Single (Single Dads Book 1) Read online

  Mia was there, in a portable crib, waving her chubby hands in the air and staring up at a Disney mobile.

  “You like Winnie the Pooh?” I murmured as I crouched next to her. “This is Winnie. He’s an extraordinary bear. Once he ate so much honey that he got stuck in a rabbit hole—it’s a lesson in life, baby girl.” I swung the mobile. “And this is Tigger. He’s a funny dude, and he has this bouncy tail you’ll love.” I went round and told her about Eeyore, Kanga with tiny Roo, and last of all, Piglet. “Piglet is my favorite,” I informed her, in all seriousness. “He’s a shy little thing, but he’s super brave, and cute.” She caught my thumb and held it tight, and I looked up at Ash. “Can I hold her?”

  I’d seen a lot of things in the ER, complex things, tragedies, uplifting moments, frustrating cases, life-changing seconds, but there was nothing like a baby to make me smile. One day, I would have children of my own.

  “Of course,” Ash said after a moment’s hesitation. I bet he was sitting there contemplating all the ways that he could say no. And why wouldn’t he? After all, he didn’t really know me that well.

  I scooped her up, then settled on one of the comfy chairs, nestling back and sitting Mia on my chest.

  “Hello, beautiful, hello you.” I crooned and bounced her.

  “She smiled today,” Ash was proud. “For real, not a reflex smile but a real smile.”

  “Did you smile, baby girl?” I asked Mia and bounced her again. “What a clever thing you are.”

  I caught Ash’s stare and returned it head on. He held the look for a moment and then shook his head and turned to pick up his coffee. I’d caught him in some kind of thought at that moment. I wonder what it was?

  “Do you have a lot of babies in the ER?”

  I hesitated before answering. I had babies with nowhere else to go, I had babies born on the streets, I had babies that were hurt, but I wasn’t going to tell him that.

  “Some.” I picked Mia up and pressed a kiss to her nose. “But none of them are as gorgeous as you. No, they’re not.” I was using that voice that only an adult thinks is cute, but Mia didn’t seem worried, and I swear I caught the hint of a smile.

  I settled her in the crook of one arm, letting her hold my thumb, then expertly placed her back in the bassinet and clicked the button for the mobile to move. Then I sipped coffee and opened the Cool Ranch Doritos. Multitasking with food and drink is something all ER personnel became good at. I put the coffee down, working my way up to what I wanted to say, a mouth full of chips. Should I explain that sometimes when a person is tired, they may not understand what another person was saying to them? Should I say that the offer of a date was a real one, and it wasn’t often I asked someone out, and that I was more the casual hookup kind of guy, but that Ash was different?

  I stuffed in another handful of chips, then passed them over to Ash, who shook his head.

  “No, not with coffee but thank you though.”

  I stared down at the coffee in one of my hands and the Doritos in the other. “It’s gross, isn’t it? At work, you eat what you can get your hands on in the spare seconds you have, and you get used to all kinds of weird combinations. Cupcakes and cold fish sticks with half-defrosted stew, canned corn, followed by burnt chocolate toast, you name it. I’ve tried all the food combinations under the sun.”

  He smiled at me, and I felt emboldened.

  “I wasn’t joking, you know,” I blurted.

  His smile wavered momentarily, but he hid it behind his coffee mug. “Sorry?”

  “About the date. I think a date would be good.”

  He blinked at me and opened his mouth like he was going to talk. Then he shut it again and appeared confused.

  “You. Me. Coffee. Outside?”

  “I have a baby,” he said and sat back in his seat as if that much had cost him all his energy to say.

  “I never said anything about it being just me and you. Bring Mia. Anyway, it would be a second date,” I added and waited for him to fall into my trap.

  “Huh?”

  “We’re doing our first date now.” I lifted up the packet and rattled it. “Coffee and Doritos, me, you, and Mia.”

  “That’s not—we’re not—no.” He sounded confused and in denial, but my time was nearly up.

  “I need to head out to work.” I stood, he stood, and we were about as close as we’d ever been. I could actually reach out and touch his face. “So, when will we have date two?”

