It felt wrong.
There was enough trouble in the world; there was no need to go looking for it by dangling bait in front of a hungry beast with sharp teeth.
Tanner nudged my elbow. “The feeding show always was your favorite.”
Either that has changed or Ray was a really good liar.
I shrugged and looked down to Sammy who was still on my lap, clapping so hard his hands would miss each other every so often and land on his chubby arms. He looked back at me and smiled, mustard crusted around the corners of his mouth. I didn’t care if it left me with a bad taste in my mouth, if it made Sammy smile like that, it was alright by me. “Nah, it’s great.”
On the way back to the car, Sammy walked between us, grabbing both of our hands. We swung him back and forth as he shrieked in delight, my stomach doing a little flip every time I knew his smile was a result of something I’d done.
We’d done.
“You know, we had our first kiss here. Right in the parking lot. We actually couldn’t afford to go inside so we set a blanket on the grass by the fence to watch one of the shows until we were told to leave by security,” Tanner said, his eyes squinting as a low hanging cloud rolled away from the bright sun.
“We did?” I looked around to the lot crowded with families and searched for something familiar, something that would snap it all in place for me.
But it never came.
When Sammy’s little legs got too tired to keep walking, Tanner lifted him and carried him on his shoulders as we made our way through the parking lot. When Tanner’s hand sought mine out, I could already see where the truck was parked. The happiness radiating off of the boys was infectious as they listed all their favorite parts of the day. I didn’t want to ruin the amazing day we’d had by pulling away and again reminding Tanner that the girl he loved wasn’t his anymore. So for the twenty or so feet to the truck, I let Tanner hold my hand.
And for all twenty or so feet, I thought about King.
After we’d left, I was surprised when instead of taking me back to my house, Tanner passed it, and instead pulled into the driveway of his parents flamingo pink house.
“What are we doing?” I asked, as Tanner continued down the long winding driveway to the back of the house.
“I live in the pool house out back,” Tanner explained.
“No, I mean why didn’t you drop me off?”
“I figured you might want to give Sammy a bath, read him a bedtime story, help me put him to bed,” Tanner said, parking the truck right outside a smaller but still bright pink version of the main house. The windows of the truck were only slightly lower than the roof of the pool house.
The truth was that I wanted to do all of that and more. I didn’t even have to think hard on it to know that what I really wanted was to keep Sammy with me. Have him sleep in his room down the hall from me, have me be the one who he wakes up to in the morning, and who rocks him to sleep at night.
But I wasn’t going to push anything. I was still the girl with the brain injury. Of course no one would trust him with me full-time when I don’t even remember being a mother in the first place. But I didn’t have to remember being Sammy’s mom to actually be his mom.
Because he remembered me. And looking in the rearview mirror, into Sammy’s identical eyes, I knew that nothing else mattered but being everything to that boy that he wanted me to be.
That I wanted me to be.
“Yesssssssssss,” Sammy agreed from his car seat. “Storrrrryyyy.”
“I guess I’m giving a bath and reading a bedtime story then.” It’s not like I could argue with that level of enthusiasm even if I wanted to.
I didn’t want to.
“It’s nice to see you smile.” Tanner said, coming around and opening the passenger side.
Inside the pool house was more like a large hotel room; the bed and living room were one in the same. A small portion of the main room had been walled off to make a makeshift room for Sammy.
Tanner ran the bath water and, at first, I stood there in the center of the bathroom, feeling useless and uncomfortable, not knowing what to do with my hands. But when Sammy threw a washcloth and it smacked against my face, I pulled it off and went over to the tub. The second I kneeled down beside him, it all fell into place. I washed his hair and soaped him up as if I’d done it a thousand times before.
Because I have done it a thousand times before.
