“Murphy,” I grumbled. “What can I help you with?”
She opened her mouth to say something when my mother’s voice called out from the office.
“Alessio! You have a phone call!” Mama yelled.
“Alessio?” she teased. “I thought you introduced yourself as Murph?”
I would’ve replied, but my mother chose that moment to come outside and hold the phone out to me.
Instead of staying rooted to the spot—the same spot I’d been standing in since I’d seen her pull up into my driveway—I turned my back on Mavis and walked to my mother, taking the phone from her hand.
“Murphy,” I said.
“Hi, this is Justin from the moving company,” Justin said. “I’m here with all of your things.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose.
Fucking finally.
They were only two days late.
I’d been living in a four-bedroom house with empty rooms for four days now.
“Great,” I said. “Can you get it in by yourself, or do you need someone there?”
“I think we can get it all in by ourselves. I know that you said that you had to work,” Justin replied.
That was the only thing saving him from not getting a tip.
The man had proved to me a million times over that I’d been stupid to hire him.
He’d come cheap and recommended by a friend, so I hadn’t hesitated to use him at first. But after him flaking off on me a couple of times before the move, I should’ve just said ‘fuck it’ and found someone else.
But my mother had recognized another broken soul and had informed me that I needed to allow him to do his job. So I had.
And then we’d been sleeping on the floor since because of her kind heart.
“Good, if you have any questions on where anything goes, shoot me a text of the piece, and I’ll tell you where I want it,” I ordered.
Justin cleared his throat. “Got it, Boss.”
I rolled my eyes and hung up, turning around to address the elephant in the room to see my mother hugging Mavis.
Son of a bitch.
“Mom,” I said. “Our movers are going to text you if they have any questions on where any pieces are going. Make sure that they put all your stuff in your house, okay?”
My mother pulled away from Mavis with a large smile on her face, and my heart pinched.
My mother didn’t know how to hold a grudge.
It didn’t matter that twenty years ago the damn woman she’d been hugging had been the reason for her losing her job and our house.
No, all it mattered was that Mavis had, at one time, been a girl that she used to care for.
Well, it didn’t matter if my mom couldn’t hold a grudge.
I sure the hell could.
And I would continue to until my last dying breath.
“Mom,” I said when she stayed where she was, smiling. “Can you give us a moment?”
Mom smiled. “Sure, I’ll let you two catch up.”
The last fucking thing I wanted to do was move back to Paris, Texas.
The problem was, this was where my heart doctor was located.
And when you had problems with your heart, it was easier to be near said doctor.
The woman currently standing in front of me was the very reason that I hadn’t wanted to come back.
I knew it would be inevitable that I’d run into the Popes.
I just hadn’t figured that I’d do it on the first day that I was open for business.
“I can’t believe it’s you, Alessio.” She shook her head, a small smile coming over her face. “When I saw your mother, everything clicked into…”
“Listen,” I said carefully. “I don’t like you. I’ll never like you. You’re the reason that we were kicked out of our house, lost our insurance, and I had to start working at the age of thirteen just so I could help my mother make enough money just to put food on our plates. You can smile and be pretty all you want, but it’s not going to change anything.”
When we were kicked out, my mother had debt up to her eyeballs.
All because of me and my stupid fucking heart.
Getting kicked out of our home wouldn’t have been a problem had my mother’s credit not been completely destroyed as she tried to keep me alive, and us fed, while working, and me being in and out of a hospital room many times over the course of my short life.
It took us over two years to be able to find a place to stay, and even then, it’d only been because we’d used my social security number to get it.
Mavis blinked. “Smile and be pretty?”
“You know you’re beautiful,” I said. “You’re just better at using it to get what you want now.”
Her hand dropped to her stomach, and it was then that I realized that Mavis was pregnant.
Disgust hit me and I stepped back. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. What did you want when you stopped in?”
Mavis blinked, clearing the fog from her eyes as she seemed to gather up her composure, wrap the aloofness around her like a cape, and then say, “I wanted a mechanic’s opinion on the car I was going to buy. But I think that I’ll just leave.”
She started to head to her car in the next moment, and I felt like a dick.
“What kind of car were you wanting to buy?” I asked.
She looked at me over her shoulder, then turned back around without another word.
“Buy American,” I told her. “Parts are easier to get.”
She ignored me and dropped down into her car, then rolled up the window once she had it started.
She didn’t reply.
Nor did she take my advice.
The next time I saw her she was driving a minivan.
One made in a foreign country.
CHAPTER 2
Practice makes perfect. But since nobody is perfect, why practice?
-Mavis’s secret thoughts
MAVIS
2 weeks later
I was scared to go to the class after seeing who’d just walked through the doors ahead of me.
In fact, as I stared at the doors to Madd CrossFit, I contemplated starting my foreign-made van up and peeling out of the parking lot.
