by Drew Elyse
It wasn’t even about loss. It was a goddamn breakup song.
But I wanted to believe. I wanted it so bad it hurt.
In my head, I could hear Joel laughing. It didn’t even hurt to hear. It was comforting that even in my head, he thought this was as ridiculous as it really was.
Really, Katie? Are you fucking kidding me?
Well, he could fuck right off.
This was rock bottom. It had to be. There was no lower than breaking down to a song best suited for roller rinks.
But the great thing about rock bottom was you could only go up.
Chapter Nineteen
Liam
I’d been a fucking wreck all day. It was a good thing it was my day off.
Fuck, what the hell did I know. Maybe it would have been good to throw myself into work. Or maybe I would have done one appointment, felt this edginess the whole time and eventually have to cancel the rest because I couldn’t handle being there.
I’d wanted to call or text her every fucking minute of the last couple days.
Most of the morning, I’d just been pacing around my apartment, turning my phone over and over in my hand. I’d written dozens of messages I didn’t send.
When the damn thing went off in my hand, I jerked so hard I nearly dropped it. After bobbling it a couple times, I got it in hand and answered before looking.
“Hello?”
“Hi, honey.”
My mom. Not Kate, not that I expected it to be.
“Hi, Momma.”
“What’s wrong?” she shot back right away.
How the hell could she possibly know? I’d said two words to her. She liked to claim she just knew her kids, but I’d been suspecting for a long time she paid someone to bug our shit.
“Nothing.” I thought it sounded convincing.
“Don’t lie to your mother.”
“Mom, why did you call?”
“I had a feeling.”
That was what I meant. How? It didn’t make any sense, but this wasn’t some one-off thing. She did this all the time. Shitty day at work? I could almost guarantee she’d be calling.
My phone buzzed, and I pulled it away to check without thinking. If it was Kate, I wasn’t going to keep her waiting.
Tracy: Mom’s bitching that you haven’t updated her about Kate. Fair warning.
Busted. I’d talked to Mom and Tracy a bit over the last couple weeks, but my responses on Kate had been—
“—and I just want to check on you.” I heard when I put the phone back to my ear.
“Or could it be because you were talking to Tracy about me and decided to go to the source instead of complaining to your other children?”
She didn’t say anything, and I knew she was figuring out how to spin it.
“I’ve got two children both keeping their love lives all hushed up. What am I supposed to do?”
All right, no spin, then. Just going right for it.
“I can’t call it a love life, you know that.”
She sighed. “I know. I just want this to work out.” You and me both. “Kate and Owen are lovely, and I can see how infatuated you are. I think you’d all be good for each other.”
“You know as well as I do that I can’t push. It’ll ruin any shot I have.”
There was a long pause while she considered it. I hated knowing that she was going back to that dark place, even just for moments. Still, my point was made. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” I knew it was coming from a good place. With her, it always was.
“Are you seeing her today?”
I took a moment before I answered. I considered leaving it at a no, but I had to get this out to someone or I’d fucking burst. “No. Today’s the anniversary. She and Daz, her brother-in-law, flew back to be with him.”
Through the line, Mom took several measured breaths. “That poor girl.”
“I don’t know what to do for her,” I admitted.
“I’m not sure there’s anything you can do. You can be there if she reaches out, but she might not be in a place where she can do that with you.”
I knew that, but it was reassuring to have it confirmed by my mom. Everything with Kate had me questioning myself. “Okay.”
“Why don’t you come over?” she suggested. “You sound like you’re climbing the walls there.”
There was no point in denying it. Getting out of the house, being with Mom, it might actually help. “Yeah, I’ll be over in a bit.”
When she hung up, I looked at my phone, unable to stop myself from popping back to my text stream with Kate. I read the last ones on there again, from days ago, it was the conversation about taking the pictures. Then, I was scrolling up to a conversation from the night before that.
Kate: Owen won’t stop talking about wanting paints.
Me: Get the boy some paint.
Kate: This is your fault.
Me: You could say thank you for fostering an interest in art in an impressionable mind.
Kate: I’ll see if you still think that when I make you come scrub paint out of the carpet.
Me: Put down a tarp.
Kate: Tried that before.
Me: Bigger tarp.
Kate: I’d have to put him in a quarantine tent to keep him from getting mess anywhere else.
Me: Anything can be bought on the internet, gypsy.
Kate: Including carpet cleaner. Might want to stock up.
I smiled, even though it didn’t feel as natural as normal. It was little things like that, the passing indication that I was going to continue to be a part of her and Owen’s lives, that gave me hope. Today was an exception. Today she needed space.
Tomorrow might be different.
“How often do you visit him now?”
Mom and I had cups of coffee, which was probably the last thing I needed when I’d been jittery as hell all day. Connor was at his art class, so it was just the two of us.
“Your father?”
“Yeah.”
“Not as much as I used to,” she admitted. “Every couple months I’ll try to stop by, but it depends.”
