If ever there were three words that, strung together, should have struck pure, unadulterated fear into the heart of one Nick Stokes, those three words were “Can we talk?”
It was an average Saturday afternoon when those same, fateful words were uttered, stated so simply that Nick looked up from his book instead of immediately bolting for the door. Bobby hovered just inside the doorway to the living room, staring at him in the awkward silence and looking very much like he wanted an answer. He looked so unassuming – and so oddly anxious – that Nick smiled and closed his book. “Sure. What’s up?”
Famous last words.
Bobby nodded solemnly as he settled onto the couch, and suddenly, Nick developed a very negative feeling about this whole “talking” business. Bobby Dawson did not, under any circumstances, nod solemnly, because Bobby Dawson was not a solemn man. Even when his ex-partner flaked out and left him picking up the parental slack, or when Hodges hid his favorite Johnny Cash CD, or when Jacqui chain-smoked around his very impressionable five-and-a-half-year-old, Bobby Dawson was not solemn. Irked? Sure. Sarcastic? Sometimes. Bitter? Definitely. But not solemn. Solemn meant something was… Honestly, Nick wasn’t even sure what solemn could mean. But it was something bad.
Despite the concern he figured he should have been showing, Nick frowned. “Everything okay?”
Again, Bobby nodded, but it certainly was not the nod of a man confirming his okay-ness. It was the nod of a man so lost in his own thoughts that he could do nothing other than nod. “My mom called,” he informed Nick after a moment, not really looking at him. “Cousin Vanna’s gettin’ married.”
Nick blinked. “The crazy cousin who you said sends Lisa Heather Has Two Mommies every Christmas?”
“Yeah.” He still looked uncomfortable. Nick had to wonder if Vanna’s wedding registry included the item “Bobby’s Head (On a Pike)”; Bobby’s expression was dour enough that he couldn’t be sure. “She… She wants me to stand up in the wedding.”
“Oh.” Not the best reaction, sure, but the most honest one. Bobby was still evading eye contact, though, which had to be a bad sign. “When’s the wedding?”
“Uh.” Another long, awkward pause passed between them. “Tuesday.”
Nick frowned again, glancing at him. Sure, in the year-and-a-half they’d been seeing one another, he had wanted to meet Bobby’s folks. It was surprisingly high on his to-do list, after broaching the topic of moving in together (apartment rental was a pain when you never spent any time there) and figuring out how to get Bobby’s ex to stop e-mailing him nude pictures. (And, on a related note, informing Bobby that Scott had found his e-mail address.) He’d talked once to Lucy, Bobby’s mother, on the phone; she’d been as bubbly and talkative as he’d expected the mother of an eternal optimist to be. All the photos of Walter scattered around the house showed him to be a grinning, almost-bald man just a hair younger than Nick’s own parents, and even the snapshots he’d seen of Bobby’s legendary “spinster sister” Bethany made her seem a warm, approachable character.
He’d just always assumed he’d have a few weeks’ warning.
Bobby had finally dared to look at him, expression still anxious. Nick smiled slightly and reached out to nudge him in the arm. “I’ll talk to Griss,” he replied, “get the time off. How long will we be down there? Couple days?”
“About that.” He still didn’t smile. “Vanna kinda… Wants it to just be family, ya know? A couple of cousins, my folks and hers, maybe Gramma.” He kept his eyes on Nick’s face, and Nick could tell he was gauging him for a reaction. “And normally, I wouldn’t go, but Momma read me the riot act when I tried to tell her no.”
As the good only son of a Southern-raised woman, Nick understood completely. “So go,” he said after another moment of Bobby staring at him as though he might fly off in a rage. “I’ll come over, water the plants. No big deal, right?”
For the first time, Nick really wished he had a woman’s intuition, because Bobby was still looking as nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs. Or, worse, as nervous as a man who had just heard Jacqui Franco say his name and “blind date” in the same sentence. “I talked to Scott when I dropped Lisa off,” he finally said, “and he’s gotta be in Chicago. He can’t take her while I’m gone.”
“You’re not taking her with?”
He shook his head slowly. “Vanna doesn’t want kids at the service. Wants it to be an ‘adult’ thing, I guess, and I don’t wanna drag Lisa all the way down there for three days just to be bored and mopey. ‘Sides, she shouldn’t miss school.”
Nick saw it, just then, when Bobby met his eyes from the other end of the couch. He’d had enough whiny, pretty-girl college girlfriends employ the same technique, albeit without the same subtlety and finesse Bobby managed. It was that quiet, big-eyed look that said, “I am in trouble, and I need you to rescue me.”
With the college girlfriends, it’d worked every time, and Nick hadn’t felt half as strongly about them.
He bit back a sigh. “How long is it?”
“Three days,” Bobby replied, and started to look just the smallest bit hopeful. “I’d fly down Monday after shift and come back Thursday, ‘round midnight. Mrs. Kramer’ll still take her overnight. You just have to worry about making sure she gets to school, maybe a bath.” He paused. “If, of course, you want to.”
If ever there had been a loaded statement, it was that one. Of course Nick wanted to. He’d always been fond of kids – growing up with six older sisters who were always handing off babysitting jobs to their kid brother sure did that to a man – and, sometimes, it almost felt as though Lisa was his. And, while he wasn’t sure, he figured that the way she hung all over him and called him “Nicky” was a good enough indication.
