by C. M. Albert
I looked down at the beautiful, plump puppy and couldn’t imagine anyone ever thinking he was ugly. I kissed the top of his head and closed my eyes, inhaling his sweet puppy smell.
“Ever watch the Disney movie Lilo & Stitch?” she asked. When I shook my head no, she continued. “Hawaiian girl named Lilo adopts what she thinks is a small, ugly dog, but it turns out to be a genetic experiment from an alien planet that was made to cause chaos and destruction. Trust me—it gets better,” she said, laughing when she saw my horrified face.
“In Hawaii, there’s a concept called ohana, which means family. Because Lilo’s heart is so open, she teaches Stitch to care about others through her own acts of faith, love, and this idea of ohana. She understood that sometimes your family may not look the way you planned, or be the one you were born into, but it’s even better, because it’s the one you create. Stitch was our reminder that even the littlest runt is an important part of our ohana.”
“Well, shit,” I said, tears dripping from the corner of my eyes and onto my cheeks. Stitch chose that moment to stand on his hind legs and place the soft pads of his paws right onto my face. Then he licked the tears, and my nose, and my mouth until I was laughing and had to pull him away. When our eyes met, I knew. Yeah, he most definitely wasn’t the family I imagined, but maybe he was the one I needed right now.
“So, what’dya think?” Regina asked.
I would never say it to anyone else, but what I was really thinking was that maybe the little fur ball would be the one to finally stitch my broken heart back together again. I smiled, looking up at Ryan when I answered her.
“You had me at ohana.”
Chapter 3
Ryan
WHEN WE PULLED into our driveway, it was well past dinnertime. Olivia attached a leash onto the body harness Regina gave us and took Stitch to the backyard to do his business. Luckily, our corner lot had a white picket fence (yeah, I know) surrounding the backyard, and I could already see Liv and Stitch spending hours there together. I had a feeling the little runt might be just the thing we needed to pull Liv out of her funk.
I was shutting the trunk of my Jeep Grand Cherokee when I looked up, noticing a couple of work trucks in the driveway next door at the Kerrington property again. “Huh,” I said, lifting the small box of dog supplies Regina had gifted us with.
A young guy came bounding down the front steps of the historic property, no shirt on, his T-shirt slung casually over his extremely sculpted shoulders. He nodded his head toward me.
“Hey, man. This your house?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, setting the box onto the hood of my SUV and making my way across the yard. I extended my hand to say hello.
The guy was a lot bigger up close, and not quite as young as I’d first thought. He shook my hand firmly.
“Brighton,” he said, his jaw a little too sharp and square for my liking, but his eyes were kind enough, saving him from the whole douchey asshole vibe.
“Ryan,” I said, squeezing his hand back just as firmly. “You doing some work over there?”
“Oh, yeah. It was my uncle’s place. The family’s doing some renovations this summer. Probably putting it on the market in the fall,” he said. “Thing sat here empty for way too long.”
“We were wondering if anyone was gonna fix the place up,” I said, glad to hear the dilapidated property was getting restored to its former glory. That was one of the reasons why Liv and I loved ours so much. There’s character in an older home. “Always wondered what it looked like in there after being vacant so long.”
“Wanna come take a look?” the guy asked, using his shirt to wipe his brow.
“We’d love to sometime,” I said. “But you look like you’ve put in a long day. And we just got back home with a new puppy, so I should probably go give my wife a hand.”
“Nice,” the guy said, looking over my shoulder. Liv was standing in the backyard, holding onto a small rope toy and teasing the puppy as it jumped to capture it with his mouth. Liv’s face was flush with pleasure for the first time in almost a year. She was breathtaking with her long, blond hair falling in waves down her back. The smile I’d missed so much brought out the dimples on each side of her full mouth, giving her the quintessential girl-next-door vibe, even though she was every inch a woman. From the look in Brighton’s eyes, he hadn’t missed how captivating she was either.