  “I’m tired,” Ash said. “I’m a new dad. I don’t have time to—”

  I reached out and took his hand, and he didn’t fight me, so I tugged and drew the hand to my lips and unfurled the fingers to press a kiss to his palm. Then I folded the fingers back in, and he let out the softest of sighs.

  “You can keep that one for later,” I kept my tone soft, then gave him a cheery wink and left the house without a backward glance. He hadn’t pulled his hand away, his eyes were wide with astonishment or desire, and I was so going to take it to a real kiss next time. I was on and off shift a lot over the next few days, plenty of time to take things super slow.

  When I got home, I barely made it into the house before letting out a whoop of excitement. Cap yelped and ran out to find me, growling, then leaping at me in a doggy attack of fur and licks. I went to the floor, and we roughhoused for a few minutes before Cap got bored and wandered off to the kitchen.

  I lay on my back, staring up at the funky light fitting that changed colors. We’d lost the remote for it the day we moved in, even though the owners had left it for us on the kitchen counter with a note. The LED was stuck on red, and that thought made me smile.

  Everything made me smile. Ash may not have known it yet, but we were going to have a date.

  Asher

  I settled into a routine, or at least as much of a routine as I could have with a newborn. I definitely did not think of Sean and his stupid-ass hand-kissing nonsense. Or the claim that we’d had our first date.

  So what if the kiss he’d pressed to my skin was one of the most erotic things that had ever happened to me. So what if he was cute and funny and ate his Doritos as if they were going to be ripped away from him at any moment. And did it count that he held my daughter in such a gentle and confident way, and that he was right? Mia had smiled at him.

  What didn’t help was that lying in bed that night, just thinking about the kiss to my palm was enough to make me smile and make me hard.

  I was not going on a date with Sean because he was too dangerous to be around. I could fall for a guy who kissed my hand and treated me as if I was special.

  Yep, way too dangerous.

  So I avoided him if I saw him, which was only twice and from a distance, and everything settled back to normal.

  By the time Tuesday came around, I was sleeping when Mia slept, dealing with life when she was awake, and I felt like a god. I still checked her breathing all the time, and every move I made in the house was because of Mia, but I did manage to catch up on some television with her dozing on my chest, and I even solved a coding problem for the beta launch of a new game I was part of. All one-handed, which made for slow coding at first, until I realized that the sling I’d bought for the long walks in the park was actually useful to hold Mia close and give me two hands to type.

  She loved it. Or at least I imagined she did because she didn’t cry and even fell asleep in there, and to me, that was a win. Of course, I was kind of hunched over and finished the session with a tension headache and sore shoulders, but yes! I could do this single dad thing.

  Brady: You there?

  Ash: Yep. Feeling good today. In control.

  Brady: Take the day as a win.

  I was going to, and the feeling lasted until the evening.

  The first sign that things were heading south was that Mia wouldn’t drink her milk. She batted at the bottle, screwing her face up in indignation that I would even think she might want it. She had this cry I’d identified as “I’m pissed at you, Dad,” and tha
t was the one she was giving me now. Sobs and hiccups turned to wailing and then fitful sleep and then more crying.

  My short-lived time of being the best single dad on the planet subsided with her sobs, and then when I thought I might have finally had her down for sleep just before three a.m., I brushed a hand over her short fluffy hair, and her skin felt warm.

  Or was that me feeling cold? This is San Diego. This is June. I’m not cold.

  All the knowledge I had about fevers fled my brain, and I fired up my laptop. What did I Google in a situation like this? I knew that body temperature fluctuated, depending on the baby, on the time of day, on their age. I went straight to my go-to page of the American Academy of Pediatrics and picked up the thermometer to check. The ear thermometer was the best I could buy, based on a hundred positive reviews and recommendations on all kinds of baby forums from people with more experience than me.

  I checked the display, then referred to the website. “99.4. Okay, Mia, body temperature for a healthy baby is in a range between 97 degrees and 100.4, so you’re not too high.” I checked again. “99.7, shit, Mia.” Had the reading really gone up point three in the few seconds? One more check and Mia mewled in protest. “99.3. What do I do?”

