When It's Right

by Denault, Victoria

“I know it does for me,” he replies, and then he points to the sky. “But that doesn’t hurt either.”

  I turn to look at the setting sun. Every inch of the sky is a beautiful rose-gold color. The sound of the waves hitting the shore a few feet away immediately makes my shoulders start to loosen. I tilt my neck from side to side, and then I feel his hands on my waist.

  “Come here,” he whispers and positions me between his legs on the blanket, my back to his front, facing the sinking sun. He starts to rub my shoulders, and it feels so incredible I accidently let out a moan.

  “I’ve heard that sound before,” he whispers against the back of my ear. “And I know it means I’m doing something right.”

  “You do everything right,” I sigh back. “You’re a unicorn.”

  You’re my unicorn, I think, and it should scare me, but then he hits a knot right between my shoulder blades and digs in, and all I can feel is sweet relief. I moan again.

  17

  Griffin

  I didn’t think I would be making out with her on a beach at sunset, but I’m definitely not complaining. Everything between Sadie and me is unpredictable. Not just that, but if you were to make a list of all the dos and don’ts of a successful new relationship, we’d probably tick every item in the don’t column—but again, I have no complaints.

  She’s a fucking fantastic kisser. She holds nothing back. Her lips are needy, her tongue is greedy, and there’s this untamed wildness to everything about her when she’s kissing me that wakes up parts of me I thought were hibernating for good. She makes me hungry for her touch, for her skin, her lips, her everything, which is why we’re still making out long after the sun is gone.

  Except for the dim, flickering light of a far-off street lamp, the glow of the moon off the rolling waves, and her cell phone screen occasionally lighting up where she dropped it on the blanket, we’re in darkness. I desperately want to take her home and finish what we started more than a week ago.

  “If we don’t leave here soon, we’re going to get slapped with a public nudity charge,” she warns me breathlessly. “Because I’m going to take your dick out of your pants and put it in my mouth. Again.”

  Jesus…this girl’s mouth. It alone makes me hard.

  “If it’s in your mouth, it’s not public nudity,” I reply cheekily and kiss her again, biting her bottom lip gently.

  “You should take me home,” Sadie whispers against my cheek, her hand slipping down from my shoulder and to my lap. She purposely presses her palm into my hard-on. Electricity shoots up my spine in a delicious way. “Because this will get out of control if we stay.”

  I stand up, taking both her hands in mine. I pull her up a little roughly on purpose so she bumps up against me. I reach around and steady her with a hand on her perfect ass. I pull her against me. “Everything about us seems to always be out of control,” I tell her.

  In the pale light I see her lips part in a guilty smile. “I know. I don’t know why. And I feel like we should figure that out but…I just like you.”

  “I like you too, Sadie Braddock,” I confess, and it feels so trite but I swear I have never been so giddy to say something or felt it so genuinely as I do right now. “I feel like myself again with you.”

  “Me too.”

  Suddenly we’re drowning in bright white light. Headlights. Someone parked in the lot facing the beach not only turned on their headlights but their high beams. We both are instantly blinded as we turn and squint toward the source. I shield my eyes with my hand. “Fuck, buddy.”

  The driver must realize their mistake because the lights dim to normal and then go out altogether, but then the van peels from the parking lot much more quickly than it should, especially without any lights on now. It drives away so quickly, before my eyes can adjust, and I can’t make out anything more than the shape of it and a color—silver.

  “That was weird,” Sadie remarks, her brow furrowed as she blinks. I nod, grab the blanket off the sand, handing her her cell phone, and then take her hand in mine as we walk back to the car.

  I’ve never been a big hand-holder, but with her it’s different. I like to touch her, even innocently; I just like the feel of her. I have this primal instinct when I’m around her to touch her and soothe her. She’s a confident, blunt, bold woman who clearly can take care of herself—and others. But yet something in me, something deep, longs to take care of her. It’s unnecessary, but it’s there, and it’s not going away. Every time I see her, my affection for her, my need for her, my urge to soothe her grows stronger.

