No Excuses

by Nikky Kaye

  “I don’t—”

  “Jesus, woman! You’re arguing with me now!”

  I shook my head. “No, I’m—” I paused, realizing that my automatic response was to disagree with him, when I really didn’t. Why did I do that?

  With a deep breath, I put my hand flat on his chest. The strong, steady beats of his heart pulsed against my palm. I turned my face up to his, meeting his gaze openly and honestly.

  “I don’t want to fight anymore.”

  I could almost see him thinking. Had I been fighting with him? Against him? Did it really matter? Whatever he saw in my face answered his questions, and I would no longer question his answers.

  His mouth covered mine with a deep, possessive kiss. He stole my fear, and when he pulled back I was breathless.

  “Wait.” Reaching behind me, he turned off the water.

  The sound of our breathing seemed even louder when no longer muffled by the shower. His handprint smeared across the fogged glass as he felt for the door. He prodded me toward it so quickly I was surprised that I didn’t leave my ass print on the steamed-up glass.

  Inch by inch, he shuffled me across the en suite bathroom and toward his bed. He held me close, like we were magnets drawn together.

  My hair was still drenched, water dripping down my back and over my ass. Jake seemed to be able to shake it all off like a dog. We fell onto the bed, caring only that it was a soft place to land.

  He branded me with his lips—on my mouth, cheeks, neck, collarbone, forehead. I tensed, expecting his passion to collide with mine—too hard, too fast. Instead, he slowed down and pulled back to look at me.

  I didn’t think about the danger of loving him. All I knew was that with Jake, my hollow spots were all filled. I let out the breath trapped in my chest in a shaky hum. Then I leaned forward and kissed him.

  His body vibrated under my hands, as though it could barely contain his desire. My hands paved a path up and down his back.

  The empty space between us slid sideways and wavered, like a rip in the space-time continuum. The room around us swallowed all sound, the world beyond the apartment shrinking. My entire universe had collapsed on itself, compressing into the white-hot points of contact between our bodies.

  What on earth could possibly come next? I wondered.

  The problem with comparing intimacy and desire to the universe is that the latter is inexpressibly infinite. It’s hard to compete with that—but we tried.

  We took our time, learning each other through touch and taste and smell. For maybe the first time, I felt as though he’d been able to crawl inside my skin and feel what it was like to be me, and vice versa.

  His fingers and tongue and cock inside me stroked, not plunged, and I embraced him fully.

  “Give me more,” I begged him.

  He took my face in his hands as he throbbed deep inside me. “Annie, I’m giving you everything I can. Don’t you know that?”

  His words penetrated me deeply, filling me with pleasure so intense that it made my heart hurt.

  “It’s not like before,” I gasped.

  He nodded. His hips moved and he swelled within me. “Before… before, we were…” His chest pressed against mine as he took a deep breath. “That was before. This—this is after.”

  When I closed my eyes, I was shocked to feel tears sliding down my overheated cheeks.

  He stilled. “Am I hurting you?”

  I shook my head. “Not yet.”

  His sigh enveloped me. “Feel me, Annie.” His hips moved lazily against me, but I felt him more inside my brain than my body.

  “I’m full of you,” I groaned.

  He sped up his pace, his jaw tight. With one hand, he reached down and wedged his hand between us. “You feel that?” he asked, his fingers moving between my clit and where he entered me.

  “Oh my god.” I felt it all.

  My head tilted back, my orgasm swelling within me. When it came, it was in waves that nearly choked me and pulled me under. He held onto me tightly, burying his face in my neck.

  “Oh fuck, Annie.” His voice was hoarse as he jerked and twitched, grunting softly into my hair.

  This was the scary part.

  This was the blissful part.

  This was the after.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  JAKE

  Dom asked me once what it was like to be a parent. At the time, I wasn’t seeing Stella enough, and think I said something bitter, like “fuck if I know.”

  But it was… relentless.

  Relentless in the way that desert sand gets in every crack, crevice and pore of your clothes and body. Relentless, like how self-doubt, fear and guilt plague your subconscious.

