by Chloe Cox
Neither of them even noticed for a few days, and when they did, it didn’t matter. Adra was fucking incredible. He had watched her go back and forth from blissful to frightened, from serene to scared—and he got it now. It wasn’t just her family and her past experiences; it was that the stakes were so damn high. Falling in love always felt like winning big, but when it was with your best friend, you were all in. They were both risking it all.
He could see it haunted her even though she was happy. Sometimes she’d look at him with those big doe eyes and he’d see all those fears, clear as day, and that was his cue to step in. And he made a point of it: he would never not be there for her. Hell, he couldn’t get enough of her anyway.
It was one of those times, lying out by the pool at night, Adra on his chest pretending she hadn’t just tensed up, that he decided to push her.
“Adra, what are you afraid will happen?”
She sighed.
“I don’t know.”
“Bullshit,” he said, and he hauled them both up so he could see her face—and more importantly so that she could see his face.
“Look at me,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere. I love you.”
She smiled at him. “Drama queen.”
“Watch it,” he growled, his hands on her ass. He let her run her fingers through his hair for a while, and just watched her.
“I’m serious, Adra,” he said finally. “If you believe one thing…”
“I know,” she said, and she touched his face.
He believed her. She did know. But that didn’t stop it from feeling too big to handle.
So they took it slow.
And it was fucking wonderful.
And it wasn’t until Sunday that Roman finally called Ford.
“My wife wants to know if she should be worried that Adra hasn’t answered her phone in two days,” Roman said.
“Adra is…very well,” Ford said, smiling at the beautiful woman who was currently destroying his kitchen. She’d caught the end of a Top Chef marathon and she’d been inspired.
Then Ford remembered who he was talking to.
“Wait, is the baby coming?” Ford asked. “She’d kill me if we missed the birth of your kid.”
“You haven’t yet, unless something has changed in the last five minutes.”
“Well, tell Lola not to worry. We’re just fine.”
“She wants to come to dinner.”
“Shouldn’t she be—”
“Ford,” Roman said, his voice only slightly strained. “My very pregnant wife wants to come to dinner, and she wants to see her friend. So she is coming to dinner. And even if you have to get Adra down from an overly complicated suspension harness, she will be at dinner so that my wife can talk to her.”
Ford laughed. He knew all about the impending stress of fatherhood, in a screwed up way, and what it was like having this great big responsibility and not being able to do anything in the meantime. Just waiting drove most men crazy. Roman had found something he could make happen, so it was going to damn well happen. The poor bastard.
“Done,” Ford said.
“Thank you.”
“Anytime.”
And as Ford went to go tell Adra that she could either make an overly ambitious meal for four instead of two, or she could order from a three-star restaurant and just put it on some plates and he’d never tell, he made a mental note to look for her phone.
***
Dinner was mostly a chance for Lola to gloat.
“I knew it!” she said. “Oh man, I knew it, knew it, knew it!”
“Knew what?” Ford said innocently.
“I’d kick you under the table if I could reach,” Lola said.
Ford laughed, but he was watching Adra to see if any of this spooked her. It didn’t. She looked…she looked wonderful. She looked dazed by how wonderful everything was.
Hell, so was he.
Which set off his Dom sense a little bit. Nothing was ever so perfect or so easy. But he ignored it.
Of course he fucking ignored it. He couldn’t take his eyes off of Adra for more than a few seconds.
“Ok, I’m just saying maybe next time listen to me and save yourselves the angst,” Lola said. “Where’s food?”
“Please, the angst was the best part,” Adra joked. “And food is…complicated.”
“Tell me there’s food,” Lola said.
“Tell her there’s food,” Roman repeated.
“No, there’s food, it’s just…”
Ford couldn’t help from laughing.
“The appetizer came out ok,” he said. Which it sort of had. She had “plated” it forty-five minutes ago and it was kind of sad and droopy looking, and Ford never had the heart to ask what it actually was, but it did actually exist.
Adra had dumped the main course before he ever got a chance to see it and then she’d informed him that they would never speak of it again.
“Hush,” she said to him, smiling.
“We ordered delivery,” Ford said. “Should be here any second.”
“You ordered delivery,” Adra said. “Did you ever find my phone?”
They both smiled at each other, remembering how it was lost.
“Yeah, it’s dead,” Ford said. He’d found it in the bushes lining the walk from the drive to the back yard, but he’d forgotten about it as Roman and Lola arrived. “Let me plug it in.”
He thought about that later. If he’d used the charger in his bedroom instead of the one in the living room, would it have made a difference? Would it have made it seem less urgent, given Adra more time, made it less of an overall clusterfuck?
They’d only just torn into the Chinese food when Adra’s phone sucked up enough juice to turn itself on. And that’s when the notifications started.
That distinctive little ping went off just once at first.
“That message is from me,” Lola said. “Probably the next five, too.”
They’d all laughed, and then laughed again when Adra’s phone kept pinging. It was kind of hard to pinpoint the moment when it stopped being funny, but it was Lola who put it into words.
“There is no way I called you that many times,” she said.
