by Violet Paige
“Well, it’s an apartment, actually,” I said. “I can’t fit my whole apartment in a suitcase and take it with me to California.”
“Why not? Is it a really big apartment?” she asked, endlessly persistent.
Bruin rolled his eyes. “Emma, that’s probably enough questions, honey.”
“Oh, I don’t mind,” I said quickly. Emma grinned at me fondly.
“I like you,” she said. “You’re nice.”
“Well, thank you. I like you, too,” I told her.
This conversation, if you could really call it that, was going in circles. But I expected that was probably pretty par for the course with a toddler. Emma scooped out and ate a big bite of melty ice cream.
Bruin mouthed the word “sorry” at me but I just shrugged, smiling back. The truth was, I was really enjoying interacting with Emma. I had never spent very much time around kids. None of my friends had babies yet, and most of my clients were well into middle age, so their kids were usually grown up and out of the picture. Jeff rarely made time for dating, much less getting into a serious relationship that could involve a kid. I was the younger of the two of us, so I never had a little brother or sister, either. I had always expected to kind of hate hanging out with a little kid. I had no idea what to talk to them about, what kinds of things they were into. Half the time I couldn’t even properly guess how old a child was without being told explicitly.
But Emma was cool. At least, she was cool for a three-year-old. She really was like a very small, very chatty, girly version of Bruin in a lot of ways. She didn’t mince her words, saying exactly what was on her mind, even if it was awkward to say. She was upfront about what she wanted, even if it didn’t make sense to other people. Like the rainbow sprinkles. I was sure she knew perfectly well that they would be crunchy, but she wanted them for their aesthetic value. It was silly, but I kind of understood it. At my apartment, I had an old-fashioned vintage alarm clock in my bedroom. I never used it because I just used my phone as an alarm. But I kept it around because I liked the look of it.
Ugh, here I was, finding common ground with a literal toddler. Who was I anymore?
Meanwhile, Emma was singing some made-up song about ice cream. Bruin and I both laughed when she rhymed “spoon” with “moon” and that seemed to delight her. She grinned, her chocolatey little face radiant with joy. I could feel my heart swelling with fondness for her already. It was difficult not to adore her, she was so cute. And the fact that she was like a little Bruin clone certainly helped.
“You about ready to head out, Em?” he asked her. She looked into her bowl of melted ice cream with a serious expression, like she was doing some crazy calculations in her head. Bruin was biting his lip to stop from laughing.
Finally, she looked up at us both and nodded, setting her spoon down with a clink.
“I’m done,” she announced.
“Okay. Good. You’re one slow eater, you know that?” Bruin said, picking up her bowl and spoon and dropping them in the trash. He offered her his hand and she took it. Then she turned and reached for me. My heart skipped a beat. God, she was adorable.
I took her other hand and she laughed with joy. “Swing me!” she exclaimed.
Bruin and I lifted her up and swung her a few times once we walked out of the ice cream shop and into the parking lot. She giggled and kicked her feet, looking up at us with overflowing happiness. It was late afternoon, the sun just sort of beginning to decline toward the horizon. The sky was streaked with pink and purple, the world around us cast in that gorgeous golden glow that always happened this time of day. We piled into Bruin’s rented Mercedes, Bruin strapping Emma neatly and carefully into her car seat.
“Daddy, where’s my pony?” she asked as we started to pull out of the parking lot. I shot Bruin a dubious look. I knew he had serious money, but he didn’t really buy her a pony, did he?
“Relax,” he said quietly to me, smirking. “It’s a toy pony.”
“Pony, pony!” Emma chanted, kicking her legs.
“Miss Whinny is back at the house, Em,” he told her.
“Aww,” she whined, poking out her bottom lip.
“You’ll be reunited with her soon, okay? Just be patient a little longer,” he said.
“Daddy?” she chirped.
“Yes, princess?” he answered. The car pulled out into dense traffic.
“What does patient mean?” she asked.
“You want to take this one?” Bruin asked me in an undertone. I blushed. I had no idea how to explain something like patience to a child. Or even really to an adult, for that matter.
“Uhh,” I began awkwardly, wracking my brain for an example. “It’s like… when you have to wait for something for a long time.”
“Yeah?” Emma prompted me to continue.
“So, you’re waiting and waiting and it feels like you’ve been waiting forever, right?” I added, glancing at Emma in the rearview mirror. She looked very contemplative for someone who could hardly even read yet. She nodded.
“I hate waiting,” she said solemnly.
“I know. Me, too. It’s hard to wait when you want something really bad,” I said.
“Or when you’re really bored,” Emma burst out.
“Yeah. That works, too,” I said, laughing. “It’s hard to wait. But sometimes you have to.”
“Why?” the little girl asked again, for the umpteenth time today. Bruin sighed, but I just smiled and turned to look at her. She wasn’t joking around. She really wanted to understand.
“Because life is long,” I said softly. “And sometimes there are times when it feels really long. And you might want to skip the boring stuff or the scary stuff or the sad stuff, but instead you have to wait. And just know in your heart that things are going to change once the bad stuff ends. But until then, you have to smile and be happy anyway. And that’s called being patient.”
