by Drew Elyse
“Now that’s what a man likes to come home to,” Slick said as he came back into the room. The indulgent smile on his face at his daughter’s laughter was priceless.
“She’s still out?” I asked about Deni.
“Yeah. Hopefully will be for a while.”
Well, that was good. I had managed to vent out some of my issues and helped a friend. “My work here is done, then,” I announced. “Tell Deni she can call me if she needs more naps, okay?”
“Sure thing. Thanks, Cami.”
With that, I left the happy, though worn out, family and headed to Gauge’s…my apartment. Wow, I really had to figure some things out.
I heard the elated, high-pitched voice in the hallway and considered turning around and going somewhere, anywhere, else. I stared at the brushed chrome numbers on the white door, the key in my outstretched hand.
“This will be so perfect,” I heard Stacey enthuse from inside. “This crib is really nice. It’ll be a great place for him.”
Swallowing back my already burgeoning desire to shoot off a sarcastic remark to a situation I did not even fully understand yet, I slid my key into the lock and let myself in. Gauge was sitting on the ground in the living room, a collapsed cardboard box discarded nearby, the dark wood pieces of a crib laid out around him as he screwed two together. He was wearing one of his ratty pairs of jeans and a white wife-beater that molded to his chest. It was a mouthwatering contrast to his bronzed skin and black tattoos. Beneath the smooth surface, the muscles in his arms flexed and moved as he worked the screwdriver. The sight was enough to have my body buzzing with a sexual current.
"Oh. Hi, Cami," Stacey greeted me. The cool down on my system was far more apt to jumping into the Arctic Ocean than a simple bucket of water.
Gauge glanced over his shoulder. "Hey, darlin'."
"Hi," I answered them both with an astounding lack of inflection.
"How's Deni?" Gauge asked as he returned to his task.
"Tired, but well. I watched Jules for a while so she could get a nap."
"That was so nice of you," Stacey said. Either she legitimately meant it, or she had perfected the art of being passive aggressive to the point her true intent was undetectable. Yes, I realized even then the former sounded far more likely, but that did nothing to assuage my suspicion.
As I contemplated her tone, I managed to plunge us all into an awkward silence. Well, it was certainly awkward for Stacey and me—though she kept up the smile. Gauge, however, focused on building a rather nice looking crib. Once I was closer, I could see the scrolled panels along the top of each end and realized how detailed it was.
“The crib is really beautiful,” I said.
“Isn’t it, though?” Stacey gushed. “It’ll be perfect for the baby.”
Tension settled into every muscle in my body, but I tried to keep my face and voice relaxed as I asked, “Did you get the same one?”
“What?” She seemed genuinely confused. “Oh. Right. Yes, I got the same one. It’s at my apartment.”
“Did you go there and set it up already?” I asked, aiming the question to the room at large in hopes Gauge might wade in and save me from the situation. He did not.
“Not yet,” Stacey said, something in her voice seeming edgy—that was definitely not me projecting that time. “There’ll be time to get to that. Plenty of time. It will definitely get done before he arrives.”
Having crossed the line from edgy to rambling, Stacey actually lost that happy-go-lucky affect and started to look uncomfortable. Her eyes moved from Gauge to the crib to her protruding belly.
Did she think there was a chance she would not need the other crib? Did she think she was somehow going to get me out of the picture in the remaining week or so of her pregnancy? That when the baby arrived, she would be bringing him back here? Did she think the crib Gauge was putting together was going to be the only one her son used?
“Well, it’ll have to,” I said rather pointedly. I saw Gauge look over at me from the corner of my eye, but I did not acknowledge him.
“Yes, it’ll have to,” Stacey parroted.
“If you’re going to have primary custody, he’ll need a bed,” I pressed right on.
“Cami,” Gauge warned.
“Of course,” Stacey said.
I kept my mouth shut after that, both Stacey and I awkwardly watching as Gauge installed the fourth and final side of the crib. Distantly, I wondered if I had ever been in a more tense situation. Dinner the night I met Gauge came to mind. There was one time I accidentally walked in on Roadrunner with a club girl when I was a teenager. Still, this one was certainly in the running for the top spot.
“So, Stacey,” I started, trying to be civil. Unfortunately, I failed miserably. My desire to get to the bottom of her motivations overpowered any ability to be civil. “What brings you over, anyway? Seems like Gauge has got this well under control.”
