Free Suddenly Sexy by Linda Francis Lee

daughter home at that hour.
She didn't even move to take Katie to her room. Instead, he was the one
who tucked her into bed.

For years, Katie came and went from her house at all hours. More often
than not, Jesse knew, Mary
Beth was too self-absorbed, too caught up in concern over some man to
notice when Katie was gone.

When he returned to the kitchen that early morning he shrugged, feeling
awkward. "See ya."

"Jess?"

He stopped with his hand on the knob.

"I'm sorry about your mom. She loved you a lot."

His throat started to work again and his eyes burned. But he swallowed
it back. No more crying.

"Thanks."

He raced out the door, across the yard, slipping back into his own bed
just before his dad got up to fix breakfast. Carlen Chapman didn't say
much to his boys for months, a strange spiraling distance widening
between them until Jesse felt like he was losing his father, too. But
Carlen had kept his sons fed and clothed.

Food and clothes. Two things a parent had to provide for a child.

Jesse glanced at the plate of Pop-Tarts. "You need more to eat than
that."

Travis stared at his new dad. Not exactly a new dad like the new
stepdads some of the kids at school got. This guy had been his dad from
the beginning, though no one had known it except his mom. So really,
Travis reasoned, he was a new-to-him dad.

Jesse Chapman was really tall— please,
please, please, let me get tall like him —and handsome in a movie
star kind of way, not really a dad kind of way. In fact, his dad really
didn't seem much like a
dad at all.

Without so much as a What do you
want to eat? , Jesse looked in the refrigerator, and Travis could
tell
he was surprised by what he saw. "Eggs," Jesse said.

"Yeah, Kate said we couldn't live on Pop-Tarts alone."

"You talked to her?"

"This morning before she left for work. She got up early and went to
the grocery store."

"She must have gotten up real early."

"Yep, said she didn't want to leave us here without any food." He
laughed. "She's really nice."

His dad looked out the window, and the guy kind of laughed, thinking of
something that made him smile and shake his head at the same time.
"Yeah," Jesse said, "she's nice." Then he got back to work on all that
food.

Travis sat at the table, trying to decide if he should mention the fact
that Kate had stopped at McDonald's and gotten him a Big Breakfast
after she went to the store. She hadn't gotten anything for herself,
only had some cereal and coffee, saying, " No more fat thighs for me ." Which,
Travis reasoned, must be why she left the house wearing ankle weights.

Travis decided not to tell Jesse about the Big Breakfast or the ankle
weights.

"I saw you swimming this morning," Travis offered instead, dubiously
eyeing the eggs going into a skillet. "You remind me of that swimmer
lady on those old movies my mom likes to watch. Esther Williams."

All that got was one dark eyebrow raised kind of funny, like he wasn't
all that happy about being compared to Esther.

"Not that you look like a girl," Travis added hastily. "I just mean
you're a good swimmer. Like Tarzan. Yeah, Tarzan in the really old
movies. Though you swim way better than him. You put your head in the
water. Tarzan does that weird above the water thing, like he doesn't
want to get his hair wet. Though
why Tarzan would care about wet hair, I don't know. He's hanging out
with Cheetah. Do you really
think a monkey cares?"

Jesse looked at him like he was trying to figure out if he was supposed
to answer that. It was the same kind of look that tons of people gave
him when he talked.

"Do you watch a lot of old movies?" Jesse asked.

Talking! With his dad! "They're my mom's favorite. Did you know that?"

That got more silence, and it belatedly occurred to Travis that his dad
probably didn't know a whole lot about his mom, because he almost
hadn't recognized her. Which couldn't be great, since Travis knew all
about how kids were made.

Jesse set a plate of eggs, bacon, and toast in