Nova Chester is my badass-warrior-woman friend. We’ve been besties since high school. My family was reasonably well-off but my dad was determined to make a ‘statement’ by sending his kids to public school instead of carting us off to Hoovertown Private High School. It was a political strategy he adopted to bolster his run for the state senate but I’m glad he made that decision because that’s how I met Nova.
She’s my opposite in endless ways but she feels like my soul mate on many levels. She’s the friend who has a catty retort for every situation and can kick some ass even in four-inch leather thigh-highs. The one you call when you find your blind date blocking the service exit with his tongue down the waitress’s throat halfway through your romantic rendez-vous (True story, by the way). She’s blunt. She’s real. She’s straightforward. And because of that I trust her with my life despite her rough edges.
"No, no. Just let me say this,” she insists. “You were always way out of his league. And I know that he broke your heart but—you know what they say—the best way to heal a broken heart is to find a Greek sex god with a monster cock and ride the shit out of him until you fracture your pelvis."
I laugh. "I really don't think that's what they say."
My phone bleats in the pocket of the jeans I’m wearing. I pull it out and check it. A text message from my older sister.
Vivian: Where’s the sales report I asked you to prepare? You said it would be on my desk by Friday!
I roll my eyes. I love Viv to bits but she really needs to chill out with her stupid reports and memos and business plans. I shove the phone back into my pocket without responding.
"Well, you know what I mean," Nova urges. "You need to put yourself out there more, present yourself in a way that highlights your very best attributes. You need to slay. You can't let that man break you once and for all, Reesie!"
"I don't know what you're talking about. Nothing is wrong with my self-esteem."
"Honey, denial will get you nowhere! No woman with solid self-love would wear these!" Nova yanks a fork from the place setting beside her and stabs it into the basket of clean laundry. "Do you really, truly, honestly think that any man wants to tear off your pants in the heat of passion and find this pathetic shit covering your ass?"
I stare at her with a frown as she slips the prongs of the fork through the leg of my red control briefs. "Those are my favorites,” I argue, “So comfy…"
"My point exactly." She slides off of her chair and sashays her tall, curvy frame right out the back door with my underwear hanging off of her fork. “No more of this, Reese,” she says sternly. I watch in horror as she tosses my panties onto the recycling heap sitting on the back porch.
"What the hell?!" I whine as she drops back into her chair like what she just did is no big deal.
She pushes the laptop aside and grabs her phone, tapping at the screen. "Oh, relax. I've got your back."
I open my mouth to protest just as Sophia floats in through the front door, all perfect and manicured and engaged, her 20-pound diamond ring shining like a flashlight in the dead of night.
"Hello." She looks at us and sighs happily, her perma-smile nearly splitting her face in two.
Y'see—that's what love looks like. That's how a woman walks around when she's got the man of her dreams waiting in her bed with a come-hither look that's designed only for her. I’ll have that one day, right?
My nostrils twitch with restrained jealousy but I smile anyway. "Hey Soph."
“Happy Cupcake Sunday!” she chirps.
Cupcake Sunday is our weekly tradition. I take the day to experiment with new recipes and perfect my craft. Nova brings leftovers from her Sunday morning shift at Gallo’s and Sophia brings wine from her fiancé’s family winery. We laugh, we gossip, and most importantly, we eat.
“I’m exhausted,” she moans as she sets a bottle of cabernet down in the middle of the table.
Nova glances up to inspect the wine label. A satisfied grin spreads across her face. “Good stuff, Soph!”
Sophia acknowledges her with a wrist flick that says ‘Think nothing of it. I have two hundred dollar bottles of wine daily.’ She smooths her hand over her hair. “I spent the whole morning trying to decide on a social media company to live-tweet the wedding. So stressful.” She maintains a straight face as she lands in a chair with a graceful flourish.
Sophia was studying early childhood education while working part-time at her family’s restaurant but when she got engaged, she dropped everything to devote herself to the wedding arrangements and the home remodelling and her fiancé’s needs, in general. Now, every sentence that comes out of her mouth involves Joshua somehow.
I can’t say I blame the girl for being excited. The Davies are practically royalty around these parts. The winery is just one of the many businesses they have a hand in. Not that that’s why she’s marrying Josh, of course. The girl’s been head over heels for that self-important, color-coordinated, Lacoste-wearing jerk for as long as I can remember.
Nova and I share a look and I telepathically warn her to shut her mouth. Being Nova, she ignores me. “You young socialites work so hard planning your quarter-million-dollar weddings. You ladies really should form a union or at least circulate a petition.”
Sophia catches on to the sarcasm immediately and throws Nova a hard look. With an eyeroll, she changes the subject. "What are you guys up to anyway?"
Nova’s attention falls back to her phone. "I'm in the middle of buying some new underwear for Reese."