“What a cute dog” was all he said. But a man’s not stupid. He can tell when another guy is checking out his wife.
I drank in her energy, unsure when I would see it again. It was almost like having the old Liv back. I could hardly blame the guy.
“It’s gonna take some getting used to,” I said. I ran my hand over the back of my neck and turned my attention back to the neighbor’s nephew. “Just swing by sometime when you have a free minute to show us around. We’d love to hear your plans. We got lucky when we moved in here. The whole place had been restored immaculately. We didn’t have to do a thing to it—thank god.”
Brighton laughed. “That’s what I’m hoping your new neighbors will say someday.”
“You’re welcome to come check out our place if you want. Whoever renovated it paid an insane amount of attention to the littlest details. It’s what made Liv fall in love with it.”
“Liv?”
“My wife,” I said, not sure why I didn’t like the way her name sounded coming from his lips. Truth be told, he was probably closer to her age. I doubted he was even thirty yet.
“Yeah,” he said, glancing back at her one last time. “Well, I better head out. It’s been a long day and I could use a beer about now.”
“Nice meeting you,” I said. “Good luck with the reno.”
“Thanks,” he said, yanking the gray shirt from his shoulder and shrugging into it before climbing into an older-model, white Silverado. He unrolled the window and cranked some Tom Petty as I gathered up the small box and headed down the stone walkway to our front porch.
Brighton waved at me from his truck before making a right at the corner of our house, driving past Liv on his way out of the neighborhood.
“I MET MR. Kerrington’s nephew today,” I told Olivia later.
We were in the study, sitting on the carpet and playing with the puppy. Between this and going to get Stitch together earlier, it was the longest I’d spent with my wife in months.
She looked up, only vaguely interested in what I was saying. “Oh, that’s nice. I didn’t think Mr. Kerrington was still alive.”
“He’s not,” I said, patting the floor and grinning when Stitch pounced my hand. “The family’s renovating and selling.”
She lifted her head, finally intrigued.
Olivia was a designer—well, she’d been a designer, before our lives imploded. She owned her own interior design firm, Live Well Interiors. We thought it was cute because who didn’t want to live well? And it was especially clever since it was so close to Olivia’s real name—Liv Wells. Though the business was still technically operating, Liv hadn’t done much paid work over the last few years. It fluctuated between each pregnancy and each loss. This last stretch of time off had been her longest yet.
“Would you like a tour of the house? I know you’ve always been curious what the inside looked like.”
“You really think he’d let us?” she asked, trying not to sound too excited.
“Already talked to the guy about it today. Name’s Brighton.”
“Brighton?” she asked, scrunching her nose. “Brighton Kerrington? That sounds pretentious.”
I thought about the man who’d shaken my hand, with his tan, ripped chest, messy blond hair, and pale green eyes. His biceps were sculpted from an honest day’s work, and the two tattoos he sported said anything but pretentious.
“He was nice enough,” I said, shrugging. “I hope you don’t mind, but I told him he could pop over here sometime to check out our place, too.”
She chewed the corner of her mouth, less excited now. I knew that wo
uld be a stretch for her, having someone else inside our house. It was her safe place, her sanctuary. Even more so after we lost Laelynn. She’d spent far too much time in it over the last seven months.
“I can make something up, maybe say it’s not a good time,” I said, not wanting to upset her.
“I’ll think about it.” She picked up Stitch, then stood, cradling the puppy to her chest. “I hope you don’t mind, but today took a lot out of me. I’m taking him out to go potty, then I may sleep in the guest room down here. That way I can let him out at night without having to wake you.”
“Liv—”
“It’s not permanent. Maybe just a few nights. Till Stitch can make it through the night in his crate without peeing.”
I bit back my frustration. Today had been a good day, and I didn’t want to set her back. But this was not going to fly for long. We’d spent too many nights apart already after Laelynn died. One excuse had led to another before she just gave up and started sleeping alone downstairs and shutting me out even more.