Ford watched the anxiety start to seep into Adra’s expression. They’d had a few days cut off from the rest of the world, and it had been almost perfect. But that wasn’t real life.
Whatever was happening right now: that was about to be real life.
Wordlessly, Ford got up from the table and walked over to Adra. He knew what she was thinking: Charlie. Or some other version of disaster. Part of Adra was always waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“C’mon,” he said. “It’s gonna drive you crazy.”
He took her hand and walked with her over to her phone where it was charging in the next room.
“I feel ridiculous,” Adra said, laughing slightly at herself as she picked up the phone. “I just have such a bad feeling, you know? I mean, obviously, it’s…”
She trailed off.
Ford felt it like a punch to the gut. Her face—all the joy went out of it.
“Adra, what’s wrong?”
“I have to go,” she said.
“Charlie?” he said.
Adra nodded sadly. “I have to go.”
~ * ~ * ~
The drive down to San Diego was miserable. Adra kept thinking about one thing: Ford’s face when she told him she had to leave, and that she had to go alone.
She’d guessed he’d known it was kind of bullshit. Not entirely; she really didn’t think that Nicole and the boys would benefit from having a stranger show up in the middle of all this, even if he was her stranger. But the truth was that wasn’t why she’d insisted on going by herself. And she didn’t entirely figure out why she’d done that until she actually got there.
In the meantime, she thought about Ford’s face. And she thought about how unimaginably happy she’d been in the past few days, how she’d felt things she never, ever let he
rself believe she’d get to feel. And how what was so terrifying about that wasn’t that she was afraid Ford would leave—when he told her he wouldn’t ever leave her, she’d almost wanted to laugh, because it was like telling her the sky was blue. She had more faith in Ford than she’d ever had in anyone in her life.
No, what was terrifying about it was watching how happy she made Ford, and knowing she could break his heart. It was watching him talk to her about the son he almost had, and realizing that he needed her, in his way, just as much as she needed him. That scared her. She could hurt him as bad as he could hurt her. It blew her mind. And it terrified her, with that familiar kind of panic, which surprised her.
That man had taught her more things about herself in the past few weeks than she’d learned on her own in thirty years. And that last lesson was a total mindfuck, because she’d never been in a position where that was possible before.
And she was willing to deal with the mindfuckery—she was dealing with it—until she got those messages.
The first one was from Charlie. Just the first one. “I can’t do it. I’ll call you when I get where I’m going.”
And the next bazillion were from Nicole.
She didn’t need to call Charlie to know he wasn’t answering his phone, so she didn’t bother. She just called Nicole to tell her she’d be there in a few hours, and what she’d heard had frightened her.
Nicole just sounded…flat.
Adra broke every speed limit in the book on the way down. She told herself the whole way that she was overreacting, that this was obviously just her own neuroses kicking into hyper-drive again, that she’d get there and it wouldn’t be a huge crisis, and she’d go back to Ford and resume the business of slowly changing her life.
She told herself all sorts of reasonable things.
One of the worst things about being prone to anxiety and freaking out and imagining the worst-case scenario in every little situation was when she actually turned out to be right.
The house was a little bit of a disaster. It looked like…it looked like one of those places she’d seen on television pre-intervention. The sink was overflowing with dirty dishes, so the boys had started putting them on whatever surface was available, piling them up into little statues of cereal bowls and cups that adorned the entire house like tiny little cairns. Someone had done a load of laundry days ago, but it had never been folded or put away, and was just taking up one of the seats on the couch, so the cat had claimed it as a bed. There was trash on the floor like a fine layer of debris.
Adra wouldn’t have believed this level of chaos could build up in only a few days, except she had seen those boys at work herself. In two days they could level the place down to the studs if they wanted. So this wasn’t exactly as bad as it could be.
None of it was such a big deal on its own, not really. She could imagine things getting out of hand even if both parents were around; it happened with kids. But Adra knew her sister-in-law. And Nicole was a neat freak.
So this level of disaster was not good.
She picked her way through the house like it was an actual disaster zone, or like she had to be careful of destroying evidence, and didn’t catch herself until she got to the kitchen. It was the silence, that’s what was so weird. This house was never quiet. It spooked her until she saw the boys out in the yard, playing some sort of game.
And then she got to the bedroom and her heart broke a little bit more.
Nicole was lying in bed, surrounded by used tissues. Adra just stood there for a second in the doorway, trying to catch her breath. She had found her mother like this so many times. So many.
Except that Nicole, when she heard Adra come in, turned over, startled, and sat up. Nicole grabbed a tissue, apologizing, Nicole tried to engage, be normal, or as normal as she could be under the circumstances. Adra’s mom…Adra’s mom wouldn’t have done any of that. She would have been drunk or too depressed to speak, or both. She wouldn’t have moved from that mountain of tissues. She would have just kept staring at the wall with vacant, sad eyes.
“Oh God, you scared me half to death. I thought you were one of the boys,” Nicole said, dabbing at her eyes with a clean tissue. “I just…I had to send them outside so I could have a cry. I’m trying to schedule it,” she said, laughing through her tears.
