“Come on, come on, let’s go, let’s go!” Nick tried to hurry things along by rushing his words but things never seemed to go how he wanted them to.

“We can’t go without Mittens!” Olivia declared dramatically, throwing her little hands up into the air. Her face was contorted with grief as she searched high and low (mostly low, she was only three feet tall after all) for her precious Mittens. She had only turned her back for a minute (or sixty) and he had managed to get away from her. She presumed he had run away, but Nick was sceptical of her theories.

Nick held back a growl, “Stupid stuffed cat,” he muttered, lifting things up to look for any sign of ole black, white, and beanie, “Where did you last have him?”

“He was at the tea party, then when I turned around he was gone!” the girl heaved herself onto the couch with flare, looking up at Nick with the most pitiful expression he was sure he’d ever seen.

“The tea party was during breakfast this morning Olivia,” her father reminded her, trying to stay patient and understanding even though the clock was ticking, “It’s been hours. Do you think he could still be in your bedroom?”

Olivia pouted, her fine blonde hair falling into her face, “I don’t know! He’s lost!”

“He’s not lost,” Nick assured her, “Stay here, I’m going to take a quick look.”

Jumping the stairs three at a time he searched every room, throwing pillows and blankets to the side as he hunted for Mittens. He could have cared less what happened to the dumb toy but it meant the world to Olivia, and represented a pet that her mother would probably never let her have. He was about to leave the girl’s bedroom when he spotted a flash of white artificial fur peeking out from under a Dora the Explorer lounge chair.

“Aha!” he exclaimed, moving the chair aside to uncover the elusive Mittens, “I found him!” he yelled as he bolted down the stairs, “We should get going…” his voice tailed off as he realized that Olivia was not where he left her.

He took a quick glance around the room before bolting through the house calling her name. With Mittens gripped tightly in one hand he checked all of the open doors, the living room, kitchen, and dining area before finally finding her in the laundry room digging through a pile of clothes.

“What are you doing in here?” he snapped, eyeing her angrily, “I told you to stay put!”

Olivia, surprised by her father’s outburst, recoiled and looked up at him with tears in her eyes, “I thought Mittens might be dirty.”

Nick grabbed her by the arm, pulled her out of the room full of soaps and chemicals and shut the door tightly behind them. It hadn’t been long ago that the baby proofing had actually worked. Now though she could open any door she wanted because she had figured out the ins and outs of every mechanism in the house.

“When I tell you to stay somewhere you have got to stay there!” Nick instructed, handing her the cat, “What if we hadn’t been in the house, and we had been outside and you ran off and someone snatched you up?”

“I don’t know…” Olivia whimpered in reply, not really following what he was saying.

Nick took a deep breath, counted backwards from ten and sighed, realizing there was no need to be angry, “I’m sorry,” he apologized and dropped to his knees to give her a tight hug. He ran his hand soothingly over her hair, hating how worked up he got when he couldn’t find her for any moment.  

Olivia wrapped her arms around him and kissed his cheek, happy that he wasn’t mad at her any longer, “Can we still go to the park?” she asked, practically forgetting what had happened just a moment ago in the laundry room.

“Oh my god, I forgot about the park!” Nick exclaimed, remembering why finding Mittens in a hurry had been an important task in the first place, “We’re late!”

“Let’s go, let’s go!” Olivia jumped into his arms, giving him a sense of déjà vu as she repeated his very words. He stood, holding her against his hip. He ran a mental checklist of everything they had done, and everything they had left to do as he made his way to the closest exit then grabbed her bag of necessities (water, snacks, and toys – the usual) and hurried out the front door for the short walk to the park.

~*~

A short wave hello and Nick was already feeling like an awkward teenager thrown into a testosterone fuelled, estrogen enriched fantasy. It was wrong, he knew, to feel the way he was feeling but for some reason Alaina had woken up a side of him that he hadn’t experience in a long time. For the first time in years he was feeling bashful, vulnerable, and young. It wasn’t that he was old by any means, but he had never imagined that at twenty-five he would be living like a forty year old, and just as, if not more, unhappy. When he was a teenager he envisioned this time of his life being full of friends, parties, drinking, and fun rather than fatherhood and a nearly loveless marriage. It wasn’t the fatherhood that he minded because Olivia meant more to him than anything in the world, but at times he wanted more. He wanted to be the breadwinner in the family, and be able to tell people that he did more than just stay home with his kid, and he wanted Holly to act like she appreciated him a little more, but he couldn’t wait forever. There were people out there who really did appreciate him and he was fairly certain he’d found one of them.

