by Hazel Parker
Exhausted and sticky with sweat, he remained on top of her for a moment, breathing hard with his eyes closed. After a moment, he rolled away, too tired to want to hold himself up anymore and deciding to settle himself on top of their clothes in the bed. Anna’s eyes were shut, her face glowing and pink, and she was breathing just as fast as he was.
“Brett,” she called again, her voice a little stronger this time. “That was…amazing.” He nodded, watching her eyes open and smiling when she looked at him. He couldn’t resist the urge to push her hair away from her face now that it was damp and just the slightest bit frizzy.
“You’re amazing,” he replied. The passion that he’d indulged had only been a reflection of how strongly he felt for her. “I’m crazy about you. You’re the most incredible person I’ve ever met.”
She giggled, her face turning an even darker shade of pink as she leaned in to give him another kiss, this one less hot and sweeter, more loving, and more caring.
“I think I’m falling in love with you, Anna,” he admitted. He knew that this was the worst time to say it and he prepared for her to react in kind, but she didn’t. Instead, she just smiled, pressing another kiss to his lips.
“The feeling is mutual,” she said. Instead of rolling back to her side of the bed, which was so unfairly far away, Anna rested her head on his chest, where Brett could stroke the soft skin of her back and whisper sweet things back and forth with her until they finally drifted off to sleep, knowing that there was an incredible future ahead for the two of them, both feeling excited to explore it.
Epilogue: Anna: Six Months Later
Anna had just stepped out of the shower and was blow drying her hair when she heard the door slam shut. She listened as Brett went through his daily routine of hanging up his jacket, putting his keys away, and setting his paperwork in a place where he’d remember to look at it later (even when Anna told him to stop working so hard and come to bed).
“Hi, honey,” he called, entering their bedroom already loosening his tie. Though he’d been working at the hotel he’d bought for nearly five months now, and he dressed up like this every weekday, he was still more than eager to take off the suit at the end of the day and change back into jeans and a t-shirt. Anna loved the new look, sure: it was clean and crisp and professional. Still, she had to admit that she found herself more attracted to the casual attire. That was how she’d fallen in love with him, and that was always how he looked when she thought about him, which she did often.
“How was work, sweetie?” she asked, turning off the hairdryer and leaning in for her kiss.
“Oh, you know,” he said, “same old, same old. How about you?”
Anna shrugged. “About the same,” she replied. She’d thought that she would want to work second shift when she’d started at Sunny Villa, but now that Brett woke up so early in the morning, she’d come around to the idea of early mornings. It meant that she got to have breakfast with him, and sometimes even a little joint morning shower when they didn’t care if they ran a little late for work.
“Are you getting ready for the barbecue?” he asked, more conversationally than to verify that she’d remembered because she always did. They went over to Martha and Jake’s house every Friday for dinner, and it was one of Anna’s favorite things. She looked forward to it and wouldn’t miss it for anything.
“I was thinking of wearing the red sundress,” she said, pointing to the bed where she’d laid it out with the shoes that she’d planned to accompany it. “What do you think?”
“Perfect,” Brett said reflexively. He never vetoed an outfit choice of hers despite that she always asked his opinion—he always told her that she’d look beautiful in anything.
“Hurry up and get ready,” Anna commanded, pointing to the dresser where he kept his evening attire. “Martha’s going to kill us if we’re late again.”
When she turned around wearing only a towel to put her clothes on, Brett caught her by the wrist, pulling her into his lap on the bed and into a deep, long kiss. As they laid down on the bed, his hands already on her naked body, she thought that maybe just a quickie wouldn’t make them that late.
“Eh, she’ll forgive us,” Brett argued, and Anna couldn’t argue with that logic.
They were only late by twenty minutes, which was so on-par for the couple that Martha had started delaying the cooking so that things wouldn’t be finished too far before Anna and Brett arrived. Jake was manning the barbecue pit while David and his husband, Geoff sat at the outdoor table with Martha.
“Look who’s finally here,” David called, pointing as Brett opened the gate to the back yard. Anna waved her hands dismissively.
“Yeah, yeah; we’re always late; sorry about that. Hi, Martha,” she greeted, then crouched down to speak to her pregnant belly. “Hi, baby.” Brett gave his brother a pat on the back and his sister a kiss on the cheek before sitting down next to Anna at the table.
“So, what’s everyone talking about?” he asked, knowing that they’d derailed the conversation with their tardy entrance.
“You,” Geoff replied, earning himself an elbow in the ribs from David. “What? We were!”
Brett looked a little fearful. “What about me?”
“Oh, we were just taking bets on when you’re going to ask Anna to marry you,” she replied casually, “the usual.” Anna flushed bright pink, which made the others laugh, and Brett rolled his eyes.
