How Forever Feels

by Laura Drewry

  Nick just kept right on nodding. “Maybe not, but I’m telling you right now, it will.”

  “So…what? I should give up my chance for a family because it might throw a wrench into a relationship I’m not even having? That’s crazy.”

  “You’re right.” Jayne came around the island and took the chair between Maya and Nick. “You shouldn’t have to give it up, and yet I just can’t shake the feeling in my gut that this thing with Griffin isn’t right. It’s not what you really want.”

  Maya couldn’t even argue with her, because she had that same feeling in her gut, too. It wasn’t exactly what she wanted, but maybe it would have to be enough.

  Should she could tell Griffin no, and walk away from a very real chance at having a baby of her own simply on the off chance that maybe—just maybe—a miracle would fall out of the sky and some guy (Jack!) would sweep her off her feet and give her the family she wanted?

  Or should she take a step back and look at it realistically? The chances of her ever finding a man (Jack!) to spend the rest of her life with wasn’t exactly looking promising these days, and while she was still fairly young, she couldn’t pretend her window of baby-opportunity would stay open indefinitely. How much longer did she have? Five years? Ten?

  When she considered how fast the last ten years went by, it wasn’t exactly a comfort to her, and sure, there were medical breakthroughs all the time, and with the options available now, women were having babies well into their forties, but Maya didn’t want to wait that long.

  In a perfect world, the choice would be easy; she’d simply listen to her gut, walk away from Griffin, and magically end up with the whole fairy tale, including her own Prince Loyal (charming was way overrated) and cute little woodland creatures who’d dress in tiny little outfits and clean the house.

  This wasn’t a perfect world, though; it was the real world, and she needed to at least listen to her head when it begged her to take what was being offered. To not only take it, but to grab it with both hands and hold onto it with everything she had, because the chance might not come around again.

  “Ugh.” Pushing her tea aside, she crossed her arms on the island and dropped her head on top of them.

  “Maya.” Nick’s voice was low, soothing, and infuriatingly rational. “If you really think having a baby with Griffin is the right thing for you, and you honestly believe that Jack isn’t entitled to an opinion, or that it shouldn’t make a spit of difference to whatever your relationship is with him, then you have no reason to hide it from him.”

  Infuriatingly rational.

  “I’m not hiding it from him,” she muttered, her face still pressed against her arms. “I’m just waiting until I decide what to do before I tell him.”

  “Maya.” Jayne’s voice this time, but that’s as much as she said before Maya jerked upright and pressed the heels of her hands against her temples.

  “I know!” She didn’t mean to yell it like that, but she hated knowing they were right. “I’ll tell him. I will. It’s not like I have a choice, do I? Whatever this is between Jack and me, it’s not enough to make me think we could have a future, but it’s more than enough to make it feel like I’d be cheating on him. How screwed up is that, I ask you?”

  Jayne’s wincing only proved Maya’s point. Nick just took a slow sip of his tea, then set the mug down and looked straight at her.

  “Do you love him? Jack, I mean.”

  “Excuse me?” Maybe inviting Nick to stay wasn’t such a great idea after all.

  “It’s a simple question.”

  “Actually, Dr. Phil, it’s not.”

  She didn’t know why Nick and Jayne were laughing, because there was nothing funny about this.

  She really liked Jack—there was no question about that—but love? She loved the way she felt when she was with him, and she loved the way she felt when she thought about him, which happened more often than she was ever going to admit to Nick. She loved the way the greens and browns in his eyes melted together when he looked at her, the way he smiled so big and easily, and she loved that he’d rather laugh at himself than at anyone else.

  She loved his dog, the fact that he wore Iron Man underwear, and yes, even though it pained her, she even loved the fact that he was so goddamn loyal to the Carsons.

  This time when she dropped her head to the table, she dropped it to the table with a thunk and an agonized “argh!”

  “Told you it was simple.” The laughter in Nick’s voice was followed by the sound of Jayne thwacking him on the arm. “What?”

