This Is Forever

by Natasha Madison

  “How much older?” I ask him.

  “Eighteen years,” he says, and my eyes open wide. “Were you an oops?”

  He throws his head back and laughs. “Matthew and Allison are from my mom’s first marriage.”

  “So your half brother and sister?” I say, and he shakes his head.

  “Not to us,” he says. “My dad is their dad; doesn’t matter what blood they have.” I put my hand on his arm. “Their father cheated on my mother, and she caught him. I’ve never met the man, but I’ve been told he’s a tool.”

  “Do they still keep in touch with him?” My hand remains on his arm.

  “Nope. He stopped coming around when my dad came into the picture. He tried to get my mother back, but my father, well, let’s just say he squashed that idea right away,” he says, and his face lights up again. “It took one look from my dad, and he was a goner. I mean that, and my mother told him to take a hike, which made Dad want her even more.”

  “Love at first sight.” I smile now and take my hand off his arm and eat another meatball. “Are your siblings married?”

  “Yeah, all of them. Matthew is married to Karrie, and they have four kids.” My eyes go big. “He’s a caveman. If he could carry her around over his shoulder and pound his chest while screaming she’s mine, he probably would.” I laugh. “Allison is married to Max, and they have two kids. He is also Matthew’s ex-enemy.”

  “Holy crap,” I say, mesmerized by the family.

  “Oh, yeah, not only did they get married”—he starts to laugh—“but they eloped, and Matthew found out watching SportsCenter.” I put my hand to my mouth.

  “One more meatball,” Dylan says, and Justin looks at me for approval.

  “You sure? There is pizza and pasta coming,” I say, and he nods his head.

  “So tell me more,” I ask, wanting to hear more.

  “Zara was the first twin to get married to Evan Richards,” he says, then waits for my reaction after he says his name, and when I just shrug, he looks at Dylan. “Evan Richards.”

  “He’s the best. He won a Stanley Cup,” he says, wiping his mouth. “Not as good as Justin, though.”

  “Wait,” Justin says. He takes out his phone, and suddenly, he’s FaceTiming someone, and the man who fills the screen is hot. “Yo,” Justin says, and the man speaks up.

  “Hey,” he says, and then I hear a woman’s voice yelling in the background.

  “Why the hell is Justin calling you?” She now stands next to the guy, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a prettier woman in my life.

  “He likes me better than you,” the man says.

  “Okay, listen,” Justin says. “I want you to hear what I just heard.”

  The woman snatches the phone. “Oh my God, is this gossip?” she says with a squeal. “I love gossip. What is it about? Is it about Allison? Did you notice her weight gain, too? You think she’s pregnant?”

  “What?” Justin asks, shocked. “I need Evan.”

  “I’m here,” he says, and he comes to stand next to who must be his wife, Justin’s sister Zara.

  “Dylan,” he says, pressing the button to turn the camera around. “What did you say about Evan Richards?” Dylan smiles and becomes shy. “It’s okay, buddy. He knows,” Justin says.

  “I said he’s good,” Dylan says, almost hiding his smile.

  “And …” Justin says.

  “But you’re better,” he says.

  Zara starts laughing, and Evan yells, “Bullshit!” Loudly.

  “There is a kid in the room,” Zara says, and now Evan grabs the phone from her.

  “I want to speak to Dylan,” he says, and Justin hands Dylan the phone.

  “How old are you?” he asks Dylan.

  “Eight,” Dylan says.

  “What level do you play?” Evan asks him.

  Zara is in the background. “Would you stop harassing the child, Evan?”

  “I play forward,” Dylan says proudly.

  “When I’m down in two weeks, how about we play one-on-one?” Evan says, and I hear dogs barking in the background.

  “You just threw down to a child,” Zara admonishes.

  “It’s on,” Dylan says, and I shake my head as he hands the phone back to Justin.

  “Okay, just thought I would share that with you,” Justin says when he gets the phone back.

  “I’m sure you did.” He laughs. “Where are you?”

  “We are at Cicionni,” Justin says.

