Dream Boy

by Cassie-Ann L. Miller

  I try to walk by her, to say goodbye to my daughter in the bathtub. But the strong, protective mother in Sophia steps up to the fore, blocking my way. “You stay the fuck away from her,” she seethes. “You stay away from my child.”

  Jamming my tongue into my cheek, I fight against the emotions threatening to surface. I grab my bag from the floor, walking backward toward the exit. My eyes stay on them—the woman I love falling apart in the darkened hallway, my innocent child playing in the bathtub.

  Like a coward, I open the door and I walk away.

  33

  Archie

  The wide-open road stretches ahead of me.

  Tall trees line both sides of the asphalt highway and the clean, sharp scent of pine fills the cabin of the car. A brisk, crisp wind whips my face.

  I used to love this feeling. The freedom, the possibility. I used to live for this. But now, all I feel is doom.

  Deep in my bones, settling in my flesh. Hopeless despair.

  I miss my girls. Every time I close my eyes, their faces play on the backs of my eyelids. The perfect torture.

  But my sticking around in Copper Heights wasn’t serving their interests. I was just holding them back. So, I’m on the road again. Flitting from town to town.

  I pull into the parking lot of some random bar in some random town. I throw the car into park and watch people stepping inside. Happy people, smiling, laughing. It takes me back to that night at the bar in Vegas when I met Sophia, crying into her flowery bouquet.

  I get that feeling in my chest. The breathless feeling. The heat right beneath my ribs. The scalding desire. That wanting her that goes beyond her gorgeous curves and her pretty eyes. Desire singeing into the depths of my soul.

  But I can’t have her. It wouldn’t be right to hold her back for my own selfish reasons just so I don’t have to be alone. She deserves the best and that ain’t me.

  So, I sit here in my car, with Johnny Cash playing low on the stereo and I close my eyes.

  My heart aches, knowing I’ll never feel her love again.

  34

  Sophia

  Pushing a stroller with half a dozen toddlers up the steep incline toward the park? That's easy.

  Carrying this heavy heart around in my chest? That’s what I'm struggling with.

  Dammit—This feeling. Deep and achy and hopeless. It’s what I was trying to avoid. It’s why I didn’t want to get involved with Archie to begin with.

  But he promised...

  He promised he’d be there for River and me. He promised he’d stay.

  Of course, that's what men do. One minute they have you standing on the bow of the Titanic, feeling like you can fly. And in the blink of an eye, they kick you overboard to swim with the sharks. Wait—that’s not how the movie ended, is it?

  River has been super cranky ever since Archie left. She doesn’t want to sleep in her own bed. She’s clingy. She does anything for my attention. It’s like she’s afraid that I’ll abandon her, too. Her way of coping with that fear is by acting out. I’ve been extra patient with her, spending more time with her, doing everything in my power to reassure her. It’s all I can do to make it up to her.

  Mommy fucked up.

  I put my desire for Archie ahead of what was right for our daughter and now, my little girl is suffering. I don’t know if I’ll be able to forgive myself.

  As we’re crossing the street into the park, River flings her bottle to the ground and it lands on the muddy sidewalk. She starts to cry.

  "Danggit. Fudge,” I mumble as I bend over to pick it up.

  I hate wasting even a drop of my hard-fought breastmilk. Pumping was a bitch and a half but I made sure to stock up the freezer before I weaned her. It’s been months, though, and her supply is starting to run low. So, it really hits me hard to have to throw a full bottle away.

  I scoop the bottle out of the puddle and toss it into the storage basket at the bottom of the stroller. It's gross. I can’t wait to get back home and sterilize the shit out of that bottle.

  Right as I’m about to resume the trek to the park, a fancy sportscar zips by and bumps into a puddle, dousing me with cold, dirty water.

  I shriek. Can a girl catch a break?!

  This is my breaking point. I am tired. I am done letting life piss all over me. It’s time for me to stand up for myself.

  When I see the car pull up at the curb a few yards away, I veer the stroller onto the grass and kick up the brakes before hollering over my shoulder at Ramona. “I’ll be right back. Do not take your eyes off these children.”

