by J Santiago
Standing outside her door, he hesitated. He couldn’t figure out what else he needed to do. He thought he understood the reasons she held back, but in the dark of night, they sounded like hollow excuses. Maybe he needed to be clearer. Resting his head on the door, he couldn’t wait any longer. Decision made, he pushed open the door with a bit too much force and stumbled in as the door bumped and banged off the wall.
He’d expected Lu to jump or startle awake, but instead he met her blue eyes, illuminated by the light of the door. He stood awkwardly in the doorway, gazing uncomfortably at her.
“Couldn’t sleep?” she quipped.
“You either?” he asked.
“Nah. Been up since about three.” But it hadn’t driven her out of her bed as his energy had. “Been laying here hoping I’d eventually fall asleep.”
“Been up for a while,” he offered. Lu continued to lie there, on her stomach, but she’d propped her head on her hands.
“I figured. You’re showered and dressed and I smell coffee.”
“Yeah.” He didn’t move, feeling more unsure of himself than he’d ever remembered feeling.
“Are you going to stand in the doorway or come in?” she asked.
“I’m deciding,” he answered truthfully.
“What’s going on, Lex?” she asked, pushing up on her bed so that she was sitting crisscross applesauce.
His hand found the door that’d run away from him and he shut it gently behind him. Walking to the bed, he sat down near her but without invading her space. He looked over at her and grinned. Without thinking anymore, he leaned over and kissed her hard. She kissed him back and dug her fingers in his too-long hair, holding him close. He pulled away from her but continued to hold her face in both hands.
“Look, I want us to have a chance. Can we take things slow and see what happens?” Lex said.
She reached up and pulled his hands away from her face. She jumped off the bed and ran into her bathroom. He heard the sink run and grinned.
“Really,” he teased when she returned, “you had to brush your teeth?”
Looking slightly embarrassed she grinned shyly. “Yes. If we are going to be talking this close to one another.”
He rolled his eyes. “Answer me.”
“Ugh, Lex, why are you pushing this?” Her grin replaced by a look of dismay, she ran her hands nervously through her hair.
“Seriously, Lu? Since our parent-teacher conference, I haven’t been able to think about anything else. I want to be part of your life and not just as a parent. I don’t know how else to tell you. I love you. And I know you love me. I can feel it when you kiss me. I want a chance for us to be a family.” He saw her eyes widen, and he knew she wanted to grab hold, but she continued to hold back.
“Lex, it’s been a crazy year for you. You lost your dad. You said yourself you feel like you’ve missed out on something. There are too many reasons not to do it right now. I can’t be a mistake that you regret later. We have too much between us. Please, just let this be.”
If she’d tried to convince him that she didn’t love him, he would have been able to fight her. He’d have kissed her into oblivion or held her until she capitulated. But her reasons, he could understand. He knew his feelings weren’t going to change, but she didn’t have that faith in him. While he wanted to be angry with her, he felt resigned.
“Look, I’m going to let this go for now. But it’s not going away. And in one or two or three years, when I still feel the same way and I come back to you, you are going to regret that you let this time get away. We’ve already lost nine years. How much more are you willing to lose?”
He watched her, hoping it would sink in, wanting her to change her mind. But she didn’t. She merely continued to stare at him before taking a deep breath and turning away from him.
“I need to shower.” She got up from the bed and left him sitting there.
Lex waited until he heard the shower running. Then he left the room.
43
The last to leave the field, Lex entered the tunnel, the exhilaration of the win pounding through him, the adrenaline rush shaking its way out. He thought he saw her standing at the threshold of the tunnel waiting for him. Shaking his head to dispel the hopeful illusion, he made his way to the locker room. Thus had been his existence recently, since that painfully slow good-bye in the airport. His brain conjured her at odd moments. Not alone times; rather, in the midst of a game, in the crowd at the stadium, at a bar with his teammates—all places she would never appear. Wishful thinking, he knew. He thought his parting words would convince her, break through her scared. But somehow his abandonment of her at seventeen stood out greater in her mind than his love for her at twenty-six.
He accepted his teammates’ congratulatory handshakes and pats on the back before he showered. Donning jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and slides, he grabbed his bag, heading back out into the now-empty tunnel. Except it wasn’t empty. Standing directly in the spot he’d imagined her, Lu leaned against the wall. He often found himself startled by the woman who’d grown from the little girl with the serious blue eyes, the too-old soul, and the super-smart brain. Enveloped in a black midlength coat, a scarf that covered most of her neck and face and a pair of knee-length boots, she resembled an Alaskan bank robber. He almost blinked but knew that the vision wouldn’t disappear this time.
