by Laura Drewry
“Besides, having met Will before it all went to hell, would you have ever thought he’d turn out to be such an asshole?” She didn’t give Regan time to answer. “Right from that first night, he always made me feel like I was the best thing in his life. In fact, he was the one who pushed for a quick wedding, who brought home bridal magazines and who insisted on adding my name to the deed on his house before we were even married, so I never doubted for a second that he wasn’t just as in love with me as I was with him.”
She knew it was hard to believe, knew some people probably thought she had to have been blind or just plain stupid, that there had to have been signs of trouble, however small, but even in hindsight, Maya couldn’t see anything, and God knew she’d looked.
Will had already been teaching at the Newport Ridge High School, so she’d moved up from Vancouver, opened her flower shop, and everything was perfect. Or at least she thought it was, right up until that July afternoon when she’d walked into his classroom to help him pack up for the summer and found him standing over the assistant librarian, his jeans down around his ankles and her skirt hiked up around her waist.
Crushing devastation, that’s what Maya’d felt; a pain so sharp, so overwhelming, she’d actually staggered back into the doorframe. Combined with colossal rage and humiliation, the whole thing had been too much to handle. She’d had no idea how to deal with it, what to say or what to do. The only thing she knew for certain was that they hadn’t even been married a year, and she couldn’t just walk away without putting up a fight.
She arranged counseling appointments, which Will never showed up to; she made his favorite meals, which he never came home for; and she waited up for him hoping he’d sit and talk to her, but he never wanted to talk and spent most nights on the couch. In fact, as time went on, he’d hardly look at her at all. In a last ditch effort, she’d even lowered herself to trying to seduce him with new lingerie, but all he did was sigh and shake his head.
“Maya?”
Blinking the pub back into focus, she gave her head a quick shake and turned her attention to Ellie. “Sorry?”
“I asked if Jack knew Dickhead was screwing the skank?”
“He’s says he didn’t.” Maya frowned. “I mean, he and Will spoke on the phone pretty regularly, so I guess it’s possible he knew and that he’s just lying to me, but I don’t think he’d do that. No.”
“Have you talked to him since you left Dickhead?”
“Jack? No.” She lifted her hands a little and laughed lightly. “I ran into him and Will once but I was the only one who said anything, and though I don’t remember exactly what I said, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t anything to be proud of. I emailed him a few times after that but he never responded.”
“That’s weird.” Jayne frowned. “It just seemed like you two were pretty good friends.”
The tiny ache she’d spent two years suppressing suddenly resurfaced.
“We were,” she said. “But he’s Will’s best friend, so you can’t really blame him for not keeping in touch, can you? It would be like one of you guys keeping in contact with Will.”
“I guess,” Ellie snorted. “Except Jack’s the one who made contact with you tonight, and you can bet your ass none of us would even cross the street to bother spitting on Dickhead.”
Jayne finished the rest of her cosmo and pushed the glass away. “Do you think Dickhead’ll be pissed about you and Jack getting together now?”
“Yes, but who cares?” Maya laughed, dry and short. “Will gave up his right to think anything about me the first time he touched that skank.”
A round of amens was followed by Jayne’s raised hand.
“Just remember when you’re making plans with Jack that you’re meeting Tim on Friday night.”
Maya let her head drop forward as she fought to stifle a groan.
“Yeah, about that.” She sighed. “I was kind of thinking about canceling.”
“What? No!” Jayne couldn’t have sounded more indignant if she tried. “You said the thing with Griffin wasn’t exclusive, and you already agreed to this. You can’t back out now.”
“Yeah, but—” Maya stopped, clamped her mouth shut, and held her breath. She’d been all set to tell them tonight, then Jack showed up, and now it was late. Their tab had been paid and Regan was already reaching for her jacket.
“But what?” Jayne pushed. “Are you seeing someone we don’t know about?”
“No.”
“Are you thinking about going out with Griffin again?”