When Gauge looked over that time, I made the mistake of meeting his eyes. The warning in them was unmistakable. He was getting pissed, which only served to fuel my own attitude.
“Oh, well…” Stacey stuttered out, trying to formulate an answer to my question, “we were out buying the furniture and everything, and I just…wanted to see how Gauge was going to set things up here.”
I nodded, taking a sort of sick satisfaction in the fact that she no longer looked like the cheery character she had constantly been as of late. She looked rattled. I had rattled a very pregnant woman over her closeness to the father of her baby. It should not have been remotely satisfying, but my absolute distrust of Stacey’s intentions made it just that.
The warning glares from Gauge continued, and I opted to heed them. It was not so much out of some desire to mind him, more out of feeling like I had rock the boat enough. I was not intentionally trying to be disruptive, I just wanted to see if I could ruffle the feathers right off Stacey’s disguise.
An hour or so later, I was sitting in the same armchair I had taken up residence in when I got back. Gauge had powered through the rest of the crib at top speed before asking Stacey if she was ready to go. He went on to say the assembly of anything else they had gotten could wait. Stacey had not really needed the convincing, though. My impression of an ice queen was sufficient in having her scurry off to warmer places.
If I were smarter—or at least less inclined to get into it with Gauge—I would have moved in the time he’d been gone. Instead, I remained seated there, awaiting Gauge’s imminent return.
Metal scraped against metal. The door unlatched, then opened and closed. Through it all, my eyes remained locked on the crib. Any other innocuous item in the room would have probably been a better choice, but it was where my eyes had focused, and I had not had the concentration to make them shift away.
“You want to tell me what the fuck that was?” Gauge demanded as he stomped into the room. He was not directly in my line of sight, and I let it remain that way.
“What what was?”
“Stop with the fuckin’ games, Cami,” he ordered.
“Excuse me?”
“You were a straight up bitch to her tonight.”
That time, I did not even answer. He called me a bitch. A bitch.
“Fuck, I didn’t mean that,” he backtracked.
“Really? It sounded like that was exactly what you meant.”
He cursed, shaking his head. “Look, I’m not taking it back. Why the fuck did you do that?”
“So you think I’m a bitch?”
“I think you were acting like a bitch, yeah.”
“And the fact that she’s after you even when she knows we’re together, that means nothing?” I refused to let him make me the villain.
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“No, I’m really not. She’s always around, even when she has no reason to be. She’s calling and texting you constantly. And what is with her fucking ‘everything is magical’ act?” I was losing it, and I was past the point of reigning myself in. “
Are you going to sit there and tell me she’s always been like that, because, news flash, I know that’s not true. You are not the only one who knew her before you knocked her up!”
“So you’ve been talking about this shit with everyone? You take this to everyone else we know instead of fucking talking to me like a rational goddamn person, and then you blow up and talk to her like that?”
What was happening between us really hit me. I volleyed my very real concerns about Stacey, and he immediately jumped to her defense. “So, this is entirely on me?”
He did not say a thing, which was my answer.
“I need to go.”
“Cami—”
I cut him off right there. “No. I may not have handled this well, but—”
“Didn’t handle this well? You came in and started berating the woman who’s about to have my kid in my own fucking apartment,” he roared.
“Your apartment?” I echoed quietly. Well, we had never discussed what claim I had on the apartment. I knew I felt like I was more of a guest than anything, but I suppose I had thought Gauge did not feel the same way. I thought if I had brought that up to him sooner, he would have told me I was being silly. Clearly, I had been wrong. “Right. Of course. It is your apartment. Well, don’t worry, I’ll be sure to get all of my stuff out of your apartment right away.”
He grabbed for my arm as I turned away, but I spun around and met his aggression head on. Not a word needed to be said. The look on my face, the absolute and unyielding statement that I was done with the conversation, stopped him. I wondered if he could see how well and truly done I was with everything.
Without waiting for things to sink even further into chaos, I walked out with only my purse. As soon as I sat in the driver’s seat of the truck I was borrowing from Dad, I marveled at being in the position of walking away from a relationship turned to an absolute train wreck again.
Maybe I really did need to be done. Not with a conversation, not with Gauge, but done with the whole sick game called love.
It was not worth the carnage.
I stood there like a fucking moron while she walked away.
