40. Chapter 40
Chapter 40
Riley
I checked my phone every chance I could throughout the day at work. There were never any new notifications from him. I knew he was doing what I asked him to do, but I missed him so much. We hadn’t gone this long with talking since he came back into my life in August.
I’m doing the right thing for me , I kept telling myself.
I typed and deleted several messages as the day went on. I wanted to tell him that I loved him. I needed to know he was okay. I needed to fix this.
Nothing I had done was wrong. I had made the decisions that I needed to in order to protect myself, to give myself time to trust him. I knew that. He knew that. I still should have reacted differently last night. I could have handled myself better and still stuck to my boundaries. That was the thing I regretted.
“Thank you so much for watching him,” Jenna said as she watched her son run toward my kitchen. She reached for her purse and started to stand from the couch.
“You know I love hanging out with him.” I watched as Aaron turned the apron I’d laid out for him around in his hands. “Can I ask you a question?”
She settled back onto the couch. “Of course.” Concern washed over her face reminding me that we had never really been close.
“How did you know Milo was the one?”
Her eyes sparkled, and her mouth lifted in a soft smile. “How much has Milo told you about us?” She brushed a strand of blonde hair out of her face and adjusted her knit beanie to keep it back.
“Not much really. He called me one day not long after you two met to tell me about this amazing woman he had met and that you had a kid. He wanted to do whatever it would take to win you over.”
Jenna laughed and twisted her wedding band. “Yeah, I think he was all in from day one.”
“But you weren’t?”
She shook her head and looked in the kitchen where Aaron sat at the table digging through the box of cookie cutters. “My ex-husband and I got married straight out of high school. We were too young and neither of us knew how to have a healthy relationship. We tried for years to make it work. We thought having a kid would fix all our problems but not long after I found out I was pregnant things just went from bad to worse. He wasn’t a bad guy; we just weren’t right together.” She kept her eyes fixed on her son the whole time she spoke, her love for him written all over her face.
I reached over and squeezed her hand.
“We finally decided we would be happier divorced when Aaron was just a few months old. Back then it felt my whole world was falling apart, but now I’m glad we had enough clarity to call it quits. I couldn’t imagine having my baby grow up in that toxic environment.” Her voice shook. “After a year of living in my childhood bedroom trying to get back on my feet, my parents decided to convert their basement into an apartment for us. My brother owns a construction company, so my parents asked him to help with the remodel.”
“Milo works for your brother,” I said. I knew that part.
She nodded. “Any time he was at the house we would always end up talking. I don’t remember how it happened but sometimes he would be the only one there working, and I would find myself helping. Being around him felt easy. I was the single mom of a toddler, and I was so focused on raising him I forgot how to be myself. Being around your brother reminded me that I was more than just a mom.”
“Were you scared?” I asked.
“I was terrified. I had already made a mistake with who I chose to have a child with. Even though everything with Milo felt so easy, and he was great with Aaron, I was so scared to let him fully into our lives. What if I made a mistake in choosing him and I put Aaron and I back into another toxic situation?” She squeezed my hand. “Once the renovation was done Milo just kept showing up for me. He let me have my space, but he was always there showing me love any way I would let him.”
She took a shaky breath and focused on Aaron. “For Aaron’s third birthday my parents went all out. They rented one of those blow-up bounce houses. Technically Aaron was a little young to even be in one of those, but we made sure he was only in there by himself, and I was right there watching. He had been to other birthday parties for kids in my family before and was always upset that he was too little to jump with them. He was in the bounce house when he saw my parents bringing out his cake. I was sitting at the entrance and opened the flap to let him out thinking he would go straight for my arms. He got so excited he jumped straight out, flying past me and landing on the ground.”
“He broke his arm,” I said, remembering not long after that Milo brought Jenna and Aaron to my parents’ house for a cookout for the first time. Aaron’s little arm had been in a rainbow cast.
“Milo scooped him right up and took us to the hospital. I was panicking the whole time and felt like such a horrible mom, but he stayed calm and took care of us. Seeing him step so easily into a father role in that emergency made me realize how much he was a perfect fit for our little family.”
“Were you still scared?” I asked.
She laughed. “Oh yeah, but I was more scared of missing my chance.” She stood and went over to Aaron, wrapping her arms around him and planting a kiss on the top of his wild hair. “Riley, is there someone….” Her words trailed off.
I nodded and joined her and Aaron. He stayed focused on picking the best cookie cutters.
“I know I haven’t been part of the family for long, so I haven’t been around for all your past relationships, but Milo has told me about them. Whoever this new someone is, I can tell that they make you happy.” She ran her fingers through her son’s hair trying to smooth it out.
