Regardless of that, Stephanie was right. I couldn’t expect everyone to change their entire lives just because of the end of the relationship. There was no reason my parents and Mason’s parents shouldn’t maintain their friendship.
The next night I went into the bar for work wondering if Mason or any of the boys would mention the barbecue. I’d gotten used to Mason being the first of the brothers to get to The Hollow and often the only one there when I arrived. We fell into the rhythm of getting the bar ready to open for the evening.
“How was your day off?” he asked when we’d gotten much of the work finished.
“It was good. I spent most of it with my parents,” I said.
He still didn’t say anything about the barbecue, so I wondered if his parents had even mentioned it to him yet.
“How’s your dad doing?” he asked.
“Says he’s much better, but Mom thinks it’s him being stubborn.”
He smiled and poured two shots. I caught one of the glasses as he slid it across the bar to me. We clinked the rims of our glasses together and took the shots. I never took more than one, but I had found just one calmed my nerves and made it easier to work next to Mason.
He took the glasses and put them in the sink. I went behind the bar to get the trays of salt and pepper, napkin holders, and other items we needed to put out on the tables. He reached for them at the same time, and we bumped into each other.
The way I moved suddenly made it so our bodies were pushed up against each other with my back to the bar. I drew in a breath, and Mason stared into my eyes for an intense second. In the next instant, he grabbed my face and kissed me. It was brief, but it left me stunned, and for the rest of the night, I found it much harder to concentrate on work.
14
Mason
I knew for sure now what it was going to be like to kiss Ava again.
I also knew how she would react to it. And that was not well. As soon as the kiss ended, she scurried away under the pretense of setting up the tables for the evening. But ever since then, she had been weird. It wasn’t like she was completely avoiding me. That might have been easier. Instead, she was just kind of skirting around me. Orbiting me rather than actually interacting with me.
If only I had checked my text messages earlier that day. If I had read them when they came in rather than putting it aside so I could focus on work, I would have gotten the one from my mother. Then I would know about the barbecue the entire family was invited to at Ava’s parents’ house before I decided to spontaneously kiss her. It would have at least given me all the information I needed.
As it was, the day of the barbecue had come, and I still hadn’t decided if I should even go. Things were awkward with Ava at work as it was. Being away from the professional environment and just hanging out with our families would only amplify that.
Our parents had been friends for many years, and all of them were thrilled when she and I were together. There was a bit of a royal families uniting their kingdoms vibe to it. From the time we were children, they encouraged our friendship. And when it blossomed into a romance, they were as happy about it as we were. From day one, they talked about us like we were engaged.
In all honesty, I didn’t mind. From the very beginning, Ava was my endgame. She was everything to me. I couldn’t imagine a moment of my life without her. Even when I got scared and acted like a punk. There was probably a better, more sophisticated word I could use for it now that I was an adult, but the one my brothers hurled at me back when it all went down worked just as well after all these years as it did then.
Our breakup was devastating, and it was just compounded by having to tell my parents. They were crushed, and I had to deal with the sense that I had broken Ava’s heart and disappointed my parents all while running my life through a woodchipper.
Even all these years later, our parents weren’t over us not being together anymore. My parents believed we would be back together one day, that us breaking up was a fluke of our youth and she’d find her way back to me. I’d heard her parents thought the same way. Which just made the idea of being on display in front of them while we waded through the murky weirdness that was our current interaction with each other even more uncomfortable.
But what was also uncomfortable was the thought of telling my parents I wasn’t going to be there. They would want to know why and start making assumptions. Questions would start flying. Inevitably they would try to be helpful by making big, loud excuses for me when they got to the barbecue. It would just be easier to face it myself.
Finally coming to the decision to go came late, and by the time I got there, it was already in full swing. As soon as I walked out onto the deck behind their house, I saw Stephanie. That wasn’t a coincidence. She wasn’t just there because she and Ava had been best friends for years. Stephanie was a living shield.
As soon as Stephanie saw me, she glanced back behind her, and I caught sight of Ava. She was standing beside the table full of food, talking to her mother. Seeing her there in a flowing floral sundress that grazed over her curves with the gentle breeze and scooped low on her graceful back brought back all the compulsions that made me kiss her behind the bar the other day. I couldn’t help myself then, and if I was any closer to her now, I would be right back to that place.
Trying to put those thoughts behind me, I headed over to where Ava’s father sat on a chaise lounge propped with a variety of pillows and cushions. An umbrella brought close up beside him protected him from the sun, and a little table to the other side held a glass of iced lemonade. I walked up to him and grinned.
“I see what you’re doing,” I said. “You’re just faking all this two broken legs stuff so you can get all these perks.”
Wayne smiled up at me and chuckled. “You caught me. These casts—” he knocked on the protective devices on his legs, “—totally fake. I had the prop department up at the high school make them for me.”
I laughed. “Well, you are pulling it off. I brought you some of this.”