I nodded. I hadn’t been in a while, and I wondered what that said about me.
“Sometimes, I go when I need to feel connected to him,” Mom went on. “I just try to remember that it’s only a place. I believe he’s with us, that he keeps an eye on us. Visiting there isn’t for me to reach out to him, it’s for me to have a place to let out the feelings of grief without spending too long staring at the pictures of him and bringing that back into the house.”
We both let that sit. There was only so much that could be said about that.
Eventually, I had to ask her the question that had been eating at me for weeks.
“Am I making a mistake? Is going after her just going to be a mess for both of us?”
Mom looked out at the backyard, sipping from her mug with a picture of the three of us kids on it—one of half a dozen she had, because she still liked getting that kind of shit for Mother’s Day.
“I can’t answer that, honey. At three years, I was nowhere near ready. I hadn’t even begun to focus on my own grief with all that we had going on with Connor. I hadn’t met Derek, either. Who knows how much sooner I might have confronted those feelings if he’d been around to make me. Everyone’s process is different, and I can’t tell you how it will be for Kate. I can only tell you that what I saw here was a woman who already had feelings for my son, even if she didn’t know what to do with them.”
I made myself take a drink while I considered that. From the start, I’d been prepared for this to go sideways. What I hadn’t prepared myself for was how much harder the thought of that happening would be the deeper I got in.
“After all,” Mom kept going, “a woman doesn’t just let a man pull her into a bathroom alone for twenty minutes if she isn’t interested.”
I choked, sputtering coffee back into the cup and all over myself in the process.
“Jesus
Christ, Mom.”
“Just saying.”
Mom: How’s she doing?
I shook my head reading the text.
I didn’t have the first fucking clue how Kate was doing.
It had been four days since the anniversary of Joel’s passing, and I hadn’t heard a thing from her. Yesterday, I’d finally broken and sent her a text.
Me: I’m here. Just remember that.
While I still didn’t want to push, she had me nervous. When we’d talked about this trip, she’d made it sound like she might need a day or two to clear her head afterward, but then things would be fine. The fact that she was ghosting on me now didn’t sit right.
I’d never gotten a response.
I dropped my phone back onto the side table. If I responded to my mom on this one, she’d press. She’d want to know why we hadn’t talked. She’d want to fuss and reassure me, and I couldn’t hear it. I’d been over and over that same shit in my head, and it was getting me nowhere.
The fact is, I’d been digging, but I wasn’t fully entrenched in Kate’s life yet. This could be the end for us before we’d really started.
And didn’t that just fucking suck?
I took a swig of the whiskey I’d poured.
Any other time, I wasn’t the drinking alone kind of guy. Fuck, I wasn’t much of a spending time alone kind of guy at all. It might have been a product of growing up in a close house, but being alone in my apartment when I wasn’t working on a tattoo design or some other project made me climb the walls. It was too fucking still, too fucking quiet.
When that was compounded by the desire to drive up to Kate’s place and demand she face what we had between us, the bottle of Jim had started calling to me. Two glasses in, I didn’t feel any better. Actually, I felt pathetic as fuck sitting around alone, flipping channels and trying to drown my sorrows.
I tossed back the last of what was in my glass and got up. The bottle was going away. This shit wasn’t going to help.
The knock at my door surprised me, then made me roll my eyes. I dropped the bottle on the counter and went to answer it. I swear to God, if it was my mother…
I swung the door open and stopped.
“Hi.”
Christ, she looked incredible.
Her hair was up, and she had on a pair of cotton shorts with a white shirt and a zip up hoodie left open. It was the kind of thing she’d wear around the house, and all I could think was how bad I wanted to see that. I wanted to be a part of her life that way.
“Gypsy.”
She fidgeted, adjusting her sleeves, then smoothing the length of her hair in her ponytail. “Can I come in?”
I stepped back, letting her pass me. She stopped just inside to slip off her shoes next to mine. I took that as a good sign. Whatever this was, she wasn’t just showing up to tell me this was done and get the hell out of here.
“Can I get you anything? A drink, or—”
She came to an abrupt halt, and I stopped speaking. Between one breath and the next, she spun around, threw her arms around my neck, and pulled me down to her sweet lips. I didn’t resist for a fucking second. No, after days of worrying this was done, that I’d never get another shot to be where I was right then, there wasn’t a thing that could stop me.
Kate pulled back, just a bit, and gasped, “Liam, I—”
I kissed her again. There’d be time for her to say whatever she needed to. I’d give her all the time in the world. Right then, I needed more of the taste of her. It was the only thing that mattered.
Squeezing her tight against me, feeling her body mold to mine, I coaxed her lips open with my tongue. They gave way with a light sigh from her that went straight to my balls.
My gypsy was back, and unless I was reading this wrong, she was fucking mine.
Chapter Twenty
Kate
I’d thought about this moment for days. I’d pictured it the entire drive over here. Still, the real thing was better. Being that close to Liam, kissing him again, it felt like being alive. It was a feeling I’d lost over the last couple years.
