Chapter Fifty
fifty
Ridley
Ridley sat on the bench, his guts churning, long after he’d watched Lanie walk away, unclear on what just happened.
Had he expected Lanie to run into his arms when he got there? No. Not really... Or maybe just a tiny bit.
But he also knew he had a lot to make up for. The days after the wedding had not been his finest hour. It was all still kind of a blur. From gathering Bea in his arms and telling Lanie to leave, to calling after her as she ran to the tube stop. It had all been a shit show.
One he’d caused.
He’d asked Lanie to come home with him because he’d wanted her in his bed, to see her spread across his sheets. Ever since the first time she’d stopped by with her girlfriends and Ridley walked in to see his house full of life again, he’d known it. He wanted her with them, a part of his reality. And Ridley could see clearly now that his infatuation with Lanie had grown into something far more serious far sooner than he’d admitted to her or even to himself.
That’s why it had been so amazing to get that voicemail from her, even if she’d clearly been drunk when she left it. It was a five-minute ramble that revealed lots of things he was sure she’d rather it hadn’t. He still chuckled thinking about it. But it made him love her even more. And the best part had been learning she felt the same, that she loved him too, when she said so... seven times. He’d counted. It had been like hearing the perfect melody played in the perfect key. He’d never admit to her how many times he’d replayed that message, letting it lull him to sleep.
She loved him and he most definitely loved her back. They both knew it. And that was supposedly all that mattered, right? So then, how could shit go downhill so quickly? Ridley was still sitting, immobilized on that bench, trying to figure it out.
His phone rang as he looked around the peaceful and surprisingly quiet campus.
“Did you talk to her?” Bea spoke before he could even answer. “Did you apologize? Did you tell her I was sorry too?”
Ridley smiled despite himself. “I spoke to her.”
“Did you apologize though?”
“I did.”
“For me too?”
“I did not.”
“Dad!” Bea wailed into the phone. “How could you? You promised!”
“Honey, I didn’t get a chance. She wasn’t in a listening mood.”
He didn’t know that that was necessarily the truth. It seemed more like there were some magic words Lanie was waiting on but he didn’t know what they were. With Thyra, his Rosetta stone had been Gavin and his bad behavior. Ridley had no idea what to do to get through to Lanie.
“Then you listen. What did she say?”
Ridley thought about it. What had she said? “That I embarrassed her in front of you and that I made her feel disposable and that we live too far apart.”
“And what does that tell you?” This voice was masculine.
“Hello? Bean?”
“That’s Gavin, Dad, don’t worry. He picked me up from school today.”
Ridley gritted his teeth, still not used to the new arrangement that he and Gavin would officially share custody of Beatrix, with Ridley as her primary guardian. “Take me off speaker, would you please?”
“Wait, before you do—Aronsen, think about it. What do all those things tell you?”
“I can’t move back to the United States.”
“Says who?” Gavin asked.
“Yeah, says who?” Bea chimed in. “But she didn’t directly ask you to move back, Dad. She asked you to tell her that you’d consider it.”
“I agree,” Gavin opined. “Sounds like she asked you to tell her she was not interchangeable, that she was enough of a fixture in your life that you would establish some sense of permanence in your lives together.”
She had? How didn’t I hear all that?
“Maybe figure out a way to close the distance. Like, I don’t know...consider some compromise?” Bea offered. “Like you and Gavin are doing?”
Allowing Bea to travel more freely between his house and Gavin’s was hardly the same as him attempting to maintain a transcontinental relationship. “Give it up. We are not moving to New York, Bean,” Ridley said.
The sound of Bea sucking her teeth came through the phone.
“Look.” Ridley sighed heavily. “I told her I wanted to figure out what we were going to do about the distance because we found our new coordinator.”
There were boos and hisses on the phone. His own personal Greek chorus. Great.
“What?” Ridley asked defensively.
“You don’t lead with why you’re not coming back. You lead with when you’re coming next, man! You tell her when she can expect to see you again because you’re not going anywhere,” Gavin chided.
Ridley hated that this was making some sense. “How do you know these things?”
Gavin laughed into the phone. The sound almost made Ridley’s ears ache.
“Well, I’m glad you asked. Therapy is this amazing thing I’ve discovered. But my most foolproof relationship method has always been to think to myself, ‘WWAD? What Would Aronsen Do?’ And then I do it.”
Ridley rolled his eyes.
“So, the question is, where’s that impetuous young man gone to?” Gavin concluded.
The very idea that this joker was talking sense took Ridley’s breath away. But impulsive moves were his parents’ thing, not his. They were antithetical to Ridley’s very fiber. To all the ways in which he tried to live his life.
No. His job, Bea’s schooling. Their home, their lives. All of those things were in the UK.
“There are too many things up in the air right now for me to do anything as rash as what is being hinted.” Ridley didn’t even realize he’d said that aloud until he heard Gavin’s next words.
“The operative words I hear are right and now. ”
Ridley took a deep breath and held it, trying to locate and then listen to the tiny voice in him that he’d long ago shoved down deep and locked away. What did it say?
Go get her.
“Aronsen?”
“Dad? You there?”
“O-kay,” he said to his apparent coconspirators after long minutes of quiet. “Gavin, I think you and I might need to have a little talk.”
Bea screeched on the phone.
“Calm down. Don’t get excited...yet.”
“Too late!” Bea giggled.
“Whenever you want, of course,” Gavin said. “I’ll happily put you on my calendar.”
Ridley rolled his eyes skyward. Thyra’d had one helluva strange plan keeping this guy in their lives...but Ridley could finally see that perhaps there was some merit to it.
“Ridley, go get her.”