But, since this class was the only damn class that I could attend today or tomorrow, I reluctantly got out of my van, slid my fancy-ass back door open, and grabbed my bag.
I groaned at the weight.
I’d added new lifters to the bag, and they were a whole lot heavier than I’d thought they would be.
That, or maybe I was turning into a little bitch the more pregnant I got.
Not that that was possible to do. You were either pregnant or you weren’t. There was no ‘more’ possible.
Maybe a better phrase would be ‘how far along’ I was.
I was now a total of five months.
Weeks wise, I was twenty weeks, officially halfway to the finish line.
If I was lucky, I’d make it thirty-eight weeks and get to finish my finals for this semester before I went into labor.
But knowing my luck, that would never happen.
I’d probably pop three weeks early and have to beg my sister to watch my newborn while I got through the rest of my classes and clinicals.
Not that she would ever say no. My sister was my best friend. My ride or die. The one woman that I could count on no matter what. My person. My love went to only one person in this world, and it was her.
“Hey, girl!”
I looked up to see a woman that I rarely got to see because she frequented only the early classes—classes that I avoided if I could help it seeing as I hated getting up early.
“Alma!” I cried. “Hey! How are you?”
Alma smiled her sweet smile to me, her face a ray of sunshine despite the early hour. Oh, and the no sun thing.
“I’m doing well. What are you doing at this class? I thought you avoided anything before seven am like the plague?” she snickered.
I
sighed. “I do. I wish I could still. But I have a clinical today from seven in the morning until seven this evening. As well as an even earlier one tomorrow. So if I want to get a workout in this week, it’s going to have to be today.”
She groaned. “Well, I hope that you brought a portable shower. Coach told me he did this one last night to test it out, and he was so sweaty afterward that he needed a hose down.”
I groaned as I walked in, my eyes automatically going to Murphy, aka Alessio, in the corner who was talking to Madden.
My eyes skipped right over Madden and stayed on the man that was sitting on a box slipping on his tennis shoes.
I looked away when Alma once again drew me into conversation.
“When are you due?” she asked.
I was so focused on her, and getting ready to workout, that I hadn’t realized how close Madden and Murphy had moved until I heard Madden say, “You’re pregnant?”
I rolled my eyes.
Where the hell had he been the last five months?
“Yes,” I said. “Something in which I told Sophia, in front of you, three months ago.”
Sophia was Madden’s daughter. Madden’s adult daughter that looked too old to be his kid, yet that was something that I’d never dug too far into seeing as it wasn’t my business.
Madden was hot—and when I say hot, I mean holy cow I blushed when he gave me direct eye contact hot—but he wasn’t my current object of fascination.
The scowling, pissy man beside him was.
It’d only been two weeks, but that two weeks I’d obsessively focused on everything that had to do with Alessio Murphy Romano.
I’d googled him—and found out that he’d won the fucking lottery.
I didn’t know anyone that had won a scratch off, let alone the damn lottery where they won millions of dollars.
But that’d been all that I’d gotten out of Google.
The man was a ghost other than that. He didn’t have social media. He didn’t even have a business page.
There was no Yelp. No Google showing me his place of business or hours.
Hell, I couldn’t even find him on his old Myspace page anymore—and I know that he used to be there because I’d been one of his top friends, and him mine.
We’d been twelve and thought the world couldn’t touch us.
Oh, how wrong we were.
“Well,” Madden said, bringing me back to the present. “If you need accommodations…”
“I’ve already spoken with my doctor, as well as a trained prenatal coach,” I said. “If I need accommodations, then I’ll follow the guidelines for sure.”
Madden grinned and clapped his hands. “Everyone gather around the board. Let’s go over this awful workout.”
Fifteen minutes later, I was standing underneath a rope, staring up at it, wondering if this was a good idea.
I hadn’t done rope climbs in months. Definitely not since I’d gotten pregnant.
Technically, everything should still be exactly the same, climbing wise. My belly wasn’t big enough yet to be a hindrance.
I held onto the rope with both hands and was about to launch myself to get a good grasp higher up when I felt his presence.
“Should you be doing rope climbs?” he asked.
I felt my eye twitch.
“Should you be over here worrying about me instead of on your rope doing your own freakin’ workout?” I wondered.
Murphy sighed. “That’s not what…”
I climbed the rope just so I could dismiss him.
It wasn’t the same as I’d done it last, but it definitely wasn’t something I couldn’t do.
Yet, when I came back down, jarring a bit harder than I’d intended to due to his closeness, he scowled.
“You need to control your descent better,” he urged.
I snapped. “You need to control your annoyance!”
That was the best comeback you could think of, Mavis? Really?
I felt my face flush at the complete inadequacy at my comeback and narrowed my eyes when his lips twitched.
Instead of answering with his own comeback, he walked away, heading to his water that was in a gallon jug on the side of the room.
Sadly, when I’d set my own down, it’d been right next to his.
