Hadley
“Oh, sweet Jesus!” My life flashed before my eyes, and I threw an arm across Ryker’s chest. I had the whole ‘mom arm seat belt’ down pat. It was the fourth time I had pulled it out of my bag of tricks today.
Ryker batted my arm away and slammed the car into park. “What did I do now?” he demanded.
“Do you not see that tree?” I tossed my arm toward the windshield and shrieked, “You were about to hit it!”
Ryker squinted his eyes and unbuckled his seatbelt. “I’m done. That tree is over twenty feet away, Haddie. I think you either need to get your eyes checked or take a chill pill. All I’ve been doing for the past half an hour is slow circles in the parking lot.”
I turned in my seat and glared at him. “That is way closer than twenty feet.” It was more like nineteen, but I wasn’t going to admit that.
“You drive home. I’m likely to kill us by hitting a tree three blocks away.” Ryker wretched open the door, slid out, and slammed it shut.
“Shit fudge,” I whispered. I wasn’t trying to be wound so tight, but it was damn nerve-wracking having someone who didn’t know how to drive operate the only means of transportation I had to get us around. If an accident were to happen, we would be shit out of luck with no way to buy a new car. I could only afford liability, and I knew they wouldn’t cover my sixteen-year-old nephew who didn’t have a license crashing into a tree…twenty feet away.
Ryker leaned against the door, his back to me, and I knew I had fucked up again. “One day, Haddie. Can you at least go one day without fucking up?” I pushed open the door, rounded the front of the car, and leaned next to Ryker.
“Let’s just go home,” he mumbled.
I sighed and pulled my phone out of my pocket. “No can do. I put a roast in the crock pot before we left, and I don’t have to start the potatoes for at least two hours. You’re stuck with me in this parking lot until then.”
“Haddie, you about had a heart attack when a leaf blew at the windshield.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “It was a damn big leaf.”
He pushed off the car and stood in front of me. “How about I try a little bit longer, and then we head to the trampoline park?”
“Trampoline park? We have one of those?” I had lived in Falls City all of my life and knew nothing of a trampoline park.
“They just opened it a month ago. It looks like a huge warehouse, and it’s in the industrial park. I heard some of the students talking about it today. I can work on my hyper tricking.”
There was so much in that sentence I didn’t understand. Warehouse? Industrial park? Hyper tricking? “What is hyper tricking?” I decided to ask about the thing I really had no clue about.
“Flips, kicks, jumps, and all mashed together, and if I get really good, I can add it in with my weapons.”
“Ah, karate.” I should have known. Karate was what Ryker talked about ninety percent of the time. “So, it’s just one big trampoline you jump around on?”
“No, at least the ones I’ve been to before aren’t like that. I’ve never been to Sky Fall before.”
Hmm, Sky Fall. I had no idea how much going to a trampoline park cost, but Rick had tossed an extra fifty to me last night for staying late to clean up. We should be able to swing it and hopefully still have money left over. “Okay. A couple more turns around the parking lot, and then we can head over there.” Ryker didn’t get to have a lot of extra fun, and he seemed super excited to go.
“Yes!” He pumped his fist in the air and pushed me to the side to get back in the car.
Well, that was easy enough to cheer him up. Apparently, this parenting was a balancing act of messing up and fixing it.
I had the messing up down; I just needed to work on the fixing part.
**********
“Man down,” I croaked, waving my arm in the air. With my luck, I was seconds away from being trampled by the gaggle of giggling girls who had been following Ryker around for the past hour, and no one would miss me.
I was on one of the corner trampolines, trying to not draw attention to myself, but Ryker kept coming by me with the group of girls in tow.
My lungs were begging for air, and I realized how out of shape I was. Ryker was looking down at me, a huge grin on his face. “I think you almost just did a cheat seven twenty.”
My hand rubbed my chest where I had somehow managed to knee myself. “That’s great, except I have no idea what that means.” It had felt like I had been flying through the air to my death.
“It means you rotated, a lot,” he laughed. He held his hand out to me and helped me up. “Next time, try landing on your feet, and not with your knees in your chest.”