  I picked up my phone and thumbed to Siobhan, but was this something I should’ve been asking her about in the middle of the night?

  She answered on the third ring, just as voicemail was going to click in.

  “Ash?” She sounded wide awake.

  “Were you awake?” I asked.

  “No, but getting a call from someone in the middle of the freaking night wakes me the hell up.”

  Guilt flooded me. She might have thought it was Dan calling from overseas or bad news from the army or from me. I’m shit at this.

  “I’m sorry—”

  “Whatever, Ash. It’s okay. I wasn’t properly asleep anyway. So what’s wrong?”

  “Mia is hot.”

  “Okay,” She stayed calm, even as I was freaking out. “How hot?”

  “99.4, then 99.7, then 99.3.”

  “Okay, how long between those readings?”

  “A couple of seconds. So why are they all over the place?”

  “You need to… when you use an ear thermometer if you don’t get it placed properly, it can sometimes… I told you that you needed to buy a rectal one. Look, none of that is important. Does she seem ill to you?”

  “She’s crying a lot.”

  “Okay, well, it’s probably nothing to be super worried about, but how about you go and check with Doctor Hottie.”

  “What?”

  “You know, Doctor Hottie from next door, see if he’s home, go and ask him, and he can say if you need to go to the pediatrician. Phone me back. Let me know, and, Ash? Don’t panic. This is perfectly normal.”

  I didn’t stop to argue that temperatures all over the place was anything but normal, and that Mia was hot, and that I was fucking panicking.

  I wavered between going straight to the hospital or doing what Siobhan suggested. Maybe I should do both? If I knocked on the door, and Sean wasn’t there, then I would put Mia in the car. I dressed quickly and then wrapped Mia up, then unwrapped her because she was hot. Then enfolded her back in the blanket because she was hot to the touch, but that didn’t mean she was hot. She was already in her sleeper, and a tiny jacket, a hat on her head.

  Then I headed next door, just as a car pulled up onto their driveway and parked. The door opened, and a streak of dark shape headed straight for me, a dog dancing around us and nosing at my leg.

  “Cap, heel,” a voice said from the darkness. “Sir? Is everything okay?”

  The man stepped out of the shadows, and he was in a dark blue uniform. The cop, Luke or something. No, Leo, his name was Leo.

  “I need to talk to Sean,” I blurted. “It’s my baby.”

  Leo didn’t hesitate. He unlocked the front door, stepping inside, the Labrador winding its way around his legs and trying to trip him up.

  “Cap, kitchen,” he ordered, and after a few short barks of disapproval over the fact that he wasn’t allowed to stay, the lab padded into the kitchen and sat glaring at me. “I’ll get Sean.” Leo took the stairs three at a time, and there was banging, crashing, cursing, and then Sean appeared at the top of the stairs, buttoning jeans and attempting to get his arms through the sleeves of his T-shirt, all in one flailing mess of movement. He bounded down the stairs, coming to a halt next to me.

  “What’s wrong?”

  I thrust Mia at him. “99.4, 99.7, 99.3,” I said in a manner that wasn’t an explanation at all.

  “Rectally?” he asked, and I balked.

  “No.”

  “Okay then,” he turned Mia, and she hiccupped. “Let’s have a look then.” He stalked away from me, avoided the dog, cut through the kitchen, and into what seemed like a storage room where, in my layout, there was a small office. The room, lit by a bare bulb, was piled high with boxes. “Sit here,” he instructed, then vanished, only to return carrying a big bag. Sean opened it one-handed and pulled out petroleum jelly and a thermometer, laying both on the table, then began to take off Mia’s clothes one layer at a time.

  “Was she in her crib?” he asked as Mia caught his thumb.

  “No, I was working, and she was…” I patted my chest. “In a sling.”