His face lit up when I pulled the bottle of Crown Royal from behind my back and held it out to him. It remembered it being his favorite drink when Ava and I were dating. He always had a little of it after dinner or at parties. Wayne took the bottle and held it carefully in his hands, gazing down at it for a few seconds before setting it to the side.
“Thank you,” he said. He reached up his arms, and I leaned down into his hug. “You’ve always been the son I’ve never had.”
And there it was. I’d been at the barbecue for less than five minutes, and it had already begun. I could only hope that would be the most intrusive of it.
He opened the bottle and tipped some of the Crown Royal into his lemonade, then invited me to get my own. I went to the drink table and came back with a lemonade for him to augment. We chatted for a few minutes before he told me to go get something to eat. Since I was late getting to the gathering, everybody else was scattered around already eating from their massively mounded plates.
But considering this event was being hosted by Linda Williams, there was more than enough food to go around. She was well-known for her proclivity toward feeding people. It was her love language, as Ava once told me.
I went to the food table and glanced over the options. Since everybody else already had the jump on me, I grabbed a second plate. I was going to have to take my second helpings along with my first. I mounded up the various meats and sides along with cornbread and rolls and gingerly balanced both plates and my drink as I made my way over to the picnic table where Stephanie, Tyler, and Matt sat.
“Does no one feed you?” Stephanie asked a few minutes later after I’d taken down much of my plates.
“Not like this,” I said. “Everything’s delicious. This macaroni and cheese is amazing.”
“Ava made that,” Stephanie said.
“She did?” I looked around to find her so I could compliment her directly, but Ava seemed to be missing. “Do you know where she went?”
Stephanie looked around and shrugged. I finished a bit more of my food, then washed it down with doctored-up lemonade before getting up. I wandered around for a few minutes before finding Ava sitting on the front porch, her elbows rested on her thighs and her chin in her hands as she stared out over the neighborhood glowing in the setting sun.
“Nice day, isn’t it?” I asked.
She looked up at me, evidently not at all startled by my showing up, then resumed her staring. “Yes. There’s something about Sundays. Somehow they seem prettier.”
“More peaceful,” I agreed as I sat down beside her. “I think it’s because most people are taking it a little easier.” Ava nodded but didn’t say anything. The conversation was square on my shoulders. “Look, I’m sorry for kissing you the other day. I shouldn’t have done that. I can understand if you’re mad at me.”
Ava glanced over at me. “I’m not mad about you kissing me. I was just shocked by it is all.”
We sat in silence for a few seconds, but I felt years of questions and wondering bubbling up inside me. There was so much that hadn’t been said between us that needed to be said. I had been waiting a long time, and I couldn’t take it anymore.
“Can we talk about what happened?” I asked. “Not the kiss, but what happened between us?”
Ava nodded and took a sip from a cup beside her that smelled a lot like vodka. “Sure.”
“Why did you leave the way you did? I know you wanted to go to school and have a career and all that, but why did it have to be that way?” I asked.
Ava’s sigh sounded like the world was deflating her. “Losing the baby about destroyed me. I wasn’t sure what else to do. Getting pregnant obviously wasn’t in my plans, and I was completely terrified about it. Then it was gone, and I felt like I did something wrong. Like that the miscarriage was my fault.”
“You can’t think that way,” I said. “Miscarriages are very common. Far more common than most people think. I’ve heard one in every four women experience at least one miscarriage during their reproductive years. Most of them occur very early in the pregnancy because there’s something wrong with the baby. You didn’t do anything that would have caused it.”
Ava looked shocked by my spiel as she turned to look at me. “You know all that?”
I nodded and shrugged modestly. “Yeah. Well, I looked into it a lot after it happened.”
“You did?” She sounded surprised, but there was a soft, almost nostalgic note in her voice.
“After you left, I read up on it, trying to find out as much as I could. I wanted to know about it for myself, but I also wanted to be able to help you if…”
“If…?” she asked, leading me.
“If you ever came back to me,” I said.
The conversation broke the ice, but maybe a bit too far. All my efforts to keep my distance from Ava and not let on that I was still attracted to her, or still hanging on to any of my feelings toward her, went all to hell as the Crown Royal and vodka bottles emptied out. Both of us ended up very drunk and very flirty, drawing looks from our parents, my brothers, and Stephanie.
By the end of the night, my brothers tugged me away. They asked Linda and Wayne if my car could stay at their house for the night, and when the Williamses agreed, they poured me into one of their cars and drove me home. Finally, everything felt like Ava and I were at peace with each other.
15
Ava
I woke up disoriented and groggy again. But this time it wasn’t because my phone was ringing. Instead, it was sharp little slices of sunlight sneaking through the cracks of my curtains and searing my eyes. Where was my sleep mask? I had gotten into so much of a habit of wearing it, I couldn’t believe I didn’t have it on.
Until it sank in that I didn’t have curtains on my bedroom windows in my little apartment. Wooden slat blinds all the way. That meant the sunlight was coming through the curtains somewhere else. Somewhere I didn’t have a sleep mask to put on and keep myself properly defended from the early morning sunlight. Like my parents’ house.
