Off-Limits Box Set

by Ella James

It looks like his arm was maybe on the small of her back.

  I look at them for one more moment before going to Page Six.

  “If you do decide you want to know, Page Six has got the scoop. It’s brutal, too.”

  I don’t want the scoop. I don’t want to want it.

  And still—I search his name. I hold my breath waiting for the page to load. And when it does, I blink, and read the headline one more time because I just don’t understand.

  McKellan and Decristo battle over three-year-old

  My eyes fly over the story.

  According to recent court filings, the fiercely private power couple welcomed a child in December 2013. County court records reflect a motion filed by lawyers for McKellan in May 2017, alleging Decristo spirited the child away, comparing her actions to ‘a heist.’

  According to sources familiar with the drama, Decristo flew the child to Portugal with no warning to McKellan, and afterward informed him he was not the child’s biological father.

  “Gabe didn’t know she had been cheating, but she’s been with one of her exes on and off since before the baby got here,” says a source. “She did genetic testing and found out that Gabe wasn’t the dad. Anyway, she’s with the kid’s real father, and she decided she didn’t want [him or her] to see him anymore. She wanted to transition [him or her] to viewing Gabe more like an uncle and this other man more like a dad.”

  I devour details like “compound outside the city” where the child was being raised, and “devastated” as a descriptor of Gabe’s reaction to being told the child wasn’t his by blood. My eyes catch on the words “no recourse in the state of New York for non-biological fathers who aren’t married to the child’s mother, no matter how much money they have.” It’s a quote from Madeline Decristo’s lawyer. “If he wanted a more formal arrangement, he could have agreed to marry Ms. Decristo or adopt the baby.”

  A source from Gabe’s camp said, “Adoption should never be necessary when a man has raised a child believing her to be his own. Simply put, if a woman lies to a man about paternity, he should have rights. This is immoral. Gabe’s daughter should be extradited to America. We’re going to keep on fighting this.”

  I check the date on the article. September 4, 2017. I click another link and blink down at a newer story, this one from just five days ago. I swallow as I start to read.

  “Sources familiar with the bitter custody war between powerhouse authors Gabriel McKellan and his former partner Madeline Decristo say the two are at an impasse over custody of a young child, raised from birth as McKellan’s biological daughter but later learned to be the product of another union between Decristo and an unnamed Broadway actor…”

  I unclench my jaw and skim straight to the bottom, reading only the last line. “Legal experts in the state of New York say McKellan’s chances at salvaging paternal custody are ‘abysmal.’”

  Fifteen

  Marley

  Sometime after 2 AM, I give up on sleep and dive into a book on my phone’s Kindle app. Historical romance where the hero has to find a noble wife or risk losing his title and his land. Sometime around 5, I’ve learned all the things and can envision the coming conflict: the woman he married is not actually a noble, and the lord’s enemies know. He’s going to have to pick between the woman he loves and his family’s estate.

  I don’t know when I finally drift off, but Mama wakes me around 6 with a ring of the little bell I gave her, whispering that she needs help getting to the restroom. I help her, and then when she can’t sleep, I make us oatmeal. After that, I help her bathe and help her change her clothes, and when, as I help her into her recliner, she glances up at me and tells me I’m “starting to wrinkle” I pretend I didn’t hear her.

  Soon enough, one of Zach’s friends’ wives shows up to keep Mom company, and I drive the short distance home under craggy, mostly leafless winter trees. I realize that it’s Halloween tonight and make a mental note to buy some candy. As I get out of the car, I wish to see him on the stairs. I want to go back to that day I wrapped my arms around him. God, I want to talk to him and ask if he’s okay. But I did that already, and he told me “no.” An honest answer.

  God.

  All day at work—where I see two three-year-old girls—I’m haunted by what I found out. I’m heartbroken for Gabe. Just shocked and heartbroken and sad. Even though we aren’t best friends or lovers. Even though we’re only neighbors who shared one very inappropriate, very weirdly timed sexual encounter. My throat stings for him, and my eyes leak for him, and only as I drive to WalMart for candy do I realize I’m crying for my own lost child as much as his.