  “I can’t be,” Maya moaned. “That’ll make everything worse. And besides, he’s only been back a couple weeks…okay, almost a month…but it’s too soon. It can’t be that. Can it?”

  Their silence reverberated through her skull, silently screaming what the three of them already knew, until she bolted upright again and grabbed Jayne’s arm, jostling her so hard her tea slopped over onto the island.

  “You have to help me, Jayne. Tell me how you did it. How did you stay sane for so long when he was right there all the time?”

  Without even looking at each other, Nick and Jayne laced their fingers together and squeezed.

  “I don’t know.” Jayne laughed. “But I didn’t live here for a long time, remember?”

  “Ohmygod, that’s it!” Maya cried, squeezing Jayne’s arm tighter. “He’s leaving! Oh thank God! We’ve got, what, another three weeks, maybe four if things go longer than expected, and then he’ll be gone! Oh, that’s beautiful. How soon can you get his office finished, Nick, for real I mean? And don’t be shy to kick his ass out of there—I heard all about the finishing gun disaster—so if he’s slowing you down, you should feel free to go all Donald Trump on his ass.”

  She was acting crazy, she knew that, talking as fast as she was, but she couldn’t help it.

  “Uh, Maya,” Jayne said. “Just because he moves away doesn’t guarantee anything will change; at least it didn’t with me. You just need to find a way to live your life without him in it, and you also need to get used to the fact that he’s going to hook up with some other woman.”

  It was like Jayne had just doused her with a bucket of ice. “What other woman?”

  “I don’t know, I’m just saying. If you’re off having a baby with Griffin, you can’t really stop him from going out and hooking up with someone, too. And so he should!”

  “But—”

  “I’m not saying he’ll love her, or that he’ll ever stop loving you, but come on. Even if you don’t have a baby with Griffin, can you really see yourself sitting around alone for the next forty or fifty years? No. So you can’t expect Jack to do that either.”

  “I know, but—” Maya clamped her mouth shut and forced it to stay that way. She’d come here, to Jayne specifically, for this reason. Jayne had stood by and watched Nick marry someone else, someone who didn’t even like Jayne, so if anyone knew how to get through it, it was her.

  “How did this even happen?” Maya asked, more to herself than either of them. “I mean, God, it’s Jack.”

  Nick’s soft snort made both Maya and Jayne look over at him.

  “No, it’s just…” He shrugged and lifted Jayne’s hand to his lips. “I used to ask myself that about Jayne all the time, too.”

  “Awww.” She nudged up next to him and laid her head on his shoulder. “You never told me that.”

  “Oh God. If you two are going to get all mushy and cow-eyed, I’m going to go.”

  “Okay, see ya. Good talk.” Laughing, Nick pushed up from his chair, but Jayne just rolled her eyes.

  “Never mind him. What do you think you’re going to do?”

  Maya threw up her hands and expelled a loud sigh.

  “I don’t know. I think about him all the time, and even though time just drags when I’m not with him, it’s absolute torture when I am, because it’s not like we can…” Smirking, she lifted her brow at Nick. “You might want to go find something else to do now.”

 
“Oh!” Surprise morphed straight to understanding and then a shudder. “Yeah, I don’t need to hear about that. I’ll be out back with Duke.”

  Another kiss for Jayne, a helpless smile for Maya, and he was gone. Jayne waited until she heard the back door close before she spoke.

  “Have you and Jack…?”

  “No, but I’m not gonna lie, Jayne, every time he kisses me goodbye, even though it’s only on the cheek, it’s like…holy crap.” She smoothed her finger around the rim of her mug and shook her head slowly. “And the crazy thing is, it’s not just about sex. I mean, yeah, obviously, I’d have him naked in a heartbeat if I could, but…like last night for instance, God, all I wanted to do was crawl through that phone and curl up against him in that stupid hotel bed.”

  Jayne sighed. “Yeah.”

