Chapter Six
Levi
“You’ve got chocolate in your hair,” Harper says, raising her arm and running her fingers through the strands near my temple. She smells like the chocolate chip cookies we baked with Lily, and I want to bury my nose in her neck, kiss her, and whisper I want her. This is a side of her I haven’t seen before. Gentle, sweet, maternal. She was stunning in the pool earlier. So confident and commanding. She kept me absolutely riveted. Then I watched her bake cookies with my niece and talk about swimming. When she enlisted Lily in a secret “swimja” society, I was fascinated even more.
“Thanks. I’m pretty sure I’ve got chocolate in my ear, too.” Lily’s little hands were covered in melted chocolate after she ate two cookies and decided to hold my face and kiss me for making her favorite food.
“Your niece adores you.”
“What’s not to adore?”
“Where should I start?” Harper fires back.
“You can’t give me a compliment and then knock it down, Ham.”
She bristles. She hates when I call her Ham, which is partly why I do it. “It was an observation, not a compliment.” She also likes to argue with me.
A high-pitched squeal snags my attention, and I turn my head. Lily is chasing a year-old mutt around the dog run at the animal shelter. The second we got here, she had to go play with him. I’m hoping the running around tires her out.
“Thanks for hanging with us,” I say. I’m not sorry for using my niece as an excuse to have more time with Harper. I can handle Lily on my own, but I saw an opportunity that put me closer to winning the bet, so I took it. The more time I spend with Harper, the more ammunition I have when Elliot gives me shit about her.
“I’m not sure Brad appreciated me showing up with you.”
I lean my arms on the chain link fence and watch Lily skip around the dirt and grass in delight. “Why do you say that?”
“He thinks we like each other and isn’t happy about it.”
“What are you talking about? Did he say something to you?”
She hunches. “It doesn’t matter.”
It matters. “He mentioned Kayla, didn’t he?” My brother-in-law thinks I’m still fucked-up, and to a degree, I am. But I don’t need him butting into my personal life. Especially where it concerns Harper. Not sure why that bothers me so much in particular, but it does.
“Not in so many words, no.”
I shift my stance, and my arm brushes hers. It’s unintentional, which makes the electricity spreading through my body that much more significant. I like her touch. Her nearness. Something in me comes unearthed. I know she’s suffered loss in her past, too.
Lily shows no signs of slowing down, so for reasons I’m not too clear on, I decide to tell Harper about Kayla. My family is always encouraging me not to keep shit bottled up inside. “Kayla and I started dating when we were sixteen, and when she was seventeen, she got pregnant.”
Harper’s head swings around, her eyes wide with surprise as she looks at me.
“When she told her parents, they freaked. They were ultra-strict and religious and didn’t think we were having sex. I was in love with their daughter and would have taken responsibility, but they saw it as ruining her life if she kept the baby. They were also overbearing and cared what other people thought so they packed up and moved to Ohio so Kayla could have the baby in secret and give him up for adoption.” I let out a breath. “In that sense, her parents were unselfish. They wanted a couple who couldn’t have children to be blessed with one.”
“Him?” Harper whispers.
I nod, a little choked up. Somewhere out there is a boy with my DNA. Lily waves to me, and I wave back. “I didn’t find that out until college. When Kayla left, they forbid us from having any contact. They made sure she had no cell phone or social media access, so I had no way of reaching her. But we’d talked about going to UCLA together, so in the back of my mind that first week of school, I wondered if maybe I’d see her. Turned out she was there.”
“Wow.”
“We got back together. She was different, but the same, and I wanted to help her.”
“What do you mean?”
“She hadn’t wanted to give up the baby. She fell in love with him while he grew inside her, but her parents threatened to disown her if she didn’t. And afterward, they continued to make her feel bad about herself. She was pretty screwed up when she got to college and took a lot of that out on me. It was my fault the condom broke. Why did I let her go? Why didn’t I come after her? Then, other times, she made me feel like I was the king of the world. She told me she never stopped loving me.” I scratch the back of my head. “We were on and off throughout college. The off times were on her. She’d do shit and say shit to push me away, but I knew she didn’t mean it, and I loved her, so we’d work it out. After graduation things got better. She got a job she really liked, and her confidence grew, and I thought we were over the baby and ready to talk about a future together.”
“But that didn’t happen,” Harper says softly.
“No. Turned out she started seeing someone at work while she was seeing me. For six fucking months. One morning when I got home from an overnight shoot, she told me about him. She said she was in love with him and he was going to help her find our son.”
“What?”
I clear my throat. “Yeah. I told her that wasn’t right. That in my head our son had a good life with parents who loved him, and she’d better not interfere without their consent. Then I said we were through. About six weeks later, she shows up and says she ended it with the douche and gave up her search and she loves me and made a mistake and would I please take her back. That was the night you and Teague were at our house.