  “Who is we, Justin?” Zara asks, and I see Justin give the same smile he did when he was talking about his family.

  “Dylan and Caroline,” he says and comes closer to me. “Caroline, say hi to my bratty number one.” He turns the phone on me, and I try not to panic, but I swear my hands start shaking, and I have the sudden need to drink another gulp of wine.

  “Oh, shit,” Evan says in the background and comes closer to the phone. “It’s about to be real.”

  “Hi,” I say, and Zara’s eyes open wide.

  “Hi,” she says, “it’s so nice to meet you.”

  “You, too,” I say, and I don’t know what else to say so Justin takes over.

  “Okay, squirt, call you later,” he says.

  “I’m so telling everyone,” Zara says, and he laughs, then he hangs up. Before I can ask him what she means, the door opens, and Lara comes back with another waiter, both of them carrying trays.

  “I hope you guys are hungry,” she says, and I don’t say anything else because two pizzas and two huge plates of pasta are set down on the table.

  Dylan digs into the spaghetti and then eats a slice of pizza, and the only thing that I can fit in my stomach is two slices of pizza. But Justin eats us both under the table, and when I look at him, he just winks at me.

  When Lara comes back in, she takes the remainder of the food and offers to box it up for us. “I’m stuffed,” Justin says, stretching backward and then putting his arm around my chair to pull me closer to him.

  “Did you eat enough?” he asks, and I look over at him and nod.

  “Okay, you two,” Lara says, coming back in with a tray. “I made this special tiramisu and then a Nutella cheesecake this morning,” she says, putting the dessert in the middle of the table.

  “If I eat anything else, I’m going to explode,” I whisper, but Justin sits up and takes a spoon and then cuts a piece of tiramisu and brings the spoon to my mouth.

  “Taste it,” he says, holding the spoon to my lips. I open my mouth, and the cool of the cake hits my tongue, and then the sweetness follows. “Good, right?” he says and takes another piece and eats from the same spoon.

  Dylan is eating his own piece, and I swear the kid has a hole in his stomach sometimes. “Dylan, don’t make yourself sick.”

  “Mom, it’s so good,” he says, finishing the whole piece.

  “Here, taste this,” Justin says, holding the spoon to my mouth.

  “I can’t,” I say, trying to duck from him, but he doesn’t let up.

  “Just taste a bite,” he says, and I open and take the spoon, and I swear I will never taste anything as good again. “Good, right?” I nod my head.

  I watch the two of them finish the dessert, and then Justin stands. “Let’s go, sweetheart,” he says again. I look at him, and he just smirks at me. Then he turns to Dylan. “Ready, champ?”

  “Yup,” Dylan says and gets up, and Justin grabs the bag with the takeout. I follow Justin out of the room and expect him to walk ahead of me, but he doesn’t. He waits for me and then puts his arm around my shoulder. When we walk past the hostess stand, he doesn’t even look their way.

  “Thank you for coming,” the two women say, and all he does is nod. We are almost out of the door when a couple of fans come over and ask for pictures. He is very polite to them, and they pose for pictures.

  “It’s so cool,” Dylan says next to me, and I have to agree that it really is. When he finishes, he comes to us, and we walk back into the lobby.

  “Let
’s get you guys home,” he says as we walk through the lobby and to the elevator. I try not to look around too much, and when we get into the garage, I follow him to the SUV.

  “Look at that red car,” Dylan says, pointing at the sleek red car next to the SUV.

  “You like that one?” Justin asks, opening the passenger door for me and then the back door for Dylan.

  “I bet it goes fast, fast,” he says, sitting in the car seat.

  “I’ll take you out in it this weekend,” he says to Dylan, and Dylan squeals while I just stand here looking at him. He slams the back door and turns to me. “You ready?”

  “That’s your car?” I ask him, looking at the red car. I don’t know what it is, but it just looks expensive.

  “Um, yeah,” he says. “That one also.” He points at a truck and then the sleek black BMW next to it. “That one also.”

