31. Bridget
31
brIDGET
“ Y eah, we got here just fine,” I said as I trapped my phone between my ear and shoulder while I pawed through a rack of dresses. “I think we’re gonna grab something for lunch and hit some more stores before we head back. Wanna meet at the bar for dinner?”
I spotted Erica and Mel debating sweater colors a few feet away while Chase chirped in my ear. Kristin, Hannah Jane, and Maddie were off piling anything baby-related into their buggies.
There was something hypnotizing about that bright red bullseye. It made shopping lists vaporize as soon as you walked through the shiny glass doors. The five-dollar coffees and neatly arranged displays lured dollars straight out of my bank account.
Erica and Mel spotted me and hustled over.
“I’ll see you tonight. Love you,” I said before sliding my phone back into my bag.
“Chase?” Erica asked with a shit-eating grin.
I rolled my eyes and giggled. “Maybe.”
“Y’all are so friggin’ cute,” Melissa squealed as she grabbed a white dress off of a rack and held it up. “What do you think? It’s a little long, but I can get it hemmed.
Erica tilted her head as she assessed it. “What’s the occasion?”
“The nurses at work are throwing me a bridal shower.”
“It’s cute,” I said, fingering the fabric. “You should get a pair of white Converse to go with it.” After all, it was her favorite kind of shoe. It would be fitting.
Mel’s eyes turned to saucers. “You’re a damn genius.”
“I have my moments,” I said smugly, flipping my hair over my shoulder.
Erica sipped the hot tea from her paper cup and let out a happy sigh. “The day Beaufort gets a Target will be a damn good day.”
I hooked my arm through hers as we walked down the rows of neatly folded clothes. “Until then, we’ll have to settle for girls’ trips to New Bern.”
“Steve told me about the lead on Kyle coming up empty.” She sighed. “That sucks.”
“Tell me about it,” I muttered. “I just want it to be over. I have a protective order against him, but because he’s been hiding Lord knows where, they haven’t been able to serve him. A piece of paper doesn’t mean shit.”
“Steve hasn’t been sleeping well,” she admitted quietly as she picked through a stack of jeans. “This case is really getting to him.”
“I’m sorry…”
“Oh, honey, don’t be.” Erica offered a soft smile. “He was the same way when Tyler Beale was messing with me and trying to scare me off. It’s that protective instinct. Our men don’t know how to turn it off.”
“Chase is stressed. He hasn’t said it, but I think it’s because he wants to keep me locked up and safe. ”
“I’m sure it weighs on him. Trying to protect you while letting you take your freedom back… It’s a hard thing to balance.”
“Until Kyle’s locked up…” I swallowed. “Same trailer, different park.”
“You’ve got a good one.”
“Yeah,” I said as I held up a floor-length skirt in an autumnal yellow for assessment.
It was the type of breezy chiffon that would billow in the wind. I rarely wore things like that, though. The plain t-shirt dress I threw on today was about as fancy as it got. I was a jeans, tank top, and cowboy boots kind of girl.
“What do you think?”
Erica lifted another hanger above the waist of the skirt, completing the outfit. She looked at me with wide eyes and said, “Uh-huh. You’re getting that. I don’t care if you don’t have anywhere to wear it. We’ll make an occasion just for it.”
She was right. I didn’t have an occasion to wear it, but I would someday. Hopefully soon.
“Okay!” Mel said, regaining order over our rowdy group of six.
We sat crowded around a table that overlooked the Neuse River. We had shopped until we nearly dropped, then walked around downtown New Bern to find somewhere suitable for lunch. Maddie gave each restaurant the sniff test until she and the baby boy in her belly found somewhere that agreed with her pregnancy palate.
“Everyone gets to ask Bee a question. Rapid-fire style,” Mel said as she dropped a hushpuppy in her mouth. “Ready?”
The girls had been peppering me with questions about Chase and me all day. I had artfully dodged most of them .
“Are y’all getting married?” Kristin asked without a moment of hesitation.
“Uh… Maybe? In the future?” I didn’t tell them that Chase had proposed at least twice a day. Sometimes more if he did it over a text message. Sometimes I proposed to him.
“When did y’all kiss for the first time?” Erica asked, all dreamy-eyed.
I laughed. “Does it count if we kissed once in middle school?”
Simultaneous awws and squeals erupted at that little tease. Everyone murmured their demands for both stories, so I began with how Chase offered to kiss me so I could get some experience before my “real” first kiss.
I stabbed my straw into the ice in my glass. “And we hadn’t kissed since then,” I said, wrapping up the middle school story. “But that big storm happened a few weeks ago. It spooked me, so I ran to the house and banged on the door. He let me stay over and sleep in his bed. The next morning, I went over to the cottage to brush my teeth. When I came back to the house, he was cooking breakfast and asked me to grab something out of the fridge. When I turned away, he pulled me back and kissed me.”
