by KV Rose
We cry together over someone who might never have cried for us.
We hold each other, and we don’t let go.
Not for a long, long time.
51
Alex
Halloween night, we go to the boardwalk. There’s a carnival, clowns on stilts walking along the bridge over the canal, people dressed up in costume. The smell of funnel cake and popcorn in the air. There’s not a lot of people here, considering it’s the off-season, but I think Zara likes it best that way.
I know I do.
I throw my arm around her shoulder, tug her close to me and kiss her hair. She cut it, at a place on the coast, and it’s to her shoulders now, all neat edges and healthy ends. I didn’t really know anything about that, but she pointed it out to me. She told me the “straggly parts” were gone, and I never ever thought her hair looked “straggly”, but whatever. It looks good as fuck, just like it did before. Though she looks older now, in a good way. Classier, maybe. Except for the fact she’s in a nearly translucent black, long-sleeved top tucked into her skin-tight skinny jeans, and she’s not wearing a bra so maybe classy isn’t the word, but I don’t care.
She knows I’m not going to share her like he did, and so long as she understands that—which she said she did—then I don’t care what she wears. She could walk around fucking naked for all I care.
Which makes me think of when I pulled down her bikini top at that fucking party and that fucking video I’ve painstakingly tried my best to erase from everywhere. She doesn’t seem to care about that though.
Our past lives, as she likes to call them. Even though they weren’t that long ago.
She does act like a different person. Quieter, not too…hyper. Because she’s sober. But she’s kinder, too. And I think she loves me more.
I kiss her again as we get to the middle of the bridge and she comes to stand at the edge, against the wood railing. It’s close to ten o’clock, and the stars shimmer on the surface of the water which is, grudgingly, I have to admit, really damn romantic.
I wonder if she’s thinking the same thing, but she just slurps on the orange juice in a plastic cup she has in her hand and I can’t tell. I don’t know where her mind is right now. I’ve asked her probably a hundred times what she was thinking the past week, so I let it go for now before she gets sick of me.
But I can’t stop staring at her. At her sharp cheekbones, those long, dark lashes. And even in the night, even under the stars and the moon, I can see the blue green of her eyes. They’re Caribbean eyes. That’s the best way to describe them. Beautiful, like the sea, but better than the view of it we’ve got right now.
“Are you okay?” The words come out before I can stop myself. I’ve never had a lot of self-control, and I guess that hasn’t changed.
She turns her gaze to me and it’s a little hard to breathe. Especially when her pink lips turn up into a smile and the stud in her nose catches the starlight. She looks like fucking magic.
Okay. I’m obviously in love.
“Why do you ask?”
I notice that she didn’t answer my question, but I let it go, pulling her even closer to me, so her head is against my arm. She smiles a little, clutching her orange juice, and I glance out at the canal. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a fucking clown on stilts, but I don’t care. I ignore him, and the kids running and screaming from his path.
“I just want to know how you’re really doing,” I whisper into the dark.
She wraps her arm around my back, and I turn back to look at her, her eyes searching mine.
“Truly?” she whispers, and I feel myself tense, getting ready for her words. They may not be what I want to hear, and I have to be okay with that. I want her truth, even if it hurts. I’ve poked and pried so many times the past week. Probably too many times. I know it’s not good for her recovery, but I can’t walk around on eggshells when I’m with her all the time either and I always want to be with her.
“The truth would be best,” I tell her quietly.
She squats down, my arm falling from around her shoulder, and she sets her orange juice cup on the wooden planks, then stands back up and circles her arms around my neck, standing on her tiptoes even though she’s in gray, heeled booties. Another new word I learned from her.
“I love you, Alex Cardi.”
I can’t explain the feeling in my chest when she says those words. I can’t explain how it swells and nearly bursts and I regret all the bad from before, all the shit I said about her. Did to her. All the fucking bullshit with my ex-roommate and how I left to go to the coast, and he was able to get his hands on her all over again.