“I’ll ask her when the time is right,” he said in a tone that implied that he’d said the same thing a million times before. “You don’t want to get engaged right now anyway, do you, Anna?” he asked, and she felt her cheeks become an even darker shade of red.
“Well…” she trailed off, not wanting to say anything more. The rest of the party began to hoot and holler, and Brett threw his hands up in a submissive gesture.
“Alright, you win!” he caved to the masses. Looking at Anna tenderly, he took her hand. “I’ve known I wanted this since the minute we started dating; I was just waiting for you to be ready. We’ll go pick out a ring sometime this week if you want.”
Anna willed herself not to cry as she nodded, leaning in to kiss him tenderly but not so deeply that it would need to be a private affair. When she pulled away, he smiled at her.
“I love you,” he said, and she kissed him once more, chastely, on the lips.
“I love you, too,” she replied. After the required cooing was finished, the group began to shift back into normal conversation about things like work and family life and sports, but Anna felt dazed, like she couldn’t focus on anything but Brett the whole time, and she couldn’t have been happier for it.
Bodyguard
Chapter One: Abby
The only thing Abby Miller hated more than packing moving boxes was unpacking them. She’d gotten everything off the truck and into her new apartment a few days ago, but now came the real burden: finding a home for everything. The thought of living out of boxes wasn’t ideal, either, and she knew she had to do it, but it just didn’t seem fair to have to move twice in less than a year. If it hadn’t been absolutely necessary, she wouldn’t have moved out of her boyfriend’s place, especially not in the middle of winter. Luckily, she had her amazing best friend to help her without so much as a complaint.
“This sucks,” Chandra exclaimed, trying to fit more of Abby’s books onto her already-full bookshelf, which had somehow, in her old apartment, held them all. Well, maybe it wasn’t without a complaint.
“I know,” Abby agreed. “I’m sorry.” Chandra shook her head.
“Not your fault that Trevor turned into a psycho,” she reassured. “I’m whining for whining’s sake, but you know I’m happy to help. I am just glad you got out of there.”
“Thanks. It was starting to get pretty scary with him,” Abby admitted. “You never think it will happen to you. It’s always someone else’s story. He wasn’t letting me leave the house, and he kept threatening me; he would take my phone and scroll through my emai
ls and internet history. It got to a point where I couldn’t leave the apartment without him.”
“Red flags everywhere,” Chandra said. “I told you that I saw trouble in him when you first introduced him to me, but no, you had to doubt my empathic abilities.”
Abby laughed. “Yeah, well, from now on I’ll filter my relationships through your psychic abilities.” She’d already unpacked her clothes and most of the things that belonged in her room, plus most of the things in her living room. Despite a disheartening lack of furniture, the only things that really needed to be unpacked and sorted were the boxes from the kitchen, and they’d been working all morning. “I’m starving,” Abby decided. “Want to go get some lunch and finish this when we get back?”
Chandra couldn’t have agreed faster, setting the books she was holding back into the box and practically lunging for her keys. “I’ll drive,” she offered, “but you’re buying.”
Another unfortunate thing about having to move to get away from someone was that Abby was a creature of habit, and once she found a few restaurants she liked, she didn’t usually stray from them unless forced. Though this neighborhood was a little less than half an hour away from her old one and the restaurants were by no means too far away, she wanted to avoid going back there for fear of running into Trevor. He knew the places that she’d frequent and would likely be checking them regularly since she’d moved out without warning. Chandra had taken her in for the three weeks that it took to find a new place, helping her find a new apartment that she could afford on her own. Moving her things from his place to a storage unit had been a much more difficult task, but she’d managed to do it in secret with the help of a few other friends, and she had gotten every bit of her stuff out of the apartment before Trevor had returned from work.
Abby pulled the car in front of a diner and parked. The parking lot was empty enough that there was no line, but not so empty to imply that the food was inedible, so she decided that it was probably good enough. Besides, after a whole day of unboxing things, both girls were hungry enough to eat almost anything.
“I’m going to be so relieved when all this moving crap is over with,” Abby began as soon as the waiter had taken their order.
“I can only imagine. We’ll have to go shopping for furniture soon. I mean, it was nice of Gemma to give you the mattress from her guest bedroom, but you can’t stay on a mattress on the floor forever.”
“I know. Sleeping on the floor is starting to hurt my back,” Abby agreed. “Didn’t your brother say that we could borrow his truck for the furniture trip?”
“He did. And Devon works from home, so it’s not like he needs it, so just let me know when you want to go and we’ll make the trip.”
Abby nodded her head said that they should go tomorrow, get it all over with as soon as possible, but her body said that she needed to sleep for a week, and she’d never been one to put mind over matter. Besides, she’d been through a lot; she deserved a break, and so did Chandra.
