A Wedding on Sunshine Corner, page 15
Savannah smiled and waved a hand through the air as she poured herself a glass of wine. “No, don’t worry about it. It’s a relief, honestly. Between running the preschool and planning everything else, I didn’t know how I’d get it done. Besides, watching you do this is giving me a lot of fodder for when I have to plan yours. So thanks.”
“Are you sure?”
Savannah nodded, keeping her smile bright, though it was slipping. After the weight of the day, her veneer was cracking. If she didn’t sneak away soon, she would make a fool of herself in front of everyone. She blinked rapidly before squeezing one eye shut. “Ouch—I think I’ve got an eyelash in my contact. I’ll be right back.”
She slipped out of the room and into the half bath down the hall, resting her shoulders against the shut door and closing her eyes. Why couldn’t she be as confident and on top of things as the rest of her friends?
Was she just doomed to always be the baby of the family, struggling to keep up? Never quite able to do the same things as the people around her did? Always needing help?
Faking it in the hopes of someday making it had served her well for most of her life thus far. But for some reason her confidence was failing her now. Maybe it was because she had so many responsibilities all of a sudden. Maybe it was watching all her friends get married and successfully parent their kids.
Meanwhile, here she was, in relationship limbo with a guy who—up until a couple of months ago—thought she was flighty and annoying, and who used to basically hate her guts. Add that to her leaning on her best-friend-slash-boss to both plan her brother and future sister-in-law’s party for her and to mediate her toughest situation at work.
Was it any wonder she always felt like she was never quite measuring up?
Chapter Seventeen
It had been a hell of a day for Noah. It had started out innocuously enough, but when Noah and his partner had already been on three emergency calls before 9:00 a.m., he knew he was in for a rough one. And it shouldn’t have surprised him. Full moons were always completely nuts. He didn’t believe there were werewolves running around, but even ordinary humans lost their minds a little bit this time of the month and did some completely inane things, and Noah was the lucky one who got to patch them up.
By the time six o’clock rolled around, he was exhausted. All he wanted to do was pick up Rosie, maybe order in a pizza, because the thought of cooking anything nutritious was insurmountable to him, and spend a nice evening with her. And then, once Rosie was in bed, invite Savannah over so he could lose himself in her, for even just a few hours.
He hauled his bag over his shoulder and lifted a hand in goodbye toward the crew surrounding the dining table.
“See you tomorrow, slacker,” Grant called, a wide grin stretching his face.
Noah barely hid the grimace the word caused. Deep down, he knew he wasn’t a slacker. He worked as many hours as the other guys—he just did them in a different structure. But it was that difference that made him feel, well, different. Doted on. Like people were bending over backward to throw him a bone, and he hated it.
“Adams,” his shift captain barked as Noah’s hand settled on the door. “Can I see you for a second before you leave?”
He glanced at his watch and cringed, hoping that Abby would be lenient with him. Again. Because when his captain asked if he could see him, it certainly wasn’t a question.
Noah strode into his office, clutching his bag over his shoulder. “What’s up?”
Chuck settled himself in his chair and folded his hands on top of his desk. “Shut the door, will you?”
Nothing good ever started that way, but Noah did as the man asked, trying not to read too much into it. “Sure thing, boss.”
“I won’t keep you too long,” Chuck said, his mustache twitching. “I know you’ve got to get Rosie.”
“It’s all right,” Noah lied. “What did you need to talk about?”
The older man sighed heavily and leaned back in his chair, resting his folded hands over his round belly. “We’re coming up on six months, Adams. We’re all a family here, and we all want to help out as much as we can. Which is why we’ve been flexible with your schedule to give you a little breathing room. Some time to figure things out, what with Jess moving out of the state and all.”
“I know you have, and I appreciate it.”
“No one thinks you don’t. And if there was a way to make this work where we could do this indefinitely, we would. But the truth is, it just doesn’t. We take care of our own, which is why we’ve allowed this leniency. But we’re coming up on the better part of a year here. I think it might be time for you to make some tough choices.”
“What do you mean by tough choices?”
But Noah didn’t need him to say the words. Not when he already knew what was coming. He’d been waiting for this day since the moment Chuck had agreed to an altered schedule in the first place.
Chuck cleared his throat and met Noah’s eyes. “We’re going to need to move you back to twenty-fours to be in line with the rest of the guys. They’ve got families, too, who’d love to have them home every night for dinner.”
He knew they had families. It had been that detail that had eaten him the most since he’d needed to ask for a schedule accommodation. Why should he get this allowance when the others didn’t?
Chuck must’ve read the look on Noah’s face wrong, because he was quick to clarify, “Now, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. No one’s brought a formal complaint to me. But you hear whispers, you know? I’m looking out for you as much as I am for the unit. I don’t want those whispers to turn into resentment.”
“I understand,” Noah said through a throat filled with glass. But he didn’t. Didn’t have the foggiest idea how the hell he was going to make this work.
“All you need to do is find some additional childcare. That should take care of this, shouldn’t it?”