  And that was just during the waking hours.

  Even relentlessness had a routine, however. Within a few weeks, the three of us had found a rhythm. Well, as much as possible with Stella going back and forth between her mom’s and my place.

  That was the point of the conversation I had just started with Sheila.

  “Is your schedule going to be regular soon?” I asked her. I dropped Stella’s little Frozen backpack inside the front door of her apartment.

  “Jesus, I hope so. I think so.” Sheila looked tired, but also… happy? “I really like this job, so I’m praying the hours don’t kill me. I feel like I’m making a difference, and god knows it’s never boring.”

  I understood what she meant, but I also understood the toll it could take on a person. I was a complete asshole to almost everyone for close to six months after I finished my last tour.

  There was no point in reminding her that she didn’t need this job, given what I contributed to her and Stella’s bank accounts. The truth was that I was proud of her initiative. My bitterness of the last couple of years was easing.

  Maybe Annie was right, and she had given me brain damage.

  “Who’s Annie?” Sheila asked. “Stella talks about her.” She’d opened Stella’s backpack and was looking inside, her tone carefully casual.

  What to tell an old girlfriend about a new one? “She’s, uh, staying with me.”

  “Houseguest?” Was that jealousy?

  I rubbed my neck, not sure how to label it. Hostage, houseguest, hookup… heart? “Sort of. Sort of not.”

  She tossed the backpack onto the couch, her voice hard. “I don’t want Stella around some casual—”

  “Watch it…”

  Sheila’s hands went to her hips. “Fine. Fling. Whatever. I won’t have her exposed to that.”

  “Exposed to what, exactly? A nice woman who knows how to pour her a bowl of cereal?” And makes bacon, while knowing all the words to Stella’s favorite songs? The horror! “Go ahead. Tell me exactly what kind of woman you think I’m exposing our daughter to.”

  I waited for the snide, passive aggressive insults; the paranoid fear that our little girl was going to be emotionally scarred by spending time with another woman who wasn’t her mother or her mother’s mother. Or Evie. Or a preschool teacher. Seriously, she was around other women all the time.

  Sheila had always been a bit… what was the word? Helicopter-y? I immediately bristled when I saw her blades starting to spin, her mind whirling with assumptions and judgment. She sighed, and the voop voop slowed down to a dull whine.

  “Okay. Sorry. I’ll give you—and her—the benefit of the doubt.”

  My eyes widened. This was definitely progress. We exchanged a tired smile. “Look at us,” I said. “Being grown-ups.”

  “It’s probably about time. In a couple of years Stella will be more emotionally mature than you.”

  And there was the snide insult. It was almost a relief. There was only so much personal growth I could manage in a month.

  Without Stella to plan around and Annie at work, I went to the office and worked through dinner. It wasn’t the first time, nor would it be the last.

  “Corporate MREs, Dominic. Look into it,” I’d suggested at one meeting. “It could be huge.”

  R
ight now I was immersed in researching possible locations for expanding the Stella toy store. Part of me didn’t want to create another one. It was one of a kind, just like its namesake.

  My passion project.

  The business part of me, though, knew that it would be a good idea. It was hard enough to be a big retail empire and appear to have a heart and conscience these days. Stella would expand the Stone brand and position it in a positive way.

  I hadn’t realized how late it was until I saw the darkness outside the window, and my eyes were burning from staring at the computer screen.

  Even with my fists pressed against my closed eyes, I noticed when the lights in the room went on.

  “You are still here.” Dom looked just as meticulous fresh as when I saw him earlier. Only the dark shadow on his jaw indicated that time had passed.

  I, on the other hand, didn’t even bother with a suit jacket. What the fuck was the point?

  “You want to go get a late dinner? Evie’s hungry.”

  “Now? That’s a really late dinner.” Although, there was no reason not to, and I could eat.

  “She’s always hungry.”

  “Wedding stress getting to her?”

