I hope you guys like this chapter. I do. It's got some great moments in it.

JUNE 9

I whistled quietly as I worked on a wall display of skateboards. Instead of meeting at the Smoothie Shack or the Round Table like we usually did, Jon and I were hanging out at his shop today. I'd been to his shop before, but I'd never stayed for very long. But he'd had some things to do, so I'd offered to come over and help.

I noticed that he kept glancing at the ceiling, toward his and Charlie's apartment. He had been doing that since I got there. He was seriously nervous about the baby. "Jonathan," I said.

He looked over at me. "Yeah?"

"Calm down. It'll be fine. Her due date's not for four more days."

He sighed. "I know, I know. I just…The baby could come early. It literally could be any day now. Any minute."

"You'll be fine. You're freaking yourself out over nothing. What are you going to do with the shop when Roman is born?"

He shrugged. "I'll have to close it for a couple weeks, I think. I know I live just upstairs, but I want to get Roman settled into a routine before I go back to working. It'll be easier on me and the baby if I'm not running up and down all day, I think."

He had a point, but he would lose money if he just closed down for that long. "Hey, I could help out. It's the summer, so I've got quite a bit of free time. I could run the shop in the afternoons, so you don't have to close entirely. You don't even have to pay me." I got a pretty good allowance from my parents, and I'd always put a portion of it away into savings. I had worked part time last summer, but I had decided not to this summer.

"Yeah? Sounds good to me. But of course you'd get paid. I don't care if you're my son or not. I'm not going to make you work for free. You're hired."

I grinned. "That's gotta be the easiest interview I've ever had. How's Charlie feeling?" I asked, getting down from the stepladder. "Is she ready to have the baby?"

"More than ready. She's really excited."

I grinned. "Yeah, everybody at my house is pretty excited for Kensley. Bex is probably the most excited. She says she's sick of being surrounded by boys all the time. She's obsessed with soccer, so you would think that she'd be a tomboy. She's not. She's actually pretty girly. And Mom's not really girly at all, so Bex is excited to have another girl to do girly things with."

Jon nodded. We were quiet then, getting the shop cleaned up and organized. He'd just gotten a shipment of supplies earlier in the day, so we'd been working on getting it all put where it needed to go and changing around some of the displays he had hanging on the walls. We'd only had one customer come in while we worked, and we'd been at it for a few hours.

"Does the shop do well?" I wondered. "Do you get a lot of business?"

Jon shrugged. "It's pretty good. Today's actually a really slow day for some reason. I think I made a really good choice in locations, though. Skateboarding is pretty popular with the college kids, and it's good to be right across from the campus."

"I bet. A skateboard is cheaper than a car, and faster than walking. And you can ride a skateboard on the sidewalks. It'd be great for getting between classes. I might need to think about learning to skateboard," I said thoughtfully.

Jon looked over at me. "Do you want to learn? I could teach you."

I started to grin. I'd never really thought about learning to ride a skateboard before. But it might be kind of fun. And it was something that Jon and I could do together. "Yeah," I said. "I think I'd like that."

"Wanna start right now?"

I looked around. We still had several boxes to unpack and one more display to put up. "Shouldn't we finish this first? And maybe it would be better to wait until after Roman is born. I don't want to take time away from him."

He flapped a hand at me. "I can finish with these boxes tonight, no biggie. And it really won't take you very long to get the basics. No more than a week, if that long."

"All right."

"Hang on. I'll be right back." He disappeared through the back door that led upstairs to his apartment. He came back just a few minutes later, holding a scratched up skateboard. "This was my first skateboard. You can have it if you want."

I was surprised. "Wait, seriously? You don't want to keep it for Roman?"

Jon gave me a crooked grin. "I know I wasn't a part of your life for a really long time, but you're still my oldest son. The skateboard's yours, if you want it. I was thinking of giving Roman my competition board, if he wants it when he's older."

I reached out and took the board from him, without saying a word. I didn't really know what to say. I was feeling a little overwhelmed, to be honest. Since I'd met Jon, our relationship had almost been like that of an uncle and a nephew. I'd never really thought of him as a dad. But this…

This was a father-son moment.

And it didn't change what I had with Alex. Alex would always be my dad. But it was nice to have something similar with Jon, too. Not quite the same, but similar.

"Sorry it's a little scruffy. It's been through a lot." Jon scratched the back of his head, looking embarrassed. He probably thought that I wasn't saying anything because I thought it was lame or something.

I shook my head. "No, it's fine. It's great, in fact. Thanks." I put the board on the floor, grinning at Jonathan. "All right. What's first?"

He grinned back. "First we find out which foot you should put first. You want the foot that you're most comfortable with in front."

And so Jon started teaching me how to ride a skateboard.