by Ali Parker
But I couldn’t. I couldn’t just leave with her thinking that I’d become such a pretentious fucker that she wouldn’t even have another cup of coffee with me. For that to be true, I’d had to have come off as the worst asshole in the history of assholes. Which evidently, I had.
“Look, I know I was a jerk.” I ran a hand through my hair and blew out a breath, mind racing as I tried to think of what to say that might encourage her to give me a shot here.
The door opening interrupted me, shortly followed by a dark-haired little cannonball shooting past me and throwing itself into Maggie’s arms. “Mommy!”
Maggie’s entire expression changed instantly at the sound of the little girl’s voice. Her stony face relaxed, and her narrowed eyes became soft and happy. She laughed and swept the girl off her feet, spinning her around. “Hey, bug. What are you guys doing here?”
As I was trying to remember how it worked to use my muscles to turn around so I could see who else had arrived, my stunned brain suddenly put two and two together. Maggie’s a mother. That’s her daughter.
Daughters had fathers. A most inappropriate, random stab of jealously speared my gut and almost made me double over. Jordan had warned me that she could be married, that I should have found out if she had a boyfriend. It was my fault that I didn’t know what was going on with her. I was very careful not to let my shock or jealousy show, though.
Despite this turn of events, she was still Maggie, and I still wanted a second chance to make everything up to her. As a friend. Not even I was enough of a dickhead to go messing around in other people’s relationships—especially when there was a kid involved.
Maggie’s and my friendship had simply been too important to me to let it end like this. It didn’t end like this, asshole. It ended years ago in a much, much worse way.
Ignoring my internal beratement, I finally managed to employ my muscles and turned around to face whoever had entered the shop with Maggie’s daughter. Relief so intense it made my head spin floored me when I saw Gayle, Maggie’s mother. It didn’t necessarily mean there wasn’t a significant other in the picture, though. It simply meant that he wasn’t here, and I could find out about him the right way: from her.
Gayle’s easygoing smile dropped as soon as she realized who I was. For a terrifying second, I thought she was going to slap me. Maybe yell at me for missing Ryan’s funeral. Burst out in tears seeing me alive and well when her son wasn’t.
None of those things happened.
Gayle’s easygoing smile was replaced with confusion. Then her lips spread into a massive grin, and fond warmth radiated from her eyes. “Noah Sims. My dearest angel boy, how are you?”
She spread her arms wide and enveloped me in a hug that smelled like paint and felt like comforting, familiar heaven.
“Oh, I can’t believe we’re running into you like this,” she said. “I’ve heard you’ve done amazing things. You’ll have to tell me all about them.”
I hugged her back and hung on to her spindly frame for a second too long before letting her go. “I’m good. I have, and I’d love to tell you about it all sometime, but how are you? How have you been?”
See? More than a self-centered, self-absorbed asshole right here.
A soft groan sounded behind me, and I’d once known Maggie well enough to know that it had come from her and that it meant that she knew exactly what I was doing. Sigh. Crap. She’d known me just as well, if not better. Of course she knew what I was doing.
Gayle, on the other hand, either didn’t know or didn’t care. She beamed at me. “I’m well. Actually, I’m amazing now that my daughter and granddaughter are here. How is your mother? I heard she’s got a granddaughter too. She must love being a granny as much as I do.”
“She does.” I grinned. “She lives for that little girl. We all do. She’s also playing bingo now, if you’d believe it.”
Gayle sniffed, but there was amusement in her eyes. “Don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it. She must be playing on the other side of town. I haven’t seen her around where I play.”
“She plays at the Community Center near our house,” I said.
She snapped her fingers in recognition. “I’ve heard of those meets. I’ll have to go check it out sometime. Your niece should be around the same age as Lydia, five-ish unless my memory truly is abandoning me.”
“It’s not.” I grinned. “She’s five and a half. She never lets us forget that half. Light of our lives.”