I regret letting him ruin my life because I didn’t want to relive a night that wasn’t even mine to stress over. I regret what happened to Cari, but I can’t say I’m not happy it wasn’t fucking me.
It wasn’t fucking me.
I did what I could.
I’ve always tried to do what I could.
Except where Zara is concerned. I did hurt her. And I almost drowned her, too. I almost fucked everything up for us.
“Do you?” I ask her, but I can’t hide my smile.
Especially when she jumps up to plant a kiss on my head. I catch her, pick her up by her thighs, which she wraps tightly around me, making my dick fucking rock hard in no time flat. I’m aware there are children around us and those stupid clowns but it’s fucking ten o’clock. If someone doesn’t want their kids to see two idiots in love, they should take them elsewhere.
And when some woman mutters, “Get a room,” I offer her my middle finger without pulling my tongue out of Zara’s mouth.
She laughs against me, pulling back and flicking my nose. “You’re awful,” she tells me, and I know she doesn’t mean a fucking word of it.
“You love me,” I say against her neck, pulling her skin between my teeth.
She wraps her legs tighter around me, rocks her hips. I swear to God I would fuck her right here, except I don’t swear to God anymore and I don’t want anyone else to see my girl.
“Let’s go back to the hotel?”
She licks her way down my throat, but finally pulls back, her face flushed and her eyes bright, and she nods.
Once we’re there, her naked on the bed and waiting for me, I sink to my knees on the mattress and run my hands up her thighs, eyes taking in every inch of her smooth, pale skin.
In two days, I’m meeting her mother again. Tomorrow, she’s having brunch with my mother, who is in an in-patient rehab. My father is a pussy and went away to some pastor retreat in Utah which I’m sure will do absolutely nothing for him, but I don’t care.
I just want her to meet my mom, and I want to meet hers, and I want to go back to school and walk arm-in-arm with her to class, and take her to the gym and we can start working on that business plan of ours.
My inheritance is already in my account and has been for some time. I took money out of it for my legal fees from last fall, and I did it again for the shit with my ex-roommate, but there’s plenty left, and Zara herself isn’t poor. We could really start something.
Build an empire.
“What are you thinking about right now?” she asks me, propping herself up on her elbows, a slight frown on her face.
I glance at her naked before me, and my cock stirs.
She sees it and smiles. “What were you thinking of before you just looked at me like that?”
My hands slide up her thighs, over her hips, her torso, her breasts because I can’t fucking resist them, and then to her face as I lean over her, settling myself between her thighs.
“Two things.” I wiggle my hips against her. “I was thinking about your scars.”
She goes rigid, so I keep talking: “If you don’t want to tell me, it’s fine. But it broke my heart a little, that you thought I didn’t notice them. I always did. I always have.”
She swallows, averts her gaze. “I used to hurt myself,” she admits, and that fucking nearly tears me apart. “Because
I didn’t think I was, you know, worthy of anything. And it felt good. It felt good then.”
I run my thumb over her lip. “I’m so sorry, princess.” I take a deep breath. “When was the last time?” I ask her, since she seems willing to talk about it. “When was the last time you didn’t feel worthy?”
She keeps looking down between us. “When you told me you wanted your father to like me. When you told me you wanted me to be more respectable.”
Those words sear through me. Thinking of what she did to herself because of what I said. Of her admission, right now. Her vulnerability.
My heart fucking breaks. “God, Zara.” I blink back my own tears, gripping her face just a little tighter. “I’m so fucking sorry. I was…” I hang my head, and surprising me, she runs her fingers through my hair. Her touch sends a shiver through me, but I don’t look up. “I was fucking stupid.” I pick my head up, meet her gaze. “And you’re so worthy. I’m so sorry, Zara.”
She smiles at me, her fingers still in my hair. “I’ve wanted to tell you that for a long time. But now that I have, tell me your other thought. You said you were thinking two things.”
