The Arrival of You

by Cranford, B.

  Ashton’s laugh at my last comment was mimicked by Kennedy, who was staring at the screen—at her own image, most likely—with a look of complete fascination, and who seemed to think the laughing girl was doubly interesting. Planting a kiss on her daughter’s head, Ashton spoke again. “Girl, if you hadn’t clicked with him, I’d have asked when you put your lady parts out to pasture.”

  “My lady parts are one hundred percent not out to pasture.” I gave her a pointed look, and she looked downright gleeful.

  “Yessss. You have no idea how happy that makes me!” Her smile was wide and genuine; the smile of a best friend who’d seen tears and heard recriminations and listened to self-doubts. “Tell me more, and feel free to include many-a-detail.”

  Rolling my eyes at her request, I picked up the story where I’d left it—with the whole clicking thing. “You all would love him, Ash. He teased me right off the bat and I swear, it reminded me of you and your idiot brothers.”

  “They really are idiots.”

  “I kissed him. Like, we were sitting there doing the whole getting-to-know-you thing and I told him I’d kiss him in return for his middle name. Who does that?”

  “You do. That’s classic, I-asked-Jaxon-to-maul-me behavior.”

  I smiled at the thought of college-age Bianca, who was more fearless and adventurous than post-divorce Bianca. “Damn right, it is.” I felt a surge of pride, which might explain why I added, “I gave him a blow job in the airplane bathroom and it was the sexiest thing I’d ever experienced until we got back here to his place and now I think it’s, like, a five-way tie.”

  “Five-way tie? Have you done anything except Lucas since you got there?” She giggled at her own innuendo. “I suppose you got your phone organized and called your mom, so that’s something.”

  “I met his parents. And his sister.”

  Ashton jerked her head forward, and I could practically hear her say, “What?” even though she didn’t actually say it. It was implied. Emphatically.

  “Yeah. We had dinner at their place, we talked about penis sizes and ate some tofu and kale—they’re vegans—and then came back to his place.”

  “Came back to his place, huh?”

  “You saw your brother today, didn’t you?” I joked, knowing that her older brother, Aaron, had never met a comment he couldn’t turn into deeply sexual innuendo.

  “Actually, yes,” Ashton replied with a grin. “He’d be so proud of you for joining the Mile High Club. He’d also want to know more about the penis size conversation.”

  “Should we be talking about this in front of the baby?”

  “She’s fine. She’s too busy loving herself in the camera, not to mention too young to really take in what we’re saying.”

  “If you say so.” I shrugged, thinking about what I wanted to say next. Knowing that I needed to get it off my chest to someone who knew me and who I trusted to tell it to me straight. “I’m scared, Ash.”

  Her face immediately changed from playful conversation mode to serious conversation mode. “Of what? Are you hurt? Do I need to send help?”

  I shook my head immediately and aggressively. “No. No. He hasn’t hurt me, and he wouldn’t.” I shook my head some more. “I know he wouldn’t.”

  “If that changes, you’ll tell me, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “Okay, then, what are you scared of?”

  “Honestly? Having my heart broken again.”

  9

  Lucas

  “Having my heart broken again.”

  It hurt my heart to hear those words from Bianca. She was speaking quietly enough that I barely heard them, but that didn’t lessen the impact. She was clearly confiding in someone—I couldn’t tell for certain, but I was pretty sure it was her friend from the car ride, Ashton—and I didn’t want to interrupt.

  I’d woken up to find her gone and immediately rolled out of bed in search of her. I’d needed to know she hadn’t hightailed it out of my house and my life before I got the chance to tell her I wanted her to stay.

  Except now I’d found her, and I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to stay and listen to what she had to say to her friend, but I didn’t want to invade her privacy. She spoke again before I got the chance to decide, and I was glued in place by her words.

  “He fits me, Ash. Does that make sense to you? Because it doesn’t make sense to me.”

  It makes sense to me, pretty girl.

