He or she was so tiny.
My heart stopped. Literally stopped—and yes, I know what the word ‘literally’ means. It was too early in the day, after too many hours on a plane, to do the math. Was it mine? Was it someone else’s? God. Fuck. It couldn’t have been someone else’s. This baby was mine. Jesus Christ. I had a baby. Indie had a baby. And she hadn’t said anything. Not a phone call. Not a letter. No nothing.
She’d had so many ways of contacting me. I’d made sure my whole staff was available for her. Blake checked on her every week to assure me she was fine. Jenna would accept any message she’d wanted to send me through her with open arms. Especially now, when she was a mother and actually resembled a warm and welcoming human being. Not to mention Indie had both my phone numbers, my email, and my secret Facebook account I’d only given ten people in the entire world. Anger swept through me.
Now I was moving, all right.
Back and forth, pacing on the sidewalk by the busy road like a bloody moron. She hadn’t seen me yet, but she would, soon, and what was I going to say? Cheers for letting me know I’m a father? Then again, she had a very good reason to be mad at me…
Fuck. Fuck.
We’d deal with it, I decided. We’d deal with the baby. He or she was so small, anyway. They wouldn’t even remember I hadn’t been present in their lives for the first few months or so. It was fine. We could pick up from where we left things off. If anything, wasn’t it an incentive for Indie to give me another chance? I was sober, richer than God, and desperately in love with her. Plus, I’d change diapers and do all the messy shite a lot of blokes shied away from. Hell, I hated that I saw the baby as a way to have leverage over her. I was thinking like high, manipulative Alex again, and I really wanted to leave that bastard behind, in rehab, when I left it.
I took a step into the park at the same time someone else did. But he was faster, not slowed down by the shock and horror at finding out what I just had.
He breezed past me.
Walked over to her.
Wrapped his arm around her shoulder.
Kissed her cheek…
It is scientifically impossible to die of a broken heart. I discovered it in that moment. Because if it was, I’d already be dead. Done. Over. That’s how much it had hurt to see them together. I watched them. She smiled at him as he sat down.
She was so beautiful.
He was so…not.
Normal brown hair. Normal clothes. Normal height. Normal weight. Just normal. What the hell did he think? Walking into her life with his normalcy and picking up the pieces—my pieces—playing daddy to this baby—my baby. I wanted to walk over there and beat the shit out of him. I didn’t even care that I had a criminal record, and the last time I got bailed for DUI and insinuating I’d wanted to shag an officer, my lawyer had warned me that the United States of America had just about had enough of my sorry arse, and the next time I got into trouble, I could get deported.
You can’t allow yourself to get deported, idiot. You have a baby to think about now.
Fine. I wasn’t going to beat the shit out of him. But I was going to do something.
I wish I had the virtue of patience. Then, maybe, I would have thought things through. Taken a few steps away, made a phone call, to Blake or Jenna or even Lucas, and asked them how does one react to the news that his ex—Indie was my ex, for the sake of this argument—had his baby, and moved on with some useless prat. I would maybe even go as far as asking them how—despite all the progress I’d shown—they still couldn’t trust my judgment, and had therefore hidden the existence of my baby from me. Because they absolutely knew. They had to know. Blake, Hudson, and Lucas were all in touch with Stardust. I knew that.
But I didn’t have anything other than a thousand burning suns in the pit of my stomach, suns that told me I’d be burned alive if I didn’t approach them, and so I did.
I light-jogged to them, feeling angry and relieved at the same time.
Indie’s head snapped up when I was about three feet away from her, and she dragged her eyes from the baby she cradled and fed, staring back at me.
I stopped, unable to make the rest of the journey. Her eyes paralyzed me, but it was her expression that undid me. She looked like she was…sorry. Like she’d missed me. Like she, too, had a lot of things to say. But she didn’t move, either, so we just looked like we were in an old movie that had frozen on a scene. The bastard beside her dragged his gaze up, every muscle in his face lax and happy.