The girls melted into a chorus of love-struck sighs.
“That’s even better than when Steve kissed me in the middle of the bar,” Erica said as she reminisced.
I let out a nervous laugh. “And then we got a little carried away, and he dry-humped me into an orgasm against the refrigerator.”
The waiter chose that moment to swing by and offer refills. He grabbed Mel’s glass and ran.
“I bet it felt like y’all had the longest round of foreplay,” Maddie said with a laugh.
I snorted. “Our whole lives have been foreplay.”
“I bet the sex is amazing,” Kristin cooed. “Chase has some serious big dick energy. ”
“Look at you,” I teased. Kristin used to be so shy about talking about sex. It was adorable. “Will changed you.”
“That, or he taught her how to fuck.” Hannah Jane winked at Kristin.
Kristin laughed. “Okay, fine. He’s excellent in bed. It’s never boring.”
“Will seems like such a daddy ,” Mel said. “And you’ve got the age thing going for you. The gray is looking good on him.”
“He’s not old enough to be my dad!” Kristin laughed, then choked off. “Okay, fine. So he’s the same age as my parents. But in my defense, my parents had me when they were very young.” She turned her attention back to Mel. “What about you, missy? Don’t think we didn’t hear what happened in the bathroom at the bar last time we got together for girls’ night.”
Now it was Melissa’s turn to blush.
“Oh my God!” I laughed, whipping my head around to look at Mel. “Please tell me you and my brother did not have sex in the bathroom of my bar!”
“I plead the fifth!” she said, and giggled as she sipped her drink.
“Smart,” Hannah Jane said, pointing a manicured finger at Mel.
“Back to Bridget,” Mel said. “Have you given Chase a legendary Bridget blowjob yet?”
The poor waiter had the worst timing. He returned and nearly spilled half of Mel’s drink at the sound of the word “blowjob.”
We concocted the legendary Bridget blowjob after a drunk night in our early twenties. Maddie, Mel, Hannah Jane, Heather, and I were bemoaning how much we hated blowjobs, so I did something about it.
I went on to create a blowjob so potent that it flipped the power dynamic. That drunken night also involved Heather sending Steve to the store for five cucumbers so we could practice breathing through the gag reflex. We were too tipsy to drive.
Our men thought we were nuts, but we were much tamer now than we were at twenty-three.
It took me a few different boyfriends to get the technique down, but I was nothing if not committed to my research. If they handed out PhDs for oral, I’d have one hanging on my wall.
Of course, I wasn’t selfish. So, on another drunken girls’ night, steeled by the courage of bottom-shelf vodka, I shared the cumulation of my research. On a cucumber, of course.
Now, the Bridget blowjob lived in infamy. I was a legend among women. The keeper of knowledge. I was basically a saint.
“What do you think?” I shot back, grinning as I dragged a fry through a dollop of ketchup.
“Oh, he’s lucky,” Maddie grinned. “Luca knows that if I go down on him, it’s because I want something. And it’s usually effective enough that I get it.”
The waiter practically threw our check on the table and sprinted away. We would definitely need to leave him a big tip.
“Please.” Mel laughed. “You don’t even have to bat your eyes, and Luca is drooling all over you.”
She groaned. “Yeah, and he’s turned into an overprotective crazy person now that I’m knocked up with this little guy.” She smoothed her hands over the slight swell in her belly. She was going to be the cutest momma. “We’re going up to Brooklyn in a few weeks, and I overheard Luca telling his mom that I’m not allowed to help Nonna cook. I have to sit in the living room with my feet up.”
“It’s the ring,” Erica said. “Steve was way more protective of me when I was pregnant with Eli than when I was pregnant with Aly. I think it’s because we had just started getting to know each other when I was pregnant the first time. That ring changes everything. It’s like the sparkly diamond hypnotizes them, and the boys go from logical, reasonable humans to overbearing ogres.”
“Steve has always been an overbearing ogre,” Mel said. “Still is.”
“That’s true,” Erica agreed.
“But she’s right.” Mel lifted her hand, flashing her gorgeous engagement ring. “The ring erases all their brain cells. I have to keep reminding Jason that I was a perfectly capable adult before he proposed. Now I’m a perfectly capable adult who just happens to have an engagement ring.”
“I can’t wait to get married,” Kristin sighed. “I swear, you and Chase and Mel and Jason will get married before Will and me.”
“Why’d you put it off for so long?” I asked. Will had popped the question to her over Christmas. It was nearly October. According to Kristin, their wedding wouldn’t be until the summer.