  “I can’t trust it,” she said next, lifting a hand and rubbing it down her cheek.

  Trust what? I wanted to ask.

  “Maybe Jaxon-Bianca would know what to do.”

  At the mention of another man—one who wasn’t her ex—my spine stiffened. And I realized I was doing exactly what I’d told myself I didn’t want to do. Eavesdropping. Shaking my head at myself, but curious as fuck about who Jaxon might be, I turned and walked quickly and quietly away from her and her conversation.

  By the time I made it back to the bed, I had run through a million scenarios about what she might have been saying to her friend about me, and most of them ended with her not coming back and crawling under the covers with me again.

  I hated it.

  I hated second-guessing myself. Hated that I hadn’t stayed to listen and tried to glean more info. Hated that I’d been so tempted to.

  Mostly, though, I hated that I felt a kind of certainty that Bianca clearly wasn’t feeling. Because I didn’t know what to do about it, or how to make her feel it.

  Like I could actually make her feel anything.

  I rolled to my side, my back to where she’d be sleeping if she was still in the bed with me, rather than on the phone with her friend, and closed my eyes. A million thoughts cycled through my head—some dirty, some dire—but none of them explained why, when she tiptoed back into my room and slid back under the covers with me, I stayed quiet.

  “Lucas?” Her voice was a whisper. “Are you awake?”

  I didn’t answer, because I wasn’t sure I was ready to know what she’d decided, if she’d decided anything talking to her friend. And though it might’ve made me a coward, I wasn’t ready to hear her say that she was leaving.

  Because even though she’d climbed back into my bed, she didn’t sidle up close to me. She didn’t make anything other than a cursory attempt to see if I was awake.

  It felt like she had one foot out the door already.

  * * *

  She was a quiet sleeper, and an oddly compact one. She stayed on her side of the bed for the rest of the night, almost at the edge of the mattress. She didn’t wander across or steal the covers. She didn’t snore or huff or talk in her sleep.

  She just lay there peacefully, on her stomach, with her face turned away from me.

  It was tempting to roll out of bed and walk around to watch her in sleep—to see if something in her face told me the answer to the question that had kept me awake the rest of the night. Instead, I stayed put, wanting to touch her but not daring to.

  “Luc?” Bianca rolled over until she was on her side facing me, a look of intense worry on her face. “Are you okay?”

  I nodded, wondering what she saw on my face, whether I’d somehow managed to wake her. And, because I’m a guy and she was a smokin’ hot woman, wondering whether she’d object to me touching her all over again. Maybe biting her some more, because I wasn’t even close to done with my goal of biting her all over.

  “You’re not sleeping,” she said softly, moving closer to me, her hand reaching out and touching my cheek.

  I brought my own hand up to rest atop hers and conjured a smile. “I’m horny,” I joked, wiggling my eyebrows at her.

  She had no idea I’d heard her the night before, and I didn’t want to give her more reason to want to leave.

  She rolled her eyes and worked hard to suppress a laugh, though she wasn’t completely successful. “Still?”

  “Always, I think, when I’m looking at you.”

  “You are so charming. I
bet you say that to all the girls.”

  My forced smile died on my mouth, frustration seeping in that she didn’t get it, even though I knew I hadn’t expressly told her that it was her—and only her—that I wanted and that I talked to that way. “No, Bianca.”

  Eyes widening, her whispered “No?” was colored with a hint of confusion and uncertainty.

  “No.” I took her hand from my cheek and brought it down to my chest, resting it over my heart, like I had in the car on the way home from my parents’ place, preparing to make my case. “I might have thought, at first, that there was something with other women—”

  “Like Erin?”

  “Like Erin, yeah. You sound a little jealous.” I hoped it was jealousy I was hearing and not just wishful thinking adding meaning to her innocent question.

  She shrugged but made no attempt to move her hand away, and neither agreed nor disagreed with my assessment.

