Worth Everything (Worth It 4)

And then his mouth is moving down, down, until he reaches the tightly cosseted swell of my breasts.

“Stop me if you’re gonna stop me, lady.”

I want to lift my leg up and wrap it around his hip, but I can’t lift anything. I’m wearing a garment designed for mincing around. I know, because I designed it.

“You’re awfully fresh.” I can feel the smile on his lips as they brush my nipple through the satin. The tease.

“You married, ma’am?” He addresses the question to my cleavage.

“You care?”

“I don’t truck with married women.” He lifts his head to tell me this, his hound-dog e

yes all soulful and dark. He’s lost the cap. I see it on the floor where our feet have tangled together, Glen-check wool next to beat-up cordovan oxfords and two-tone pumps with bows on the toes.

I spent days finding the right shoes.

“A cad with principles.” I furrow my fingers through his hair. He’s slicked it back, but I loosen it. I like it falling in his eyes. “That’s rich.”

“Who says I’m a cad?”

He squeezes my ass, his long fingers pressing close to where I want them but not close enough.

“Jeez, fella,” I say on an exhale, dropping my head to the wall behind me and letting my eyes drift closed. “I sure as hell hope you’re a cad.”

I imagine the vibration of the train in the wall behind my back as he peels the satin off my shoulders and puts his mouth on me. As he drops to his knees and pushes the dress up my hips. The fringe ought to be an impediment, but he’s the sort of man who can handle a little fringe.

He’s not a cad, though. Not really.

The babysitter is sick, and I hate her.

This makes me a bad person, I know. She sounds so pathetic on the phone, frog-voiced and snotty, and I’m supposed to comfort her. It feels like emotional blackmail. Why do I have to be nice to her when she’s ruining my day?

“I can still come if you want me to.” She means I want to stay in bed and watch reruns of bad television. “I just don’t want to get Josh sick.” Only a very bad mother would expose her child to this pestilence. A very bad, very selfish mother.

I’m not a bad mother. Not usually. But there’s no room in my life for sick babysitters. I have to teach in forty minutes, and I haven’t done my class prep yet. I have office hours afterward, meetings with nine separate students to talk about papers they haven’t started thinking about writing. I have a dissertation chapter to finish if I’m going to manage not to get fired when I come up for my contract renewal in the fall.

Sometimes Josh gets the short end of the stick, but I console myself with the thought that I get it a lot more often.

I’m not a bad person. On the other hand, I’m not such a good one that I’m going to tell my babysitter to stay home. This will be a life lesson for her: Don’t say yes when you mean no.

Maybe if I’d learned that lesson sooner, I’d have told my sister no when she asked me if she could put me in her will as her children’s guardian. Then, when Paige and her husband and my three-year-old niece, Ava, got killed by a drunk driver, I wouldn’t have become the mother of a nine-day-old infant.

But if I’d done that, I wouldn’t have Josh now, and not having Josh has become inconceivable.

Sweet as pie, I ask the babysitter, “Why don’t you come on over? He has a strong immune system. If you feel really crappy, you can show him cartoons.”

Of course, Josh gets sick the next day.

He sleeps badly, waking up every hour and calling for me. I set up a humidifier in his room, rub his back and soothe him to sleep, but by the third time he wakes, I’ve given up on the idea of getting any sleep myself. I rock him in my arms for hours, singing folk songs when he gets fussy.

He tucks his head against my neck, breathing warm against my skin, and I feel so guilty. So inadequate.

I should’ve canceled my office hours and stayed home with him. I should put him in daycare, but I can’t afford it. My salary is pitiable, and I have loans to pay off. So I make do with a couple of babysitters, telling myself he’s better off at home, spending as much time as possible with me.

But when I’m at home with him, I’m a distracted mother, always trying to get away with as much work or as much cleaning as I can. He wants nothing but me—my attention, my love—and I want to give it to him, only I want so many other things too.

When Paige and I were kids, we both thought we’d have big families one day. I imagined a husband and three children, every little girl’s version of domestic bliss. Then I went to college, and I spent the summer after my sophomore year as a camp counselor in Colorado. The job was relentless. Cabins full of eight-year-olds for three weeks at a stretch. They never stopped needing me for one second. I felt like I was suffocating.