With excited movements, Sophia pulls up the chair next to Nova. "Oh, good! She could use some for sure! Lemme help!” I cringe. Are my undies that bad?
Sophia Gallo is my sophistication-seeping-out-of-her-pores friend. We grew up across the street from each other in Hoovertown, the upscale neighborhood of Copper Heights (if there is such a thing as “upscale” in a place like Copper Heights). When we met, my dad had just been elected to the state senate. Her dad was a hard-working businessman on the rise. She’s the friend who has a killer pair of four-inch stilettos for every situation but is still a classy bitch even on the rare occasion that she happens to find herself in tennis shoes and a T-shirt.
She’s the one you call when you see that disastrous blind date walk into your father’s re-election campaign event with that slutty waitress on his arm and you happen to be wearing the same dress as said slutty waitress. (Again, true story. Are you starting to see now why I’m hesitant to date again?) She’s refined. And well bred. If I had to trust anyone with picking out my new panties, I guess it’d be her.
She flips her lustrous raven hair over her narrow shoulder and peers down at the screen. "I like this one! Lacy. Cute. But it doesn’t scream I’ll let you tear these off in a janitor’s closet, y’know?”
“Boring!” Nova pretends to snore. “I have a feeling that Reese needs some hot pink latex and fishnets in her life.”
“I beg to differ,” I say, siding with Sophia. “Nothing says Fuck me and never call me again like pink latex and fishnets on a first date.”
Nova groans. “Come on, Reese!”
I plant my hands on my hips and stand firm on my decision. “Experts warn strongly against wearing underwear made of latex and other synthetic materials. Compromising one’s vaginal health all in the name of wearing cute panties that no one else will ever see is nothing but extreme narcissism. And this girl won’t be a part of it.” I harrumph self-righteously.
“This girl won’t be a part of it!” Nova echoes me in a mocking tone. “This girl also won’t be a part of the sexually active population for the foreseeable future.”
Sophia giggles suddenly. “Well, I know how we can settle this debate. Maybe you can ask the hot-as-hell guy I just saw moving into the house next door." She tosses me a wink.
"What hot-as-hell guy?" Nova asks, her head snapping in Sophia's direction.
"I just passed a U-Haul truck on the curb outside that house that’s been for rent for the past few months. A ridiculously
hot guy was carrying stuff inside."
“Why are you only mentioning this now?” Nova's gaze penetrates my skull. "Did you hear that, Reesie? Fresh meat. Right next door! Perfect for you!"
"Don't get all excited," I say disinterestedly. "Charlie rented out the place next door for his friend who just moved to town. They served together in the military and now Charlie's giving him a job in the construction business. Apparently, the guy's got tons of baggage. His wife is gone, he just came back from the warzone and he has a kid."
Nova speaks in a lyrical voice with a smile as wide as the Nile. "Well maybe you should help him unpack that baggage. Literally and figuratively."
I scoff. “I don’t think so.”
“He’s broken,” Sophia muses. “Just the way you like ‘em.”
“I do not like broken men,” I mutter weakly.
She gives an elegant shoulder shrug. “You totally do. You have a savior complex. No shame in it. It’s noble.”
My friends are convinced that I have an unhealthy obsession with finding guys who are emotional disasters and trying to fix them. As much as I’d like to refute it, I’ve got to say that it’s true. Martin was cold hard proof of that. I haven’t dated too much since he and I split but each of my romantic prospects has been more fucked up than the last. At this point, there’s no point in denying it.
Once I form an attachment to someone (or something), I can't just walk away, even when the relationship starts to show signs of wear and tear. I believe that almost anything can be fixed, can be saved, can be restored. I believe that we walk away too easily, we give up too fast. Maybe I've got some sort of attachment issue. Maybe I have hero syndrome. Or maybe it’s just misplaced optimism. All I know is, I believe in holding on.
Jeez—a shrink would have a field day with me.
Nova lifts an eyebrow. “But you’re not fixing anybody with your pitiful underwear collection. That’s for sure.”
"Would you two stop it? There's absolutely nothing wrong with my underwear. Or with my self-esteem. Since when did it become a crime to be single?" I give Nova a pointed look. "You're single."
She leans back in her chair and folds her arms across her chest. "Yes, I'm single but I don’t take it out on my vagina. She has her needs fulfilled on the regular. You, on the other hand, are repressed."
Sophia glares. "Please don’t launch into another long-winded diatribe about your masturbation practices."
Nova glares back. "I will diatribe about my masturbation practices till my dying day if settling down means getting stuck with a square like Joshie Bear."
"Hey, that's my fiancé you're talking about!” She throws up her arms in anger.
"And that's my vag you're talking about!” Nova retorts.
“He is not a square."
“Josh has four sides that are all the same length and four ninety-degree angles. I’d say he’s a square, Princess Sophia."
