“I’ve been putting meals together pretty much since I could walk, it seems,” he said. “By the time I was about eight, I couldn’t stand the sight of peanut butter sandwiches anymore, so I asked my mom to teach me to cook.”
“She was a good cook?”
“Yes, she was.”
There was hesitation in his tone. And she wondered if there was more to the story. Like, when she was sober she was a good cook. Or, when she wasn’t in jail she was a good cook. Tamara didn’t know many of the details of his growing up, but she knew enough to fill in some of the blanks with at least a modicum of accuracy.
Within minutes they had dinner on the table and were sitting down to eat. He didn’t mention the baby at all. She didn’t ask, either. But it felt...unfair, somehow, doing that to him. Making him keep such a momentous change in his life all to himself.
A friend wouldn’t do that. And posing or not, she had to be a good friend if she was going to find out more about him.
“It doesn’t send me into a tailspin to hear about babies,” she told him, spearing a bit of salad on her fork. “You can talk about her.”
“I just want to make sure I know the boundaries first,” he said. “I need to know what you can and can’t handle.”
“What I can’t do is hold her.” The words jumped out. “That’s my trigger. The rest, I can manage. I can close my eyes if it starts to get me. Or walk away.”
There. She relaxed a bit.
“But the other day...you picked her up so naturally.”
“And I’ve been paying for it ever since.” Wow...she was playing her part better than she’d ever suspected she could. She was being more honest with him than she was with anyone, including her parents.
Maybe because she knew he wouldn’t be in her life all that long? Or because he was an outsider who wouldn’t be hurt by her pain?
Maybe because she wasn’t completely playing a part?
“Paying for it how?” he asked between bites of his salad.
“The first night I think I was up more than you were.” And, based on what he’d later told her about it, that was saying a lot. “I have nightmares. And panic attacks.”
She was tempted to say she had hot and then cold flashes, since she was having another series right now. But she’d had the first one before she’d known about Diamond Rose.
Speaking of which...
“Did you name her? Diamond Rose—it’s such an unusual name.”
“No.” He finished his salad. “My mother did.”
As he started in on his lasagna, he told her about the names Gold, Flint, Diamond—and the rose. Expensive, beautiful, sweet.
And fragile, she added silently.
She’d taken her first bite of lasagna and was too busy savoring the taste to talk. She loved to cook. Considered herself good at it. He was better.
“It was the first time,” she said out of the blue. She’d just swallowed that bite. Wanted to think about the second. Another sip of wine. Or the way Flint’s shoulders filled out the black polo shirt he was wearing with his jeans. But she wasn’t. She was still thinking about that baby.
“The first time you’d held a baby?” Leave it to him to catch right on. Did the man never miss a beat?
She nodded.
“In how long?”
“Since I lost Ryan, if you don’t count the few times
we tried in my therapy sessions, which I don’t count because I never managed to hold the infant by myself.”
Fork hovering over his lasagna, he paused before skewering another bite. “How long has it been?”