When bath time was over, I dressed Sammy in the PJs Tanner had laid out and he clamored up onto my lap as I read to him from Larry the Leopard Learns His Spots by Dr. Nellenbach. When he drifted off to sleep, his head on my shoulder, I walked him over to the other side of the room and set him in his bed, which was low to the ground, and had a guardrail along the side so he wouldn’t fall to the floor during the night. I was just about to leave when Sammy’s little voice pulled me back into the room. “Mommy?” he asked.
“I’m here,” I said, kneeling beside his bed.
“Mommy, sunshine song?” Sammy asked, talking with his thumb in his mouth. He yawned. “Sunshine song when I go na-night.”
I opened my mouth to tell him that I didn’t know what song he was talking about, but the words of the song came out instead. As I softly sang to him, Sammy closed his eyes and hummed along.
You are my sunshine, my only sunshine
you make me happy when skies are gray
you’ll never know dear, how much I love you,
please don’t take my sunshine away.
When the song was over Sammy opened his eyes. “Mommy, snuggles with me?” Sammy lifted his little blanket.
It was an offer I couldn’t refuse. I sat on his mattress and lifted him into my arms. I sat back against the headboard and cradled him under my chin, setting his blanket down over both of us.
And for a long time, I just sat there, breathing in his hair. Absorbing the feel of his soft chubby fingers absently playing with mine. A peacefulness I hadn’t known since I left King’s washed over me. The way I felt about Sammy was the most overwhelming sensation I’d ever experienced. Like every single part of me belonged to him. Like the very reason I was ever put on the earth was to be his mother.
“Mommy,” Sammy said, snuggling into my chest, “I wuv you much.”
I covered my mouth with my hand to muffle the sound of the sob that came out of nowhere. I brushed his curls from his eyes and leaned over to kiss him on his head. “I love you too, baby. So much,” I told him.
And I did.
My brain may have forgotten him, but my heart hadn’t.
I stayed there for a long time with my son wrapped in my arms. Long after his breathing became even and I knew he’d long been asleep.
I was careful not to wake him when I wiggled out from underneath him. When my feet hit the floor, Sammy stirred and I stilled until he rolled over onto his stomach with his hands above his head.
Deep in sleep.
I kept my eyes on Sammy as I tiptoed out of the room, running right into Tanner who was standing in the doorway. “Have you been here the whole time?” I whispered.
“Yeah,” Tanner admitted, stepping aside to let me pass. He shut the door. “I couldn’t take my eyes off you guys. Reading stories, bath time, it’s something I never thought I’d see again.”
“It was…amazing,” I admitted.
Tanner grinned and plopped down on the couch. “His room in your house is bigger, but I built this for when he stays with me. Although, I admit, sometimes my mom is the bath giver.” He patted the couch cushion next to him. “My mom and dad have been spoiling him rotten these past few months.”
“Two rooms in two houses,” I said, still standing.
“He was usually only here with me a couple of nights a week.” Tanner said, again patting on the cushion, motioning for me to take a seat. I sat, but on the opposite end of the couch, up against the armrest.
“I don’t bite, Ray,” Tanner said with a laugh.
I tried to relax, but I needed to
say something and I didn’t know how he was going to take it. “I don’t want to push things, Tanner. And I know that I don’t really remember him as my son. But I feel him. He’s a part of me. I know it.” I paused. After starting with all the reasons why he should be reluctant to allow what I was about to ask, I was hesitant to continue.
I closed my eyes. Took a deep breath, and blurted it out. “I want Sammy with me as much as possible. I think he wants to be with me too.” I turned my head away and braced myself for the rejection.
Tanner scoffed. “You’re his mom, Ray. You don’t need my permission to spend time with him.” He stretched his arm over the back of the couch. “Let’s take it slow. Sammy can start spending more time with you, but I think it would be better if it was gradual. It was a hard adjustment for him to be without you, I don’t want to push him into anything too quickly.”
I felt my face light up. It felt good to smile again. “Thank you, I really mean it. That would be great.” I sighed in relief. “Can I ask you something else?”