But three days? Alone? With a five-and-a-half-year-old?
Bobby kept looking like he was one short twitch away from a nervous breakdown, which was enough to do Nick in. He smiled and, despite the protest of certain, logical portions of his brain, shrugged. “How bad could three days be?” he questioned.
His reward was the Bobby Dawson he knew and loved – a big, warm, quirky smile that lit up his whole face, and a willingness to close the distance between them on the couch. If he’d settled any closer to Nick, in fact, he probably would have been draped across his lap, though – with a smile like that – Nick couldn’t say he would have minded. “I’ll make it up to you,” Bobby promised.
Nick chuckled and reached up to brush a knuckle along his jawbone. “I’m sure you will,” he replied, and – once Bobby moved to brush a kiss against his lips – decided it was high time to show him how much he’d be missed.
==
“Are you insane?”
Nick blinked as he glanced up from the crime scene photos he was busily laying out, surprised but also not to see Jacqui Franco standing in the doorway, her hands on her hips. “Excuse me?”
Apparently, Jacqui had never heard of irony. “Are you insane?” she repeated, and kicked the door shut behind her. The one room in the lab with only one exit route, and she’d just trapped him. He tried not to worry too much about this situation. “Bobby just told us that he’s going away and leaving you with Lisa.”
“So?”
“So? She’s a kid. Do you know what it’s like, babysitting for that kid?”
Despite all his proper decorum, Nick rolled his eyes. “Jacqui, I have six sisters, twelve nieces, and three nephews.” He picked up another photograph, studying it. “I’ll be fine.”
She sighed. “It’s not the same.”
“I see her every day.” He laid the shot in the proper place and reached for another.
“Coming over to play with her and make out with Daddy isn’t the same.” That caused Nick to drop the next print in the pile, and when he glanced up, Jacqui was leaning her elbows on the far end of the lighted table and simply studying him. “Nick, I like you. A lot, actually. You’re a good guy.”
Nick wondered what bizarre alternate universe he’d just stepped into, where Jacqui Franco was paying him a compliment that didn’t come off as completely backhanded. “But?” he prompted.
“But…you’re painfully naïve, sometimes.” She smiled ever-so-slightly. “So here’s what I’m thinking. David and I can split the time. You can hang out at the house, water the plants, whatever else you’ve got in store. We’ll take care of the rest.”
For a brief moment – a very brief one – he tried to imagine what the world would be like if Hodges and Jacqui attempted to raise a child together. He bit back the associated laugh and glanced at her across the room. “Jacqui, I’ll be fine. Really. It’s three days, and I’ve got Mrs. Kramer right next door to help me out.”
She watched him closely for a moment, her eyes drilling right into his soul. He hated that look, the look his mother, sisters, Catherine and, on some rare occasions, Sara always managed to summon up, that “I know best simply because I have a uterus” expression. It could make any man uncomfortable at a few thousand paces, let alone from across a single table.
He somehow kept smiling, though, and Jacqui finally rolled her eyes before tossing up her hands in frustration. “When you’re panicking because you can’t figure out why she won’t eat peanut butter and jelly,” she warned sharply, “do not come crying to me.”
“I won’t,” Nick promised, and watched as she stormed out of the room as though he’d just insulted her grandmother. He rolled his eyes to himself as he reached for the prints, and then frowned.
Why in the world wouldn’t Lisa eat peanut butter and jelly?
==
Grissom, understanding (and unsurprised) in all things, allowed both Nick and Bobby to leave work on Monday morning an hour early. They loaded the car, picked up a sulky Lisa – “Dada and Daddy both goin’ away at the same time? No fair!” – and made it to the airport with plenty of time to spare.
Bobby, with Lisa clinging to his leg as they stood a few yards from the nearly-empty security checkpoint, looked about ready to tear up his ticket. “You sure you’ll be alright?” he asked for what was probably the seventh time in as many minutes. Nick resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “Because, I mean, Momma’ll be mad, but – ”
“We’ll be fine,” Nick assured him with a smile, and patted him on the arm.
“No we won’t!” moaned Lisa, burying her face further in Bobby’s thigh. If she wasn’t already crying, she was close to it, and they exchanged tense glances. “Daddy, I wanna come too. I don’t wanna stay with Nicky! Don’t make me!”
Bobby sighed, and, via some sort of parental voodoo Nick only wished he fully understood, disengaged his daughter’s arms from around his leg so he could crouch down to her level. She sniffled miserably – yup, she’d been crying – and swiped at her face. “Babydoll,” he soothed, “you like Nicky, remember? It’s three whole days, just you two. You get to play games and go to the park and all sorts of other fun stuff.”
An unimpressed kindergartener, to Nick, was an interesting creature. Her dark eyes darted in his direction. “But he’s not gonna do the voices right,” she protested.
“Voices?”
“We’ve been reading Stuart Little. I do voices.” Nick smiled, and Bobby sent him an “I am not amused, thanks” glance. “I don’t do it when you’re around.” He looked back at Lisa and brushed some of her hair from her face. “You can take a break from Stuart until I come home and do all the voices.”
“Promise?” she stressed, and very earnestly at that.
