The Perception

by Adriana Locke

  The feeling of his breath, hot on my face, as he kissed me goodbye. The sound of his voice telling me he just wasn’t ready and that he couldn’t do it. That he was leaving me.

  That he was leaving us . . . in every sense of the word.

  I’ll never forget hearing how empty the house sounded when the front door slammed shut. The last time he’d ever shut it.

  I jumped back to reality when Max touched my hand.

  “Hey,” he whispered, his voice soft. I glanced quickly up into his eyes. The irritation was still there, but concern overshadowed it.

  I tried to smile, but was afraid that I’d lose the small amount of control I had managed to hang onto. I looked in front of me. His house, our house for however much longer—weeks, days, but probably minutes—sat in front of us.

  I remembered the first time Max brought me to his home. The night after we went to Maisano’s the first time. How I felt such a connection to Max that night. I ended up sleeping in his bed. I felt my face ease with a smile as I remembered my surprise the next morning. Random sex was good for me, but I never stayed the night. It implied too much. But with Max, it just happened as naturally as anything.

  Everything was easy with Max.

  But feeling it end wouldn’t be.

  We sat quietly in the truck, the engine off, both of us sort of working through our thoughts. He took my hand in his and traced the lines in my hand with his thumb. “I know all the lines in your palm,” he said, more to himself than to me. “I know every bend and every deviation. I know them better than my own.”

  I smiled through the tears that were stinging my eyes.

  “I don’t know what’s going on, but I have an idea,” he said softly.

  “I doubt it,” I said, taking my hand from his and climbing out of the truck. I heard his door open and close behind me. He met me at the front door, unlocking it and turning off the alarm system. I sat my purse down on the couch and looked around. I suddenly felt out of place, so unwelcome. It was like the house now knew my secrets and was spewing me out like the toxic mess I was.

  A ruiner of dreams—that was me.

  I couldn’t ruin his, even if it meant ruining myself.

  “So?”

  “So what?” I asked.

  He looked at me patiently. The lines at the sides of his eyes were deep. He was tired. He’d been working so damn hard and now I was going to drop this into his lap. I was going to ruin the image he had of me in his mind; he’d never look at me the same.

  But he would understand why I’d been pushing him away. Why the expiration date on our relationship was drawing closer.

  “Can we not talk about it?” I asked hopefully.

  He heaved out a breath. “If that makes you happy, but we’re gonna have to discuss it sooner or later, Kari. Something happened with you and him and by the look on his face, he’s not gonna let it go. And I’ll tell ya what,” he said, taking a step towards me, “I’m not about to sit around and let that happen. There’s not a chance in hell, sweetheart.”

  “Oh, Max,” I said, my voice cracking. The tears flew down my face like it was a race to stain my dress. I sat on the couch and put my head in my hands, fear mixing with the rejection that was barreling towards me head on.

  This was going to happen sooner or later . . .

  “I want you to know that I love you and I’m really sorry for leading you on this long,” I said through my wet fingers.

  He sat beside me, trying to pull me into his lap but I resisted. I needed space for this.

  Space is something I needed to get used to real quick.

  I took a deep breath and gathered my courage.

  It was going to take all I had to nuke the best thing that had ever happened to me.

  MAX

  She wouldn’t let me hold her.

  There were a lot of things she refused me in our relationship, but that was a new one. She always let me hold her, love on her. She may protest and throw up a bit of a fight, but she always let me in the end. The physical part of our relationship she never had a problem with. Hell, it was how I communicated with her half the time. I told her I loved her and she’d balk; I’d love her body and she reciprocated.

  So why not now?

  “What’s goin’ on?” It sounded more like a plea than I intended for it to, but I didn’t really care. It killed me not to ask her in the truck, but I knew she was working through whatever had just happened and I knew whatever happened was huge and would be comin’ out regardless.

  She looked at me sadly, mascara running down her cheeks. “I knew Blaine a long time ago,” she began, her voice wavering. “We were engaged, actually.”

