Sift

by L. D. Davis

  He rubbed his jaw as he looked at me with those damn sad eyes.

  “It’s different now,” he continued softly. “I don’t know now. I'm not sure if I will ever really have you back, Darla. I’ve never been scared of anything in my life, not until now. I’m terrified as shit that I’ve lost you for good.”

  I didn’t bother to try to blink away the tears that slowly dropped from my lashes and slid down my cheeks.

  “What do you think, Dar?” he whispered. “Have I lost you for good?”

  I swiped at my eyes. “I don’t know,” I whispered back. It was as honest as I could get.

  He didn’t look relieved or troubled by the statement before he asked the next big question.

  “I need to know what I’m up against here. You need to be fucking honest.”

  My spine stiffened. I had a feeling I knew where he was going.

  “Is there someone else, Darla?” Cade asked point blank. “Like maybe that Trey guy? Is there someone else?”

  The memory of Connor’s warm smile and his body moving against mine slammed into my mind, but I shook my head. Cade asked if there is anyone else, not if there was, and since Connor had not called me back, he was definitely something of the past and not something of the present. It wouldn’t have done anyone any good to know what had happened in the past and would not happen again.

  “There’s no one, Cade,” I murmured. “I told you Trey was just a friend, and I meant it. There is only you, Caden.”

  We stared at each other for a long minute before Cade inhaled deeply and sat up straighter.

  “Well, fuck,” he said with a small smile. “Even if you had said there was someone else, I would have destroyed the fucking competition.”

  I shook my head and laughed a little. “You’re such a cocky bastard.”

  “That’s one of the many reasons why you love me.”

  Our food came then, and the heavy, heartbreaking conversation ended. When Cade asked me to have dinner with him Sunday night, I accepted. I also skipped the Uber ride home and accepted Cade’s offer to drive me instead.

  He parked his car in a space half a block from my apartment instead of parking illegally in front of it. He walked me to the door, where we embraced and held on to one another for a long time.

  “I fucking love you,” he whispered in my ear.

  “I fucking love you back.”

  I thought maybe he would try to kiss me, and I thought maybe I would kiss him back, but he released me so abruptly that I took one stumbling step back against my building. By the time I took my next breath, Cade was already walking away down the sidewalk, his shoulders hunched and his head bowed.

  I wanted to go after him. I hated seeing him like that, but just as I took a few steps to go to him, my phone rang. It was my sister’s ringtone which made it a phone call I couldn’t ignore. With some regret, I watched Cade get into his car down the street as I took the call.

  “I think I’m having this kid this weekend. I’ve been having contractions on and off,” McKenzie said casually when I answered.

  My brow pinched together. “Shouldn’t you be screaming and praying and threatening to cut off your husband’s balls?”

  “They’ve been mild so far, but I’m sure I’ll be threatening castration soon enough.”

  I watched Cade’s car pull into traffic with a sinking heart, but then I remembered that I would see him for sure on Sunday. Sunday we would be able to begin again.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Weeks later Cade and I were…well, something different. We weren’t together as a couple, but we weren’t exactly apart either. We were…undefined.

  By mutual agreement, things progressed slowly. We had to be careful not to fall back into our old habits, not to fall back into who we were the day I’d left for Virginia.

  Cade wasn’t the only one who had to make some changes. I did, too. I had been just as hot and cold in our relationship as he had been. I’d shouted, said terrible things, and put my hands on him to cause violence. It wasn’t excusable just because I was a female.

  While I did want Cade to make some changes, I didn’t want to change who he was overall. I loved his cocky confidence, his charm, and even his often arduous behavior. I loved what was rough about him as much as—if not more than—what was smooth and pleasant about him. I loved him for who he was. I just needed him to treat me as anyone deserved to be treated. Maybe that would require some internal changes for him and me both, but I wanted the core of Caden Hanes to remain the same.

  The Sunday of our date, my sister McKenzie gave birth to a baby boy who she named Thomas. I had taken a trip down there the following weekend to see her and the baby, hoping that I wouldn’t run into Connor. I didn’t. He must have known I would be there, because he made himself scarce that weekend, even though, according to my sister, he was at either her house or my dad’s frequently. I couldn’t avoid him forever, though. Eventually, I would have to face him. We were bound to see each other at some point in the future.

  Whenever I thought of Connor, my chest ached with guilt, and some other emotion I didn’t yet understand. I thought about him often, too, more often than I would have liked to admit. It was almost impossible to get his smile out of my mind or to forget how his body felt against mine or the way he smelled.

  I always had to push him out of my mind, though. I had made my choice when I left him that morning, and he had made his when he didn’t return my call.

  McKenzie had been sending me pictures and short videos of Thomas almost every day since he was born. I always looked forward to them, so when my phone alerted me of a message one Saturday morning while I was working, I picked it up without hesitation, eager to see my pudgy little nephew.

  The text message wasn’t from McKenzie, though. The message was from Connor.