He nodded, smiling at her. “Cross my heart, babydoll. Now, gimme a hug I can pass on to Gramma, you.”
She grinned and surged forward, hugging him tightly. They clung together for a moment, the little girl muttering something to Bobby and making him smile, until some arbitrary guideline for Bobby’s flight crackled across the intercom.
He ruffled Lisa’s hair before standing. His gaze settled on Nick. “You’re sure – ”
“Yes,” he reiterated for the last time, and before the word was even completely out of his mouth, Bobby had closed off the distance between them and hugged him tightly. He smiled into the other man’s shoulder and, despite himself, returned the embrace. “It’s three days,” he informed him quietly. “We’ll be fine.”
“Doesn’t mean I won’t miss you,” Bobby murmured into his ear, and caught his lips in a blink-and-you’d-miss-it kiss before pulling all the way away. “Good luck.”
Lisa sent him one last, forlorn look. “Bye, Daddy,” she waved, and he waved back as he picked up his carryon and walked into the security checkpoint. Nick watched him go, too, until he disappeared around a bend in the line.
Needless to say, he was surprised when there was suddenly a hand in his, and he glanced down at a still-suspicious Lisa. “Hey, kiddo,” he greeted her, suddenly guilty that he’d more-or-less forgotten she was there. “You wanna go home?”
She nodded, and he smiled at her as they started through the terminal. Three days with this? It’d be a cakewalk.
==
Less than six hours later, the doorbell was ringing over and over again.
Nick groaned, smashing his eyes shut as he caught the display on the alarm clock – three-thirty in the afternoon? No way he was getting up. For all his better traits, the doorbell Bobby had installed a few months earlier when the house’s original had broken was a clattering, eardrum-shattering nightmare of a tone that existed only to drive weaker men completely insane. In this case, the lesser man was Nick, and he had no problem admitting to it.
“Go away,” he muttered as the doorbell kept going, covering his own head with Bobby’s unused pillow. Convincing the moping Lisa that she really did want to go to her afternoon kindergarten class had been, proverbially speaking, like pulling teeth, and by time the bus had rambled down the street at a quarter until noon, Nick simply wanted to sleep. Which, really, he could have been doing if the doorbell wasn’t haunting him.
He allowed it to keep up for a few more, painful seconds before finally rolling out of bed and plodding across the room and down the hall in his boxers. “Comin’!” he announced once he made it to the front foyer. The afternoon sunlight bit his eyes as he flicked the locks and tossed open the door. “Yeah, what to do you – ”
A big-eyed, pouty-lipped, messy-haired Lisa Dawson stared up at him from atop the stoop.
Well, shit.
“Hey, kiddo,” he greeted, swinging open the screen door to let her in. “I was just thinkin’ about – ”
Lisa, who suddenly looked much more like a calm, rational adult woman than a kindergartener scorned, stepped past him and into the front hallway…and then kept going. By the time Nick fumbled the door shut and latched the locks, he’d already heard one of the bedroom doors slam.
He raked a hand through his hair and, for a moment, just stood in his boxers on the front rug, not completely sure what to do. What was the proper protocol for locking out a five-year-old, especially when it wasn’t your own five-year-old? Was there a guidebook? Someone he could call?
Jacqui came to mind, but thanks to the heart-to-heart they’d had in the layout room, he immediately eliminated that option. Instead, he stepped into the kitchen just long enough to flick on the coffee machine, stopped off in the master bedroom to get pants and some form of shirt, and then decided to brave the pits of despair.
He knocked on Lisa’s door.
“Go away!” she shrieked in a very stubborn little girl voice, and he frowned. “I’m staying in here until Daddy comes home!”
Nick sighed. “Lisa…” he coaxed, and tried to think back to all the days his sisters had convinced him to stop sulking in the back bedroom back at the house in Dallas. “Can I just talk to you, kiddo?”
“No! You’re not my daddy!”
An apt assessment, because Bobby certainly would never have forgotten what time kindergarten ended. Heck, Nick’d been up a few times when Lisa had come home from school, and watched him make her a snack and turn on her favorite shows before going to bed.
He had to admire him for his parental prowess, if nothing else.
“I know, sweetheart,” he admitted, though it felt a little too obvious to say aloud. “I just wanna talk.”
There was a long pause. He idly wondered if Lisa had ever been trained in the proper use of firearms. “Fine. I don’t care.”
Nick knew enough about both females and small children to know that she did care, and inched the door open. Sitting in the middle of her very pink bed in her very pink room was Lisa. She still wore her shoes and backpack, and was clutching her favorite stuffed dog to her chest and sniffling miserably. “Hey,” he greeted.
She didn’t look at him. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t even move.
“I’m…sorry.” It felt exceedingly odd to be apologizing to a child. This could not be normal, could it? “I…” He crossed the room and sat on the very edge of her frilly pink comforter. “Your daddy will be home soon.”
“He left,” she stated, sounding surprisingly bitter. “Dada always goes away, and now Daddy went away.” She hugged her stuffed dog more tightly. Her eyes looked ready to bore a hole in her footboard. “I want my daddy.”
Nick smiled softly. “Yeah, me too,” he admitted, though he didn’t mean to. She snapped her head around to look up at him, surprised, and he managed a weak smile. “We’re kinda stuck without your daddy, kiddo.”
