Chasing Serenity

by Ashley, Kristen

  When he finished the sip, he said to his buddy Rix, who had his own beer and was lounging in his wheelchair at Judge’s side by the railing on Judge’s deck, “Shut the fuck up.”

  “Probably takes an hour and a half just to do her hair,” Rix kept on.

  “If it looks like it has every time I’ve seen her, I don’t give a shit,” Judge replied.

  “She’ll spend half your money on makeup alone.”

  “Good she makes her own then.”

  “Though…that ass…”

  Rix let that hang, and the crinkles at the corner of his eyes stated how he knew that got under Judge’s skin even if Rix didn’t look at him, just sucked back some of his own beer as he stared at the sunset.

  “That isn’t funny,” Judge warned.

  That was when Rix looked at him, all fake innocence. “It isn’t?”

  “Fuck you,” Judge returned.

  Rix suddenly stopped giving him stick and started studying him.

  He then diagnosed, “Man, you got it bad.”

  “She’s gorgeous. Dresses great. Is funny. Smart as hell. Got her own thing going with work. Gives back. So yeah…” He shrugged, totally down with this concept. “I got it bad for Chloe Pierce.”

  “Your dad is gonna love her,” Rix said carefully.

  Judge shifted in his seat.

  “Your mom is gonna detest her,” Rix went on.

  “How ’bout I have an actual date with her before we get into the parents,” Judge suggested.

  “I don’t know why, considering you’ve met all of hers, and work with the step one.”

  “And they’re damn fine people,” Judge returned.

  Rix shook his head, took another slug of beer and cautioned, “She’s gonna be work, bud.”

  Okay, now Rix needed to piss off.

  “I’ve been around her where she hasn’t been pushing me away twice, Rix,” he shot back. “And one of those times, I had to coax her to stop pushing me away while we were having it. We got to know each other a little. We had fun together. She doesn’t have my ring on her finger. Christ. Chill.”

  “I just know you,” Rix noted.

  “I know you do, but you don’t know her.”

  “Yeah, I know, even though I spent hours with her at a party where it wasn’t like there were five hundred people there and she didn’t meet me,” Rix pointed out.

  “She was pushing me away. She’s hardly going to stroll up and introduce herself to my best bud when she’s avoiding me.”

  “And at that time, you hadn’t even let on you were interested and she was jacking you around already.”

  Judge kept quiet so he wouldn’t lose his shit and say something he didn’t want to say.

  Rix twisted his torso to fully face Judge and continued, “Listen, I can see you’re pissed at me. But you gotta know I’m not sayin’ this shit to set you off. I’m also not saying it to dog her. But you got a type…and you repeat a pattern.”

  “Let’s not talk about this,” Judge suggested.

  “We been out here thirty minutes and you’ve looked at your phone ten times because the woman has not reached out all day.”

  Judge said nothing.

  Though it hadn’t been ten times.

  Three, tops.

  “That’s shades of Meg and Kimberly,” he carried on. “And Jess was far from above yanking your chain.”

  “Chloe has a business to run.”

  “She knows you’re into her and she knows, because you are, she can bust your balls.”

  Yup.

  Rix could piss off.

  “Just because you got a thing for heads-up-their-asses pieces of work, Rix, do not land your shit on me,” he clipped.

  “At least mine don’t make me drive two hours before they fuck me over,” Rix shot back. “And they wait until they’ve given me at least one orgasm before they decide to try to lead me around by my dick.”

  “You do not know this woman,” Judge returned.

  Rix nodded once. “You’re right. I don’t. I know you. And all I’m saying is, be careful. That’s it. The thing now is, you’re as pissed as you are about my message because you know I’m right. And you’ve put yourself out there.”

  He had.

  But so had she.

  “She’s not who you think she is,” Judge told him.

  “I hope you’re right,” Rix replied. “What you need to get is that not every woman who’s just your average, everyday woman who doesn’t have some lofty ambition or some massive trust fund or some other gold-plated stick up her ass is gonna turn out to be like your mom.”