“Absolutely anything,” Tanner said, and I could tell from the way his eyes shone when he spoke that he really meant it.
“If we were together, then why didn’t we live together? With Sammy? This two houses less than a mile apart thing kind of seems a bit strange. Don’t you think?”
“I know it’s not common these days, but after we had Sammy, we decided we wanted to do things the right way and wait until after graduation, like how we’d originally planned.” Tanner laughed and scrunched his nose. “Actually, you decided that we were going to wait. I’m not going to lie, I did try to talk you into it a few thousand times or so. So that was it. We were going to move in together after the…” he trailed off and slapped himself on the thigh. “Nothing, I shouldn’t have said anything. Just forget it.”
“No, tell me. You promised to help me, to walk me through my life, right?” I reminded him.
Tanner stood and walked over to the kitchen. He opened one of the drawers and pulled something out of it. Holding whatever it was in one hand and covering it with the other, he walked back over to me and sat back down on the couch, this time with his thigh pressing up against mine.
Tanner took his one hand away, revealing a small black box in his palm. “We weren’t going to move in together until after…”
Sheer panic. It’s what I felt as he opened the hinged top of the box, revealing a thin gold band topped with a tiny round diamond.
The few other memories I recalled had kind of flowed into my mind. This one came crashing in like an out of control bus.
Ray
15 years old
Tanner is sick. Really sick. Sicker than he’s letting on. It breaks my heart to see the dark circles under his eyes. The cheeriness of his bright pink Polo doing nothing to brighten the mood of what I know he is just about to tell me.
When he goes to sit at the edge of my bed, he winces when he connects with my soft mattress. He is in pain, has been for a long time. But no matter how many times I ask him if he’s okay, he brushes it off and tells me he’s fine. He can’t brush it off anymore. He was about to come clean and I don’t know if my heart can handle it.
“So, you know I’ve been sick for a while,” he starts, reaching for my hand and intertwining his fingers with mine. Holding hands came naturally to us. We’ve been doing it since we were five. He is my best friend. Him and Nikki. Always have been. We used to act out getting married in the houseboat when we were younger. Upon Tanners insistence, Nikki was always the reverend and Tanner and I were always the bride and groom.
“You’re so bossy. You’re always telling us what to do. It’s not fair.” Nikki used to tell him. “Why don’t I ever get to be the bride Mr. Bossy-Pants?” She’d whine.
“‘Cause Nikki,” Tanner would answer. “Me and Ray really are gonna get married someday.”
Tanner has always been so certain of our future together. It’s his certainty that keeps me from telling that I think of him as just a friend. But that’s also a lie in a way, because I may not love him the way a wife would love her husband, or the way a girlfriend loves her boyfriend, but Tanner and I are so close that he IS so much more to me than just a friend.
And I do love him.
He’s my family.
He is my world.
Him and Nikki both are.
I always thought that maybe I would grow to feel the same way about him that I know he feels about he. We have time. We’re still so young.
We have our whole lives ahead of us…
Recently, all talks of Tanners future stopped.
“Yes, of course I know you’re sick, but you’re getting treatments, right? You’re getting better.” I know it before the words cross my mouth that it isn’t the truth, and somewhere in my mind, I am hoping he would continue the lie he’d been reciting over the last few months. That it is getting better. That it is going to be okay.
I search his eyes for any sign that he is about to tell me that he’s made a miraculous recovery but the hope in his eyes is dying right before me. “Ray, I stopped responding to treatment.”
I feel like someone is punching me in the gut.
No, in the heart.
“But there is something else they can do, right? Some other treatment? Here,” I say, grabbing my laptop off my night stand, opening it up. “Let’s Google what else there is to try. Maybe something Eastern or holistic.” My fingers flew across the keyboard as I tried to find something that I knew didn’t exist. Tanner might be done lying to me but I’m not done lying to myself.