  "Uh-huh," she mumbles uninterestedly, one hand locked on Sebastian's wrist, the other scrolling the screen of her phone.

  God, this chick.

  But right now, I’m just grateful that she agreed to come back to work for me after I fired her. I would have been stuck with a mess on my hands if she’d turned up her nose at my second-hand, recycled job offer.

  Anyway, right now, I'm on a mission to give that asshole driver a piece of my mind. I stomp right up to the car. Leaning over the spotless dark-tinted window on the driver’s side, I rap my knuckles against the glass.

  My heart stops beating as the window lowers in slow motion and my ex-fiance’s smug face comes into view.

  His mouth quirks into his usual boyish grin. “Hi Sophie.”

  The overpowering scent of his cologne floats out on the air-conditioned draft and my stomach turns with revulsion. An excessively pretty blonde with the body fat ratio of a mosquito leans around him and gives me a little wave. “Hi there! Boy, everyone’s so nice in this town.”

  My insides contract painfully. My nostrils twitch. “Joshua.” I straighten my posture and lift my chin.

  “How have you been?” He asks the question casually, like we’re nothing more than good old friends who fell out of touch after college. Is this guy for real?

  Screw this.

  “I’m doing fantastic. I’m doing. Fucking. Fantastic.” I turn on my heel, headed back toward my tribe of toddlers.

  “Sophie. Sophie, wait. Please.” I don’t look back but I hear the car door slam behind me.

  When I feel his hand at the curve of my elbow, I spin back around and growl. “How dare you touch me?! After everything?!”

  His shoulders drop. “Look—I’m sorry. I’m sorry for the way things turned out.”

  Really? That’s all he has to say for himself?

  “Thanks for the sentiment,” I say dryly. “Gotta go.” I try to turn away but he touches my elbow again.

  I jerk my arm away. I am one more nonconsensual touch away from unleashing my long lost inner ninja. Try me, asshole.

  He shakes his head. “We need to talk, Sophie. Like, really have a serious conversation about our situation.”

  I stiffen my spine. “It’s been two years, Josh. We don’t have a ‘situation’.”

  His chest rises on a deep inhale and he presses his eyes shut. “I love you, Sophia.”

  My eyebrow jerks up at the declaration and I hear Ramona spit out a laugh somewhere behind me. I glare at her. “Could you take the kids to the playground? I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “Sure.” With a shrug, she grabs the reins of the stroller and pushes it off across the grass.

  I turn back to Josh. He’s looking at me with pleading eyes. “We should get back together,” he says. “It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  A coughing sound sputters from my lungs. “What?”

  “We should get back together.” He smooths his hand over his perfectly brushed-back blond hair and glances off in the direction of the playground. “I wasn’t ready before but I’m ready now. I’m ready to settle down.” He watches me like he expects me to break out into cartwheels at the announcement. “You and me and that kid of yours—we can be a family.”

  My patience is running so very thin by this point. “Just get out of my face, Josh. Climb back into your testosteronemobile with your manicured stick figure and go drive off a cliff. Because—new
sflash. You are not the father of my child.”

  He shrugs a shoulder dismissively. “Well, that was sort of obvious to me because we didn’t have sex for like a month before the wedding. But…” he gives me a magnanimous smile. “I forgive you, Sophie. Besides, nobody else knows I’m not the kid’s father. We can make this work. Let’s just call it even and get back together.”

  Is this conversation really happening?

  “Josh, why don’t you tell me what’s really going on?”

  He grunts roughly. “Nothing’s going—”

  “Joshua!”

  His shoulders slump in defeat. “My parents are getting divorced. My dad has his new 20-year-old girlfriend and he hasn’t been answering my calls. My mom is too fucking depressed to even press ‘send’ on PayPal transfer to my account—”

  “You’re doing this for money?!” This is incredible.

  He tries to reason with me. “You don’t understand. I have zero influence right now, Sophie. Zero. But a baby…that would make my mother so fucking happy—”

  I throw up a hand over my shoulder as I walk off. “Goodbye, Josh.”

