But he happened to be around the day during my senior year that a Navy recruiter had come to school. I’d come home excited to tell my mom what I’d decided to do with my life, since I’d never been sure before, and she was always on me to make a plan.
When I’d walked into the house, there he was, sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a beer and watching my mom cooking dinner. “Son,” he’d said as I came up short at the sight of him. He used the word like a weapon.
I refused to call him Dad. I refused to acknowledge him at all.
Instead, I turned to my mom and started telling her about my talk with the recruiter and how he thought I might be a good fit for the SEALs. Over at the table, my father had busted a gut. “You’ll never be a SEAL,” he said derisively. “You know how hard that is? I knew guys way tougher than you who couldn’t hack it.”
I glared at him, my hands curling into fists. “Watch me.”
I didn’t see him again for almost a decade—he had the nerve to show up at my mother’s funeral and claim he was sorry, and I nearly lost my mind and threw the punch I’d been dying to throw for twenty years. My sister and Naomi had to calm me down.
Bree kept in touch with him for a while, but I told her not to tell me anything. I didn’t care if I ever heard his name again.
But I supposed he had taught me some valuable lessons—how not to be a father. How important it was not to let anyone make you feel weak. How good it felt to prove someone wrong when they doubted you.
Turning around, I dumped the rest of the beer in the sink. The last thing I wanted was a hangover in the morning. My girls deserved better.
After turning out the lights, I went upstairs, checked on them one last time, and went into my bedroom.
Five minutes later, undressed and under the covers, I lay with my hands behind my head, wide awake and unable to stop thinking.
About the past. My mother and father. Naomi and me. Our marriage had failed for different reasons than my parents’—I hadn’t been unfaithful, and to my knowledge, she hadn’t either—but we just hadn’t loved each other enough to make up for lost time, for our differences, for failed expectations, for hurtful things that couldn’t be unsaid.
I thought about Chip and Mariah and hoped it would work out better for them. It certainly seemed like some people were able to figure it out. Maybe it was the luck of the draw. Or maybe it helped to grow up like Chip had, in a house with a mom and a dad in a good marriage. Seemed like Winnie had grown up that way too.
Not that she’d been a grownup very long.
Stifling a groan, I flopped onto my stomach and shoved my head under my pillow, trying not to think about her perfect round ass, her bare wet breasts, water dripping down her warm, smooth skin. I imagined licking droplets from the stiff peaks of her warm pink nipples. I remembered what it felt like to pull her toward me and press my hard cock against her. What would it be like to cover that body with mine, to move inside her, to make her moan beneath me?
She was probably in bed now, just a few feet from the other side of this wall.
It was too close.
Seven
Dex
“Look at the way his nostrils flare when he snores.”
Hallie’s voice came through the fog of a restless sleep.
“Yeah.” Luna giggled. “Is that hair in his nose?”
“Ew, I think it is. I never noticed that before.”
“Maybe he cuts it,” Luna said. “I saw him giving his bushy eyebrows a haircut once.”
More giggling. “I’m glad my eyebrows don’t look like that.”
“They kind of do.”
“Do not!” Hallie was indignant.
“I just mean they’re dark like his. But don’t worry, yours aren’t as fuzzy. Daddy’s are like black caterpillars crawling over his eyes.”
Hallie snickered. “Totally.”
Silence for ten blissful seconds. And then.
“Daddy has an outie. I have an innie.”
“Me too.”
“Outies are funny-looking.”
“I know.”
The next thing I knew, one of them stuck a finger in my belly button. I opened my eyes. “Seriously?”
Luna, whose finger was still on my belly button, grinned. “Did that wake you up?”
“Your shit-talking woke me up.”
“We want to go swimming,” Hallie said.
“We have church first. You have Sunday school.”
“Can’t we skip it?”
“No. Your mom would kill me. Bring me my phone please.”