Comeback (16 page)

Maybe I didn’t have to figure it out today, though.

Whether it would only be for a few days or a little longer, I was fairly certain Jessica did at least intend to stay for now. If not, she would have left with Soupy and all the guys’ wives and kids a little while ago instead of sticking around to help me put the kids to bed. I’d been busy preparing a guest room for her ever since she’d gone off to sort out bath time. Thank goodness she’d taken over for that because I’d acted like an idiot and hadn’t been able to figure out what to do. I’d been around them enough over the years on my summer breaks and all that I should have been able to get them to bed, but I’d frozen up when Elin had mentioned her mother and what she would have done.

Everything about this was proving to be even more difficult than I’d been expecting, and I’d already known this was going to be the hardest thing I’d ever done in my life. How the hell was I going to get through this? Why had Emma believed I could?

I had just finished putting fresh sheets on the bed when Jessica said, “Nicky?” from the doorway. Her voice had been quiet, as though she was trying not to startle me.

I turned around, a pillow still in my hands, to find her leaning her shoulder against the doorframe. I held the pillow out in front of me, feeling thoroughly inept. “Emma said you were planning to stay for a while. To help out with the kids.” I couldn’t think of anything better to do with that pillow than maybe bury my head in it.

“Is that all right?”

I couldn’t get a read on her in the low light, so I bent over to turn on the lamp at the bedside table. It lit her in a soft glow, but it didn’t help much for helping me discern her reaction. “You don’t need to feel like you have to keep your promise to her, you know. She’s gone. She’ll never know.” And now I sounded like an ungrateful ass, even though I’d only been attempting to give her an escape route. I didn’t want her to feel as if she had to stay with us if she didn’t want to.

“But I would know. So would Elin.” Jessica took another step into the bedroom, then another. She stopped when there were only a few paces between us and took the pillow from me, tossing it onto the bed. “So would you.”

“I can’t hold you to a promise you made to ease a dying woman’s mind,” I said.

She shook her head. “That’s not why I made the promise. It wasn’t about Emma. It had nothing to do with easing her path.”

It had to have been for Emma. There wasn’t any good reason for Jessica to have done it otherwise.

Another step. And another. I could almost feel her breath on my chest. If I listened hard enough, I might have been able to hear her heartbeat.

“The kids, then?”

She shook her head, and she lifted her hand up to cup my cheek as if that was the only answer I should need. But it was the answer that made the least sense of all.

“You didn’t make that promise for me.”

“Would you rather I go? I will, if that’s what you want, but I think we’ll need to sit down with Elin and the boys and help them understand.”

I didn’t know what I wanted. Hell, I didn’t know what I needed. I only knew that in that moment, the softness of her palm and the warmth of her body so close to mine were the only things that mattered.

I put my hands on her waist.

She didn’t pull away.

“Nicky.” It was a whisper, just a breath on the air. She lowered her hand until it pressed against my chest. I could feel the pulse in her wrist hammering against me, matching the rhythm of my heart. It was the only time all day I’d been aware of my own heartbeat, the only time I’d felt alive. The only time I’d been glad I was.

Nils came streaking in wearing nothing but a pair of underwear and still so wet the water was beading and dripping down his arms. He giggled like a lunatic and ran a circle around us. Jessica backed away before I could tighten my grip and keep her close. Nils raced behind me and hugged tight to my leg, making me as wet as he was. Then his brother came running in after him in an almost identical state of undress.

“I’m coming for you,” Hugo somehow got out through his laughter.

“Save me!” Nils shrieked.

“Oh no, you don’t,” Jessica said, laughing. She grabbed hold of Hugo, either oblivious to how wet he was or else she didn’t particularly care, and guided him back out into the hall. “Off to bed with you two.”

I somehow got free of the giggling slippery eel’s grip around my legs and picked him up, tossing him over my shoulder to follow them.

I couldn’t kid myself. If they hadn’t raced in right at that moment, I was going to kiss Jessica. And all appearances pointed to the fact that she was going to let me.

I felt as messed up as I ever had on pills and booze, but I hadn’t taken a damn thing.

IT TOOK ALMOST
an hour to get those boys to dry off, put on their pj’s, and settle down in bed. At first the difficulty was due to the fact that they couldn’t stop giggling. Then the reality that their mother wasn’t there to tuck them in and would never be able to do that again hit them, and the giggles turned to sniffles and then all-out crying. What was the right thing to do at a time like that? Leave them to comfort one another? I didn’t know anyone cold-hearted enough to do that, not even me. Wrap them all up and hold on tight until they finally fell asleep? Seemed like a reasonable possibility, but if we did something along those lines, were we locking ourselves into repeating the same thing every night for the foreseeable future? Nicky seemed to be looking to me to help him figure it out, and I wasn’t sure there was a right answer for this situation.

In the end, the two of us stayed with the boys, curling up in their beds and holding them. It wasn’t long before Elin joined us, too, once she finished with her shower. She crawled into the bed along with me and her youngest brother, and little Nils rolled over to hug her, sniffling and snotting all over the clean pj’s she’d just put on. Since he had her to hold, I eased myself off the bed, putting a bit of distance between us. I took a seat in a chair by the window, even though I was tempted to sneak out of the room entirely. Would they notice if I left? I wasn’t sure.

Eventually, exhaustion won out, at least with the two boys. Elin was still awake and holding on to Nils when her brothers both fell asleep.

“Do you want to sleep in here tonight? With them?” Nicky asked her, his voice little more than a whisper.

She nodded and pulled her brother closer. He smacked his lips but didn’t come close to waking. I moved over to pull the blankets up around their shoulders, and Nicky kissed her forehead, brushing a blond curl away from her eye.

