by C. C. Wood
I found myself telling the girls about the Sunday dinner with Charles two weeks before and what happened afterwards, though I left out some details. Everyone listened and laughed when I told them that I’d fallen asleep the first time he tried to tell me he loved me. Then they all ribbed me about my reticence to discuss the sexual activities that led to my admission.
Not for the first time, I noticed Tanya looked a little sad. She had been wearing that expression more often lately. I’d repeatedly asked her what was bothering her, but she always managed to steer the conversation away from herself. Since she seemed to be as tipsy as I was, I decided it was time to force the issue.
“Tanya, what’s bothering you?” I asked. “You haven’t seemed like yourself lately.”
As usual, she tried to evade the question. “You have a good man there, Yancy. Hang on to him.”
This time, I refused to be distracted from the topic. “Tanya, tell us what’s going on. You seem….sad.”
Her eyes lowered to her glass and she toyed with the stem. Then she picked it up and drained it. “If I’m going to discuss this, I’ll need more alcohol.”
I caught the waiter’s eye and waved him over. I ordered everyone another round. After he left, I turned back to Tanya and said, “Talk.”
“Four years ago, I took on a male client whose wife had filed for divorce. She was determined to get everything she could from him before she was done and she had one of the most brilliant, cunning lawyers I’ve ever come up against. I worked on that case night and day and barely managed to save my client from having to pay a crippling amount of alimony and child support. The night after the papers were signed and the divorce was finalized, her lawyer came to see me.” She paused as the waiter returned with our cocktails. “He asked me to dinner. Thinking it was a mindfuck, I laughed him off, turned him down. Over the next few weeks, he pursued me with the same single-minded determination he exhibited in the courtroom. In spite of my better judgment, I liked it. I liked knowing that he was thinking about me constantly, that he was willing to work for me, to earn me.” She laughed. “I know how to play people, but this man was a master because I didn’t even realize that, by telling me he was constantly thinking of me, I did the same in return. Finally, I gave in and agreed to go out to dinner with him. The first time he kissed me, that was it. We were all over each other. The next three months were intense. He wanted me, so he had me, and once wasn’t enough. A thousand times wouldn’t have been enough. Before I knew what was happening, I was head over heels.”
Tanya trailed off, lost in her own memories.
“What happened?” Grier prompted softly.
Tanya blinked rapidly and I realized that she was near tears. I placed my hand over hers and she turned her palm to face mine, squeezing my fingers. “He was offered a job in New York. He took it.”
“Did he ask you to come with him?” Chelsea asked.
Tanya laughed, a sharp, bitter sound. “Oh yeah, he asked me. If he had once, just once, admitted that he loved me as much as I loved him, I would have said yes without hesitation. But he couldn’t. He wouldn’t, and there was no way I was going to sacrifice my pride and beg for his love. So I walked away and he left.”
“What happened to bring this up for you again?” I asked, trying to keep my voice gentle.
Tanya met my gaze, her brown eyes haunted. “He’s back, only now he works at my firm.”
“Oh, shit,” Lucy said.
Tanya buried her head in her hands. “Every day, I go into the office and see him in the break room, flirting with the associates, and I have to sit across the table from him at our weekly meetings. He’s nice, friendly even, but he acts as if those three months never existed.” Her head snapped up, eyes full of fire. “It’s like he’s taunting me, fishing for a reaction and it’s just like him, the bastard. He plays games, manipulates, cons. The mindfuck is his specialty. That’s why he’s such a good lawyer. He sees weakness and knows how to dance around the subject until he has you backed into a corner.”
“What are you going to do?” Grier asked quietly.
Tanya drank more of her cocktail. “I don’t know. I’m still trying to decide if he’s playing games with me or has honestly moved on. Until then, I’m civil but distant. I’ve found that’s the best way to deal with manipulative shitheads.”
That got my attention. “Really?” I asked.
She looked confused. “Huh?”