It was stirring up a heat I thought I might never feel again, and it spurred me to press in closer, deepen the kiss.
“Christ, gypsy,” Liam groaned, and I gasped at the way my muscles clenched in reaction to hearing that.
He bent, dipping me backward a bit and he put his hands under my thighs and hoisted me up. A startled laugh popped out of me as I wrapped my legs around him, but it dissolved into a moan at the pressure that created right where I was starting to need it. I couldn’t stop myself from rolling my hips, seeking more.
A moment later, I was on my back on the couch, Liam looming over me.
“You’re going to kill me,” he groaned, dropping in to kiss me breathless again.
When he’d well and truly accomplished that, he leaned up, chuckling when I tried to follow.
“Not yet,” he rumbled. I whined a little in response, past the point of being embarrassed about it. “We gotta talk first, gorgeous.”
He was right, I knew that. It didn’t mean I had to like it.
I went to move away and sit up, but he pressed down with his hips a bit. Through the haze of need that threw my senses, I noticed the hard ridge of his cock. My pulse skyrocketed even as I tried to calm myself down.
“No.” His voice was more rough and demanding than I’d ever heard it, and it did very delicious bad things to me.
“No?” I was distracted. I had no idea what he was talking about.
“We need to talk, but if you try to get out from under me now, I’m going to put you right back there again, and I won’t have the control to stop again.”
Okay. Wow.
“Oh.”
“Fuck, I hope you say that when I’m inside you.”
“You’re very good at this,” I breathed.
He tilted his head to the side a bit, bemused.
“The… uhh… talking.”
The confusion lifted, and pure masculine pride took its place. “Good to know.”
I bit down on my lip, my mind already wandering to how he might use that knowledge.
“Right now, you need to be the one to talk, though, gypsy.”
Okay. I was ready for this. I’d spent a lot of time thinking about what I was going to say.
“I’m sorry,” I started. “I didn’t mean to shut you out the last couple days. I just…” I took a deep breath, trying to collect all the thoughts that I’d been juggling. “Going back there made me realize a few things, and I needed time to work through all of that.”
“Like what?”
“Like that I haven’t really been living for the last three years.” I decided to leave out Cher’s involvement in acknowledging that one to keep from sounding like a lunatic. “I knew it. I knew that I’d narrowed my life down to just being about Owen, but it seemed like it was what I should do. Like I’d been gifted this love with Joel that it was all I was going to get, and now my job was to mourn it. I think going back there again made me really see that as much as it hurts, I didn’t die that day. Joel… he… he sacrificed himself to keep me and Owen alive, and I’ve been wasting it.”
I brought my hands up, running them along his chest. It should have felt beyond awkward to lay there with him above me while I talked about this, but having him there felt right. It was like he was shielding me, making this bubble where I could say anything I needed without fear.
“It’s partly because of you, too,” I went on.
“Kate—” he tried to interject, but I shook my head.
“I know this was on me. I’m not saying I wouldn’t have gotten there for one reason or another anyway. But it happened now because you came into my life and made me really feel something for the first time in a while, and you didn’t just let me run away when it scared me.
“I wanted to come to you as soon as I got back, but I didn’t want it to be a knee-jerk reaction to everything I was feeling. You were right, I had to know what I wanted. I
’ve spent the last few days waiting for the doubt to take over again, but it hasn’t. I want this. I want to start living again, and I want you there with me.
“You told me all I had to do was say the word, so… ugh… this is me, saying it,” I finished inelegantly.
Liam stared down at me, his eyes roaming my whole face. He brought one hand up, tracing the edge of my cheek as he watched. None of it was what I expected. I’d thought he’d be happy. Excited, maybe? I might have pictured him ravaging me in response. This? Him staring at me so intensely, but without any emotion on his face? I didn’t know what to do with that. My stomach tightened.
That hand slid back into my hair, and his eyes shut for a moment, almost like he was in pain. Did he not want this anymore? Had he decided—
My train of thought derailed when he opened his eyes again, and he smiled at me like I’d hung the moon just for him.
“My gypsy,” he whispered, almost reverent.
And then he was kissing me again.
There was no restraint this time, from either of us. His body was flush with mine, his hips between my legs. Our lips and tongues danced, learning each other, giving and taking until we were both panting.
My hips started to rock again. It’d been so long since I’d felt this way. Desire was just a memory, and experiencing it again was more volatile than I’d let myself remember. The heady sensation of causing the same in him only drove me higher.
Liam ripped his lips from mine, and I groaned at the loss. “Owen,” he panted. “Do you need to get home?”
I shook my head. “He’s with Daz and Avery tonight.”
“All night?”
I knew what he was asking. It wasn’t just logistics. He was giving me a chance to cool this down, to back away and take things slow. But this didn’t feel fast. This had been building for weeks now.
“All night.”
He got to his feet, and I made a little noise of protest before he leaned down and picked me up.