Oddly enough, what shocked Kimberly even more than the pregnancy news was the report that Felix had held hands with and kissed his new woman right there in the middle of the coffee joint!
He’d never been one for public displays of affection.
Maybe he’d changed.
It was weird to think that he’d changed. It was weird to think he’d been out of her life for the better part of a year. A wave of nostalgia hit Kimberly hard as she struggled to make sense of everything she’d just heard. But deep down, she was happy for Felix. He deserved good things.
~~~
After hearing the news about Felix, he started crossing Kimberly’s mind more and more often. It wasn’t in a longing way; she was long past the days of lusting after two guys at once and Garrett still had her heart. But she couldn’t help but wonder what her life would have been like had she stayed with Felix.
Kimberly expected it would have been an ordinary, unremarkable life tucked away in a safe, quiet suburb. Felix would teach all day and be home every night for dinner. Would she work? She wasn’t sure. She knew Felix would have supported her had she chosen to, but he also would have been happy for her to be a stay-at-home mom.
A stab of pain shot through Kimberly’s psyche at the thought of babies. She wanted to be a mother. Now Felix was getting ready to be a dad, no doubt picking out baby clothes, contemplating names and setting up the nursery – all with another woman.
She wasn’t convinced she’d have been completely happy with Felix. She’d probably go through life sticking to familiar old routines (grocery shopping on Tuesdays, laundry on Wednesdays and housecleaning on Thursdays). It wouldn’t be exciting but it would work. It would be comfortable.
What would life with Garrett have been like? Kimberly couldn’t even picture that. In the past, she’d expected he’d never settle down and change his hard partying, self-indulgent ways. After hearing about his childhood and his desire to one day provide for a family of his own, however, she had her doubts.
He just might be the devoted husband and father she’d dreamed about. In the past, he’d been aloof and nonchalant in a desperate attempt to protect his heart. But if she could just break down those walls he’d built and earn his trust…Kimberly was certain he’d be the family man she’d dreamed about marrying since she was a little girl.
Of course, as a kid Kimberly hadn’t dreamt about a husband who’d tie her up and spank her. She hadn’t envisioned someone who drank and smoke and told vulgar jokes. She hadn’t expected The One to tease, challenge and sometimes even enrage her.
But that’s because a small child doesn’t have that sort of insight. All a little girl sees is the princess-style white dress and the smiling, handsome groom at the end of the aisle, not all the less magical stuff that comes after that.
~~~
“We need to do this more often,” Kimberly smiled as Jane plopped down at the kitchen table in Kimberly’s apartment. Saturday nights were much less lonely when her best friend was visiting for the weekend.
“We do,” Jane agreed. “Don’t get me wrong – married life is great and I love my husband – but sometimes I just need a break, you know? I guess the honeymoon phase has officially come to an end,” she laughed as she popped a salt and vinegar flavor potato chip into her mouth.
“Well it has been eight months,” Kimberly pointed out. “That’s a pretty good run for a honeymoon phase if you ask me.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Jane agreed. “I can hardly believe it’s nearly May!”
“Me neither. What do you want to do tomorrow?” Kimberly asked. She was eager to plan a lazy, leisurely Sunday and show Jane a good time in the city. “We could go shopping or hang out at the park as long as the weather’s warm enough – early springs are the best! Oh, and there’s a movie on right now that’s supposed to be good –”
“Please don’t hate me,” Jane replied, “but I’ve sort of already made plans.”
“Oh!” Kimberly was surprised. Normally when Jane visited they hung out together nonstop the entire time. “No problem,” she said. “What are your plans?”
Jane flashed her mischievous Jane smile that could only mean one thing: she was about to say something Kimberly wouldn’t like. “The plans aren’t for me,” she said. “I mean, I’ll probably just go hang out in the park and work on my tan if the weather cooperates, but whatever, that’s not important. The plans I’ve made are for you, my dear.”