“You miss Daddy?”
“Sure do.”
“A lot?”
He nodded. “A whole lot.”
She sniffled again and wiped her nose on the back of her hand. For a moment, she just watched him carefully, all big eyes and messy curls. Nick knew, from the stories he’d heard, that she’d been adopted as an infant, but he swore, sometimes, that she could easily be Bobby’s biological daughter. “I’m hungry,” she decided after a moment.
“Oh.” Well, that’d been easy. “You want a snack?”
Lisa nodded very earnestly. “I want…” She glanced up at the ceiling for a moment. “I want PB ‘n’ J.”
Nick, who had been in the process of hoisting himself off that damned pink comforter, froze. “…you do?” he asked.
“Yeah.” She clambered down off the bed, too. “And milk.”
“And milk. Right.” He smiled down at her as she grabbed his hand and started pulling him out of her bedroom, a little girl on a mission. “We can do that,” he assured her, “right after I, uh, call your Aunt Jacqui.”
==
“So, Nicky, I hear you’re playing the single dad this week.”
Nick glanced up from the newspaper he’d been pretending to read and cleared his bleary vision to see Greg, Sara, Warrick, and Catherine hovering just inside the break room, each armed with a coffee mug. He rubbed his face and tried to stave off the enormous yawn he felt building in the back of his throat, but nothing helped; he yawned anyway. His friends exchanged amused glances before settling into seats around the table. “Yeah,” he admitted, reaching for his own coffee. “Bobby had an out-of-town wedding.”
His coffee was cold, but he drank it anyway.
“You look like death warmed over, man,” Warrick pointed out oh-so-helpfully, and Nick shot him a sharp look. “What’d the kid do? Play the drums all day?”
Sara smirked and snaked the entertainment section out of the newspaper.
“Nah,” he replied, half-shrugging. “She’s got this weird jelly thing, and…” He waved it away with a hand. “She made me watch Disney movies with her until I had to come in.”
“Ouch,” Sara winced, not looking up from her article. “That’s tough.”
“Hey!” Greg protested. “I’ll have you know that The Little Mermaid is one of my top ten favorite movies of all time.” Everyone glanced dubiously at him. “What? It’s manly.”
Warrick shook his head. “So much is explained by that one statement.”
Nick chuckled and stood to refill his coffee. “It wasn’t so bad,” he informed them blandly. “Today’ll be better. She does some YMCA daycare-type thing Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, I guess.”
“You’re a braver man than I,” Warrick decided, sending him an appreciative nod. “I wouldn’t even think about dating a woman with a kid, let alone watch it for her.”
Sara snorted. “I’m sure Tina’s happy to hear that,” she put in.
Greg slapped her a subtle high-five around the corner of the table.
Setting down her coffee cup, Catherine – who had been suspiciously quiet thus far – sent him a thoroughly sympathetic look. “You know,” she put in, “Lindsay’s always looking for babysitting jobs. She could come by after school and watch Lisa for you.”
Sara glanced at Greg. Greg tossed a suggestive look over at Warrick. Warrick suddenly found the contents of his coffee mug very interesting.
Nick, who had been mid-swallow, tried his best to keep from choking. “Thanks, Catherine, but I think I’ll be okay.”
“You sure? Lindsay’s really good with kids.”
Just as his mind started smoking in its attempt to come up with a nice way to inform Catherine that he probably would not trust her daughter – a sweet enough girl – with Bobby’s favorite house plant, when Jacqui suddenly popped her head in the break room. “Stokes, need you.”
He couldn’t help it; he blinked in confusion. “Jacqui, I didn’t give you any – ”
“Yeah, I know. Still need you.” And there was that look again, the one that just dared him to argue with her. “Now?”
“Right.” He nodded his brief goodbyes to the others – three of them confused while Greg looked something between amused and concerned – and then followed Jacqui’s rapidly retreating back down the hall, around a corner, and – surprise of all surprises – out the back door.
By the time his feet hit asphalt, she’d already lit up a cigarette.
“Stokes,” she sighed, and Nick’s quick survey of the area found that, yes, all the other techs were waiting for him. This was never a good sign. “Stokes, Stokes, Stokes. You owe us, you know.”
He didn’t. “What?” he asked, not completely sure it was his lack of sleep causing the cloudiness in understanding this. “W–why?”
“Should we start at the beginning?” Hodges asked. “We’d be here all night.” Jacqui sent him a sharp look. “We would,” he protested, crossing his arms. “And probably most of tomorrow, which would be unfortunate for the one of us who didn’t get his beauty sleep.”
Archie scowled. “Is it that obvious?”
Ronnie rolled his eyes.
“Our point is, Nicky, my boy,” Jacqui continued, “that you need a crash course. Lisa Dawson is not just our friend Bobby’s only child. She is also the future of our Pantheon.”
“Along with Tony,” Ronnie jumped in. “And any future children Jacqui, Wendy, Archie, or Hodges may have.”
Hodges shuddered. “The day I voluntarily let Sanders within ten feet of a child is a cold one in Hell.”
Smirking, Wendy leaned up against the dumpster. “You mean you and pookie aren’t planning a great big family?” she intoned.
“No. And for your information, I don’t call him ‘pookie.’”
