by Ella Fields
“Well, isn’t this cute,” Kayla had said, passing by me as I’d waited at the bottom of the steps one morning.
“Shut up.”
“Seriously, Daphne. All bullshit aside …” She glanced at the lot where Lars had taken Annika’s bag after helping her out of the car. “This is really starting to become quite sad.”
“What is, that pink rinse you attempted to put in your hair?”
Kayla cackled. “Nice, but no.” She turned, and I caught a rare dose of sincerity in her eyes, the likes of which I hadn’t seen since we were kids. “The way you’re still hanging on when it’s clearly a wasted effort.”
Left alone with her words, the crisp wind biting my cheeks, and the sight of Lars and Annika crossing the lawn to school, I felt yet another piece of me shift and fade.
I’d turned and climbed the steps before Lars could see me and hid in the bathroom until class.
“Are you sure about this?”
The car salesman’s voice brought me back to the present. I wasn’t sure about anything anymore, but I did know that, no matter what, I wouldn’t regret it.
“Do you want the extra five hundred or not?”
I ended the call a minute later and paced the floor of my room, eyeing the scrapbooks, postcards, stamps, and letters on my desk that I hadn’t touched in weeks, possibly months as I waited for Lars to call.
He didn’t. It was Sunday, and after he’d worked all day yesterday, I knew he was home today, trying to catch up on a history assignment.
Out in the hall, I almost ran into Mom and screamed. “What the fuck is on your face?”
“Watch your mouth,” she hissed, clutching her cream robe tighter. Lifting her hand, she carefully touched the white film covering her face. “And it’s a face mask, duh.”
“What, you can’t buy any that don’t make you look like the grim reaper?”
Mom’s brows rose, which made it even freakier. “I’ve just spent ten minutes meditating.” She slurped at her martini. “So I’m going to pretend you didn’t say something that makes me want to slap your irritating face.”
“Whatever.” I continued down the hall and then rushed to the door. It’d been almost an hour, so I knew it would be there soon.
Opening the front door, my hand hit my chest as a scream glued to the roof of my mouth.
“Hey, princess.”
Stumped, I just stood there, feeling my heartbeat thunder through every part of my body. “Ellis. What do you want?”
His dark gaze assessed, and then his lips turned up. “It’s been a while, and I was in town. Can I come in?”
Somehow, over the noise of my heart, I could hear Mom’s footsteps behind me in the house.
Think, think, think.
I closed my eyes, then opened them, and called out, “Hey, Mom, your boss is here!”
Ellis’s mouth fell open, and his brows dunked toward his nose. “Daphne …”
“I’ve got places to be. Sorry.” I slipped by him and didn’t look back. As I neared my car, I heard Mom’s shocked laughter, and I tried to ignore how happy she sounded when she told him to come in.
He hadn’t tried to contact me since homecoming, and I hadn’t thought about him since.
So that was how it worked, I realized. You traded everything you felt for one guy to another, if they were capable of evoking a strong enough reaction.
And Lars had Ellis beat by miles.
Some minutes later, I leaned over the steering wheel when I saw all the cars outside Lars’s house and parked down the street.
I parked across the road and was pulled to a halt when I saw the balloons swaying from the porch railing. Pink balloons.
“Daph?” His voice was the only thing that stopped me from fleeing when I realized what was happening.
A baby shower. Without me.
I pasted on a smile, and Lars stomped on his cigarette. “Hi.”
“Hi.” He took my mouth and kissed me, starving and searching. Licorice and nicotine exploded over my tongue, and I sank into him, wishing his touch and taste alone could wipe everything else away.
Pulling back, I thumbed some red lipstick from his lips, and asked, “So a baby shower?”
“Yeah, I was just about to call to see where you were.”
“What?”
Lars’s eyes narrowed. “Annika only decided the other night after you’d left, but she said she’d told you at school on Friday.”
I nodded, not wanting to say she hadn’t. The last thing he needed was to worry about Annika and me having any issues. I didn’t want any. I just wanted to be with Lars. “Let’s go party then.”