  He comes chasing after me like the shameless shit he is. “I’d split the money with you, of course. We just have to pretend the kid is mine. No big deal.”

  “Joshua. Seriously. Get lost.” I continue my march across the grass. “I can’t believe you’re even making me this crazy proposition right now. You stood me up on our wedding day. You left me standing there like an idiot. Why should I do you any favors?”

  He sighs roughly. He looks off into the distance. “I didn’t know myself back then. I was lost. And I just had so many different people chirping in my ear. That made it hard to make any decisions, to think straight. I mean, there was Alina—”

  “Alina?” I glance back and jerk up a brow.

  His bleached teeth sink into the corner of his lip. “One of the strippers from my bachelor party—”

  I heave a sigh. “Seriously, Josh?”

  “I’m trying to come clean, Sophie. Hear me out.” He rolls his shoulders back, the way he does when he’s trying to ease tension. “As I was saying, I was in bed with Alina. And she was putting serious doubts in my head…” He adopts a high-pitched imitation of a female voice. “‘Oh why do you wanna get married? Marriage is a trap’, ‘Oh, look how good your skin is. You’re gonna age so well’, ‘Oh, what’s the rush to settle down? You’re gonna regret it later’. And then Francie—”

  “Who’s Francie?” I whisper.

  “Francie was the other stripper. Gosh, follow along, Sophie.” He shoots me a look of irritation. “Francie, was like, ‘Men don’t go through menopause. You can get married anytime. You don’t have to rush into anything’. You see, I was taking advice from the wrong people.”

  “Evidently.”

  “But that doesn’t change the fact that I love you and we belong together.” He bats his blue eyes at me pleadingly.

  “You don’t love me,” I say on an exhale. “You never loved me. For three weeks before our wedding, you didn’t even touch me. Not once.”

  He flinches. “That’s because I had chlamydia. It was a stubborn strain and the antibiotics—”

  My mind is spinning. “Get out of my face. Just go.” I thrust a finger in the direction of his car and the Barbie doll waiting inside of it. “I would rather rattle a tin can outside of the Quickie Stop on Cumber Street than get dragged into this scheme with you.”

  At that, his repentant facade snaps right along with his patience. “Stop being difficult, Sophie. Just stop. Your pride is blocking your decision-making faculties right now. Open your eyes. You’re as desperate as I am and you know it. You ruined your life by getting pregnant by some random random. Now, you’re pushing around a grocery cart full of snot-faced kids for a living and you have baby food in your hair. God, when did you become such a basic bitch?” He paces and shoves his hand into his hair. “This is your chance to redeem yourself, to take your place in the Davies family dynasty.”

  I think back to Clara. Elegantly-dressed and reeking desperation. That’s not a privilege. It’s a prison. “This conversation is over.” I step up to the edge of the playground where the children are toddling about. I lean my weight against the empty stroller as I watch them.

  How did I ever think I loved this man? I legit hate the fact that he even exists right now.

  His perfect forehead pleats with frustration and in that moment, I’m almost certain that he’s wearing cream foundation. “Look—we need to move past this. I’ve made mistakes. But I’m back to give you your happy ending.”

  Pursing my lips, I pull in a breath. Then I turn to face him. “I’m confused about a lot of things, Joshua. Hardly anything in my life makes sense.” He nods in understanding as I bend over and rummage around in the bottom of the stroller before straightening to face him. “But there is one thing that is crystal clear to me...”

  He steps closer and runs his fingers across my cheekbone. “What’s that, baby?”

  My patience snaps and two years of repressed anger comes spilling out. “There is no happy ending for me that includes you.” I swing the bottle up to his face and squirt the dirty breastmilk at his smug grin.

  His high-pitched shriek fills the air as he brushes wetness from his hair and face. A string of obscenities pours from his mouth as he sprints back toward his waiting car.