“Sort of, yeah,” she admitted, bringing Regan’s attention back up. “But it’s a little more complicated than that.”
Regan’s arm stilled halfway into her sleeve. “How complicated?”
Crunching her hands into tight fists, Maya pressed them under her chin, exhaled slowly, then flagged Shelley over. “We’re going to need another round.”
“Not for me,” Regan said. “I have to drive.”
Maya kept her gaze fixed firmly on Shelley. “Bring it. We’ll call Carter to pick her and Jayne up.”
The air around the table stilled as the three of them sat frozen, unblinking as Maya turned to face them. Regan’s jacket still hung half-on, half-off, but she didn’t move to fix it either way.
Maya’s stomach tipped and tossed, her pulse started to race and she was suddenly cold. There was no one she trusted more than these three, but it was still a little scary saying this out loud and admitting that she was actually considering this crazy idea.
And it was crazy. Wasn’t it?
She unclenched her fists, set her hands flat on the table, then folded them together so they’d stop twitching.
“Okay, so here’s the thing.” In one fluid movement, her friends all leaned in closer as though by doing so they could keep Maya’s whisper from drifting past them. “Griffin asked me to have his baby.”
“What?!” So loud, so very, very loud, it brought Shelley hustling back to their table.
“Is everything okay?”
“Yeah, sorry,” Maya muttered. “But we’re gonna need a rush on those drinks.”
By the time Shelley started heading back to the bar, the other three were all talking at the same time, sputtering over one another, none of them finishing a single sentence.
“Are you—”
“Is he—”
“But you—”
“I know. It’s crazy.” Nodding, Maya looked at each one in turn; everything they were thinking right then, she’d already thought. Every question they were trying to ask, she’d already asked herself.
Jayne sat with her hands pressed tight against her cheeks; Ellie kept muttering “holy shit” under her breath; and Regan, still caught up in her jacket, couldn’t even seem to blink.
“I know,” Maya repeated, tucking a hefty tip in Shelley’s little black apron pocket as she set out the fresh round. “Thanks, Shell.”
“Are you sure everything’s okay?”
“Yeah, it’s fine. Thanks.”
Sitting stock-still, Jayne let her eyes follow Shelley across the room; then she leaned over the table and practically hissed. “Fine? This isn’t fine! How can you drop something like that and say everything’s fine?”
If it had been Regan or Ellie to freak out first, Maya wouldn’t have been surprised, but Jayne…She was usually the quiet one in the bunch, so to have her lean over the table like that, with her hands still glued to her face, and her eyes absolutely wild, Maya couldn’t help it—she laughed.
“You think this is funny?” Jayne croaked. “You’re talking about having a baby with—”
“Shh!” Still laughing, Maya raised her hands off the table in a “calm down” gesture. “I know, and if you could all maybe take a breath, I was kind of hoping we could talk about it like sane, rational women.”
“Sane? Sane? The three of us are perfectly sane, Maya, it’s you who has obviously lost her freakin’ mind!”
“Maybe, but does that mean we can’t talk abou
t it?”
With a sudden jerk, Regan yanked her arm free of her jacket and balled it up on her lap. “Yeah. You talk, I’m going to drink.”
Maya tipped her glass in Regan’s direction, took a sip, and set it down again.
“Okay. You know we’ve gotten together at my apartment a couple times and you know we’ve talked on the phone, but what you don’t know is that both times he came over, he stayed the night—and no, not like that—he slept on the couch.”
“Griffin Carr slept on your couch.” Ellie’s voice was flat, even, as though by repeating the words it would be easier for her brain to digest. “Griffin Carr spent the night at your place—”
“Twice,” Jayne said.
“And you made him sleep on the couch.” Ellie exhaled over a slow nod. “Okay.”
“Trust me, Ellie. He was fine with it.”
“How do you know? Apparently you can’t even tell when a guy’s hitting on you—so how the hell would you know if he wanted to sleep with you?”