  She’s quiet as we get in the car, staring at her phone screen, and the look on her face is changing into something much less relaxed. I reach across the console and cup the side of her face, turning her blue eyes to mine instead of her screen. “What’s wrong? And don’t say nothing because I can see it’s something.”

  “Jude texted me to say Winnie and Ty fought the whole way home.” I sigh. “God, I wish she would just call time of death on it and save us all more heartache.”

  “As enjoyable as this unexpected make-out session was, I am happy driving you home and picking up where we left off tomorrow,” I volunteer.

  “It’s not that I don’t want to keep this going, because I do,” Sadie explains, her expression earnest. “I just know that the thing with Winnie and Ty is probably still blowing up. Those two can fight for hours if no one plays referee, and I don’t want that person to be my mom. She’s dealing with enough. And she’s the only one home with them.”

  “No explanations necessary,” I promise, and I mean it. “Where do you live? I know it’s not the place I picked you up at for our first date.”

  She looks shocked, but she gives me the address.

  As I drive I can still sense something is bothering her. I keep glancing over at her, but she’s not looking back. Her eyes are on her hands in her lap. I want to coax her into talking again, but for a second I realize this might be a reality check. Maybe I am the only one running too fast here. Maybe she doesn’t feel the connection I do and isn’t drawn to me as intensely as I am drawn to her.

  But then, as I turn into her family’s affluent neighborhood, she speaks. It’s so soft I have to turn down the radio to hear her. “I’m betting when you decided to jump back into the dating world, you didn’t expect to find a woman who still lives at home.”

  “If you didn’t live with your parents here, I wouldn’t have met you, because you’d still be in Toronto,” I reply. “Also, like you so aptly pointed out, I’m wise enough to know the difference between a woman who still lives at home because she’s got valid extenuating circumstances and one who lives at home because she can’t stand on her own two feet.”

  “My extenuating circumstances, valid or not, are kind of a lot to handle,” Sadie says, just as softly as before. “Which is why I don’t expect anyone to handle it. You can see how well Ty is handling it.”

  I can’t comment on the situation I saw between her sister and this Ty guy. I can tell there’s a whole lot of history there I have no idea about. As we pull up in front of the address she gave me, a big, refurbished apartment complex just around the corner from the famous painted ladies, I put the car in park and turn in my seat to face her.

  “How about this?” I say and reach for her hand, slowly, deliberately lacing our fingers together. “I’ll let you know the second that you being an incredible sister, loving daughter, or dedicated nurse starts annoying me, and you can dump me on my ass. Sound good?”

  She blinks. “I mean, I’m not going to be able to—”

  I lean forward and silence her with a kiss. “I know what you’re going to say. You’re not going to be around every time I feel like seeing you. You’re not going to be able to just impetuously spend the night at my place or whatever. But that’s okay. I’ve got my own stuff to deal with. This isn’t going to be easy, I know that. But I don’t want something that’s easy, Sadie. I want something that’s worth it.”

  I watch her expression a
s my words sink in. The worry creasing her brow seems to dissolve, and her lips start to turn up in that incredibly sexy little smirk she does so damn well. Her arm slides around my neck, and she pulls me in for a scorching kiss. And while her tongue slides into my open mouth, she crawls over and into my lap. She is the same way she was from the first kiss—uninhibited and intense. And I react the same way I did before—but getting incredibly turned on and instantly hard. I palm her ass and rub myself against her core. She rolls her hips in rhythm with me.

  I groan.

  “I just wanted to show you, I’ll be worth it,” she whispers against my cheek after she breaks the kiss. Then she reaches for the door handle, and before I can stop her—because, damn, do I want to stop her—she’s out of the car and walking to the front door of the building, roses in hand, and swinging her perfect ass in a way that is doing nothing to stop my blood from heading south.

