“No naked women have been inside since then,” I confirm.
I take a seat in one of the black leather recliners and place the baby seat down on the floor in front of me while Naomi hesitantly lowers her ass down on the sofa.
“So, can I hold her or what?” I ask before I undo the strappy things crisscrossing over the baby to yank her out.
“Not yet. You can’t wake a sleeping baby. Are you crazy?”
“Occasionally,” I answer truthfully. “What are we supposed to do until she wakes up?”
“Wait,” Naomi responds, leaning back a little further on the sofa.
“Okay.”
I have no fucking clue what to say to her. How have you been is a ridiculous question since she knows that I already know how she’s been – shitty. I refuse to resort to small talk about the weather; and talking about the MC will only result in talking about Fiasco, which I would rather avoid.
“I need a smoke,” I mutter mostly to myself.
“Of course you do,” Naomi huffs. “But you’re not smoking around her.”
“I know that.” How dumb does she think I am? “I’ve actually cut back to less than a pack a day, which is why I need one.”
“That’s good, I guess,” she replies, sounding less than impressed.
And to tell the truth, I have no goddamn idea how to impress this woman anymore, if I ever even did. She liked my dick and my tongue well enough months ago and just tolerated the rest of me.
“What are we doing here, Malcolm?” Naomi finally asks, getting straight to the point.
“I don’t know,” I tell her truthfully. “I wanted to see you and the baby.”
“You just wanted to see us?”
“Yes. I just wanted to see you and talk to you, and here you are, which makes me think you want the same damn thing.”
“We’re not going to sleep together again,” she says flatly.
“Sleeping wasn’t what I had in mind for you when I get you back into my bed,” I joke, which doesn’t go over well when Naomi rolls her eyes and gets to her feet. “Sit your ass down, honey. I was joking! Mostly.” She glares at me. “Sit! Please?” Finally, she does what I asked. “We already know we’re good together in bed. Maybe I want to try and see if we could be good together out of it too.”
“I have no idea what that means,” she huffs.
“It means what I just said!” I tell her. “Trying to move on and forget you didn’t work. I don’t want to be without you anymore. Or the kid.”
“Why should I trust you?” she asks without looking at me. “You didn’t trust me, and you hurt me…”
“I told you I’m sorry. Or at least I apologized to you in my head a million times. Either way, I’m sorry, Naomi. I fucking miss you. Hell, I even miss the kid, and this is the first time I’ve ever seen her.”
“I’m not sure if you’re good for her yet,” she admits softly. “She’s innocent and fragile; and if I can help it, I’m not going to let anyone ever hurt her.”
“Good. That’s good,” I tell her. “I don’t want anyone to hurt her either. Or you. And I know I’m asking a lot of you to trust me on this; but at the same time, I think you always wished you had a dad around, just like I did.”
“I never wanted Harry around,” she argues. “But yes, the idea of a father figure, I longed for it as a kid. Every Christmas I asked Santa for a father, not toys. What I got with Harry wasn’t what I had in mind.”
“Tell me about it,” I mutter. “My mother used to love telling me how I could never be a good boy because of what my father said about me. He told her I was born of sin and didn’t stand a chance at ever being a decent human being.”
“What do you mean?” Naomi asks.
“My father was not only a married man but also a man of god. He knocked up my nineteen-year-old mother one morning on a pew right in the middle of his church before Sunday school.”
“Holy crap. How do you know all of that?”
“She told me. Several times, unfortunately. And she said he blamed her for dressing so slutty and being a tease. Told her it was her fault he gave in to temptation even though he was the one with a wedding band on his finger.”
“What an asshole.”
“Yeah. I never met him because she didn’t just like to tell me the story of how I was made. She also liked to repeat the fact that my father paid her five hundred dollars to get an abortion when she told him she was pregnant. But since she thought she could get more cash out of him if she had me, she didn’t go through with it. He sent her a few hundred dollars a month to keep her quiet, so that his wife, and a few years later, their son, wouldn’t find out about me, his bastard first born.”
“Jesus, Malcolm,” Naomi whispers.
“I’ve never told anyone that before,” I admit. “And the reason I’m telling you now is not because I want your sympathy. I don’t. I was fine without that fucker in my life. But I don’t want to ever be anything like him. I never should’ve blamed you for getting pregnant or offered you money to end it. It was my fault for not putting on a rubber, not yours. I’m finally able to take responsibility for that, something my father never did.”
“No, you trusted me, and I let you down. I never meant to…” she starts and then gets choked up.
“I know. So how about we just forget it and move on? Start over, even though I know it won’t be easy and that I have a lot of work to do to try and make it up to you and to Honey.”
“That…that sounds good to me,” she agrees with a half-smile that I’ve missed like crazy. “I missed you, even when I didn’t want to.”
The breath I didn’t even know I had been holding comes pouring out in relief.
Naomi
* * *
Our visit with Malcolm is actually going better than I anticipated. He’s being…nice and sweet, which is unexpected. He even came right out and said he misses me, us, and wants another chance…
“She’s awake!” he says so suddenly that Honey fusses. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I say as I get up from my seat to unbuckle her and lift her out of the car seat. “Still want to hold her?”
“Yeah,” he replies, so I place her in his arms and take a step back.
In true Malcolm fashion, he doesn’t dare ask me to confirm if he’s holding her right. He just acts like he’s done it a million times before. And he’s actually good at it too, cradling her and protecting her in his strong, tattooed arms. This may be the first time he’s actually held her, but already I can tell that he’s falling in love and wouldn’t let anyone hurt her.
“Now I get why you looked so happy in the hospital even though you were crying and had been in so much pain,” he says softly. Guess Nancy was right about Malcolm being at the hospital after all which is… surprising.
“I can’t even remember the pain now,” I admit. “Once I saw her, it was like it all disappeared. I was just happy my daughter had come into the world healthy. Holding her made me feel whole. And before that moment, I didn’t know if I could be a mother. But those doubts went out the window because I knew I would do anything for her.”