The bride-to-be seethes. “I’m so about to uninvite you from the wedding.”
I snicker quietly to myself and pull the cupcakes out of the oven as the timer goes off. At least when they're fighting, the focus is off of me. As the girls continue to bicker, I take it upon myself to open the wine and pour us each a drink. By the time we’re drunk and eating cupcakes and leftover Italian food, we’ll be humming Kumbaya around the dinner table.
I drop a perfectly good wine glass and it shatters to pieces when Nova and Sophia both yell out in unison, their eyes focused right over my shoulder. I spin around and look out the wide glass of the back door.
And I scream the loudest.
Chapter 3
Leo
My arms spread wide as I hold up the crumpled instruction sheet in front of me and try to make sense of the diagrams and drawings.
"Fucking Christ!" I mumble under my breath. As soon as I utter the words, my head quickly snaps in the direction of the door. I breathe out in relief.
Thank god Brent didn't hear that because I'd have to explain to him again why he isn't allowed to use those naughty words while I can't seem to stop spitting them out every few minutes. It's hard to go from the brutal, adrenaline-driven environment of the battlefield to the life of a civilian, a father, a role model in the blink of an eye.
But that's no excuse. I have to set a good example for him. He’s already been torn away from his mother with little explanation. If I don’t step up to the plate, he'll lose his faith in humanity as a whole at the tender age of four. I can't allow that to happen.
He’s the single light in my dark life. His innocence is the flicker that keeps hope alive in my chest. I have to protect him, not just from the cruel, harsh world, but also from the darkness that has all but swallowed me up. Even as my anger, my guilt, my overwhelment threaten to overpower me, I have to show up every day and fight for that little boy’s future. I don’t know how I’m going to pull this off, but I’ve got to. I’m all he has.
This town is as good a place as any for a fresh start. With its quiet, tree-lined streets and its two-story single-family homes. The perfect place for playing in the backyard and riding bikes on the quiet roads and reading books in a tree-house. The perfect place for giving my son the kind of childhood I never had.
I turn back to the IKEA disaster on the floor in front of me. I'm almost positive that this isn't what the dining table on display at the store looked like. Why are the legs sticking out of the top of the table instead of underneath it? I rotate the diagram 90 degrees and it still makes no sense.
Scratching the back of my head, I sigh. Maybe I should have read the instructions before I started building instead of waiting until I fucked up.
I stick my head out the back door to check on Brent. He's sitting on the grass beneath the big oak tree with his Iron Man action figure in hand, mumbling animatedly to himself as he waves the thing around. His superhero cape is fastened securely around his shoulders. I feel a pang in my chest and I'm not sure if I'm touched by his innocence or if I'm jealous of his cluelessness.
"Enjoy it while you can, buddy." Because one day, life will give you a series of swift kicks in the ass and you'll long for the days when you could just strap on your cape and pretend that you can stop the world from crumbling down all around you.
I step back inside. Man—this house is hot as hell. I didn’t expect that April in northern Illinois would be this muggy. Leaving the door open for air to circulate, I turn back to my IKEA project. As soon as I'm done with tablegeddon, I've got to figure out the air conditioning system. In the meantime, I tear off my shirt and kneel down with the tiny wrenches and screws that came in the box and begin disassembling the table.
This needs to get done tonight. I'm determined to sit my son at the table for dinner. It's what families do. They sit at the table every night and they share a home-cooked meal. For us a home-cooked meal means packaged ramen but I digress. I want to give the child some semblance of normalcy even though our whole world has been flipped on its head.
I get lost in the project, bent on figuring this puzzle out. I'm a military-trained weapons technician. I put guns together and take them apart in the blink of an eye. I can build a bomb using a rubber band, a nylon sock and the contents of my vegetable drawer. I'm about to start work on a general contractor’s team the day after tomorrow, for crying out loud. There's no way I'm letting an IKEA kitchen table take me down.
"Daddy, look at me!" I hear Brenton call out from the back porch.
"Yeah, buddy. Really cool," I say, barely glancing his way before he's scampering down the stairs again, his cape flapping behind him.
I'm down on my knees, taking another shot at screwing that leg into the table. I think this thing is finally starting to come together. But a few minutes later, a flash of red catches my attention as it zooms across the back porch.
What the..? Am I seeing things? Every now and then, my PTSD causes my mind play to tricks on me. But when the red bolt zips by again, I know for sure that this is no optical illusion. I stumble to my feet as fast
as I can, bolting toward the door.
It's too late.
My son giggles wildly as he charges up the neighbor's back porch and presses both tiny hands to the glass pane of the door. There's a pair of enormous red panties covering his face.
I cringe all the way down to my toes when I hear a woman's shrill scream rip through the air.
Click here to find out what happens next.
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