Adra blinked.
Snap out of it, Adra. She’s not Mom.
“What can I do?” she said.
Nicole leaned back against the headboard. “Give Charlie a brain transplant?”
Adra wanted to cry, but she made herself laugh instead.
“How are the boys?” she asked.
“Oblivious. Daddy is on a business trip again. I had to work from home, though, so that’s why the place is a mess,” she said. Then she sighed. “I don’t know how long I can keep any of this up, though.”
“When was the last time you slept?”
“Sleeping?” Nicole said wryly. “What’s that?”
Adra flopped on the bed, feeling miserable and powerless. Just like she felt when she was a kid, and she had to watch her mother go through the same thing. Of course, Adra had gotten older and realized that, no matter how much Adra loved her, her mom had her own issues, that it wasn’t all that simple. But the feeling was still there.
“I am so sorry, Nic,” she said.
“It’s not your fault,” Nicole said. “I know what he’s like, Adra. I know…I knew about this, kind of. I mean, I knew what I was getting into. I know that sounds completely insane, but…I love him.” She shrugged.
Adra stared at this woman she’d thought she knew, and realized she only knew a very superficial part of her. “How are you not losing your mind?”
Nicole looked at her. “He always comes back, Adra.”
Adra forced herself to smile, but inside…
Inside, she was screaming. Inside, she remembered how there was a time when their father didn’t come back, and she felt ten years old again, powerless to stop it. Inside, she felt afraid.
***
As steadfast and sure as she was, Nicole was also just worn out, having gone through something like this countless times, and she’d reached her limit. And even though Adra had seen this so many times before, she still felt like a kid with no idea what to do.
So she did what she’d done when she was a kid—she took care of stuff.
She cleaned. She was like a whirlwind dervish of cleaning. She made the boys come inside and help, mostly as an excuse to check on them. They seemed fine, but she wondered. She wondered how long it would be before they figured out something was wrong, and that made her want to suit up and hunt her brother down. She would not let this happen to these boys.
And while she was thinking of ways to fix her brother’s screw-ups, she made Nicole take a sleeping pill, because even an apparent stoic superwoman needed sleep. And she was relieved to hear that Nicole’s parents were coming down from Seattle, the one piece of good news. They were retired, had all the time in the world, and were great with the boys. Nicole had plenty of people who wanted to help her.
Just not her husband.
So by the time Adra put the boys to bed, her heart aching when each one of them hugged her, she was a mess on the inside. She kept it together up until the rest of the house was asleep, and then…
Then it started.
She had let herself forget what this was like. She had driven down here in a total panic because she’d remembered, suddenly, she’d remembered the things she’d let herself forget. And just because Nicole wasn’t broken by it, the way her own mother had been, that didn’t change things, not really. She had let herself forget what her family was really like.
She had been so, so stupid.
So when Ford called her, she knew what she had to do.
“Adra, why are you crying?” he said.
She could already feel it in his voice. He was worried. She could imagine him pacing around that house, just looking for something to do, for somewhere to put th
at energy. She knew the only reason he hadn’t insisted on coming with her, let alone tracked her down, was because of how much he respected her, but this would be driving him crazy. Causing him pain. Adra was perversely grateful that he was far away, that it was just his voice tugging at her heart over the phone, because she knew that if she had to see him in person she could never, ever do this.
“Because of what I’m about to say,” she said.
There was a pause.
“Tell me what happened,” he said.
“He left,” Adra said. “Nicole says he’s coming back, but I don’t… I’d forgotten what this is like, Ford. It’s bad.”
“Does she have anyone else? How long are you staying?”
“Her parents are coming. I’m staying as long as she needs me.”
“I’ll come down.”
Adra closed her eyes and stifled a sob.
“No,” she said.
“Adra,” he said, after a moment. “Don’t.”
“I’ve been so stupid,” she said. “So, so stupid. You don’t understand. If you knew…”
“I’m coming down.”
“No!” she said, suddenly desperate. She really couldn’t do this if she had to see him. She didn’t care if that made her coward so long as it didn’t make her the woman who made promises that she couldn’t keep.
“You deserve so much more, Ford,” she said quietly.
“So do you,” he said, and she could tell he was saying it through gritted teeth. There was nothing that annoyed him more than when he thought she disparaged herself. She smiled sadly.
“Not that,” she said. “I know I deserve more too, but it’s not…it’s not that simple. I’m not capable of this. I’m not. But you are. I can’t do that to you. I can’t risk it.”
“That is my risk to take,” he said, and it was the first time she heard him sound angry. “Mine. You’re afraid, Adra. I’m not.”
“Yeah, no shit,” she said.
“Adra, I love you. I don’t care about anything else.”
“That’s exactly the problem,” she said. “Don’t love me. Please, don’t love me, don’t be hurt by me, don’t trust me. I’ve been so afraid of being hurt by you, because I love you more than I ever thought I could love someone, but the truth is, I’ve been hurt like that before. I know what it would do to me. But if I ever did this to you…”