Little Do You Know

Chapter 8

1988

It was so goddamn hot. Eddie sat on top of the kitchen counter in nothing but his boxers, eating from a carton of mint chocolate chip that Dani had asked him to pick up from the store earlier. This apartment was always too damn hot or too damn cold. Too cold he could handle. They would curl up under blankets, warming each other with their bodies. Too hot was unbearable. There was only so much he could do to cool off. So, here he sat, barely clothed, eating ice cream on his counter, hoping the cold creaminess would cool his body temperature down a bit.

Dani was upstairs laying Lyric down for the night. They'd given her a cool bath and let her sleep in her diaper to keep her as cool as possible. The one fan they owned was in her room, set up in the center, blowing toward her crib so their baby girl could get a good night's sleep. As for them, well, they were screwed for now. Eddie was hoping to pick up another fan this week when he got his paycheck in a couple days. Nothing had been left over from their paychecks last week after they got groceries, diapers, paid the rent, and caught up on the light bill so it didn't get shut off. They had received the final notice, letting them know if they didn't pay at least half someone would come out to cut it off.

Eddie hated how much they struggled. It made him feel like shit. He wanted to give Dani the world because that's what she deserved and more. He wanted his girls to have so much more than what he could provide for them right now. Hell, he just wanted one week where they didn't have to worry about or talk about their financial strain.

They'd had to get the cable shut off because it was a luxury they just couldn't afford. Him and Dani had taken to watching movies that Steve let them borrow under the table from Family Video or reading books together in the evenings. Not that Eddie minded that, Dani leaning back against his chest as she read aloud or lying with her head in his lap as he read to her. Then they would talk, sometimes for hours about the characters and the plot, dissecting it all, trying to work out what would happen or what should have happened. Sometimes they would even pull out a board game. In the winter, they'd worked through a few puzzles together they'd borrowed from Uncle Wayne. His uncle loved his puzzles, had dozens of them, so he didn't mind lending them a few that he'd already solved.

To Dani's credit, she never complained but Eddie could see the strain the money concerns were putting on her. She never bought herself anything, making do with what they already had. This winter, he caught her using duct tape to cover a hole in her boots and coloring over it with black sharpie to try to get another season out of them. She shopped at thrift stores and had hit up garage sales to find Lyric's summer clothes. He'd found her crying in the bedroom a couple of weeks ago because she'd been embarrassed when she had to put things back at the grocery store because she didn't have enough cash to buy everything, everyone looking at her as she painstakingly chose things from the cart and walked them back to the shelves. It had gutted him because this was not the life he'd envisioned for them, not the life his beautiful girl deserved.

"Hey, you better not be eating all my ice cream, handsome."

Eddie glanced up, spoon halfway to his mouth and almost dropped it. Dani stood, arms crossed, one leg propped over the other, an amused smirk on her face. But what almost had him dropping the spoon was the miles of leg that was on display as she stood there in one of his Iron Maiden shirts that she'd cut off so it would fit her and nothing else, the shirt barely skimming her ass. Shit. She slept like this almost every night in the summer. You'd think he'd get used to it but every single time she knocked him out with how damn good she looked in his shirts.