  “Every time I’m near him, I want to touch him, like I almost don’t believe he’s real, so if I could touch him, I could be sure, but I can’t. I can’t even hold his hand! And God help me, every time he smiles at me I just want to…” Sputtering out what sounded like a deranged laugh, she let her head fall back and covered her face with her hands. “I’m losing it, aren’t I? I’ve gone crazy, there’s no other explanation.”

  “No, you’re not crazy.” Jayne’s smile lasted about half a second before turning to a wince. “You’re just in love, that’s all.”

  “It can’t be,” Maya huffed. “I’ve been in love before and it wasn’t like this. This is…I don’t even know. And I went and invited him out tomorrow, so we’ll be together all afternoon…which is awesome, but at the same time, I have to ask myself why? Why put myself—and him—in a situation that we both know isn’t going to end well? Am I some kind of masochist or something?”

  “Probably.” Jayne’s laugh, soft and kind, made Maya groan. “Here’s what you do. You get up tomorrow, and you go spend whatever time you can together. Don’t put any pressure on yourselves to make it any more than what it is, just enjoy it. And then you get up the next day and the day after that and you do it all over again until he goes back to Seattle.”

  “Is that what you did?”

  “Yup.” Jayne’s gaze drifted past the island, past the kitchen, to a memory that made her sigh. “Every day until I left town.”

  Maya stared at her friend for a long time. “How hard was that, getting on the bus and driving away from him the way you did?”

  Jayne’s nod was slow, thoughtful. “Second hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

  “What was the first? Watching Nick marry Abby?”

  Jayne blinked back to the present and turned a sad smile on Maya. “No. Watching him bury her and knowing I couldn’t do anything to help him through it.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Maya whispered. “That must have been…God, Jayne…and here I am, wallowing around in self-pity over something so stupid.”

  “It’s not stupid; it’s hard. And I hate to tell you, but even if he was going back to deepest darkest Siberia, where there was no Internet or phone service and where regular mail really did run on the backs of snails, it’d still be hard.” Pushing off her stool, Jayne patted Maya on the back and walked around to refill the kettle. “Luckily for you, my friend, you’ll only be three and a half hours away from each other. Same time zone and everything, so you can pretty much see each other as much as you like.”

  “If that was true, Jayne, I wouldn’t be sitting in your kitchen crying in my tea right now.”

  “What does Jack think of all this, anyway? I can’t believe he’s been carrying this around for four years. That couldn’t have been easy for him.”

  “I don’t know, he hasn’t said much since he told me.”

  “Figures.” Jayne leaned back against the counter and crossed her arms over her chest. “You have to admire his loyalty and at the same time, you just want to crack him up the back of his head.”

  “Exactly,” Maya huffed. “Except I’d need a ladder to reach up that high.”

  Jayne’s chuckle came out over a half-snort. “Maybe take him out at the knees instead.”

  For the next few moments, they didn’t say anything, just looked at each other with the same helpless expressions. If there was an easy way out of Maya’s situation, neither one of them knew what it was.

  —

  Maya couldn’t remember the last time she’d had jitters like this. Going to Jayne’s last night was supposed to have made her feel better, or at least help give her some kind of direction, but all it had done was make her crazier.

  And now she had less than half an hour before Jack showed up, and for the life of her, she couldn’t stop twitching. She’d dropped a bucket of water and two vases before Alec arrived, took one look at her, and shooed her out of the way.

  “Good Lord, what’s wrong with you?” With a gentle nudge, he pushed her toward the stool at the end of the table and set about sweeping up the latest vase. “Are you ill?”

  “I wish,” she grumbled, more to herself than anything.

  “Then it can only be one other thing making you look like that, and he better be worth the cost of that vase. Crystal’s not cheap so he better not be either.”

  That made Maya smile a little. Pushing sixty, Alec stood a stout five seven—maybe—always wore his graying hair combed neatly and was never seen in anything but a suit and tie. The single-breasted dark blue with micro-thin black pinstripes, complete with a crisp white shirt, looked particularly nice on him, even though he’d paired it with his Pac-Man tie.