I shakily stood. “I didn’t think I was flexible enough to do that. That is definitely going to leave a bruise.” The park was divided up into numerous rectangles, each surrounded with padding for individual jumping. There was also a basketball-type trampoline court and another area with a huge trampoline where you could play dodgeball.
I had no plans to venture out of my own little rectangle.
“I think you should try jumping first before flipping,” Ryker chuckled. He bounced over to his trampoline, next to me, and lightly jumped.
“That’s what I was doing.” I had been jumping up and down, minding my own business, when I had gotten a little brave and decided to up my game a bit. I upped it a bit too much. I dropped down to my knees and fell back on my butt. My legs were not ready for me to be standing on them again. “I’ll leave the fancy stuff to you.”
Ryker jumped, each time going higher and higher. “It’s easy to do it here, out on the mat is where it’s hard.” He tucked his legs, flipped backward, and landed on his feet, bouncing back up. “It took me months to figure out how to do that in the studio.”
I believed that. I couldn’t even get the hang of it on the trampoline that was doing all the work of getting my body in the air. “I blame my inability to get my ass in the air on the fact that I’m old.”
“Then if I were you, I wouldn’t come to the studio.”
“Why is that?”
“Because Tate, Dante, and Kellan are older than you and they can get their asses in the air. Well, maybe Dante can’t flip very well, but Tate and Kellan can.”
I laid back, slightly bouncing. “Well, more power to ‘em. I’ll keep my ass on the ground.”
Ryker did a series of flips, coming down from one, already planning out the next. He was flawless flying through the air, and it didn’t look like he was trying at all. “You can really do all of that on the ground?”
He did one last flip and plopped down on his ass. “Most of it. I can’t do a cheat seven twenty like you did, though.”
I sat up, my elbows underneath me. “That’s because I have skills no ninja has ever seen before.”
“I didn’t know that there were ninjas in Falls City.”
“Looking at one right now,” I said, laughing. “You’re like grasshopper in Karate Kid. Although, you have more skills than Daniel ever did.”
Ryker shook his head. “I don’t know; his switch kick was on point. Especially from that flamingo stance.”
I laughed loud, picturing Ryker standing on one foot like the pink bird. “I’m going to need to see you try that.”
“Come to class next Saturday, and you can see it. Maybe I can get Kellan and Tate to show you how this stuff should really look.”
I sighed and smiled. “You really like this stuff, don’t you?”
“Karate?”
I nodded.
“Yeah, I do like it.”
“Can I ask why?”
“It just is something I’ve been doing for so long that I don’t feel like myself if I’m not doing it. Somewhere along the way, karate became who I am.”
I sighed and laid back down. My sixteen-year-old nephew had more passion for something in life than I ever did. “I’m sorry I can’t afford lessons for you, Ry.”
“It’s okay. I like to help teaching the classes. Besides, I do get small lessons from the guys. Roman, one of the instructors, was one of the best guys on the circuit. The fact that I can even walk into the same school as him is amazing.”
I’d never been to the karate school Ryker was teaching at. I knew where it was, but I had never stepped foot inside. “Can I really come watch you help teach?”
“Yeah, of course. The guys won’t mind.”
“Well, then I guess I’ll have to drag my cookies out of bed next Saturday and watch my ninja nephew kick a little ass.”
“Really?”
Saturdays were always hell waking up early, but for Ryker, I would stay up all night and be to the school an hour early if it made him that happy. “Yup. And if you’re lucky, I’ll even let you drive.”
“You know, if you just let me drive, you won’t have to wake up so early to get me to school every day.”
“I need my car during the day, Ry.”
Ryker scoffed. “You don’t need your car during the day.”
I rolled my eyes and sat up. “Do you seriously think I do nothing but sleep all day?”
“No, but if you give me a list of errands to run, you can do nothing and sleep all day.”
“How about you work on getting your license, and then we can discuss you taking the car to school.”
“Sounds like a plan I can get down with.” Ryker bounced away, and I fell back.
I was tired. Who knew bouncing for an hour could wear you out? “Fifteen more minutes, Ry, and then we’re hitting the road,” I called.
Dinner, dishes, and then I was falling into bed.
Thank god I had the night off because adulting was exhausting.
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