“You know where to find me if you need me,” he murmured.

She gave him a resolute nod.

Then we backed out of the room, leaving the door cracked so we would be able to hear if anything was wrong.

Once we were out in the hallway, he dragged a hand through his hair, his shoulders drooping with what must surely be the same fatigue I felt. He pressed his eyes closed for a moment, although I didn’t know if he was saying a prayer or trying to figure out his next step. Then he took off down the hall toward the kitchen. I followed him, as worried about him as I was about Elin.

“Did we do the right thing?” he asked once we were far enough away from the boys’ room that none of the kids should’ve be able to hear us. His voice was scratchy, sounding like tires crunching over a gravel driveway. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know why Emma thought— She should have—”

“You’re doing the right thing,” I interrupted. “You’re figuring it out as you go, which is all you can do. There is no handbook, no set of rules to follow in a case like this.” I thought about crossing over to him and taking him in my arms as I’d done with his nephew but decided against it. Right now, I was fairly certain he needed to talk more than he needed physical comfort. Maybe. Lord knew he spent more time in his own head than he did talking in general, and that wasn’t likely to change now.

“She thought it would be best because you love those kids, and that’s what they need right now,” I said. “They just need someone to love them. Someone to be there for them. That’s all.”

He opened a cabinet and pulled down a couple of glasses, then filled them with water from the refrigerator. He passed one of them to me. “But what if I mess up?”

“Then you mess up. And you try to fix it and do something different the next time so you’re not repeating the same mistake. Have you ever known any parents who didn’t make mistakes? I know I haven’t.” My father was example 1A on the list of parents who’d screwed up, and I liked to think that I’d turned out all right…in the end, at least. I took a seat on a stool at the bar, settling my glass in front of me. “Were your parents perfect?”

Nicky took a swig of his water before quirking up an eyebrow and cocking a grin in my direction. “Perfect for
me
, I guess you could say. But no, not perfect.”

“Exactly. Hell, it’s not just parents. No one is perfect, no matter what they’re doing. People screw up. We screw up all the time, and we learn and grow and try to make things better the next time. That’s just how it works. I’d say you’re doing pretty well, all things considered.”

His expression turned dubious.

“You are,” I insisted. My need to reassure him, to continue refilling his well of confidence, kept growing. “You’ve got your flaws, but who doesn’t? You’re learning from your mistakes, and you’re trying to make yourself into a better version of you. That’s all anyone can ask from or expect of you.”

He let out a humorless laugh. “You seem to have it all figured out.”

“Guess I’ve fooled you, then.” I smiled when I said it, hoping I’d be able to get him to smile again. I’d seen too much of this brooding version of Nicky today, too much of him in pain. I wanted to help pull him out of it, even if it was only for a few minutes.

He did give me a small grin, but it didn’t reach his eyes. He finished off his water and put the glass in the dishwasher. I’d hardly even sipped from mine. I looked down at it now, Emma’s words running through my head on constant repeat.
My children will need him. He’ll need you.
How was I supposed to know what he needed from me, though? And if I couldn’t figure that out, how could I give it to him? I didn’t think he was going to be much help in terms of pointing me in the right direction, seeing as how he tended to do a lot of thinking but not always a lot of talking. And even with all that time spent in his head, did he have the first clue what he needed right now? Not likely.

He cleared his throat, startling me out of my thoughts. “I meant what I said earlier, you know. You don’t have to keep that promise.”

“What if I want to keep it?”

“Do you?”

I nodded. I did, even if I didn’t know for certain how it would work. If I stayed, surely I would start to believe I was part of the family after a while, wouldn’t I? Even if Nicky and I weren’t a couple? I thought so, but it was hard to know.

For a moment, Nicky stared at the tile floor. A long moment, actually—so long I wished I could get inside his head for just a little while so I could see the gears spinning or whatever was going on in there, in case that would give me a hint as to how I should proceed with him. Then he looked up and met my eyes again. “It wasn’t that long ago that you made it clear you weren’t ready for me to tease you, to play around with you. Now you’re saying you’ll live here and help me with my niece and nephews. I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know how to interpret any of it. What am I supposed to think? What are you proposing this should be between us? Not just you and me, either… I mean all of us. The kids, too.”

And there was an excellent question. “I don’t know what this is,” I finally said. “I wish I did. There aren’t any easy answers, though. Not in any of this.”

“So now what?”

“So now we figure it out as we go. Same as we’re doing with the kids.”

He raised a brow. “A day at a time?”

I shrugged, smiling.

“They’ve been hurt a lot, you know,” he said, sober as ever. “It was really hard when Gabe was killed. Then they had to watch my father die, and they watched me struggle with my addiction, and now they’ve lost Emma. I don’t want to let them get attached to you if you’re going to walk away. I’m all they’ve got right now. I can’t sit here and watch while they get hurt again. Not if I can prevent it.”

“So what are you asking of me? I promised Emma I wouldn’t leave, and I gave Elin the same promise. What do you need from me?”

He shook his head. “I was going to kiss you earlier,” he said as though that was an answer to my question, resting his weight with his forearms on the bar between us. Maybe it was his answer, though. “Before the boys came in and changed my plans.”

My breath caught at the expression in his eyes. There was life in them now, sparking bright and crackling like a fire in the hearth. So I’d been right, then. I’d thought that was what he’d been thinking, when he’d held me close, drawn me in with his hands on my waist. It might be even crazier than the fact that he’d intended to kiss me, but I was fairly certain I would have kissed him back.

I swallowed, trying to force all my thoughts back where they belonged. “Were you?”