Kimberly tipped her head to the side and looked at her best friend suspiciously. “What sort of plans are they?” she asked, not liking the direction the conversation was taking. Then a terrible thought occurred to her. “Oh God, it’s not a blind date, is it?” she demanded. “I know you keep pushing but I keep telling you I’m just not interested right now…”
“Just trust me, okay? He’ll be here around noon. I’ve already taken the liberty of ordering lunch from the catering place down the street. They’ll be dropping it off a few minutes before lunchtime. And I’ll make myself scarce well before then.”
“You invited some guy to my place?” Kimberly demanded. This was just getting worse and worse. “What if he’s a serial killer? Oh God, what if you’ve set me up with an axe murderer?”
“Now you’re just being ridiculous. I’m your best friend. I’m not going to do anything that will put you in danger. Just trust me, okay?”
Kimberly glared at Jane. “Fine,” she said icily, “but if you come back to a scene that looks like something out of a horror movie and I’m not alive to say it then: I told you so!”
Chapter Twenty-two
Kimberly’s stomach was in knots. She was furious with Jane for putting her in such an awkward situation – the last thing she wanted was some strange guy barging into her apartment and trying to flirt with her!
As Jane unapologetically left for the park wearing oversized sunglasses and carrying a raunchy romance novel, Kimberly considered leaving too. It wouldn’t be nice to stand some poor guy up, but running seemed like as good an option as any. But before she could think that possibility through, the buzzer rang.
“Dammit!” she hissed, throwing a deep purple sweater on over her simple green cotton dress. She definitely wasn’t going all out with her date preparations, but she looked presentable, at least. She hurried to the door and flung it open, expecting to see the catering guy there to make a drop-off.
“Garrett!” she exclaimed, not knowing what else to say. “You’re…here.”
He gave her a strange look. “Well you did ask me to come over,” he reminded her.
Kimberly didn’t know what on earth he was talking about, but she was too excited about seeing him to care. “Come in!” she urged.
Garrett did walk in. This time he took his shoes off at the door. When he walked past her, Kimberly caught a whiff of him. He smelled faintly of expensive cologne rather than alcohol. That was a first.
Then she noticed the crumpled brown paper bag in his hand. “You brought booze?” she asked somewhat incredulously. That seemed very much like the old Garrett she knew, but she was surprised that he’d expect her to just drink with him like they were still old buddies.
“Oh,” he said, looking down at the crumpled paper bag as though he’d forgotten about it. “No. When I didn’t hear from you…well I assumed the baby wasn’t mine,” he said. “But I wanted to bring you something anyway, so…I got baby clothes. I wasn’t sure what you had so I got one for a boy and one for a girl,” he said apologetically, pulling the tiny, adorable clothing from the bag. “The bag they gave me at the store was neon pink and had hearts all over it,” he explained, wrinkling his nose in distaste. “Naturally, I trashed it and stuck the clothes in something a little less ridiculous.”
Kimberly laughed. “Naturally,” she agreed. Then she remembered just how out of the loop Garrett was. “Actually,” she said, “the pregnancy was a false alarm.”
“You don’t have a kid?” Garrett inquired, surprised.
“No. I�
��don’t have a boyfriend, either.”
“What happened to whatshisname?”
“He’s, um…still teaching at the university and expecting a baby with someone else, actually,” Kimberly said. “It’s okay,” she added quickly when she saw the expression on Garrett’s face. “We ended things on relatively good terms. I don’t keep in touch with Felix but from what I hear, he’s in a pretty good spot right now.”
“And you?”
“What about me?”
“Are you in a good spot? I was worried when I got your texts last night.”
Kimberly’s forehead wrinkled in confusion as she pulled her phone out of her sweater pocket. “I didn’t send you any texts,” she said, scrolling through her message history. Then it dawned on her. “Jane!” she hissed, simultaneously wanting to hug and smack her best friend.
“Jane?”
“She’s here visiting. She must have gotten ahold of my phone last night and sent you the messages. She’s…got this crazy idea in her head that she needs to play matchmaker or mediator or…something,” Kimberly said apologetically. “I’m so sorry you came here under false pretenses.”