  I started putting those pieces together in the truck, a jigsaw coming to life.

  “We were going to move to California. We had a marriage license and everything.” Her voice broke and a sob hiccupped in her chest.

  Good lord . . .

  “I had a surgery when I was a little girl, not long after Mom died. When I was a teenager, I had a lot of cramping and stuff. The doctor said I’d probably never be able to have a baby. There was a lot of scar tissue and stuff.”

  She fought back the sobs that were trying to escape. She was struggling to maintain control and the sight killed me. Watching her break broke me.

  I reached for her again, not sure where this was going. The words coming out of her mouth seemed to physically hurt her, pain etched across her face. I just wanted to hold her close, but she pushed away. Again.

  My breathing was shallow. I hated seeing her in pain like this. I didn’t really even care at that point what happened between her and Blaine. I just wanted to make her better.

  She swallowed. “Blaine knew what the doctor had said and he was fine with it because he didn’t want kids anyway. His parents were drunks and his brother was an asshole, so he didn’t want kids. He just wanted to live free and happily, not responsible for anything or anyone. Then one day I missed my period and was really sick and . . .” Kari looked to me, the whites of her eyes red. “I was pregnant. I was due on my birthday.”

  Her hands flew to her stomach without her even realizing it. I wanted to reach out and grab her, hold her to me, but I was afraid it’d shake her outta the moment and she’d stop talking. I could tell she’d held this in for so long, I wanted her to get it off her chest.

  For her good. Not mine.

  I tried to process what she said, to wrap my head around the points she was making, but I couldn’t get passed the look on her face.

  Motherfucker!

  “And I was so fucking happy about it.” A smile inched its way across her face. She looked at me, almost embarrassed. “I’ve never been as excited as I was once the shock wore off. It was like—like I did something right. Like I wasn’t a failure. I had never thought much about carrying a baby because I was young and Blaine was my first real relationship, but once I knew that there was a child inside me . . .” Her eyes misted over and she looked to the floor. “It felt like the most natural thing in the world. I felt like I was a woman.”

  I wanted to interject, to tell her a million reasons why she was a woman, but she kept going.

  “I couldn’t wait to tell Blaine. I waited for him to come home from work, already imagining which room would be the nursery and how we’d decorate it. I was making mental lists of baby names and things that my mom had read to me as a child that I wanted to read to him or her.”

  The tears were pouring down her cheeks, her chest rising and falling so hard. I reached out and brushed some of the tears away with the pad of my thumb, but it was pointless. Each tear was replaced with three more. She didn’t lean into my touch as she usually did. She just sat there like a stone.

  It broke my damn heart.

  “Blaine came home that night. It was late. I was sitting on the couch . . .” Her voice trailed off. She turned her head slowly towards me, dragging her eyes with it. “I told him.”

  The simplicity in her voice told me the conversation wa
s anything but simple.

  “He called me a bunch of names. Said I must have tried to get pregnant on purpose.” She sat up taller, her voice laced with anger. “He said I wasn’t any better than the other girls out there, trying to trap him with a kid. He wasn’t home twenty minutes from the time he got there until he left again.”

  “He left you?” I asked in disbelief. The thought of Kari being alone and devastated made me sick to my stomach. Just imagining her sitting there, crying like this because of someone else . . . I wanted to go find that “someone else” and make him pay for hurting her.

  Blaine had everything with Kari that I wanted so fucking badly.

  He had everything I wanted. Everything she wouldn’t give me.

  That sonofabitch had it all and walked away.

  “He left me that night, but he came back. You know,” she shrugged, “to get his stuff.”

  Her voice broke on the last word and I didn’t care what she did—I pulled her into me, wrapping my arms around her and holding her against me. This precious girl crying broke me in two.

  She fisted my shirt in her hands and cried quietly for a long time. I just held her, going through everything in my mind, wondering how she got along.