“I know when a guy’s hitting on me,” Maya said, rolling her eyes. “Usually. The thing with Griffin is that…well, I like him, he’s great, and we get along really well, but there’s no spark there for either one of us.”
“There’s no…” Jayne clamped her mouth shut, growled, then dropped her hands to the table. “Then why the hell are you even thinking about this?”
Maya closed her eyes for a second and exhaled slowly. “Because, Jayne, given where I am in my life right now, it might be my only chance.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Regan cried, her voice a dry croak.
“Just listen. When I found out about Will and Stella…it broke me, it really did.” She lifted her hands to wave off the three of them, who’d all leaned forward again. “I’m fine, I am, and I don’t believe every guy out there is a cheating pig like Will. It’s just that I was so sure I’d found forever with Will that it never once crossed my mind that I shouldn’t trust him, and when I found out what he was doing, I lost that ability to trust. And not just other people, but myself, too.”
Ellie reached across the table and wrapped her hands around Maya’s. “And we hate that he did that to you.”
“I know. The thing is, though, Jayne can set me up on dates from now until the second coming, and it won’t matter. They’re all going to end the same way, because I’ll always be wondering if that guy is trustworthy, or if I’m just paranoid, and that’s not fair to any guy. I mean, honestly, if I think about it, there are four guys I know who I would trust implicitly and every single one of them is off-limits.”
“Who?” Jayne asked. “Is Nick one of them?”
“Of course. And Carter and Brett, too.” She hesitated a second, then nodded. “And Jack. He might be loyal to Dickhead, and he might have avoided me for the last couple of years, but he’d never hurt anyone like that. Will used to tease him for being soft, but I never thought it was him being soft. I mean, given what he went through as a kid, I always thought it was more that he knew what it was like to be hurt or forgotten, and he never wanted to be the one to make anyone else ever feel that way.”
The three of them sat in silence, watching Maya sip her wine and waiting for her to continue.
“Anyway, in between the two times Griffin and I actually hung out together, there were a lot of phone calls that went on for a while, like some of them went on for hours.”
“Holy crap,” Regan murmured.
“By the time he came over the second time, we both knew there wasn’t going to be a big romance between us, but we really enjoy each other’s company, and I think that’s the main reason he asked me.” She chewed her lip for a second then shrugged. “He knows he’d never make a good husband, he told me that himself, but he really wants to be a dad—you should hear him talk about his nieces and nephews, it’s adorable. Anyway, with no romantic attachment between us, it sort of makes sense.”
“It does?” Jayne asked. “How?”
“Given the way I am now, I can’t see myself ever getting married again, and until Griffin showed up, I had written off any chance I had of having children, too. But why should I? It’s the twenty-first century, single women have children all the time, for various reasons, and they do it alone. But I wouldn’t be alone; I’d have him to share everything with.”
“And how will you share everything with you living here and him living in L.A.?”
“I don’t know,” Maya admitted. “I haven’t figured that out yet. I haven’t even agreed to this yet, I just wanted to hash it out with you guys so you could help me with the figuring-it-out part.”
Regan and Jayne both spoke at the same time.
“Do it.”
“Don’t do it.”
Ellie just sighed and shook her head. “I don’t know, Maya. I just don’t know. This is huge.”
“I know.”
“This isn’t what you want,” Jayne said, her voice gentle but firm. “You’ve always wanted the whole thing—the husband, the home, the kids—and I think it’s wrong for you to settle for anything less than that.”
Regan watched Jayne as she spoke; then she turned to Maya and looked at her with something Maya could only describe as fierceness.
“You’ve always wanted to have kids, Maya, and if you’re both in complete agreement about what’s what, you should do it. Don’t let the chance pass you by, especially since these other two don’t seem to be in any hurry to make me an aunt.”
It wasn’t often Regan said anything about the fact that she and Carter couldn’t have kids of their own, so Maya reached for Regan’s hand and gave it a tight squeeze.