  Gabe

  Maybe the worst thing is, I’m not sure what to do with pictures. Do I put them in a drawer, or everywhere? Do I build a shrine or do I erase her from my heart? I could never. I would never want to. But to look at her is agony.

  I get texts weekly on Sundays from Madeline. Long ones—sometimes three or four—updating me on Geneva, reassuring me that she’s okay.

  Her thinking is brutal and not completely void of logic. She wasn’t going to keep on with me, wanted to marry Oliver and live in Portugal or Spain while he danced there—Oliver is a famous ballet dancer—and since apparently he sired Geneva, and I didn’t, and, as she put it, Gen is “young enough to forget” me, she decided to initiate that plan whether I liked it or not.

  Oddly, I’m not sure she realized I would still want to father Gen the same way as I always have once I found out she’s not my biological child. But that’s Madeline for you. Self-involved, oblivious, not very good at empathy regardless of how much she wants to be. What’s best for Geneva? Well—we know that. Court precedent for married couples who made their children with their own genes is tilted in favor of joint custody, as research shows that’s what works best and what scars children least.

  But Madeline is selfish. And she was mad at me, I think. Mad I didn’t care more when she told me she loved Oliver, when she told me she’d been seeing him at intervals since Gen was born.

  “You were never free or open to me! You are a closed door,” she yelled in Spanish when she and Gen landed in Portugal that first day they were gone.

  “That’s bullshit and you know it,” I’d told her, and Mad had sobbed, “She isn’t yours, Gabriel. And neither am I! I wanted you to marry me! I wanted you more than him, but you told me no, no, no!”

  “Is Gen right there? You shouldn’t—”

  But my input was useless. Madeline never asked for it again.

  It’s Halloween when I go through my old photos and find one from last year, when Gen dressed as a bumble bee. All of a sudden, I just have to have it on my fridge. I have to be her dad in this one way. I put it on a USB drive, throw some clean shorts, socks, and a long-sleeved shirt on, leash up Cora, and start toward the nearest pharmacy with my heart tearing in my chest.

  It’s never going to get easier. I know that now. I almost don’t want it to. Gen is my baby. She always will be. When this year passes, and she’s more used to Oliver, I’ll fly anywhere to see her. I’ll be an uncle to her, if the court rules that I have to, but I’ll be the best uncle she ever fucking had. And in the meantime, Christ, I hope that fuck is good to her. I hope he loves her when she whines and cheers when she markers in her Peppa coloring books. I hope he loves the way she says that she’s a “gurl” and takes his time brushing her hair when it gets tangled. I hope he understands she hates ground beef and milk and vegetables in pasta, and if he gives her an apple, watch out, because she’ll gnaw and gnaw until she’s biting on the core. I hope he doesn’t tell her Legos are for boys or that she can’t become a “rocket woman” when she grows up. And I really hope he or Madeline wakes when she has nightmares. Madeline is a hard sleeper, so that part was always me.

  By the time I reach the drug store, I can’t even go inside. I run back toward the house and through the cemetery, down the path that leads down to the boardwalk, where I sit there with my legs hanging over the lake and hold onto the US
B drive.

  Why does it hurt so much?

  I’m so glad I hurt for her, if nothing else, but God, it’s not an easy thing.

  In half an hour, I’m good for the pharmacy, so I jog back there, order a few prints, and then head home. For the first time in a few weeks, I write several thousand words. By afternoon, I’m wrung out, but I feel a little better. I ride my motorcycle to get the pictures, and I put them everywhere.

  My girl is beautiful and perfect. I tell myself, as Trick-or-Treaters start to ring the bell, that she’s so lucky. She has three parents who love her. I put on my vampire cape and grab the bowl of candy I bought last week. When the doorbell rings next, I stand up. And shut my eyes, and try to breathe. But I can’t breathe, and so I have to take one of those stupid fucking pills.