I thought back to the one time I had brought my ex around the family after Jenna joined us. It hadn’t been long before we broke up. Looking back, I could see he had been trying to distance himself from me and I had been on edge waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“I really think he’s different,” I said. “But I always think that.” I shrugged and picked Aaron’s apron up from where he had dropped it on the floor. “I’m scared I’m wrong about him like I’ve been wrong about all the others.”
Jenna opened her arms to me and motioned for me to step closer. “I think you should give him a chance. Even if you turn out to be wrong about him, at least then you’ll know. You can’t let a hypothetical heartbreak keep you from a chance of happiness.” She wrapped her arms around me and squeezed tight.
“My therapist told me the same thing,” I said into her shoulder.
“Then maybe you should listen to us.”
“All the others always seemed like they were more worried about how I could make them happy,” I said as I squeezed her back.
“What about him?”
Matt was always happiest when he was making the others around him happy. He loved everyone and everything around him with boundless energy. He wore his heart on his sleeve from the moment we first met, never leaving room for doubt. “He cares more about making me happy.” I sniffled as I felt tears start to burn my eyes. He didn’t just care about making me happy. He has gone out of his way to ensure I felt safe, felt seen every step of our relationship. Matt had been loving me in a way that was so soft it made falling for him not feel like falling at all. More importantly, this whole time he hadn’t been just showing me how he felt, he had been showing me that I deserved his love even when I struggled to reciprocate. “He makes me feel like I deserve to be happy.”
***
Aaron and I finished rolling out the sugar cookie dough and were picking out cookie cutters when the front door slammed open. I jumped, the cookie cutter in my hand clattering onto the table. Aaron looked up at me with wide eyes, freezing with a snowflake in one hand and a snowman in the other.
“Where’s my favorite nephew?” Emery called from the doorway. Aaron relaxed as a smile brightened his face. Emery draped her jacket over the arm of the couch, ignoring the coat rack right behind her. “I know you two aren’t making cookies without me.” She tiptoed up behind his chair, catching him by surprise and tickling his ribs. “Did you forget to invite me, buddy?” Aaron giggled as he twisted in her grip.
“I thought you had plans,” I said. I pressed a round cutter into the dough, focusing all my attention on twisting it for a clean cut and avoiding Emery’s eyes. She had been home less and less this month, always refusing to tell me where she was going. The tension between us had been growing exponentially. I felt like I barely knew her anymore. Last night’s argument between us may have been over her constant meddling, but there was something underlying we hadn’t touched yet.
“Being here with the two of you was more important.” The corners of her mouth twitched. She pushed up the sleeves of her sweater on her way to the pantry to pull out an apron. Her fingers stumbled over the ties.
“You don’t have to be here if you don’t want to.” I struggled to keep my voice low and smooth, not wanting to fight in front of Aaron. I looked back to where he knelt in the chair next to me. He pressing the snowman shape into the dough, not paying attention to us.
“I know I messed up, Riley. I’m sorry and I won’t do it again. Will you forgive me already?”
I shifted my attention to helping Aaron transfer the snowman to the baking sheet. “I want to decorate it,” he said, trying to grab it from me. His tongue wiggled the loose front tooth that looked like it was barely hanging on.
“We have to bake it first,” I reminded him. He nodded and then started cutting out another cookie. “Why won’t you tell me what you’ve been up to?” I asked Emery as she moved to his other side.
She spun a Christmas tree cutter around her fingers. “I don’t want to jinx it,” she answered after a long pause. A frustrated huff escaped me before I could remind myself to be calm. She always expected me to tell her everything but couldn’t return the favor. I could keep prodding until she told me something, or until she got mad enough to leave. That had never been something I could do, even when just once I wanted to give her a taste of her own medicine.
“I can watch Aaron if you want to go see Matt.” She looked at me over his head, blinking at me like she was doing me a favor.
My heart raced and Matt’s tear covered face filled my mind. My body tingled with a craving for his touch. It hadn’t even been twenty-four hours since he left after our fight, yet it felt like forever. A whole day of not talking to him, not seeing him, not feeling him. I missed him so badly it hurt.
Could I just show up after telling him I needed space? The space was for both of us, to give us both time to think about everything we had said. I couldn’t just take away the space we both agreed we needed, no matter how much I ached to fix this.
I had to give him the time to change his mind.
Emery went to bed as soon as Milo came by to pick up Aaron. My body buzzed with excess energy. I scrubbed the house clean, wrapped Matt’s Christmas presents, and baked another batch of cookies. At midnight I checked my phone to see a voice message from Matt. It was like he knew I needed to hear his voice.
“Goodnight, sweetheart,” was all he said. No pressure to talk to him, no pressure to not take the space I told him I needed. Just a reminder that he was there and thinking about me.
I loved him. I wanted the first time I told him to be a big deal.
He deserved a big deal.