“Oh, you don’t?” Archie cleared his throat dramatically. “‘Oh, pookie. I’m sorry your case turned out so badly. Let me make it up to you tonight.’”
Nick would never have guessed Hodges’ face could turn that particular shade of red. “You hacked my e-mail?” he raged, and had Archie not ducked behind Ronnie, Nick figured Hodges would have made short work of his nose. “You little bottom-feeding – ”
“Focus, boys.” Jacqui flicked her ashes into the air. “You can kill each other later. First, we have to teach Nick everything there is to know about our favorite baby girl.”
He sighed. “Jacqui, really,” he assured her, “I’m fine.”
She arched an eyebrow. “You didn’t know about the jelly.”
Wendy, of all people, turned to gape at him. “You didn’t know about the jelly?”
Nick decided against asking. “Guys, it’s alright,” he repeated, in case they’d somehow missed it the first time. “I can handle two more days.”
“You will,” Ronnie stressed, “once we give you this crash course.”
“Or else.” And even though Hodges was still glaring at the shoulder of Archie he could see, Nick definitely knew that particular barb was aimed in his direction, and was wise enough to not argue.
==
Lisa Dawson, it turned out, refused to eat grape jelly because it reminded her of a nightmare she’d had as toddler of Barney turning into a swamp monster, so Bobby always bought her apricot, instead. Even being in the same room as a cat lead to violent allergic reactions, and – like all proper little girls – her favorite fictional character was Ariel from The Little Mermaid. Her favorite food, incidentally, was fish sticks, her favorite color pink, her favorite animal the coonhound (apparently, her grandparents kept several hounds as hunting dogs), and her favorite song Johnny Cash’s “Sixteen Tons.” Nick had no idea how Bobby had managed the last one.
Despite his slight bitterness at being force-fed all the need-to-know information of his better half’s daughter, Nick felt positive about the future of his babysitting when he arrived back at the house after logging a few hours overtime, and sunk down into bed with the intention of earning the contented, vindicated rest of a man who could survive the next two days unscathed. Unfortunately, the Blue Hawaiian coursing through his blood stream had other ideas, and he spent most of the six hours he should have been sleeping staring at the ceiling and thinking. Would Lisa have a positive report for Bobby when he returned home? She wouldn’t tell him about being locked out, would she? And what about Jacqui? Jacqui had not exactly been the very model of a modern major supportive friend, even with the crash course. Would she have a positive report? Would she suggest that Bobby end the relationship? Bobby wouldn’t shun him just for being an inept babysitter…would he?
Nick only realized he’d fallen asleep when the alarm – set for three-fifteen – started buzzing, and he used the last of his energy to turn it off and force himself out of bed. The soft smell of coffee wafted through the air and he decided that one more hit of the good stuff wouldn’t ruin his life any more than falling asleep while waiting for Lisa would. He could greet her, watch her munch on some Goldfish crackers, and then go back to bed while she entertained herself for an hour. The Little Mermaid was, after all, high-quality entertainment. If that couldn’t buy him short afternoon nap, what would?
Lisa, apparently, had other ideas.
“I don’t feel good,” she informed him in a grade-A whiny voice as soon as he opened the door, and he blinked off the clouds of exhaustion only when she reached forward and clung to his leg. “I want Daddy.”
“C’mon, let’s get you in the door,” he managed after an initial, muted wave of panic, and he stumbled clumsily into the living room with Lisa attached to his leg. She was cuddled up to him on the couch before his posterior even reached the cushion. “What’s wrong?”
“I feel yucky,” she informed him, and snuggled into his t-shirt. “Want Daddy.”
Was there no reasoning with a kindergartener? He patted her head, not sure what else to do. “What feels yucky?” he asked in the most indulgent tone he could muster.
“Me.”
“What part of you?”
“All of me.”
Oh, this was going swimmingly. He set down his coffee and allowed Lisa to curl further into his lap. “Can I fix it?”
“No,” she informed him bluntly, and scrunched her eyes shut. He sighed and stroked her hair, trying desperately to keep his eyes open. “I want Daddy.”
Her whining, despite her best interests, grated on the wrong nerve, and he cupped his cheek in a hand as he kept slowly petting her hair. “Trust me, kiddo,” he mumbled, his eyelids suddenly leaden, “you’re not the only one.”
==
When Nick woke up from his impromptu couch nap, his neck hurt and Lisa was still in his lap, her face pressed into his t-shirt and her thumb in her mouth. The sun was a lazy orange ball, low in the sky, and he groaned when he realized just how close to work time that meant he was. Lisa grumbled and swiped at him when he picked her up and set her down on the couch, and by the time he’d showered and changed, she’d woken up and was following him around.
“I don’t wanna go to Mrs. Kramer’s,” she complained, practically standing on his feet as he popped fish sticks into the oven and heated up some mashed potatoes of questionable origin. She kept one hand at her face, thumb in her mouth, but utilized the other in nabbing at his shirt and jeans pockets. “I don’t feel good. I want Daddy.”
Even breaking out the flavored-something-or-other coffee Greg had given Bobby for Christmas didn’t improve his mood, and Nick sighed as Lisa pushed her fish sticks away and sunk into her chair at the table, her lower lip pouting out. “I feel yucky.”
“Lisa, sweetie,” he intoned, rubbing a hand over his face – would he ever wake up? – as he tried his best to remain calm, “you have to tell me where it feels yucky so I can get you some medicine.”
