Chapter 36
36
[Ruthie]
F or the next ten days, the Anchors are home, and Bolan and I fall into a blissful swirl of family life. He goes off to play baseball. I take care of Tulane. And when he’s home, we sneak in sex whenever and wherever we can. Tulane’s nap time is particularly productive and creative.
One morning, Bolan fucked me up against the drawers inside our walk-in closet, when I was trying to put away laundry. Afterward he told me that being domestic made him horny. He also praised how I decorated the duplex. The little touches like plants and pictures. The bigger statements like the easy chair in the office and a dining table with six chairs.
Life is good.
Although, Bolan is set to leave on another long stretch of away games. He’ll have three in Philadelphia, then back to Arizona for another set of three. I don’t want to have concerns about our separation. I don’t have any doubts about him. He’s my future.
Even if he can be a hot mess. He’s been scrambling around the duplex, looking for his bag, which is already at the top of the staircase, ready for his trip to the airport. He’s standing in front of the fridge, looking at his phone, hand lifted like he’s about to open the appliance. Tulane is still sleeping in the early morning hour, and I am waiting to say our goodbyes.
But then, Bolan lowers his raised hand and swipes something on his phone. His thick brows dip inward, the crease deep.
“What’s this?” The growl in Bolan’s voice makes the fine hairs on the back of my neck rise. “Just what the fuck is this?”
He swings his head in my direction, eyes passing through a wave of emotions. Shock, fear, disappointment. And then anger.
He steps toward me, flipping his phone in my direction, screen outward and points with this other hand at the display. “What the fuck?”
A female speaks on the video, her words projected on the screen as she talks:
“ Bolan Adler paid me a million dollars to pretend to be his wife but then he settled on a consolation prize for his fake wife instead .”
Glancing up at Bolan, I’m not certain I fully register what I’m seeing. I drop my gaze once more to his phone, the device nearly vibrating in his hands.
My eyes fall on the familiar, pretty face of Melody Cross who is explaining how Bolan proposed to her but within days of their engagement announcement, he broke the promise and asked a second-string woman to pretend to be his wife, claiming she was the financially cheaper of the two options.
The she is me.
I glance back at Bolan, dumbfounded. “I thought she signed an NDA. ”
Bolan glares at me, causing an uneasy feeling to stir in my belly. Like he somehow thinks I’m at fault.
“But wait. There’s more.” Sarcasm drips from his tone. He taps at his screen and produces a second video.
Something called a stitch appears, where Melody has split the screen, her face showing on half the image as she points at a video on the other half.
The caption reads: Is that her? I can almost hear the implied disgust as my gaze falls on the opposite video.
The one where two people are kissing. The film is black and white. The couple are young, college aged. He’s wearing a backward baseball cap. She’s wearing a backless shirt, and?—
“Shit,” I whisper.
In addition to Melody’s caption, she mouths, She kisses like a fish . Then mimics the opening and closing of a goldfish’s lips. The hit stings.
Bolan flips the phone toward himself to take a second glance at the video, then turns the device back toward me.
“That’s us, isn’t it?” Confusion and upset strangles his voice. “You fucking knew who I was after all, didn’t you?”
When I glance at those forest-green eyes, the ones ablaze with flames, I swallow thickly. “I can explain.”
Bolan continues to stare at me. The anger crackling in those eyes turns to something more desperate. Hurt.
He stands taller while slowly lowering his phone to his side. His eyes search my face for something, anything, but defeat seems to settle in. He rolls his shoulders back.
“Seems a little late to tell me the truth.” His gaze is scorching. “That’s if you ever planned to tell me the truth.”
I step closer to him, but he jerks back. My heart sinks. “I didn’t know it was you. Not at first.” The dark ballroom. My thoughts on Clifton and the ocean.
“But when you kissed me . . .” I bite my lower lip. The truth was in that kiss .
“When I kissed you . . . What?” His shoulders lower, in direct conflict with the pain in his eyes that narrow. “You thought you’d get laid by Bad-ler ?”
My back stiffens at the mention of an old nickname he told me about. My hands turn to ice. “I’m not going to dignify that question with an answer.” Defending myself on this point is moot. Bolan knows sleeping with him was the furthest thing from my mind when we first reconnected.
He continues to stare at me, his mind computing something else. “You said Clifton and you took a break in college. He’d been unfaithful to you.” His brows lift. “Had you been unfaithful to him first?” He lifts the phone and points at it. “Did you cheat on him with me?”
“No! No, absolutely not.” The wound he’s inflicting on me goes deeper. Bolan knows how I feel about cheating. Knows my experience with it from Clifton. I’d never do that to someone. Never do that to him.