  Judge returned his attention to the night sky.

  His black and brown brindle shepherd mix, Zeke, shifted up from his place lying on a folded blanket between them to sit on his haunches and butt Judge’s hand with his muzzle.

  His boy felt his daddy’s pain when mentions of Judge’s mom reared their head.

  Judge massaged Zeke’s neck.

  “I’m not being a dick,” Rix said quietly. “I’m being a friend. I got good parents, both of them. I have no clue what it’s like to have a dad like your dad, who’s on your ass to make more of yourself. And a mom like your mom.”

  Rix didn’t put any definitions on Judge’s mom.

  But he’d met her.

  She called herself a free spirit.

  Judge called her a functioning alcoholic and drug addict.

  Nope.

  Strike that “functioning” part.

  Regardless that bar was low, “functioning” was what he wanted her to be.

  The brutal truth: she was just an addict.

  “I’m just saying, turn the tables, and what would you say to me, Judge?” Rix asked. “You’d look after your boy. You’d say the same damn shit.”

  “I don’t see you shacked up with the woman of your dreams.”

  It came out before he could stop it.

  And before he could do anything about it, Rix tossed a hand to his stubbed legs and returned, “I did. She just couldn’t deal. So she took off. None of them can deal, Judge. They like my big dick and what upper body strength means with the way I can use it. They’re not such big fans of me walking on my hands to the bathroom when I don’t wanna dick with my wheelchair or put on legs. What’s your excuse?”

  “The word hasn’t been invented for the kind of woman Peri is,” Judge said low.

  “She was normal. She met and fell in love with a man who became not that man. So she took off. She tried. But it wasn’t on Peri.”

  It was Judge this time who twisted fully to Rix as he demanded, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  Rix threw forward his shoulders. “I’ve come to terms with it.”

  “Saw her in Sprouts the other day.”

  Rix’s jaw bulged.

  He so had not come to terms with it.

  “She tried smiling at me. I flipped her the bird,” Judge finished.

  At that, Rix’s lips spread wide in a huge white smile. “Seriously?”

  Was Rix being serious?

  “Dude, she fucked you over,” Judge bit off. “Of course I’m serious.”

  “Think about it, man. Am I not better off without her?”

  He absolutely was better off without that weak, cowardly bitch.

  “You’re a pain in the ass when you get all Zen,” Judge mumbled.

  “You do PT after a double amputation, learn to race a wheelchair, handle a handcycle and get used to new legs and running blades. Zen’s the only way to go.”

  “Fuck you for being superhuman, then.”

  Rix let out a longsuffering sigh at how awesome he was. “It’s always been the way.”

  Judge chuckled, but he didn’t miss how quick Rix looked away and how he further hid what he was feeling behind another sip of beer.

  Yeah.

  Peri was a weak, cowardly bitch.

  “I know you want to, check your phone,” Rix invited to the blanket of midnight-blue, starry sky.

  He’d t
urned his sound off, but he didn’t get a vibration for a text.

  Still, when he flipped the phone over, he had a notification he hadn’t noticed.

  An email.

  From Chloe.

  “She emailed,” he muttered, opening the mail.

  “Okay, maybe she isn’t a player,” Rix muttered back.

  But he was wrong.

  “What the fuck?” he asked his phone.

  “Oh shit,” Rix replied.

  “She’s blowing off Wednesday.” He started opening attachments. “And Saturday.” The attachments loaded, began coming up, and he skimmed. “And she did all the preliminary work on the project.”

  “That’ll save you some time.”

  He looked to Rix. “And she says she wants to move forward through email,” he glanced at his phone then quoted, “for the time being.”

  Rix did not look at all happy that he was right.

  Judge returned to his phone, reread the message, and then pulled up his text string with Chloe.

  “Right, hothead, take a breath,” Rix advised.

  “Fuck that,” Judge gritted.

