The Beginning of Forever (Summer Unplugged Book 5)

by Sparling, Amy

  “Oh.” I feel like an idiot now. “I knew that, I swear I did,” I say with a pathetic little laugh. “I can’t wait until we’re old enough to legally do everything there is to do.”

  Jace slings an arm around my shoulders and pulls me close to him. “I can wait.”

  “Really? Why? We’re basically kids and it sucks.”

  He shakes his head. A mother with three unruly toddlers rushes by, yelling for the kids to slow down. “I don’t want to be too old, too soon. I want to live our lives as long as we can, you know? See everything we can and do everything we want. That can’t happen if time speeds up and we’re older.”

  “Oh blah,” I say, leaning my head against his shoulder. “You always say all of the right things.”

  His lips form a slight smile, but his gaze is fixed somewhere in the distance. “I think a lot. I’m always thinking about something, so by the time I say it, I’ve had time to work it out in my mind. You, on the other hand…” He kisses me on the tip of my nose. “You are always talking. I think you might actually say words before your brain even thinks them.”

  “Oh shut it,” I say, even though he’s right. Jace is naturally quiet and I’m naturally talkative. I’ve always thought it balances out nicely between the two of us, but maybe I’m wrong. “Does it bother you that I talk too much?”

  “You don’t talk too much,” he says. “A lot. But not too much. Besides, I like your voice.”

  “You better like it,” I say, joking around with him. “Hey, why are we-?” I stop mid-sentence as realization comes to me. “How are we getting out of here if we’re not renting a car?”

  “We’re getting picked up. I thought I told you all of this?”

  “I guess I forgot,” I say. Trepidation fills me as I put together the pieces in my head. “Your parents are picking us up?”

  “Yes ma’am,” he says in a fake Texas accent.

  I let out my breath in a long, slow sigh. This is not what I was expecting. For some reason, I had imagined we’d rent a car and then drive to their house and that way I would have enough time to compose myself for meeting his parents. I know it’s technically not that big of a deal, but it feels like one. I’m meeting my fiancé’s parents for the first time and I’m pregnant with his kid and I’m practically a kid myself. I guess if I prepare myself for the judgmental glares and snide remarks beforehand then it won’t hurt as bad when they happen.

  My fingernails dig into my palms and the inside of my bottom lip feels raw. I’ve been chewing on it absentmindedly and now I can’t stop.

  “They’re here,” Jace says, looking around. “I can smell her.”

  I smell it too. The scent of vanilla cupcakes and coffee. Two seconds later, a woman with bright blonde hair bursts through the crowds of people, her bright red lipstick molded in a beaming smile. “Jace!” she squeals, rushing up to him with her arms open wide. She wraps him in a hug and even though he’s over a foot taller than she is, she almost makes him look like a little kid again with the way she hugs him, swaying back and forth like she hasn’t seen him in forever. And, that’s kind of true.

  I recognize her from the photos I’ve seen of her, but Jace’s mom is much more vibrant in real life. She’s bouncy and colorful and all smiles. As soon as she releases him from her bear hug, she sets her sights on me.

  “Hi,” I say, lifting my hand in a pathetic wave.

  “Bayleigh, my dear!” I suck in a deep breath to prepare for her massive hug, and even with my expecting it, her embrace blows me away. She is somehow soft and motherly with the grip of a boa constrictor. She clings to me twice as long as she did with Jace. Up close she smells mostly like coffee, but in a good way–like I’m sitting in a beautiful coffee shop surrounded by books. When she ends the hug, she pulls back and holds me at arm’s length, gripping my elbows so hard it hurts. “I am so happy to meet you.”

  “Me too,” I stutter like some kind of idiot. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  Her features are strikingly similar to Jace’s now that I’m seeing her in person. She has a nice nose like he does and a strong jaw line. Her eyes, though lined with fine wrinkles, sparkle the same way Jace’s does when he’s really excited about something.

  “Where’s Dad?” Jace asks her.

  “He had to work,” she says, curling up her nose. “You know how it is.”