It all crashed back down on me. The night before was the barbecue my parents threw, and so I did my part to contribute to the event by getting drunk and reminiscing with Mason. So drunk, in fact, that I couldn’t even drive myself home. Which was how I ended up spending the night in my childhood bedroom. With the exception of posters, pictures, awards, and other uncomfortable memorabilia of youth, everything about the room was kept the way it was right before I left.
I groaned and dropped my face into my hands. “Ugh. I am ridiculous.”
Something shifted beside me, and the movement startled me. Gasping, I jumped to the side and looked down. A pink sleeping bag with Stephanie’s head on top sat bolt upright and turned to look at me. Stephanie’s hair was a swirling mass on the top of her head and down her face.
“So am I,” she said.
I laughed. “What are you doing here?”
“Same as you. Sleeping it off,” she said.
She wiggled her arms out of the sleeping bag and pushed it down to her waist. I noticed she was wearing a pajama top I recognized as one of mine from high school. Mom really had just kept all my clothes exactly as they were.
I shook my head and rubbed my eyes, pushing my hair back away from my forehead. My memories of the evening before were a little murky, and a flicker of worry went through me. “So… what exactly are we sleeping off? I don’t remember coming to bed, and I’m having a bit of trouble piecing together everything that happened last night.”
“Well,” Stephanie said, scrambling up onto the bed beside me, “you left the barbecue for a little while. I figured you just needed some time away from everything.”
“You mean away from Mason,” I said.
She hesitated. “Yes. But then he noticed you were gone and went to find you.”
I nodded. “I remember that. I was sitting on the porch having a drink, and he came out to talk to me.”
“When you came back, the two of you were pretty chummy.”
“Oh, no,” I groaned. “Did anybody notice?”
“Everybody noticed,” she said. I groaned again and flopped forward over my bent legs. She patted my back. “But don’t worry, it wasn’t like you were crawling on each other or anything. You were just super friendly and a little flirty. You started drinking, so I started drinking, so we drank together. And that’s how we ended up here.”
I sat up and sighed. “Well, I guess that’s not so bad. It’s like our old sleepovers.”
“It’s a little different than our old sleepovers. We weren’t drunk during those,” Stephanie pointed out.
“No, but they usually involved a lot of talk about Mason, so that’s right on par.”
“True. So, what happened on that porch?” she asked.
I let out a breath. “We finally had that talk. He asked me what happened and why I left the way I did. We’ve never really talked about it. It finally gave me the chance to open up about how painful losing the baby was and that I just didn’t know what I was supposed to do next. It was too hard, and I didn’t know how to handle it. So, I left.”
“How did he react to that?”.
“Better than I thought,” I said. “He told me he looked up miscarriages and learned about all of it. He wanted to be able to help me through it if I came back.”
Stephanie looked stunned. She blinked a couple times. “Wow. I wouldn’t have expected that.”
“I know. Neither would I. Not that he’s a bad guy or anything, but I just never thought he would go to those lengths.”
“So, what does this mean?” Stephanie asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Except…”
“Except?”
“He kissed me,” I said.
Stephanie gasped, her hands covering her mouth. “At the barbecue?”
“No. At the bar. A few days ago.”
“He kissed you a few days ago and you didn’t tell me?” she asked, obviously frustrate
d.
“I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. We were just getting ready for the workday, and he gave me a fast kiss. That was it. Nothing long and drawn-out or anything. I didn’t even know what to think about it,” I said.
“What do you think about it now?” she asked.
“I’m still not sure.”
That evening I showed up at the bar, trying to prepare myself for seeing Mason. I didn’t know what it was going to be like between us, but I was hopeful. Walking into the bar, I looked over to where he usually was and saw Tyler standing there instead. He noticed me and waved.
“Hey,” he said. “I had a great time at the barbecue yesterday.”
“Good,” I said. “It was fun.”
He noticed my eyes flickering around. “Mason’s running late. He had to go back to your parents’ house and pick up his truck.”
“Ah,” I said. “Yeah, I thought I noticed it was still there when I left earlier.”
We went to work getting the bar ready for the evening, and about half an hour later, Mason showed up. I looked up at him and smiled, but he brushed past me and went into the office. When he came out a few minutes later, he greeted me, but it was short and distanced. He was weird for the rest of the time we were getting ready for the evening, and I decided to ignore it. I didn’t want to get into it with him while we were at work.
But damn was that man wishy-washy. I really thought our conversation on the front porch was going to have a different effect. That maybe things would have cleared up and we’d be able to move forward one way or another. Now I wasn’t so sure anymore. If anything, it seemed like our conversation had made him more awkward around me.
Compared to the event nights, the crowd that night was fairly low. I was feeling a bit let down by it, and it must have shown on my face. Jesse walked up to the bar after bringing out a plate of food and leaned over to look at me.
Second Chance Baby Page 9