  “More like my big billionaire dick getting to her,” he joked. “I knocked her up.”

  “Dude! Seriously?”

  Dom looked ridiculously pleased with himself. “It’s early, but yeah. You know the way they calculate that shit is stupid, right? It should just be counted from the date my guys hit the target.”

  I hesitated to congratulate him, recalling a sad, scotch-soaked scene from the fall. Evie had lost a pregnancy at eight weeks, and it had hit them hard. Hopefully Dominic hadn’t just jinxed it by telling me.

  “Congratulations, I guess. She okay?”

  “Other than puking in the morning—so far, so good.”

  “I’d throw up if I woke up to you, too.”

  He gave me the finger. “So, you guys want to have dinner?”

  “Sure.” It was embarrassing how many things in my body popped as I stood up. How long had I been sitting there? Jesus. I rolled the sleeves of my shirt down. “Are the girls ready?”

  “Don’t we have to go pick Annie up?”

  I froze in the middle of plucking my leather jacket off the back of the stiff little loveseat in the corner of my office. “Stiff,” because I knew from experience it was uncomfortable as fuck to sleep on.

  “What are you talking about? Evie was supposed to pick Annie up after she dropped Stella at Sheila’s.”

  It wasn’t ideal, but it was the best we could organize. It had been a clusterfuck of a day, with meetings that wouldn’t end and trying to juggle big and little people’s schedules.

  “They told me she went home early,” Evie said as she walked through my office door. “Just call her.”

  Irritation flared in me. Why hadn’t she texted me? Why had she left work? Was she sick? Injured? She’d told me about some of the gory accidents that could happen in a restaurant kitchen, and my mind immediately went to the emergency room.

  I grabbed my phone off the corner of the desk and thumbed out a quick message to her. Then another. Waited thirty-three seconds, then sent another.

  “Jesus, man. Give her a chance to respond.”

  Sticky tendrils of tension spun a web between the three of us as we waited for my phone to buzz or beep. Something. The gurgling of Evie’s stomach was the only sound in the room.

  “Sorry,” she whispered. “Try calling her. I don’t know why people always text first, every time. I mean, it’s a phone.”

  It went straight to voicemail—twice.

  “Shit.”

  “It’s okay.” Evie patted my arm. “Why don’t we just go back to your place and pick up something on the way? Maybe she’s sleeping or something.”

  I sure hoped so.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ANNIE

  “Mmmm.” I snuggled into my pillow, my eyelids weighed down by sleep and still feeling swollen and gritty.

  Oh god, that felt so good. There was nothing like your own pillow. The cool side always felt cooler, and the warm side smelled like your own skin and shampoo.

  Actually, that was a little creepy.

  I nuzzled the pillowcase anyhow, luxuriating in the comfort it gave me. It smelled… weird. Not like “the dance club odor on your hair after going out” smells, but… laundry soap or fabric softener. Something about it teased at my brain.

  What kind of detergent was it? I flashed on the memory of doing Jake and Stella’s laundry—along with my own, of course. Nothing said co-habitation more than washing someone else’s dirty underwear. Of course, Stella was still struggling with potty training; I’d discovered that the hard way.

  I’d discovered a lot of things the hard way in the previous twenty-four hours. My head still throbbed, and I kept my eyes closed and ran through the day before like clips from a bad movie.

  After lunch, Jake had gotten sucked into a conference call about china suppliers—the toy tea sets, not the country—and marooned Stella and I. I’d already helped her change her clothes twice in the morning, and had become an eagle-eye expert on identifying her “pee pee dance.”

  When it became clear that I was going to be late for my shift, Jake prompted me to call Dominic on another phone and ask him for an escort. To say I was irked was an understatement. For god’s sakes, it had been close to a month! Was I going to be babysat like Stella indefinitely?

  But that begged another question: what to do with Stella? I didn’t know that much about little kids, but I was pretty sure that three year-olds were supposed to be supervised. This three year-old’s father didn’t appear to be wrapping up his meeting anytime soon.

