Page 89 of The Wreckage of Us
As realization set in for Hazel that I was standing in her bedroom, tears filled her eyes. I didn’t know if they were from happiness or exhaustion, but she rushed over to me quickly and hugged me from behind as Rosie lay in my arms.
“I feel like every time you come back to me, I’m going to fall apart,” she whispered into my neck, gently kissing my skin.
“I feel like every time I come back to you, I’m not going to want to leave.”
Rosie fussed a bit more in my arms, and Hazel frowned a little. “She’s probably hungry. I can take her from you and go warm up a bottle for her.”
“It’s fine. I’ll hold on to her. You can go get the bottle. We’ll wait here.”
She hesitated as if she was going to argue, but instead she murmured a thank-you and hurried out of the room. When she came back up with the bottle in her hand, Rosie and I were sitting in the gliding chair, finding a nice rhythm.
Hazel smiled our way. “It looks like she’s comfortable with you.”
“I like kids. I used to help watch James and Leah’s little sister when she was a newborn. Kind of comes naturally for me.”
“Well, I wish I could say the same,” she joked. “Trying to get her to calm down when she’s hollering is a new kind of hell. Do you want me to feed her?”
“I can do it.” I reached for the bottle, and once I started feeding Rosie, she began eating like a champion. It was crazy how the first time I saw her, she’d looked so small and broken in that incubator, but now she was growing so fast, making a big turnover from her rocky start at life.
Hazel sat on the floor in front of us and looked with wonderment in her eyes. “I want to ask why you’re here, but honestly, I really don’t care. I’m just so glad you’re home.”
I smirked. “Me too. Max surprised the band with tickets home for a small holiday break. He said it was a gift for us hitting the Billboard charts. Which ... by the way, we hit the Billboard charts.”
She grinned cheek to cheek. “Yeah, I know. I read about that early this morning.” She picked up her phone and showed it to me. “I sent you a text message about it but obviously was too out of it to remember to hit send.”
“Ha. No worries. You have good reason to be exhausted.”
“Yeah, but still, I’m so proud of you. Not to sound like a complete creep, but I kind of stalk you guys on the internet like it’s a drug habit.”
“Careful. You can’t trust everything you read online.”
She raised an eyebrow. “That’s funny, because before you said believe everything on the internet.”
“Yeah, well, that was before I saw the dark sides of it.”
“You mean your single bachelor lifestyle and panty-melting skills?”
I cringed as those words left her mouth. “I was hoping you didn’t read that article.”
“That’s the problem with being your biggest fan. I read every article.”
Rosie finished eating, and I moved her to my shoulder to burp her as I kept gliding in the chair. “Listen, Hazel, that whole article was my publicist’s doing. We hadn’t even known it was going to be run that way until it was up. I talked to Max about it and told him it was uncool. I want the world to know about us.”
She shook her head. “I’m fine with it being this way. I get that part of being a rock star is having the sex appeal that makes women melt. In the words of the All-American Rejects, I’m fine with being your dirty little secret.”
I groaned. “But I don’t want you to be my dirty little secret. I want you to be my dirty little public girl.”
A wicked grin fell against her lips as she leaned forward. “I can do a lot of dirty things privately and publicly.”
“Don’t say things you don’t mean.”
“Trust me. I mean it. The minute Rosie goes down, I’ll show you.”
Well, that didn’t sound too awful. As I held Rosie on my shoulder, I felt a wetness moving down my back as realization set in that the baby had thrown up all over my shoulder.
I held her away from me, and Hazel was quick to grab her. “Sorry about that. Gosh, she’s been spitting up like crazy after eating.”
“It’s really no trouble. Vomit happens. How about this. How about you try to get her back to sleep. I’ll go take a quick shower from the long flight, and then we’ll talk about those dirty little secrets you mentioned before.”