  Jace nods and I just stand here, wearing a small smile and trying to look nice because I don’t know how it is. I’ve never met the man. It feels like a small blessing in a way, that I only had to meet one of the parents this time. Now, when I meet his father later in the day, I would have had time to compose myself and think of something better to say, something impressive and something that would make you glad your son is marrying this girl.

  Mrs. Adams, or Julie, as she insisted that I call her, drives a massive SUV type vehicle called an Escalade. But I’d rather call it a tank because it’s so huge. My butt slides across the tan leather backseat with every turn she makes. Jace turns around from the front seat and gives me a silly grin. “You okay back there?” he asks after a particularly sharp turn sent me flying.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I say. “Maybe I’m having fun back here.”

  “I could be having fun too if you’d have let me sit with you!”

  “You haven’t seen your mom in forever,” I say in a snappy but joking voice. “You need to sit by her.”

  Julie nods appreciatively. “I like this girl,” she says, looking back and winking at me. “I like her a lot.”

  They talk about Jace’s job and our apartment and random other things that moms always ask about. When the conversation turns to dirt bikes, I accidentally tune it out and become amazed by the sights out of the window.

  In Texas, the land is flat and dry and boring. There’s cows as far as the eye can see. Here in Sacramento, the entire place is beautiful. Hills and mountains and beautiful homes. Even the air smells different. Or maybe that’s just the new car smell from Julie’s Escalade.

  We come to a red light in a busy part of downtown. Jace turns around and slaps his hand on my thigh. “Hungry?”

  “Starving. Are we almost there?”

  “Oh, honey we’re like an hour away,” Julie says. “That’s why we were thinking Mexican. You up for Mexican?”

  “Huh?”

  Jace laughs. “I told you she wasn’t paying attention. Mexican food. Yay or nay?”

  I rub my hand over my stomach. “Yay. Definitely yay.”

  We visit an enormous two-story Mexican restaurant called Escalante's for lunch. Things are going really well and I’m feeling less nervous by the second. Sure, I still have to meet Mr. Adams, but if he’s anything like Jace’s mom, it won’t be so bad. Now all I have to do is play it cool and be sweet and charming, not get any unexpected morning sickness for three days and then make it home without any incidents that would make them hate me. So far, so good.

  “I am so excited that Jace found someone to make his life with,” Julie says. I only halfway heard what she said because I was stuffing my face with the most delicious tortilla chips I’ve ever eaten. She smiles warmly and pats my arm from across the table.

  “Me too,” I reply quickly, because that answer sounds like it would fit in with whatever she had just said. Jace and his mom laugh. I glance over at Jace, lifting an eyebrow. He just winks at me and dunks another chip into salsa.

  Julie lets go of my hand and squeezes Jace’s hand this time. She’s a very touchy person. “Bayleigh is such a sweet girl.” She’s telling her son this, but she looks over and smiles at me. “I was a nervous wreck when I met Gary’s parents. Of course they were both strict and very religious and since I was already pregnant with you at the time, they acted like I was some kind of evil witch who had come to take their son to hell with me.” She rolls her eyes. This story probably explains a lot about why she’s so kind to me and in a weird way, I am grateful for Jace’s mean grandparents. And I know this is a terrible thing to think, but they’ve both bee
n dead for a while now, so I won’t have to meet them and be subjected to the same treatment as Julie went through.

  Jace glances at me and then back at his mom. “I’m lucky to have you guys as parents,” he says. It’s probably the most intimate thing I’ve heard him tell another person besides me. “You always support me, and I’m really grateful for that.”

  Julie’s face crinkles up and for a moment, it looks like she might cry. “I love you, Son.”

  Our waiter brings Julie a margarita and Jace makes a little whimper as if he wanted one too. “I’d get you one if you were at home,” his mom says. “This place probably prefers not to break the law by selling alcohol to minors.”

  I laugh and use the opportunity to poke fun at Jace. “Can’t rent a car...can’t buy alcohol,” shaking my head as if I’m disappointed in him. “Would you like to order off the child’s menu?”

