by Jamie Pope
“That, I’ll have to agree with.” He turned her so that most of her back was touching the chair and he was half atop her, and then his hand wandered to her bikini bottoms, inside to her lower lips. He groaned when he felt her there. “So soft. So wet.”
She felt slightly embarrassed by his words, but they caused her to become even more aroused. “You do this to me. Only you could ever do this to me.”
“You make me crazy,” he said before he took her mouth. “I can no longer think straight when I’m near you.”
He slipped his fingers inside her, stroking her slowly but firmly. She knew she should just lie back and enjoy him, but she was unable to be passive when she was with him. She needed to give back to him. She reached inside his swim trunks and took his hardness in her hand. He hissed in pleasure. She worked fast, knowing she was only moments away from explosion herself.
He kept kissing her, those long, deep, breath-stealing kisses that made her feel otherworldly.
Orgasm struck, and she cried into his mouth. He spilled himself in her hand and kissed her one last time before he got up and led her into the warm ocean water. She was topless, but on this resort clothing was optional. She wouldn’t have felt comfortable enough to do that if there were anyone else there.
The ocean water was incredibly warm, the waves gentle. Cricket wrapped her body around her husband’s, and they just floated together.
“It’s going to be hard to leave this place,” she said as she kissed his shoulder.
“We can stay longer if you want. There’s nothing pressing to get back to.”
“Except life. You have a career that I know you must be missing.”
“You’re more important to me.”
“I’m surprised no one married you before I got the chance. You are a very good husband. Have I told you that? You’re a better man than I ever could have wished for.”
“There was no one that I wanted to marry before you came along.”
She’d gotten pregnant. That’s why he married her, and she couldn’t forget that. She wouldn’t have seen him again if she hadn’t. “Are you going to apply for that out-of-state job when we get back?”
“Unless you don’t want me to.”
“I want what you want. It’s a simple as that.”
“I want to buy the house from your father.”
“What?”
“I have a lot of money saved. I’ve made good investments. My salary is high enough to support us both. I could buy the house from him.”
“No, I don’t want you to do that.”
“Then we can buy a new house on the island together. I know you love your house, but if we buy a new house, we could make it our own. I like the house, but I feel like it’s your house.”
“It’s not my house. It doesn’t feel like home without you there. I’m sorry if I’ve made you feel like a guest there.”
“You haven’t.”
“My father won’t take your money. I know he won’t. That was his gift to me when I finished my second PhD.”
“I won’t feel like it’s my home unless I have paid something for it. I think he’ll understand where I’m coming from if I sit down and have a conversation with him.”
“He likes you. I feel like you want to do this to prove something to my mother. You don’t need her approval.”
“I hurt my hand and then I met you and then we were going to have a baby and then we lost the baby, and everything in my life felt so out of control. I haven’t felt that way since my father died. I can control how I treat you. The work I do. How we live. The kind of father I will be.”
“You still wish I was pregnant, don’t you?”
“Of course I do. Don’t you? I want to make a family with you.”
“How many kids do you want? We never discussed it. We got married so quickly. We didn’t know each other. Sometimes I think we still don’t know each other.”
“I know you. I know that your favorite color is marigold yellow. And that you love to spend rainy days in bed. Your favorite food is ice cream, and you’d rather eat that than real food. I know that bugs scare you and having fresh flowers in the house makes you happy. I know you want a simple life. And to answer your question, I want a lot of kids, but I’ll settle for as many as you want to give me as long as it’s more than one.”
Life wouldn’t be so simple if he went back to being a surgeon in one of the best hospitals in the world. He would work all the time. He would miss out on large parts of their children’s lives. He would try to be there. He would love them, but he wouldn’t be able to leave his patients behind because his work was too important. And she wouldn’t be able to travel the world and work in less-than-safe places, because she knew that she couldn’t risk her life when she had children to think about.
She’d been so happy when she learned she was going to be a mother, but motherhood wasn’t the life she had planned for herself. She hadn’t planned for Elias to come in and change everything she knew about herself.
“How long do you want to wait before we try again?” he asked her.
He wanted to be a father. He wanted a big family. He treated her beautifully. There were times when he looked at her with such tenderness in his eyes that she would swear he was as in love with her as she was with him. But she could never be sure. Life would be unbearable without him, but spending a life with him and wondering if he would be happier somewhere else would be nearly as painful.
“I think we need to put off this discussion for now. We need to know where you are going to work first, and then we can worry about the house and everything else. I don’t want to think about the future. I have a few more days in paradise with you, and that’s all I want to think about right now.”
“Okay.” He kissed her lips softly. “That’s more than okay.”
Chapter 14
They finally left Costa Rica. Left that little slice of paradise and returned to Hideaway Island, which to Elias had once been paradise for them, too. But returning felt much different. It was as if a little bit of the happiness drained out of them as soon as they stepped foot off the plane. It made sense for them to feel that way. They had a lot of painful memories here, business left unfinished.