“It all’s yucky,” she retorted, and sent him a dark look. For a little girl who supposedly didn’t feel good, she certainly was being stubborn. “Make Daddy come home.”
He set down his coffee mug and met her stubborn stare with one of his own. “Your daddy’s in Georgia,” he told her for what felt like the thousandth time. “He’ll be back before you know it. In the meantime, it’s just us. So you’ve gotta…play pretend like I’m your daddy.”
Had he actually just said that?
“No.” She crossed her arms. “You’re not my daddy.”
“I know. But you gotta pretend. Like when you pretend to be Ariel.” She kept glaring at him. “Please, Lisa. It’ll make Daddy happy.”
That didn’t make her happy. “Daddy doesn’t go to work when I feel yucky.”
Nick closed his eyes and allowed himself to sigh again, if only because that kept him from cursing. No, of course Bobby didn’t go into work when Lisa was sick, because Bobby could tell when she was actually sick and when she was trumping up stunts to get cookies or affection lavished upon her. Bobby was her father, and understood these fatherly things. Nick was just the makeshift, last-minute babysitter who’d fallen for a solemn nod and some drawled-out pleas, a man so desperate to prove himself as the good boyfriend that he’d dived into shark-invested waters before noticing his arm had been severed.
“Your daddy has a different job,” he finally said, mostly because it was the first rational thing that came into his mind.
“My daddy loves me.” Her brow crinkled. “You hate me.”
Nick blinked despite himself. “What?” he questioned blankly. She just kept looking at him, only this time, her eyes were dampening rapidly. “Lisa, no, I don’t – ”
“You hate me!” she said, and shoved the table enough to rattle the dishes and tip her plastic glass. Juice splattered across the table as she shot out of her chair. “You’re just like Dada’s friends! You don’t like me, you just like Daddy!”
“Lisa,” he groaned, reaching for a napkin. She was standing at the corner of the table, and her cheeks were wet. He tossed the napkin into the lake of juice before moving to stand in front of her. “Kiddo, I do like you. Really. It’s just…”
And how, exactly, was one supposed to explain complete parental ineptitude to a child under six?
“…I’m not good at this like your daddy.” He crouched down and swiped at her tears with a finger, surprised when she didn’t immediately shirk away. “You feel yucky because you miss him lots. When he’s home, you’ll feel all better.”
She frowned, and her lower lip kept quivering. “Promise?”
“Sure, kiddo,” he replied, and leaned in to give her a peck on the forehead. “Now, c’mon. Let’s eat your fish sticks and get you over to Mrs. Kramer’s.”
She nodded and climbed back into her chair. She spent the rest of their time together taking contemplative little bites of her fish sticks while Nick sopped up Lake Apple Juice and pondered exactly how many hours it was until Bobby came home.
==
Work puttered by, slower than proverbial molasses, and every hour found Nick just a bit more exhausted than he’d been the hour before. Hodges threatened to pour acid in his hair if he fell asleep in the trace lab (“you could use a trim, anyway”) and, when he passed the print lab on errands, he caught Jacqui sending him looks that translated easily into “told ya so.” He ignored them as best he could, chose water over coffee, and arrived home just in time to watch Lisa climb onto the bus. As soon as the yellow monstrosity was around the corner, he locked the doors, closed the shades, and collapsed into bed, determined to get as much sleep as humanly possible before Lisa arrived home and another disaster overtook his life.
The phone rang at ten a.m.
Despite himself, his good breeding, and his personal dislike of cusses, Nick allowed some pearls of four-letter-words to pollute the air as he groped around the nightstand for the cordless phone. He found it, squinted briefly at the buttons, turned it on…and then turned it off again.
It started ringing a second time before he could even get comfortable. Groaning, he grabbed the phone and pressed it to his ear.
“H’lo?”
“Hello, Mr. Dawson!” an extremely cheerful voice piped up on the other end of the line. If this was a solicitor, Nick would have some very choice words, good breeding be damned. “This is Sylvia, the secretary at Cannon Elementary. Lisa got sick at our morning program, and we were curious if there was any way you could come pick her up. If not – ”
“She got sick?” That was enough to get him to sit up, and he was out of bed before the secretary could even answer his painfully obvious question. “Is she okay? What’d she say?”
The secretary chuckled. “She threw up, and the nurse says she’s running a little fever,” she assured him, and sounded way too amused for her own good. “But, you know, the school has a policy that students who are running a fever need to go home. Can you pick her up? If not, we have a Scott Newman on file, as well as – ”
“No, no, I’ll be there.” Where in the world had he shucked his pants, anyway? “Gimme ten minutes. Thank you.”
He found his jeans and a somewhat-acceptable shirt and threw them both on, along with the first jacket on the coat rack. He realized halfway to the school that he hadn’t put socks on and his boots were uncomfortable without them; he realized two-thirds of the way there that he was wearing Bobby’s jacket, and when he got there, it hit him that he hadn’t even brushed his teeth. Oh, he was setting a fine example. He smoothed his hair down in the rearview mirror and popped a mint before climbing out of the Tahoe, and prayed he wouldn’t have to breathe on anyone.