Speaking of light… A light bulb lit up in my head. If Maggie’s daughter was the same age as Della, that meant it was likely that they’d have at least some of the same interests—particularly in relation to a day coming up next week. I can work with that.
Turning my head, I looked at Maggie over my shoulder. “Speaking of my niece, I’m taking Della trick or treating on Halloween. Do you guys want to come with us?”
“I’ll let you know,” she said in a tone so flat I just knew that she wasn’t even going to consider it.
“You do that.” I smiled. “I really hope we see you there.”
Maggie dropped her gaze away from mine and focused on her daughter, showing her something underneath the counter. Gayle and I chatted for a few more minutes before I excused myself.
My job here was done for today. I was ninety-nine percent sure I wasn’t going to hear from Maggie, but I wasn’t giving up just yet. I still had a few more tricks up my sleeve, and I’d pull out every damn stop for this woman. She deserved nothing less from me after everything I had done, and neither did Ryan.
Chapter 12
Maggie
“Noah Sims, huh?” Mom waggled her eyebrows at me when he left, a knowing smile forming on her lips. “Fancy meeting him here. I couldn’t help but notice he didn’t have any dry cleaning with him. Was he trying to stoke that old flame?”
I scrunched up my nose and resisted the urge to shout eww. “No, Mother. He wasn’t trying to stoke anything. He was just passing by. That’s all.”
“I highly doubt that.” She waved a finger at me. “I have a sixth sense about these things, you know. I have a feeling he’s still harboring that old crush on you.”
“What old crush?” I tried for a nonchalant chuckle, but it came out sounding like a manic laugh. “He didn’t have a crush on me when we were kids, and he certainly doesn’t now. The only person he’s crushing on is himself. Trust me.”
“What in the world are you talking about?” She frowned. “That boy had a huge crush on you when he was a teenager. Don’t even try to deny it. I was there, Maggie. Teens might think their parents are stupid, but we’re not. I saw how he acted around you. He practically drooled whenever you walked into a room.”
Drawing in a breath, I released it as a long sigh. “Arguing about how he felt about me back then doesn’t change anything now.”
Maybe if she had known how he’d used me back then, how he’d whispered all the sweet nothings to me and then broke my heart, she wouldn’t be such a champion of his. She didn’t know, though.
She’d asked me who had made me cry so much, and I’d told her that it was just some guy from school. Little did she know that it was some guy who had just graduated with Ryan and who just so happened to have been around our house almost every day.
Despite how deeply he’d hurt me, I hadn’t wanted to tell my mother the truth about him. I still didn’t want to. I’d been afraid that telling her might make her do or say something that would tear holes into Ryan and Noah’s friendship.
The last thing I had wanted was to hurt my brother just because his best friend had hurt me. It wasn’t Ryan fault, and he’d have been heartbroken too if he lost Noah. One Hampton being heartbroken over Noah Sims was enough.
I’d promised myself from the get-go nothing that happened between Noah and me would ever impact their friendship, and I’d kept that promise. To his dying day, I’d never let Ryan know what had happened with me and Noah. As my brother, he’d have felt dutybound to do something about it, and
I couldn’t let that happen.
They’d remained best friends, which was why I’d been so surprised when Noah hadn’t shown up at the funeral. In retrospect, maybe he’d already morphed into this self-absorbed jerk even then, and that was why he didn’t attend.
“Maggie?” Mom snapped her fingers in front of my eyes, her frown still firmly fixed on her face. “I asked what you meant about how it doesn’t change anything now.”
I sighed, bringing my hands up to rub my eyes. “Noah’s a different person than he used to be, Mom. He’s changed, and it wasn’t for the better.”
“I don’t think so.” She got a faraway look in her eyes. “I think he still seems to be the same sweet boy that he was when you were younger. I loved him like he was one of my own, you know.”
“I remember.” Another reason why I’d never told her anything. “Can we just drop it, please?”