Elias stood behind Cricket as she let them into the house that was not theirs, but hers. A gift from her father. The reason they had escaped to Costa Rica. Her mother had said that he had been a guest there, and walking back in, he didn’t feel any more at home. This place would never be his home unless he had some ownership of it.
“It feels empty, doesn’t it?” she asked as she turned to him once they were in the living room. “It’s odd that it feels empty. It was just the two of us before we left, and it will be just the two of us until...” She trailed off, the sadness seeping into her expression.
She said she wasn’t ready to try again. She had taken precautions to ensure that there wouldn’t be another accident, and he was fine with that. He enjoyed being with just her. In Costa Rica, he had never felt closer to anyone in his life. But he sensed that even though she said she wanted to wait, she didn’t. Or it could be something else. Something she wasn’t telling him. He had felt a little distance between them the last couple of days. It left a funny feeling in the pit of his stomach. But he forced down his worry. This was a tough time for them. Everything was so up in the air. They just needed time to figure things out.
Things would settle down between them. Elias took a step toward Cricket and smoothed his hands down her bare arms. “I know what you mean. After the way we left here, I’m surprised the locks on the doors weren’t changed.”
Cricket looked up into his eyes, the worry clear in her tone. “My mother hasn’t tried to contact you? She hasn’t offered you your job back?”
“I don’t want my job back.”
“Yes, you do,” she said in a
fierce whisper. “It’s because of me you aren’t going back.”
“You influence a lot of my decisions, but you didn’t make me quit. It was time for me to move on. It’s best to keep my family and my career separate. It will make Thanksgivings that much easier.”
“If you wanted it back, Elias, I would ask her for you. If you wanted me to, of course. I’ve never asked her for anything. She would do this for me. She would have to or I don’t think I could ever look at her the same way.”
“You’re worried about me and my job, and I’m worried that I’ve ruined the relationship between you and your mother.”
“You can’t ruin what was barely there. It’s never been easy between us.”
“You should call her,” he urged. “Just let her know that we’re back and that you’re feeling all right.” This wasn’t sitting well with him. To him, family was everything, and he couldn’t imagine a world where he was estranged from his family.
“No. I left with you that day for a reason. I chose my husband over my mother, and she needs to understand that what I do with my life is my business. If she can’t respect my choices, she can at least respect me enough to keep quiet about them.”
“I know, baby. Your mother wants what’s best for you. I just think she doesn’t know how to convey that. But we can’t go the rest of our lives not speaking to her.”
“I’m done talking about this, Elias,” she said forcefully enough that he took a small step away from her. “She’s my mother, and I’ll decide when and how we communicate again.” She shook her head, the anger clearing out of her eyes. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have snapped at you. I’m tired.”
“Do you need me to get you anything? Are you hungry?”
She looked at him for a long moment. There was love in her eyes. It was clear as day, and yet he had never heard her say it. He had never said it, either. Something was stopping him, some invisible wall blocking their words.
She closed the distance between them and kissed his cheek. “You don’t have to take care of me anymore, Elias. I’m going to go rest for a few hours.”
She walked away, leaving him alone and feeling off center. He wanted to take care of her, not because she needed to be taken care of, but because she was his wife and he was in love with her.
* * *
The next afternoon Carlos, Ava and Ava’s husband, Derek, showed up to welcome them back to the island. They all seemed happy to see their brother again, and Elias seemed glad to be back around his siblings, because he spoke to them for hours, about Costa Rica and their trip and his mother and aunts. Cricket was happy that Elias’s family was so close. There was never any stilted conversation. There was never strain between them. They all seemed to support each other unwaveringly.
It shouldn’t make Cricket sad that her husband had so much love in his life, but it did. Because even with her inherited fortune and all her education, she didn’t have that. She could never have the big family and the overabundance of love.
She had excused herself to the kitchen under the pretense of getting snacks for everyone. She had been gone for over ten minutes now. Slowly chopping veggies for a platter. She had tried to keep up with the conversation as best as she could, but she still felt like an outsider with the Bradley clan, an interloper. Unlike Virginia or Derek, because they had married into the family in love. Cricket had married into the family because she had been pregnant by one of its members, but now that baby was gone and the only connection she had to them seemed to be temporary at best.
She was glad Virginia wasn’t here with her baby girl, Bria. That would have made things worse. That would have made this evening even harder than it was. It had been almost two months since her loss. In Costa Rica, she’d been distracted by the lush surroundings, the new experiences, the constant lovemaking with her husband. But back here, she was reminded that her own family was splintered, that her grief was still there right under the surface, that the insecurities about her marriage were too strong to ignore. Elias didn’t want to live in this house or on this island. He had a bigger life planned for himself than he was currently living. And she had a career that she was proud of, one that she had wanted to grow—before that fateful night that placed Elias onto her path.
