Rooster: A Secret Baby Sports Romance (12 page)

“I’ve done everything to him that I can think of. I’ve changed him, bathed him, kissed him, cuddled him, rocked him to sleep but nothing.”

“Then maybe it’s for the best”, April says.

“How is a crying baby for the best?” I say, ready to panic.

“Because it means you’ll have no way of avoiding what you need to do tonight.”

There is some noise on the line and it sounds like April is being called away. “Iz, I’ve got to go.”

“April?”

“You’ll be fine. Remember, less fucking more baby Daddy talk.”

“Wait.”

“I’ve got to go”, she insists.

“I’m not ready”, I say, but it’s too late. The line has already gone dead.

When the buzzer goes half a second later, it’s so loud it actually makes me scream.

Rory

I can smell the food even before I’ve got to the apartment. If she’s cooked what I think she’s cooked, I’m not going to be able to help falling in love with this girl. She could have a million and one skeletons in her closet and it wouldn’t matter, if she cooks me traditional beef stew every once in awhile, everything would be automatically forgotten.

Her place reminds me of the inner city tower blocks we get in the shitty outer suburbs of Dublin, the kind of place I grew up and where my Mom and her side of the family still live now. It’s hard to believe that this, and my hotel on the square, are even in the same city, let alone the same borough.

Manhattan is a relatively small place, and when you think about New York you definitely don’t think about poverty. This place has it all though, graffiti on the outside, lift door kicked in and teenagers hanging about outside trying to sell me weed. Even the stairwell stinks of piss.

I climb the six floors up to the top of the building, where the smell of that stew comes wafting out from underneath the two-inch gap of the front door so thick I can almost taste it. Even if I were blind I could have made it up here, and having started the evening with a hunger anyway, now I’m here, I’m absolutely famished.

When I knock, I notice the jemmy marks on the door where someone has obviously had a go on the lock, before I hear Izzy’s voice call to me from the other side.

“One minute”, she says.

Two weeks since I saw here last and it’s almost been worse than the whole year we had apart. I hadn’t even heard from her until a couple of days ago, another one of these
we need to talk
pre-conversation conversations she seems to be so fond of, followed by the surprise invite over here I hadn’t expected at all.

To be honest, I hadn’t expected her to call. I wanted her to, but the way she left my hotel room, didn’t fill me with all that much confidence about such an imminent return.

Yet here I am. Not only meeting up with Izzy again, invited to her inner chamber. Whatever the fuck she wants to talk about, which is clearly codeword for multiple orgasm, I can’t wait.

Life is good at the moment. The back alley angel is back in my life, I’m nailing this fucking weird game that seems to be a mix of winters out at my uncle’s house in the country, where we’d play rugby on the frozen ice of his pond, and straight up cage fighting, I’ve just got an advance on my first paycheck, and I’m about to fill my boots with beef stew.

The only thing that could top this off is a cold Guinness and the kind of orgasm that rolls your eyes into the back of your head and curls your toes to the far wall.

Izzy looks worried when she finally opens the door. Beautiful, but worried, and make that half opens the door. It’s the same as the last time I saw her, hiding behind the wood as though trying to decide whether to let me in or not. It’s coquettish and playful and I can’t say I don’t like it.

“Hello, Rory O’Connor”, she says.

“Hello, Isabel”, I say back

“You’ve brought your stick.”

“Flowers are so passé.”

“Are you trying to impress me?” she asks.

I hand it over to her. “I got Kowalski to sign it for you. I know you’re a fan of his work.”

“That’s very thoughtful of you, thank you.”

“Are you going to let me in?”

Just looking at those chocolate brown eyes of hers gives me a boner. Although, maybe it’s not just the eyes, maybe it’s the look she’s hiding behind them. Half timid, half playful, fully erotic. I’ve missed that look. In fact, I’ve missed everything about this girl. The way she stands barefoot with one foot balanced over the other, the way she ties her hair up with a pencil, the type of dresses she chooses, her cracked nails bitten to the wick, her plain face unchoked by the artificiality of makeup.

“Welcome to my humble abode”, Izzy says sending the door wide.

I step inside to the open plan apartment, the food already out on a dining table that seems to have been set up solely for this purpose, the rest of the space given over to books, clothes, and other assorted junk that gets collected over time.

“Nice place”, I say.

The view from up here is incredible, and while I walk casually around to check it out, Izzy watches me patiently, her hands clasped behind her back.

“I like it”, she says. “It’s small, but it’s cheap. Cheap for Manhattan, I mean.”

I go to the table and lift the lid on a stew I already know will be absolutely delicious. The smell is all over the apartment, probably all over the lower east side by now, it’s that good.

“Irish stew”, I say, eyes wide.

Izzy shakes her head. “American stew”, she says with a smile.

She’s watching me carefully like we’re playing a game where she’s hidden something and I have to guess what it is. I half expect her to say
warmer
or
colder
as I move into different parts of the room. She’s clearly got something she needs to tell me, but is struggling to find the words. Is this my last supper, or am I misreading this entirely?

“I’ve missed you”, I say, moving towards her.

I take hold of the back of her neck and bring her towards me. Our lips are millimeters apart, so close I can feel the heat coming off them, when, all of a sudden, I swear I hear a baby crying.

Izzy presses herself onto me, fighting her tongue into my mouth and biting down on my lip, but that sound is super distracting and unless these walls are paper thin, it’s clearly coming from inside this apartment.

I pull away momentarily. “Did you hear that?” I ask her.

“Hear what?” she says innocently.

“That, that sound?”

“What sound?” she says, pressing herself into me again.

