Page 49 of Pucking the Single Dad
"Your girlfriend's amazing," Mr. Henderson told Brad. "The way she engages the kids—Finn's lucky to have her."
I felt Brad's gaze on me, heavy with something I couldn't interpret. "Yeah," he said softly. "We both are."
The three-legged race should have been a disaster. Brad's six-foot-three frame towered over my five-foot-five, our strides completely mismatched. But his competitive nature emerged as he studied the other pairs, calculating angles and timing like he was planning a power play.
"Trust me," he said, and before I could respond, he'd essentially scooped me against his side, my feet barely touching the ground as he powered forward. I shrieked with laughter, Finn jumping and cheering as we crossed the finish line in first place.
"THAT'S MY DAD! THAT'S MY MISS SERENA!"
"Subtle," Maria drawled from her lawn chair throne, sunglasses not quite hiding her knowing smirk. She'd "volunteered" to chaperone with all the subtlety of a detective on a stakeout. "Very believable fake couple behavior, you two."
But I couldn't focus on Maria's matchmaking agenda because Emma, a second-grader with anxiety, had gone rigid by the pond, that telltale tremor in her hands I'd learned to recognize. I slipped away from Brad, crouching beside her.
"Five things you see," I whispered, just for her. "Start with the dragonfly."
"Dragonfly," she breathed. "Cattails. Your bracelet. The... the turtle on that rock."
We worked through the senses while I kept us moving with the group, my hand steady on her shoulder. Jason bounced past—I'd sent him on his third "critical supply mission" of the day, burning off his ADHD energy without making it obvious. He'd figured out my game weeks ago but played along, grateful for the excuse to move.
"She okay?" Brad materialized beside us, voice low enough that Emma wouldn't feel spotlighted.
Emma nodded, breathing steady now, and ran ahead to join her friends. I watched her go, the familiar satisfaction of a crisis quietly averted warming my chest.
"You didn't even hesitate." Brad's voice had gone strange, almost reverent. "You just... knew. With her, with Jason bouncing off the walls, with every kid here."
"It's just teaching—"
"Stop." He caught my elbow, and suddenly we were too close, his eyes doing that dangerous thing where they went all intense and searching. "You reshape the world around these kids without them even knowing you're doing it. That's not just teaching. That's—"
He cut himself off, jaw working like he was fighting words that wanted to escape. Around us, children shrieked over pond creatures and parents pretended not to stare, but all I could focus on was the way his thumb had started tracing absent circles on my arm, like he'd forgotten this was supposed to be pretend.
The evening campfire cast dancing shadows as we roasted marshmallows. Brad sat on a log with Finn on his lap, and without thinking, I settled beside them. Brad's arm came around me, pulling me close enough that Finn could lean against us both. The position should have felt awkward—we were performing intimacy we hadn't earned. Instead, it felt like coming home.
"Who wants to share a family talent?" the counselor asked, and Finn's hand shot up before Brad or I could stop him.
"We do the Inhaler Hero song!"
"The what now?" Brad's chest rumbled against my shoulder, amusement barely contained.
"Miss Serena made it up so I don't forget my breathing steps." Finn scrambled to his feet, dragging me up with him. "And Dad can do his stick thing!"
And somehow—somehow—I was standing in firelight teaching thirty sugar-crashed children to rap about bronchodilators while Brad performed what could generously be called "juggling" with marshmallow sticks. He dropped them on purpose, letting Finn dive in for dramatic saves, and the whole ridiculous performance had parents actually filming us on their phones.
We were a circus act. We were ridiculous. We wereperfect.
Several mothers dabbed their eyes. We'd become the family everyone wanted to believe in, and the performance felt so real I forgot we were lying.
That night, after tucking exhausted children into sleeping bags, the adults gathered around dying embers with cups of coffee and wine. I sat between Brad's knees on theground, his chest solid behind me—a position that started as necessity due to limited seating but became something else as his arms settled around me.
"How long have you two been together?" Mrs. Patel asked, her tone suggesting she'd been dying to know all day.
"Feels like forever," Brad said, and the raw honesty in his voice made me shiver. His arms tightened fractionally. "Sometimes you meet someone and everything just... clicks."
"That's beautiful," Mrs. Gomez sighed. "You can see how much you love each other. And Finn absolutely adores you, Serena."
I should have corrected her, should have maintained some boundary between fake and real. Instead, I leaned back into Brad's warmth and let myself pretend, just for tonight, that this was our truth.
The next morning on the bus ride home, Finn had transformed into a sixty-pound octopus sprawled across our laps, completely knocked out from adventure. One hand was fisted in my shirt, his feet somehow wedged into Brad's armpits. Other parents smiled at us knowingly, making comments about our "beautiful family" that should have felt false but didn't.