“Eh, I’ve got a bunch of boxes I can overturn and use as a coffee table or a television stand,” she shrugged. “As long as I’ve got a place to sleep, eat, and shower, there’s no rush.”
“I just want you to feel at home as quickly as you can, Abby,” Chandra argued. “After everything that happened with Trevor, I just want you to have some normalcy and basic comforts…like a couch.” That, she could agree, made sense.
Her relationship with Trevor had started four months ago, and though she’d thought it was a little early to move in together, Trevor had seemed hurt by her hesitation to accept the invitation, so she’d taken his key and moved her stuff in. At the time, she’d reasoned that she was already spending most of her time there, anyway, and her lease was up, so it was either move in January or wait another whole year. Against her better judgment, she’d decided not to renew her lease, and that decision backfired pretty quickly.
In the span of just a month and a half, he’d become controlling and volatile. He didn’t like her putting her stuff anywhere, so she’d had to keep it boxed up, which made her feel less like they were living together and more like she was renting half a bed in his apartment. Soon after that, he started to hide her car keys on the weekends so that she couldn’t go anywhere without him, and that was around the same time that she became aware of just how much he drank. When she was just staying for date nights, she’d never noticed, since she normally had quite a bit of wine herself, but once she was spending every night with him, she realized that it wasn’t just special occasions on which he had a few shots of whiskey after dinner. He spent a lot of the evenings drunk, and in his drunken state, loved to pick fights. Though he hadn’t hit her, something told her that it wasn’t out of the question when he’d put his fist through a wall after she came home from work an hour late and he accused her of cheating.
The day after the fist through the wall, Chandra had taken her apartment hunting, and the day after that, she was out of that place and into her new one. The sheer stress had yet to wear off fully, but she was managing it. She was less and less frequently waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat thinking that he was going to find her.
“So, you’re pretty sure he’s going to leave you alone?”
Abby nodded. “What choice does he have?” she asked. “He doesn’t know where I live anymore, and I think he got the message that I don’t want to be with him after I cleaned out everything I owned from the apartment.”
“I just worry,” Chandra reiterated. She was always worrying about something. “I was watching this program the other night; it was about this husband who was cheating on his wife, and when she finally left, he—”
“You watch too many crime documentaries,” Abby dismissed, half because she thought it was ridiculous and half because she knew that hearing the rest of the story would add to her nightmares. “Trevor might be a jerk, but he’s not a serial killer or anything. I’m going to be fine. And besides, it’s a gated community. You need to know the code to get inside the premises, let alone the building.”
“Yeah, but what if—” Abby didn’t even have to cut her new, inevitably terrifying hypothetical short because the waiter did it for her by returning to their table with their food.
“Can I get anything else for you?” he asked, a cute, tall guy who probably wasn’t even out of college yet.
“We’re okay, thanks,” Abby replied, eager to dig into her chicken and waffles. The waiter gave her a flirtatious smile and winked.
“Well, if you need anything, give me a wave.”
Chandra turned a wicked grin to Abby as she cut her double cheeseburger in half. “I think he was flirting with you,” she warned, and Abby rolled her eyes.
“So?” she asked. “And for the record, he could have been flirting with you.”
Chandra gestured from head to toe, beginning with her buzz-cut hair and plaid button-up and ending with her combat boots. “I think that even the average man is smart enough to know that this look isn’t for them,” she pointed out, “and you’re dodging. Are you going to give him your number? You know he wants it. And if we’re wrong—my fries aren’t that great, anyway, so we don’t have to come back.”
Abby laughed. “No, I’m not,” she said firmly. “I’m not looking for a boyfriend yet. I just broke up with a psycho.”
“Which is exactly why you need to get back out there! I can introduce you to some people if you want.”
“I don’t think we have the same type,” Abby said, and Chandra rolled her eyes.
“If I knew a bunch of cute single women, do you think I’d still be single?” She stopped to take a massive bite of her burger and then continued before she’d fully swallowed it. “I know your natural inclination will be to brood, but Trevor is not worth mourning, so I’m not going to let you.”
Abby sputtered. “I don’t brood,” she denied, but it didn’t fool the woman who’d been her best friend for years.
“You do,” she insisted. “It’s what I like
about you—you’re not afraid to open up your heart and get attached. But it also means that every time you have a breakup, you hole yourself up for a few months to lick your wounds.” Abby couldn’t deny that, so she took a bite of her dinner so she didn’t have to.
“Either way, I think I’ve got some trust issues I’m going to have to work through before I hop into a new relationship,” she claimed, and Chandra laughed again.
“Who said anything about a relationship?” she asked. “I said I know cute singles, not that I’ve booked a wedding venue. What you need is some good ol’ fashioned rebound sex.”