  In all the times she’d seen him since he moved to town, he’d never worn a simple or plain tie; they were all something weird. There was the one that looked like a hot dog, one that had the periodic table on it, and she was pretty sure he had a tie for each Star Wars character.

  “Now.” With everything swept up and taken care of, he straightened his round glasses and rubbed his hands together. “What can I do?”

  “There’s not—oh crap, he’s early.” Suddenly parched, Maya couldn’t even manage to swallow before the door whooshed open and in walked Jack.

  “Oh my.” Alec’s quiet appraisal made Maya laugh as she stumbled off the stool and tried to contain the bubble of happiness Jack’s appearance brought to her.

  “You’re early,” she said, wishing she could at least stop smiling like that, especially when his only response was a small shrug and a barely restrained grin of his own. Pathetic, that’s what they were. “Uh, Jack, this is Alec. Alec, Jack.”

  “Well, hello, Jack. It’s nice to meet you.”

  “Yeah, you too. Great tie.” They shook hands, but before Jack stepped back, his tipped his head to the side a little, pretending to size Alec up. “I hear you’re the sweetest guy ever.”

  “I do what I can.” Alec’s round face warmed into a slow smile. “But in truth, I think Maya’s being a little overly generous if that’s how she described me.”

  “It’s the truth.” With her hand still gripping the back of the stool, she straightened her shoulders and exhaled. “Okay, well, the morning orders have all been taken care of, so you’re free to play around with whatever you like. Go crazy. Ellie’s in her boutique all day if you need something, and you have my cell number, so…”

  “So go already.” Alec’s voice was gentle, his wink teasing as she edged around him to grab her jacket and bag. “Have fun.”

  Maya’s smile faltered a little, but Jack’s voice was steady as a rock when he answered.

  “We will, thanks.”

  They darted out into the rain and headed straight for Jack’s Jeep, where Maya gave Pete lots of love before turning and staring out the front window like Jack did. The thick steady rain hadn’t let up in days and showed no signs of slowing now.

  “It’s kinda nasty out to be doing the Four Lakes Trail in this,” she said. “What should we do?”

  The wipers swished four or five times before Jack shrugged. “What about bowling?”

  “Bowling?” She tried not to laugh, but one look at how serious he was and she couldn’t
help it. “Really?”

  “Why not?”

  “Let’s see. Because I haven’t bowled since my seventh birthday party. Because you don’t know who else has had their feet in those shoes. Because—”

  “You haven’t been bowling since you were seven?” Jack put the Jeep in gear and pulled away from the curb. “That’s just wrong, Snip. We’re going bowling.”

  “What about Pete?”

  “He’ll be fine in the hotel for a while.” Even as he said it, he peered through his rearview mirror into the backseat. “Not a fan of the rain anyway, are you, buddy?”

  The whole way to the hotel and then back to the bowling alley, she tried to talk him out of it, but Jack was determined that that was what they were going to do. So there she was, half an hour later, standing near the foul line on Lane 8 in an ugly pair of red-and-black shoes, watching her ball wobble its way down the gutter.

  “Yeah,” she scoffed. “This is awesome. Great idea.”

  “You’re doing it wrong.”

  “No—ya think?” Rolling her eyes, she lifted another ball off the rack and turned to face the ten pins that stood there taunting her. “Is it possible to find heavier balls, because these ones don’t quite rip my arms out of their sockets.”

  “Here, let me show you.” Jack’s voice, right behind her, made Maya start, but it took her a second or two to move out of his way. With a ball in hand, he nodded down the alley. “Don’t aim for the pins, aim for the marks on the floor. Keep your wrist straight and follow through.”

  Three long strides, he released the ball and sent it sailing down the alley, where it blasted all but two of the pins backward.

  “Okay,” she muttered. “Look out.”

  She waited until the pins reset, then stepped forward. Ball up, eyes focused on the middle arrows painted on the floor, she took one step, drew the ball back, lost her balance with the swing of its weight, and promptly dropped it behind her.

  The kids in Lane 6 thought it was hilarious and apparently so did Jack.

  “Pins are that way,” he said, pointing.