Garrett gave one of his characteristic it’s-no-big-deal shrugs. “No worries,” he said. “I only had to catch the red-eye from Los Angeles.”
Just then the buzzer rang again. “Want me to get that?” Garrett asked. When he saw that Kimberly was too lost in thought for the question to even register, he simply walked to the door.
Kimberly was too engrossed in her phone to even glance up. She looked over the text messages from the previous night quickly. Jane must have sent them while Kimberly was in the shower. Jane had sent Garrett several rather cryptic messages, including ones that simply said, “I need to see you” and “can you come over tomorrow around noon?”
What baffled Kimberly was that Garrett had obligingly caught the red eye from Los Angeles just to come have lunch with her. That had to mean something, didn’t it? She didn’t know. Reading things into the things Garrett said and clearly had not worked for her in the past. Maybe it was time to stop making assumptions and quit trying to read between the lines.
“You ordered food?” Garrett asked, returning with a large packed picnic basket full of cold salads, fresh vegetables and deli meats.
“I, uh…Jane did,” Kimberly admitted apologetically. “I think she’s trying to force us to have the world’s most awkward date or something. Again, I’m so sorry about all of this, Garrett.”
“Actually,” he said, “I’m famished and the food looks delicious. Mind if we dig in?”
~~~
“You seem different,” Kimberly commented. She was seated at the kitchen table across from Garrett. He’d been voraciously eating his way through the basket of food. She, on the other hand, had barely touched her plate. Instead, she’d simply sat there and tried to study him without making it obvious she was staring.
“I quit drinking,” he replied through a mouthful of pasta salad.
“Oh. Why?”
He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and raised his head to meet Kimberly’s gaze. “Maybe you were right,” he said. “Maybe I did have a problem. I wouldn’t call myself an alcoholic, but I did use drinking as a crutch to…numb loneliness, I suppose, and forget the past.”
“What made you stop?” Kimberly asked, half-expecting Garrett to say he’d met some amazing perfect knockout of a woman and now he’d never be lonely ever again.
Instead, he simply replied, “You.”
“Me?” she repeated, not understanding. “Why? I asked you once about how much and how often you drank but I wasn’t trying to be judgmental. What you choose to do is your business…”
“Yeah, I always thought that too. But then with the whole pregnancy thing…I thought a lot about who I wanted to be if the kid was mine. I thought about the sort of life I wanted to give it and what kind of example I wanted to set. So,” Garrett cleared his throat, “I decided to make a few changes.”
In that moment, Kimberly realized that Garrett had been genuinely excited by the prospect of having a child with her.
“I’m sorry things didn’t work out the way you hoped,” she said softly.
He waved his hand dismissively and then took a huge bite of a deli sandwich. “No big deal,” he assured her through a mouthful of pickles and turkey. “It turns out I get a lot more done in a day when I’m not hungover!”
“What…what other changes did you make?” Kimberly wanted to know.
“I decided I’d really had it with all the travel,” Garrett said. “It was a fun lifestyle for a young single guy with no responsibilities, but if I was going to have a kid I figured things needed to change. So I changed my role at work. Now I travel five days out of the month instead of twenty. Oh,” he added as an afterthought, “I also moved out of the hotel.”
“I know,” Kimberly blurted out before she could think better of it.
“You do? How do you know that?”
Kimberly blushed furiously. “I…tried to call you, once,” she confessed.
“Why didn’t you call my cell?” he asked. “I’ve still got the same number.”
She leaned against the table for support, suddenly feeling very frail and tired. “I didn’t try to reach you as hard as I could have,” she whispered. “I didn’t think you’d want to hear from me or even take my call, for that matter. And even if you did, I didn’t know what to say to you.”
Garrett set down his sandwich, food forgotten. “Why does this have to be so complicated?” he demanded, sounding annoyed but not with her. “This is dumb. One thing I’ve learned from my shitty childhood is you can’t live in the past. Can’t we just start over and try to go back to the way things were, before all the awkwardness and tension?”