  35

  Archie

  Exhausted and utterly miserable, I heft my bag on my shoulder as I trudge out of the administration office of the grimy roadside motel in the grimy backwoods town I’ve just arrived in.

  There’s no plan. No objective beyond making it through another day. And I don’t know why I’m even bothering with that.

  I clench my fingers and the blunt teeth of the room key bite into my palm. The warm colors of the sunset light up the sky but do nothing to improve my gloomy mood.

  A group of bikers perch on their motorcycles and eye me suspiciously as I climb the stairs. I give them a lethargic chin tip and they lose interest, turning back to their conversation. As I’m sliding my key into the lock of room 104, a monster pickup truck pulls into the parking lot.

  “Are you fucking serious?” I mutter to myself.

  The truck pulls into a parking space and the engine cuts off.

  “How the fuck did you find me?” I growl as Charlie and Leo hop out of the truck, their doors slamming behind them.

  “Hello to you, too,” Charlie grumbles as he moves toward the stairs.

  Leo smirks at me. “We’re ex-military. We know a guy who knows a guy who knows how to track cellphone signals.”

  Bastards.

  “Why are you here?” I lean against the rusty metal railing and make my face as unwelcoming as humanly possible as they climb the stairs.

  Charlie’s words drip with sarcasm. “We are here to assist you in removing you head from your ass. And we’re prepared to resort to surgical means, if necessary.” He smacks me in the back of the skull.

  Leo chuckles.

  I don’t have time for this. I need to get some weight off my leg. “To y’all this is a joke. To me, it’s my fucking world crashing down around me. So fuck off.” I shove the door open and step inside.

  A blast of musty air hits me immediately. I don’t even twitch. I’m starting to get used to the putrid, impersonal smell of nondescript motel rooms. Dumping my bag on the floor near the dressing table, I fall onto the edge of the bed.

  Leo comes in and sits on the dressing table. Charlie takes his station, leaning against the doorframe. The silence presses down on me, making everything harder. Sharpening my guilt. Amplifying my depression.

  Finally, I blurt out. “Sophia is goddamned perfect, okay? She deserves better than a mangled Frankenstein who the military patched back together. I don’t get to have a happily ever after with a woman like her. It’s not in the cards. When I left her in that Las Vegas hotel room, I told her to find a good man who deserves her—”

  “A
nd that man is you,” Leo interrupts.

  “Sophia is a great girl,” Charlie says, “She’s wonderful and kind and optimistic. But one thing she’s not? Weak. She doesn’t need you walking around wielding a sword or shooting fireballs out of your asshole to protect her. She can hold her own. But she needs love, Jones. She needs a guy who’s gonna stand by her side no matter what, even when he’s scared, even when he doesn’t feel like he’s man enough.”

  “Your biggest flaw isn’t that you’re missing a leg,” Leo tells me candidly. “Your biggest flaw is that stupid, twisted belief beneath your skull that you don’t deserve love, that you aren’t a good man. Fuck that noise. Drown it out. You have a duty toward your family. They need you. Don’t cower away from that responsibility.”

  Fuck. I thought that running away would be easy, that hiding from these feelings in me would be the answer. But these two brawny assholes in front of me are determined to terrorize me with the hope. Hope that I can be the person I’ve convinced myself I could never be.

  The shrill sound of Charlie’s phone slices through the air. “It’s my wife,” he mumbles, his lips splitting in a smile as he steps outside to take the call.

  Leo huffs out through his nose as he stares after our friend. He shakes his head. “Did you ever think Charlie could become a one-woman man? Or did you think that I would find fucking euphoria after my brutal divorce? Do you remember the conversations we had when you were trying to convince me to go after Reese? I was a fucking train wreck, man. Now, look at me.” He spreads his arms out around him. He does look pretty good. Freshly showered and well-rested at the least. “That’s the power of love, Archie. When it’s coming at you, you can’t stop it. But when you embrace it, it changes you. It turns you into the person you need to be to become worthy of it. Embrace the love.” He gives me a goofy expression. “Lay down your weapons, soldier. Love doesn’t have to be a battlefield. It can just be…love.”