CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Alex
Then
I used to imagine how it would end. Riley’s interest fading by degrees until one day I’d come home to a note left somewhere I couldn’t miss it.
A few lines explaining that things had changed, that he was sorry, that it had been fun while it lasted but the time had come for him to move on.
I was twenty and still writing endings early.
Hard habit, when people leave before dessert.
I’d keep the note. Frame it, maybe, or put it in a box with everything else I’d saved. I’d take it out on the nights I was tempted to call him. It would do its job, and I’d go on being the kind of woman nobody stayed for.
I was weeks from the end of my sophomore year.
That day still hadn’t come. Nearly two years in, every kiss still felt like the first one.
We ate Sunday dinner with his parents like it was ours by right.
The men in the club treated me like family, which is to say they teased me and worried over me in roughly equal measure.
The sex was, if anything, better than it had ever been.
The blinds were half-drawn and my nutrition book was open on the floor.
He took his time with his mouth first, the way he did when he wanted me to stop thinking. I let him continue, praying it wouldn’t end. I came once against his hand before he even got his jeans off.
He found it funny.
I found it inconvenient.
Before I had my wits about me, he was inside me and the joke went away.
He moved like he always moved when it mattered. Careful, then certain. I locked my ankles at his back and said his name against his neck and felt the same stupid clarity I had felt in a church parking lot, only different.
This time I knew the shape of him like I knew my own name.
We made a mess of my textbooks. I tripped on his boot. We were everywhere. Someone’s bass leaked through the floor. He finished with me against the wall and his face in my hair.
We slumped to the floor and stayed there until our sweat cooled and the textbooks on the floor started to look like a dare.
I hadn’t known my life could hold that much. Between Riley’s family and the club, I had many people who loved me. They said it out loud, regularly. More than I’d had in the first eighteen years combined.
Believing it still scared me.
I did it anyway.
I was flat on my back, too spent to do more than stare at the ceiling. “You going, or am I?”
He lifted his hand from where it rested on my hip. “I’ll go.”
“I can.”
“No.” He put his hands on either side of my face and kissed me. “I’ll go.”
It had become a ritual.
One of us making the trip down to the soda machine for root beer, the two of us drinking it in bed until we fell asleep or found the energy to do something else. Sleep usually won.
“Thank you,” I said, without moving.
He came back a few minutes later in cutoff shorts and boots, shirtless, and handed me a cold bottle with a look that said he knew exactly what he was doing to me.
He’d started working out three days a week as a New Year’s resolution. It had done its work. Dressed, he looked like himself. Without the shirt, he looked like a different, more dangerous version of the same man. The kind of dangerous that made me want to put my hands on him immediately.
“You should wear a shirt downstairs, Mister,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because you’re too good-looking to be wandering the halls half-dressed. I don’t need to fight one of my neighbors over you.”
“If someone came on to me, I’d shut it down.”
I’d watched him do it. A kiss, an arm around my shoulder, a hand finding my waist the second another woman looked at him a bit too long. He never said a word about it. He didn’t have to.
He read the label on his bottle and shook his head. “I still can’t believe you’ve got me drinking root beer.”
“I still can’t believe you’ve got me in a leather vest on the back of a Harley.”
He sat up. “You’re a born biker.”
“I am,” I agreed. “You didn’t have to twist my arm to get me on that thing, did you?”
“You didn’t have a choice. You were down to your last sip of water.”
“I had plenty of choices,” I said. “I came with you because I wanted to.”
“I saw your water bottle. You’d have been dead by sundown.” He finished his root beer in two swallows. “I still can’t believe we kissed on that rock.”
“What do you mean?”
“I hadn’t kissed anyone but my mother since high school. Then you show up, and every rule I had went out the window. Who does that? Kisses a stranger the day they meet her?”
“That kiss rearranged something in me,” I said. “For the record.”
“Same.” He set the bottle on the nightstand. “I figured I’d be single forever. Then there you were. Stranded.”
“I broke down in the desert and it turned into the best day of my life.”
He went quiet for a second, somewhere back on that rock. Then he looked at me. “You remember when I asked you what your dreams were?”
“Up there?”
“Yeah.”
I’d never forgotten it. “I remember.”
He moved closer. “What’s changed?”
“With what?”
“Your dreams. You’re two years from graduating, two years smarter. Same dreams, or different ones?”
I hadn’t thought about it in those terms, so I didn’t have an answer ready. When I met Riley I’d been chasing whatever adrenaline would make the day feel like it mattered. I hadn’t been unhappy, exactly. I hadn’t been much of anything.
Now I had everything I needed. The one thing still missing was the same thing that had always been missing. Some version of my parents that actually wanted to be in my life. I knew better than to expect it.
I let myself want it anyway.
“Same as last time you asked,” I said. “A normal life with my parents. It wouldn’t even have to be normal. Different would be enough.”
“They’ll come to your graduation, won’t they?”
“Sure.”
I regretted it the moment it left my mouth. They hadn’t come to my high school graduation. I’d told them about Riley in every message I sent home, and they still hadn’t met him. There was no version of the truth where they showed up for this one either.
“They probably won’t,” I admitted. “If I’m honest.”
He rubbed my shoulder. “I’m sorry. I wish I could do something about it.”
“I’ve got you. The guys. Your family. My friends at school.” I took a drink of root beer. “The only thing missing is a family of my own, someday. If I can’t have one with my parents, maybe I get to build one instead.”
I hadn’t planned to say it. Once it was out, I half expected him to go quiet the way men were supposed to when a woman brought up the future too soon. I made a mental note, too late, to think before I spoke.
“How many kids, in a perfect world?” he asked.
He said it like it was nothing, like the idea didn’t scare him at all, and something in my chest loosened. “I don’t know. One of each. I really don’t care, as long as they’re healthy.” I handed him what was left of my soda. “What about you?”
“I’ve always wanted a boy.” He looked at the ceiling. “But I like the idea of a girl too. Someone to stand on the porch with a shotgun for.”
“You wouldn’t need the shotgun. They’d see the Harley parked out front and turn right back around.”
“It’s fun to think about,” he said. “One of each. That’d be perfect.”
It was fun. More than I would have guessed, given how carefully I’d avoided the subject with anyone else.
“I’d want to be hands-on,” I said. “Not that we couldn’t have help. But I’d want to be there. Always.”
“I’d do it the way my dad did it with me. Teach him baseball. How to ride a skateboard. Build a motorcycle with him in the garage, piece by piece. Some of my best memories are just me and my old man, working on something.”
I didn’t have those memories with my own parents. I had them with Martina, though, in a smaller way. Only fourteen years separated us. She’d started out feeling like an authority figure and ended up feeling like an older sister.
“Martina came into my life when I was four or five,” I said. “I used to think of her as in charge of me. Then I got older and realized she was barely older than me herself. By high school she felt more like a sister.”
“We’ll have help too, probably. But we’ll be there. I’m not handing my kids off to be raised by somebody else. We’ll do it together.”
The we did something to me every time he used it instead of I. “We can take them out in the Jeep. Desert trips.”
He groaned. “You and that Jeep.”
“Our kids are going to love that Jeep. Wait and see.”
“Our kids.”
“Yes,” I said. “Ours.”
He held out his fist, pinkie extended. “Pinkie promise.”
He could be terrifying to strangers and ridiculous with me in the same ten seconds. I loved both versions of him equally.
“Promise what?”
“If we’re lucky enough to have a family, we put them first. Before everything else.”
It cost me nothing to agree. Whatever else our children might inherit from either of us, an absent parent wasn’t going to be one of the things.
I hooked my pinkie around his and kissed him. “Promise.”