Oh, yeah. Just some additional childcare was all he needed. Additional childcare he couldn’t afford—especially not when it’d be an overnight rate if he was working twenty-fours. He was barely scraping by now with what he paid for Rosie’s preschool and after-school care. Some of the latter cost would go down, since he could pick her up early on his off days, but that would barely touch the overnights. He didn’t know how he’d make ends meet. Though his mom was available for watching Rosie almost anytime he asked, she also had a job to contend with. And he couldn’t ask her to work her schedule around his.
“I’ll get it figured out.”
Chuck slapped a hand on his desk, a smile blooming under the overgrown mustache. “Good, I’m glad to hear it. But, Adams, listen, if you can’t…” He pressed his lips together as if he didn’t want to say the words, but they were necessary all the same. “There’s no shame in finding something else. Doesn’t mean you couldn’t hack it. It just means this career didn’t fit quite right in your life, right now.”
Noah left the station with a hollow ache in his chest, the thought of not being an EMT weighing him down. He couldn’t remember a time when this wasn’t exactly what he wanted to do. Who would he be, anyway, if not this? He had no other training…no other skills that would allow him to obtain a nine-to-five job somewhere else.
He’d known this day would come at some point. Yet, though it had been nearly six months, he still hadn’t expected it to come quite so soon. And he certainly hadn’t been ready for it.
* * *
Later, after Noah had picked up Rosie from Sunshine Corner and they’d arrived at home, he and Rosie had, indeed, feasted on pizza before her weekly video chat with her mom. They sat on the couch, Rosie tucked into his side, as she regaled Jess with her week’s adventures.
“I can even write my name now, Mommy! And I’m getting really good at scissors. But Daddy says I can’t play with them by myself, because that’s how accidents happen.”
“By accident, did he mean you accidentally cutting your hair?” Jess asked.
Rosie pressed her hands to her mouth and giggled, shooting a glance over her shoulder toward Noah before focusing once again on the laptop. She leaned close and dropped her voice to a whisper. “He got really mad at me when I did that.”
“I don’t blame him.”
“Thankfully Grandma could fix it, huh?” Noah said. He had no idea how long they’d been talking—five minutes or fifty—it was all the same to him. He had so much weighing on his mind that he was there but not. Present, but not present.
“I’m gonna go color your picture! Bye, Mommy!”
“Bye, sweetie, love you!” Jess called, though Rosie was already halfway down the hallway to her bedroom.
Noah sat up, exhaling a deep sigh and rubbing a hand through his hair. “I guess she’s had enough of that.”
Jess hummed and regarded him with narrowed eyes. “And what have you had enough of?”
Noah’s brow furrowed and he stared at his ex-wife. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, please.” She rolled her eyes. “We might not be married anymore, but we were married for seven years. I can still read your cues pretty well, even through a computer screen. So spill. What’s going on?”
The last thing he wanted to do was lay this all out for his ex-wife, but the truth was, Jess was more than just that. She was also the mother to his kid. And while things didn’t work out between them, their split had been amicable, and neither of them held any animosity toward the other. Sometimes relationships just fizzled without any big cataclysmic event to cause it. And that was exactly what had happened with theirs.
He heaved out a deep sigh. “It’s work.”
After a long beat of silence, she made a continue on gesture with her hand. “Yes, and?”
“You know how they switched my schedule to better accommodate me taking care of Rosie on my own?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, Chuck called me into his office today to tell me that I need to get it figured out.”
“Get what figured out?”
“I need to either find more childcare for Rosie, or I need to find a different job.”
Jess was quiet for long moments, her gaze boring into him even through the screen. Finally, she said, “You know, I got a two-bedroom specifically so Rosie could come visit.”
“Yeah, I know,” Noah said, not quite understanding where she was headed with this. A two-week visit over the summer wasn’t exactly going to help with the situation he found himself in now.
“Maybe…maybe Rosie should come live with me for a while.”
Noah’s entire body jerked at the mere suggestion, a pit forming in his stomach at the idea of his daughter moving away from him. There was no way. No. Way. He wouldn’t be able to stand not seeing her every day. Not hugging her and listening to her talk about her day, not watching her grow and change in the tiny, daily ways that happened at this age.
“You know that’s not what we agreed,” he said, his voice firmer than necessary.
Jess had hated leaving Rosie behind, but they’d both been on the same page that Heart’s Hope Bay was her home. She had stability, friends, and family here. She had him. And yes, a kid needed her mom, but she needed her dad, too, and her dad was the one who had been here, holding things together all this time.
“I know,” Jess said, her tone much softer than the one he’d used on her. “I’m just saying it’s an option. We might not still be married, but you don’t have to do this all on your own.”
Except that he did. He would. He’d figure this out, one way or another, without anyone’s help. He could take care of himself and Rosie. After all, he’d been doing it for the past six months. It was him who’d finally gotten them back on track following the sharp decline when Jess left. Rosie had been better in the past couple months. She’d become less clingy, less anxious. He realized, too, that that had happened in no small part thanks to Savannah and her influence at the preschool.
