Travis
I was more than a little agitated to have John summoning me to the football stadium so late in the day. The one benefit of not being on speaking terms with Ronnie was that I'd managed to earn myself an entire day with Stella all on my own. I spent most of the day still wishing that Ronnie was there with us, but I'd also relished the chance to fully try on parenthood for the first time.
Luckily, Laurel had pitched in. When I'd called to tell her I had no idea how to entertain a two-year-old, she'd shown up with a gift basket full of activities for us. It was a little too nice to have been put together on the spot, so I had a feeling she'd been preparing for a moment like that. Laurel had a major soft spot for Stella. It still surprised me that she was so into kids.
"What's that?" Stella asked, pointing to the building in front of us.
"That's daddy's home."
Her eyes widened. "You live there?"
"For a good portion of the year, I kinda do." I laughed as her eyes widened even more as we closed in on the building.
Growing up with Vinnie, I was sure she'd seen football fields before. It seemed that a college stadium, though, was a first. I liked knowing I was sharing that with her.
"Mommy coming, too?" she asked.
She'd been asking that all day, and each time the innocent question pained me a little more.
"No, baby, not this time."
Just as John had said, the side door to the stadium had been left propped open for me. I shifted Stella in my arms so that I could pull it open for us. Inside, the lights were dimmer than I was used to. I used mostly muscle memory to get from there to the tunnel leading out to the field.
"Down," Stella requested.
There was nowhere for her to go but forward, so I obliged her. The second her little feet hit the ground she took off at her fastest sprint. I kept up easily with her at my normal pace, her little legs moving several times to make up for each of my single steps. We burst out of the tunnel side-by-side.
My brain kicked into overdrive to make sense of what I was seeing. A giant inflatable screen had been set up on the sidelines of the field. An oversized blanket was spread out over the grass in front of it. An actual picnic basket sat next to the blanket. I looked beside me to Stella, only to find Ronnie standing there with the little girl in her arms. Her teeth sank into her bottom lip the same way they had when she's joined my art class.
"Ronnie? What is all this?"
Her voice wobbled as she spoke. "A little over three years ago, we were trying to figure out how to spend our Friday night. There happened to be a screening of A Streetcar Named Desire showing in the park. Neither of us were all that into the idea of watching a black and white movie, but we figured it would be a good place to spread out a sheet and…cuddle."
I smirked at her word choice. I knew she was saying, "cuddle" for Stella's benefit. The truth was that we'd spent the length of the movie kissing like our lives depended on it. There was a pretty healthy amount of groping that had gone on, too.
"Afterward, we parked your car down by the lake and…" I filled in the blank she'd left. We'd had sex. "And the…" Condom. "Ended up breaking."
I still vividly remembered the way we'd momentarily panicked but then ultimately laughed it off. We'd never imagined anything would come of it. We'd felt invincible together.
Finally, I realized where her story was headed.
"That's why you named her Stella."
"Labor sucked. I was so drugged up that when they handed me that little baby all wrapped up, I kept replaying in my head that scene from the movie where the dude is yelling 'Stella!' I didn't even realize I'd started calling our baby that until my mom pointed it out."
"I love her name."
"Me too," Ronnie agreed softly. "Her last name included."
"You never regretted giving her my last name?"
"No, never."
"Hmm."
"Travis," she whispered. Stella started squirming, and Ronnie had to let her down. Her little legs carried her as fast as they could over the length of the field. I held my breath when she tripped, but she quickly got up again and kept moving.
"I was mad when you left. You didn't even give me a chance, y'know? I came to see you in the hospital, and you asked me to leave. I thought you just needed a few days, but then you were gone for real. No one knew where you'd gone or how to get ahold of you."
"I know." She blinked hard.
"Nathan was the reason charges got dropped against me."
"Wait, what?" I'd thoroughly surprised her with that bombshell.
I nodded slowly. "You know his dad was a big-time lawyer?"
"I vaguely remember that."
"Well, Nathan went to his big-shot dad and pointed out that if I went down for the drunk driving, then there was a chance everyone else was going down with me. Nathan was the one that had thrown that party. He convinced his dad that the last thing they needed was anyone poking around in their business."
"His dad actually went for that?"
"He did after Nathan admitted we'd only left because he was harassing you. That's why I was helping Kylie address her own partying issues. I sort of felt like I owed at least that after what her brother did."
"Ugh. Is it awful of me to say I hate that Nathan was the one that took up for you?"
"I hated it, too." I shrugged. "But not nearly as much as I hated how guilty I felt about what had happened."
"The accident was partly my fault, too."
"Oh, I know." And I was more than a little relieved to hear that she'd somehow come to terms with that as well. "The thing I really felt guilty for wasn't the wreck. It was for not protecting you when you'd needed it. I'd never gone to bed without you before. I don't know what the hell I was thinking when I left you up alone that night. I should have stayed with you until you were ready to go to bed, too. We both knew those parties weren't exactly safe."
She flinched.
"What?" I asked.
"I told you to go to bed without me."
"No, you didn't."
"Yes, I did." She looked completely certain, but I didn't remember that at all. I'd been drinking pretty heavily that whole night. I tried to scan my brain for any memory of her telling me to go to bed, but it wasn't there.
Ronnie nervously twirled her finger around her hair.
"I seriously don't remember that at all."
"Kylie wouldn't stop following you around the party. I was jealous and pissed off. I left to go to the bathroom and when I came back she was hanging all over you. You didn't even seem to notice her really, but it made me so mad."
My brain kicked into gear. A flash of a memory overwhelmed me as my mind finally filled in the blanks from the story Ronnie was telling.
"What do you want me to do, Veronica?"
"I want you to go to bed, Travis, that's what I want you to do."
"Are you coming?"
"Soon," she'd promised.
"That's really what you want me to do?"
"Yes! I'm tired of watching her pant after you like a dog."
I rubbed my aching head. "What a mess."
"Yeah, what a mess," she agreed. "Where do we go from here?"
I stared at Ronnie hard. We'd been through a lot in a very short amount of time—or over the span of a long time, depending on how you looked at it. The last few weeks with her had made me start to imagine my future with her in it. Not just as someone I was sharing a kid with, but as someone I was sharing a life with. As a teenager, I'd made a lot of shit choices, but Veronica had never been one of them.
"I don't want a re-do or a start-over, Ronnie. All I want is to move forward. The way we should have done a long time ago. Can we do that?"
"I want that so much. Can you forgive me for what I did?"
"There's nothing to forgive, not really. We were young. I don't think either one of us understood what sort of impact our choices could have. This time around, I think we know exactly what's at stake between us."
Our eyes both drifted to Stella, who had at some point made herself comfortable on the blanket in the middle of the field. She was fast asleep on the edge of it.
"I never gave her a nap," I realized. "I was so busy worrying about what to do with our time that I completely forgot I should have let her nap."
Ronnie tossed her head back and laughed. "I'd say she's out for the night, then. So, how about a movie?" She grabbed my hand and pulled me towards the blanket. "I even brought snacks."
Wearily, I eyed the movie screen, remembering the story she'd told to go along with the set-up. "You're not actually gonna make me watch a movie in black and white, are you?"
"Hell no," Ronnie snorted. She reached into the basket and held up a projector remote and a stack of movie cases. "I was thinking action movie marathon."
Grinning, I reached for her and hugged her against me. It had only been a few days without her, but it had felt like a lifetime. Never again did I want to have to be without her, not for a few days, and certainly not longer than that. Ronnie might not have been perfect, but I really believed that we were perfect together.
I brushed her hair back from her face. "No more running, right?"
"No more running," she vowed.