barely four years old, he has a great arm. We really have to work on his spiral, though. It’s a wobble at best.

“So—I should go,” Maddie says.

“Yeah.”

We don’t hug, because, muddy waters. Still, I feel like I want to say something, do something, to make it less awkward.

“Tell your mama goodbye,” I say to Gabe. “Tell her she looks pretty.”

She has just started to crouch over him to hug him goodbye, and she looks up at me, startled.

She has green eyes and high-arched eyebrows that make her look like she’s always about to ask a question. Her mouth is a wide bow and her bottom lip—yeah. You already know that drill.

I shrug. “Teaching him how to get the ladies.”

She glares at me.

I grin back.

She sighs, and I can tell she’s trying not to smile.

There. Tension broken.

“Be a good boy,” she tells Gabe, crouching down to hug him, giving me a quick mouthwatering glimpse down her shirt.

“ ’Bye, Mama,” he says. “You pitty!”

I can’t read the look on her face when she glances up at me. But that’s nothing new. Maddie’s been a closed book to me for so long now I almost forget that it wasn’t always that way.

She straightens up, gives me a little wave, and takes off across the lawn.

Her dark hair swings, her hips sway, her jeans hug her. She looks just as good going as coming.