The Hot Mess and the Heartthrob(76)

“He might not want to talk about it, Ms. Wilson,” Wyatt says.

“I have about forty-eight hours before he leaves town again, and I’m not interested in spending most of it babysitting him to make sure he’s not going to do something like taking a fake girlfriend again when it might ruin his chances with a woman I actually like. So, he’ll talk about it whether he wants to or not.”

She’s threatening torture, and if she’s confessing to dating Tripp’s team manager, I doubt there’s any amount of blackmail I could use to get her to stop.

Which means the easiest course of action is to give in and tell her so I can get back to dealing with this on my own. “Ingrid dumped me. Happy now?”

“Of course not. What did you do?”

“What did I do?” I throw my hands up. “Do you think if I knew what I did, I’d maybe be working on undoing it right now instead of sitting here with no fucking—sorry, freaking clue where it all went wrong?”

Mom’s studying me, and I know that look.

It’s the you know what you did wrong, Levi, but I’ll let you pretend you don’t.

I take a swig of beer.

That doesn’t help.

So I try it again.

Nope. Still not helping.

“Her ex was always gone,” I say to the floor. “So I’m out of the running. Because I’m always gone too.”

“Oh, sweetheart…”

“I called my assistant and told her to cancel everything she could for next year. I can’t cancel my tour. I mean, I could. I could. But I couldn’t live with myself.” The economic impact of a canceled tour is massive, and I don’t mean to me. I mean to all the people who work on a tour. The support staff. The crew. The band. The people who work the stadiums for shows.

I’d still have millions in the bank if I paid to cancel a tour. But those people count on their paychecks. I can’t let them down, and I know Ingrid would be extremely disappointed in me if I did.

And then there would be thousands upon thousands of disappointed fans.

The weight of making the world happy has never felt so heavy.

“Does she ask you to do that?” Mom asks.

I shake my head. “It’d be easier if she had. Instead, it’s like…it’s like she sees me for exactly who I am and what I do, and she respects me the same way you do for it, not like I’m some kind of a god, but like I’m a guy who does good things in the world because I have an obligation to use the gifts I’ve been given. But who I am is also the exact barrier. And you know what’s dumb? She told me that. She told me, time and again, that she put her kids first, and she didn’t have it in her to commit to anything else on that level.”

Mom sighs and leans closer to me, bumping my shoulder with hers. “Honey, being a single mom is hard enough. Bringing another man into it who’ll have different ideas of what’s okay for the kids to get away with and what’s not, and trusting he’ll be as consistent with rules and boundaries as you are, before you even consider when he’s there and when he’s not…that’s a huge burden. I didn’t date when you were younger because it wasn’t worth the emotional toll of balancing a man with what was best for you. There was literally no energy left to even begin to consider one more person to care for, and unfortunately, when I was younger, I tended to go for the men who needed care as much as you did.”

My fist tightens around the wet beer bottle. “Why did you give us so much? You deserve time for you too. You can’t just be a mom. You get to be you.”

“Ah, sweetheart…if only it were that easy.”

Is this anger irrational, or is it justified? I don’t know. I just know I’m seeing red. “And you had Beck’s family. And Mr. and Mrs. Rivers. Davis’s family. Wyatt’s family. They watched us all the time. You could’ve had the help. Ingrid doesn’t have that. Her parents dumped her on her grandparents when she was her girls’ age. Her ex is nowhere to be found. Her best friend lives out in the suburbs. Her kids—they’re awesome, but there’s three of them, and Hudson—he’s like Beck and Davis and me all rolled into one.”

“The good parts?”

“The fun parts.”

Mom grimaces.

“Exactly.” I sigh. “She won’t ask for help because…”

I trail off.

She probably does ask for help, but knowing Ingrid, not until she absolutely can’t avoid it.

Just not from me, with the one exception of watching her kids earlier this week.

When she couldn’t avoid it.

And I get it.

I’m not dependable. I travel all the time. I can’t be the father any kid deserves.

Not the kind of father I’d expect myself to be after watching the examples of all of my friends’ fathers, and the years I’d look around on my birthday, or holidays, or during talent shows at school, and realize somewhere out there was a guy who cared enough to knock my mom up, but not enough to stay, and knowing that I’d never be that kind of person.

Fuck. Just fuck.

“You want my advice?” Wyatt asks.

Dude was so quiet, I forgot he was sitting on my other side.

But of everyone here, he’s the only one who’d understand. He got married years ago to the wrong woman because she was pregnant, then had a rough divorce later that cut him out of his own kid’s life nine months out of the year for several years. Then when he and Ellie hooked up, they had to make long distance work until he managed to network his way into an assignment at the local base north of the city.