Her All Along

by Cara Dee

  1- Make Avery fall in love with me.

  And she thought she’d failed miserably? Or that she hadn’t even begun?

  The rest of the list was just so Pipsqueak.

  2- Spend the rest of the summer together and make him understand that he has to wait for me.

  3- Move to SF and work my ass off. Fly home as often as possible to remind Avery that I’m worth waiting for.

  4- Move home, open my shop, wait for Avery to propose.

  5- Convince Avery to have a baby with me.

  I scrubbed a hand over my mouth and jaw to hide my amusement, and I had to look away. Fuck me, certain things hadn’t changed. And it made me so goddamn happy. She may be an adult now, but her perspective still came from an innocent point of view. I didn’t want that to go away completely—ever. Because it made the world a brighter place to me.

  “I know it was naïve,” she said stiffly.

  I shook my head and put my arm around her. “Do you even realize how brave you are for being this honest?”

  She flushed and furrowed her brow. “But I don’t need any filters around you. You understand me.”

  “It’s still brave, sweetheart.” I pressed a kiss to her temple and tried to gather my thoughts. I had drawn a million incomplete conclusions, and with her cards on the table, I didn’t want to say the wrong thing and hurt her. “First of all, this made my whole fucking year.” I placed the notepad on my leg. “I’m incredibly humbled by your showing it to me.”

  “Fuck,” she whispered. “There’s gonna be a but. I’m ready for this.”

  “No, no. No.” I smiled into another kiss to her hair. Christ, this girl. “Hear me out, okay?”

  She nodded with a stiff jerk.

  “It’s a complicated situation, but we have time, don’t we?” I murmured. “In a span of just a couple months, I’ve gone from loving you like a family member to craving you like air. And, in the interest of full disclosure, this has been building up for quite a while. I’ve grown more and more attached to you, and in retrospect, it’s been leading up to this—to what I feel now.”

  Was I making a lick of sense? Earlier today, anxiety had seized my chest at the notion of her leaving soon; I’d almost been ready to beg her not to go. But now, this notepad had landed in my lap like the biggest insurance policy I could imagine, and it was allowing me to sit back and think things through properly. At the same time, Ryan wasn’t wrong. Two years was a long time, and most importantly, a long time during a crucial part of Pipsqueak growing up. So much could change.

  “You overlooked something in your plan.” I tapped the notepad with my finger. “While you were trying to figure out how to, as you put it, make me fall in love with you, you started spending your summer with me.”

  She nodded. “I know. I rushed into step two.”

  I grinned faintly. “Baby, that’s where step one happens. But you don’t have to do anything except be yourself, because that’s the young woman I already adore.”

  “Oh.” She pinched her lips together, the picture of concentration.

  Now came the hard part…

  I blew out a breath and winced internally at a stab of discomfort in my chest.

  “You’re going away for two years.” I rubbed her neck gently. “No matter how strict you are with the goals you’ve set, you’ll be in a new city. You’ll meet new people, make new friends. Balancing responsibilities and hobbies is already so difficult for you, hon. Every time you find a new interest, you dedicate yourself to it one hundred percent, and everything else sort of disappears.”

  She could multitask expertly on mindless chores, much better than I could. But as soon as she needed to concentrate, her world shrank to include only her and the problem she faced. There’d been times I’d come home from work to find her cooking, baking, talking on the phone, and painting her toenails all in one jumbled moment. Then, ask her to write a grocery list, and she’d need to sit down in silence so she could focus.

  “You don’t honestly believe I’d forget my home, do you?” Pipsqueak scowled up at me.

  I kissed her forehead. “No. But I think you’ll be too busy and distracted by your new life in California—and if you force anything outside of what you can handle, your studies might suffer.”

  She crumpled in an instant, bottom lip quivering, eyes filling with tears. “But I don’t wanna be without you, Avery.”