Jess was the one who had fled. Rosie was already dealing with one parent abandoning her. He’d be damned if he shipped her off and made her go through that all over again. Hell would freeze over before he forced his daughter through that. Before he’d give her up.
Somehow, he’d figure out a way to make this work.
* * *
Noah opened the front door to the sight of Savannah on the other side, a wide smile stretched across her face. One that slowly melted away when she got a good look at him.
“Hey,” she said. “What’s going on?”
But Noah didn’t answer. Instead, he hooked his finger through one of her belt loops and tugged her inside, straight into his waiting embrace. He wrapped his arms around her and took a deep breath for the first time in what felt like days, inhaling her scent and setting his body at ease. Which wasn’t all that hard to believe, considering the past three hours had felt like a lifetime in and of themselves. Had it only been three hours ago when Chuck had told him, basically, to shape up or ship out?
As soon as he’d hung up with Jess, he’d texted Savannah and asked her to come over early. Rosie had only been in bed for fifteen minutes, and he knew he was playing with fire, but he’d wanted to eke out as much time with Savannah as he possibly could. He didn’t know when she’d suddenly turned into the person he went to for comfort. But somewhere in the past few weeks, it’d happened, whether she realized it or not.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, pulling back to look up at him, her fingers threaded through the hair at the base of his head.
But he didn’t want to talk about it. Not right now, anyway. Before he discussed this again, he needed to process through it on his own. He shook his head and met her eyes. “Just a long day at work.”
“Are you sure that’s all it is?” Her gaze darted all over his face, and he knew she could read it. Every pained, frustrated inch of it.
“Yeah.”
After several long moments where she continued to study him, she finally nodded. “Okay.”
And that was it. She didn’t push. Didn’t press to get him to open up to her and spill all his secrets, even though she could very obviously still tell something was bothering him. And that small act only attracted him to her more.
“You want to watch a movie?” He was throwing her all sorts of curveballs tonight. With the exception of the DIY project she’d instigated, movie watching and other extracurriculars always came after the bedroom activities.
But instead of calling him on it or pressing him for more details, she smiled and nodded. “Girl’s choice?”
He laughed low under his breath and allowed her to drag him into the family room, their hands connected between them. “Depends on what you pick.”
“You know I have excellent taste in movies.”
“Are we basing this off of your love for Nicholas Sparks movies?”
“Not movies. Movie, okay? And The Notebook is an amazing theatrical masterpiece that demonstrates a lifetime love any of us would be lucky to have, I’ll tell you that much.”
Noah snorted and settled into the corner of the couch, tugging Savannah down next to him and tucking her into his side. “If you say so.”
She glanced over at him. “Have you even seen it?”
He raised his eyebrows at her. “Pretty sure you already know the answer to that.”
“Then you can’t talk trash about it. And you just bought yourself an evening with Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams,” she said, grabbing the remote and burrowing into his side.
The funny thing was, as long as that evening consisted of Savannah, too, it could be filled with just about anything else, and he wouldn’t have minded in the least. Their relationship was growing far more serious than he’d ever intended it to. Outside of the woman he married, he’d never called a girlfriend—and Savannah couldn’t even technically be classified as such—when he’d needed support. And yet he’d reached out to her automatically, as if going by nothing more than instinct.
But the last thing he wanted to do after the day he’d had was to examine that particular instinct too closely tonight. Not when the whole reason he’d needed Savannah’s comfort in the first place—comfort, just her being there; not sex, but intimacy—was all thanks to his last failed relationship.
Later, he might worry that he was traversing down a slippery slope. That asking Savannah over for something other than to satiate their physical need for each other was opening up Pandora’s box. But for now, tonight, he was content to lie with her on the couch, breathe in her scent, and find comfort in the silence.
Chapter Eighteen
Savannah was being ridiculous. She knew she was, and yet she couldn’t stop her mind from spiraling to thoughts of how, even though this Thanksgiving was going to be similar to a dozen previous, it really wasn’t.
The Lowe family had always been big and welcoming, and Savannah’s mom was notorious for inviting anyone who so much as hinted that they might be considering keeping the holiday small to join them. Abby and Hilde had been feasting on turkey and her mom’s famous buttery mashed potatoes with them for years. Abby’s boyfriend, Carter, was new, sure, though his sister Becca and her daughter Sofia had joined them a time or two, back before Carter returned to Heart’s Hope Bay. Becca and Savannah’s younger brother Jackson had been friends forever, not that Savannah would ever understand it, considering Becca was a responsible human being while Jackson was a surfing-addicted man-child.
Noah, however, had been a fixture at their family’s house during the holidays for actual decades. But in all those prior years, never once could she have recalled, at any point during a meal, exactly what he’d done to her the night before. Exactly how many times he’d made her bite her lip or moan. How many times he’d pulled her back as she was trying to leave, just to get one more kiss.
She’d also never been able to sit across from him and picture him naked with any sort of accuracy. And now she could paint a mural of his bare chest in her sleep, not to say anything of his backside.