  When Dom arrived, Stella was doing her second lap around the living room without touching the floor. I’d been “supervising,” naturally.

  “Nice parkour, kid.”

  “Uncle Dumb!”

  She squealed and launched herself at him from atop the end table. I dove for the empty juice box that she’d kicked over in her welcome.

  “Uncle dumb?” I hadn’t heard that one before. My giggles ended as soon as one mutated into a snort.

  “’Dom’ was hard for her to say at first. I’m sure she’ll figure it out at some point.”

  “Hopefully after she’s eighteen,” I muttered.

  “Stella, get off me. Isn’t he done yet?” he asked, peeling his niece off his chest and jerking his chin toward Jake’s den slash home office.

  Stella vaulted onto the couch again, her curls bouncing around her face. No doubt—kids were cute, but they were hell on the furniture. “I wanna come with you!” she announced, but it was unclear which “you” she meant.

  “I’d better ask him.”

  Different voices collided in the den. Clearly his conference wasn’t even close to finishing. Not wanting to interrupt him, I tapped him on the shoulder. He spun around in his chair, away from his computer, eyebrows raised.

  “So you’re saying that we need to find a different source for the pattern printing?” he asked. I looked at him blankly, until I realized he was addressing his colleagues.

  “I’m going to work. What about Stella?” was an easy conceptual question, but I felt compelled to ask him through some very creative sign language.

  Laughter echoed from a speaker.

  He whipped his head around. “Just a minute,” he said to the computer—the screen with people’s faces on it.

  Oh my god. I’d been in full view of the webcam, miming a preschooler’s pee pee dance. Mortified, I darted to the side, out of the way of the webcam. In my zeal to escape, I bounced off a wall.

  Heard more laughter.

  Clearly I’d been wrong about the camera’s field of vision.

  At that point I just slunk out of the room. When I got back to the living room, I found a red-faced Stella and Dom with his face twisted into a grimace.

  “She peed on me.”

  “I’m sorry!�
�� she wailed.

  Her bow-legged cowboy walk of shame to the bathroom might have been amusing if it didn’t mean another mess to clean up.

  I sighed. It was my fault; too many juice boxes, and no “pee pee dance” tutorial for Uncle Dumb. A third change of clothes later for Stella, I was now officially late for work.

  Blissfully ignorant of the drama outside his den, Jake popped his head out to ask Dom if Evie was home today. Within a few seconds, it was all arranged that Stella would go to Dom and Evie’s for a few hours. No miming required, except for the X-rated gesture he gave me in silent promise for later that evening. Since he hadn’t had to deal with cleaning up urine all morning, I offered him a different kind of hand gesture.

  The rest of the day was equally pissy. I went over it all in my mind, hoping against hope that if I kept my eyes shut, it would turn out to just be a dream. I wanted to put my head under the covers and not come out.

  My manager was close to losing his shit when I rushed in. I was annoyed as hell at being late—and made even later by having to move Stella’s car seat to Dominic’s sleek sedan. If Jake hadn’t been so overprotective, I could have just gone to work by myself and Dom could have waited with Stella until Jake was done his meeting.

  Instead, everybody had to be moved around like pawns on a chessboard. And everything was so black and white. I started my shift almost snarling with irritation.

  Dom’s patronizing reminder that Evie would pick me up later didn’t help. I waved him off, feeling like a surly teenager. Blah blah blah. Thanks, Dad. Can I have twenty bucks? Only Stella blowing me a kiss from the back seat lifted my grumpies—and only a little.

  It had been a long, shitty shift, and it wasn’t even eight o’clock. I was in the weeds all evening, distracted and grumpy. For a professional waitress, I sure wasn’t acting very professional—and it showed.

  “What is going on with you tonight, Annie?” my manager asked me as I sucked back a Diet Coke by the bar. “Boy trouble?”

  I pasted my second-best “customer service smile” on my face. I didn’t have enough energy for my best smile. “Boys? What are boys?” I blinked at him. “I live for my job, John.”