Sylvia, it turned out, was a perky-looking blonde who could have been any of his college girlfriends. “Welcome to Cannon Elementary!” she greeted happily. “How can I help you? Are you here to fix the boiler?”
Given his garb, Nick figured he deserved that. “Uh, no,” he replied, smiling. “I just got a call to pick up Lisa Dawson. She got sick durin’ the morning program?”
The frown he received in return also reminded him of any of his college girlfriends, and it was far from reassuring. “I’m sorry,” she said after a brief pause, still sounding far too happy for someone apologizing, “but who are you?”
He blinked. “I’m – ” The man who hadn’t thought this through. The realization hit him like the ground hit Wile E. Coyote in a Warner Brother’s cartoon. The school had called Bobby, and hadn’t realized that there was another Southerner living in his house and answering his phone. Thusly, they’d expected Bobby to come pick up his daughter, and not some other Southerner who had no claim whatsoever to the daughter in question.
Rubbing his face, he sighed. Sylvia stared at him curiously. “It’s kind of a weird situation,” he admitted, the exhaustion returning full-force as he groped at the right words. “Bobby and I, we’re…” The words caught, and he fumbled a smile. Why did these things always happen to him?
Sylvia looked extremely sympathetic. “I’m sorry, but we can’t just let one of our students go with a – ”
“I’m his partner,” Nick interrupted, and she sent him a fish-face mid-word. He tossed up his hands. “Bobby’s out of town for a wedding, and I’m watchin’ Lisa. Scott Newman’s his ex, and he’s in Chicago or something, and – ”
“Nick Stokes?” He only stopped because the secretary said his name, and she glanced up from the file she’d started flipping through while he’d been rambling. He nodded dully, and she smiled. “We have you right here on the emergency contact form. 676 Lonestar Avenue?”
Nick blinked. Bobby’s address? Oh well, whatever it took. “Yeah,” he replied. “That’s me.”
She smiled – Greg would like her, Nick figured, with all the smiling and the perkiness – and rose from her desk, handing him a form and a pen. “You just need to fill this out – name, address, reason for taking Lisa out of school, and then sign at the bottom. I’ll go check with the nurse. I think she was lying down when we called you.”
He nodded again, his lips and tongue completely failing him. He’d been on the emergency contact list? With Bobby’s address? That was a little odd. Sure, the “moving in” discussion sat number one on his “serious discussion” list, but this… This had to mean something, didn’t it?
If it did, it required vast amounts of coffee to process. Coffee, sleep, and a good, strong dose of courage in the form of one Mr. Jack Daniels and his good friend, Diet Coke.
“Nicky-papa!” The force with which Lisa lunged at his legs nearly knocked the pen out of his hand. As it happened, the second S in “Stokes” had a serpentine tail. “I wanna go home!”
Despite his irritation, his confusion, and his embarrassment at having not brushed his teeth, Nick couldn’t help but feel awful for the little girl. She’d complained about feeling yucky, and he’d ignored it. And now look what’d happened. He wondered if he could convince Grissom to change the locks on the ballistics cabinets until he could explain all this to Bobby.
Instead, though, he bent down and hauled Lisa into his arms. She was heavy, but clung so hard around his neck and buried her face so deeply in his shoulder that he figured he owed it to her to tough it out. He slid the form back to Sylvia. She had those flirtatious doe eyes that women always shot at Bobby when he was out with Lisa. “Anything else?”
“No, I think that will do it.” Her teeth practically glimmered. “You take care, Mr. Stokes.”
“You too,” he replied, smiling back.
==
Lisa, utterly miserable, spent the rest of the day curled up in bed with Nick, snuggling into his side as though he might disappear at a moment’s notice. He reset the alarm when it went off at three-fifteen for seven, and – when it went off again – called into work and explained, blearily, exactly what had happened.
If ever he would have categorized Grissom’s tone as amused, it was over the phone. “If I didn’t know better, Nick,” he chided, sounding almost playful in some small way, “I’d say you were the one feeling under the weather.”
“Six of one, half a dozen of the other,” he replied, and hung up the phone.
He dozed back off, and awoke some indeterminate amount later to the distant sound of the television. Lisa had rolled away from him at some point, curled up with her stuffed dog on Bobby’s side of the bed, and a quick consult with the dreaded alarm clock showed it was well after midnight. He yawned and climbed out of bed.
The house beyond the bedrooms smelled vaguely of coffee and fish, and he smiled as he wandered up to the living room door and caught Bobby sitting on the couch, munching on Lisa’s leftover fish sticks and drinking warmed-over Christmas coffee. “Should’ve woken me up.”
Bobby snapped his head around and blinked momentarily, surprised. The expression faded quickly into a bright smile. “Hey,” he greeted. “I didn’t wanna interrupt. You were cuddlin’.”
Nick rolled his eyes and wandered over to the couch, plopping down at Bobby’s side. Not that Bobby seemed to mind; on the contrary, he reached over and pulled him close, a pseudo-hug that ended in lips brushing against his. “Missed you,” he murmured between brief “hello” kisses, and Nick smiled against his mouth. “Next time, you gotta come with.”
“No kiddin’,” he responded, and embraced his urge to lean in and kiss Bobby full on the mouth. His lips parted immediately, and Nick felt the edge of his tension melt away as their tongues reacquainted themselves. Bobby gave a hushed sigh against him, and his fingers curled into Nick’s hair.