  Jace’s mouth falls open. He reaches toward me, grabs a strand of my hand and tugs it. “Did you just pull my hair?” I ask, laughing. “Way to dispute the fact that you’re not a kid!”

  Jace laughs and sticks his tongue out at me. I stick my tongue right back out at him. A flash snaps both of us back to reality. We look over and find Julie holding up her phone and nodding. She just took a picture of us and now I’m so embarrassed I could die.

  “You better delete that,” Jace tells his mom, still laughing.

  She shakes her head. “This is going right in the digital scrapbook. Trust me. When you’re forty years old, I will send you this picture and you’ll be really glad I took it.”

  “That’s so far away,” I say, letting my imagination take a hold of me. “We probably won’t even remember what we looked like when we were this age.”

  Jace shakes his head and says something about how he will have stayed just as sexy as he is today, thanks to modern science and cryogenics or something like that. I take Julie’s lead and smile at him, but my mind is really somewhere else, my thoughts lost to the possibilities of the future.

  I had been looking at this all wrong. Meeting Jace’s parents isn’t just a one-time meet them, charm them, and never see them again thing. It’s the start of a lifetime of knowing each other. Of holidays and birthdays and vacations to see their grandchild. It’s two more people to call if Jace ends up in the hospital again. One day she really will show us that picture she just took. And we’ll be older and greyer and our child will be in college. Maybe we’ll have two kids. And she’ll know all about it because she’s family. Because we’re family.

  As terrifying as it is to meet the people who brought my soul mate to this earth, I now realize how important it is to know them.

  Chapter 14

  I always knew Jace came from a wealthy family, but I never knew how wealthy. When we arrive at his parent’s house, I have to physically stop my jaw from hitting the floor by clenching my jaw together. We drive up the cobblestone driveway, which is U-shaped around a massive water fountain with a concrete angel in the middle. The landscaping around the front yard is so pristine, it most definitely has a gardener who tends to it daily.

  Their house is a massive brick structure with tons of windows and a high peaked roof. There’s two white columns that frame the doorway, rising from the ground up to the roof. It’s right about now when I notice that the house seems so huge because it’s not just a typical big two-story house. It’s three stories.

  Julie parks up front and turns down the radio volume before shutting off the engine. “Gary gets so annoyed when I leave the radio up loud,” she explains, rolling her eyes as if he’s a mean old man and she’s the cool young kid who loves loud music.

  I glance over at Jace to see his reaction to coming home to such a massive place. He’s just staring at his phone, checking the supercross results. He must sense me looking at him because he looks up, his eyes finding mine instantly. “Eight bedrooms,” he says, nodding toward the house. “I’ll let you pick which one we stay in.”

  “I thought we’d be staying in your old bedroom?”

  He shakes his head. “That’s been turned into the trophy room.”

  We climb out of the car and I follow Jace to the back of the vehicle even though I know he won’t let me carry my own luggage. “Trophy room? Now I have to see this.”

  Julie laughs. “I wouldn’t exactly call it a trophy room.” She grabs Jace’s suitcase and he takes mine, carrying it by the handle and not letting it roll.

  “You know the foyer part of our apartment?” he asks. I nod. It’s a teensy space between the doorway and the living room where we hang our keys and kick off our shoes. There’s also about twenty random dirt bike trophies cluttering the area. Jace mostly teaches people how to ride these days, but occasionally he and Ash will drive a few hours out to race the pro class at a local track. “Pro” class doesn’t mean the professional supercross racers that Jace was banned from before I met him. It just means people who aren’t famous, who are just as fast and get to race for money. The terms are confusing, but I’ve just learned to accept them for what they are.

  “My old bedroom is pretty much like that,” he says, closing the car’s cargo door.

  We enter through the front door, which I’m assuming is for my benefit. The front door is, of course, two doors that swing open into a marble floored foyer that is seriously bigger than my living room at home.

  A massive staircase is to the left, taking you up to the second floor balcony. Beyond that, I can just see where another staircase starts, going up to the third floor. It’s all so shiny and beautiful that I’m scared to walk around out of fear that I’ll dirty the place just by being in it.