“Distant but civil works best?”
I saw when comprehension hit. “Yes. Drives’em nuts when they can’t get a rise out of you or a reaction of any kind.”
Before I could say anything else, Lucy’s phone buzzed on the table. She glanced down at the screen and groaned. “Shit, ladies. I told Chris to pick Yancy and me up at 10:00 because that’s when the restaurant closes. It’s 9:50 and he’s on his way.”
The other ladies grumbled under their breath as we dug around in our purses for our wallets to pay the tabs. By the time we’d hunted down our waiter and paid the bill, it was a little after ten. We gathered our stuff and headed out into the crisp March night.
Before I got in the car with Lucy and Chris, I grabbed Tanya and gave her a tight hug. “Anything you need, anytime, you call me, okay?”
“Okay.”
I pulled back and gave her a hard look. “I mean it.”
She laughed. “Okay, okay. If I’m having a bad day, I’ll call you,” she promised.
“Good.”
I climbed into Chris’ car and waved good-bye to Tanya, Chelsea, and Grier. On the drive home, Lucy and I did our best to annoy the shit out of Chris.
I think we succeeded, because, when he pulled into my driveway, Chris looked over his shoulder at me. “Yancy, I’d say it was a pleasure, but it would be a lie.”
I laughed. Now that I’d spent some time with Chris Barden, I was beginning to understand his dry sense of humor, and I knew he was being sarcastic.
“Thanks again, Chris.” I blew Lucy a kiss. “I’ll talk to you later. Thanks for tonight, I really did need it.”
She rested her chin on the back of her seat. “Anytime, Yance. Call me if you need anything, even if it’s just to talk.”
I nodded and climbed out of the car. Chris waited until I unlocked the door, stepped inside, and waved before he backed out of my driveway. Smiling, I shut and locked the door. Lucy found a good man in Chris Barden.
I followed the sound of the television into the living room and found Charles stretched out on the couch, watching a movie. I stared at the screen in surprise when I realized it was Twilight.
“Are you watching a tween vampire flick, alone?” I asked incredulously.
Charles’ head popped up over the back of the couch. “Hey! Did you have fun?”
I nodded. “Yeah. Thanks for watching the baby. Did she give you any trouble?”
“Nope. You have a great kid, Yancy. We played and watched some TV, then I gave her a breathing treatment and put her to bed.”
“Good.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “So, you didn’t answer my question. Why are you watching a chick flick?”
“Hey, I like this movie,” he said defensively.
“Uh-huh. Obviously, since you’re lying here in the dark, watching it……alone.”
I squealed as he vaulted over the back of the couch and came after me. I tried to run but I was too tipsy to get very far. Charles wrapped his arms around my waist and lifted me off my feet.
“I think I need to shut you up,” he said, laughing as I struggled.
He then proceeded to find a creative way to do so, that involved stripping me naked and bending me over the arm of the couch.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Three Weeks Later
I LEFT MY meeting with Delinda Malone feeling better about the state of Cooper’s custody suit. We finally had the initial hearing, and the judge not only seemed unimpressed by my ex-husband’s case, but annoyed by his attorney’s antics as well. I would retain sole custody of Carole
na, with no visitation unless I wished, until he reviewed all the facts.
When Cooper’s lawyer tried to argue the point, the judge leveled a look at him and said, “By his choice, your client hasn’t seen his daughter in over a year. He can wait a couple more weeks.”
After that, Delinda seemed extremely satisfied. When we left the hearing, she said, “I think everything will turn out just the way you want it.”
The way I wanted it was for my daughter not to be sick and my ex-husband to be a good father. Unfortunately, that wasn’t possible. Still, I could take what I could get, and that would be sole custody of my little girl and the security of knowing that she wouldn’t be neglected.
A week after the hearing, Cooper started calling me. For days, I ignored his calls and erased all his messages. Then he began to text me and his messages became more and more desperate. I sent everything to Delinda, but didn’t respond.
