Long and Hard: A Bad Boy Box Set

by Lulu Pratt

  I sigh as I head in the direction of the place that I least want to be in the entire world. Ethan will probably already be there with Riley, and I’ll have to talk to him, deal with him every day, for hours, until I have to go back to my apartment in the city, and back to my normal life. In spite of how much I’ve resented him, right along with Alexis, I can’t deny that he’s a good and loving father. The only conversations he and I had face to face in the last couple of months were about Riley.

  There’s nothing that I need to be thinking about at the moment except for how we’re going to manage to both raise Riley when we have to remain separated. I push any thought about what we’d been like before things went so badly between us out of my mind and focus on the fact that I’ll have several days with my niece. That, at least, will be one good thing to come out of this horrible trash heap of a week.

  Chapter Four

  ETHAN

  THINGS ARE already a little tense when Lara gets to the house, and I’m almost ready to make an excuse and leave. But with Alexis gone, and everything going on, I know I have to stay. I have to get through it.

  Riley’s down for a nap, and Nathan is in the kitchen reheating some of the food that people brought for the family. The numbness that has become second nature pushes down any emotional reactions I might have. In spite of myself I end up almost staring at Lara as she takes off her shoes. I just freeze there thinking what if it was Alexis instead of Lara untying her shoe.

  Alexis and Lara were always as different as they could possibly be. Lara was always the serious one, while Alexis was the fun, popular one. Where my wife had been blonde with green eyes and a small frame, Lara has dark brown hair and gray-blue eyes.

  “Hey,” I say, feeling awkward.

  “Riley’s down for a nap?” Lara almost sounds disappointed, and I can’t really blame her.

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you staying in Alexis’ room, or the guest room?” Lara crosses her arms over her chest and looks around the living room, like she’s trying to find the best way to escape.

  “Riley’s napping in Alexis’ room, but I think… it’s probably for the best for us to actually stay in the guest room,” I say. I put my daughter down to sleep in Alexis’ old bed, and just being in the room had been almost too much to take. Seeing all the reminders of her had been enough to drive me out of there as soon as Riley was asleep.

  “Too many memories?” Lara gives me a look as she steps over to the couch, and there’s a lot in it — anger, worry.

  “Something like that,” I say, watching her sit down. I take a chair, not quite on the other side of the living room, but close enough.

  “So, I guess we should talk a bit about… you know… how we’re going to do this,” Lara says.

  “Do this?” I’m so distracted by so many thoughts of what has happened in the last week that I can’t even figure out what she means.

  “Raise Riley together,” Lara says.

  “Oh, oh, right,” I say, nodding.

  “Because… I mean, it’s not like we live in the same town anymore,” Lara points out.

  “That’s true,” I agree.

  “So, we need to figure out how we’re both going to get time with her, and make this work.” Lara sighs.

  “How are you feeling about what Alexis wanted?”

  That’s a big question that’s been on my mind since the reading of the will. When Alexis and I had made the provision to have Lara in our daughter’s life if Alexis were to die, it didn’t seem that complicated. We’d made the change back after last Christmas, when Alexis was sure that we’d have plenty of time to talk to Lara about it, and when she had new hope that maybe, somehow, Riley could bring the family back together.

  “I don’t know,” Lara says. She scrubs at her face and shakes her head.

  “You don’t want to be in Riley’s life?” I ask. That thought had occurred to me more than once, too little, too late, but I’m terrified of it now. How am I even going to begin to take care of Riley on my own?

  “I do, I do,” Lara says. “I love her, and she needs a mother. It also means that she is connected to her maternal family. I feel honored to have been asked… it’s just a bit of a shock,” she sighs.

  “I know. We were hoping to talk to you about this this weekend. But, what is it then?” I ask.

  Lara pulls her hands away from her face and gives me a brittle little smile. “I don’t want to deal with you,” she says.

  I stare at her for a moment. I know I should have been expecting this. After all, there’s a reason that Lara pushed Alexis and me out of her life. And I have to admit that I could somewhat see the point in it. I should have been expecting it, even if she was the one who’d broken up with me. But to me, at least, it feels like her excuse to be bitter at both Alexis and me got old a long time ago.

  “I get that, I guess,” I say. What else can I say?

  “I don’t want to have anything to do with you. I haven’t since…” Lara presses her lips together and closes her eyes.

  “I know,” I say quietly.

  “But this has to be about Riley,” Lara says. She takes a deep breath and exhales slowly.

  The atmosphere in the room is heavy and I can hear Nathan banging a few pots together. I have to somehow make this work for Riley.

  “What is your work schedule like?” I ask.

  “I’ll need to get together with my bosses, but some of the people at the office work from home two or three days a week, and with what I do it’s not hard to get approval, as long as I turn in my work on time,” Lara says.

  “You know… I don’t even know what you do,” I say. I realize that I have no real idea even what Lara does, since she cut Alexis and me out of her life completely, I know next to nothing about her.

  Lara shrugs. “I do website design, and some graphic design,” she says.

  “Still lost,” I tell her with a little awkward grin. Lara rolls her eyes and smiles a little, but she’s beginning to relax, at least a little bit.