“I went into that experiment?—”
“That damn experiment.” Bolan visibly bristles cutting me off, reminding me that he’d been blackmailed into participating. His future on the college team was linked to that moment. Heck, his entire life might have rested on that experiment. If he failed psychology. If he was kicked off the team. He might be upset with me from keeping the truth for him, but he isn’t angry at me because of the experiment. That moment meant two different things to us, individually, but I need him to know what it meant to me.
“That experiment meant?—”
“Was this some kind of revenge?” he counters, slicing off my words again, like his brain skipped ahead.
“Revenge for what?” I blink at him.
“I don’t know.” He tosses his arms out to the side, like he understands the statement is ridiculous. “Clifton maybe. Were you pissed at him, so you used me?” His expression is stricken, like that might actually be a possibility.
Staring at him, he reads my face. The one with guilt written on it but not how he thinks.
“You did,” he whispers.
“It wasn’t like that.” I hold my breath expecting him to interrupt me once more.
When he lowers his head, eyes no longer able to look at me, I begin. “When Clifton wanted that break, I was relieved.” I exhale, thumping my chest and blinking back the tears “I needed a break as well.” Our love had been hard and fast, and too much at times. And he’d really hurt me when he’d been the one person I trusted.
“I didn’t want to randomly hook up with someone. I didn’t want to date someone else. I just wanted to kiss somebody.”
“Just a little taste,” Bolan snipes, narrowing his eyes while pinching his forefinger and thumb within an inch of each other. “A sample of another.”
I shake my head. “I just needed to know if Clifton was the only one for me.” The tears fall. Bolan stares at me and I lick my lips. “And that kiss proved to me he wasn’t.”
His eyes widen but his shoulders are still tight.
“I’ve held onto that kiss my entire life.” My voice cracks and I blink harder as the tears fall faster. “And I knew someone like you wouldn’t be interested in me. Wasn’t ready for someone like me.”
“Someone like you?” he echoes back, as if I’m insulting him. As if I’m better than him, but that’s not what I mean.
“Someone quiet and shy and looking for a family. Looking to start one and be part of one.”
Bolan continues to watch me. The anger in his eyes cuts deep, but within that anger is also hurt. I lied to him, although I hadn’t outright. I’d omitted, and guilt eats at me just the same .
“You knew who I was,” he finally states, reminding me of the rules. No contact. No seeking out the other.
“You were hard to miss on campus. Once I’d had that kiss from you, it felt like you were everywhere. Star athlete with a reputation as a ladies’ man.” I swallow thickly, the tears clogging my throat. “You would have never picked me.” I shrug, knowing the truth is, if I’d approached Bolan back then, despite the rules, he wouldn’t have wanted a serious, committed girlfriend, and I wasn’t interested in being his one-night stand.
“You don’t know that.” His brows pinch again, softer than his earlier crease. “You didn’t give me the chance.”
Sighing, I accept that he’s right.
“I kissed you for me,” I clarify. “And something inside me came to life.” I clutch one hand over the other against my chest. “I’d never done anything like that before. Never felt anything like that moment. Those sixty seconds. Not before. Not after. Not until I kissed you again in that ballroom. That’s when I knew. Because I knew only you could kiss me like that. And I’ve been holding onto that first kiss all this time.”
Bolan turns his head. His lids blinking suddenly. He squeezes his thumb and forefinger across them before facing me again.
“You went back to him.” His tone is dark and growly once more.
“I went back to him.” There isn’t any way to dispute this truth. I accepted Clifton’s apology and his groveling, and we were a couple again. Because I was still that young, foolish girl who wanted a family. Wanted to be the center of his world, and while I thought I was, I learned too late I wasn’t. Then I just felt stuck.
“What about the ballroom? That night you?—”
“I was lonely and melancholy. All this bullshit about Clifton. People praising him like he was a saint when he was just a man. A sad, depressed man who had demons I could not help him chase away.” And dear God, had I tried. Suggestions of therapy. Constantly monitoring his mood. His behavior. Trying to navigate him day after day in those final years.
“In that ballroom, I would have never gone further with you if we hadn’t shared a kiss first. When I knew it was you.”
Bolan licks his lips, his shoulders falling finally. “Was it retaliation then? Were you angry at me for my past? For our college days?”
I’m shaking my head before he finishes the question. “No.” The tears in my eyes nearly blind me. “I just wanted a second chance.”
“A second chance at what?”