After four days of trying to reach me through my cell phone and home phone, Cooper called my office at 4:30.
When I answered the phone, he said, “Please don’t hang up, Yancy.”
“What do you want, Coop?” I asked, my voice neutral and even.
“I need to talk to you. In person.”
I scoffed. “That didn’t go well the last two times, so I think I’ll pass. And haven’t I told you before to have your attorney call mine if you want to discuss things with me?”
“Please, Yancy. I need to talk to you.”
I sighed. “Coop, you put your hands on me and, the last time I saw you, you showed up at my house uninvited. I don’t particularly care to talk to you.”
“Look, you were right. Someone from the Office of the Attorney General has contacted me. They’re threatening to garnish my wages or even throw me in jail. I don’t have the money to pay everything I owe.”
I scowled. The bastard was whining about not having the money to pay child support to me? “I don’t see how that is my problem, Coop. Perhaps instead of spending a lot of money on a lawyer and suing me for custody of Carolena, you should have tried to pay down what you owe.”
“Yancy.”
“What, Coop? You want me to feel sorry for you after you abandoned me and your daughter? It’s not gonna happen.”
“What if I drop the suit?” he asked. “Would you forgive the back support payments?”
I realized then why he’d gone the route he had. While Cooper wasn’t as intelligent and articulate as Charles, he was cunning. By suing me for custody, if I agreed to forgive the child support quickly enough, his legal fees would be less than what he owed.
“No, Coop. I won’t.”
“Are you willing to risk losing your little girl?” he asked slyly.
His words told me exactly how little he thought about his daughter. He called her my little girl. Not by her name. Not even our little girl. Mine. To him, she was nothing more than a means to an end to get himself out of the trouble he’d created for himself.
“Cooper, if that were a strong possibility, you wouldn’t be on the phone with me now. You know that your chances of winning this suit are practically nil. You might get lucky enough to have supervised visitation, but I doubt it.”
I didn’t even have the energy to be angry. I think Coop had exhausted all the anger in my body over the past few weeks. He was sad. Pathetic and sad. A year ago, that would have enraged me. Now, it just broke my heart for my baby girl.
“Yancy, please, I can’t go to jail. Please meet me so we can talk this out,” he pleaded.
“I think we’re talking it out just fine on the phone.”
“What do I have to do for you to consider this?” he asked.
A thought came to me, piercing my calm and I almost dismissed it immediately. It was wrong to even allow it to cross my mind. Then I forced myself to stay on track and really considered what I wanted to ask him. All I wanted was for Carolena to have a loving, devoted father. Cooper had proven that he had no intention of being that man. Perhaps it wasn’t such a horrific suggestion after all.
“Yancy?”
I focused on the conversation. “I will forgive the child support, on one condition.”
“Whatever it is, I’ll do it.”
I wasn’t so sure. “I will forgive the child support if you sign papers terminating your parental rights.”
When I said it, my words sounded so cold, so calculated, but they weren’t. I hated myself for even thinking it, but my daughter deserved a chance at having a man in her life who didn’t pretend that she was nonexistent. It wasn’t an easy choice and maybe it wasn’t the compassionate one, but I knew, absolutely knew, that Carolena would be better off.
Cooper didn’t respond for a long time.
I took a deep breath. “It’s a lot. You can think about it and…”
“I’ll do it,” he said quietly. “I never wanted to have children, never expected to. At least this way, whoever you marry can adopt her, be the dad she needs.”
His words so closely mirrored my own thoughts, that I clenched my left hand so tightly my nails dug into my palm.
“I’ll talk to my lawyer and have him take care of the paperwork,” Cooper said.
“Okay.” What else could I say? I knew, deep in my heart, this was what was best for Carolena, but it still hurt. I was taking someone’s child away from them.
I shook my head. Cooper didn’t feel that way. If he did, he wouldn’t have agreed so easily to my terms.