It had taken a lot of work to get her back into our bedroom. I wasn’t letting a puppy come between us—no matter how cute he was.
“Truth?” I asked, knowing she’d never break our pact to be honest at all costs, no matter how much it hurt the other person.
“Truth.”
I breathed a sigh of relief, then wrapped my arms around her. “I love you,” I said, kissing her forehead goodnight. “I think Stitch is going to be a nice distraction for us.”
She tensed in my arms, and I knew instantly it was the wrong thing to say.
“I don’t need a distraction, Ry. I need Laelynn, and that’s not an option. Everything else is just second best.”
As she walked out of the study with Stitch in her arms, I wondered if she felt that way about me, too.
Chapter 4
Olivia
I LOVED STITCH. I really did. But a dark wave of sadness washed over me ever since we brought him home. I’d taken to sleeping in the guest bedroom so I could take him out of his crate at night to go to the bathroom. Like clockwork, every night at 2:00 a.m., I put him on the leash and walked him down our long driveway and back up again on autopilot. Maybe it was the interrupted sleep. Maybe it was the grief I couldn’t escape no matter what I tried. Either way, I spent the next week lying in bed crying again, like I had right after the funeral.
Having a puppy should’ve helped, but all it did was remind me of the daughter we’d never get to raise. It wasn’t fair that Laelynn would never meet Stitch or get to play with him in our fenced-in yard.
Ryan tried. Lord knew the man was a saint. But my heart ached so badly I could hardly breathe most days. I had nothing to get up for. No job. No daughter. No joy. Just a big, empty void that not even the new addition to our ohana could fill.
A couple of times, I caught Ryan over in the neighbor’s yard, talking to some guy—though I never got a good look at him from my bedroom window. Ryan was spending more and more time next door and often came back sweaty and smiling. A few times, he even went to have a beer with Brighton, coming home late and affectionate.
He popped his head in the guest room today to say hi and see how my night was. I wanted to say: It was like shit. That’s how it was. Just like the other night. And the night before that.
But the hopeful look in his warm brown eyes stopped me. I was dead inside, but I wasn’t cruel. The reason I fell in love with Ryan, other than our earth-shattering chemistry, was because of his compassion for others, and the way he could easily put himself in someone else’s shoes. I’d seen him do it time and time again for other students, and then one day, I’d needed his compassion, too. The day I’d found out that my adoptive parents had died in a freak boating accident. I was shaking when I went to his office to explain why I wasn’t going to be in class the following week.
The lines between professor and student evaporated in that moment as he gathered me into his arms to comfort me. He later told me he didn’t treat other students with that kind of compassion but was often a sympathetic ear for them.
Me? I was different. I was the one who finally captured Professor Wells’s attention for good. We both knew it the instant he touched me. We didn’t say anything—especially since I was consumed by the grief of losing my parents—but the look that passed unspoken between us transcended time and space. It was a silent knowing. An acknowledgment passed between us that whatever it was we were feeling, it would eventually need to be explored.
That exact moment is when I started to believe that Ryan could be my soulmate.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked, coming into the room. He sat on the edge of the bed and stroked Stitch’s back. Even though the puppy now slept on the bed more than he did in the crate, it wasn’t a lie. I took him out religiously every night at 2:00 a.m.
“I miss you,” I said, surprising myself. “I was just remembering how you treated me after my parents died, when you hardly knew me.”
“There was always something special about you,” he said, squeezing my leg through the blanket.
Even though his hand was over the thick, waffled fabric, it still shocked me how much I responded to his touch. We hadn’t had sex more than a handful of times over the last seven months. We’d tried too soon after Laelynn’s death, but it’s not exactly sexy when your wife is crying while you’re trying to get her to orgasm. That put an end to that. I just hadn’t been ready to let him inside me. I couldn’t explain it—and he wouldn’t have understood. But my body was still a shrine to the memory of our daughter, not a safe port for my husband. It felt like a betrayal, as if our making love would wash away the memory of how she felt being inside of me.