I don’t want to. I want to grovel at her feet. Tell her I was a stupid moron. I want to beg her to forgive me but I think she already has. I think she has because we both made mistakes, and neither of us knew what love was.
But we had to grow into it. It’s part of growing up, and we did that. Together, we did that.
I blow out a breath. “I was thinking of what our life is going to look like a year from now.”
She smiles faintly, but I see something else in her expression, the dim light from the bathroom giving me just enough light to gauge her emotions by. And now that she’s not on drugs, she’s full of them.
She said she wasn’t fun without the drugs, but she’s more fun. She might be quieter, but she laughs more. She teases. She’s serious, too, and she’s everything.
She’s everything I’ve ever wanted. I’m always thinking about her, and us, and what we’re going to do together now that this shitty chapter of our life has passed.
I tip her chin up, turn her head to face me. “What?” I ask her, worry in my tone, but I can’t hide it. And I don’t want to. I want her to know how I feel. “What do you see when you think of yourself in a year?”
She runs her hand through her hair, and I watch her throat bob as she swallows. “I think I’ll be a broke philosophy major without a job and a shitload of debt from student loans.”
Relief courses through me, because those problems are solvable. Those problems are too fucking easy.
She trails her fingers over my shoulder, eyeing my bare chest, a smirk on her lips. “And I think…no, I hope you’re still here.” She meets my gaze, her fingers still against my skin. “I hope you don’t leave. I hope you still find me fun a year from now. I hope you don’t mind that I’m really awkward and I’m kind of boring, and I don’t really do shit when I’m not high and I actually kind of hate parties and also…” She bites her lip, laughing a little. “Also football.”
I grab her hand, press it to my mouth. “I already knew that,” I tell her. “About the football. The rest?” I suck on her index finger, and then the next one, and the next one. I love the way she wiggles underneath me, like she just can’t wait for me to fuck her.
Yeah, neither can I, but I’m going to, just for a minute.
“I love you for who you are. I’m getting too old for parties,” I tease her, “and it’s a shame you got over them before you even turned twenty-one, but,” I shrug, “less boys to flirt with you so fuck it. I don’t care.”
I drop her hand and she runs it through my hair.
“Who knew you could be so damn romantic?” she asks me, grinning.
I lean down and kiss her, her lips parting for me, her hands going around my neck. “I’m not. I just really, really like you.”
She drops one hand, and reaches between us, grabbing my aching cock. “I like you, too. And this. A lot. It’s the biggest one I’ve ever seen.”
I’m not sure, exactly, what to make of that or how to feel about it, but I just laugh anyway and she guides me inside of her and it might make me sound like a fucking idiot, but when I’m inside of her it feels like home.
Later that night, she’s curled up beside me, her mouth open as she drools on my chest. It’s actually pretty sexy, especially the way her spine feels beneath my fingers as I draw circles down her back, staring up at the dark ceiling.
But Eli’s words come back to me, and although I hate thinking his name, although I hate thinking of him, and although sometimes the way he felt bucking against my hands makes my skin crawl when it passes through my mind, I can’t help but smile as these words: And you can’t breathe for her, too. She’ll pull you down in that grave and bury you with her.
He was a fucking psychopath, playing me as well as he played her.
But I buried him.
I fucking buried him, and it’s Zara I want. Zara that wants me.
And when I imagine my future, she’s in it.
Because this girl? The one whose head is against my chest? Yeah. I didn’t save her. That girl saved me.
Epilogue
Three Years Later
Zara
“I’m closing this fucking place.”
“No, you can’t, someone is coming right—”
He flips the switch for the closed sign on the gym, pulls down the blackout shade and steps back, retreating into the shadows.
I clamp my hand over my mouth, trying to stifle my laughter as there’s a polite knock on the door.
We’re supposed to be open 24/7.