  “I might have thought that there was something else with them, but there wasn’t. Not when there’s this.” I didn’t say what this was, because she knew. I’d heard her all but admit it to her friend overnight. And I wanted her to acknowledge it.

  I wanted her to, and I needed her to, and I was feeling an anger build inside that she wouldn’t. Because I knew she wouldn’t. And though it might’ve made me an arsehole because I knew why she was leery of the fact we’d only know one another for about twenty hours, I was this close to demanding that she face up to it.

  “If you thought you’d felt it with them,” she started, giving her hand a slight tug, but making no further attempt to pull away when I wouldn’t let her, “how do you know it’s different? How do you know that tomorrow or the next day or the day after Christmas, you won’t realize that, just like them, I’m not the one?”

  “You could be though.”

  “Lucas—”

  “Just a thought, nothing more.” I shrugged, affecting a nonchalance I wasn’t exactly feeling. The anger, that’s what I was feeling. “You have to acknowledge that there’s something here.”

  “Yes,” she said in a whisper, like she didn’t want to speak it out loud but had no choice. I opened my mouth to say something back, but she didn’t let me. Raising her voice to a more normal level, she said, “Uh uh, no. I’m talking. Yes, I can agree that this is . . . Look, I don’t know what it is, but I wouldn’t have come back here with you if it was nothing.”

  I watched with interest as she wrinkled her brow, her conflicted thoughts clearly written across her face. “I can give you time,” I offered with a magnanimousness I wasn’t really feeling. “I’m not trying to pressure you.”

  “I don’t think you can. Give me time, that is. I think you’re trying or whatever—willing to try. But I think your ‘hopeless romantic’ side is making you want to hold onto something that might be a simple—if intense—attraction. Lust, Luc. It’s lust.”

  “What hopeless romantic side? Have you seen it yet? When I was fingering your pussy or licking your clit or—”

  Her other hand slammed over my mouth. “First, don’t say it like that. And second, I heard you.”

  I raised my eyebrows and waited until she removed her hand. “Heard me when?”

  “Last night.” Her eyes tracked across my face, searching for what, I didn’t know. “I didn’t think you’d intended for me to hear it.”

  I let go of her hand and she pulled it back quickly, but still faced me. “What are you talking about?” I asked, remembering even as I asked the whispered words in the dark.

  “You said it was going to work. You said—”

  “You’re the one,” I finished, unable to deny that I’d said it. Annoyed that it felt like I should deny it or should be ashamed of saying it. “It didn’t mean—”

  A swift shake of her head was all it took to cut me off. “Don’t say that. Don’t discount what you feel because of me.”

  “It seems to me that that’s exactly what you want me to do, actually.” The bed sheet was pulled up and covering her from me and me from her, and I rankled a bit at the fact I couldn’t see her. That stupid sheet, it was like a barrier that she was employing to keep me back and away and herself locked tight in her denial.

  She has every right to her denial, Lucas. I hated the sensible part of my brain that wanted to accept what she was saying. Because I would be a fool if I didn’t understand that most people didn’t work the way I did—and the way my dad had.

  Most people didn’t just know. Luckily for Dad, my mum had felt the same. And though Bianca might recognize that our chemistry was off the charts, and real in a way that couldn’t be denied, she didn’t see that it was the kind of real that could stretch out into forever if we just let it. If we agreed to accept it and work on it and nurture it.

  “I know you want to believe that this is like what your parents have. I want to believe it too, but I can’t. I can’t just say to hell with it, and I’m definitely getting the sense that that’s what you’re expecting me to do.”

  I shrugged again, because my anger was beginning to fire in my veins and it was directed inward—at myself for not being as subtle as I thought I was being—and at Bianca for not just believing.

  “Can I tell you a story?” she asked quietly, her face looking wary but making no move to get out of my bed and away from me.

  “Yes.” Though I tried to keep my frustration out of my answer, I could still hear it clear enough that I added a calmer, “Please,” so as not to upset her.

