The Slow Burn (Moonlight and Motor Oil #2)(53)

One could say I wanted that too.

A lot.

And one could say I loved he wanted that.

A lot, a lot.

“And Christmas is coming,” he continued. “That’s makin’ cookies and watchin’ Christmas movies and wrappin’ Brooks’s presents and goin’ to parties, and you give that kind of overtime to the store, you’ll be beat and some of that can’t happen, but most of it’ll be done just to get it done instead of it bein’ done because it’s fun.”

He thought all that was fun.

Where did this guy come from?

He was totally surreal.

The good kind.

“Honey—”

“No pressure. You do what you gotta do,” he said. “I’m serious about that. I get it. Life is about doin’ what you gotta do. You just need to know that if I don’t get that shit, I’ll be disappointed. And I know that seems like I’m full of it and puttin’ on pressure. But for this to work, we have to communicate and you gotta know where my head is at and what I want. I want the same back from you. I get life is about disappointment too. But I’m not gonna get in this with you and sit on shit that disappoints me and let it infect what we got. We’re here.” He raised Brooklyn’s spoon to indicate just how here we were (and one could say I loved that too). “I’m good. That isn’t gonna make me stop wanting more.”

“I won’t take the Saturday shift,” I told him.

And God.

God.

The look on his face.

It was like I put a chest filled with treasure on the island and told him it was all his.

“I don’t want life to be about disappointment for you, Toby,” I told him quietly.

“Babe, your dad was a dick who beat your mom, so she had to put you in a car and escape him. Your husband was a deadbeat waste of space who cheated on you. My mom took off on my dad, who worshiped her, leavin’ a five-year-old and a three-year-old she’d carried in her own fuckin’ body, and no one knew why she pulled that shit. My brother fell in love with a woman and went all in, not hiding that. And she decided to go on the lam with her motherfucker of a brother who ended up kidnapping your kid and I’m still some serious pissed I didn’t get to rip his balls out through his throat, he did that. Life is about disappointment, Adeline. We got good now. We sail those winds. Because a different wind is gonna blow and it’s probably gonna blow soon. So we gotta take what we can get.”

I stood there, staring at him, hurting for him, and wondering if all this was why he’d spent the last decade and a half chasing experiences and adventure.

Maybe he wasn’t doing that.

Maybe he was running away from disappointment.

He had to get to the garage and I had to get Brooklyn to daycare and then get to the store, so I didn’t have time to get into that.

I knew one thing.

I needed money.

One could say I had a helluva cushion now. But ten thousand dollars wasn’t ten million dollars, and I needed to keep my eye on that ball for me and my boy.

But I also knew I was going to have a conversation with Michael that day about how bad it would be if I couldn’t do holiday overtime.

“You need me to get Brooklyn from daycare Thursday and Friday nights, get him home and do his gig for you?” he asked.

“That’d be great, honey,” I said softly.

“I’ll be on it,” he muttered, and turned back to Brooklyn, who, as I watched, decided in the time between Toby stopping feeding him and Toby starting again, he hated cereal if him giving Toby an ornery face and jerking his head side to side when Tobe tried to shovel some in was any indication.

“You done, bud?” Toby asked my kid.

“Gah!” Brooks replied.

Since I wasn’t even sure what “Gah!” meant, Toby tested it out and lifted the spoon hovering close to his face.

Brooklyn jerked his face away.

Tobe tossed the spoon into the bowl and muttered, “You’re done.”

Then he took Brooks’s bib and rubbed the cereal off his face, doing this also with natural ease, even if Brooklyn wasn’t helping and instead was jerking his head around and shouting, “Dodo! Nono! Fafa!”

Through this, I stood there and watched wondering how life had led me from what I’d had, which, outside my mother being a seriously boss bitch and my sister being the best big sister alive, wasn’t much, to starting things with a good, decent man one day and having him slip into feeding my son breakfast the very next morning like he’d done it since Brooks started eating semi-solid food.

And in that moment I knew Toby was wrong.

Life wasn’t about disappointment.

Life was a journey.

The journey of finding what I’d seen on my sister’s face the night before.

Finding your place.

Finding your people.

And settling in so when those cold winds blew, you had warmth to see you through.

Toby was going to understand that.

I knew it.

No.

I vowed it.

Because I was going to teach him.



“Hey,” Toby greeted when he picked up my call.

“Hey,” I said, on the trot back to the store at lunch after dropping the cards at Macy’s.

“You sound like you’re running,” Toby noted.