“We wanted to get the house done, and I wanted to finish my degree. Logan is in his first year in college, and Kylie is a senior. Waiting was just easier.” She stared longingly at her ring. “I just hate feeling like I’m in limbo.”
“I get that,” I said as I pulled out cash to cover my portion of the bill. “Moving in with Chase—officially—helped a lot. I stopped feeling like I was holding my breath, waiting for the unknown.”
“What’s with all the tulips?” Hannah Jane asked. “Isaac’s flight from London got in at six this morning. Chase was already out there planting bulbs when I left to pick him up.”
There were days when getting out of bed was hard. If I didn’t have hospital bills to pay, I would have holed up in the house and played hooky. Some days I needed Chase to remind me I was worth loving. That I wasn’t used or broken.
Chase planted a constant reminder that beautiful things grow out of the dirt .
I woke up every day more in love with him than I had been the day before.
“He brought me tulips in the hospital,” I said as I tore my paper straw wrapper into little bits of confetti. I omitted the history of the gesture. It wasn’t my story to tell.
“I love a grand gesture,” Maddie sighed wistfully. “I can’t believe y’all are finally together after all these years. It was fate.”
Fate cut it a little close this time .
The rest of the girls had their struggles with getting their happily ever after, but the only other person who came close to my certain-death experience was Erica.
I loved seeing Maddie pregnant. It suited her. She had the glow that everyone talked about. Watching Luca dote on her was downright adorable.
But I didn’t know if I could give that to Chase.
I had shut down the idea of having kids a long time ago. Not because I didn’t want them, but because I didn’t want to subject a child to having Kyle Kingsley as a father. I’d made peace with the hard choices life had forced me to make.
But things were different now. I had fallen in love with my best friend and his irresistible rescue dog. I had fallen in love with his home—our home. And for some reason, he fell in love with me. I could only be thankful.
Still, if I started unpacking the boxes where I’d carefully hidden my hopes and dreams, I was sure to uncover even more skeletons.
Maybe it was something I needed to talk over with Naomi first.
We paid our bill and exited the restaurant. I made it a few steps down the sidewalk before a flash of heat hit me, followed by a cold chill.
No, no, no. Now was not the time for a panic attack. Not in front of everyone .
“Oooh!” Hannah Jane squealed. “Look at that boutique! Y’all up for one more stop before we head back?”
“You guys go ahead,” I said. “I’m gonna run back inside and use the restroom.”
“You sure?” Erica asked.
Mel’s intuition must have been tingling because she gave me a quizzical look.
“Yeah, I had too much tea at lunch.” I jerked my thumb back toward the restaurant. My breath was coming in staccato gasps. “I’ll meet y’all at the truck when you’re done.”
I breezed by the hostess stand and barely made it inside the restroom before my heart started racing. Breathe through it. Breathe.
The bathroom door opened and closed. “Bee?” Mel’s voice was quiet.
Breathe through it.
The slight click of metal against metal echoed as she checked each stall for occupancy. Her Converse peeked out beneath the door to mine as she rattled it.
“Bee, it’s just me.”
Reluctantly, I pushed the latch back and cracked the door. Mel slipped in and closed it behind her. “What’s wrong? You had that look on your face.”
“I just… I needed a minute.”
“Panic attack?” she asked.
I nodded.
Mel reached out and held my hand. “What do you need?”
“Nothing. I’m good.”
“Bee.” Melissa huffed. “Don’t bullshit me.”
“You’ve done more for me than I will ever be able to repay. I’m good, okay?”
Melissa shook her head. “No one’s keeping score.”
Cautiously, I admitted, “Sometimes I have these little episodes where I feel like I’m doing something wrong by being out, and if I don’t get home, I’ll…”
“I get it,” Mel said quickly, sparing me the need to explain what Kyle would have done if he thought I had a little too much freedom. “Is that why you hid in the cottage for so long? Why it took you so long to come back to poker night?”
“Yeah.” I sighed. “I mean, I didn’t want to answer questions or be stared at like a freak on display. Most of it was feeling like if I left where I was supposed to be, he’d come at me. It was just safer to stay in my little box.”
“Oh, sweetie,” she said as she wrapped her arms around me.
“I’ve been going to therapy,” I admitted. “It’s been helping a lot. But… It’s still scary.”
Melissa sat with me, patient and quiet, as I closed my eyes and forced myself to go through the breathing exercises Naomi taught me.
“You know,” Mel said as we exited the bathroom and walked out into the midday sun. “Jase said something to me a while ago. He told me that my demons don’t know what I’m made of.”
I laughed. “That’s because they don’t know how much you can bench.”
“Healing is scary. But every time you take a step forward, you prove to your demons that you’re stronger than they are.”
“Thanks, Mel,” I whispered as I pulled her into a hug right there on the sidewalk.
She squeezed me tight. “What are sisters for?”