“We thought you wouldn’t make it!” Alaina said breathlessly, a smile strewn across her face as she jogged over from the sandbox where Benji continued to play happily.  She had her hair in a long braid and even with no makeup on her face and a hint of wrinkles her face light up his morning.

She’s married, Nick reminded himself as he too glued on a grin, “We almost didn’t, we had a toy emergency. Mittens decided to give himself a time out,” he joked, motioning to the cat that was gripped firmly in Olivia’s grasp.

“Daddy founded him,” Olivia suddenly piped up to Nick’s surprise and delight. Since she had very little interaction with anyone other than her parents in her first few years Nick had found she had become very shy, and unwilling to speak to anyone without knowing them first. With how fickle other children were they wouldn’t give her the time she needed to open up so they would have moved on to a different game with a different child before Olivia even got a chance to show them who she was.

Alaina’s warm smile went straight to Nick’s heart and he watched as the woman reached out and touched Olivia’s arm, speaking to her directly, “Good thing you have such a good Daddy!”

Olivia smiled a toothy grin and nodded, “The bestest one ever.”

Nick quickly found himself blushing again, this time from his daughter’s compliment. Clearing his throat he looked down to the youngster, “Do you want to go play with Benji?”

Olivia took a moment and stroked Mitten’s fuzzy ear (worn down from years of love) and contemplated his offer, “Will you push me on the swings later?”

“Of course,” Nick nodded, patiently awaiting her decision as he rubbed her back.

“Okay, I’ll go play,” Olivia smiled and Nick put her down on the ground, still in a state of amazement as she ran towards the sandbox where Benji was constructing a sand village.

“She’s a different person over night, she normally won’t let me out of her sight. She has to be with me all the time, and now she can’t wait to be somewhere else,” Nick chuckled, still completely surprised to see Olivia playing with Benji in the sandbox, playing being a relative term since it appeared she was just knocking over his village.

Alaina nodded, following Nick’s line of sight over to the sandbox, “You know, kids pick up on the smallest things. Maybe it wasn’t that she needed to be with only you all the time, maybe it was that she thought you needed to be with only her?”

Nick’s head snapped back over to Alaina, meeting her eyes for a brief moment before glancing down uncomfortably, “Why would she have any reason to think that?”

“Maybe she thought you were lonely?” Alaina shrugged then headed off down the grass to supervise the kids leaving Nick looking on in surprise that after only knowing him a day it seemed she could see right through the façade he had been hiding behind for years.

~*~

“So, your husband,” Nick prompted, getting into the groove of playtime gossip as he and Alaina sat on a bench adjacent to the playground, “What does he do?”

Alaina scoffed, obviously holding back what he wanted to truly say to that question while her bitterness momentarily got the best of her, “Not a whole lot,” she said initially before apologizing and trying the moment again, “He’s a lawyer,” she finally answered and a silence passed over them while they went about retrieving the kids snacks from their bags; goldfish crackers and a cookie for Benji, granola and apple slices for Olivia.

“You meet in college?” Nick suddenly asked, piercing through the quiet as he brought them back to the original topic.

Alaina shook her head, her long braid swaying with the moment, “No, we were both out of college at that point. We were working the same person down in Florida, a politician, fellow by the name of Jack Rollins, I’m sure you probably have heard of him?”

Nick raised an eyebrow, “Isn’t that the congressman who got on the news for killing that male prostitute?” he questioning, silently wondering in the back of his mine how old Alaina must be if she and her husband were well established in their careers when that had happened, and they had met.

Alaina laughed at his incredulous expression, it was more of a chuckle really, but it made Nick want to laugh right along with her, “That’s the one! At the time I was working in his office and Brian ended up being his criminal defence attorney and that’s eventually how we met! Needless to say we were no longer employed by the congressman shortly thereafter.”

“Yeah it’s tough to pay your employees from prison,” Nick joked, “So what brought you to New York suburbia?” he enquired, hoping he wasn’t being too nosey in his curiosity of her background.

