Page 44 of His to Cherish
She made shit easy.
“I don’t have anything to give her. Nothing good, anyway.”
“Bullshit,” David said. “But come on. Don’t be alone tomorrow. Not on his birthday. Let’s go do something stupid crazy and know he would have loved to have been there with us. He always wanted to go skydiving.”
That familiar burn soaked into my chest. I suddenly needed air. I didn’t want to think about Derrick being happy for me. I didn’t want to do shit that Derrick had wanted to do. He could never do those things. It would never be the same.
I didn’t want to do the things he liked to do or wanted to do…I just wanted my kid. And I could never have that.
I slammed the beer on the counter and reached for my keys. “I need to go.”
“Home?”
Where it was silent? Where memories of Derrick screamed and shouted at me until I felt like I was going insane? Hell no. Not tonight. Not the night before he should have turned fourteen.
“No,” I admitted, and stared them all down, daring them to laugh in my face. “Chelsea’s. And if it makes you fuckers stop worrying, I’ll talk to her and get her to hang out with me tomorrow. Deal?”
David pressed his lips together. Tyson grinned. Declan just glared back.
“Promise us,” Declan said with all the fierceness he had in him. “Promise us if it gets too hard, if she can’t take off work, promise us you’ll call. Wewantto help you, Aidan. We want to be there for you.”
My gaze flickered over them. “Fine. I promise.”
As I drove away, I couldn’t keep all the memories of Derrick from piling down on me. The conversation I’d had with the guys brought it all back to the forefront of my mind like a flaming arrow I couldn’t outrun.
Try your hardest. Never settle. Go after your dreams. In the end, the only regrets we have are the chances we didn’t take.All the inspirational bullshit I’d spewed at him as a father bounced around in my mind until I settled on one, screaming louder than the others.
Life is too short, so fight for what you want.
It rattled me so badly that when I pulled into my driveway to shower and change, my hands were shaking and sweat dripped down my neck.
All the times I had told Derrick to chase his dreams. All the times I stopped myself from going after mine for him. All the times he’d told me that was stupid. I thought of all the wisdom I’d tried to fill my kid up with, advice and quotes he’d listened to because later I found them scribbled on Post-it notes and hung on his walls or hidden in books or on the bathroom mirror.
He’d fucking taken that shit to heart. He’d worked at it and he’d lived it every day, always striving.
My head fell to my steering wheel and I knew I couldn’t spend the night alone with my thoughts and memories. Tears fell from my cheeks onto my lap as I sobbed, remembering everything about Derrick. His smile and his eyes that looked just like mine. The way he nibbled his lip when he swung a baseball bat or tapped a pencil when he studied or bobbed his head when he listened to music.
But the thing I knew more than any of that shit was that he’d be so mad at me if I didn’t, at some point, pull my head out of my ass and go after the things I wanted.