  My mouth gaped open as I stared at his name. It had been almost two months since I had last seen him, and only a little less than that since I’d last heard his voice. Why was he texting me out of the blue? Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe he’d meant to text someone else, and in a few minutes, I would get the “Sorry, wrong number,” text.

  Even as I told myself not to do it, I eagerly opened the message and read. The message was definitely meant for me and no one else. There was a picture of a sad looking brownie attached.

  “My sister baked me some brownies. I don’t have the heart to tell her that they taste like cardboard.”

  So, our first open line of communication in nearly two months was going to be about food? I pinched my lips to try to hold back my smile.

  “Let me guess,” I typed back. “It came out of a box.”

  “Yessss! And she’s so proud of herself for it. I had to eat a couple to appease her, of course.”

  “Poor you,” I teased. “You’ve been spoiled.”

  His response came only a few seconds later. “The blame of that falls squarely on your shoulders for opening my eyes—and my palette to such things.”

  My chest warmed at the remembrance of his face and his moans as he tried my baking for the first time. Then my cheeks heated as I remembered his face and his moans during that last night we’d spent together.

  I knew that I should have just said something polite and pretended that I was too busy to keep texting—and indeed I really was busy—but I couldn’t stop myself from sending the next message.

  “If you’re at your sister’s in Delaware, that means you’re only about an hour and a half away from making your taste buds happy.” I quickly followed that up with a “Haha,” to insinuate that I was joking.

  I was joking. Mostly.

  There was a longer than usual pause between messages. I bit my lip as I waited for a response, afraid and relieved that maybe that was the end of it.

  It wasn’t.

  “One-hour and twenty-three minutes,” he said. “83.6 miles.”

  I couldn’t explain why that sent shivers down my spine, but I shook them off and texted him back.

  “
I guess that’s right. Anyway, I actually have to work for a living. Good luck with those brownies.” I added a smiley face emoji and waited.

  And waited.

  Connor didn’t text me back.

  I let out a heavy breath of disappointment and then roused myself, and shook my head as if to clear it.

  Just as well, I thought to myself and doggedly forced myself to focus on my work.

  Two hours later, as I was decorating a cake for a customer, my boss Chef Sergio, came into the kitchen. Although he was a fabulous pastry chef, he liked to spend time at the front, chatting with the steady stream of customers. The grunt work was left to me and another girl most days.

  “Someone is here to see you,” Sergio said.

  I didn’t look up from my work. Sometimes my friends dropped in. Very seldom Caden stopped by. Once in a while, certain customers wanted to talk to me, but I couldn’t stop what I was doing.

  “Umm,” I said distractedly. “Who is it?”

  “A man. I do not know. He is not wearing a nametag.”

  I ignored the underlying sarcasm in the Italian man’s response.

  “Well, he has to wait or come back. I’m busy.”

  I heard the door swing shut, muffling the noises from customers and the two girls that worked the counter. A moment later, the sound amplified again as the door opened.

  “He said he will wait.”

  “Tell him he’ll be waiting no less than a half hour,” I murmured as I concentrated on the finer details.

  “I am not your servant,” Sergio said, as he tried to put anger behind his words. “You are mine, Signorina Simpson.”

  I gave him a dismissive, “Mmm hmm,” and smiled.

  I heard him chuckle before he exited once again.

  Sergio could be very hard on me. There were many times—especially in the beginning—that I had gone home close to tears—if not already fully sobbing. But he was only hard on me when he was teaching me. Any other time, he was almost like a friend, or father figure.

  I finished up with the cake a little more than twenty minutes later. I smiled with satisfaction at the anniversary cake. It was for a couple celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary. It was four tiers, with gold fondant, white pearls, and white buttercream flowers that wound around the cake like a spiral staircase to tasty splendor. The interior of the cake was a golden vanilla with more white buttercream between the layers. It wasn’t the sexiest cake, but it sure was pretty. I hoped the long-time customer sent me a picture of it after they cut it so that I could add it to my album.

  I took a picture of my work, gave some directions to my delivery team, and went out to see who was waiting for me.

  It was Connor.

  I stopped dead when I saw him, leaning on the counter and talking with Sergio.

  That was why he hadn’t answered me. He must have jumped in his truck almost immediately to get there so quickly.

  When Sergio glanced up and saw that I had frozen like a deer in headlights eager to be roadkill, his eyebrows rose slightly, questioningly. Connor saw that and turned his head and found my startled gaze.

  He smiled. I smiled, though I knew my eyes were still big, and we both began to walk to meet each other in the middle of the room. We stopped a foot away from each other, both of us seemingly too afraid to move any closer.

  “Hello, beautiful,” he said softly as he gazed down at me with those gorgeous eyes.

  “Hello, Connor,” I breathed.

  His smile widened.

  My butterflies awoke from their slumber.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  A few miles away from the bakery, there was a lake I went to during warmer weather when I wanted to be alone. I’d never told anyone about it. Cade, Cherry, and my coworkers probably knew where it was, but no one knew it was my secret quiet place. Now it wouldn’t be so secret anymore.