  “Anyway, the important thing is that I can figure out a few days a week where I can have Riley. That way maybe you won’t have to keep her in daycare or whatever,” she says.

  “Alexis and I didn’t want to put Riley in daycare for a while. We feel… felt she was too young. We wanted her to be raised at home for a while. Your sister loved being a mom. Becoming a mom and having Riley around made her so happy.”

  I look out the window for a few moments. I am aware that the woman in the room with me probably hates me more than any other person alive.

  Chapter Five

  LARA

  I DON’T KNOW how much more of this I can deal with. I want to get out of the living room, I want to leave the house altogether, actually, but I know I have to be mature and handle the situation. I have to do what’s right.

  “I can see if I can move my schedule around too,” Ethan says in a quiet voice, and I nod. At least, I think, we’re both trying to accommodate this incredible mess that Alexis’ death has made in our lives.

  “I guess we can figure out a way to do things. Me taking a couple of days a week off, you having her maybe one day during the workweek and on weekends, something like that,” I say.

  Dad comes into the living room and if I didn’t know better I would never have suspected that only about an hour before he’d been begging me to take the issue to family court and sue for full custody of my niece. He’s smiling as much as he’s capable of, telling us that he reheated some of the lasagna and the big, honey-glazed ham that the Jeffersons dropped off, along with the Giuseppes’ casserole, that there’s plenty to eat.

  “It’ll be good to all be together another couple of days,” Dad says, sitting down with a beer he brought with him from the kitchen. More than anything I’d like to grab a glass or two of wine. I’m definitely feeling the strain of having to actually interact with Ethan, but I know I need to keep my mind sharp, even if it makes everything more painful.

  We start talking
about the next few days. I have to get through this, for Riley and for myself. I volunteer to help Ethan come up with child care options back in the town that he and Alexis moved to, and Dad suggests that he or Ethan’s parents can take Riley a couple of days during the week, if neither Ethan or I can cover things. I go along with it, but I feel like there’s some kind of risk in Dad having too much time watching Riley by himself. He has only been on his own for a few months and I am sure the death of Mom aged him.

  After a while though, I just want to get a hot bath and forget about everything that’s happened in the past week. One thing I missed about my parents’ house in the time I was estranged was the bathtub my parents had had installed in the bathroom that Alexis and I shared growing up. It was huge, deep and wide, big enough, I used to imagine, for two people to enjoy it at the same time.

  “I’m going to head up and take a bath, I think,” I say, getting up from the couch. I take my plate and Dad’s plate into the kitchen and rinse them off. I’m sure that by the time I get back downstairs, after my bath, Dad will have done his part of the old-fashioned kitchen chores, putting the leftovers away, and I’ll have the actual dishes to do. Fortunately, when Mom started getting sick, he had a dishwasher installed, so at least it won’t be that much trouble.

  I carry my suitcase upstairs to my old room and look around. The few times I’ve been back in town, I’ve stayed in hotels. The idea of having to be under the same roof as my sister for any period of time longer than a few hours was just absolutely intolerable to me.

  I grab a towel out of the linen closet and start to the bathroom, but I can’t help stopping just outside my sister’s room, listening intently for any sign that Riley might be awake. Almost against my will, even as I’m standing there, I find myself thinking about all the things that came up between Alexis and me that led to me cutting her out completely.

  We’d been so close when we were growing up. According to my mom, Alexis had been so happy to have a little sister, so overjoyed to meet me, and then she’d been a good playmate as soon as I was able to walk. Apparently my first word was “Lex,” my baby nickname for her.

  By the time we were both in school, we were different enough that there was never a real competition between us. I was the one teachers always considered serious and studious, and Alexis was the one who made friends wherever she went, who did well enough in class to hold a 3.0 average but was never really interested in doing better.

  I should have known there would be an issue when Ethan and I were dating in high school. I still don’t know, to this day, why I was so attracted to him right from the start. In freshman year, he tried out for a play I was working on with the theater club as a joke, and then just kind of stuck around. While I helped the upperclassmen designing and building sets, he would bother the hell out of me, teasing me relentlessly. He should have been the last guy I ever chose to date. He skipped classes regularly, he’d been suspended from school more than once in freshman year alone.

  But I had to admit he was fun. And when one of the upperclassmen in theater club tried to take credit for something I’d come up with, Ethan stuck up for me, proving to the teacher-sponsor that it had been my idea. So, when he’d asked me out to the homecoming dance, I’d said yes.

  And when Alexis had met him the night of the dance, she’d flirted with him. At the time I just rolled my eyes and Ethan was polite to her. I never thought that I needed to keep an eye on either of them. If I remember correctly, the following week Alexis started hanging out with another boy, so she was just a born flirt.

  I shake my head and step away from Alexis’ room, forcing myself to go to the bathroom, to take the bath I promised myself. Ethan never ever did anything to show that he was even remotely interested in Alexis while we dated all through high school. He practically ignored her. That was part of why it had come as such a shock that he’d hooked up with her years later.