  “Okay. Okay, about three months before Lindsey—the woman that Mason cheated on me with—came into the picture, I was sitting outside at our place. Mason’s and mine. Alone, because I was alone a lot at the time. I hated being alone.” Her eyes fell away, looking around the room instead of at me. The sun had started to rise and even though I was pissed off at the conversation—and hell, even at Bianca—I couldn’t help but notice the way the light hit her skin.

  “Bianca—” I started, wanting to be allowed to touch her but unsure if I was or not.

  “No. It’s fine, it was what it was. We’d been together for so long and whenever I wondered if maybe we weren’t supposed to be together anymore, I couldn’t help but also wonder who the hell I was or who I’d be without him. I knew I’d changed—not just since the distance had begun to grow between us, but since we’d been married too. Of course, I had—we’d been married for over a decade and that’s a hell of a long time. I grew up with him and traveled the world with him and made plans with him. Imagining not having that anymore hurt.” She sucked in a long breath, her voice wobbly when she added, “It hurt so much.”

  “I’m sorry.” What else could I say but that? My anger was slowly being replaced by the hurt she must’ve felt then, because I wanted to be able to take it on for her. But I couldn’t.

  “Me too. I’m sorry too. I decided that day that I was going to find a way to make it work. That there had to be a way, because I still loved him. Despite everything, I still love him.” She raised her eyebrows at me, emphasizing “love” because, why? Did she think I wouldn’t notice the change in tense, or refuse to believe that she could still love someone that hurt her?

  “That’s fine—”

  “I know it’s fine. I don’t need your permission to still love him, you understand that, right?” Her anger was swift and pointed, and I nodded. “Good. Anyway, I decided that day I’d find a way to make it work and . . .” She trailed off and was so silent and so still that I could’ve believed she’d fallen asleep if she wasn’t still facing me, her eyes glinting in the rising sunlight and her face drawn in upset that surpassed everything I'd seen from her so far.

  I picked up the thread of her story. “And you didn’t. Make it work.”

  “No. I tried and that’s why it galls me that he wanted to say I was to blame for what happened. I tried; I did. And it still didn’t work, and I still don’t know who I am without him and I still can’t believe that I didn’t know him the way I thought I had.”

  “But
I’m not him.”

  “No, but I’m not me yet, either. And I don’t know you, Lucas. I feel like I do. I feel how right this is and I want to believe that I can surrender to it and it’ll be fine, but I can’t just do that. Do you understand? I can’t just say I’ll be fine, and we’ll be fine. Because I thought that before. I thought that once before and I had a hell of a lot more than a single day to give foundation to that belief. But I still failed.” She reached up to brush across her cheek, the first sign that she was crying and not just shaken from the feeling needed to tell me her story. “I failed.”

  Taking a risk, I moved closer to her and wiped away another of her tears. “He failed. You didn’t fail, he did.”

  “We both did.”

  I shook my head. “No. He did. If he’d tried too, to make it work, then maybe. Maybe then it’d be right to say you both failed, but he didn’t. You tried. He didn’t.” I paused, wondering if what I was about to say was okay. To hell with it. “I will. I will work because I want to. Because I want you.”

  She was in my arms before I had a chance to process it, and it felt like pure, undiluted victory.

  Only it wasn’t. Because the cloud of curls on her head—all the more out of control after a night of sleep—were brushing back and forth under my chin. She was shaking her head.

  She was wrapping her arms around me and telling me no at the same time.

  “Bianca?”

  “I need to leave.” Her words were muffled, spoken into my chest.

  “No, you don’t. You can stay. I want you to stay.” I tightened my hold on her, not wanting to trap her or give her any reason to fear I wouldn’t let her go, but unable to curb the impulse to keep her with me.

  I knew she needed to be with me, even if she doubted it.

  I felt again the brush of her hair, which was both unfamiliar in texture, yet altogether familiar because it was hers, and angled my head as best I could, desperate to see her face. “Pretty girl.”