Chapter 16
CARSON
This bash is wild. So much family. Kids running and screaming. Parents trying to control them. Back inside the pavilion, Ayla has quiet activities arranged and the kids make slime out of glitter glue and borax, and bouncy moon rocks. Some folks disappear to do their own thing.
I help Ayla whenever I can. Nobody else is. I don’t think her family is that callous; I just think they’re used to her taking charge.
I’m helping clean up the glitter slime when her cousin Emilio approaches us.
“Hey, Carson,” he says, extending a hand to shake.
I eye him. I don’t know him well, but he appears to be well lubricated. “Hi, Emilio. Good to see you.”
“I’m kinda confused.” His forehead pinches between his brows. “I thought I heard you two were divorced.”
Ayla and I freeze.
Ayla recovers. “What?” She laughs. “Why would you think that?”
Emilio shakes his head, wobbles, and sets a steadying hand on the table. “It wush a while back. I thought someone said shomething. Can’t remember who.”
“Weird.” Ayla grins. I see the tightness at the corners of her mouth and eyes.
Emilio shrugs, too wasted to care much. “Well, it’s good to see you, man,” he says to me. “I think the lasht time the whole family was together like this was at your wedding.”
“That’s true,” Ayla says with a laugh.
Our wedding was big and boisterous and fun, with all her family, all my friends and teammates, and my family of course, although they were outnumbered.
Ayla was so beautiful, like a sexy princess in layers of white, her shoulders bare, her blonde hair glowing beneath a veil like a halo.
She looked like an angel. I’ve always thought she looks like an angel, from the first time I saw her at Uncle Ernie’s, behind the bar, the lights making her blonde hair glow.
“That’s my slime!” A boy about five years old shouts at another boy who’s maybe three, distracting me from my memories. I think they might be Emilio’s kids. I remember Ayla talking about what terrors they are.
“Mine!” He grabs the slime back.
The five-year-old punches him.
“Knox!” Emilio tries to intervene. “Stop that. You can’t hit your brother.”
“He took my slime! I made blue slime. His was pink.”
“No!” The three-year-old’s face is red. He shoves his brother. “Mine is blue!”
Ayla is wide-eyed and blinking. “Tripp, we can make more blue slime if you want.”
Just as we’re trying to clean up.
Tripp sulks. “I want that!”
Knox shoves the slime in his brother’s face.
My jaw drops.
The boys are swinging at each other and Emilio tries to wrestle them apart. “Okay, boys. Come on. Who wants to go in the pool?”
“I do!” Tripp yells.
“Well, you can’t go in the pool if you’re fighting. Where the hell is Lyla?” Emilio looks around for his wife. Apparently, she’s not here.
“Mommy is talking to Aunt Hannah and Aunt Ashley,” Knox says.
Emilio nods with a resigned expression. “Well, let’s go see if she wants to go in the pool, too. But you have to behave.”
He leads the kids away.
Ayla and I look at each other. She bites her lip, trying not to smile. “Well. Good luck to them.”
“Remind me not to go the pool.”
“Oh come on. You love kids.”
“Apparently, not all kids.”
“It’s different when it’s your own.”
Which we never had a chance to learn about.
Holding that baby earlier was shockingly disturbing.
I kind of had a hard time when one of my teammates had a baby about six or seven months after Kane died.
I didn’t want to see the baby at all at first, but then I decided I should do it to get past it.
It wasn’t that bad. But today… I don’t know why, maybe because Marco is almost the exact age Kane was.
Now here’s another reminder of our lost child. We’ll never know what a hellion Kane might have been.
“Okay, well the slime was a success.” I pick up a trash bag full of empty glue bottles. “I’ll get rid of this.”
“Thanks.”
Ayla goes over to the games corner she set up.
Some of the older relatives—Nonna, Uncle Ernie and Angie, Ayla’s other great-aunt and her “kids” who are in their fifties, Vince and Melissa, and a few others I don’t know—are happily playing card games.
I watch her check in with her nonna and the others, smiling, laughing at something someone says.
She goes over to the beverage station that’s been set up against one wall and gets more tea for Nonna.
Then she moves over to the genealogy table where a few folks are looking over the items and sharing stories. I join her there to listen to some of the memories for a few minutes.