Mom was too far gone down memory lane. I wasn’t even sure she’d heard me. “I always used to think it didn’t matter if I loved him like one of my own, even if he wasn’t truly part of our family, because I thought eventually, he would be. I was convinced the two of you were going to end up together. I watched you dance around each other for years. Then something changed, and I really thought that this was it. I thought you two had finally found each other.”
Her voice had taken on that dreamy quality of reminiscing. Hearing her thoughts on the matter stung, but I figured it was best to just let her get them out. Hopefully, we would be able to put this run-in with Noah behind us once and for all afterward.
“You guys were so close. I know you always denied it, but I was sure he was the boy who was making you so happy that one year. You were always smiling, and he was always sneaking peeks at you. I even saw him climbing into your window one night.”
My eyes widened. “You knew about that?”
She smirked and raised an eyebrow. “Like I said, teenagers think their parents are stupid. We’re not. We’re not blind either. Anyway, when I saw that, I thought that something was finally happening between you two. I was planning on having ‘the talk’ with you the day after I saw him sneaking in, actually. I know we’d already had it, but I was worried.”
Even so many years later and holding my own daughter in my arms, I cringed at how embarrassing that talk would have been. Quickly setting Maggie down, I told her to go find Addie before Mom could elaborate any more.
Mom’s sex talk had been an interesting one as it was. It involved flavored condoms, bananas, cucumbers, and even an oddly shaped sweet potato—because not every penis is beautiful—and three of the most painful hours of my young life.
Having the talk with her again—when discussing me actually having sex, and with Noah no less—would have been awkward as fuck. I didn’t even want to think about what fruit she’d have chosen to symbolize his penis. Just the thought about how all that would have gone down made me feel sick to my stomach.
Mom grinned when the blood drained from my face. “Don’t be such a prude, baby. Talking to your mom about it, especially when it first happens, is totally natural. In fact, it’s an important milestone in the mother-daughter relationship.”
I pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes. “Can we please stop talking about this?”
I heard Lydia chatting to Addie in the back about chimpanzees. No idea why they were talking about them, but I’d have done anything to be part of that conversation instead.
“Fine.” Mom’s grin dimmed, and her eyes lost the traces of humor in them. “My point was that I thought you two had finally admitted your feelings to one another. But then you came home the very next day, and your eyes were all red. I heard you crying in the bathroom later and again after you went to bed that night. When I asked you about it, you blamed it on some other boy. Noah stopped coming around to the house. Ryan told me it was because they were both busy packing for college and stuff.”
“You didn’t believe him?”
She shook her head. “Not really. I had a feeling there was something none of you were telling me, but when I pressed the issue with Ryan, he genuinely didn’t seem to know anything. I figured my instincts were off, and I didn’t want to push you for information. You were just so sad.”
The sick feeling in my stomach intensified. It was awful to hear how Mom had perceived that time in my life, and I could see how worried and confused she had been about it. Teenagers are terrible, terrible people. Apparently, I hadn’t been an exception to that rule.
“I thought Noah might come to cheer you up, since that was always what happened. When he didn’t, I knew something must have happened between you two. So what was it? What happened?”
“Life happened.” At least that part was true. “We went our separate ways and never spoke again. We have nothing to talk about now, either.”
“That can’t be right.” She narrowed her eyes but then sighed and gave me an understanding smile instead. “You two might have grown apart, but it might be nice to reconnect with old friends now that you’re back. Why didn’t you say yes to going trick or treating with him? You would have jumped at the chance to spend some time with him when you were a kid.”
“I’m not a kid anymore, Mom. I have a kid now, and my kid and I already have plans with Angela Bennett. See? I am connecting to old friends.”
“Angela?” Mom perked right up. “How is she doing? God, it’s been years since I’ve last seen that glorious child. I adored her.”
With Mom off the topic of Noah and firmly on the opposite side of memory lane where Angie lived, I released a quiet sigh of relief. I tried to keep up with her as she chatted about Angie, but hearing all those things about Noah made it difficult to shove him out of my mind.