“I’d like that,” Kimberly said, unconvinced that what Garrett was proposing was even plausible. Surely it couldn’t be that easy, could it?
“I bought a house,” Garrett said suddenly.
“You did?” She couldn’t imagine him living in a house. Who would bring him room service and clean up after him?
“Sure did. Why don’t you come over sometime and I’ll give you a tour?”
“Okay. Where is it?”
Now it was Garrett’s turn to look embarrassed. For once in his life, he appeared flustered as he picked his sandwich back up and stared at it intently so he wouldn’t have to face Kimberly. “You’ll think I’m such a creepy stalker,” he mumbled, “but my place is two blocks away. I figured that, you know, if the kid was mine, I wanted to be nearby.”
Before Kimberly could respond, there was a knock at the door. “It’s just me!” Jane called before stepping inside. “Are you decent?”
Kimberly glared at her friend. The suggestive question wasn’t lost on her and presumably wasn’t lost on Garrett either. “You’re in so much trouble,” she told Jane, only half-joking.
Jane flipped her hair nonchalantly and pranced through the kitchen. “Hi Garrett,” she trilled on her way past him. “I’m going to make myself scarce. I’ll be in the spare bedroom reading my book if anyone needs me. Ta!”
~~~
Garrett ended up staying well into the evening. The conversation was somewhat strained. They talked about nothing. They struggled to fill the silence. Kimberly noticed he wasn’t as boisterous and entertaining as usual. She wasn’t sure if it was because he’d stopped drinking or because he was uncomfortable being there.
The entire situation was awkward. When has there ever been anything pleasant about deafening silence? Even so, Kimberly didn’t want Garrett to leave and he didn’t seem ready to go. Even feeling awkward together was nicer than being apart.
When she was finally at an absolute loss for idle chitchat, Kimberly put on a movie. She and Garrett had never stayed in and watched a movie together. Sure, they’d flipped on the TV after sex at the hotel sometimes, but that was different. There was pay-per-view porn and room service there.
The movie-watching at Ki
mberly’s couldn’t have been any more ordinary. She kind of liked it. Now, in a way, she knew what it was like to have a lazy evening in with Garrett. With him, even that was exciting.
He still managed to make her heart beat a mile a minute, even when he was sitting there doing nothing but staring at a television screen. She liked the way he slouched down on the couch and casually threw his arm over the back of it, his legs stretched out in front of him. She liked the tiny hole in the knee of his jeans and the way his shirt was wrinkled as though he just didn’t care enough to iron it.
She liked watching him during the funny parts of the movie. The way he quietly chuckled was endearing.
Every so often, Kimberly caught Garrett looking at her instead of the television screen. Usually she saw it out of the corner of her eye and pretended to be oblivious, but one time their eyes met.
It was like time stood still briefly and they were frozen there, in that moment. During that time, Kimberly felt like she and Garrett were connected on some deep, meaningful level. It felt, she supposed, like they were connected at the soul.
Then he abruptly looked away, shattering the illusion. Disappointment washed over her.
Part of Kimberly wanted to slide closer to Garrett and cuddle up with him there on the couch. But she didn’t dare. She had no idea how he’d react. Even if he reacted favorably, she felt like initiating physical contact with him was akin to playing with fire.
So she sat there at one end of the couch while Garrett sat at the other, a large pillow separating them. It felt like they were miles apart.
Chapter Twenty-three
Kimberly couldn’t get over all the changes Garrett had made in preparation for becoming a father. It made her sad for him that there was no baby. She could only imagine how excited he must have been in the beginning only to be let down when he discovered the truth.
She also couldn’t get over the size of his house.
“It’s huge,” she marveled, leaning her head back to take everything in as Garrett walked her into the marble-floored grand foyer a week later.
What the Heart Desires (Contemporary Erotic Romance) Page 12