  “Suit yourself, but you’re gonna regret it.”

  He looked to his friend. “I broke through. And now she hands me this shit?” He waved his phone in the air.

  “What makes you like her?” Rix asked.

  “I told you. She’s funny and—”

  “Bullshit. What makes you like her, Judge?”

  “I told you, man.”

  Rix leaned his way.

  “Bullshit,” he clipped. “She’s different. You told me that after New Year’s. Why?”

  “There’s something…”

  Judge couldn’t finish.

  “You don’t understand it yet?” Rix asked.

  Oh, he understood it.

  “She’s vulnerable.”

  Rix’s considerable muscled bulk landed back in his chair as if the power of what Judge said shoved him there.

  “Lady in White Satin is vulnerable?” he asked with sheer disbelief.

  “Don’t give me shit.”

  “She’s the visual definition of a maneater.”

  “She’s also carrying the entire weight of her ludicrously famous, once worldwide-celebrated for the functional healthiness of their love, but now very broken family on her shoulders.”

  Rix winced before he replied, “Well…fuck.”

  “Uh, yeah,” Judge concurred.

  Rix had nothing to say to that.

  Judge did. “There’s more to it, I know it. She can’t share because she can’t be sure I won’t buy a new car by selling it to some rag. That’s a whole new version of alone we don’t get.”

  “I don’t get,” Rix corrected. “You being Jameson Oakley’s son, AJ Oakley’s grandson, I think you get it. Or you get it more than me and maybe more than most folk she could meet. Does she know who your dad is?”

  He nodded. “She asked if she needed to sign an NDA.”

  “She knows who your dad is,” Rix murmured. Louder, he asked, “Does she know you got enough money to buy a fleet of Cherokees?”

  Judge looked away.

  “Well…fuck,” Rix repeated. “You haven’t told her she has nothing to worry about with that shit?”

  “I want her to trust me because she trusts me. Not because my dad has offered to lay enough money on me I could buy a city block in downtown Phoenix and my granddad declared I’m the only ‘real man’ left of the Oakleys, so he’s cut everyone else out of his will.”

  “Fun times for you when that old guy kicks it,” Rix observed on another chug of his beer. And when he finished swallowing it, went on, “That happens, that family of yours is gonna land on you like the pile of stinking shit they are.”

  “Probably a decade of lawsuits.” Judge chugged his own. “But they can have it. I have no interest in sucking more blood from the earth to perpetuate the cataclysmic damage of fossil fuel.”

  Rix grinned and tried to joke. “Because you’ll already own a city block and then inherit the state of New York when your old man kicks it?”

  Judge shook his head in disgust.

  Rix chuckled.

  But then he got serious again. “Vulnerable?”

  “Yes.”

  “Man, I’m not sure you should go from finding the ones that want to take over the world and drag you along with them to hold their purses and eat their scraps to ones you gotta fix.”

  “Protect,” Judge corrected.

  Rix gave him a look.

  Yeah.

  It wasn’t one or the other, it was both.

  Fix and protect.

  Like he’d failed to do with his mom.

  Zeke settled back down between them with a groan.

  Judge looked to his phone and then he typed in, That email. Not cool.

  He sent it.

  “Shit,” Rix whispered.

  Judge kept typing.

  See you Wednesday.

  He sent that too.

  Nothing all day, but only a few seconds passed by, and he got something back with that.

  I have something on.

  He immediately texted, Liar.

  No wait at all and then, Something came up. And incidentally, how rude.

  Nothing came up except you had some time to work yourself up about how much you like me. Suck it up. We’re exploring this. Zeke and I’ll be hungry when we get there, but he’ll need a bathroom break. Pizza’s on you, I’ll bring the beer. Order it to be there by six thirty, just in case I hit traffic and to give Zeke plenty of time to find his perfect spot.

  I won’t be here, Judge.

  Your ass better be there, Chloe.

  What’ll happen if it isn’t?