Dammit.
I waited until he took his water over to where he was set up before hurrying over to mine.
“Bathroom break and prayer time,” Madden yelled.
I snorted at his ‘prayer time’ and headed to the bathroom, hurrying through seeing as there were only two stalls in the women’s, and at least eight women in line to use it.
I smiled at Alma who took my stall.
“You know the new guy, Mavis?” Alma asked as I washed my hands.
“No,” I paused. “Yes. Kind of. We knew each other from way back when. His mother used to be a cook and maid at my grandmother’s estate when I was growing up. Her and her son, Murphy, lived in a house on the backside of our property before my grandmother showed her true colors and fired her.”
Alma made a sound of disgust—everyone knew I was a Pope, and they also knew my grandmother was a shithead—and flushed before moving to allow another chick into her stall.
I didn’t know her, but I did notice the look of interest on her face.
Alma washed her hands while I toweled mine off.
“He doesn’t look like he likes you,” she said.
I shrugged. “It doesn’t seem like it.”
Back outside, I went to my spot just as Madden came up to me and said, “How many more are in the bathroom?”
I looked up at him and answered as my eyes caught on Murphy’s across the room.
His eyes were on Madden’s closeness, and I twisted so that I couldn’t see over Madden’s shoulder—which in turn made me appear to be moving into Madden.
I wasn’t.
Though Madden was hot, he was just not the kind of guy that I was into.
Then again, there was no type of guy—at least I hadn’t thought there was until I saw Murphy—that I was into now that I was pregnant. I was officially off guys.
After taking my explanation to how many girls were in the bathroom, he patted my shoulder and moved away, heading toward the rolling white board that had the workout explained on it.
Once everyone was back in the room, we moved and gathered the last remaining things we would need in the workout—thank God the ropes were only for the warmup—and got started.
Alma was correct.
The workout was a beast. It’s official name was Hansen, which ended up being five rounds for time of thirty kettle bell swings at a weight I was no longer allowed to do, thirty burpees, and thirty knee raises on the bar in substitute for the GHD sit-ups—a type of sit-up that you did on a fancy machine that literally made you sore for a week straight.
Being pregnant was hard, because I hadn’t had to scale my workouts since I’d joined the CrossFit gym four years ago. Granted, not scaling didn’t mean that I was the best in the gym, but it also meant that I had a leg up on any newbies that walked through the door.
Backstepping was hard. Especially when I had to work out next to Murphy who obviously had done CrossFit for some time himself.
How did I end up getting so close to him?
And why did I continue to get watched like a hawk despite him having his own workout to focus on?
By the end of the workout, I was working out directly in front of Murphy.
And it wasn’t like only he moved.
We’d both somehow been jostled aside enough that we ended up working out straight across from each other.
I got to watch the sweat trickle down his chest as he slayed the workout.
And he sat down on the bench when he was done and watched me until I finished mine.
By the time that I was done, I never wanted to work out again.
“Told you so,” Alma teased as she collapsed on the floor beside me.
I rolled my eyes. “I
know you did. I should’ve listened. Now I’m going to smell awful the rest of the day. Man, Madden really needs to put in a shower here.”
I felt more than saw Murphy move closer, and reluctantly turned to give him my attention.
“You can shower at my shop,” Murphy offered.
I would’ve immediately said no, but I was prone to UTIs with this pregnancy—Goddamn did they suck big donkey balls—and keeping things clean and fresh were a great way to make sure that I didn’t get another one.
And I was not going to turn down the chance at a shower and smelling good the rest of the day after that particular workout.
CHAPTER 3
Things I like to lift:
1. Weights
2. A fork
-Text from Mavis to Murphy
MURPHY
As I rode my motorcycle into the forecourt of the shop, I wondered again, for the thousandth time, why the hell I’d offered Mavis a shower at my shop.
I parked and got off my bike, then headed to the front door without waiting for the woman that’d followed me the entire way to get out of her car.
Once I had the door unlocked, the alarm disarmed, and the lights on, I waited in the doorway, a wash of light spilling out into the slowly brightening morning, for her to arrive.
She did with a flurry of haste.
“How much time do you have?” I asked.
“Two and a half minutes,” she exaggerated.
I snorted and gestured for her to come inside, easily overtaking her and showing her the way to my place upstairs above my office.
I didn’t plan to utilize this space, but I’d found that it was easier to change out of my dirty clothes here, then take a shower, than it was to ride home sometimes.
So everything that was needed to get a body clean was there, which I showed her to the next second.
It wasn’t much. Honestly, I would’ve never thought it’d be good enough for a Pope, but the way Mavis smiled when she saw the shower was enough to make me grin.
It also gave me hope that she wasn’t a stuck-up snob like her grandmother.
Being gone about fifteen years, and not seeing Mavis in all that time, made me a bit wary of what I’d come back to.
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