  He nodded as if maybe he’d had a eureka moment, and took off her sleeper so she was just in a diaper. Then he felt all over her body and didn’t seem worried by anything. At last, the mewling stopped, and he smoothed his finger over her head. I pointed at her torso, which had a faint speckling of red.

  “Oh my God, is that a rash?” I panicked. “Do we have a glass to roll over it? She could have meningitis. They said we should watch for that—”

  “It’s okay. It’s just a heat rash,” Sean said. Then he glanced up at me. “She wore a diaper and was dressed in a sleeper, jacket, and hat, in a sling against your chest. Right?”

  I counted off the items in my head. “Yeah.”

  “I think maybe she was just overdressed.” Sean picked her up, and with one hand, he held her still, talking nonsense to her, until the last of her fitful movements stopped and she relaxed against him.

  “You think she was overdressed?” That wasn’t a diagnosis. I couldn’t help her with the word think.

  “Feel her now.”

  I touched her forehead, and she didn’t seem as hot.

  Then it hit me. Hard. “Are you saying that I caused this?” I began evenly. “I made her overheat? This is on me?”

  “Ash, you couldn’t have known that—”

  “Oh my God, I could have…” All the energy in me fled, and I slid down the wall. “Someone needs to come and save her from me.”

  Sean sat next to me, tilting his knees so that Mia was propped up. She was so little in his gentle hold, and I’d never thought just how tiny she was next to an adult. Small, vulnerable, and I’d hurt her by over-caring. She was wide awake, her cheeks not as red, her head cool to the touch now. I took her from him, feeling ashamed of myself, angry at fucking up, and unreservedly humiliated.

  “Don’t beat yourself up. You did the right thing when she started to get hot,” Sean said and knocked his knee against mine. “You have the most precious thing in your life in your hands right now, and you love her more than anything. You were trying to care for her, and when something seemed wrong, you came to a doctor.”

  My cell vibrated, and I pulled it out of my pocket, responded to Siobhan’s Everything ok? with a yes, it’s all good. The doctor checked her out X, then pocketed it again. I’d have to deal with her teasing in the morning, but right now, I had a doctor to face and embarrassment to deal with.

  “Come on,” he cupped my knee in encouragement. “I’ll walk you home.”

  “You don’t need to, it’s okay.” I stood and picked up the discarded clothes, taking the blanket and putting it over her shoulders, then taking it off, before standing there like an idiot and feeling awkward.


  Sean placed the blanket over her with a light touch. “Trust yourself,” he murmured, and for the longest time, we were so close that it was almost as if he was Mia’s other dad, and we were intimate in our love for her.

  That thought startled, me, and I left their house faster than I thought possible. Mia slept five hours solid.

  I didn’t sleep at all.

  Sean

  It was Friday, and it had been three days since I’d seen Ash with Mia and her overheating. Not for want of trying, though. I’d double-shifted at the ER, then on this, my first real time at home, I’d spent an inordinate number of hours outside, on both front and back yards, simply on the off chance I might see him, but the closest I got was seeing his scarlet car as it disappeared down the street about an hour ago.

  “Explain to me again why you’re sitting out here planning a way to accidentally meet up with our neighbor,” Eric said from my side. He was at home today and had decided his current mission in life was to follow me around like a shadow.

  “I just want to make sure Mia is okay,” I explained again.

  “Nope, still doesn’t make sense,” he said and sat heavily on the front step of our covered porch. “He lives next door, dude. Knock on his door and ask him if she’s okay.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  Eric side-eyed me, then huffed. “Maybe you want to ask him more than just whether Mia is okay.”

  I glanced at him in time to see his eye-roll.

  “What else would I want to ask him?” I asked, even though it was a moot question because I knew I wanted to ask him out for another coffee or something. Eric understood me far too well not to see this for what it was.

  “You found out he plays for your team, and you wanna take advantage of him.”

  Eric made a kissy face, and I punched him in the arm, hard. He laughed at me because he was made of stone, and my weak-ass punch wasn’t going to even make him flinch. At work, they called him Tree, but Leo and I refused to call him that. He’d been Eric ever since we were kids, and that was the name that stuck.