Emma stared at me, and I could almost see the little cogs turning in her head as she genuinely considered the meaning of my words. Then she perked up and said, “You’re smart.”
I laughed. “Thank you. I think you’re pretty smart yourself.”
Emma looked positively elated at the compliment. “I can count to ten,” she bragged.
“Wow! That’s really impressive,” I told her.
“She can spell her name, too,” Bruin added, with a twinge of pride.
“E-M-M-A,” she announced, clapping with every letter.
“Good job,” I said, smiling so hard my cheeks almost hurt.
“How do you spell Jillian?” she asked. I spelled it for her and she was so amazed, she then asked me to spell Bruin, patient, ice cream, and rainbow. I spelled them all for her and she seemed truly fascinated by my ability.
“I wanna learn to spell,” she said, a hint of envy in her tone.
Bruin looked at me happily. “Fostering a desire to learn. You’re a real natural with little kids, you know?” he said with a smirk. I rolled my eyes.
“Have you heard how many times she’s asked ‘why?’ I’m pretty sure the desire to learn is already more than present,” I laughed.
“Daddy, I don’t wanna go home yet,” Emma said suddenly. Bruin frowned.
“Why not, honey?” he asked.
She pouted. “Because then Jillian will go away.”
My heart was breaking. Bruin glanced at me sadly. “Well, she has a job to do. And like I said, she doesn’t live here. She lives in Georgia.”
“How far away is Georgia?” she pressed on.
“It’s on the other side of the country. What’s the name of our country, honey?” he asked, clearly hoping to distract her with trivia.
“A-mer-i-ca,” she said, emphasizing every syllable.
“Good job!” he said.
“I don’t like Georgia,” Emma declared.
“You’ve never even been there,” Bruin said. I had a feeling what she was about to say.
“I want Jillian to stay,” she said firmly.
Just then, my phone went off. There was a business meeting happening tomorrow evening back in Atlanta. I was expected to attend. Bruin caught me looking at my phone.
“Duty calls?” he asked quietly. I nodded.
“Unfortunately,” I replied. “I need to be on a flight tonight, Bruin.”
“I understand,” he said. “I need to take Emma home. It’ll be her bedtime in a couple hours. Can I call you a car to take you back to San Diego?”
“Yeah. That would be great.”
“Jillian, don’t go,” Emma said, her big blue eyes blurry with tears. It pained me to see her so sad, but I reminded myself that she wasn’t my child. I wasn’t abandoning her. I had a job to do. A life to live on the other side of the continent.
So I gave her a reassuring smile and said, “Emma, you remember what patient means?”
She nodded sadly, sniffling.
“You’ll see me again, okay? But for now, you have to be patient.”
Later that night I was on a red-eye flight back to Atlanta. It was with a heavy heart that I boarded the plane, feeling somehow like I was walking out on something very important. But what was the problem? Sure, I’d had a wonderful time in California. I’d made a huge sale. I’d had amazing sex. And I got to meet the most adorable little girl on the planet. And now I had to go back to my job. The job I loved, that gave me an amazing lifestyle.
What was I so sad about?
When the plane landed, I called a cab to take me home. I was exhausted, my mind racing in a million directions as I tried to work through my feelings. There was so much going on right now, it was hard to make heads or tails of it. I was so caught up in my thoughts that it took me awhile to remember to check my phone.
When I did, I found that I had several missed calls. From a number I didn’t recognize.
I frowned, confused. I dialed the number for my voicemail box and listened to the one solitary message left there. It was a familiar male voice, but it wasn’t Jeff or Bruin.
“Jillian? Hey. It’s me. I know it’s been forever since we last spoke, but I needed to call you. It’s important. I’m in town this week for work and I need to see you. There’s something I want to talk to you about, and it’s urgent. Can you meet me? This is Danny. Danny Fields.”
“No new messages,” said the phone recording. I hung up and dropped the phone in my lap as the cab pulled up in front of my building.
Holy shit. My ex-boyfriend was in town. And it was urgent.
23
Bruin
“Now, you can hear about the size of these things all you want, but it’s an entirely different experience to actually be there and see one in the flesh.” I said, drew out every word carefully for dramatic effect.
I was at a business dinner with a few old colleagues and some potential new clients. We were sitting around a dinner table at one of the high-end sushi restaurants in Santa Barbara, and I had the entire table watching me with rapt attention. I had a few stories I used to entertain new business associates, but the one about my Alaskan hunting trip with Rhett was one of my favorites.
I even had the young waitress’s attention.
“At this point, I still hadn’t been face-to-face with a bull moose,” I retold the story. “And Rhett and I had a local guide to help navigate the brush. When we caught sight of this monster, it was big enough that I thought the guide’s eyes were going to pop out of his head.”
There was a light laughter around the table as I talked.
“This was October, and I don’t know about Rhett, but for a California boy like me, well, my fingertips were numb already,” I said with a grin. “But seeing it made our blood run hot. There’s no feeling so primal as being confronted with an animal like that, the kind that really makes it hit home that Alaska is an entirely different world.”
A few of the other men at the table who’d hunted nodded in agreement.