“Work,” Alaina shrugged, “Brian got tired of the kinds of cases he was getting down south, especially after losing such a high profile case like Congressman Rollins’ so we decided to come up here for a change of scenery. Brian’s family is from here.”

There was that quiet again, looming over them both. Nick could have sworn that the hush was accompanied by a smidge of sexual tension, but he dismissed it as being his own twisted imagination, or perhaps wishful thinking.

“We should probably get these to the kids,” Nick suggested, motioning to the snacks that were still in their hands.

The woman agreed and Nick couldn’t help but notice all the differences in their parenting skills, and in the ways they did things. When Benji ran over Alaina simply brushed any visible dirt from his hands then handed him his store-bought, pre-packaged snacks and a juice box while Nick had to (as per Holly’s specific instructions) thoroughly clean Olivia’s hands with water from their bag and wipe them down with a small towel before allowing her to eat her home prepared, brown bagged snacks and small bottle of water. He would love to let Olivia indulge and buy her something sweet and deliciously unhealthy for her playground snacks but with how closely his spending was monitored by big sister (or wife) he could never get away with it. After all, if it wasn’t on the list, it didn’t get purchased.

She didn’t seem to mind though, he thought as he watched her munching on her apple slices beside him, swinging her legs back and forth happily. He supposed that if she grew up eating healthy food she wouldn’t find it so repulsive later on in life and that was definitely a good thing.

“Want one Daddy?” Olivia asked, holding out a sliver of green apple (the flesh still white and sweet thanks to a small amount of lemon juice in the plastic container).

Nick smiled, and shook his head, “No thank you baby, you eat your snack,” he patted her head then looked back over to Benji who was sitting on the ground eagerly stuffing small cheesy fishes into his mouth.

“Enough about me, let’s talk about you for a bit,” Alaina suggested, popping her face into Nick’s vision.

“What do you want to know?” he smiled.

“Well, what does your wife do?”

His smile fell a little and he looked down to his hands, “She uh, works in a museum.”

“She’s a scientist?” Alaina wondered inquisitively.

“Kind of,” Nick thought of how to explain without making his wife look like a complete nerd. It wasn’t that he cared how Holly would feel about being portrayed as a bore, he was more concerned about his own reputation; he had married her after all, “We met in college. She was taking museum studies and anthropology. She doesn’t deal so much in the science as much as she does in the history. Coins… she studies currencies, that different civilizations used and that kind of thing.”

Alaina looked genuinely impressed, “Wow! That sounds like really interesting work!”

Nick didn’t think his eyebrows could get any higher up his forehead than they already were, “Really?”

“Yeah,” she nodded enthusiastically, “I’ve always loved that kind of thing, you know, china plates from the titanic, tools that the Native Americans used before white people came to the continent, it’s interesting to look at life as what it was.”

Nick suddenly couldn’t keep himself from laughing, “You know I think you might be the only person who didn’t outright tell me that Holly had the most boring job on the planet from the sounds of it.”

“Well I didn’t say I wouldn’t be bored if I was doing it myself,” Alaina chuckled, “I just said it was interesting. If you’re into that thing I imagine it’s a very fun job. Myself, I’d rather just go to the museum and look at everything than do any of the behind the scenes work, but I respect that.”

Nick was amazed by this woman; he was simply amazed. It was like she could find the good in anything. His eyes caught hers, blue into green, and there was an instant where he could have sworn he felt sparks deep in the pit of his stomach. 

Alaina though, didn’t seem as sure as he did about their shared moment and she pulled her eyes away from his, “Wow, time sure has flew! We should actually probably get going, lots to do at home,” she explained standing up from the bench.

“Will we see you tomorrow?” Nick immediately asked, shooting to his feet.

Alaina smiled at him sweetly, “Tomorrow is Saturday, the weekend.”

“The weekend,” Nick nodded, realizing that she was in fact correct. He dreaded the weekend and their daily excursions and he was already looking forward to Monday, “Next week then?”

She nodded and collected all of Benji’s things to shove into her bag, “It’s a date!” she said, intending for her words to be completely platonic, but Nick being easily wound up and addicted to the small amount of attention the woman provided found her words anything other than innocent.