  “You have four cars?” I ask him, and he puts his hand on my back and ushers me to get in the SUV.

  “Does it matter?” he asks, and I want to say yes, it does, but he just continues. “It’s a car.”

  “Yes,” I say. “Four. You own four cars.”

  “Well, five,” he says. “I keep one at my parents’ house for when I visit.”

  He smiles. “Now, let’s get Dylan home. He must be tired.”

  “Smooth,” I say. “Very smooth.”

  He looks at me and winks, and my stomach literally flutters. “Oh, you ain’t seen nothing yet, sweetheart,” he says, closing the door.

  “Mom,” Dylan calls from the back seat, and I turn around. “I really like him.”

  “Yeah, baby,” I say, looking back to the front. “Me, too,” I say quietly under my breath.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Justin

  “Four.” I hear her mumbling from beside me. She turns her back to the door and looks at me. “Four cars.”

  As I look over at her, she’s still wearing my sweater even though it’s like a dress but she folds her arms over her chest. “I mean, five,” I joke with her, and she rolls her eyes.

  “Sorry,” she says. “Five, you have five cars.” She shakes her head. “You see, right?”

  I look in the rearview mirror and see that Dylan is slowly losing the battle to stay awake. “I’m not sure what you’re asking me right now.”

  “I’m saying that we are literally night and day,” she says, but I interrupt her.

  “We are two people who met and like each other. What does it matter how many cars I have?”

  “You having all those cars is not the issue,” she says.

  “So why are we still talking about this?” I wink at her. “If I had zero cars, would you like me more?”

  “Well, no,” she says, and I laugh.

  “That’s a step in the right direction.” I glance over at her, and she looks confused. “You admitted you like me.”

  “That’s what you got from that?” she asks, then lowers her voice and checks to see that Dylan is now sleeping with his head to the side. “Out of everything I said, that is what you focus on?”

  “Yup,” I say. When I hear her huff, I reach over and take her hand in mine. “Shh, you’ll wake him,” I say as I link my fingers with hers. I take in that she let me, and I also take in that she holds my hand back while she just looks outside for the rest of the drive.

  When we pull up to her apartment complex, she shows me where to go, and I park in her parking spot. “You grab the food. I’m going to grab Dylan,” I say before she gets out. It looks like she is going to argue with me, but she doesn’t. She gets the food, and I slowly unbuckle Dylan and carry him in, following her. “He’s out cold.”

  She opens the door and walks in and puts the bag of food on the table and then rushes into the bedroom. The house is literally a sauna. “I’m going to open the windows and get a breeze going,” she says, opening the windows, and I notice there is no breeze even when she does that.

  I lay him on the bed, and he curls into the fetal position, but I take off his shoes and socks. “Will he be okay?” I ask, and she nods her head and takes off my sweater that she is wearing.

  “Yeah, he’ll probably be out until tomorrow,” she whispers, and I walk out of the room, and she follows me.

  “Do you want something to drink?” she asks me, and I nod my head. She goes to the fridge and opens the freezer to get some ice cubes out.

  I turn to sit on the futon and wait for her. She walks back into the room holding two glasses and hands one to me. “Here you are.”

  “Thank you,” I say and take a sip and then wait for her to sit down. “Tonight was fun.” I start the conversation, and I watch her as I talk. “I don’t know what the deal is with your parents or your siblings, and I didn’t want to ask about them in front of Dylan, but I want to know everything.”

  “There really isn’t much to say,” she says, taking a gulp of water and then looking down at the glass that is already forming condensation on the outside. “My parents were …” she says and then corrects herself. “They are religious people, and they didn’t like the fact that their only daughter got knocked up at seventeen.” My heart sinks for her. “So when I told them I was pregnant, they gave me two options. One, give the baby up for adoption, which I was never going to do, or two, move out.”

  “But …” I start to say, but when she shakes her head, I want to pull her to me.

