A Husband's Watch. Karen Templeton
she yelped when he reached underneath her pajama top to cup one breast. “What on earth do you think you’re doing?” she said in a frenzied whisper.
“I think it’s called living in the moment.” An odd sense of well-being came over him, as all his troubles seemed to fade…away… He rubbed her nipple with his thumb, grinning when it snapped to attention. Grinning even harder when other things did. “When was the last time we lived in the moment, Faithie?”
“At least four kids ago,” she said with kind of a sad look on her face. “But this is not the night to rekindle those memories.”
“Why not? Seems to me we could both use the tension release, don’t you think?”
“That’s the meds talking, Darryl, not you. Besides, Heather’s still awake. Honestly!” Faith said in a gasp when he pinched her nipple between his thumb and forefinger. “Cut it out! I’m tryin’ to get you dressed!”
“And I’m tryin’ to get you undressed. And yeah, you can grit your teeth all you want, but those little dots of color in your cheeks give you away every time.” He leaned close enough to tongue her nipple through the satin, and she made that gurgly noise in her throat that still got him, even after more than a dozen years.
“Mama? Daddy?”
Darryl yanked his hand down so fast he smacked his own knee, a move his banged-up ribs had definite issues with, even with the pain meds. Fortunately, since Faith’s back had been to the bathroom door, Heather hadn’t gotten an eyeful. But that didn’t stop a blush from racing up Faith’s neck and across her cheeks like a brush fire. It was kind of cute, actually. Like they were teenagers again, fooling around in the storeroom in old man Prickett’s pharmacy that summer Faith had worked the soda fountain.
Except she’d never looked mad when they’d fooled around in Prickett’s.
She yanked her robe closed, nearly strangling her waist with the belt as Darryl said to his daughter, “We’ll be out in a minute, sugar. Soon as Mama finishes patching me up, okay?”
“’Kay. C’n I wait on your bed?”
“Sure, honey,” Faith said, finishing up the bandage with a stone-faced expression that gave no clue to how turned on she’d been not thirty seconds before. “There,” she said, tucking everything neatly back into the first aid kit, which she set on the shelf over the toilet. “Let me go check on the little ones and I’ll be back in a minute—”
He grabbed her hand. “Later?”
“Oh, right.” Her expression was wry. “With a doped up man held together with tape, plaster and…whatever the heck they use for stitches these days. Darryl, for goodness’ sake—be real.”
After she left, Darryl stood, checking out his reflection. The new bandage was half the size of the one they’d put on in the hospital, he noted. Neat and efficient, just like everything Faith did.
She hadn’t always been so efficient. So predictable. When they’d first gotten married, she never went to the grocery store that she didn’t have to turn right back around and go get the five things she’d forgotten. She’d put in a load of laundry and not get around to drying it for two days, or start a pan of eggs to boil and not give them another thought. But if their first years of married life had been filled with the occasional blackened pan or slightly mildewed clothes or not being able to make a sandwich because they’d run out of bread, Darryl also fondly remembered unplanned camping trips and parties for no particular reason and—his personal favorite—surprise intimate encounters in the shower or the kitchen or the laundry room.
He missed that. Even more to the point, he missed the Faith who used to do those things. And if he could only shake the feeling that her changing was somehow his fault…
“Daddy? You okay?”
Leaning heavily on the sink, Darryl carefully turned to look at his oldest girl. The reason they’d gotten married in the first place, he obliquely thought. An excuse to get married he’d welcomed with everything he had in him.
“I’m fine,” he said with a rush of air, then ushered her out of the bathroom.
“You don’t look fine.”
“Appearances can be deceiving.”
Swallowed up in one of those baggy, too-long sleep tees, she flopped onto her tummy on their bed. Pushing twelve, the girl straddled that fine line between innocence and wisdom that sometimes scared Darryl half to death, especially since most days he wasn’t all that sure which side of it he was on himself. “We’re in serious trouble, aren’t we?” she said, her narrow chin propped in her hands, those wide blue eyes fixed on his. “Because of the tornado destroyin’ the shop?” When he hesitated, her pale brows crashed over her nose. “You can tell me the truth, Daddy. I’m not gonna freak on you or anything.”
Faith returned just in time to hear this last line; now they exchanged a glance that ended in Faith’s giving him a go-ahead nod. So he lowered himself to the bed and said, “Let’s just say things are gonna be kind of tight for a while.”
“Will we have to move?”
“No,” he said, even though he hadn’t thought that part of things through. They’d refinanced last year and lowered their payments, but without his income… “I promise we won’t end up camping out in somebody’s pasture.”
She looked mildly relieved. For a moment or two. “But we don’t have money for extras, right?”
Faith sat beside Heather, wearing her “Oh, dear” face as she rubbed the girl’s bony back. “Honey, this probably isn’t a real good time to bring this up…”
The girl twisted around to look up at her mother. “But it’s gonna eat me alive until I know—”
“What’s going on?” Darryl asked.
Gently sifting Heather’s slippery blond hair through her fingers, Faith said, “You know how Heather and I were taking dance classes over at Carly Stewart’s?”
Yeah, he knew. Carly’d recently moved to Haven, had started up a dance school in an old barn next to Sam Frasier’s farm. Faith had been real excited about the exercise class she’d started, hoping to work off some of the weight she’d put on from the pregnancies. And Heather had started taking ballet classes, too.
“What about it?”
Faith stroked Heather’s hair some more. “Turns out Carly thinks Heather has real potential. To be a ballet dancer, I mean. But because she’s starting so late—most little girls begin lessons when they’re five or six—she’d need private lessons to catch up. We’d only found out yesterday, so I was planning on talking it over with you last night….” Her sentence ended in a one-sided shrug.
“I see,” he said, although he didn’t really. Not that he didn’t want his kids to do whatever made them happy, but…Heather becoming a ballet dancer? Anybody becoming a ballet dancer? Besides, kids changed their minds all the time. Look at his older brother, Dave, who’d begged their father for oboe lessons, only to lose interest after six months.
“Carly already offered me a partial scholarship,” Heather said, the hopefulness in her eyes searing straight through him. “So maybe it wouldn’t cost all that much.”
Darryl pushed out a sigh, then faced the mirror over the dresser. Both females watched him, waiting for an answer he couldn’t give.
“You know how I hate sayin’ no to any of you kids,” he finally said to his daughter’s reflection, “but I honestly don’t see how we can swing it right now. Maybe next year.”
“It’ll be too late by next year!” Heather’s eyes filled. “You don’t have to get me anything for Christmas. And I’ll contribute my whole allowance. Please, Daddy? I want to do this more than anything in the world!”
Out of deference to his ribs,