As we move away from the group, I say, “We nearly got busted by Emilio.”
“Oh my God. Yes! What the hell! He probably did hear we got divorced.”
“I think he was too trashed to think much about it.”
She makes a face. “He was a little lit.”
“I still don’t understand how you think people don’t know.”
“We’re a big family. Some of them live far away.”
It seems crazy to me, but it’s not my family anymore.
That evening, after the organized festivities, including a trivia competition won by Elisa and Bria, we end up with a party in our cottage.
I’m not sure how this came about. I think Ayla offhandedly invited cousins to come by and they all show up.
Luckily, they bring their own drinks because we did not prepare for this.
One good thing is it shows everyone Ayla and I are definitely sharing a bed so if anyone else thought they heard we were divorced, this should end that.
They spend the evening reminiscing and laughing.
It’s fun seeing Ayla with her people, how relaxed she is and how loveable she is.
She talks to everyone, asking interested questions about their lives, listening intently to their responses.
She doesn’t say much about herself. That’s always been her way.
Eventually, our guests call it a night, Rachel the last one to leave. She keeps making weird faces at Ayla and Ayla frowns at her and I have no idea what’s going on. “Is there something you want to say, Rach?” I finally ask.
She swivels her head around to face me. “Uh. No. Why? Well. Maybe—”
“No, there isn’t,” Ayla interjects. “Time to go, Rach. See you in the morning. You’re still going to help decorate, right?” As she talks, she nudges Rachel toward the door.
“Of course I’m going to help.” At the door, she pauses and whispers to Ayla, which I can’t hear.
“I’m fine,” Ayla says, pushing her cousin out onto the veranda. “Night!” She closes the door.
“What was that about?”
“Nothing. She’s just… nothing.”
I lift a skeptical eyebrow, but busy myself putting glasses into the dishwasher and bottles into the recycling bin. “Okay.”
Ayla disappears into the bathroom with her pajamas. I finish cleaning up by the time she returns, make-up washed from her face, making her look vulnerable, wearing those sexy pants and top. “Tonight, I’m taking the couch,” she says firmly.
I want to argue with her. But after waking up with her ass all snuggled into my erection, maybe it is better to sleep separately.
My dick remains unconvinced.
I turn out the lights, use the bathroom, and pause beside the couch in my boxer briefs. Ayla is burrowed into a blanket. Maybe asleep?
She should have the bed.
“Hey,” I whisper. “You awake?”
Nothing.
Okay. Too late. I climb into bed, turn off the lamp and lay on my back. I close my eyes, but I’m stubbornly wide awake.
“Do you think you’ll ever have more kids?”
My eyes fly open. “You are awake.”
“Yeah.” A soft sigh wafts over the bed. “Sorry. Never mind.”
“It’s okay.” I pause. “I don’t know about having more kids.”
“Same.”
“Are you afraid?”
“Yes. But also… eh. I don’t know. Are you afraid?”
I think before replying. “No. But I don’t deserve kids.”
Her head lifts in the shadowy room and I can feel her frown. “What do you mean?”
I shouldn’t have said that. “Come here.”
She hesitates, then rolls off the couch and joins me on the bed, wrapped in her blanket. With her head on the pillow facing me, I roll to my side, too. I can make out her big, shadowy eyes and plump lips. I set my hand on her hip.
“When my dad died, my mom told me I had to be ‘the man of the house’. I think she was trying to give me a reason to be strong. But I took it seriously. I was going to look after her and my sisters.”
She nods.
“I probably took it a little too seriously. I did everything I could to protect my sisters. Which caused some, uh, friction between us.”
“They have alluded to you being bossy.”
I huff a small laugh. “Yeah. I tried to control them a lot. How late they stayed out, who they went out with, what classes they took at school, how much they studied.”
She knows some of this, of course. But not all.
“Lenny was only two years younger than me. It really pissed her off. We had a huge blow up one night because I embarrassed her in front of her friends. She actually left home.”
“What do you mean? She ran away?”
“Yeah. She was fifteen. She packed a bag and took off.”
“Oh my God. I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah. It’s not something I like to talk about. My mom was out of her mind with worry. She was certain Lenny had been abducted, and was probably dead in the woods somewhere.”
