“Thanks, guys,” Joachim said. As they left, he chatted with them, giving them fist bumps and selfies, and he even allowed one of the women to kiss him on his cheek for luck. Who were these people to him? They seemed very accommodating for general builders and decorators. “Sorry about that,” he leaned against the closed door, “everyone thinks they know me.” He shrugged, but the words were weighty with meaning—I just couldn’t figure out if he was angry or happy that he was the center of attention.
“You didn’t need to do this,” I began, but he waved it away.
“My daughter needs space, then I make space. Everything I can fix I will do,” he added, grinning back at me. “Except me, sometimes.” He turned his back on me to rummage in the nearest box. He couldn’t know that every time he said the word daughter my heart stuttered, and my belly churned but add on the self-deprecation and the admission of fixing himself of his addictions, and I was a mess for how I should be reacting.
“Joachim—”
“Aha!” He pulled out a pod coffee machine that he immediately plugged in and placed on the small table. “I grabbed some of everything, and I got juice boxes too. Is Soph allowed to have them?”
The way he shortened her name to Soph, it seemed as if it was the most natural thing in the world, making all my thoughts escape.
“Earth to Isaac? Juice?”
“Yeah, good.”
He went to his belly on the floor immediately and held out the juice, staying far enough from the cardboard house so he didn’t scare her, and then he rested his head on his hands.
“Whatcha doin’, Sophie-bug?” he asked and yet another endearment slipped out and took hold of my heart.
“Building a house, but I don’t have my bears.”
“We’ll get them later,” I reassured her, but Joachim was already attempting to fix things.
“We’ll get you some more bears. What kind of bears do you like?”
“She has bears… they’re in her case.”
He immediately rolled over, and in one smooth move, he stood and hurried out of the door.
I knew he was going for the bears. With a sigh, I crossed to the coffee machine and rummaged through the pile of pods, finding a caramel coffee, and pushing a mug in place. He was back as fast as I could make the caffeine I desperately needed, arms full of teddies, including Sophie’s favorite, B-Bear. Then he was back down on the floor.
“B-Bear!” she exclaimed, and Joachim lifted an eyebrow in question.
“I used the bear as a way of explaining her illness to her and that B was for bear, and so B-Bear stuck,” I explained.
“I like it.” He gave me an open smile, and it made me weak in the knees.
She took each of her toys into the box, plus a cushion, a juice box, and a bag of chips, and had a tea party to which both Joachim and I were invited. With my caramel latte and his coffee straight-up black, we both lay on our bellies, chatting to Sophie, B-Bear, and all her other bears. She only lasted about thirty minutes. Her eyelids began to droop, and she curled into the cushions, with B-Bear in her arms and her thumb in her mouth, she slipped into sleep.
“Should she do that?” Joachim asked.
“Sleep?”
“No, suck her thumb. I mean I read this article that says it has its place, but I don’t know. Should I be giving positive reinforcement to get her to stop, or identifying triggers?”
I never imagined a jock asking a question that had clearly come out of his research.
“She’s self-soothing.” I turned to him, and we were so close I could see the green flecks around his irises. Too close for comfort. “I want her to have everything that helps her right now,” I said. “When she’s older…”
I stopped talking, tears choking my throat, which I forced back, and for the longest time, we stared at each other. It was as if there was a bridge between us that was linked in pain. Fuck this.
He broke the connection first, blinking and then shifting away from me. “I… I have so much to learn to be a daddy.”
“It’s a daily thing.”
“Will you tell me everything? Was she a good baby?”
I smiled because this was solid ground, and it didn’t involve me feeling as if there was a ton of bricks sitting on my chest.
“Loud. When she was born at thirty-six weeks, the doctors were… it was an intense situation, but the moment Sophie was there in the world, she let us know about it.”
“Did your sister… did Ashley meet her?”
“For a while.” Then I couldn’t stop the emotion that choked me, and the first tear tracked down my face.
“Will you tell me?” He reached out to catch the tear, and the compassion in his eyes spoke to me in a hundred different ways. I’d told the story a few times, to specialists, but never to someone with an emotional investment. I didn’t have a family. I had one or two friends. No one cared as much as he would. I decided to state the facts without emotion, but that lasted until the first breath.
“She had pre-eclampsia. We thought we’d dealt with the real fear when they delivered Sophie early by cesarean. Only about half an hour in, Ashley’s heart stopped. Just like that… one moment she was there—she got to hold Sophie—the next, she was gone.”
“And you’ve cared for Sophie since then?”
“Every day.”
Joachim cradled my face, and I held my breath.
“I can never thank you enough, Isaac,” he murmured.
“I’m her uncle.” Her daddy. Her everything. Until Joachim.
He dropped his hand after a moment and then turned to rest his head on his hands again.
“And now she has her daddy too.”
Chapter Eight
Joachim
Something changed in the way I looked at Isaac.
Ever since the day he and Sophie had moved in and we’d had that moment… well, things were different. It had started when I’d cradled his face. There had been a second when I’d seen something more than sadness in his gaze. That quick glimpse of attraction combined with the sizzle that raced down my arm like an electric current from merely cupping his cheek had—
My face met the glass as someone crashed into me from behind. It hurt, but my pride was injured more than my nose, which had bounced off the plexiglass, and I spun around to glower at Moral.
“Hey, asshole, this is practice,” I snapped at the big oaf. He patted my helmet, then skated off sniggering. “Asshole,” I muttered, then glanced around to see that my teammates were all gathered behind Renco’s net making kissy faces at me. “Assholes,” I amended then skated to the smirking group. “You couldn’t just call my name?”
“We did, five times, yet there you stood staring down at the hoagie ad. You hungry?” Moral asked, then patted his belly as if the hard abs were a beer gut. “We can hit the coffee shop after the scrimmage.”
“Any chance we can save the coffee klatch for after practice? First game of the season is tomorrow night,” Xander reminded us as he skated up looking very much the team captain. “Also, just a heads-up, Brady is here and sitting up in the rafters with Sinclair. Don’t look.”