Not that Ryan wasn’t willing to keep trying. He initiated intimacy often—no matter how many times I rejected him. It wasn’t because I didn’t love him, or that I wasn’t attracted to him. I just felt disassociated, if that makes sense. My body is there, but my heart and soul are usually somewhere else. Maybe in a little field somewhere, with a stream, and flowers. And Laelynn, crawling through the grass on chubby, dimpled hands and knees.
But I was rarely in our house on West Liberty Street where my heart and soul belonged.
So, it surprised me that I was feeling something again so soon after making love to Ryan only a few days ago. Or had it been a week? I couldn’t remember. Time meant little to me now. But there was something different about him—though I couldn’t put my finger on what it was exactly. He seemed more like the man I’d fallen head over heels in love with all those years ago. His spirit felt lighter somehow, almost playful.
“Liv, you know I’ll always protect you and be here for you, right?” he said, his eyes as intense, passionate, and steady as the day I met him. “I only want to make you happy. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
“I know,” I said quietly, pulling him down for a kiss. I could tell he was as surprised as I was, but Ryan never turned away an opportunity to connect. He once told me he physically craved everything about me. And as he worshipped my body for the next hour, he proved that no matter how shitty I’ve been to him, that hasn’t changed.
I just wished I could say the same.
Sometimes, I could hardly remember who I was anymore. I’d been prepared to be someone’s mother, before that dream was snatched away from me. Now, I was just an empty vessel. No matter how many times I made love to Ryan, he would never be able to fill the void that Laelynn left behind.
ON FRIDAY, I finally got to meet the infamous Brighton Kerrington. Apparently, while I’d been spending my days curled under a blanket in the dark, Ryan had been bro-ing it up with the neighbor’s nephew. I didn’t know what to expect when we crossed the yard so I could finally see inside their family home. The rest of the crew had sloughed off for the day, but Brighton stuck around to give me a private tour of their work in progress.
What I never saw coming was the godlike man leaning back on the front steps, with his T-shirt off and slung casually over his broad s
houlders. His eyes were closed as he worshiped the last rays of the day’s sun. Everything about him was hard, raw, sexual power. My mouth ran dry as my eyes traveled down his perfectly sculpted chest, over washboard abs, and finally to a V so prominent and mouthwatering, I nearly lost my footing on the uneven terrain.
Ryan was holding my hand as we neared, and I was glad. Otherwise, I wasn’t sure my legs would support me. I’d only ever had this kind of reaction to a man once before, and it was the day I stepped into Lecture Hall 303A. I’d been early because I was nervous and getting there first would give me time to calm my nerves and get situated before the other students arrived. I didn’t deal well with change, so this was par for the course each new semester.
The classroom was small and intimate, configured with semicircular, stadium-style seating. With no one else in the room, there was no escaping the devastating brown eyes that connected with mine. Or the dimples that quickly flashed when his mouth curled into a grin that nearly decimated me.
Ryan had waved his hand, suggesting I take a front row seat. I wanted the floor to open and swallow me whole.
“Professor Wells,” he’d said, extending his hand. He didn’t look like my other professors in either my undergrad or graduate courses. His demeanor and presence were physically disarming. The man oozed sexuality and confidence.
I set my books down where Ryan had pointed and reached out to take his hand. It sounds corny, even now, but when he cupped my hand warmly and shook, I felt a spark so intense and real it was alarming. He was my professor. I quickly let go, running my hand over my hair, which I’d taken a painstaking amount of time perfecting for my first day of classes.
I licked my lips, any coherent reply escaping me.
“And you are?” he’d asked, smiling.
He was sitting on the tabletop near my seat, his sports coat hanging over the back of the lecture chair, his sleeves rolled up his muscled forearms. Worst of all? He was wearing dark-framed glasses, and I literally couldn’t focus on anything beyond those and the kind brown eyes staring back at me, amused.