“So, I had my muzzle-loader ready, I could practically feel my whole body go still.” There was perfect silence in the room. “And that’s when the calf we hadn’t noticed behind us snorted.”
Eyes went wide around the room. I grinned.
“The giant was maybe ten feet in front of us, and as soon as it heard the calf, it turned, saw us, and it bent its head and charged. I’d never seen something barreling toward me that fast. Rhett and I dove out of the way, and as soon as the crashing sound of almost two tons of animal barreled past us, we were back up and aiming.”
I winked at Rhett, who happened to be sitting across from me, his arms crossed and a grin on his face. We always told the story a little differently. It was an ongoing competition between us.
“And there’s still some debate about who got the shot off first, but we both fired, and the sound of that thing crashing into the ground is still fresh in my memory.”
There was a scattered, impressed murmur throughout the room as the men nodded approvingly, and the waitress took the distraction to hide her blushing face, making her way out of the room to get more drinks for us.
“Where in Alaska was this?” asked Mr. Tanaka, one of the potential new clients at the table.
“Just off the Stikine River in the southeast,” I explained, picking up a piece of nigiri. “I’ll send you the name of my guide, if you’re interested.”
“I should say I am,” he said with a laugh, exchanging nods with some of the other men around him.
“I think Bruin understates my contributions,” Rhett said in a half-joking tone, and there was a laugh around the table, “but I’ll let him have this one.”
“If you ask me,” one of my colleagues next to me said, nodding toward the door out of our private room, “that waitress would let you have her, too.”
There were some laughs and nods of agreement around the table, and I smiled politely, rolling my eyes while I took a bite of the sushi.
“Leave her a tip, and she’ll come back for more,” another said.
“Come on, where’s the hot-blooded Bruin I know?” Rhett said.
“I’m catching a redeye flight,” I lied, giving Rhett a meaningful glance, and he quirked an eyebrow for a moment, but he caught on.
The waitress returned and started serving drinks. Rhett said something flirtatiously to her while the other men took a moment to enjoy their drinks and eat in the break in conversation, but I couldn’t focus on any of that.
Truth be told, I was surprised I’d been able to focus on this dinner at all. I was still rocking it, but it took a lot more willpower than usual.
These were my regular hunting grounds. I could charm anyone, seal any deal, no matter whether the businesspeople were men or women, foreign or local, friendly or hostile. It was the kind of environment I thrived in, and I got energized by it all.
So, why did this feel like an uphill slog that I couldn’t wait to end?
I knew why, of course. Ever since Jillian had left for Atlanta I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Every night that I laid down, all I could think about was how I wanted Jillian there at my side. I wanted to turn her over and fuck her sweet and hard all at the same time until the two of us were panting at each other’s sides, drifting off into sleep with our energy spent on each other. And when I woke up, I wanted to see Jillian’s face next to mine, those gorgeous green eyes fluttering open sleepily before I took her out to brunch at whatever place became her favorite.
I wanted to see her playing with Emma, to take them all on vacations down to Cozumel, St. Martin, Costa Rica, anywhere they wanted. I wanted us to do it together, too.
I had to face the facts. Jillian had changed me, in a major way. None of that would have been on my mind a few weeks ago. Well, except the sex, but that was only getting better over time.
When I stood in the master bedroom’s shower, steam rolling down my muscled shoulders, I still couldn’t believe that shy, awkward Jilly had become the woman that I—
I stopped myself short at the thought of the word that was at the front of my mind. The L-word.
“Bruin?” a voice called to me, and I gave my head a shake, snapping out of my trance.
One of my friends was looking at me with a puzzled look. “You all right, pal? Wanted to know if you wanted another sake.”
“Please,” I answered with a nod, smiling at the waitress, who was waiting patiently beside my friend. She gave an overly-bright smile and hurried off.
She was short and slim, with jet-black hair and a face that men would kill for. She couldn’t have been older than twenty-one, and she had a smile that could light up the room.
And I felt nothing for her.
The old me would have been all over her, giving her the night of her life and something to talk about for the next few months, something to make other men seem inadequate by comparison. But Jillian had changed all that, and I knew it.
And every time I thought about that, it took me out of the present.
I pulled myself together and passed the rest of the dinner as well as ever. I chatted about hunting a little more with Mr. Tanaka, reminisced about our soccer days with Rhett, and built rapport like the expert I was. As long as I could keep my mind off Jillian, I had complete control over every word that was said at the dinner, even when some of the lightweights at the table started to feel the one-too-many sakes that were going around.
When the dinner finally wound down, I had the bill put on my card and exchanged a lot of handshakes and a lot of bows with the businessmen as we headed outside into the cool evening air. Rhett hung back, presumably to chat up the waitress. Some of the men were wobbly already, and they got into cabs and headed their separate ways after many promises of more lunches and dinners, more meetings, and some promising prospects for a business deal in the near future. As usual, they were interested in purchasing some of the software we were developing as part of the empire I’d been building over the past few years.
As well-padded as my finances were, I knew I had to get my head out of this funk, or business would start to suffer.
When most of the men were gone, I started to head around the building for a quick walk to clear my head, but I felt a clap on my shoulder.