He sauntered toward her, swag from the game making him cockier than normal. Only in the face of Lu did he feel any vulnerability.
“Everything OK?” he asked, eyebrow raised, grin in place.
She smiled because she found it hard not to smile in his presence. Nodding, she said, “Yes, Nina is good and all is well.”
Although he knew the answer, he couldn’t resist teasing her. “Here with Malcolm?”
He watched her eyes grow wide before she realized he was messing with her. “I thought I could treat you to a postgame meal. If memory serves, you are always ravenous after a game.”
“You and your SAT words …” Shaking his head, he reached a hand out to her. “What’d you have in mind?”
“Steak?”
“God, I love you,” he said, not in a serious, declaration sort of way but in a way that made Lu giggle as she took his hand.
They didn’t say much on the ride. Of course they talked about and discussed Nina. Lex had recently disciplined her for the first time and had survived almost unscathed but admitted to Lu that he’d had a hard time resisting the tears. “I put my earbuds in and blasted Jack Johnson so that I wouldn’t have to hear it.”
Rolling her eyes, she assured him it would get easier.
After they plowed through dinner without any discussion of her unexpected appearance, Lex’s patience began to wane, but he continued to wait. When the waiter brought them both coffee—he had never been able to get accustomed to tea—he sat back.
“What’s up, Lu?”
Toying with her coffee cup, she remained silent.
Frustrated, Lex signaled the waiter, requesting their check. When he arrived, however, Lu aborted his attempt to place the check down.
“Can I have a Stoli and tonic with lemon? And then you can cash us out.” She handed him her credit card and looked at Lex. “My invitation. My treat.”
Lex didn’t argue. Again he waited. The high from the game and the amazing meal worked against him and he started to get tired. Moving forward, he leaned his forearms on the table, taking away some of her space. “I’m getting tired and my patience is ebbing. I know you have something you want to talk about. It didn’t used to be this hard to get you to tell me what you are thinking.” There. Gauntlet thrown.
“What makes you think we can do this?” she asked, taking him by surprise.
“Do what?” he asked, teasing her. At her eye rolling, he continued. “I’m not going to make this easy, Louisa May.”
“How utterly surprising,” she murmured, smiling. “What makes you think we can make this work?” At his raised eyebrow, she added, “Yo
u and me, together.”
“Ah, that wasn’t so hard.”
The waiter arrived with Lu’s drink and the check. Signing the slip and putting her credit card away allowed her to avoid his gaze. But zip-ping up her purse, she stored it on the back of her chair and turned to face him. “We don’t even know each other. You’re suggesting we just pick up and do what, date? What happens when we decide we don’t want to date anymore? It’s not just you and me in this anymore. It would affect Nina.”
Part of him was disappointed. This was the same argument they’d already had. He’d offered assurances, but she wasn’t buying it, which meant that even though she showed up tonight, she wasn’t any closer to capitulating.
“What do you want to know, Lu?”
Her eyebrows drew together. “What do you mean?”
“You said we don’t even know each other. What don’t you know?”
At her surprised expression, he sighed. “You want to know how much money I make?” he asked. He knew this would piss her off, but they had to start somewhere.
“No! I don’t care about your money.”
“I know. See, I know that about you because you haven’t cashed one fucking check that I’ve sent for child support. But just so we’re clear, and in the name of full disclosure, I make a lot of money. My last three-year contract was worth about twenty million dollars. I don’t expect that my new one, which will be negotiated soon, will be any less. I also make some money for endorsements, but since I’m picky about that, I have only ever put my name on one product. I always felt that the more I endorsed, the cheaper the endorsement. I give approximately twenty percent of what I make to a secret trust”—he winked at her—“which you now know about. About thirty-five percent of it I give to charity—Doctors Without Borders is my favorite, but I also give to a number of schools for pregnant teenagers in the U.S.” When her eyes welled up, he chased it away with his next statement. “I haven’t been with another woman since I was with you in May. Absolutely no interest.” On the heels of that statement, he continued. “I still love to play soccer and would play for free if they stopped paying me. When I’m done, though, or when my level of play starts to drop off, I will stop. I won’t stick around. I definitely want to follow in Malcolm Helms’s footsteps, because he’s done everything right. Which means I’d like to stay here, but if it wasn’t working for you or Nina, I’d go wherever we needed to go.”
Lu sat stunned. Not really knowing what to say.