  Obviously, via text, he couldn’t tell if that was sarcastic or curious.

  Knowing her, it was both.

  Though she’d only let the sarcasm show.

  You don’t want to find out.

  You’re terrible with a threat.

  No, if you’re not there, I’ll tell Duncan I can’t work with you and I want you off the project.

  Radio silence.

  He sucked back some beer.

  Zeke fell to his side and stretched out.

  His phone vibrated.

  Not. Gentlemanly. AT. ALL.

  And there it was.

  No way in hell was she going to give Duncan a headache, and through him, her mother, and through her, her father.

  She’d bleed herself dry before she did that.

  Regardless that he wasn’t fighting fair and he knew it, Judge grinned at the midnight blue with its sparkling pinpricks outlining the purple-black ridge of mountains before he threw back the rest of his beer.

  “Want another?” he asked Rix.

  His friend drained his own, held out the empty and then grunted.

  That meant yes.

  Judge grabbed Rix’s bottle, pushed out of his chair, avoided the firepit he’d lit to keep them warm in the chill mountain air and headed into his townhouse with Zeke coming out of repose to be at his heels.

  But he didn’t miss Rix’s parting shot.

  “Let the games begin.”

  Oh yeah.

  Too fucking right.

  In his life, he’d experienced the agony of defeat.

  Way too fucking often.

  But this one he was in to win.

  Chapter 14

  The Pieces

  Chloe

  It didn’t bode well that it was physically painful to play Wednesday evening so I would be at the very least twenty minutes late to meet Judge at my place (in the end, checking the clock on my dash, it was twenty-three minutes).

  However, it wasn’t just pain, it was agony as I drove down my street, seeing him standing on my front stoop, a cute medium-size dog that was absolutely some kind of shepherd breed (or mix) with brindled fur and tongue-lolling happy grin on its adorable face sitting next to him, and on the other side of the stoop, a small cooler, probably filled with beer.


  As he watched me drive by, Judge didn’t look happy.

  I wasn’t happy either.

  I suspected we were both thus for entirely different reasons.

  I headed around back where my garage was, pulled in, parked, grabbed the pizza I’d personally picked up from Federal (I didn’t ask, indeed, we hadn’t texted since Monday night, but I went with prosciutto and date), along with the paper bag containing the wedge salads, my purse, attaché, and I walked into my house.

  I put the food on the island and dropped my purse and case before I headed to the door.

  Incidentally, not going directly to Judge leached massive reserves from my iron will.

  I used more arranging my face in a part bored, mostly displeased expression before I finally opened the door.

  “Hello, Judge,” I greeted.

  “Chloe,” he replied. “Just to say, I know your head’s twisted up with something, but my time on this earth is as limited, therefore just as precious as yours. You fucking twenty minutes of it away that I’ll never get back is not okay. Even with this shit we got going on between us, due to the fact your head is twisted up, I’ll remind you, not that I don’t know what I want, that is still not okay.”

  In my frame of mind, although this was fair, and I deserved it, it was not a great place for him to start.

  “I’ll remind you that I didn’t want to have this meeting,” I retorted.

  “And I’ll remind you you don’t got a choice.”

  Before I could say anything further, he clicked his tongue, his dog jumped up, body wagging with excited friendliness, and they both came into my house.

  The dog was on a lead.

  I did not want to like that Judge wasn’t one of those people who just assumed, due to his love for his dog, that everyone should love it, but more, abide it willy-nilly in their space.

  I did not trust people who didn’t like animals.

  That said, I did not like people who had some mistaken sense of entitlement that everyone should put up with their pets wherever they, as an animal owner, bringing along said animal, decided to be.

  If it was genuinely a companion pet, that was one thing.

  If it was your hyperactive springer spaniel that jumped on my leg while I was buying a sweater at Neiman’s, that was another.

  Judge having his dog on a lead gave indication he got this vital nuance of socially responsible pet ownership.