“I knew she was hurting and messed up, and a part of me always wanted to be her hero. I was the guy who got her back to a happy place. It just never lasted long enough. Two weeks later she told me she was pregnant with the other guy’s baby.”
“Holy shit.”
“I haven’t seen or talked to her since and have no plans to.”
Harper covers my hand with hers. “I’m sorry all of that happened to you.”
I turn my wrist and lace our fingers together. “Thanks. I try not to linger on it, but sometimes when I think about Justin, I wonder what-if.”
“Justin?”
“Kayla named our son Justin.”
“Is that weird?”
“Thinking that if things had gone differently, I’d be a dad right now? Yes. Knowing and wondering about a kid who might look and act just like me and I’ll never know him? Definitely. I’ve felt guilty. Sad. Confused. But mostly relieved that I didn’t have to make a decision back then. The truth is I wasn’t ready to be a dad, but my parents taught me to take responsibility for my actions, so I would have stepped up.”
“You’re a good person, Levi.”
I rub my thumb over the back of Harper’s hand. She’s easy to talk to. Always has been. “Thanks, Ham. You’re a good listener.” A piece of me wants to pull the I-told-you-my-story, now-you-tell-me-yours card, but that’s not why I confessed to her. I shared without much thought, really, obviously needing to get it off my chest after Brad poked at my past. Do I trust Harper with my story? Fuck, I don’t know. If someone had asked me yesterday, I would have said no.
She slips her hand out of mine. “Should we find Axl a puppy now?”
“We should.” Lily has finally turned her skip into a sit on the grass, and the dog is licking her face. “I’ll get the little monster.”
“You tricked me, you know.”
I glance at Harper with a what, me? expression while I open the gate to go grab Lily.
“Lily is an angel,” she says, her full lips twisting into a small, knowing smile. It’s the first genuine smile she’s given me since our night together. I smile back, feeling like shit. I did trick her, because I’ve got a bet to win. I remind myself it’s not hurting anyone. That when Harper and I do land in bed together, it will be because she wants it, too.
“Hey Lily-pad, let’s go find a puppy for your brother.” I pick her up and hold her close to my chest. She weighs nothing.
“Shudders peese,” she says, and I lift her onto my shoulders. Her fingers go right in my hair.
We rejoin Harper and start down the first concrete aisle of enclosures. When I talked to my sister Amelia, they were on their way home from the hospital. Axl did break his collarbone and arm but was feeling okay thanks to some pain medication. He liked his cast but didn’t like the sling he had to wear on top of that. When I asked what happened, Amelia said he was trying to save a cat in a tree. That kid. I told her if that act of heroism didn’t earn him a puppy before he turned five, then I didn’t know what did. It took a little more convincing, but I got her to agree. “Can you get one already potty trained?” she’d asked. I told her if there were no puppies, I’d do my best.
I feel Lily’s body go limp. “She asleep, isn’t she?” I ask Harper.
Harper looks over my head and nods with another small smile. Fuck, she’s beautiful. I tighten my hold on Lily and move my attention back to the dogs. We finish walking down the first aisle and round the corner to the second.
Right there on the left, my wish is granted. “That’s the—”
“That’s the—” Harper says.
“One.” We finish the last word at the same time.
Sitting with his—or her—nose against the fence is a bulldog puppy. Harper drops to her knees and immediately starts petting the pup and cooing. “He is the cutest thing ever,” she says.
I kneel beside her. I keep one arm around Lily and let the puppy sniff the knuckles of my free hand. Another couple with a young child walks up behind us. “This one is ours,” I say nicely.
“His name is Gus, and he’s eleven weeks old,” Harper reads from the sign on the chain-link gate. “Hello, Gus,” she says with affection. “How would you like to come home with us?”
Axl is going to lose his mind when he sees this dog. “Stay with Gus, and I’ll go do the paperwork?”
“Okay.” Harper doesn’t take her eyes off the puppy. “Wait.” She stands and reaches for Lily. “Let me take that weight off your shoulders while you do that.”
“Thanks.”
She puts Lily on her hip, guiding my niece’s head to her chest. “You lucked out finding a puppy today.”
“Things happen for a reason,” I say.
A flash of pain crosses over her pretty face before she turns away. “You’re lucky today, too, Gus.”
“Hey, you okay?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?” She spares me a quick glance. “Go buy your nephew his puppy.”
An hour later, Gus and Axl are sitting on the kitchen floor of my sister’s house getting to know each other. Amelia and Brad look on with smiles. Lily is in her highchair kicking her feet and waving her hands in excitement, Cheerios flying this way and that.
I glance over at Harper to find her eyes on me. She quickly looks away, hoping, I’m sure, that I didn’t catch her. But I did.
The game is most definitely on.