“I don’t know,” Ellie kept saying. “It’s just…wow.”
“Yeah. He’s flying in at the end of next month so we can talk about it face-to-face, so I need to have some idea of what I want to do by then.”
“Do it.”
“Don’t do it.”
“I don’t know.”
Funny how the three of them echoed perfectly what she was thinking herself.
Chapter 3
“All right, look, if you absolutely have to tell her, at least wait until the timing’s right…and that’s what deathbeds are for.”
Chandler Bing, Friends, “The One the Morning After”
Jack was still smiling the next morning.
He could have ducked out the side door last night, and Snip never would’ve known he’d been there. Hell, he’d spent the last two years avoiding her; he could’ve kept on doing it, but one look at her sitting there with her friends and he was right back at that damn Hawaiian party four years ago, wondering why a pretty girl like her wasn’t surrounded by a bunch of guys and wondering if he should give it a shot with her.
It had taken him a long time to get over that feeling the first time, and yet one smile from her last night screwed him up all over again.
And he didn’t even care. He should, because it meant he’d have to find a way to get over that feeling all over again, but for now, he just didn’t care. It was Snip and he liked the way she screwed him up. He liked the way those blue eyes looked at him with wonder, like she was honestly interested in whatever he said, and he really liked the way one smile from her sent everything inside him into a complete riot.
He wasn’t stupid. He’d learned early on that what he wanted or liked rarely mattered. If someone in his foster home wanted what he had, they usually took it—whether it was his LEGOs, his books, or even his dessert—and being as scrawny as he’d been, he’d always let them. It was what it was, and he’d learned to live with it. That all changed, though, when he moved in with the Carsons. They treated him fairly, and unlike some of the other people he’d lived with, Burt and Genie used the money they received for fostering him to actually care for him and make sure he had what he needed, and a lot of that included involving him in every sport out there.
They pushed Jack to do better, to be better, and he and Will used that to challenge each other in everything from school to sp
orts to girls. It seemed to take forever, but with the help of the school weight room, Jack finally started to fill out, and while he’d turned into the better athlete, he had nothing on Will when it came to getting girls. Maya wasn’t the only woman Jack had lost to Will, but she was the only one he ever regretted losing.
Maybe losing wasn’t the right word, since Jack hadn’t even tried to win her, but any chance he might have had with Snip vanished the second Will had shouldered his way between them at that party. Why wouldn’t Maya fall for Will?
Will was a smart, good-looking guy who had the ability to make everyone around him feel both important and at ease at the same time. It was one of the many reasons he made such a great teacher. Jack, on the other hand, had gone from tall and scrawny to big, goofy, and awkward, especially around pretty women. Funny thing was, though, he’d never felt that way around Snip, not even when his clumsy attempt to pick her up that night had ended in disaster.
It was the damnedest thing, like Snip understood him even when he wasn’t sure what the hell he was feeling. The night of the wedding rehearsal, he’d tried so hard to pretend Genie’s words didn’t affect him, but Snip knew they did, and she’d tried to soften the blow by poking fun at it.
It started with a copy of Cool Hand Luke, and then over the next nine or ten months, she sent copies of Papillon, Escape from Alcatraz, and The Fugitive. The last one, The Shawshank Redemption, showed up with a Get Out of Jail Free card taped across the front.
A couple weeks after that one arrived, her marriage imploded and he’d been pulled into the Carson camp, where, for some crazy reason, everyone agreed that while Will had screwed up, Maya’s reaction to it had been too extreme by half.
And as he’d always done when he disagreed with the family, Jack just kept his mouth shut and his head down.
One of the hardest things he’d ever done was ignore that first email that came in from Maya after she’d left Will, and the only reason he’d done it was because he had no idea what he was supposed to say to her. He had saved each email she’d sent, four in total; he just hadn’t responded to any of them.