by Jewel E. Ann
“And if he doesn’t get it? If he doesn’t get his memory back … his closure … what’s he going to do?”
I shrugged. “He’s giving it until the end of the year. Six more weeks. And if he still doesn’t have enough memories to remember why he fell in love with her…” I cringed because the analogy sounded terrible, but I’d already put it out there “…then he’ll bury the empty casket.”
That made Rory flinch. It started out as such a great analogy, but it ended rather morbidly.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Rory wasn’t happy. Not with me. Not with Fisher. Not with Rose.
It surprised me, and I think Rose too, that Rory struggled to accept the situation. After all, she went to prison and lost her marriage (and her daughter for five years) because she fell in love and that love caused a lot of damage. Rose speculated it wasn’t what had happened as much as Rory felt like everyone knew but her. Everyone that mattered.
The following weekend, I got a phone call while cleaning the bathroom.
“Hello?”
“Hey. Just found your name in my contacts. Who knew I had your number?”
I grinned, flipping the toilet seat down and taking a seat. “Hi. Who knew?” I hadn’t seen or talked to Fisher since Rory caught us in the hallway. We were trying to do things right, if there was such a thing as right. And it was clear that being together always led to situations like me half naked and tossing all intentions for human decency aside. All morals. Everything to make room for Fisher and only Fisher.
“Whatcha doing?”
“Cleaning the bathroom. What are you doing?”
“Thinking you should let me take you to lunch.”
Biting my lip to hide my grin as if he could see me, I told my eager heart to chill. “I have to help clean the house. My grandparents are coming for Thanksgiving this week.”
“Rory’s parents?”
“Yeah. My dad’s parents would not be caught dead having Thanksgiving here.”
“Why?”
“Because their ex-daughter-in-law not only went to prison for growing marijuana, she also kissed a girl.”
“And she liked it.”
I giggled. “She did.”
“Well, you need to eat. Give me an hour.”
“I shouldn’t.”
“Fifty-nine minutes and not a second past.”
I laughed. “Rory just started talking to me and Rose again. Not more than a few words, but it’s something. I think lunch with you would take me back ten steps with her.”
“Then don’t tell her. Say you’re running to Target for something.”
It was a dumb idea. I needed to act a little more grown-up. I needed to actually be a little more grown-up.
“Fine.” There was always tomorrow to be grown-up.
“Where do you want to meet?”
“McDonald’s on the corner.”
“Okay. Ten minutes?”
I nodded before answering, my grin ready to break my face. “Ten minutes.” I quickly combed my hair, brushed my teeth, and reapplied deodorant. My ripped jeans and tee would just have to be good enough. “I need a couple things from Target. Do you need anything?” I yelled down the stairs.
“We’re good,” Rose replied.
They’d been downstairs for quite a while. I had a feeling they were doing more talking than cleaning. Talking about the big five-year deception.
Fisher was already at McDonald’s when I pulled into the parking lot. I walked around to his driver’s door and opened it.
“What are you doing? Get in.” He eyed me with such a bright gleam in his eyes. It did all kinds of things to me.
“Thought we were having lunch.”
“We are. But not here. I just thought we’d meet here so you could leave your car and ride with me.”
I stepped onto his running board so I could lean into the cab and get my face up in his face. “Do you love me today?” I grinned, our mouths a breath apart.
He smiled. “I do.”
I kissed him and his hand snaked around my waist as he kissed me back. “Then buy me a burger and fries and tell me about your Thanksgiving plans. Tell me how your week’s been. Tell me anything.” I bit his lip and tugged it.
Fisher grabbed my ass. “We could get it to go. Drive back to my place. Eat and still have time to do other things.”
I ran my hand along his extra scruffy beard then my thumb traced his bottom lip. “Things, huh? You and your things.”
He bit at my thumb. “You like my things.”
I giggled. “I do. Too much, really. So let’s grab a table and a couple of Happy Meals and stay out of trouble for one day.”
His gaze swept along my face once before he dropped a final quick kiss on my lips. “You win.”
I hopped down and he followed me. Then he took my hand and led me inside. I wondered what he would do if he saw someone he knew … saw someone who knew he was engaged. My hand in his hand.
“What are you getting?” he asked as we approached the next open register.
“Duh, we’re getting Happy Meals.”
He chuckled. “Um … we are?”
“Yes. Hi. We’ll take two hamburger Happy Meals with apples, one with juice and one with a chocolate milk.”
“No fries?”
I glanced back at Fisher and his confusion over not having fries. Then I turned back to the guy at the register. “And a small order of fries.”
He laid down a ten. I handed it back to him.
“My treat.” I winked. Yup. Big spender for our under-seven-dollar meal.
We took our Happy Meals to a booth by the window. As I unpacked my stuff, including the Avengers toy, I noticed Fisher was staring into his sack but not pulling anything out. A confused look stole his face.
“What’s wrong?”
After a few slow blinks, he gazed at me. “You bought my work crew Happy Meals.”
As I’m sure Angie did with the slow return of Fisher’s memories, I waited for him to reveal just how much he knew before I rushed to fill in the blanks. Did he remember a piece? A chunk? Or everything?
