14. Alex
CHAPTER 14
Alex
“ W ell, that was easier than I thought,” I said, stepping back to study the two baby bouncers I had just assembled. Sam had recommended the brand, raving about how it had changed their lives when Kaycee was born and how everything would’ve been so much easier if they’d known about it when Anderson—a fussy baby—was little. Then, right after the recommendation, he rolled his eyes and told me not to get my hopes up.
But I couldn’t help myself.
The news of the twins had hit me like ice-cold water, leaving me momentarily speechless, until Sophie had snapped me back to reality with her wide, fearful eyes. As the shock settled like a dust cloud after a storm, I found myself excited, intrigued, and eager to see the two little copies of us. Even if it meant moving to St. Helena and buying a house next to Sophie's. Even if it meant arranging weekend visits, school pick-ups and drop-offs, Thanksgiving, and alternating
Christmas every year.
I was prepared to do anything to be in their lives. To be a father.
Or maybe it didn’t even have to be that complicated.
Maybe Sophie and I can —
I stopped that thought before it matured in my head, and rose to my feet at the same time my phone rang. “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” from The Wizard of Oz —a joke from Sam that I hadn’t bothered to change back—played loudly out of the speaker.
"Vicki," I huffed when I answered, feeling unnecessarily impatient. "I really don't want the walnut set. How clear can I make myself? Tell your dad he can gift it to your brother." "Alex, love, why are you so angry?” she said, her voice sloppy, her words dragged out. Vicki was drunk. Probably on that nice bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon I kept forgetting to take out of the custom-made wine rack in the kitchen.
Music played in the background, and I knew what was coming. This wasn’t the first time Vicki had called on a Friday evening since our breakup, and I knew it wouldn’t be the last. Whenever she drank, that steely armor melted away and she became the soft, gooey, happy version of herself. A rarity, but I wasn’t dumb enough to fall for it again.
“Come over, Alex. Just for the night.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“You know you want to, Alex . . . I miss you.”
“No, you don’t,” I said, taking a deep breath in and releasing it. “I’m going to put the phone down, alright? Go drink some water.”
“I’ll be waiting,” she said and hung up first.
The last thing I wanted to do was pay Vicki a visit. Still, I headed to the front door, grabbed my car keys and wallet along the way, and walked out into the crisp evening air.
It was forty minutes later when I drove into St. Helena and reached a single-story house with a stucco exterior, a pitched roof with red clay tiles, and a large California sycamore leaning over the driveway. Next to the front steps, bushes of lavender swayed gently in the evening breeze, and a welcome mat on the top step declared, Please leave by nine .
I remembered that from the last time I had showed up uninvited.
Parking on the curb this time, I stepped out of my car and crossed my fingers, hoping Sophie was home and not out with friends. I should’ve called first, especially since I’d decided to head to her place the moment I’d turned on the ignition—Sophie was the only person I wanted to see.
When I got to the front door, I rang the bell.
Footsteps padded in the distance, then the door swung open, revealing a barefoot Sophie in shorts and an oversized Guns N’ Roses T-shirt, which hung loosely over her shoulders.
“Alex, what are you doing here?” she said, running her fingers through her messy hair, making it worse, while her eyes were wide as they glanced over my shoulder to my car.
“I know. I’m sorry for just showing up like this, but I was in the neighborhood.”
A flicker of surprise crossed her face, followed by a skeptical rise of her eyebrows.
“Really? All the way from Santa Rosa?”
I nodded, fluttering my eyelashes as innocently as possible. “Feel free to kick me out.”
She reached for both sides of the doorway and I thought she might actually do it. But then she stepped out of the way. “Well, considering you’re not actually in my house, I can’t exactly kick you out. So come in, and I’ll decide if I want you to stay or not.”
“Fair enough. I’ll just take a seat and make myself comfortable,” I said, crossing the living room and settling down on the couch. If she wanted to kick me out, she’d have to lift me up herself.
Sophie stepped into the room and folded her arms over her chest. Her eyes were sharp, her full lips pressed thin. “You know this isn’t exactly how I wanted to spend my Friday evening.”
I noticed the cup of tea resting on the coffee table, steam wafting off its surface, and a set of AirPods beside it, resting on a book about meditation. Coupled with the scent of sandalwood incense in the air, it would make sense that I had interrupted something. “Would you rather I left so that you can get back to your meditation?”
Sophie seemed surprised by my observation, but she said nothing and instead took up a seat beside me, keeping at least two feet between us.
“Is it helping?” I asked when the few seconds of silence felt unbearable. It wasn’t so much the silence, but the way Sophie was staring at me made my skin feel as hot as the sun—it was as if she was studying me like one of her patients, working out the kinks, figuring out which parts she could trigger for the better.
“What?” she asked, bringing her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms around them. She leaned her chin on her right kneecap.
“The meditation?” I replied.
A light flickered in her eyes. She shook her head. “Not at all. I feel no more relaxed than when I started. If anything, I feel tenser than before, like one of those wind-up toys you played with as a kid that just keeps spinning in circles.”
“I don’t have the patience for it either.”
“Most orthopedic surgeons don’t,” she said, so dead seriously, it could’ve been a fact.
“What do you mean by that?”
“It’s just not in your character.” She shrugged. “You’re all so busy playing god, thinking you’re better than everyone else, that you won’t ever sit down and reflect on your inner self.”
A very untrue assumption, but I wasn’t going to correct her, not while I was still on probation. One wrong word and she could show me the door.
“So, you know my type well then.”
“I may have dated an orthopod fresh out of college,” she admitted, her cheeks flushing pink. She broke her gaze free from mine and rested it instead on her knees.
“Oh, do tell,” I joked. Past relationships were a dead no on any sort of date, but our circumstances were different. And this wasn’t a date.