  I wait until the door closes behind her and I can no longer see her through the glass of the front door, and then I text her before I pull away from the curb.

  I’ll pick you up tomorrow at four. Dress casual and bring your toothbrush.

  I drive toward the marina, but I’m too restless to just go home, so I call Hunter through the car app. “Where are you?” I ask when he answers, because it sounds loud.

  “At a thing,” he replies vaguely.

  “What thing?” Hunter has never been the clubbing type, even when we were in college.

  “I’m checking something out with Mia,” he says, being just as vague as before.

  “Sounds like a club,” I tell him, and the sound starts to get more distant. I hear a clang, and then the sounds disappear completely. “Since when do you two go clubbing?”

  “Can you meet us?”

  Why is he not answering my questions? And why does he sound so tense?

  “I was actually calling to see if you two wanted to hang out,” I reply. “Where are you? I’ll meet you.”

  “Actually, meet us at our place, okay?”

  “On my way.” I end the call and drive straight to their place. They live near Golden Gate Park, which means I have to take a million surface streets to get there and traffic is insane. The longer it takes, the more I agitated I get. I don’t like the way Hunter evaded every question I asked him. It’s not like him at all. Neither is the clipped, tight tone he was using. He’s always laid back.

  Both Hunter and Mia are standing outside their building when I get there. Hunter stands, and Mia runs over and hugs me. Something is very, very wrong. Hunter doesn’t make me wait to find out. “While you were on your road trip and Charlie came to visit us, we took her to the dog park,” he begins, and my blood already starts to run cold. “She was telling us how nervous she was to go to a new school next year.”

  “What?” I’m scrambling to make sense of that. “She’s not going to a new school. She’s in this one until grade six. Lauren and I looked at every school in the area, and this one is the best and she loves it.”

  “We were confused too, so we asked her about it,” Mia pipes up, her brown eyes clouded with concern. “She said that Lauren said they might be moving.”

  “What the fuck is she talking about?” I blurt out. I’ve been really good at curbing my swearing, because I’m worried I’ll do it in front of Charlie. But this is swear-worthy. “Is Lauren in-fucking-sane?”

  “I think this explains her play for custody,” Hunter says, and I feel like the ground under me has given away and is crumbling. Everything is crumbling.

  “Is she moving in with that loser musician? Where? Why would she leave Marin? It was her idea to live there to begin with.” None of this makes any sense.

  Hunter rubs the back of his neck and gets this uncomfortable look on his face. He clears his throat. “See, we didn’t want to stress you out until we knew more, and Mia thought maybe if she talked to Lauren, on neutral turf somewhere…They still get along. Mostly.”

  “I mean not anymore,” Mia mutters. “Not if she does this.”

  “I’m confused. I’m about to punch something, so can you two explain? Please,” I beg through gritted teeth, my hands clenched at my side.

  “When we dropped Charlie back at Lauren’s, Mia tried to find out a little more. But all Lauren wanted to talk about was that loser boyfriend of hers and this gig he had coming up that she was excited to go to,” Mia explains, running a hand through her black hair.

  “You know I’ve always though this custody crap had something to do with him,” Hunter interjects. Suddenly the inside of my mouth feels like it’s filled with sawdust. “So we decided to check out one of his shows ourselves.”

  “It was tonight, and we skulked in the back so she wouldn’t see us,” Mia continues. “Anyway, when they introduced Cale’s band, they said it was one of his last shows in town before they moved to New York.”

  “She wants to follow him to New York.” The words are so ridiculous, they feel strange coming out of my mouth. She’s been dating him less than a year. “What the hell is she thinking? She is not taking my daughter out of state, and she certainly isn’t doing it over this asswipe.”

  “I told you, don’t worry,” Hunter says, but he looks concerned.

  “Where?”

  “Where what?” Mia asks, but the quiver in her voice says she knows what I am asking.