  I get a shower, where I jerk off to thoughts of Marley, and then later, I hear her upstairs. It’s cold in here tonight. Just fucking cold down here. I hate this fucking house.

  I go back to my green room, where I got such good words today, and throw some curtains open, letting moonlight in. Under the heavy duvet, somehow I manage sleep.

  Marley

  I wake up on the couch—still wearing my fuzzy, green alien costume, complete with antennae—to the sound of someone groaning. Before I sit up, I know not just that it’s Gabe, but also that he’s upstairs. I also know that when I stand up, I’ll go through the door that separates our living space, and I will find him.

  Not because it’s the smart thing to do, but because I really have no choice.

  That’s what this comes down to for me, I realize as I walk, on quiet feet, toward the door. It’s not that I see logic in caring for him, it’s that I simply don’t know how not to. Knowing what he’s likely dreaming of makes it even more impossible not to go to him. And so I do.

  I walk into the hall around the stairs and follow the sound of heavy breathing to a dark bedroom with one window thrown open. The room is cool, and Gabe is sleeping in a giant bed, tangled in the covers.

  I stand and watch him for a moment, trying to understand how he still feels like mine. When I found out he was with someone else for six years. He made a child with someone else—or so he thought. He’s a little girl’s Daddy—or thought he was. My heart squeezes, and Gabe groans softly into his pillow.

  I step closer and put my hand on his bare back.

  “Hey… It’s me, Marley. You’re dreaming. Gabe.” He moans. “You’re only dreaming.”

  “Gen?” he whispers.

  “Just Marley.”

  He opens his eyes, and for a moment, as he lays there on the pillow, they are round and vulnerable. “Marley,” he says softly.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper, folding my arms around myself. “I heard you and felt bad.”

  He sits up in one motion, throwing the covers down his bare chest, so they pool at his waist. With one big hand, he rubs his eyes, then lowers his arm to fix his unreadable eyes on me. A long moment passes, during which Gabe looks at me and I let myself be looked at.

  “You shouldn’t have come in here,” he says.

  “I know,” I whisper.

  “What does it take, Marley? What will it take you to understand that you should stay away?”

  I hate the way he looks at me, the way his eyes and mouth seem to condemn. The way it makes me feel…unwanted.

  “I don’t know if I can understand—I’ve just always been like this with you.”

  “You have to be different.”

  “Why?”

  But I know the answer. I can feel the answer crackling between us. It’s because he isn’t different. No more than I am. Gabe is no different, so he needs me to be.

  “It’s to protect you, Marley. I tried to explain it to you. Do you want to be used?” He looks gravely serious. My stomach tightens.

  “No,” I whisper. But is that even true? I look at Gabe there in the bed, at his huge shoulders and his heavy pecs, at his ripped abs and what I know is underneath the sheets, and I remember his thumb over my clit. How alive I felt. How emotional. I think about the sterile environment of IVF, and then I think of Gabe’s thick cock.

  I change my answer. “Maybe I do.”

  “Why would you say that?” He looks livid as he crawls from bed, pinning the sheet around his hips and turning toward the door. “This is not a game to me, Marley. Do you know what I have to offer you?”

  I shake my head as I blink at him.

  “Nothing. I can offer you nothing.”

  “That’s not true, though.” The words are out before my brain vets them: a tangle of potentiality and strange intentions dropped right at his feet.

  “How is that? What are you talking about, Marley?”

  “You have something you could offer me,” I whisper.

  “What?”

  My eyes fall down his abs, lingering on the hand that’s near there. Near his dick. “I want a baby.”

  “What?” He looks at me so strangely, I lift my hand to touch my antennae—and find my hair is bare. I press my lips together, telling myself to say it again. It’s not unreasonable or crazy.

  “I want a baby, Gabe. I want to be a mother. You remember how I’ve always wanted kids. I didn’t fathom that I’d be thirty-three and not a mother. Last year,” I breathe, “I did IVF—to make a baby by myself—and I did,” I say in a voice that shakes. “I got pregnant…with a baby girl.” I blink back the tears that spring, hot and stinging, into my eyes. “I was pregnant…but I lost her. It’s not super easy for me to conceive, and frozen sperm…it doesn’t work as well.”