“Daphne,” he said, tone curt, and I knew he’d figured it out without having to say anything.
I walked inside to find half the girls in our graduating class in the living room, kitchen, and out in the backyard.
“Daphne?” Annika was seated at the dining table with a plate of chocolate-covered strawberries in front of her. Her current craving.
“Yeah, hey.” I nodded at Glenda in the kitchen, who was frowning at Annika while she pulled a tray of mini pies out of the oven. “Thanks for the invite.”
Annika dabbed at her mouth, which was painted a bubblegum pink, with a napkin. “I didn’t think you’d want to attend.”
Annabeth, who’d been scrolling through her phone next to her, looked up, seeming to find us interesting now. “What?”
Annika waved her off with the napkin. “You know,” she said, smiling a smile that was more of a grimace, “I didn’t want it to be awkward for you.”
Glenda dropped something in the kitchen, cussing.
I could feel my cheeks heating. I wanted to break something. Stomp on all the stupid balloons floating around my boyfriend’s house and scream.
With more calm than I thought I could muster, I said, “I asked you before Christmas if you planned on having a baby shower, and you’d said no.”
Annabeth sucked her lips, pretending to take interest in her phone again.
“I just didn’t want to make a fuss, but I guess you buying those clothes for Lily opened my eyes.” She took a sip of sparkling water. “I need things, and I have no money to get them.”
Annabeth reached over and rubbed her arm, her eyes still on her phone.
My hands slowly unclenched, and I asked, “Lily?”
Annika grinned, real and bright and beautiful. “Yeah. I asked Lars what he thought of it last night, and he said he liked it. So”—she rubbed her stomach—“Lily it is.”
“Lily it is,” I repeated, watching her hand circle her stomach over the hot pink flowing dress she was wearing.
“Daphne, would you give me a hand for a minute?”
Swallowing over the boulder in my throat, I joined Glenda and gave her a small smile as she handed me a tray and told me to grease it. “You didn’t know.”
Not a question. Still, I said, “No.”
“Jesus.” She opened a tube of cookie dough. “I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault.” I washed my hands and helped her roll it into tiny balls, setting them on two trays to bake when the pies finished.
Glenda gave me job after job, for which I was thankful. I knew she was doing it to keep my mind from dancing toward dangerous places. But it drifted there anyway. I wanted to leave, but this wasn’t about me. Doing so would make it about me, and that wasn’t what any of us needed.
I was about to ask where Lars was when I heard a horn blaring outside, and then the faint sound of my phone ringing from my purse on the countertop.
I didn’t bother to check it. I knew who it was. I washed my hands, drying them as I rushed through the house, girls gossiping and laughing in every space they could occupy, and peeked out the front window in the living room.
A black Escalade sat in front of the driveway, the sun glinting off the paint and chrome bumper.
Lars had his hands in his hair, his face a comical mask of shock as Annika joined him, and he gestured to the car.
She looked a
t him, then back at the car, and I saw the words leave her lips. “You won it? Oh, my god, Lars! Oh, my freaking god.”
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. To happen this way.
I was supposed to be out there, yet I couldn’t move.
I was a spectator. I was watching two lives merge while scarcely living my own. I was the girl peering in the window at the toy store, longing for things I couldn’t actually have.
I was an idiot.
Then they were hugging, laughing, and opening doors, exploring a prize they never saw coming.
That was the thing about the unexpected, though. If it seemed too good to be true, then usually, it was.
Daphne
Lars opened one of my unfinished scrapbook albums, his fingers turning the pages reverently as he took his time to absorb each one. “This is really something.”
On my bed, I rolled onto my stomach and propped my head up on my hand. “It’s fun.”
A letter fluttered to the floor, and his brows crinkled when he picked it up. “Dear Agnes, hours seem to drag into days as I lay in wait for any word from you. Days are years that multiply as I long for any sighting of you. You are my breath. You are my blood. You are the beat of my heart. Agnes, please, I beg of you, write me. Find me. He’s undeserving. Fear not, for I am still, as I’ll always be, waiting.”