“You need help in here?” Ava asked as she breezed into the kitchen. Cricket had been around Ava many times before, but she still couldn’t get over how effortlessly beautiful she was.
“Did they send you to see what was taking me so long?” Cricket tried to inject some humor into her voice. “I need to have these vegetables cut into precisely two-inch pieces. Research says that’s the right length for digestion.”
“Is that true?” Ava raised one of her perfectly sculpted brows.
“Probably not,” Cricket admitted. “I was thinking and kind of got lost in my thoughts.”
“You want to talk? Not about your trip or the weather. I mean really, really talk.”
“I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not. It’s okay not to be, to tell someone that you aren’t. There are certain things I can’t speak to my husband about. I run to Virginia and spill my guts. Who do you go to when you need that?”
“I don’t go to anyone. I don’t have anyone like that in my life.”
“I can be that person for you.”
“But you’re his twin. How do I know you two don’t have some sort of freaky twin connection going on? Your thoughts are probably linked.”
“Trust me, they aren’t. Thank God, because I’m pretty sure we’d both be in trouble if that were the case. Tell me what’s going on inside that brainy head of yours.”
“You know that the baby wasn’t planned. It was something that just happened. And I was happy about it. I had all these plans that suddenly changed when I got pregnant. I was publishing my work. I was traveling the world conducting research. I was teaching at some of the most respected universities in the world. And then I put it all on hold for Elias, for the family I was going to have with him.”
“And now that family is gone.”
“And now I can’t help but wonder if my mother was right. Maybe in its own terrible, tragic way, this was for the best. I lost some of myself in him. I think I might want it back.”
Ava’s expression was neutral for a moment, but then Cricket saw understanding in her eyes. “You’re not sure if you’re meant for the quiet life of dedicated wife and mother.”
“I love him, Ava. Only God knows how much I do, but he wants a bunch of kids. He wants to be the kind of father you had. He wants to recreate his childhood with our children, but we aren’t your parents. Elias is a surgeon, and I lived with a surgeon before. It’s three-day shifts and twenty-hour surgeries. It’s constant maneuvering to get to the top. And I’ll be alone again. But this time it will be worse, because I’ll be alone with children who are barely going to know their father.”
“I see your point.” Ava nodded. “This is heavy. Have you talked to Elias about it?”
“What am I supposed to say? ‘Give up your dream, the thing you’ve worked so hard to achieve so I won’t be lonely’? ‘Forget about all those lives you could have saved and stay home with me so we can watch TV together’? I can’t say any of those things to him, because I know him too well. He would give them up to make me happy, because he thinks that’s what a good husband should do, even if, in the long run, it makes him unhappy. I don’t want him to be unhappy. I couldn’t live with myself if he were.”
“And he couldn’t bear it if you were, either.”
“What do you think I should do?”
“The thing that’s the hardest to do. Compromise. It’s the only way to make things work.”
* * *
They had been back on Hideaway Island for over a week now. Cricket had been very quiet—most days she holed herself up in her office, claiming that she
had to write. He knew that she had to write, that she had a book that was overdue, but part of Elias felt that Cricket was hiding herself from him. For some reason he’d thought that they would fall into some sort of routine when they got back, but there was no routine for them to fall into. Everything was so up in the air. Nothing had been settled. Not about her parents, or where they would live. They had no further discussions of their future. They were just drifting along.
Elias had gone back to picking up shifts at the local hospital and seeing patients as a primary care physician to pass the time. He was ready to go back to surgery. Physically. His hand had never felt better, but mentally...he wasn’t sure yet. Maybe he was afraid he had lost his passion. Maybe he was afraid of being out of practice for so long, thought he would screw it up. Or maybe he just wasn’t ready to leave his wife. They ate dinner together every night. They shared breakfast in the morning. There was nothing too important that happened in the small island hospital that he couldn’t pick up the phone and call her when he wanted to.
But if he went back, followed the career path he’d always wanted, this simple, quiet life he had gotten used to would disappear. And yet he had already taken the first steps to being a surgeon again.
“You look very handsome in a suit. I haven’t seen you in one since our wedding day,” Cricket said to him as she smoothed her hand down his lapel.
“That was a good day.” He leaned down to kiss her lips gently.
“Was it? I don’t recall either of us being particularly happy.”
“I was nervous and scared. I knew my life was about to change forever. How were you feeling?”
“Like you hated me.”
“You know that’s not true now, don’t you?”
She hugged him tightly, resting her cheek against his chest. He felt the subtle sadness in her, and it worried him. “You’re my all-time favorite husband.”
“Have there been other husbands that I was unaware of?”
“You’re the first, but I think I might be one of those women who would like to get married five or six times. Variety is the spice of life, you know. But I’ll always have a soft spot for my first.”