She laughed, her head tilting back as her eyes pinched shut. That was the first time I truly noticed that Sophie’s eyes closed whenever she laughed.
When she gathered herself again, she said, “Let’s just say he had very little patience for anything and got bored quickly. We could be sitting on a picnic blanket in the park with this amazing platter I made, staring up at the Milky Way, and he’d suddenly shoot up and announce he wanted to go for a drive.”
“Picnics under the moonlight?” I asked, raising both brows.
She shrugged. “I’m a simple girl.”
“I doubt that.”
“It’s true.” She grinned. “I like flowers and picnics and massages and sometimes, if someone really tried, they could convince me to go for a hike up the mountain.” “Well, don’t worry, I won’t be trying to convince you to hike anywhere.”
She laughed again. Eyes closed. Shoulders shaking.
“So, you really don’t like the mountains?” she asked. “That thing you said at dinner that night at the seminar is true?”
“As true as the sunrise.”
“How can you not like hiking when you grew up in the most outdoorsy state? Colorado is literally synonymous with mountains.”
“Call it a genetic defect then,” I said, getting more comfortable on the couch. “My mom took me camping a lot when I was a kid. I might’ve enjoyed it back then, but somewhere along the way, the whole routine—setting up the tent, making a fire, digging a cat hole—just lost its charm.” I left out the part about how my mother’s death right after high school had dulled a lot of things for me, camping included.
“We should go camping,” she declared.
“Have you been listening to anything I’ve been saying?” I feigned a gasp and couldn’t stop smiling when she broke out in laughter.
When she stopped, taking a settling breath in, she unfolded her legs and stretched them out. Her ankle brushed against my knee. And then she quickly pulled it back, but not before the contact left a warm spot on my skin.
Sophie noticed it too.
Her smile faded almost instantly, and all the casualness of the conversation disappeared.
She shot up off the couch and basically ran to the kitchen, as if that brief touch had affected her as much as it had affected me. “Can I get you something to drink? Wine? Tea?” she asked.
“Tea,” I replied, standing up and heading to the kitchen. I rounded the island and leaned against the marble countertop.
Despite the obvious tension, like thick mist clinging to the air and seeping into every corner of the room, I wanted to be closer to Sophie.
Her movements were brisk and tense as she reached for a cup and brought the kettle to a boil. Only after she had fetched a tea bag and dropped it into the cup did she turn to face me.
“We should probably talk about how we’re going to tell Vicki.”
“How well do you know her?” I asked, folding my arms over my chest, enjoying the pressure of the countertop against my lower back, which thankfully was about ninety percent healed.
“Don’t you think if I knew her, I would’ve known about you , recognized your face at the seminar? Known that you two were engaged?”
“Right,” I muttered.
“She doesn’t share easily,” said Sophie, looking almost resentful. “I don’t think we’ve had one personal conversation in the three years I’ve been working there. And if we did, it was always about me.”
“Vicki keeps herself tightly locked up. You kind of have to pry her heart open with a crowbar,” I said, hoping humor would help the situation.
But it did the opposite.
Sophie looked worried. “Well, what do you think she’ll say when she finds out?”
I closed my eyes and pondered it for a minute, picturing Vicki with her big eyes narrowed into slits, her fists clenched, her chest heaving as she struggled to catch her breath. It was the same look she’d had after our last fight.
When I opened my eyes again, Sophie was standing next to me, back pressed against the marble, looking up at me with those lovely gray eyes. The four brown specks were unnoticeable in the dim light.
“I think she’ll break in half,” I said truthfully.
As strong as Vicki was, she still had a fragile center she kept from everyone, including me. It would kill her to know that I’d slept with someone else so soon after our breakup and gotten the one thing I always wanted—children.
“Do you think you and Vicki would’ve had kids if the time came? I mean, in a few years, after you were married or whatever.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. That was the one thing I was entirely certain about— Vicki had made it crystal clear. “She doesn’t want kids. Never did. She just didn’t bother to tell me until it was too late.”
“Oh.” Sophie looked surprised. As if it went against everything she had ever known or believed. Her jaw was slack, her gray eyes wide, and her pupils dilated. “I’m sorry.”
She did look sorry. But there was something else there. An attraction. A deep want burning in her irises. She kept stealing glances at my lips, then gazing down to my chest and flicking her eyes back up. Everything about the way she was standing, arms hanging at her sides, shoulders straight and back, body tilting toward mine, told me that she wanted the same as me.
Closeness.
The worst I could do was read the room wrong and be kicked out before I did the one thing I desperately wanted to do—kiss Sophie.
“Don’t be,” I said, stepping into Sophie’s space, arms out on either side of her while I gripped the countertop, boxing her in. “Everything happens for a reason, doesn’t it?”
Her gaze latched tightly onto mine, searching deep, far deeper than I wanted her to. If she dove into my soul, she’d see how much I wanted to make this work—not just the family thing, but our thing too.
Me and Sophie and our twin babies. A fever dream perhaps.
Sophie didn’t push me away, or mention this was a mistake. Instead, her hands went to my waist, her fingers curling around the fabric of my shirt. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what?” I asked, my voice soft as I moved a hand up to her cheek and slid it to the back of her neck, pulling her just a few inches closer.
Her fingers let go of my shirt, and she moved her palms over my lower back, their heat spreading like hot liquid over my skin.
“I’m sorry about your mother, your lost passion for camping. I feel bad that we hooked up and now have to deal with Vick’s feelings. I’m sorry that I got you into this sticky situation.” she chuckled softly, her chin tilted up and her eyes still on mine.
“You don’t have to be sorry, alright? For anything. ” I said and leaned in, closing the gap between our mouths.