It’d been about fifteen and a half hours since the door clicked shut in her wake, but it wasn’t like I was counting.
When she walked, I was fucking pissed. I nearly wrecked the crib, the coffee table, anything I could get my hands on. None of the drywall was in need of patching, and that was a miracle. I didn’t even know what the hell I was pissed at. For the first few hours, it was still Cami. I kept telling myself the shit she’d spewed at and about Stacey was uncalled for.
At about hour four, I started to wonder if “uncalled for” was accurate. Stacey was acting weird. I hadn’t really paid much attention to it because I was trying to deal with having a son on the way and my woman struggling with that. It wasn’t until I was sitting alone, trying to convince myself everything Cami had said was total bullshit, that it started to occur to me she might be right.
Yeah, fuck of a time for that. Couldn’t come to that conclusion maybe a day sooner, asshole?
Hour six came with the sucker punch of understanding that I’d been the one to fuck things up. I’d called my woman a bitch, hadn’t had her back, and worst of all, I’d let her walk out. I was on par with that spineless little shit she’d been engaged to.
Somewhere in hour eight, I found myself with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s disappearing fast. For a little while, I started defining how much time had passed by the progress through the bottle. The hope was oblivion might be waiting at the bottom. Not the case. The bottom of the bottle just meant I was out of Jack. I was still awake. Maybe that was my punishment for being a stupid fuck. I was stuck being awake and sitting through every hour of her being gone.
Jager called at the fifteenth hour, saying I needed to get my ass to the clubhouse. I’d missed the text summons coming in before that. Development with the PI, I was guessing. I’d told him if I was needed, someone was going to have to come pick my ass up. No way in hell I was riding or driving the Chevelle with that much whiskey in me. It’d be the last damn time I ever saw a road—if I made it out of the lot without wrecking.
He told me Ham was coming to get my ass, so I was just waiting for that. I was going to be a fat lot of help in the state I was in, but if they wanted me there, I’d come. The only other thing I had to do was spend several more hours staring at nothing. At least I could get some more booze at the clubhouse. There might even be enough there to knock me out.
Pounding at the door signaled me to drag my drunk ass off the couch. It might not have helped me pass out, but the whiskey was definitely doing something. I was n
“Hurry up, asshole,” Ham called. “We gotta get gone.”
“I’m fucking coming,” I yelled back. I yanked the door open and shouldered him aside as I closed it behind me. “Let’s go.”
“What the hell’s up with you?”
I didn’t answer, just tossed the keys to my ride at him and stumbled through the hallways that wouldn’t stay still. Goddamn floors were shifting all over the place. No, wait—that was the Jack messing with me.
I dropped myself into the passenger seat of my own ride and threw my head back against the seat, hoping whatever business we had to deal with was over quick. Ham climbed in and fired my girl up.
“You gonna be good to stay upright through this?” he asked.
“Is Tank there?”
“Yeah, been there a couple hours. Why?”
“He seem cool?” I’d assumed Cami was going to her dad’s. If so, he wasn’t going to want to see me.
“Yeah. Gauge, what the fuck?”
“Cami took off,” I admitted.
“Shit,” he muttered.
“‘Bout sums it up.”
“What the fuck’d you do?”
I let my head roll his way. “Why’re you assuming it’s on me?”
“Seriously, asshole? She walked, you’re fucking smashed. Not hard to figure out who fucked up there,” he stated.
Well, shit. He wasn’t wrong.
“Cami said some shit about Stacey, and I defended her.”
Ham let out a low whistle. “Bad plan, brother.”
“I told her she was acting like a bitch,” I continued.
“You got a death wish I don’t know about?”
“It’s a fuckin’ mess.”
“Yeah, I’m getting that.” Ham took a second, and then said, “What was she sayin’ about Stacey?”
“Just accusing her of trying to get with me, saying she’s been calling and coming around so much to get my attention,” I summed up.
“You don’t agree?”
I hadn’t. “I don’t know.”
“Gotta say, man, I haven’t been around Stace much since the pregnancy, but she seemed different when I was. Real fuckin’ cheery, you know? Like unnaturally.”
Which was exactly what Cami had said. Had everyone picked up on that but me? “Why didn’t you say something, jackass?”
“Not my business. Figured you got enough going on without me sticking my nose in that shit. Like I said, I’ve barely seen her. I couldn’t really say something was up for sure, so I said nothing.”