by Cee Bowerman
“Talking to you two makes me realize why Angus hates people.”
Mace
REBA
I picked my phone up and read the text that had come in while I was driving from work to the daycare.
‘Hi. This is Mace. How was your weekend?’
I hadn’t heard from Mace and had almost given up. Now that I had a message from him, I was so excited that I did a little happy dance, wiggling my ass around in the seat of my car.
I hadn’t heard from him Saturday or Sunday and I’d been a little sad about it. I’d enjoyed our conversation on Friday and really thought we’d hit it off. When he didn’t text or call all weekend, I’d admittedly been upset.
And now, here I was, sitting in my car and giggling like a teenager because the ‘hot boy’ just sent me a message.
‘Busy with the kids. Yours?’
‘Same. Finn and Lena got a stomach bug, so I watched my niece and nephew for them.’
‘Lena cancelled her appointment today. I wondered what was wrong.’
‘Can I call you later?’
‘The kids go to bed by 9:00, so after that?’
‘I’ll talk to you at 9:01 then.’
“He’s gonna call me,” I sing-songed as I danced a little more. “He’s gonna call me.”
I added his number to my contacts and then closed my phone, so I could go in and get my kids. I was walking on air, excited to hear from a man for the first time in months. No, I thought to myself, it’s been more than months since I’d felt this way.
This is the first time in years I’d been this excited about hearing from a man.
The last man who’d made me giggle like this was my ex-husband and look how that worked out.
My excitement waned just a little at the thought and I spent the walk across the parking lot and up the sidewalk remembering my first love.
My ex, Travis Lane, had been the hot guy all the girls in high school pined away for. When I was a freshman, he was a senior and captain of the high school football team. A chance meeting in the hallway when he plowed into me and caused me to drop all of my books started a romance that lasted eight years.
Twelve years ago, at 15 years old, Travis had stolen my heart. We’d stayed together through my freshman and his senior year and then my last three years of high school and his first three years on a football scholarship at a one of the Big 12 colleges just a few hours away in Oklahoma. When I was 18 and he was 22, we got married in a huge ceremony in our hometown. I then moved into campus housing with him for his senior year in college.
His shoulder had been injured his junior year, but he managed to work his way through the pain to play ball in almost every game after that.
When I was 19, Travis was drafted into the NFL and we moved to Cleveland together to start his football career. Things were bumpy between the two of us with the big move and stress of his career along with my college classes, but I was still so in love with him that I couldn’t see anything else around me. Soon, I was pregnant with our first child, Cyrus. Before Cy was even a year old, we had Vada.
I knew that Travis popped pills, but I also knew his shoulder bothered him constantly. The doctors said there wasn’t anything they could do to take away the constant ache and he was fine to play ball. His pill use hadn’t seemed like an issue and he never tried to hide it from me.
Young and naive girl that I was, I assumed he was taking the prescriptions the NFL doctors had given him according to the directions.
I slowly became aware that he was not taking them as he should and he was mixing them with alcohol regularly. I’d spoken to him about rehab and offered to go to the doctor with him, but he’d blown me off. I realized now that he’d used his charm and my naivete to keep me from realizing the extent of his addiction.
Then, when Vada was three months old, Travis was arrested for driving under the influence when he wrecked his car on a Cleveland highway. They’d found a large amount of pills in the car and in Travis’s pockets. He was charged with drug possession with intent to distribute.
This was a major violation of his NFL contract.
Two days later, his contract was cancelled. I stayed by my husband’s side as he went through almost every penny of our savings fighting the charges.
Together Travis and I went from being poor in small town Texas to big money in a strange city in a different state. Then all of the sudden we found ourselves in a strange town and almost broke again.
We’d worked through all of our problems together as a team and I didn’t think that this would be any different.
His addiction, his impending conviction on drug charges, and the loss of his career weren’t what drove me to divorce him. I fully planned on spending my life with Travis and helping him through the troubles he was facing.
But with his career over, he lost sight of what was important in life: our family.
He’d been a wonderful, loving, compassionate father. He doted on our babies. We’d shared the responsibilities of parenting almost equally even while dealing with all of these obstacles.
We were one hell of a team until he left our children home alone while he went out to score drugs.
I came home from a continuing education class for my PT certification and found both of our children in our daughter’s crib. They were both wet, hungry, and hysterically crying. They were alone and had been for some time.
Travis made it home almost four hours after I did and I could tell that he was stoned. He apologized and acted like I was making a big deal of a small problem and it was then I realized that no matter how hard I fought for him, he was not going to get better unless he admitted he had a problem and fought for himself.
I waited until he’d washed a handful of pills down with a bottle of whiskey before I packed up mine and our children’s belongings and stuffed them into a rented truck.
We were almost to Texas before Travis realized we were gone.
I filed for divorce three days later and became a 22-year-old single mother to a toddler and a six-month-old.
And I’d been alone ever since.
I pulled the doors to the daycare open and made my way down the long hall to my daughter’s after school care classroom. One glance into the little window and I knew this evening was not going to be fun.
