by Tracey Ward
She smiled. “Are you telling me YOLO?”
“Don’t be a jerk,” I laughed. “I’m being brilliant here.”
“I know, sorry. And you’re right. I’ll think about it.”
Not good enough. I wasn’t buying it.
“Don’t think about it,” I told her. “You’ve obviously already done that. Now it’s time to do it.”
“Actually,” she countered, glancing down at her watch, “now it’s time to get on the road and get to work or I won’t have a job to fund this big dream of yours.”
“Ours,” I corrected her. “Do you work tomorrow?”
“No.”
“Good.”
I stood up, feeling my body move before I could stop it. I touched her bare arm with my hand to ground myself, then I kissed her lightly on the cheek. When I pulled away we both looked surprised, but she didn’t slap me. That was something.
“We’ll look at shop spaces tomorrow,” I told her.
“Wait, what?” she chuckled nervously.
“I’ll find some online today and we’ll check them out tomorrow.”
“Kellen, slow down. I’m still in college. Don’t you think I should finish that first?”
“You can do both.”
“You could do both. I can’t manage all that alone.”
“You’re never alone,” I told her, settling onto my bike. I felt wild the way I had the afternoon in the park when she’d been looking at me, really looking at me, for the first time in years. I felt that thrill of being with her. The best part of me rising to the surface to see her. To bask in the glow of her eyes. “I’ll help you.”
“I don’t know my budget,” she persisted. “I haven’t even talked to my dad.”
“It’s a business proposal. We’ll come to him with the budget.” I grinned at her, revving my bike. “You better get moving! You’re gonna be late!”
I drove away, leaving her standing there with a shocked look on her face and a smile plastered on mine.
Chapter Thirty-Six
“Did you see Magic Mike?” Callum asked.
I scowled at him. “No, because I’m a heterosexual male. Why? Did you see Magic Mike?”
“Homework, dude,” he told me, passing me a tray of silverware on to be wrapped in thick linen napkins. “It’s research into what ladies want, and what they want is hot bodies. You’ve got a hot body and the face to go with it. Girls go insane over you.”
“No, they don’t.”
“Two of my waitresses have asked me if you’re single,” Brett informed me from across the restaurant. “One of my waiters too. They’ve all asked me to hire you.”
It amazed me every time I saw him just how much Callum looked like his dad. Brett was Callum twenty years from now, down to the color of his eyes and the well-trimmed beard that gave him a button down look, completely belying his staunch ability to drink like a freaking fish.
“Are you hiring?” I asked with a grin.
He laughed. “No way. Dan would never forgive me. Don’t be a lawyer if you don’t want to, but a waiter in a floundering dream is not your next step.”
“I need to do something.”
“And I’m trying to tell you what that is!” Callum insisted.
“So far you’ve told me to be a gigolo, and I’m guessing from the Channing Tatum tangent you’re taking off on, you want me to be a male stripper too?”
“I don’t want you to be, but the ladies do. Answer the call, fool. They want you,” he said, pointing at me in the Uncle Sam pose.
I shook my head. “Answer it for me. I’m not taking that call.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers.”
“I’m not a beggar. I’m looking for something that I’ll actually like doing.”
“What was it about being a lawyer you didn’t like?” Brett asked.
“Everything,” I answered immediately. “The suites. The office. Being inactive.”
“He’s a gym rat,” Callum supplied.
Brett nodded slowly. “What did you like about it?”
I shrugged, not really sure. “The reason I wanted to do it in the first place was because of what Dan did for me. He didn’t have to go to bat for me like that, but he did. He saved my life and I thought that’s something I wanted to do for someone else. But then I really wanted to do it for the money.”
“I hear that.”
“Is that why you did it?”
“No, I started off doing it because I loved it. I loved the entertainment industry and it was exciting being part of it, but after a while it lost its shine and once that was gone, I didn’t know what I was doing it for anymore. The money wasn’t worth it.”
“It was to mom,” Callum muttered.
“So you wanted to help people?” Brett asked me, ignoring his son.
“Yeah, initially.”
“Lot of professions you can do that in, and most don’t require a suit. What about a doctor? EMT? RN?”
The words all reminded me of my accident and the stay in the hospital. The specialists and nurses, everyone who had worked to help me survive, especially the first responders. The men who I was told had shown up at the scene of the crash and kept me alive until the EMTs got there.
“What about a firefighter?” I asked.
“There you go,” Brett agreed heartily. “It’s physical, it’s challenging, and it’s all about helping people. Strong kid like you, you’d do great at it.”
“And women love firefighters almost as much as they love male strippers,” Callum added. “Maybe even more.”
“I’m not looking to get laid,” I told him.
“Not now, no, but it doesn’t hurt to think of the future.”
My phone beeped. I picked it up to find a message from the realtor I’d contacted a couple weeks ago about finding Jenna a space for her shop. A property we’d seen that felt promising had sold. Jenna had stalled too long.