  Connor followed me to the lake after I’d loaded him up with a couple boxes of sweets from the bakery. It was the only place I could think of for us to go where we could talk undisturbed. In the bakery he had seemed fine. He smiled and chatted and made jokes, but there was an underlying tension between us. We would have to talk. I wasn’t sure how it would go or how it would end.

  For the first few minutes, as we walked along the edge of the lake, we spoke quietly about the weather. It was early May, and though the nights were still cool, the days were mostly pleasant and warm. When we had exhausted everything we could possibly say about atmospheric conditions, I decided that it was time to get on with it.

  “You didn’t call back,” I said suddenly.

  I cleared my throat and looked away from his brandy colored eyes. I hadn’t meant to start like that.

  “You left,” he responded. Surprisingly, his tone wasn’t accusatory—even though he had every right to be so—but it was just simply stated. I’d left.

  We stopped walking and faced each other. I hadn’t forgotten how good looking he was, but seeing him in my mind and seeing him in person were two different things entirely. Just looking at him made me feel a little giddy despite the seriousness of the situation.

  I pushed my hands into the back pockets of my jeans so that he wouldn’t see them shake. My voice was very soft when I spoke, and I was glad that it didn’t tremble as well.

  “I am sorry, Connor. I really enjoyed the time I spent with you, like…really, really enjoyed it.”

  “Really, really?” He was teasing, I knew that, but he seemed unable to smile as he gazed at me.

  “Really, really,” I whispered. “I liked—like I mean. Still. Currently. Still like you. A lot. I still like you a lot. I liked you a lot then, too. I liked you more than I should have right after a break up from a guy it seems like I’ve always been with. I should have really worked through my feelings for Cade before I let myself get close to anyone else. I should have definitely worked through those feelings before we slept together. But I wasn’t really thinking clearly. I was in a fog. A sex fog. I mean, not that you didn’t make me a little foggy, because you did. Not just your sex. I mean the sex with you.”

  I stopped talking when Connor placed two fingers against my mouth. He was smiling a little, but it didn’t make me feel any better. I was still all nerves, especially with him touching me.

  “Darla, you’re rambling.”

  It was the same thing he’d said the first night we met in Louie’s.

  “I am rambling,” I said against his fingers.

  His eyes dropped to my mouth and got stuck there for a moment. Slowly, he lowered his hand. His fingers trailed down my chin before falling away. His eyes shifted back to mine, and I saw the things he’d done to me in his bed, heard the things he’d said.

  “I understand how you must have felt,” Connor admitted. “I knew that there might even be a chance that you’d regret the sex, regardless of how incredible it was.”

  I nodded in agreement even as I felt my cheeks flush.

  “But, Darla,” he said, as his face darkened. “Instead of slinking off into the night while I slept, you should have talked to me. Leaving me a vague and lame note instead of waking me up was…well…at the time, I thought it was pretty spineless.”

  I swallowed hard and dropped my gaze to the green grass. He was right. I’d been utterly spineless. If I’d had a penis, it would have been a dickless move.

  “Then…why are you here, Connor?” I asked, meeting his eyes again. “Why did you text me? Why did you come here?”

  He took a step closer to me until were toe to toe. His gaze was intense, but I didn’t glance away.

  “Because I haven’t been able to enjoy a plate of nachos since you left me.”

  I gaped at him, but he went on with earnest, with feeling.

  “Because when I did eat the packaged crap again from the All In One, I did weep. Because…” He couldn’t take any more steps without stepping on my feet, but he seemed much closer. “Because every time hunger strikes me, I—”

  “You eat a Snickers?”
I interjected, my voice too high.

  “Well, that, and…” He was definitely closer. “I crave…”

  My eyebrows rose. Was he about to say that he craved me?”

  “Cinnamon rolls,” he whispered in a sultry way that couldn’t have had anything to do with cinnamon rolls.

  I narrowed one eye at him. “My daddy didn’t warn me about boys like you.”

  He copied my one-eyed look. “Is that a bad thing?”

  Lord, Darla, stop it right now.

  I didn’t stop. I smiled a small, but wicked smile and used the same sultry voice Connor had just used.

  “It’s the ones he didn’t warn me about that get me into the most trouble.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Having Connor in my tiny apartment felt strange. He wasn’t any bigger than Cade, but he seemed to be everywhere all at once even though he was only standing in the living room. Maybe I was just nervous. Well, no. There was no maybe about it. I was nervous.

  Obviously, it wasn’t the first time I’ve had a man over, but bringing Connor to the apartment was like inviting him deeper into my life. It was like inviting him to see bits of me that I hadn’t let him see before. It felt intimate, which wasn’t what I was going for, despite my flirty comment earlier at the lake.

  “My whole apartment can almost fit in your kitchen,” I joked. Well, half-joked. I was pretty sure that if we just chopped off a few square feet of our apartment, we’d fit in his kitchen.

  He leaned forward to study a picture of Cherry and me that was taken in New Orleans a couple years ago. We were drunk as hell and laden in beads.