“Good-bye, Yancy.”
“Good-bye, Coop.”
I put the handset down and stared blankly at the wall of my office. Feeling emotionally and physically drained, I saved my work and shut down my computer. It was fifteen minutes before five, but I needed to go home. I gathered up my purse and laptop bag and headed downstairs to the parking lot.
I held it together as I drove home and said good-bye to Kathy. I didn’t break down when Charles called to say he would be late coming over because he had some work to finish. I went through the motions, feeding the baby, playing with her, giving her a bath and her breathing treatment. As I did what needed to be done, I was in a fog.
I was sitting on the couch, drinking a glass of wine, with the television off, when Charles came in. Last week, I’d given him my spare key. He was spending almost every night with me anyway, so I bit the bullet. We hadn’t discussed what we imagined for our future together and I decided to take it one day at a time until we had that conversation.
Charles walked into the living room, stripping off his coat and tie.
“Hey, babe. How was your day?” he asked.
I took one look at him and burst into tears.
“Yancy? What’s wrong?” I felt his hands on my shoulders as he sat next to me and I dove into his arms, pressing my head into his chest. “Yancy?”
I just sobbed harder. He pulled me closer, his hands drifting over my hair and back in an effort to soothe me. As the tears slowed, I hiccupped and rested my cheek on his shoulder.
As the storm subsided, Charles cupped my face and turned me so that we were looking into each other’s eyes. “Tell me what happened, baby.” His voice was soft and gentle. My eyes grew wet again, but I blinked rapidly to keep the tears from falling.
“Cooper called me at work.” Charles’ face hardened and his eyes grew bright with anger. He knew my ex had been trying to get in touch with me all week. “I was right. He only wanted to reconcile because the Office of the Attorney General is threatening to put him in jail if he doesn’t pay the back child support.” I laughed bitterly. “When he realized reconciliation wasn’t on the table, he decided to sue for custody of Lena then offer to drop the suit if I forgave the amount he owed me.”
Charles ran his fingers through the hair at my temple. Somehow he knew that touching me like that would calm me down. “So, what did you say?”
I took a deep breath and released it slowly. “I told him I would forgive the back child support if he would terminate his parental rights.” I swallowed hard. “He doesn
’t have the money to pay it and I gave him an ultimatum no parent should ever face. I’m going to take away his child.”
“Before he came back, had he asked, even once, to see Carolena?”
I shook my head. “He only asked to see her after he filed for custody.”
Charles gathered me into his arms, holding me close. “Then he’s the one who cut himself off. You are only doing what you think is best to protect your daughter.” He paused and I could tell he was weighing his words. “I want you to take a moment and really think about your ex. If you hadn’t asked him to terminate his rights, would he come after you like this again if he fell behind on his support payments?”
I didn’t have to ponder the question for too long. Coop would. He was manipulative and selfish. He would do whatever it took to get what he wanted. “Yes, he would.”
“Then you have to protect yourself and Carolena, Yancy. Sometimes that means making hard choices.”
I looked up at him. “But what if he changes his mind? Or, if in ten years, Carolena wants to see him and I have to explain to her that he abandoned us?”
Charles kissed my forehead and used his thumbs to wipe away the new tears that trickled down my cheek. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
That got my attention. “We?”
He smiled slightly at my confusion. “Yes, we.”
I touched his jaw with the tips of my fingers. “Will there be a an us in ten years?” I asked. I was afraid of that question, but hope still bloomed within my chest like a flower, fragile yet beautiful.
Charles squeezed my shoulders. “What do you think we’re doing here? I spend almost every night with you and Lena. You gave me a key to your house. I love you. I want there to be an us in twenty-five or even thirty years.”
“Why didn’t you say anything before?” I asked. “I wondered how you were feeling, what you were thinking, but I didn’t want you to feel pressured. You tell me so many things about yourself, but not that.”