“Here’s the other thing, Lu: I do know you. I know that you finished undergrad at twenty, even with a break for childbirth. You did a joint master’s and doctorate program, which you finished in record time. You wrote a proposal to the athletic department regarding your research, and they allowed you to work with their football team. During that time, you also approached the NFL with your results at the collegiate level, and they requested that you work with their teams. So by the time you were twenty-five, you were making money consulting, which you used to support you and Nina, so you could stop taking money from your parents. I know that you still embarrass rather easily, which is a fucking blast for me, and that when I see you mothering Nina, it stops my heart. I’ve loved you since I was eight. It’s never waned. It was buried for a while, but when you walked back into my life, it all was there, waiting for you. Now we can keep arguing and you can keep running away from me, but when you finally start to trust me you will have wasted more time.”
Sitting back in his chair, Lex studied her. She didn’t say anything while she finished her drink. Then she stood up and held out her hand.
He eyed her warily, raising his eyebrow, expecting something.
“Let’s go.”
He stayed in his chair. “Where are we going?”
“Home,” she said, matter-of-factly, as if he hadn’t just monologued for her.
“That’s it?” he asked. “You have nothing for me?”
She smiled tentatively. “I hope I wasn’t too presumptuous, but I asked Mrs. Auberly to watch Nina tonight.”
He shot her the death glare, at which she laughed, the Lu laugh, which made his heart clench.
“You’ve got nothing on Dr. J.,” she said. She must have realized that his calm façade was really just that—a façade. “So Mrs. Auberly and Nina are at your house.”
He almost smiled. “My house?”
“Yeah. I figured I wouldn’t want to leave you in the middle of the night, so it seemed the best solution.”
Standing, he took her hand and pulled her in to him. “Awfully presumptuous of you.”
She raised both her eyebrows, “You think?” she said, smiling.
“Yeah. It was. You have something to say to me?”
Her smile faded. “I love you, AJ.”
“That’s my girl,” he said, right before he kissed her.
Acknowledgments
I’ve been writing stories all of my life. I even have a first novel, still sitting on my desk, with all sorts of editing left to be done. But, then I got married and had children. Finding time to write became difficult. A really good friend of mine told me about National Novel Writing Month. I missed it in 2011, but marked my calendar for November of 2012. Lex and Lu had already taken up residence in my brain—but forcing myself to sit down everyday and meet a quota gave me the extra push I needed to write this book. I loved meeting my word requirement and watching my characters come to life. I liked it so much that I did it again in November 2013. I can honestly say that without the National Novel Writing Month, I may never have taken the time to write this story.
They say that writing it is the hardest part. And maybe that’s true, but for me everything that comes after it is overwhelming and intimidating. I may never have taken the next step if it wasn’t for my friend Ken. When I sent him the file, I was extremely nervous. He’s definitely not a romance novel guy. But he read it and liked it and pushed me to do something with it. His belief in me, and what I could do, made me feel like I could actually get it published. As soon as he finished it, he was on the phone reaching out to Lee Gordon. Before I knew it, I was calling someone I didn’t know, asking him to point me in the right direction. When I asked Ken what I was supposed to say to Lee, his response was, “I wrote this awesome book and I want to get it published.” Thanks to Ken and Lee, I was submitting my book for consideration the next week. Ken, I feel some sort of way about what you did for me.
The idea for Lex and Lu came about during a gathering of our neighborhood supper club and our families. Watching all of the kids run around and interact, it seems natural that somewhere along the way some of these children, who have known each other most of their lives, will fall in love. Suddenly, Lex and Lu were born. Thank you to the amazing women who took me in: Cathy, Leah, Heidi, Evette, Cori, Stephanie, Janice, Shelly, Chris, Stephani. Without your acceptance of our family into yours, this story would never have made it to the page.
I have to give my most heartfelt shout out to my GIRLS. It’s not the traditional beta group—but it totally worked for me. They received my work every Monday, which made Tuesday my favorite day because they were always quick to respond—for better or worse. Brandi, Patti, Jen and Gwen, I love you all dearly. There’s no way this happens without love, support, critique, and praise. And to my more-than-best friend Nhatle, thank you for always being there for me and my children.
Thank you to my team at Greenleaf Book Group, LLC. Hobbs, who brought me in; Bryan, who managed my project; Kim, my cover designer; and Amber, Elizabeth, and Don, who had the task of editing. I appreciate all of the help and guidance throughout the process.
I’ve watched my parents support us in whatever endeavors we’ve embarked on. I’ve always stayed on the straight and narrow, but I realize now that without their ever-present belief in our ability to do whatever we think we can do, I wouldn’t have taken this leap of faith. I hope that I can be the same for my children so that they have the courage to be who they are.
Finally to my non-reading husband
, Fatty. You are the perfect partner, an amazing father, the love of my life. Thanks for helping me find the time to do what I do.