  Goddammit. “You don’t have to be, baby.” It felt like my heart crawled up into my throat, making it difficult to swallow. “You don’t have to be.” I cupped her cheek and coaxed her to look me in the eye. “Another thing you got very wrong in your plan—I already know you’re worth waiting for.”

  She whimpered through her tears. “Really?”

  “Come on.” I smirked a little in an attempt to lighten the tension. “It’s you and me. I’m not going anywhere. I may not know exactly what’s going on in my head, but I have a feeling I know where I’ll stand once I’ve let the dust settle.” I removed my arm from her shoulders so I could brush my thumbs under her eyes. She shouldn’t cry. “We both need time, Elise.”

  She sniffled and shook her head. “Time just means you’ll change your mind. I know it.”

  “Uh, first of all, you’re wrong,” I told her. “And I think you need to get to know the man I once was in order to have a little more faith in the man I am today.”

  Remorse struck her gaze, and she clutched one of my hands in both of hers. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make it sound like I don’t have faith in you. I’m just—fuck.” She whimpered again and wiped at her eyes. “I don’t want you to forget me and move on with someone else.”

  Further proof that I had to unlock my sordid past and share some things I’d rather not. But if this was actually happening, if Pipsqueak and I were going to take the plunge into something very new and unfamiliar, I wanted her to know what she was getting herself into.

  “Not gonna happen.” I leaned down and rested our foreheads together. “Can I make a suggestion?”

  “Technically, you can—”

  “May I,” I corrected with a chuckle and a sense of déjà vu. I was fairly certain we’d been here before. Years ago. “Pipsqueak, I want to take you out to dinner. I want us to spend these last couple weeks together. Then you’ll go off to California knowing that I will be here, waiting to give us a shot. And if you, at any time during your years in San Francisco, meet someone—”

  “Nooo, don’t say it like that,” she protested tearfully.

  I withheld my sigh. “I’m serious, Elise. If you meet someone, you tell me. We need to be completely honest with each other.”

  She let out a muffled cry behind her hand, then climbed up on my lap and shook her head. “You’re only saying this because I haven’t made you fall in love with me yet.”

  I smiled and pulled her closer, kinda cursing the fact that she still had leggings under her dress. “It doesn’t matter how I feel for you. You’re already one of the most important people in my life, and I refuse to hold you back. Your life is just starting, Elise. And for this next part, I’m not going to be right beside you. But I will wait, and if your grand plan ends up being a prediction of what’s to come, then…that sounds fucking fantastic to me.”

  She swallowed hard and breathed unsteadily, and instead of saying anything, she locked her arms around my neck and hugged me tightly.

  In some ways, we both had growing up to do. I’d never had a healthy relationship before, and she was so incredibly young.

  “Promise me you’ll focus on your studies, Pipsqueak,” I murmured into her hair. “Give your everything in school and secure your future.”

  “Stop being such a teacher,” she cried.

  It wasn’t the teacher in me who wanted her to achieve her goals.

  My vision blurred as I glanced up at the night sky.

  “Promise me.” I had to clear my throat.

  “Not until you tell me why this feels like a freaking good-bye,” she croaked.
<
br />   It wasn’t, though I heard it too.

  She eased back and wiped at her cheeks, and she eyed me with more sadness than I could bear seeing. “You want to pump the brakes, figuratively speaking, on everything until I move back home again.”

  “It’s not about what I selfishly want for myself, Elise.” I slipped my hands to cup her jaw, and I implored her to understand what I was thinking. “Today at the aquarium, I couldn’t stop thinking about how wrong it felt to have you leave Grace and me.”

  “Keep thinking that!” she huffed, sniffling.

  I smiled woefully. “I will, but it won’t stop me from choosing what’s best for both of us.” I took a breath and realized it was better to let her come to the right conclusion herself. “Say you and I enter a relationship two weeks before you’re set to leave for California. I will understandably miss you a great deal, so you will feel obligated to call often and check in with me. Maybe you’ll call when I get home from work and I’m tired as fuck. You’ll misinterpret my tone…” I raised a brow, hoping she got my point. Because she was the girl who asked what was wrong if a text message didn’t arrive with a smiley face. “Then you’ll spend the rest of the evening fretting instead of working on a paper.”

