She grinned and rolled her eyes. “Such a crank. Pick.”
“The stroller is heavy,” I said slowly. “If you don’t mind taking her?”
“Mind? Not in a million years.”
She knelt in front of Olivia and moved the tray aside, undid the mini-seatbelt.
“Hey, sweet pea. Can I hold you?” Olivia’s little face split open with a smil
e as Darlene lifted her up and cradled her easily on her hip. “Is that a yummy cracker? I bet it is. Can I have some?”
She pretended to bite at the biscuit and Olivia squealed with laughter.
The alarm bells were screaming now as I folded up the stroller and carried it up the stairs, Darlene following after. At my door, I fumbled for my key, acutely conscious of Darlene’s presence behind me, like a low heat against my back. A sliver of something electric slipped down my spine. I hadn’t brought a woman back here since I moved in.
Darlene isn’t a woman by your usual definition, she’s a neighbor. And you didn’t bring her back; she somehow finagled her way in.
My body didn’t give a damn how she got there, only that she was.
I opened the door and set the stroller against the wall just inside, then shut the door behind us. Us. Three of us.
Don’t get soft now. One dinner, strictly neighborly.
“She’s precious.” Darlene handed Olivia back to me, and then slipped out of her backpack to set it on the kitchen counter. “And this is a nice place. Much bigger than mine. Two bedroom?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve never seen a baby-proofed bachelor pad.” Darlene tilted her chin at the coffee table that had a protective slab of rubber on each corner. “Super cute.”
I started to tell her my place was the furthest from a bachelor pad as you could get, but my words died.
Darlene had taken off her ratty old sweater and tied it around her slender waist, then rummaged in my cupboards. She was wearing a black dancer’s top with straps that crisscrossed her back. I became mesmerized by her lean muscles that moved under her pale skin, the elegant line of her neck, and the sleek cut of her arms as she reached up on a high shelf for a pan.
I suddenly had the urge to see her dance. To see her move the way the lines of her body hinted she could.
And just like that, ten months of celibacy came crashing into me. The blood rushed to my groin, and going soft was suddenly the least of my worries. I coughed to conceal a sudden groan that nearly erupted out of me.
“You okay?” Darlene asked over her shoulder.
“Sure. Fine.”
This is a bad idea.
I started to put Olivia in her playpen but she fussed and squirmed out of my arms once she saw where she was headed. I set her on the floor instead, and watched her toddle straight to the kitchen, to Darlene.
“What are you doing down there?” Darlene cooed. “You want to come up here and help?” She scooped Olivia up and set her on her hip again, holding her one-armed. “Now, tell me, where does your daddy keep the baking pans?”
I watched a beautiful woman hold my daughter in my kitchen, talking easily to her, making her laugh. An ache—a thousand times more potent than any sexual frustration—rose up from a deep place in my heart. It felt like hundreds of emotions I’d been keeping locked down were suddenly erupting out all at once: what I wanted for me, for Olivia, what she had lost and what I was working for to keep her. They were all spilling out of me like a bag of marbles, and now I had to scramble to put them all back before I fell on my ass.
“This wasn’t a good idea,” I said.
Darlene was making a silly face at Olivia. “Hmmm?”
“I can’t do this.”
“Do what? Eat dinner?”
“Yes,” I snapped. “I can’t eat dinner. With you. And I can’t have you over here all the time, helping me out or playing with Livvie. I can’t.”