I pulled the door open and my daughter’s eyes met mine. Without even acknowledging me, she looked away.
“How’d she do today?” I glanced over at Vada in the timeout chair at the edge of the room and then back at her daycare teacher. “How many times?”
“Only three today!” Cheyenne, the young teacher, said cheerfully. It was all I could do not to groan out loud. “That’s the best in a few weeks!”
“Vada.” I stared at my daughter until she put her head down in shame.
“She didn’t make anyone cry today?” I wasn’t sure if Cheyenne was asking me a question or trying to reassure me.
“Well, that’s a plus,” I said sarcastically. “I’ll make sure I don’t kill her just for that.”
Cheyenne laughed. She knew me well enough to understand Vada wasn’t in danger, just in deep shit.
“Vada, come on,” I said a little louder.
I watched my 6-year-old stand up and slowly walk toward me. She had her head down, shoulders slumped, and I could hear her dramatic sigh from across the room. She shuffled over to her cubby and grabbed her school bag and lunchbox before she went to stand beside the door that led out into the hall.
“Are you forgetting something?” I asked her.
“Bye, Ms. Chey,” Vada said softly. “Sorry I got in trouble today.”
“You’re sorry for what you did or just sorry you got in trouble for it?” I tilted my head, knowing some sarcastic comment was about to roll right out of her mouth.
“Both,” Vada shrugged. “Mostly sorry I had to sit in timeout.”
I leaned my head back and stared at the ceiling for a minute, praying for the strength to stop myself from losing my shit.
“Thanks, Cheyenne,” I smiled at the teacher, wondering how in the hell she was surrounded by all these wild children all day and still maintained her cheerful outlook on life. It had to be wine. Lots and lots of wine.
“Bye, Ms. Lane,” Cheyenne smiled again. “Have a good evening!”
I joined my daughter at the door and opened it for us to walk down the hall and pick up her brother from his classroom. As usual, the chat with Cyrus’s teacher went well and he grudgingly closed the book he was reading and put it in his backpack before he joined me and his sister at the door.
We made our way out to the car in silence and once I was sure they were buckled in, I pulled away from the curb.
“Can we go to the movies?” Vada asked me.
“What do you think, Ms. Timeout?” I glanced into the rearview mirror and saw Vada roll her eyes. “Cyrus has his guitar lesson this evening and you and I are going grocery shopping! Isn’t that exciting?”
“I’d rather get a rash,” Vada grumbled.
“You are a rash,” I heard Cyrus whisper.
“No, I’m not! You are!” Vada screamed. “Buttface!”
Wine. I was going to buy lots of wine at the store tonight. And then I was going to enjoy a glass of it while I talked to Mace Conner.
◆◆◆
MACE
I set the phone down on the table in front of me and smiled.
I had been worried Reba would be mad that I hadn’t called over the weekend, but I’d honestly been so busy that I hadn’t had a chance. The twins were enough to keep an entire staff of people on their toes and it was all that I could do to shower on days when I had them alone.
At almost three months, it wasn’t much easier to take care of them than it had been the week after they were born.
I’d taken today off just so I could get some rest and enjoy the peace and quiet. I’d also needed to pick up my house and do some dishes since I hadn’t had a chance to do any of that over the weekend.
I heard someone tap on my door just before it opened and when I looked up, I saw Royal and Ronan walking into my house.
“Played hooky today, I noticed,” Royal put a six-pack down on my kitchen table and flopped down into the chair across from me.
“I needed to recover after taking care of the kids for two days.”
“I hear ya, man,” Ronan said as he pulled out a chair for himself. “I kept them overnight alone last week and I felt like I’d been on a three-day bender. I can’t imagine two days and two nights.”
“Did you guys at least find some new stuff at the conference?”
“We did,” Royal nodded and tossed some pamphlets onto the table.
All but two of my brothers had gone to Dallas for a builders conference. I had planned to go with them, but stayed behind to watch the twins since Finn and Lena were both sick. Angus was newly engaged and hadn’t left his house at all over the weekend, enjoying his time with his fiancée.
“Did you have any fun down in Dallas?”
“Of course,” Ronan smiled.
Royal shook his head.
“Chess and I were the only ones left standing,” Ronan laughed. “Tavin and Royal stayed in the hotel with the same shit Finn and Lena had.”
“Damn,” I wrinkled my nose. “At least two of y’all had a good time.”
“I drank a lot. Figured if I had the virus in me, the alcohol would kill it,” Ronan said as he twisted the top off a beer and slid it across to me. At just the sound of it, Royal’s face turned a little green.
“I don’t need that shit,” I said as I took a swig of the cold beer. “I walked out onto the porch for some fresh air and I swear the sounds were enough to scar me for life. I could hear Violet and Angus making sex noises on one side and Finn and Lena puking up their guts on the other. It was traumatizing.”
Ronan and Royal both laughed, but they understood what I was saying.