  I head into the bathroom, trying to push any thought of Ethan out of my mind. Seeing him again, without my sister at his side, had thrown me into a tailspin. I need to get my bearings. He’s actually looking really good, some quiet little voice in my head points out, but even thinking about him that way turns my stomach. How can I think the guy who broke my heart is looking good? Especially when he’s in mourning for my sister? It’s wrong, I’m obviously just under too much stress, reacting to the news that my sister wanted me to take care of her daughter if she died.

  I turn on the water and close the door and start taking off my clothes, intent on putting Ethan, as well as the situation with raising Riley together, out of my mind for at least an hour.

  Chapter Six

  LARA

  I’M IN BED, and in spite of the long bath, my legs still feel heavy and sore, my arms a little achy, but I can’t fall asleep no matter how I try. I’m just too restless. I turn over onto my side and try to not think about Ethan, only a few doors down the hall away from me.

  I wanted, and want, nothing at all to do with Ethan. My sister’s request in her will means that if I honor it, which seems like the best decision for everyone, I’ll have to talk to Ethan, and be involved in his life on at least a weekly basis, if not more often than that.

  I finally figure that there’s no way I’m going to get to sleep any time soon, and decide that it would be better to just go downstairs to the living room and maybe read or watch TV for a little bit, until my mind is a bit more at ease.

  I get out of the bed and pad out of my room, listening hard to make sure that I’m the only one awake in the house. I can’t hear Dad, or Riley, and by now I assume that Ethan has gone to sleep with his daughter, so I should be in the clear. I have no idea what books Dad still has hanging around, but there should be something worth reading.

  But as I get to the bottom of the stairs, I see light coming from the living room and sigh to myself. Dad must have left the lamp on, I think as I reach the end of the stairs. Of course, I remind myself quickly, that just means that it’s more convenient for me to read something, and there’s no risk of running into the coffee table or anything like that.

  Instead, I see Ethan sitting in the living room, looking at something on his phone. I consider retreating back up the stairs, pretending nothing happened, and maybe taking another bath in the hopes that the second one will make me fall asleep. Ethan looks up from his phone and that option evaporates.

  “Hey,” I say quietly.

  “Oh, hey,” Ethan says. “I didn’t wake you up coming down here, did I?”

  I shake my head. “No, I just couldn’t sleep,” I admit. I sit down on the couch and immediately feel uncomfortable.

  “Yeah, same,” Ethan tells me. I look at him and notice how the past week has changed him. Ethan is a tall muscular guy with dark brown hair and hazel eyes. He usually had a smile on his face, but after what he’s been through, I can tell that he is carrying the weight of everyone and everything on his shoulders.

  “It’s gotta be hard, after…” I press my lips together.

  “I’m just used to her being there, you know?”

  I nod at Ethan’s statement because just the thought of it makes me want to cry. I’m not even sure anymore if I’m more upset for him, and Riley, or at the fact that I’m having to relive some of the worst moments of my life, of when I found out that Ethan and Alexis had hooked up.

  “Riley’s sleeping okay?”

  Ethan picks up a baby monitor and waggles it with a wry smile. “How are you holding up, Lara?”

  I think about it for a moment and don’t really know what to say. “I’m… okay, I guess,” I say finally, a little touched that he asks after me considering that his entire world has just been rocked and nothing will ever be the same.

  I look around the living room and all I can think of is the day I found out that Alexis had seeing Ethan. I’d come home after getting my degree, and right there in the living room, Alexis and Ethan had been just talking, my sister with my ex-boyfriend on the couch. That was how I found out. No
one had seen fit to tell me beforehand.

  I found out shortly afterwards that she was pregnant. I never asked, but I was under the impression that it happened very early on their relationship and might not have been planned. By that point, I was not talking to Alexis and or my parents, so I never asked, and it was too painful to bring up. I now realize that, for my parents, their daughter was pregnant and unmarried at the time, and she needed her parents’ support.

  A few weeks after learning that Alexis was expecting Ethan’s child, I was invited to their wedding. A small affair that I refused to go to. My parents were furious with me, but I felt betrayed and embarrassed. The rift that had started with Alexis and Ethan dating, and then the pregnancy, grew into an estrangement with the marriage. The only reason I got back in touch with my parents was when my mother told me she was ill and likely not to live to see her granddaughter’s first birthday.

  I take a deep breath, this is obviously not the time to rehash any of that. It’s not worth it, even if I had wanted to talk to Ethan about how betrayed I’d felt, how hurt.

  “It’s a good thing we don’t live that far apart,” Ethan says quietly, and I shrug. As soon as I could, I’d found a place to live in the next town over, closer to where I work, and when Ethan and Alexis had gotten married, they’d gotten a place the next town over in the other direction. I’d known about that, but I’d never visited them. In fact, from the time I’d found out about them dating, and Alexis and I had our massive fight over it, I’d stayed away from even my parents’ house.

  “It’ll make it easier for Riley,” I agree, for the sake of agreeing. Ethan’s going through enough right now, and even if I don’t know if I can ever really forgive him, I don’t really have any cause to make things worse.

  “There are just so many things… I can’t even imagine what it will be like, being a single father,” Ethan says, and there’s a sound in his voice like his throat is closing up.