It wasn’t that I was still pining for him or anything, but thinking back to that time in my life still hurt. As some wise woman once sang, the first cut is the deepest.
Noah had made the first cut on my heart that summer, and it had opened up a little recently.
Everything Mom said had been like she was gently rubbing salt on the cut without even knowing she was doing it. My heart thrummed and stung uncomfortably in my chest as I tried to pay attention to the story she was telling.
I caught the words Angela, alligator, and steal before I drifted off again. I remembered the incident she was referring to well, so I knew when to smile and laugh even if I wasn’t really feeling it.
Absently bringing my hand up to rub the mild ache in my chest, I wondered if it would always be there. I’d thought it was all healed up years ago, but to be fair, I hadn’t really thought about or seen Noah for years. I wasn’t really surprised to find that doing both caused this dull pang of an old ache, though.
Noah had been that important to me, that big a part of my life that even all these years later it was still physically unpleasant to remember what had happened. Considering all that, I really couldn’t blame myself for not being surprised about it.
Once upon a time, he had been the only guy I’d ever felt a real connection to. My mother wasn’t the only one who used to be convinced we’d eventually end up together. It was strange and a bit sad to think that despite the deep connection we’d shared, Noah was nothing but a stranger to me now.
Okay, maybe it’s more than a bit sad. Taking a deep breath, I shook myself off mentally and returned my attention to my mother. Thinking about a stranger while she was talking to me was rude, and she’d raised me better than that.
Chapter 13
Noah
“You actually did it. You dressed up as a frog?” Jordan started a slow clap after opening the door to Mom’s house for me. “I’m impressed, man. I really didn’t think you were going to go through with it.”
“Della asked me to do it, so of course I went through with it.” I looked ridiculous. Truly and utterly ridiculous. But it was worth it when Della came up behind her Dad and saw me standing there.
She let out a high-pitched squeal and wrapped her arms around my legs. “You look great, Unkie.”
“Yeah.” Jordan snorted back a laugh. “Toad-ally awesome.”
“Haha. Your Dad joke game is strong, bro. That the best you got?”
He shook his head. “Nope, stocked up for tonight just in case you did come through. We’d better hop to it if you guys want to get any of the good candy.”
Resisting the urge to flip him off, I focused my attention on Della instead. Mom had braided her dark hair into thin braids that were looped around at the back of her head. She had on a bright purple princess dress with so many sparkles on it you’d be able to see her from space. On her eyelids and cheekbones, there was some glitter that had been smudged on.
“You look beautiful, Della. The prettiest princess of them all.”
Her green eyes sparkled, and she gave me another hug. “You’re the best frog of them all.”
Damn it. I’d nearly forgotten about the ridiculous outfit I was wearing. Glancing down, I seriously started to doubt my commitment to Della’s request. The girl at the costume shop had been more than happy to oblige, giving me a full-body, fuzzy, green suit and bug-eyed goggles to go over my eyes.
“Why didn’t the frog stop on the side of the road?” Jordan asked. I shot him a look, which I wasn’t sure he caught, given the goggles and all, but when he smirked, I knew he’d seen it. “Because it didn’t want to get toad.”
“Very funny.”
Della, on the other hand, thought her Dad was hilarious. She burst out in peals of girlish laughter, only stopping when there were tears in her eyes. “My Daddy’s so funny.”
“Yeah, he’s a laugh a minute.”
Mom walked into the entrance hall, her eyes also shining with amusement. “My son the comedian.”
“I’m glad you’re all enjoying this.” I mock-pouted. “I need to visit the croakroom. Then we’d better get out of here.”
Jordan laughed. “Glad to see you’re joining the party.”
“If you can’t beat them, join them.” I shrugged, noticing for the first time that Jordan was wearing his usual jeans and sweater combo for this time of year. “What are you supposed to be, anyway?”