I finished for him. “Forever yours, George.”
Lars blinked three times. “Well, fucking thank you, George, for putting me to shame.” He flipped it over, inspecting the back of the yellowed, aging paper. “Who could compete with this?”
I smirked. “That’s why I like them. Romance will never die; it simply changes shape.”
Lars lifted a brow, eyes flicking between the page I’d covered in vintage stamps and the letter he was still holding. “You have an artist’s soul, Cotton.”
“I have an old soul that needs tending to,” I said, spreading my arms. “Come feed it.”
He shook his head, smiling. “These are kind of cool.” He tucked the letter away, then pulled a postcard out of the envelope I’d stuck to the next page. “What stirred this?”
“I don’t know,” I said, dropping my arms. “But ever since I found handwritten letters from my grandpa to Petra when I was little, I’ve become kind of obsessed with old love.”
Lars hummed, his lashes half-moons over his cheeks as he kept his attention on the page. “What about it interests you? The forbidden, the romance, or the war?”
“All of it,” I admitted. “Feelings, so much of someone’s heart, inscribed onto paper and cardboard. It’s a legacy all on its own.”
He shut the book. “The vulnerability,” he said, raising his eyes to me. “They’ve made themselves vulnerable in a way that holds not a small amount of risk.”
I traced the blob of sunlight on my bedding and said nothing.
“And you shouldn’t downplay something you clearly enjoy this much.”
At that, I smirked again. “But art isn’t art unless it pains you, right?”
Lars stilled, then carefully set the album down, his fingers traipsing over the few books stacked on my nightstand as he moved to my bed. Hooking a finger beneath my chin, he murmured, “Then you’re a living, breathing manifestation of art.”
I snorted and tugged his arm until his body fell over mine.
Laughing, he rose onto his hands, his groin digging into my center as he grinned down at me. “Hi.”
“Hi.” I touched the dark, abrasive hair peeking out of his skin, my finger tracing the masculine line of his jaw and chin.
When I reached his mouth, he nipped at my finger, but I didn’t smile like I usually would. Couldn’t.
“Daph,” he said, his voice held a pleading edge. “Talk to me.”
“What about?” I forced some curiosity into the words.
Somber eyes and razor-sharp focus stared me in two. “You’re sad. I can see it. I can feel it.”
I wasn’t sure if what I felt could be summed up in a word as simple as sad, so I remained quiet.
He was happy. Slowly but surely, he was growing into who he was meant to be. Who he had to be.
“I’m okay.” I tilted my lips. “Just have things on my mind, I guess.”
Lars lowered to lay beside me, leaning on his bent elbow as he studied my face. “So let’s get them out of your mind and into mine. Tell me.”
I wouldn’t do that. Not to the extent I probably needed to. “Finals are coming, graduation is a handful of months away, college acceptance letters are arriving soon …”
“Lily is arriving soon,” he added.
Damn him.
I nodded. “I’m excited about that.” I wasn’t lying. I was dying to meet the tiny version of him, even if part of me would break as he fell in love with someone else. The heart didn’t care if it was a baby. The heart only cared that it wasn’t my baby. That she would never be my baby. It was an exquisite kind of torture. To love someone you’d never met, yet also resent them for stealing something that’d belonged to you first.
It was wrong. It shouldn’t be this way.
There was no other way.
“No faking with me, Cotton.” He slid some hair back off my face. “It’ll only piss me off.”
“What if I like pissing you off?” I grinned up at him.
His eyes thinned. “Don’t try to get out of this.” He sighed, glancing around my room. “You’re going to New York. I can feel it.”
I’d already received my acceptance letter, but I kept my mouth shut. “Or maybe I’ll end up staying right here.” We’d both applied to college close to home as well. Not that he was even entertaining the idea, no matter how much his mom or I tried to push the subject. To say Glenda had been furious when she’d discovered he’d turned down Brown wouldn’t cut it. Though she knew. She knew there was nothing else he could’ve done. That it was a path he could no longer take.
