Page 34 of Just A Little Fling

“All right, go ahead and get your clothes while I do the dishes.”

After a small disagreement about whether he needed a jacket—he did—we headed to the garden shed to get the tools to try to fix the trampled flowers. Some of them probably could be saved, but I would guess that at least half of them were a lost cause. It didn’t matter much—they were just flowers I’d gotten on sale at the garden center, but it was the principle of it.

“Babbo, what do these do?” Nico held up a little trowel and weed digger thingy. I don’t know what it was called.

“It just helps move the dirt and gets rid of the weeds. I don’t actually know what it’s… Okay, never mind,” I interrupted myself when it appeared that Nico was no longer listening to me and instead gathering every hand tool I had in my shed. “We don’t actually need all those.”

“I think we do, Babbo. I think they’re important.”

Nico looked so earnest and sure of himself that I didn’t have the heart to tell him no again. “Okay. You know best. Do you want me to help carry them?”

“Nope,” Nico answered with a pop of theP. “I gots it.”

Nico always said he was a middle, but this morning, he didn’t sound like one. He sounded little. I doubted he’d knowingly mislead me about something like that. Was it possible he didn’t know that he might be both?

I understood his concerns about going to the club, especially since he knew his boss was a frequent visitor there, and he worried about the impact on his job. I didn’t know Gabe that well, but I couldn’t imagine he would have looked down on Nico for being a middle or a little, given the fact that he was a Daddy. But when fear took over, logic was usually the first thing out the window.

Unfortunately, now was not the time to figure all of this out. Instead, I shut the door behind Nico, his arms full of completely unnecessary gardening tools, and we moved into the front yard. I tried to give him instructions about how to fix the plants. He worked hard but inefficiently because he kept getting sidetracked by looking for earthworms. He’d find one and relocate them to a safer area while assuring them their new home was much better. For the most part, I fixed the flowers myself. As predicted, only about fifty percent were salvageable. I pulled up and tossed the unsavable one in a pile for the compost bin.

“I sorry, Babbo.” Nico seemed genuinely upset when he saw the pile of pulled flowers I had accumulated. In fairness to him, he’d been drunk and had tried to use the sidewalk. He’d just gotten confused about where it was. There was an argument to be made that it was my fault because I failed to have proper lighting outside. With sufficient lighting, it wouldn’t have happened. This was on me.

“Maybe I should apologize to you?” Nico cocked his head and looked quizzically at me. “If I had proper lighting, you wouldn’t have gotten confused about where the sidewalk was.” Nico’s full belly laugh had me joining in, and there was no denying the joy in it.

“Babbo, you silly.” His chuckles trailed after him as he went back to relocating earthworms.

I had intended to stay focused on gardening because that was typically my happy place. I loved grubbing around in the dirt with my flowers and bushes, but the sweet boy playing in the front yard distracted me.

There was nothing middle about Nico this morning. He was little, through and through. Nico had moved on from earthworms and was creating dirt tracks around a dormant flowerbed. Given the mess it was making, I was glad he was otherwise occupied because my job was exponentially faster without his…help. But I did need to find replacement flowers.

“Sweet Boy, do you want to come with me to pick out new flowers?” I didn’t get an immediate answer, but Nico jumped to his feet and raced over to where I was tossing the pulled plants into the compost bin.

“We gonna go now?”

“Yes, and then we’ll come back to plant them. The yard will be good as new.” Nico immediately headed toward my car. The yard tools he’d scattered around the yard still lay where he’d dropped them. “No, sir. You pulled all these tools out, so now they need to be picked up.”

“But, Babbo, I gonna need ’em.”

“You won’t, but if you do, you can pull them out again from the pile. We can’t leave them in the yard, so they need to go on the porch. The store isn’t happening until it’s cleaned up. When we get back, we’ll put them away properly.”

Nico’s mutinous expression was equal parts adorable and frustrating. “No.”

“I’m not asking. I’m telling.”

Nico stomped his foot, crossed his arms, and stuck out his tongue at me. The final straw was the defiant shake of his head.

Internally, I cursed myself for not having a boundary discussion before this moment. What I wanted to do was threaten—and then follow through—to paddle his butt for sass and stubbornness. But thanks to me, I hadn’t had the discussion and now I had no business mentioning it. Before going any further, I took a deep breath and gathered my patience.

With a stern, no-nonsense expression, I stalked over to him. Nico raised his chin in defiance, and the stubborn gleam in his eyes was unmistakable. This was a battle of wills.

“Nico, I’m not going to let you sass me, and you’re not leaving these tools in my yard. You can listen and behave, or we won’t go get more flowers. What do you want to do?

“It dumb.”

“I’m going to give you ten seconds to decide, or I will decide for you.”

It took every ounce of self-control I possessed not to threaten to spank him. It was a miracle that I succeeded, but it was a near thing. Nico pushed all the way to eight seconds before I heard a muttered, “Pick them up.” It came with a pout and crossed arms, but I hadn’t specified that it needed to be said nicely, so it was a win for me.

Once we started gathering everything, it took less than two minutes. Given how quickly he finished, I had to wonder if he wasn’t putting me through some kind of test. If he was, it was anyone’s guess if I’d passed.

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