“I mean, wouldn’t you want to spend your day around us?” I looked over at my best friend, who was staring at his kid with the world in his eyes.
“Are you okay with it?” he asked, suddenly serious. When I didn’t answer immediately, he went on. “With Nox calling me dad? We didn’t get a chance to talk about it at dinner.”
“That shit’s a little serious for a kindergartener’s class, man.” My eyes found Kennedy, who was sitting in the desk next to Nox, and while I did my best to come up with an answer for Remy, I pictured Kennedy smiling at me the way she was smiling at my nephew. She hadn’t even stayed for dinner with her family, and I knew it was because I showed up at Remy’s request.
Great. I was jealous of a kid.
“Danny screwed up,” I told him quietly. “Whatever he did ruined her. You’re the one who made her better. You picked up those pieces and made that broken woman whole again. So no. I don’t care that Nox calls you dad. You’re his. He’s yours. And she’s the only thing that matters.” The entire time I spoke to him, I kept my eyes on Kennedy.
“One day.” Remy nudged me. “You’re gonna pull that head out of your ass and you’re gonna give her the happily ever after that she deserves. Or I’ll have to cut your heart out of your chest myself.”
“Okay, class.” Avery Malone clapped her hands together for her students. “It’s time for lunch. You know the drill.”
That’s how I found myself ten minutes later, sitting at a table surrounded by kindergarteners who all asked to touch my gun and badge. Nox, however, was completely ignoring both me and Remy in favor of the firefighters.
Oh, and Kennedy was sitting between Nox and one of those firefighters.
“Damn hose chasers.” I tried to keep my voice down, but Remy heard me and snorted. “Shut it,” I ground out between clenched teeth.
“I’m glad Parker’s not here to see this,” Remy said with a plastic spork held in his hand. “She’d never let you live this shit down. Not in a hundred years. Stop making moon eyes at her, man. It’s almost sad.” After he stabbed his spork into a Jell-O cup, he nodded toward the firefighter. “We gotta do something about that, though. You know Nox still wants to be a firefighter, right?”
I remembered the night Parker’s house had a Molotov cocktail thrown through the window, and Nox running around announcing that he was going to be a firefighter.
“Can I touch the ax?” one of the other kids sitting at the table with Kennedy and Nox practically shouted. “I want to touch the ax.”
“You can’t do that,” Josh Harmon, the firefighter in question, said as he clutched the handle to his fire ax tightly. I couldn’t blame him; those little kids were tenacious as shit and would probably start running around the cafeteria with it if they got it away from him.
Kennedy laughed at his side and reached one small hand over so that it hovered over the blade. The sound of her laughter sent a trill of anticipation down my spine, even if she wasn’t laughing or smiling with me.
“What do you think, Nox?” The laughter in her voice filled the air around her and every single child watched her, just as enraptured as I was. “Do you think I should touch the ax?”
“I’m gonna murder a firefighter,” Remy muttered quietly.
“Not before I do,” I countered.
Josh was decked out in full gear, with his helmet on the table in front of him and his ax in his hand. The suspenders for his uniform hung down almost to the ground, and I was about ready to throw professionalism out the window and drag him away from the woman at his side.
The thought of Kennedy, with Josh or anyone else, was normally enough to send me in the opposite direction. But I couldn’t run away in the middle of lunch with Nox and the other kids who’d invited us to eat with them. Even if their food tasted like three-day-old leftovers. For the first time since Nox’s attack, I was close to Kennedy where she wasn’t running away or crying, and I wasn’t about to leave until I had to. No matter what was going on around us.
“I don’t think axes are cool.” Nox brought all the people around him to attention with his statement, and both Remy and I found ourselves sitting on the edge of our seats. “I mean, a bunch of firefighters came when our house caught on fire and that was cool. But my dad and uncle both have guns. An ax wouldn’t beat a gun.” He scratched his blond head, and while all the kids started debating which was better, Remy tilted his head to the side so that we were almost touching.
“I’m gonna buy that kid anything that he wants. Literally anything.”
“Same.”
“But,” Nox went on, and again the kids around him fell silent. “My aunt has a machete, and I think that’s better than either of them.”
“A machete?” A little girl with bright-blue eyes and a blond pigtail sitting across the table from me gasped. “I want a machete. They’re huge!” I narrowed my eyes as I realized that she was the same girl who threw a crayon at me earlier.
“I do too!” Nox agreed eagerly with a toothy smile.
And that’s how both the firefighter and the police were practically thrown aside for Kennedy and her machete. Honestly, though, it was kind of nice to just sit in the background and watch everything going on around me.
“Is it pink?” the same little girl across our table called out.
“No.” Kennedy laughed. “I don’t like pink.” Her nose wrinkled as she turned almost all the way around so that she could see the little girl. “Oh, Ella. I didn’t realize it was you.” Her face broke out in a huge smile. “I’ll tell your momma that you want a pink machete though, if you want me to.”
“Oh my gosh, yes, Ms. Kennedy.”
Kennedy’s eyes slid over Ella, landing on me and everything around us vanished into thin air. The noise of children talking and dishes clanging together faded to nothing. I’d be damned if my heart didn’t skip a fuckin’ beat too, because all of a sudden I couldn’t even pull air into my lungs. The time that passed didn’t matter, because in her eyes I saw everything that mattered to me. And all the reasons I’d been running from her for the past six years melted away, leaving just the two of us alone in that moment.
Her pain, her love, all the rage at what we could have had shone through her expressive face. The face I saw in my dreams every single night. The only thing that mattered to me after Danny died.
She’s beautiful. Danny’s haunting words from so long ago struck me like a lightning bolt. One day, the two of you are gonna make beautiful babies.
Right before our deployment. Before everything exploded into pain and disaster.
I would never believe in fate, or miracles, or any of that bullshit. But Kennedy? Until the day I died, I would always believe in her. And the look of pure longing, unexplainable love on her face, decimated every single excuse I’d ever had about staying away from her.
“About fuckin’ time,” Remy muttered next to me. “And I thought I was pigheaded.”
I opened my mouth to tell him to go to hell or to shut up, anything, but I couldn’t get the words out. He was right. And there wasn’t anything I could say that would change that. He’d been telling me since the day after Danny’s funeral that Kennedy would be there, that she was mine. I was the idiot.