  What happened between them? What happened to the baby? Sam had said his ex had aborted it, but I couldn’t see Kari doing that. But if she had, did it make a difference?

  I looked down to her shaking body in my arms.

  It really fucking didn’t.

  All that mattered was fixing her. Showing her that I would never walk away from her, that whatever she did in the past was in the past. We would figure out the future together. I wouldn’t walk away from her if she got pregnant. Hell, it’d be the happiest day of my life.

  Eventually her tears turned to sniffles and she pulled back, wiping her hair out of her tear-stained face. “I’m sorry.”

  “Never be sorry for feeling,” I whispered, brushing a piece of hair stuck to her face out of the way. “Never be sorry for that.”

  “I haven’t seen him until today. He came back a couple of days after he left originally and got the rest of his stuff and I haven’t heard from him since. I guessed he’d moved to California and I’d never see him again.”

  “You never have to see him again,” I promised her. I hated him for hurting her like this. Although if he hadn’t, she’d probably be married to him now with a baby.

  She blew out a breath. “It’s not your problem.” I could see her walls going up again, blocking me out. This was the Kari I had met, the Kari scared of the world.

  It pissed me off.

  “It is my problem. If it hurts you, it’s my problem.”

  She stood up, smoothing down her dress with her hands, not looking at me. “Didn’t you hear what I just said?”

  “I heard everything you said,” I said, rising. “I’m not sure what your point is.”

  “Max,” she said, her voice cold and even, “I can’t have kids. I will never be able to do that. The fact that I got pregnant once was a fluke. There’s little chance it’ll ever happen again.”

  Her eyes were locked up, her soul put away, and all of a sudden everything started coming together.

  That was why she fought me. That was why she didn’t want to get too close. She thought I wouldn’t love her if I knew, so she was doing her best to keep me out.

  Try harder, sweetheart.

  “I heard you.” I tried not to smile, knowing she’d misinterpret it.

  She looked at the floor. “So?”

  “So . . . I’m sorry about that. You’d make an amazing mother and I’d have been honored to be the father of your children, but—”

  “There’s no buts,” she interjected. “This isn’t a negotiation. Nothing you can say will change that.”

  “Okay. What’s your point?”

  She sighed and walked around the coffee table, putting some distance between us. “I won’t do this to you, Max. I won’t do this to your family.”

  “Do what?” I said, getting a little frustrated. This gorgeous girl was gonna be the death of me. “I’m not asking you to do anything, Kari, but love me back.”

  “I’m not going to ask you to love me when loving me means you can never have a family, Max. I won’t do it. Damn it, I love you too much to even consider that.”

  “Too bad for you that it isn’t your choice, now isn’t it?”

  Her eyes widened.

  “Yeah, sweetheart. It’s gonna take a lot more than that to walk away from me.” I snorted, feeling myself get more than a little angry. “As a matter of fact, I don’t think there’s any reason I’d ever find good enough to let you walk away from me.”

  Her bottom lip quivered and I saw a faint smile ghost her lips.

  Believe it, sweetheart. Believe in me. It’s time you realize that we are forever.

  “You can’t throw your life away,” she whispered, her hand wrapping around her throat.

  I couldn’t help but laugh. Shaking my head, I smiled, “Throw my life away? Darlin,’ you’re gonna have to explain that one to me.” I took the few steps it took to reach her and grabbed her by the shoulders. She looked up at me through her lashes. “Stop it. Stop this nonsense,” I insisted.

  “Why would you want to be with me?” Her voice trembled. “You come from this huge family and being with me guarantees you one thing—that you won’t have one.”

  “Do you think that’s what I thought when I saw you? ‘Oh there’s the mother of my children?’ Because it’s not. When I saw you, I saw a beautiful woman. And when I talked to you, I heard an intelligent woman. And now when I see you smile, I see my soul being completed by the woman of my dreams. I hate it for you, that you’ll never know what it’s like to carry a child again. I hate that Blaine walked out on you. I hate that you’ve been scared to tell me this all along. But I know now and it doesn’t change a damn thing, Kar.”