  She chewed on the inside of her cheek and averted her gaze as another tear rolled down.

  “You’ll come home for holidays,” I went on quietly. “We’ll be all over each other for a few short days, and then you’ll have to leave again.” I tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. “How many days after each trip home do you think you’ll need before you can get past that hurt and concentrate on school again?”

  Because the truth of the matter was, Elise was autistic, and the quirks she had couldn’t be flipped on and off at will. She needed structure to feel well. If she pretended she didn’t have any limitations, the distress would come back tenfold.

  “What will two years of an emotional roller coaster do to your focus?” I prodded patiently. “How will that work with your anxiety?”

  She looked away and wiped at her cheeks.

  She knew the answer.

  “What I’m saying, sweetheart—” I gathered her hands in mine and kissed her knuckles “—is that you don’t have to worry about any of that. You don’t have to worry about me. I’ll be here, as always. And I know you. I know how your chaotic, brilliant brain works. I know that when I text you, you’ll answer when your mind allows it.”

  The fight had left Pipsqueak, and she just curled into my arms and dropped her forehead to the crook of my neck.

  I hugged her tightly.

  “When you come home for breaks,” I murmured, “we’ll go out for dinner and get to know each other better. You’ll reconnect with Grace and tell me everything you’ve learned.”

  “I know you,” she whispered hoarsely.

  “You do. You know me better than anyone, but we’ve never behaved like prospective daters with each other.” I stroked her back and breathed her in. She was all natural, having never liked scented body products. Except for a lotion with a scent called Ocean Breeze, which she underlined on every wish list for Christmas. “I want to get to know that side of you too.”

  She released a breath and straightened on my lap. “I guess that could be fun,” she admitted reluctantly. “But you’re still promising not to date others, right?”

  I chuckled quietly, weirdly happy about her being a little jealous. Or possessive, rather. It meant I wasn’t alone in that arena. “You have my word,” I replied. “I kinda need the same promise from you—and like I said, if you meet someone—”

  She literally slapped a hand over my mouth. “Yes, yes, I promise, but I don’t want to hear it. It’s not gonna happen.”

  I kissed her palm before she lowered it. “We can do this, baby. You know why?”

  She shook her head.

  “Because in the end, we’re us.”

  That drew a small smile from her. “Pipsqueak and Mister.”

  “Always.”

  She sighed and leaned forward, kissing me lightly. “If we’re gonna pull this off, I’m not sure I can go the rest of summer like we’ve done so far.”

  Fuck. She was right. It was going to be painful enough already.

  It was sobering. “I understand. You’re right.”

  She sank into my arms once more, and this time, it was a different kind of hug. It was the holding-on-for-dear-life type of embrace, and I didn’t want to let go.

  “I need one more night,” I murmured. “One more night with you in my arms.”

  She nodded quickly and tilted her head. I met her in a hard kiss.

  Twenty-Four

  “Settle down, everyone,” I ordered and walked behind my desk. “Mr. Sheppard, do you remember the task I gave all of you the first class of the semester?”

  I uncapped my marker and wrote down 1 through 5 on the board for the beginning of a list we’d be creating together.

  I heard some whispering back and forth, and I was fairly certain Paul was getting his answer from his ever-helpful buddy André.

  “Um, yeah, that we have to watch the news at least three times a week,” Paul answered.

  “And why did I give you this task, Ms. Brown?” I asked next, facing the class.

  She didn’t need any assistance from classmates. “Because it’s our civic duty to stay informed.”

  “Excellent.” I tapped the unwritten list on the board with my marker. “Since I can trust that you’re all following the news on Hurricane Sandy, I don’t need to fill you in. So, let’s discuss what Sandy has wrought before we move on to how we can prepare better in the future. Anyone?”