“I did. Well, technically you did. I used a company credit card.”
Fisher continued to stare into his bag. “Why? Did you do it to be funny? Did I tell you to do it? Was I cheap?”
I giggled while unwrapping my burger. “No. You weren’t cheap. Had you been cheap, you wouldn’t have taken food to your crews at all. You were very generous. And I wasn’t trying to be funny. I was collecting toys for Rory. She used to collect Happy Meal toys before she went to prison. So I continued her hobby for her.”
Fisher glanced up at me again. “Do you still collect them?”
“No.” I grinned with a slight head shake.
“Then why are we eating Happy Meals?” He pulled out his sandwich and apples.
“Because I thought it might jog a memory. And it did.”
It was possible the memory I was trying to jog involved his workshop and zip ties. I so badly wanted to just tell him, but the part of me that wanted him to remember on his own was stronger. Maybe I would mention zip ties another day.
“Huh …” He relinquished a tiny grin. “Thank you.”
Tapping a sliced apple on my bottom lip, I grinned. “You’re welcome. So how was your week after Rory lost her head?”
He shrugged, shoving a wad of fries into his mouth. “Uneventful. Just work. I tried calling Rory several times, but she’s not taking my calls.”
Chewing my apple slowly, I nodded. “What about Angie. Am …” My nose wrinkled. “Am I allowed to ask you if you saw her this past week?”
Fisher eyed me suspiciously for a few seconds before nodding. “You can ask me anything.” He slid his leg forward so it rubbed against mine. “Yes. She came over Tuesday night. She brought pizza and cake samples.”
My eyes widened. “Cake samples?”
“They were good. I didn’t really have a favorite. She assumed I’d like the chocolate with peanut butte
r. But it was my least favorite.”
“Cake samples for Thanksgiving? Christmas? New Years?”
He smirked, gulping half the bottle of chocolate milk. “Wedding,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
I cleared my throat, unable to read him. The smirk. The casual mentioning of cake. Was he baiting me? “Whose wedding?” Two could play his game.
After an exaggerated pause, his expression swelled with amusement, a little pride for his worthy opponent. “Whose indeed. She casually suggested she move back in with me, and I countered with calling off the wedding.”
The hamburger dropped from my hand, an unexpected thunk on the tray like the unexpected thunk of my heart halting, paralyzed with disbelief.
My nose wrinkled. I felt Angie’s pain. Fisher didn’t need to say another word. I knew where the story was headed. At least, I thought I knew. But why … why did I feel so bad for Angie? We were in love with the same man. On different teams, but at the same time, we were Team Fisher.
“What did she say?” I managed to say just above a whisper.
“She got a little emotional.”
Annihilated. Fisher annihilated her heart. If Angie kept herself from telling him about the miscarriage until he remembered it on his own, she knew how to toss her heart into a bunker so he wouldn’t see her true suffering. I knew this because it was what I would have done. It was what I had done with Fisher on more than one occasion.
“Then she asked me to think about waiting at least until after the holidays since I’m slowly getting pieces of my memory back.”
“Well…” there was still a hoarseness to my voice, a crippling of emotions “…that’s what you wanted too.”
He leaned back and ran his hands down his face. “No. I mean … yes. I did. But I don’t anymore. I want you. And I can’t for the life of me imagine what I might remember that would change how I feel about you. There’s no way I had stronger feelings for her.” He shook his head slowly. “A stronger feeling doesn’t exist. It’s just not possible.”
After a pregnant pause, I compelled my reluctant gaze to meet his. Love never looked so tortured.
“I think about you a lot and touch myself.”
Fisher’s eyes flared as he eased his head to one side and then the other, checking for anyone who might have heard me. Speechless Fisher was such a rare sight.
“Where …” He held his fist to his mouth and coughed. “Where did that come from?”
I shrugged. “What you said, I never expected it. So raw. So honest. And it reminded me of all the reasons I think about you …” I grinned. “And touch myself.”
“Fuck you,” he whispered with a grin, “for giving me a hard-on in McDonald’s, three feet from the PlayPlace.”
I giggled. “I had to lighten the mood. It’s hard to love you and yet feel sorry for another woman who loves you too.”
He cringed, scratching his jaw. “Right? If Angie were a terrible person, this would be so much easier.”
“It’s not that long. And I don’t blame her for not wanting you to call off the wedding right before the holidays. Her first Thanksgiving and Christmas without her mom. That would be pretty terrible of you. But then I think of what Rory walked in on last weekend, and that was pretty terrible of you too. It could have just as easily been Angie popping by. Then what? Can you imagine explaining that to your family? Nothing says happy holidays like a S-E-X scandal.”
Fisher laughed, glancing around us again. “You realize half of these kids can spell, right? And who doesn’t love a good S-E-X scandal?”
“The person not getting any S-E-X.”
The woman at the table next to us cleared her throat and scowled at us.
“Let’s go.” Fisher gathered our trash and we took our PG-13 conversation out of the G-rated play zone.
“Are you still going to the cousin’s wedding?”