  “I refused to give him away. I wasn’t even two months pregnant, and I loved him with everything I had,” she says softly. “So I packed my stuff and moved in with Andrew and his family. His parents were not much more understanding, but he was eighteen. They weren’t going to have their grandson living on the street, so they took me in. He was the star quarterback, and his name was on everyone’s lips as the next big thing. He got a scholarship, and I followed him here. The only way for us to have housing was for us to be married, so one day, we went to city hall and made it official. It was my happy ending,” she says, and her eyes then look down.

  “But then I gave birth to Dylan, and he started to spend more and more time away from home. He would complain that he couldn’t focus with Dylan crying all the time. I was with a newborn who had colic and only slept two hours a night. A day would turn two and then close to the end, he would be gone for a whole week. I just didn’t get it. Dylan was such a beautiful baby, and every single time he smiled, it just made me love him more.” She smiles now, and I notice every time she talks abut him, there is this look she gets in her eyes. The look that I see every single time I look in my mother’s eyes or my father’s.

  “I just tried to be understanding. He had all this stress on him, so the least I could do was take care of Dylan. When he was home, he was angry and stressed. He used to get pissed off that there were too many toys around, and he was constantly stepping on them.” She wipes away a tear. “Of course I would go to some games, but even then, I felt like I was intruding in his life. He had this whole other life without us in it. I suspected that he wasn’t faithful to me, and when I found out the first time, he promised me it was a mistake. Promised me it wouldn’t happen again. I knew it was stupid to believe him. Maybe that was my clue to get out, but I wanted Dylan to have a family. I wanted him to have a mother and father together. But then it came knocking on my door again at two in the morning looking for him. It was the day before Dylan turned two years old. I had these little gifts wrapped for him when he got up, and Andrew got so pissed when I asked who she was that he threw one of them at the wall, smashing the gift.” She takes a deep breath, and I want to go to her and hold her while she tells this story. I want to give her the strength from inside me.

  “Junior year, he got sacked so hard he tore his ACL.” I look down at my own hands that are now folded into fists, the rage coming out of me, and right then, I think about when I was drafted first overall. It was a dream come true. “Well, he was put on painkillers after his surgery, and he somehow got addicted,” she says softly and now wipes another tear off her cheek. “You h
ave to know that I had no idea. Not even one that he was so addicted.” She looks at me, and I want her to stop telling me all this.

  “It was not your fault,” I say. My hand goes to her cheek, and my thumb catches the tear that escapes her eyes.

  “When I found out he was addicted, I went to his parents,” she says. Her voice makes my stomach start to burn, and my heart speeds up faster and faster, and my neck suddenly becomes hotter. “They actually blamed me.” She laughs bitterly, but it comes out more like a sob. “Said I pushed him in that direction, and that if it wasn’t for me and Dylan, he would be okay. That having a child put extra strain on him.” The sobs rip out of her, and I pull her to me. She cries in my chest, her tears soaking straight through my shirt. “I never once put pressure on him.”

  “It was not your fault,” I say, hugging her, and I kiss her head.

  “When I found out that he had wasted all his scholarship money, I …” She gets up now and starts to pace in front of me. “I was so pissed and angry, and to top it all off, we got kicked out of the house.” I sit here now and rage tears through my body, making my legs start to move up and down. “He promised me everything would be okay. We moved into a one-bedroom studio that was horrible. There were roaches everywhere, and I was afraid that I’d wake up, and they’d be all over Dylan. He didn’t pay rent, and one day I caught him fucking the landlady on our couch. I got tested right after that, and I never touched him again.”

  “Stop,” I say, my heart sinking, my stomach burning. “I don’t know if I can take much more.”

  “This is me.” She stands there with her arms out to her sides. “You wanted this. You asked for it. I told you that we shouldn’t go there. We are so different.” She looks down, and I see a single tear roll down her cheek. “There were drug dealers breaking down my door to get him. There were times I came home, and the money that I had set aside to buy food with was in a syringe and his eyes closed on the couch. We ate bread for a month with peanut butter. I went to the church and asked for help with food, and we got food stamps. It took me over a year to finally save enough to escape him.” She looks up now, her shoulders square.