“Ray,” Tanner says softly, shutting my laptop and tipping my chin up so that our eyes meet. “There is nothing else. Trust me, they’ve tried everything.” Tanner has been in and out of the hospital too many times to count since he got sick. At one point, he was away more than he was home because his parents were flying him around the country from specialist to specialist. “But we have time. There is nothing else they can do for me, but what I have is slow growing. I’m not going to see graduation, but they think I have six months, maybe a year. Possibly more.”
Six months. A year. One more birthday with Tanner, one more Christmas. We are fifteen. Life isn’t supposed to end at fifteen. Life should just be beginning. There are so many things Tanner wasn’t going to get to experience. Prom. Graduation. Having kids.
We have the rest of our lives…
I just always thought the rest of our lives would be longer than six months. A year. “That’s no time at all,” I admit, hot tears form in my eyes and spill out onto my cheeks. Tanner leans over and wipes a tear away. His chestnut brown eyes may have lost hope but there is still life in them. There would be no brown-eyed curly haired kids with his eyes calling him Daddy.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” I say, leaping from the bed. I barely make it to the bathroom before emptying the contents of my stomach into the toilet until I am heaving and nothing else comes up.
I make a promise right then and there, leaning over that toilet bowl, that I am going to make the best of the time we have left. To do everything I could to make sure that when Tanner goes out, he would go out having experienced everything he could before his time was up. I flush the toilet and brush my teeth. When I go back out into my room, Tanner is leaning up against my headboard staring out the window. Clouds are rolling over the sun, casting an eerie shadow over his body. “How are you feeling right now?” I ask, making my way over to him. “Physically.”
“They gave me some meds this morning. I was hurting for a bit, but now I’m actually feeling pretty good. If they didn’t just tell me that I was going to be worm food in a year I would probably be feeling great.” He flashes me a small smile and I wince at his words, knowing full well that they are partial, if not all lies, but my resolve to give him everything and more in the time I still have him is strong and keeps me focused on the beautiful curly-haired boy on my bed. “Are you okay?” he asks me. I let out a laugh.
“Are you really asking me if I’m
okay?” I snort.
Tanner, finding the humor in his question, laughs too. “Yeah, I guess I am.” Throughout the years it’s been that smile of his that’s taken me out of every dark place I’ve ever been in, and although my family situation is far from ideal, Tanner always makes me feel like as long as I have his smile, I am the luckiest girl in the world.
“Can I try something?” I ask. He looks at me and raises a brow.
“Sure, what’s up?”
I don’t answer, instead I pull my t-shirt over my head and unclasp my bra. “What are you doing?” he whispers, his eyes wide as he stares at my bare breasts for the first time.
“Just tell me if I hurt you,” I say, pushing my jean shorts down until I am only in my cotton panties.
“Ray, you don’t have to do this. I don’t want you to have sex with me because you feel sorry for me. I don’t want pity sex from you.”
“Pity sex?” I bark loud enough for other people in the house to hear. “Pity sex?” I repeat in a whisper. “Tanner Redmond, this isn’t pity sex. This is just making the most out of life.” I straddle him and look for signs of him being in pain. There aren’t any. I grab his wrists and place the palm of his hands on my breasts.
“I don’t want to do it this way, Ray,” Tanner says, although something stiffening in his jeans tells me otherwise. He must read my face. “No, I want to. Of course I fucking want to.” Tanner never cursed, but there was excitement in his voice. “Roll over.” He pushes me off of him until I am flat on my back. He stands up and removes his shirt. His once muscled and tanned body has been replaced with pale skin over protruding bones. He is still beautiful to me.
He would always be beautiful to me.
I lift my hips and pull off my panties. His boxers tent as he gazes down at me. “Under the covers,” he says. I shift and raise up my comforter and sheet, scooting underneath. He pushes down his boxers and I lift up the covers so he can join me. I spread my legs and he settles himself on top of me, his arousal pressed up against my stomach.
Tyrant (KING Book 2) Page 10