Ayla makes a small, distressed noise.
“And I wasn’t much better. I knew it was my fault.
I was unhinged. A bunch of us were out looking for her every day.
The RCMP were looking for her. None of her friends would admit to knowing where she was.
She wasn’t at school. She wasn’t at any of the community shelters.
As the days went on, I was convinced she was dead, too. ”
“Obviously, she wasn’t.” Ayla sets her hand on my upper arm.
“Yeah. Turned out she was staying with a friend. She’d hidden her in the basement, and even the parents didn’t know. But when the RCMP came to question them a second time, Rory broke down because she was afraid she was going to go to jail.”
Ayla lets out a long exhalation.
“It was a whole big thing in town. Everyone knew about it. I… well, keep in mind I was only seventeen.”
Her hand squeezes my arm gently. “Too young to be a parent.”
“I didn’t handle it very well. I was so pissed at Lenny. Even though I’d been sick with worry for her.”
“That’s why you were so pissed,” Ayla says quietly. “Because you were worried. You loved her.”
“Yeah. That’s… yeah. We had another fight. She didn’t run away again, but for years, our relationship was strained. She started acting out in lots of ways. Smaller ways, but still… her goal was to push back. To piss me off. And it worked.”
“I always thought you and Lenny were kind of distant with each other.”
“Yeah. I hate it. But I deserve it. I was supposed to protect her and I totally failed at it. And then… I was supposed to protect Kane. And you. And I failed at that, too.”
She’s quiet, her eyes shiny as she studies my face. “What happened wasn’t your fault, Carson.” She touches my cheek with her fingertips. “I told you that.”
“I didn’t cause the accident.”
The car accident that had killed our son happened when we were on our way home from visiting Ayla’s parents.
Road conditions were fine, I hadn’t been drinking at all, I was doing the speed limit, and some fuckwad blew a stop sign and T-boned our car.
I had a broken arm. Kane was killed. Ayla was bruised and shook up but mentally, she was wounded in a way that was even more terrible and scary.
“But still, I was supposed to protect you both. Even after the accident. And I couldn’t. So… that’s why I don’t deserve to have more kids.”
We’re both silent in the dark cottage. Ayla’s breathing is uneven. Then she shifts closer to me, pushing the blanket away, wraps her arm around my neck, and presses her face to my chest. “Carson.”
My arms go around her without thought, without pause. I squeeze her to me, my throat aching.
She pets my hair, my shoulder, kisses my bare chest. There’s no one in the world whose comfort means more to me than hers. Even though I don’t deserve it.
We both take shuddering breaths. I press my mouth to her hair and breathe in her scent.
We cling together for long moments, I don’t even know how long, but as seconds tick by, things change.
Her touch is comforting, yes, but also arousing.
Her body against mine, her tits soft under the cotton shirt, has my cock thickening in need.
I know she feels it too when her leg comes up to my hip and her center meets my hard dick.
The instinct to grind into her there is too powerful to resist and then we’re both pressing our pelvises together and our hands are moving over each other—mine into her hair, one clasping her foot and pushing her leg higher so I can press my hips into her.
She wraps her arms around my neck and tilts her head back. Watching her face, I brush my thumb over her mouth so softly, and she goes still.
Heat rises between us and I can’t stop myself from leaning forward and kissing her.
It’s the best kiss because it’s Ayla’s mouth and she’s kissing me back, opening for me.
She’s still so soft and sweet. Her taste goes straight to my balls.
I lick inside her mouth and she parts her lips for me, and we kiss deeper. Hotter.
God. Her mouth.
My hand leaves her foot to grab one ass cheek and squeeze, pulling her tighter to me. My cock is on fucking fire.
We make out like this, her hands threading through my hair, scratching my back, rubbing together through our clothes. I twist my fingers into her hair and tug without thinking because I know in some intrinsic way how much she loves that.
She gasps against my mouth. My blood is on fire.
I tug her head back and run my tongue down the length of her throat, then suck gently there. So beautiful. She lets out a needy moan, and I return to her mouth for more kisses, sliding my tongue inside again and again.
She pulls back from me to stare into my eyes, her lips parted. “Carson… what are we doing?”