“Shit,” I muttered, dropping my hand and phone to the table.
The nerves in my right hand sang with a painful discord at the jolt.
“What’s up?” Callum asked.
“Another property sold out from under us. She needs to loosen up and look at more expensive places. We’re sifting through shit holes here because she’s scared to ask her dad for more money. We’re looking for a place budgeting with her income and it’s good, but not enough.”
“Have you told her yet that you’re the real sugar daddy holding the purse strings?”
I scowled at him. “No, and I shouldn’t have told you either.”
“Hey, I can keep a secret. Like that party I threw Junior year when…” he glanced up at his dad standing at the end of the table, watching him. “When, uh, we celebrated Kwanza to enrich our cultural understanding.”
I smiled. “Yeah, I remember that one. Rager.”
“You’re an idiot,” Brett told Callum before disappearing into the kitchen.
Callum snagged napkins from my pile. “So, you gonna tell her?”
“Not yet. She’s nervous about spending her dad’s money. Think how rigid she’ll get when she finds out it’s mine.”
“I can’t believe you’re loaded,” he chuckled, shaking his head.
“I’m not. My dad is and he keeps throwing it at me like I’m center stage at a titty bar. I have to do something with it.”
“You ever going to contact him? Say, ‘hey asshole, thanks for the dough and ditching me for my whole life’.”
“No.”
“Never?”
I looked at him pointedly.
“Alright,” he relented. “I get it. No means no. What about the firefighter thing? What are you gonna do about that?”
“I’ll look into it. Make sure it’s something I want to do, but it sounds right.” I thought of Dan and his advice. “It sounds fulfilling.”
***
“Alright, captain,” Ben told me, settling into his chair with a grin. “What are we talking about today?”
I’d been
seeing Ben a couple times a week for two months now and he’d taken to calling me ‘captain’ because of my strict rule about always knowing where our conversations were going. I was very clear that I didn’t like surprises.
“Jenna,” I answered immediately, no hesitation.
“What about her? What’s new? Have you found a spot for a shop yet?”
“No, not yet. She’s still being picky about her price range and it’s making it difficult.”
“And she’s still concerned about taking money from her father?”
“She’d be even more stubborn if she knew it was from me. That’s not what I want to talk about, though.”
“Alright, what then?”
I shifted in my seat, unable to get comfortable on the little couch. “It’s about what she said.”
I told him how Jenna and I had been shopping the slums, checking out shithole after shithole, and I was having no luck convincing her to look at other buildings. The latest one had been the worst. It wreaked of debris, water, sewage, and some scents I couldn’t identify. It made my gut clench forcefully thinking of her in a place like that. I couldn’t stand it.
“This is not the one,” I told her decisively.
“You’ve barely looked at it,” she replied, her nose involuntarily scrunched up in disgust as she stepped carefully over the piles of crap strewn everywhere. I couldn’t even see the floor. I started to wonder if the place really had one. “There’s a bathroom back here, I think.”
“This entire place is a bathroom.”
“Now you’re being a pessimist. What is it they always say on House Hunters about places like this?”
“’Thanks to the triple homicide, it’s priced to sell?’”
She glanced at me, smiling. “I think we’re watching different shows.”
“House Hunters: Inner City?” I asked, feigning confusion. “Is that not the one?”
“I was thinking of, ‘It has potential.’”
“For contracting hepatitis.”
“Pessimist!”
“Pisser,” I grinned.
She paused in the open door of the supposed bathroom and her face paled. “Alright,” she said, backing away slowly, “maybe this isn’t the one.”
“Are we done here?” I asked, inching toward the door. I was hoping to ride the wave of her disgust to somewhere more expensive. And cleaner. “Can we go see one of the properties I picked now?”
“We’ve been over this. You pick expensive ones, so no.”
“I pick good investments.”
“The money for which I do not have. This,” she said, gesturing to the hell hole engulfing us, “is what I can afford.”
“On your own, but we talked about that.”
“No, you talked.”
“And you clearly didn’t listen.”
“I really don’t want to ask my dad for money,” she replied glumly.
“Do you want to own a space like this?”
“Hell no.”
“Then you need to ask him for a loan. Pay him back with interest if he’ll let you, but if you want to hit the ground running, you need his help. Don’t be so proud.”
She laughed. “Are you serious? Pot calling the Kettle black, Kel! You’re the proudest person I know.”
“But I’ve taken his help before, haven’t I?”
She looked at me for a long time and I wondered what she was thinking. “You have, yeah,” she eventually admitted softly.
“He wants to help you,” I said, skirting a fine line between honesty and deception.
“How can you know that?”
“Because we’ve talked about it.”
Her eyes shot wide. “What?!”
“He’s all in.”
“When did you talk about this?”
“A while back and then again last night.” Solid, one hundred percent lies. I hated telling them, but I swore to myself that I’d come clean as soon as I could. “I know what your budget is, Jen, and I didn’t pick any properties outside of it. So can we please leave this dump and see something worth looking at?”