  I can tell I’ve well and truly stunned him, because he just blinks. “What does this have to do with me?”

  I laugh. “You could offer me that.”

  “What?” He glances down. “My… You want me to get you pregnant?”

  “It’s not crazy. People have been doing things like this since there were people. I’m a woman, Gabe. It’s not strange for me to want a child. I mean, it could be natural not to, but for me—I do.” I blink back tears, then have to wipe them because they’re falling too fast. “I want to be a mother. It’s one of the only things I really want. And I can’t do it by myself.”

  He blows his breath out. “Jesus Christ, Marley.”

  “Don’t say it like I’m crazy.”

  “You are crazy! That is crazy. You’re my ex-wife!”

  “Yes, and you know we’re compatible—in bed.”

  “Are you having a mental break?”

  “That makes me want to slap you.”

  “Don’t do that,” he warns in a growl.

  “Or what?”

  He steps closer. “You know what you’re doing, don’t you? You know how to get me hard.”

  “Are you hard right now?” I whisper.

  “You want me to fuck you, Marley. You want to be fucked. By me. And then you want to have the baby. And do what, then?”

  “Raise it. I would raise the baby.”

  “And me?”

  My heart clenches at the pain on his face. “You could do whatever. You could just bow out—or you could be the baby’s father.. You know I would love my child to have a father.” Because I didn’t. Gabe knows how I feel about this.

  “Marley…no.”

  “You don’t want another child?”

  I see my mistake reflected on his face: the way his features fall wide open and his cheeks lose all their color. His hand comes up to his face, and I feel ill with shame.

  “It was an accident,” I say, meaning I’m not sure what. “I’m sorry.”

  His face is blank now. Flawlessly emotionless. “You should go. Go back to your place, Marley.”

  “I’m so sorry. That’s not why I had the idea. Having a baby has been the focal point of my life for a lot longer than the last few days. But by the way, your ex is a real cunt.”

  He laughs—or at least, his face does. Then he’s shaking his head, looking at me like I’ve sprouted horns. “What am I going to do with you?”

  “I
could leave.” I swallow hard, imagining all the things he used to do to me. All the delicious things. “Or you could punish me. I’ve been so bad, Gabe. Very, very bad to come and tempt you like this. I can’t seem to stop invading your space in this house we’re sharing. What am I but a menace?” I smile like a vixen, and am rewarded by his flashing eyes.

  “You are a menace. Do you know how many times I fucking hear you up here? I can’t go four hours without hearing your footsteps. I changed my run time so I wouldn’t see you. Then you take a shower when I do, you stumble home wearing that fucking bug suit.”

  “Alien,” I murmur.

  “Does it have an opening in the back?”

  “Of course it doesn’t,” I say primly. “Aliens are chaste.”

  “I can’t imagine what could make you want this,” he says softly. “Who was he? The older man?”

  “My ex? Nothing awful happened. I’ve been just fine single but…I really want a baby. It’s what I want the most in life. I never thought about you until I saw you in the bed just now. Your chest,” I whisper.

  “What about it?”

  “It looks virile.” I laugh. “And I thought about what’s under the sheets.”

  “What did you think about?” he asks darkly.

  “You, Gabe. You between my legs.”

  Sixteen

  Gabe

  Marley has never been a normal girl. When I met her, that’s what I loved about her. Unlike other girls who slapped you in the face with rebel bad girl sentiments, Marley appeared normal. Just another girl. Except you’d talk to her and you’d find that she wasn’t. She used to say that when she died, she wanted me to leave her in a grassy field so animals could eat her. So she could be “part of the energy of things.” When she grocery shopped, she used to calculate her total expense as she dropped things into her buggy. She would add it all up in her head, just as a game. When I fucked her that first night in Vegas, she lit me up like the motherfucking Strip; she cleaned my clock like a fist in a cage fight. Marley burned out what was in me and made me feel cleaner. Lighter.