Years ago, our parents had bought a huge parcel of land. They’d built the office of the construction company they ran together and also the house we’d grown up in. As we all graduated from college and came back home to join the family business, we each received a section of land to build our own home. With help from our parents and brothers, we’d built our dream homes.
We’d gone from living in the same house, off to college, and then home to live on the same street as our siblings.
I loved the setup we had. If I needed time alone, I had my own house to stay in, but if I ever wanted to talk to someone, my siblings were close by.
Although sometimes we heard things we didn’t really want to hear.
Like our brother Angus and his new fiancée celebrating their engagement and our brother Finn and his fiancée puking up their guts.
“Lena and Finn are going to start going through Bellamy’s house this evening. I thought the three of us might start on Greer’s,” Royal said quietly as he stared down at the table.
“Okay,” I agreed. “I have to make a phone call at 9, so I’d like to be home by then. If we head over there now, we’ll have almost five hours.”
“Yeah,” Ronan nodded before he chugged the last of the beer in his bottle and then grabbed a second one. “Let’s get started.”
Almost six months ago, our parents, brother-in-law, and two sisters were killed in a car accident on the way to a doctor’s appointment. Bellamy and Dylan were expecting twins and our parents and sister Greer were going with them to find out the sex of the babies.
Our parents and Dylan had died on the scene, but Bellamy and Greer had lived on life support. Greer only for a few days, but Bellamy had lived on life support for quite a while until her babies were big enough to be born. The day they came into the world, Bellamy, Finn’s twin sister, left it. Our family was still adjusting to the loss and working through our grief.
We’d decided at a family meeting a few days ago that we would clean out Greer, Bellamy, and our parent’s houses so that Angus’s fiancée's family could move into them. Violet’s sisters, London and Liberty, would be moving onto our street as soon as we got the houses ready.
And in order to do that, we needed to pack up the lives of our siblings and our parents.
It was not a task that any of us were ready for, but it was necessary. Right now, all three houses stood just the way they’d been left the morning our family members had died - almost like shrines to what we’d lost.
We needed to pack away their things and start to move on with our lives.
“Let’s go,” I said as I stood up. “If we don’t go now, I might talk myself out of it.”
“Same,” Royal muttered. “I am not ready for this.”
“I don’t think any of us are,” Ronan said quietly. “But it has to be done.”
“I met someone,” I blurted out in an effort to lighten the mood. “Her name’s Reba.”
“Lena’s physical therapist?” Royal asked me. “I hear she’s hot.”
“Yeah,” I chuckled. “I had coffee with her after I picked up Lena from her appointment last week. Lena left and we stayed there for a few hours talking. It was nice.”
“Nice?” Ronan chuckled.
“What? Do you think I should have banged her on the fucking table?” I growled.
“No,” Ronan was laughing now. “Funny how you’re all prickly about it though.”
“Kiss my ass,” I glared at him.
“Is that who you’re calling at 9:00?” Royal asked me.
“Yeah,” I couldn’t help but smile. “I’m going to call her at 9:01, because she has her kids in bed by 9:00.”
“I need to take Lena to her next appointment so I can meet this girl,” Ronan said as we headed up the steps leading into our sister Greer’s house.
“I’ve never met her either, but I’ve heard Lena call her names before,” Royal told his twin. “Maybe I’ll go with you to take Lena so I can get eyes on her too.”
“Both of you stay away,” I growled. “This one’s mine.”
“Listen to
little brother growl,” Royal laughed. “Isn’t he cute?”
“He sure is,” Ronan put his hands out as if he was going to pinch my cheeks and I slapped them away. “Look at him crushing on a girl.”
“Awww,” Royal teased.
“Both of you can kiss my ass. Talking to you two makes me realize why Angus hates people.”
◆◆◆
“Hello,” Reba’s sexy voice came over the line and I realized she was out of breath.
“Should I have given you more time?” I asked her.
“Oh, no. This is fine,” Reba laughed softly. “I was rushing around making sure everything was close at hand while I talked to you.”
“Close at hand?”
“I’m going to enjoy our conversation while I drink some wine and enjoy a bubble bath.”
“Oh, really?” An image of Reba covered only in bubbles took over my brain and it was all I could do not to stutter. “That sounds relaxing.”
“It does, doesn’t it?”
“So tell me about your day,” I started. “Anything awesome happen?”
“Hmm,” Reba hummed. “Nothing really awesome, but nothing really bad either. It was just stressful. I have a few new patients and one of their moms is going to give me fits. I can already tell.”
“At least it wasn’t a horrible day, I guess. I think talking to you is an awesome ending.”
“Oh, yes!” Reba hurried. “You’re right. I am very happy to hear from you. I wondered about you over the weekend.”
“Sorry about that.”
“No apology necessary,” Reba laughed. “I’ve heard how much hard work those twins are.”
I could hear the water splashing around as Reba moved and I wondered if she was stepping into the tub. I heard her hiss and guessed that the water was too warm. Then I imagined her lush body naked and almost swallowed my own tongue.
“Are you there?”
“Yeah,” I laughed. “Sorry, I got sidetracked thinking of something.”