“There. You don’t hear it? It sounds like a baby crying”, I say.

“A baby crying? Oh fuck, he’s awake again”, Izzy says, as though it’s the most normal thing in the world.

“Who’s awake again?”

This is really fucking confusing now.

“Oscar”, Izzy says, already moving towards one of the closed doors.

“Who the fuck is Oscar?” I ask.

Izzy disappears into the darkness of the room for a moment before coming out with a crying baby in her hands. I mean this thing is about the size of a sack of spuds and it’s wailing like there’s no tomorrow. How something so small can have such a huge pair of lungs is beyond me. Apart from that, my other main question is what the fuck is Izzy doing with a baby?

“Rory, meet Oscar”, she says. “Oscar, this is Rory.”

I’m looking at her but she’s not saying anything. Either she’s not aware or I’ve got the wrong end of the stick, whichever way it is, this is fucking weird.

“Cute kid”, I say. I’m sure he’s way cuter when he’s not screaming.

“He’s a pain in the ass”, Izzy says, jiggling him up and down.

“I know this is probably a really stupid question, and maybe it’s entirely inappropriate, Izzy”, I say, “but what exactly is Oscar doing here?”

This kid has got me worried and I don’t like being worried on an empty stomach and now Izzy is giving me a glare I don’t like the look of.

“Not a fan of kids?” she asks pointedly.

“I love kids, I just didn’t expect one to come out of that room”, I say.

“Here, hold him a sec will you, I need to do his bottle.”

Bottle? Hold? What the fuck? I haven’t got a chance to refuse before she hands him over.

I’ve never held a baby before, but I guess that’s not the right time to tell Izzy that. Even if it was, she doesn’t give me enough time to do so anyway. I jiggle him in the same way she did while she prepares his bottle, the question on the tip of my tongue.

“You’re good at that”, Izzy says while she watches me manage.

“I’m a natural, obviously”, I say.

Why I’m doing it? I have no idea. I thought I was being invited here to eat and fuck, not to babysit a rugrat, but none of those things have happened yet.

Weirdly, whatever I’m doing seems to be working and when Izzy finally has the bottle prepared, Oscar is half asleep again.

“How did you do that?” she asks suspiciously.

I shrug my shoulders, careful not to wake him up.

“You can put him down now if you want”, she says.

“You don’t want to feed him?” I ask.

“If he’s asleep, I don’t want anything else but for him to stay that way. Whatever you did was obviously what he needed.”

“A shoulder to cry on”, I offer.

Izzy comes over to take Oscar away from me. “A shoulder to dribble on”, she says, passing me a towel and lifting a wet-mouthed baby back towards the bedroom. Her bedroom, it seems, unless I’m totally mistaken.

She comes over, leans in to kiss me and gives me her sexy
,
nothing weird has just happened here
eyes.

“Hungry?” she asks.

“Wait, so what was that?” I say, totally fucking confused.

Izzy sighs “Sit down and I’ll tell you. And do it quietly in case he wakes up again.”

Izzy

I can’t believe I’m about to do this.

I serve the stew, I pour the wine and I take a very deep breath.

“Oscar”, I begin.

Rory is all eyes. Two beautiful Irish gemstones as wide as the dinner plates I’m serving the food on.

“I should have told you before tonight”, I start.

“Go on.”

“I didn’t want to ruin things between us”, I say.

“Izzy, just tell me what you need to tell me”, Rory says, clearly worried.

“It’s just-.”

Fuck, this is so difficult. When Oscar was crying Rory looked like a rabbit in the headlights. A big strong man with the
anything but that look
. I should have locked the door, just in case. He’d never survive the drop out of the window, even though he looks like he’d probably risk it.

“I couldn’t say no”, I say.

Rory’s expecting the worst, I can tell. He’s not even touched his stew, and I know how hungry he is because I can hear his stomach rumbling. It’s a sign he’s worried about what I’m going to tell him, a sign he’s hoping it isn’t what he thinks it is.

“Izzy, why is there a tiny baby next door?” he asks.

Here we go. Last minute of extra time, one goal down. “It was all so last minute, she knew I was busy but it’s a special  day for her, and, maybe I should have rescheduled us”, I say, eyes down to hide the lie, “but I wanted to see you.”

I take an emergency gulp of my wine. Bury the lie with wine and everything will be ok.

“Wait, what?” Rory says.

“April”, I say.

“Who’s April?”

“I didn’t tell you about April?”

“Izzy, we’ve had an hour of conversation together, I know nothing about you. I don’t know what you do, I didn’t know where you lived until tonight. I don’t mind, I like you, it doesn’t matter as long as we are honest with each other, I just, no, I don’t know who April is”, he says.

I point to the picture of April and me, which is hanging up on the fridge behind us.

“My roommate”, I say.

“Ok. And Oscar?”

“April’s”, I say, lying through my teeth. “I’m sorry. He’s usually really good, I didn’t think I’d need to tell you at all. I thought he’d sleep through the night in there.”

Rory is smiling and shaking his head. “Oh man”, he says. “You know what I thought?”

“What did you think?” I say, waiting for it.

I knew it. I knew what would have happened if I’d told him the truth.

“I thought you were going to say he was yours”, Rory says.

“No”, I say, pretending to laugh. “Not mine, no.”

“It’s just, I don’t know, you seem so comfortable with him.”

“April’s a good friend, and we live together, so-. I guess I’ve had time to get used to it”, I say.

“You should have said.”

“I know, I thought you might freak about a baby in the house.”

“Now I get why we’re here. I mean, you can’t exactly bring him along”, Rory says.