She’d been on the road for two years when Minnesota decided to get interesting…
I saved Kyle by accident.That’s the honest truth. I wasn’t being heroic. I wasn’t even paying attention to the right thing.The cookout had been going for a couple of hours and I was doing fine… eating food that had no business being that good, laughing at something Rhett said, letting Gina introduce me to people whose names I was immediately filing away because that’s what I do, that’s always what I do… when I noticed the little boy by the pool.He was maybe two. Auburn-haired, round-cheeked, with Gina’s easy warmth already settled into his face and Knight’s quiet seriousness in his eyes. He was crouched at the edge of the pool in that particular way of toddlers… fully committed, zero concept of consequence… pushing a matchbox car along the concrete lip like it was a racetrack. The car. The edge. The water below.I clocked it the way you clock something your brain has already done the math on before you consciously catch up.The car went over.His little hand went after it.His wobbly four year old legs followed his hand.I was already running.I didn’t say anything. I didn’t yell. There was no time for any of that and anyway it would have scared him and made it worse — I just moved, crossing the yard at a dead sprint, hitting the pool deck, going in feet-first because that was the angle I had, and the water was cold, Minnesota in February cold, the kind that punches the air right out of your lungs on contact.He’d hit the side on the way down. I heard the sound… small and awful, the kind of sound you feel in your back teeth… and when I came up under him and got my arms around him and hauled us both to the surface, there was blood already beading from a scrape above his temple, a goose egg rising fast and indignant underneath it.He was screaming by the time I got us to the steps. Good. Screaming was good. Screaming meant air.I sat on the top pool step, soaking wet in fifty degree weather, holding a furious, bleeding, extremely loud toddler against my chest, and I said the only thing that seemed appropriate~“Hey. Hey, buddy. I got you. You’re okay. I got you.”He screamed for another ten seconds. Then he stopped. Then he looked up at me with Knight’s eyes… assessing, careful, deciding something… and pointed at the pool.“Car,” he said.I stared at him.“…I know,” I said. “I’m sorry about your car.”He considered this. Then he put his head back against my shoulder like he’d decided I was acceptable, and that was that.The whole pack had gone silent.I looked up. Every face in the yard was turned toward us… a dozen people, frozen mid motion, burgers half flipped and beers halfway to mouths. Gina had both hands pressed over her lips, eyes bright and wide. Knight was already moving toward us, that massive frame eating up the ground with a focused, controlled urgency that told me exactly how fast he was keeping himself from going.And Storm was standing in the doorway of the main house.He hadn’t moved. He was just there, arms at his sides, watching me sit in the pool steps with his Beta’s soaking wet child pressed against my chest like I’d done it a hundred times.Knight reached us first. He crouched down and took Kyle from me with hands that were almost painfully gentle, turning the little head to look at the scrape, running a thumb along the goose egg with an expression I’d never seen on his face before… unguarded, undone, entirely a father.“He’s okay,” I said. “Head wounds bleed a lot. He’s okay.”Knight looked at me.He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to.