“Edmond Ross?”
“Maybe.” I feigned a yawn and snuggled into his chest, inhaling his clean scent, hating what I needed to admit but couldn’t force out. I needed to. We were sinking. And although there had probably never been happier dying souls, we were still sinking all the same. “Lars …”
His phone rang, and he cursed as he pulled it out of his back pocket. “I need to get this.”
I bit down on the verbal vomit that was ready to explode. “So get it.”
“Hey,” he answered. “I’m at Daphne’s.” A long pause, and I could hear the squeak of Annika’s voice. “No, I’m not avoiding you.” A long sigh. “No, I’ll grab some. Yeah, bye.”
He hung up, then sat up, groaning and grumbling.
I sat up too. “What’s wrong?”
He slipped his feet into his shoes, then laid a kiss on each cheek before taking my lips. “Annika needs some of that heartburn shit. She’s out. I’ll be back in an hour.” He stared, resolute. “We’re not finished talking about this yet.”
I watched him leave, then rolled over to grab my phone when I saw it flashing. It was on silent, which was probably why I hadn’t seen the three missed calls before then.
Him.
Staring at the missed call notifications, I brushed a few tears from my eyes and blew out a breath. My gaze stayed glued to the screen of my phone.
Lars wouldn’t let me go. He was, without a doubt, the most committed man I’d ever met.
One I wasn’t allowed to keep.
Of course, that was how it worked. You could meet your first love, possibly your soul mate, but there were always conditions for those who didn’t deserve them.
Seeing what stood before me, I wasn’t sure if I could live with these conditions anymore.
Not because I loved him so much that I couldn’t share, but because I loved him so much that I wanted him to live without being torn in ten different directions. I wanted him to have a chance at being happy without all the strings and baggage attached.
Without me.
“Princess,” Ellis answered instantly
. “I’m leaving town tonight. Please tell me you’re over this boyfriend hang-up so I can see you.”
Like an addict who’d wised up to an unhealthy addiction, something curled sharp inside, digging into my trembling stomach. Even the sound of his voice seemed different. Less impressive, less powerful. Still, I closed my eyes and rushed out, “If you can be here in forty-five minutes, then sure.”
“I can be, yes.” I heard him say something to someone in the background. “Do you need anything?”
Opening my eyes with a start, I frowned at the chocolate nail polish on my fingers. “Uh, no, thanks.” A harsh pause had me hesitating, and I quickly added, “Just you.”
Terrified, I threw my phone to the floor and went in search of enough alcohol to see this crazy shit through.
I’d demolished three apple martinis at my parents’ mini bar by the time the doorbell rang, and though I felt warm, more bold, and confident, my hands still shook as I opened the doors.
In his suit pants and an unbuttoned steel dress shirt, sleeves rolled over tanned forearms, Ellis walked in, his loafers clipping on the floor. “Your parents?”
“Work.” As per usual. I closed the doors.
“Want a drink?” I asked, testing my voice to see if it quivered the same way my hands still were. I tucked them behind my back as Ellis’s eyes raked up and down my body.
I’d changed into a lose apricot sundress, forgoing a bra and panties to keep from stalling and potentially giving myself time to chicken out.
Ellis shook his head, his dark hair cut close to his scalp and his square jaw clean shaven. “I’m not thirsty.” Taking three measured steps toward me, he began undoing his belt. “What I am is fucking starving, and you’ve been depriving me.”
Scathing words curled over my tongue, but I hauled them back and swallowed them as his hands cupped my face, smooth thumbs gliding over my cheeks.
Startled, I stepped back, meeting the wall. “No touching, remember?”
He sniffed, grinning. “Still got that boyfriend?”
My chest seized and caught fire, and it was all I could do not to let the burn spread to my eyes.
Ellis chuckled, then gestured down the hall. “After you.”