  About half a dozen hands went into the air.

  “Ms. Hernandez,” I said.

  “A lot of people have become homeless,” she offered.

  I nodded and uncapped the marker again, then wrote that down as the first response. “We’ll call that direct impact—homelessness, loss of lives, missing persons, physical injuries, all of which affect hospitals, emergency personnel, shelters, and law enforcement. What else?”

  “The power outages,” Simon said. “Took my mom fucking forever to get ahold of my aunt in New York.”

  It’d taken me quite a while to get a response from Keira too, but she’d emailed back eventually to say they were safe.

  I nodded along and wrote that down as item number two. “Destruction of infrastructure. Roads, cell towers, schools, transportation.”

  We continued going back and forth for the next half hour or so, discussing the more immediate impacts of the hurricane, from relief efforts to damages, and it finally brought us to what I wanted them to write a paper on. The long-term effects, the lessons that could be learned, and their thoughts on how the next year would pan out in terms of rebuilding everything.

  And as if he could sense that we were in the middle of a disaster relief debate, Darius chose that moment to knock on the door.

  I’d been expecting him; he’d borrowed my car this morning because his truck was in the shop.

  “Holy shit, he’s hot.” I heard one of the girls whisper.

  Darius and I exchanged an amused look as he returned my car key.

  “I can die happy now,” he said under his breath. “By the way, stop by the bar right after work—when you’ve picked up the trooper, I mean. I have news.” Okay…? Then he cast a quick glance at the board, and he narrowed his eyes before facing my class. “Don’t trust the government to help you, kids. The second you rely on them, you’re doomed. You gotta think for yourself and make your own preparations.”

  I smirked wryly. “Are you done?”

  “Unfortunately. Ethan’s waiting outside.” He addressed the snickering students again. “What do you do when you call 9-1-1 and no one picks up on the other end?” He tapped his temple, then disappeared with a two-finger salute.

  Always a treat, that one.

  I closed the door again and faced my students, and I figured, fuck it, I could roll with the punches. “He’s n
ot entirely wrong,” I said. “Because it’s also our civic duty to be useful in our community. Everyone who can afford to help actually has an obligation to do so.” I gestured toward the board with my marker and pocketed my car key. “We already know Hurricane Sandy has caused immense damage—that will take years to recover from for many people—and being prepared is key to minimizing that damage.” I paused. “That responsibility extends to private citizens, and I want you to reflect on that when you work on this paper. What can we do, both privately and collectively, to handle disasters better? Is it even possible? Can our civic duty save a local economy?”

  Picking up Grace from day care had become the highlight of my day since Pipsqueak had left.

  “Grace, look who’s here!” Charlotte said excitedly.

  I peered into the playroom where Grace was banging a red block against a low table, and I grinned when she spotted me.

  The way she lit up fucking owned me. And made her nightly tantrums easier to survive.

  “Dada!” She threw aside the block and ran toward me. Sometimes, she stumbled. Sometimes, she managed to stay upright. It was a gamble. But man, she was learning new things every day now.

  Her hair had grown a lot too, and she had these adorable curls that bounced when she ran.

  I squatted down just in time to catch her, and I picked her up and smooched her cheek. “Did you have a good day with Charlotte and Annie?”

  “Nee-nee!” she laughed.

  “Okay, good talk,” I chuckled.

  After getting a daily report from Charlotte while I wrestled Grace into her coveralls, we wished each other a good weekend, and I carried Grace out to the car. My plan involved tiring her out with a visit to the toy store—once Darius had shared his news—because I needed Grace to fall asleep early tonight. I had so many tests to grade this weekend that I’d asked Mary to babysit tomorrow, which I tried not to subject her to now that Grace had taken up screaming and sobbing her eyes out as a hobby during our evening routine. Mary was already watching her twice a week when I was at the gym.