Chapter 16

SIXTEEN

Britt

It's the kind of scene I thought I'd see back when Dakota and I first married. I always had this vision of walking in and finding my baby girl and her father having the same kind of conversations I remembered with my dad. Seeing her having that kind of exchange with a man she only met hours earlier—a man that's already showing more interest in her than her father ever has—and it just brings it all home to me. How much I put up with. How much I got cheated out of. How much she got cheated out of.

"Hey," Silas says, giving me a smile that just goes straight to my heart. "You look better. You don't look like you're about to drop from exhaustion anymore."

"I'm still tired. Still sore. But at least I feel moderately functional. You two seem to be getting along pretty well," I observe.

"Silas let me have cereal!"

I glance over at Karli, who is indeed chowing down on a huge bowl of Fruity Pebbles. "Umm, we did not have any of that in the house."

"DoorDash," Karli says with a grin. "Did you know you can get anything you want delivered right here at home?"

"I did know," I tell her. We typically don't because delivery fees kill my very minimal budget. "What else did you DoorDash?"

"I drank your last pop," he says, "So we restocked. And a frozen pizza for us... or for you, if you're ready for me to get out of your hair."

"You bought me pizza and replenished my supply of caffeine. What kind of ingrate would I be to kick you out?" Not to mention that I don't want him to go. I want him to stay. I want to snuggle on the couch with him and put my head on his shoulder and have him hold my hand. It's terrifying how much I want to play out these terrifyingly domestic scenes with him. I'm a grown ass woman trying to play house.

"I like Silas, Mommy. I want him to stay."

I smile, but I'm not looking at Karli when I say it. I'm looking at him. "Yea, baby. I like him, too. He can stay."

An hour later, I've given Karli a bath. Her fever broke, but she was fading pretty fast. The bath wore her out, so I put her back to bed. Now, I've finally had a shower myself. I hesitate as I walk out of the bathroom with my hair wrapped in a towel, not a drop of makeup on my face and wearing a tank top with a pair of ancient booty shorts leftover from my high school days.

I get that after you've been dating for a while, you let your guard down. You start to see one another's flaws and all. But we're just not there yet. We've kind of sped up the timeline on that. But I'm not about to be fake with him. I'm not gonna do my hair and makeup to sit on my couch with him while I've got a sick kid napping upstairs. So I make my way downstairs. He's got the pizza in the oven, diet sodas over ice, and a rom com on the TV.

"You're getting major brownie points."

He grins at me. "What do I get to redeem those points for?"

"My sparkling personality," I say, picking up one of the plates from the table. "For now."

"You know that's a joke, right? You don't ever owe me for taking care of you... there's no price tag on treating someone well."

"If I thought there was, you wouldn't be here. I've had enough selfish people in my life, Silas, to recognize them on sight. That's not you."

He takes my plate from me, puts it on the coffee table along with my glass, and then pulls me against him. With his arms locked around me, and his chin resting on the top of my head, he just holds onto me, swaying with me, rocking me. It's like he knows what I need before I do.

"Silas?"

"Yeah?"

"Don't make me need you if you're not gonna stick. I don't think I can take that again," I tell him. That admission makes me feel raw. Naked and vulnerable in a way that nothing else has. Sleeping with him was one thing. Falling for him is another. But this? This thing that he's doing right now of letting me lean on him, both literally and figuratively, that's the part that terrifies me.

"I'm not running, Britt. I'm not bullshitting you. I don't have the time or desire to play games with you... does that mean we're forever? Fuck if I know. But I want to find out."

I shake my head. "I can't go there with you. Not yet."

"I don't expect you to. Right now, I expect you to let me hold you. I expect you to eat shitty frozen pizza and act like I'm a Michelin chef. And I expect you to watch a movie you've seen a hundred times, so your brain doesn't have to work," he says.

That's a plan I can get on board with.

We watched three movies. He sat with me on the couch, holding me. Then he laid down, and I laid down on top of him while he stroked my back and toyed with my hair until I was just a boneless mess. The heat is still there, simmering under the surface. I want him. But it's not the time or place. Karli has been in and out for the last few hours. Coming downstairs for a snack or to be petted on, she then heads back up to her bedroom to lay down or to play.

"I hate to leave," he whispers. "But I do have to work in about eight hours and I should probably get some sleep."

I raise myself up on my elbows and look at him. "You wanna sleep here?"

He goes still, not even taking a breath. "Is that okay? Won't someone who's about four feet tall have some questions about that?"

"Maybe. But I'll deal with it. I don't want you to go."

He kisses me, just a soft, sweet kiss, his lips brushing over mine for just a second. "Then I'll stay."