She looked at me again, her face going soft and pensive. I looked back, waiting and wondering what she was thinking. What she was feeling when she put her eyes on me that way, looking past my face and body, down below the surface to the murky waters underneath.
“I love you,” she said plainly.
I’d known it but I’d never heard her say it. I’d felt it, but now I could taste it, smell it, hear it, see it. It was everywhere. In her eyes, in her mouth, on her lips, in my ears, on my skin. It settled over me like a gentle wave washing onto the barren shores of the desert I’d made of my heart years ago. It was all encompassing because it was real. It was honest. She knew what no one else knew, what no one else was allowed to see, and still she stood there in all her glory and beauty and she loved me.
I took two shaky breaths, not trying to fall inside myself, but trying to keep myself grounded. To stay in the moment with her while I felt like I was floating. It was that wild feeling. The untethered freedom she gave me just standing near me, but now she wasn’t near enough. I closed the distance between us, pressing my mouth softly over hers, sighing down into my soul with the feel of her. With the sheer relief of touching her and knowing it wasn’t wrong. Of having her kiss me back with the same slowness, the same patience that I felt, as though we had all the time in the world.
As though there were nowhere else on earth either of us ever needed to be but there with each other.
“So what’s the problem?” Ben asked when I finished my story.
I stared at him blankly. “Seriously?”
“Yes, seriously. What’s wrong with her telling you she loves you? You already knew it.”
“I didn’t say it back.”
“But you know that you do?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think she knows?”
“Yes.”
“I still don’t see the problem.”
“Why didn’t I say it back?” I demanded, getting frustrated.
He shrugged. “You tell me.”
I rolled my neck, trying to relieve the tension building in my shoulders. “I’m not ready yet.”
“From what you’ve told me about your arrangement with her, it sounds like she understands that. You agreed to take it slow and not go stickering labels on things until you felt like you had everything under control again. Is that not still the arrangement?”
“I thought it was, but doesn’t this change that?”
“Not unless one of you says it does. Did she ask you for anything?”
“No.”
“Then you didn’t fail to deliver. Stop worrying about it. The woman you love was honest with you about how she feels, and what she feels is love for you. Stop trying to twist something beautiful into bad news. Take it for what it is – a gift.”
I wrung my hands uncomfortably. “I’ve never been good at accepting gifts.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
One Month Later
Callum sat on my feet, staring anxiously at the stopwatch in his hand. “Ten seconds, man! Push it!”
I let loose a low growl as I slammed through the sit-ups.
“Five… four… three… two… done!”
I collapsed on my back, breathing heavily as my abdomen burned. “How’d I do?”
“Was I supposed to be counting?” Callum asked in amazement. “I thought I was just the timer.”
I glared up at him. “You better be kidding.”
“I am,” he laughed. “You killed it.”
“How many?”
“Forty-six in one minute.”
I let my head drop back on the mat and tossed my arms up over my head to stretch. “Yes,” I hissed.
“So far your sit-ups are good,” he said, checking items off the list on the floor next to us. “Both your run times were insane. Your pushups are okay and your pull up score just barely clears the minimum.”
“I gotta work on
that,” I groaned, sitting up and pulling my feet out from under him. “My scores have to be better if I’m going to get through the Testing Phase. I failed it last time by a hair.”
“Dude, if you can’t get into the Fire Academy, who are they accepting? Look at you. You have negative body fat.” He reached out to pinch the skin on my stomach.
I slapped his hand away. “Guys who are stronger than me, that’s who’s getting in. I lost a lot of strength being bed ridden.”
“You mean comatose.”
“Both. What’s next? Bench press?”
“Yep, last thing.”
“Good. I’m starving.”
We headed over to the weight machines in the corner of the gym. Passing the bags, I reflexively shook out my right hand.
“How is that, by the way?” Callum asked quietly.
“Shitty,” I admitted. “I’m not looking forward to my bout tomorrow.”
“First one since the accident?”
“Yeah. Once I throw that first punch with my right hand, everyone is going to see how much it hurts. They’ll go for that weakness.”
Callum situated himself at the head of the bench as I laid down on it. “You doin’ anything about it?”
“I’ve been trying to go Southpaw, but it’s not easy. My gut says use the right hand, but my head freaks out because it knows it’ll hurt. It’s making me slow. It sucks.”
“Better than not doing it all,” he said, making his daily reference to the joys of my break up with Laney.
I reached up with my weak hand and bumped knuckles with him. “Amen to that.”
***
“Come on, Kellen!”
“Keep moving! On your toes!”
“Wear him down! You got this!”
I heard them. All of them. I’d never been able to hear them before.
The animal was still a no show. I couldn’t go into auto-pilot the way I always had, and I worried about what was happening to me. Was it good I couldn’t find the blind rage? Or was it a part of me I’d lost forever in the accident, like the strength of my right hand? With my instinct and strength gone, was it even worth being a boxer anymore?