Love . Although I don’t know that I thought it then, standing in a dark ballroom, kissing a stranger. Because I hadn’t known then who Bolan Adler really is. Not his reputation. Not his past. But who he is now. The father to a sweet girl. A good person trying to right his name. The man I call my husband.
Who kisses me like no one else ever has, and now I worry he never will again.
I make a fist at my lower belly, pressing into the ache that feels like a cement block in my stomach.
Bolan’s eyes catch on the motion, but he quickly looks to the side again. He licks over his top teeth before his jaw clenches.
His phone beeps in his hand. A reminder. It’s time to leave. He has a plane to catch and games to play states away for the next week or so.
“The last thing I need is another scandal.” His voice is hard, even and steady. He lifts his phone, shaking it in my direction. “As my agent, you’ll need to do damage control on this.”
The words cut. As if I’m nothing more than an employee. As if having a child with him would be one more mistake. As if holding onto an experimental kiss from college had been foolish and reckless, and not the fun kind of reckless, but something spiteful, something regretful.
Like he regrets me.
The hurt runs too deep, and I can hardly breathe.
“Me?” My breath hitches. “You spoke to Jared, right?” Jared called the other day to finalize discussions about the milk campaign. Surely, they discussed other things.
“You’re assigned to me. You speak to Jared.”
“Actually, I’m not.”
“What?” Bolan narrows his eyes. His phone beeps again. Another reminder.
“I quit ISM.”
Those eyes widen as big as baseballs. “When?”
I swallow, knowing the truth only digs my guilt deeper. “The day I arrived in California.”
Bolan lifts his hand, ticking off against his fingers like he’s counting back the days or weeks since I’d been there. Or possibly the infractions against me. Then he lifts his entire hand, palm outward, fingers spread, as if five is an important number. “That was weeks ago.”
“I know. Jared promised me he’d talk to you. As Imperial Sports Management represents you, he told me he’d reach out to say you’d been reassigned to him.”
In all the excitement of coming to Chicago early and then Bolan returning home, the fine detail of no longer being his agent slipped my mind. I hadn’t been acting as his agent anyway other than suggesting to Jared that Bolan should have sponsorships and then I proposed a few brands I thought Bolan might represent.
“But Jared told me you brokered the deal for the milk campaign.”
“I simply made a suggestion on your behalf.”
Bolan continues to stare at me, and I wish I could read his thoughts because his eyes are now hollow. The inviting forest is gone; in its place, is empty, solid black.
“Was this about the money?”
“This?” I question. Does he think I kissed him for money?
“Our marriage.” He swallows thickly.
My mouth falls open, as if I’ve been struck by a fast ball. The unexpected hit so hard I’m speechless a second before the pain settles in.
“Was anything the truth between us?”
“Yes, Bolan.” I step closer to him, but again, he steps back. “I—” I love you and I didn’t mean to hurt you. I’d never hurt him like he thinks—intentionally, for gain. Marrying him for money. Kissing him for retribution.
“ I got a nice deal with the Anchors.” He points at his chest. “And now I have sponsorships, and you get a cut.”
The tears on my face have shifted from guilt and grief to hot anger. “A cut?” I choke. “Did you even read the contract you signed with me?”
“Right. Because we have a contract.”
His phone beeps with another reminder notification.
Suddenly, I’m done with this conversation. He isn’t listening. While I see the hurt in his face, he apparently doesn’t see the hurt in mine. And too often, I let my late husband walk over me in similar situations.
“We don’t have a contract, Bolan. We’re married, remember? And I’m here for you. You and that precious little girl.” I glance in the direction of the stairwell and point, implying the second floor.
“You’re here as the second string. And I’m your ticket to the game.”
My head whips back in his direction. I register the wounded tone of his voice, but his words are the final strike. Out and sent back to the dugout.
“You didn’t read the contract, did you? ”
His phone dings one more time.
“That’s a low blow, Ruthie. You know I don’t read well.”
Shaking my head, I grit my teeth. “No, a low blow is this: Fuck you, Bolan.” Fuck him and his insinuations and misunderstandings and not offering me grace when I gave it to him.
He was my green.
“Good luck at your games.” That’s not my phrase, but I no longer care. “You need to go.”
There are no more reminders to pop up on his phone. I know because even though I’m not his agent, assistant, or manager, I’ve still set the notifications for him. I’ve still been taking care of him, so he gets where he needs to be when he needs to be there.
Because I care about him.
To my surprise, Bolan turns and chucks his phone down the back hallway. The distinct crash of it hitting the back door and cracking before dropping to the floor echoes back at us.
Then he turns and leaves without saying goodbye.