  “Where is Lauren? Right now. What club? Where is that shithole playing his bullshit music at?” Neither responds. “You can tell me or I can Google it. I’m sure they have a website.”

  “It’s a bar called Skippy’s,” Hunter confesses, and as I start to Google the address he starts to panic. “But, Griffin, going there and losing your shit on her, in public, is actually going to give her a case for custody. She’ll make it seem like you’re stalking her, she’ll have witnesses to testify that you have anger issues. You will be handing her a case.”

  “Fuck!” I bellow and shove my phone back into my pocket because he’s right. I don’t want him to be, but he is. “This can’t be happening. Why would she do this to me? To Charlie. We have a great relationship. Our daughter has finally adjusted to the divorce, and she’s going to try and rip her away from me?”

  “It’s selfish, and I will make that case,” Hunter promises. I stare at him, unable to speak or move or think of anything but the gut-wrenching possibility that Charlie might move to New York.

  “I’ve got to go,” I mutter, running an aggravated hand through my hair as I turn and storm back toward my car parked across the street.

  “Griff, do not go to that bar!” Hunter calls out.

  “I won’t,” I bark back before getting behind the wheel and slamming the door—hard.

  I drive around aimlessly for more than an hour and then to Lauren’s house. Hunter said no bar. He didn’t say no contact. Here it will be her word against mine in whatever we say to each other. I park across the street and just sit there and wait. Rosa’s minivan is in the driveway, and about an hour later a beat-up black Mazda Miata pulls up beside it. That rocker douchebag is driving. Lauren gets out of the passenger side, and I get out of my car.

  “Hey!” I call, and she spins to face me, shock all over her face.

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Are you thinking of moving to New York?” I ask bluntly.

  More shock—not shock at the question but shock at the fact that I’m asking it. I know the difference, because this expression is tinged with guilt, and I take that as a good sign. She might actually feel just a little bit bad about ripping my daughter away from me.

  “Get out of here, dude,” her piece-of-shit boyfriend says as he gets out of the car and walks toward us. “Her life is none of your business now.”

  I turn toward him, shoulders back, fists clenched, jaw locked. “Listen, Cale…which is a fucking vegetable not a name, by the way. Everything that affects our child is my business for the rest of her life. That’s how it works. If you don’t like it, get back in the little fucking shitbox car
and get the fuck out of here.”

  “You’re a piece of work, man,” he hisses back, but he doesn’t challenge me. He turns to Lauren. “This isn’t my jam. He’s killing my post-show buzz. I’m going back to the bar.”

  “Cale!” she calls in protest, but he gets back in his car and drives away, peeling the tires like the small-dicked douchebag he is. When his car is nothing but taillights at the end of the block, she turns to me with tears in her eyes. “You being here is stalking. I’m telling my lawyer!”

  “And I’ll say it never happened and bring up that you show up uninvited at my place too.” I shrug. “You want to play dirty, I’ll play dirty too. You are not taking Charlie to live in New York.”

  “We’re over. You can’t control my life anymore,” Lauren argues back. “I get to have my own life and be happy. Cale makes me happy. He has to move to New York because it’s better for his career. I want to go with him.”

  “Then go. Leave Charlie with me,” I suggest desperately. “She can visit you on holidays and in the summer.”

  “I can’t leave her!” Lauren cries, tears now brimming in her eyes.

  “And neither can I!”

  “Then move to New York,” Lauren replies, and I’m waiting for some kind of hint that she’s kidding or being sarcastic, but her hazel eyes are dead serious and her expression is flat.

  I’m blown away. “You want me to move to New York?”

  She folds her arms across her chest and huffs. “If you care so much about seeing Charlie every week, then that’s your only way. Because I am moving to New York.”

  She turns and storms up the front path to the door. I follow. “I have a job. A career! And a life here!”

  “And I want one there!” Lauren spits back. “Now shut up and go away before you wake up Charlie. I swear I will call the police if you don’t.”

  She shuts the door firmly in my face.

  18

  Sadie