Nick had never been so glad that Lisa was asleep.
He explored every inch of Bobby’s mouth before he finally pulled away for breath, quite contented at the ruddy, ready-for-debauching expression on Bobby’s face. He rubbed the place on Bobby’s neck where his hand had landed. “It was a long three days,” he admitted after a moment.
Bobby laughed aloud. “Yeah, Jacqui e-mailed me ‘bout that.” Nick could feel himself scowl, which only encouraged the laughter. “It’s okay. I should’ve warned you about the jelly thing. I didn’t think of it.”
“Yeah…” He met Bobby’s eyes as he trailed off, and sighed. He was an honest man, he reminded himself sternly. He couldn’t lie, or even put off the truth until after he’d properly welcomed Bobby home. He needed to be honest and – “I screwed up, man.”
He could practically feel the words bounce on the carpeting, punctuated by an enormous blink from the next couch cushion. He retracted his hands, just in case he’d need them to tug on his boots and find his car keys, and shrugged. “I forgot when school got out, I didn’t know about the jelly thing, she thought I hated her and got sick at school, and – ”
“What?” There was definitely worry in Bobby’s expression, now. Deep-rooted, dark, fatherly-panic concern. “You had to get her at school?”
“She threw up. This morning. I had to.”
“Yeah.” The worry shifted to something else, and Bobby reached for his coffee mug. Nick wondered if he should wake Lisa up before leaving for the indeterminate amount of time he’d be spending in his own apartment. “Look, Nick, I was gonna…” His cast his gaze into the murky depths of his mug. “I was gonna ask you if you wanted to, and then work got crazy and I didn’t. I didn’t think the school’d ever need you to…”
His words trailed off, and Nick frowned. What in the – oh. Right. That. It wasn’t exactly fair that Bobby had the benefit of caffeine, right now. “Yeah, I kinda meant to ask about that,” he admitted.
“It was dumb, I know.” Bobby took a speculative swig of his coffee before returning to clutching the mug as though he’d found the Holy Grail. “I’ll call the school tomorrow, get you off the list, and you can – ”
“Actually, I was gonna ask how you felt about me letting my lease lapse,” Nick cut in. The statement at least earned him eye contact, which he counted as a step in the right direction. He smiled slightly. “I kinda liked showin’ up at the school and findin’ out my new address.”
Bobby snorted. “Was that before or after you’d finished worryin’ I was gonna kick you out?”
He chuckled. “You know me too well.”
“Or just well enough.” Bobby grinned and popped a fish stick in his mouth.
==
“Hi Daddy!”
Nick woke up to the jostling weight of a five-and-a-half-year-old halfway on his lap and halfway on Bobby’s, and rubbed his eyes wearily. Bobby didn’t look much more alert as he untangled his arm from around Nick’s shoulders and gave Lisa an awkward hug. Morning sunlight – early morning sunlight, from the look of it – glimmered through the mostly-closed drapes while an infomercial about the world’s highest-quality laundry detergent babbled out of the television speakers. Nick had no idea what time they’d actually nodded off – they’d still been watching some crime show rerun last he could remember – or what time it was now, but he guessed it was early enough that a perky kindergartener would not be an easy sell.
Bobby planted a kiss in her hair, anyway. “Mornin’ to you, sleepin’ beauty,” he greeted, and she giggled as she hugged him tighter. “I heard you and Nicky had a rough time. You feelin’ better?”
“Uh-huh,” she nodded earnestly, and peeked her head out of the crook of Bobby’s neck to look over at Nick. Nick smiled at her. “Nicky-papa came an’ got me and we cuddled lots. Made me all better.”
He frowned and arched an eyebrow. Bobby frowned, too. “Nicky’s got a new name?”
Lisa pulled back at little and glanced very sternly up at Bobby. “Miss P asked if my papa was gonna get me, ‘cause I was sick. An’ when I said my Nicky was gonna come, she said that wasn’t a good name. So we picked a new one.”
“Miss P?”
“School nurse. Nice lady, lives down the block.” Bobby reached up and smoothed some of her curls out of her face, smiling down at her. “I think it’s a nice name, babydoll.”
She grinned brightly. “He’s sorta like you and Dada,” she informed her father in a fairly conspiratorial tone. Nick smiled as he watched her eyes keep darting in his direction, only to pull back away. “But he thinks he’s bad at it.”
He certainly hadn’t meant to have that repeated, and flinched when Bobby sent him a dubious look. “Bad at what?” he asked.
Nick tried to formulate and answer that wouldn’t make him sound like an idiot, but luckily, Lisa picked up his enormous of slack. “Bein’ a daddy,” she answered matter-of-factly.
From the look on Bobby’s face, though, Nick was not in trouble. Receiving a smile like that – a wide, bright, toothy grin that lit up all of Bobby’s face and even poured over onto Lisa’s – could never, in any culture, be considered a bad omen. It was the kind of smile that made Nick feel dumb for ever worrying, a smile that told him he could single-handedly bring down the apocalypse and still get a goodnight kiss for his trouble.
He liked that smile, and he liked the arm that reached up and wrapped around his shoulders even better.
“Seems like he did okay to me,” Bobby said, and Lisa nodded in agreement.