Fisher unlocked his truck and turned toward me as he leaned against the side of his truck, kicking his foot back onto the tire. “Afraid so.” He fiddled with the key fob in his hand, chin tipped to his chest.
“When is it?”
“The weekend after Thanksgiving.”
I nodded. “It’s Costa Rica. You’ll have fun.”
Glancing up, he shot me the hairy eyeball. “Fun?”
“She’s your friend. It would be sad for that to change since you’ve known her since you were six.”
“I don’t know her.”
I frowned. “But I think you will. You made a baby with her.” That came out sounding much different than it did in my head. “I’m just saying, that has to give you a second’s pause. Right? If someone brought a stranger to me and said I didn’t remember them, but I made a child with them, even if the child died, I’d need a moment to process what that meant.”
“It was hardly a child. She was only two months pregnant.”
“Well, I was raised to think of a child at any stage of life after creation as being alive … a life. And maybe I’ve changed my views on a lot of things over the past five years, but that hasn’t changed for me. So yeah, I know I’ve thought about the baby you made with her. And my mind has run in so many directions … like what if she wouldn’t have miscarried? Would you be married to her? Would you have other children with her? And then, had you been in the same accident and not remembered her, would you have fought harder to get back that life … those feelings?”
Nobody … not Rory or Rose … not his family … not Angie … nobody was allowed to say I swooped in and stole Fisher. Even when it didn’t benefit me and my interests, I went the extra mile to make Fisher really think about his decisions. Probably because he made me think about mine five years earlier. He made me consider more than our selfish desire to be together. And because of that, I left.
Did I want him to choose Angie? No. I wanted him to choose me with all his memories of her. I wanted him to find happiness with me without any fear or self-doubt.
“Are you in that scenario?” he asked.
“Does it matter?”
“Maybe. I think I would have still fallen in love with you. But I would have felt a greater responsibility to my wife and kids. The kids more than my wife. So you can spin this any way you want to spin it, but it doesn’t change my current situation. And I’m not married. I don’t have kids. She did miscarry the baby. That’s my reality. Playing the what-if game is just stupid. I’m not going to do that. So stop trying to make me fall in love with her.”
Collapsing into his chest, I lifted my head and kissed his neck. “Fall in love with me.”
He grabbed my face and kissed me. “Done.”
“And do it again tomorrow.”
He grinned. “Tomorrow? Thought you only ever wanted today.”
My hands slid behind him, worming their way under his jacket and shirt, caressing the warm skin along his back. “You make me greedy.”
“Greedy? Is that the best word you’ve got?”
I grinned. “Delirious?”
“You can do better.” He nipped at my lips as his hands covered my butt.
“Wanton?”
“Now we’re getting there.” He kissed my neck. “Keep going …”
I giggled, sliding one hand just beneath his waistband, my nails pressing into the hard muscles of his glutes. “Brazen.”
“Move your hand to the front of my jeans … then you can be brazen.”
“That would be more inappropriate.”
“You think?”
I gasped as his hand made a swift transition from my butt to diving into the front of my jeans and panties.
In. McDonald’s. Parking. Lot.
“Titillating. Salacious. And maybe a little indecent.” He rubbed me in slow circles.
“Provocative?” he whispered in my ear.
“F-fisher … s-stop.”
“I did.”
I felt the curl of his lips along my cheek, a triumphant grin. He had stopped. It was me moving against his idle hand.
&nbs
p; Yanking his hand from the inside of my jeans, I took a quick step backward, flushed and a little breathless.
After biting back his smile for a few seconds, he eyed the family climbing into their minivan parked on the other side of my car. “I think about you a lot, and then I touch myself.” He slid his gaze to mine and added the most mischievous grin.
My cheeks flamed.
His lips twisted for a beat. “Not as good as you touch me, but it suffices.”
Dirty talking in the parking lot of McDonald’s. Who did that?
We did.
It wasn’t something you could put on a dating app. The things that really made two people click were not something anyone would ever even think to put on a dating app.
“Twelve across. A bird’s wishbone.”
Fisher blinked once. Once! “Merrythought.”
“I hate you.” I turned and stomped my way to the driver’s side of my car.
His soft chuckle followed me, and before I could shut my door, he planted his body in its way and ducked his head, putting his big, arrogant mug in my face. “Nine down. Extravagant boasting.”
I didn’t know, so remained silent so he’d think I didn’t care.
“First letter is G, fourth letter is C.”
I still didn’t know.
“Gasconade.” He kissed my mouth, but I didn’t kiss him back. “I liked you. Five years ago … I liked you.”
My anger subsided, being replaced with curiosity. Why did he say that?
“You knew I liked crossword puzzles. That’s why you mentioned it. You were trying to jog a memory. But I hadn’t forgotten about my love of crossword puzzles. I also hadn’t forgotten that I didn’t tell people about it. But you knew. That’s why you made them for me. That’s why you tease me with twelve across. I liked you. That’s the only reason I would have told you. I liked you a lot. I wouldn’t have told you had I not liked you a lot. Because Angie knows I won spelling bees, but she’s never mentioned the puzzles. She’s oblivious to it, which means I never told her. So … the question I have for you is … did you know I liked you?”