Alex looks at me, his dark eyes gleaming, and then he scoops me up, twirling me around and when a little giggle slips past my lips because I’ve got my hands on his bare shoulders, he clamps his hand over my mouth, lowers me down to whisper in my ear, “Shh, princess. We don’t want to get a bad review, yeah?”
I slap his chest, but we can see through the wall of tinted windows the person walking away, glancing over their shoulder and shaking their head, irritated.
“That was horrible business!” I chide him, smacking his chest again as he sets me down on my feet.
“I don’t give a fuck,” he tells me, keeping his arms locked behind me. “I want to spend the weekend with my wife.”
I try to bite back my smile because it seriously is horrible business and weekends are a great time for us. “You could’ve called Dwight. He’s been dying to take some of his clients here.” I grip my husband’s arms as I turn to take in our gym. We’ve got ninety feet of professional grade turf, for football, soccer, sled pulling. Olympic bar cages, a café, a yoga studio, a fucking sauna.
Whatever anyone fucking wants, we’ve got it.
Castle Cardi Fitness might have a dumb name, Alex’s doing, but it’s the most popular gym on North Carolina’s coast.
We thought taking over Grove Community might not bode well for all the displaced congregants, but turns out, they love it.
And in the classroom at the very back, down a long hall past the bathrooms and change rooms and showers, I teach Stoicism to people every other night.
No, seriously. They come in droves, wanting to know how to get through fucking life. I thought it would be a joke. Alex kept pushing me to do it after I got my yoga certification and taught a few classes a week at night.
He kept telling me to use my philosophy degree, especially since I bought every book by Ryan Holiday and the fucking Stoics, too, and read through them every damn week, quoting shit at him to help him control his own temper.
“It isn’t manly to be enraged,” I’d tell him. “Marcus Aurelius said so.”
To which he would roll his eyes and slap my ass to show me just how manly he was.
It was fascinating how much I learned, after school. I mean, I got through college, earned my degree, but turns out, you learn a lot more when you’re not high as fuck, whether it’s on Adderall or not.
> Now, we have addicts in recovery or wanting to be in recovery come for my talks. We have teenagers looking for ways to handle adult problems. We have couples who own big businesses come for tips on handling stress, the Stoic way.
It’s like a big NA meeting but we’re Stoics Anonymous.
And Alex? Alex is like a god to the kids he runs football drills with. He’s a godsend to the people he trains, and he runs a few of his own meetups to discuss personal and business growth.
He reads a lot of Robert Greene, which translates well in his talks on things like how to spot psychopaths and the best way to deal with them—drown them…okay, not really, but…kind of.
Right now, he looks like he wants to take me to the Olympic-sized pool we have in the very back of our facility where the baptismal pool used to be and fuck me on one of the towels.
But he’d never actually put me in the pool.
I don’t swim anymore.
“Fuck Dwight. Fucker is off with the guys to Vegas this weekend.”
I cock my head, surprised. “Really?” I ask him as he pulls me closer and I wrap my arms around his neck. “You didn’t want to go?”
He wrinkles his nose, as if I’ve personally offended him. “Fuck no. I want to be with you.”
I glance at the closed door. “Alex,” I say, trying to keep my voice stern even as he kisses my forehead and smirks down at me. “We can’t keep the place closed. It’s bad for business. We’re a 24/7 facility and we agreed we wanted someone on staff at all times.” I glance at the clock on the wall beside the door. “The night girl isn’t going to be here for another hour.”
Alex laughs, boyish and loud and it makes my heart swell. “The ‘night girl’?” he repeats.
I glare at him. “Well, I might actually remember her name if she didn’t always look at you like she wanted to suck your dick.”
He rolls his eyes. “She does not want to suck my dick, princess. And even if she did, I wouldn’t let her. This dick is only for you.” He pulls me so far against him, I can feel said dick, and three years after we officially started dating, two years after we got married, I’m still amazed by just how damn big that dick is.