  Julie leads us up the stairs, which have carpeting so plush that it feels like I’m walking on a cloud, and then to the right and down a massive hallway. There are six doors in the hallway, and the square footage of the hall alone is probably more than my entire apartment back at home.

  “Let’s show her the ‘trophy room’, Jace.” Julie makes air quotes around the last two words in a way that is clearly mocking him. She stops at the very last door on the right and motions for Jace to show me inside.

  “Are you ready for this?” he says, lifting his eyebrows. “It’s pretty epic in here.”

  I nod. “I’m definitely ready.”

  I’m picturing class curios lining the walls, carrying various trophies, plaques and ribbons. Maybe a framed picture of Jace holding a trophy. I know he’s been racing dirt bikes since he was a kid, so there’s probably pictures of him from all ages on the walls.

  The first thing I see when I step into the room is gold and silver shiny plastic dirt bikes. A sea of trophies of all colors, many of them taller than I am, line the walls and the floor. I can only take one step inside the former bedroom without crashing into a wall of trophies that would undoubtedly crumple over like a pile of dominos. Every single space in the room holds a trophy. Hundreds of them. I was right about the plaques–the walls are filled with dozens of plaques shaped like a number plate, the number one in the center, and a brass tag at the bottom, telling which year he won the championship.

  “Holy crap,” I mutter under my breath. “I don’t think this room is big enough.”

  “That’s what the attic is for,” Julie says. “Trust me, you do not want to see the attic.”

  “I can’t believe you kept these,” Jace says, shaking his head. To me, he says, “I quit caring about the trophies when I was twelve. I wouldn’t even go pick them up after the race because I had so many but Mom insisted on getting them.”

  “Of course I wanted them,” Julie says. “My son won them and I was proud.” Her eyes light up a moment later. “Oh my god. Jace! I just remembered the greatest thing. We have to show her your first!” We shuffle back into the hallway and Jace mutters, “Oh god,” under his breath. I have no idea what she’s talking about but I am excited to see it if it makes Jace this embarrassed. Not many things embarrass him, so this should be good.

  Back down stairs, through fancy entryways and
around a spiral staircase in the kitchen that goes up to some mysterious level, Julie stops in the dinette. I had noticed a massive dining table in a formal dining room down the hall, but this room is just off the kitchen and has a round glass-top table with only four chairs. This must be where Julie and Gary eat their meals together when they’re not entertaining.

  The room overlooks the backyard which can been seen through floor to ceiling windows. There’s a porch, tons of palm trees and tiki torches, a grass roofed hut that looks like a full bar, and then the most magnificent swimming pool I’ve ever seen.

  There’s a pool at my mom’s house, but it’s small and she rarely had the money to get the water cleaned so we could swim in it when I was a kid. Mostly it sat half-empty, with green water. Sometimes we’d get it ready for summer–those were always the best summers. Something tells me Jace has never had to worry about their swimming pool’s water going green.

  I glance up at Jace and he slides an arm around me, a simple gesture of love, something he does automatically whenever I am around.

  “Let’s get this over with,” he says. “Where is it?”

  Julie’s smile stretches from ear to ear as she walks across the small room, to where a few shelves line the walls in a random pattern. There, in the middle shelf, sits a framed picture of a little boy. Next to it is a trophy that’s not even as tall as the picture frame. I walk up to it, studying the picture of what I know is my fiancé.

  “This was Jace’s very first race,” Julie explains. “There were fifteen other kids in his class and he was so nervous and so excited.”

  The picture is slightly grainy from having been blown up larger than the standard size for photos back when we were kids. No doubt this photograph was taken with an actual roll of film in a camera and not digitally. A young Jace, no older than five, stands in front of a tree holding the same trophy that’s on the shelf. He has bright blonde hair and pudgy cheeks that smile so big you can see his missing front tooth. I recognize his clothing as being motocross gear, but it looks nothing like the style of gear today. The colors are bold and tacky, the pants look like they’re straight from the eighties. I squint my eyes and try to make out the surroundings in the grainy photograph. I can barely see an old score tower near a row of trees. Mountains fill up the distance and I know he’s not in Texas.