  “You don’t look at me now like I’m flawed? Your mother won’t look at me like less of a woman than Isa? She wants to be a grandmother and I’ll be robbing that from her.” She looked at the floor. “She’ll never forgive me for that.”

  I tipped her chin back up. “You don’t give my mother enough credit. And no, I don’t look at you like you’re flawed. You’re as perfect as you were an hour ago.”

  She half snorted, half laughed.

  “You are.” I took a step back and narrowed my eyes. “It doesn’t matter to me if you can have a child. I don’t care if you aborted the baby.”

  Kari’s eyes widened in horror, her jaw dropping. “What did you say?” I took another step back as her eyes lit with fury. “What did you just say to me?”

  “I told you that Sam had said that Blaine’s ex had an abortion while he was gone.”

  She stood straight, her eyes wild. “That’s a bunch of bullshit! That’s not what happened at all!”

  I put my hands up in defense. “Okay. I didn’t know . . .”

  “How could you believe that?”

  “I didn’t know. I told you that at dinner, remember?”

  Anger rolled off of her. “I hate him for saying that. I hate him for leaving me. I hate him for destroying me so much that I lost the baby.”

  “Oh, sweetheart,” I said, trying to reach to her.

  She turned away from me, shaking her head. “Yeah. I lost the baby. I lost the one-in-a-thousand chance I had because of him. I didn’t abort it, for heaven’s sake, although I’m sure he’d like to think that. Probably helps him sleep better at night.”

  I didn’t know what to say to make her feel better. I just wrapped my arms around her from behind and pulled her into my chest. I rested my chin on top of her head. “What can I do to make this better?”

  She eventually gave up and nestled her head back against me, letting the closeness soothe her. “There’s nothing you can do.”

  We swayed back and forth, looking out the window. The sun had gone down and the landscaping lights were starting to turn on. It looked p
eaceful and beautiful.

  “If you want me to go, I will.”

  “I want you to shut the hell up.”

  “Max!” she exclaimed, not used to hearing me talk like that to her. But I couldn’t help it—I was over pretending that we were over, that this revelation was the end of us.

  I turned her in my arms to face me and bent down so our eyes were level. “Listen to me. You and I are permanent. I love you and everything that makes you you, Kari Stanley. I guarantee you I’m not leaving you and if you think you’re leaving me, you have another thing coming.”

  A small grin twitched her lips and I knew I was breaking through.

  “I. Love. You. Got that?”

  She nodded, her cheeks pinking.

  “Marry me?”

  “Oh, Max,” she laughed, pulling away.

  “What? I’m serious. Marry me?”

  She bit her bottom lip before whispering, “Not tonight.”

  KARI

  My entire body ached. From head-to-toe, I felt like I had been put through the wringer or hiked a sloping, winding trail. But in reality, I had been worked over by Maxwell Jacob Quinn.

  After hearing the truth and watching me break to pieces, I had expected him to ask for some distance. I was sure I’d looked like a complete nutcase. Instead, he had carried me to bed and made me forget the entire night had happened, that I had ever worried he’d leave me. He made his intentions crystal clear—he wasn’t letting me go.

  The soreness was a pleasant reminder of him, of the words he had whispered in my ears, of the ways his tongue had licked away every bad thought. The way he took his time, kissed away every doubt, used his hands to prove to me that he was still there. Max had a way of knowing just what I needed, of knowing that sometimes I needed to be shown instead of told.

  I tossed back the comforter and stretched before climbing out of bed and wrapping myself up in Max’s discarded robe. It was black, entirely too big, and had a small hole in the bottom of one of the pockets. But it smelled like him and I needed to be wrapped in his scent to start the day.

  He had kissed me before he left, apologizing about having to leave me to go into the office on a Saturday morning. I hated that he had to go, but his sense of responsibility was one of the things I loved most about him.