Embracing Her Ever After: A Sweet Romantic Comedy (ABCs of Love Book 5)

by Brenna Jacobs

  Her panic must have registered on her face because Mary’s eyes widened. “I’m sure that’s not it! I wasn’t trying to scare you. I was trying to reassure you that you could report the situation and keep Calvin with you if that’s what you want.”

  But now that Mary had planted the idea in her mind, it was pushing every other thought out of it. “Excuse me,” she said. She fled straight to her computer, with Mary right after her, to search “child abduction + Florida.” Right away it returned a list of current Amber alerts, and none of them matched Rachel or Calvin.

  She took her first deep breath since Mary had mentioned it.

  “You okay?” Mary asked.

  “Fine. There’s no matching Amber alerts for my sister or Calvin.”

  “Good. So why not start the foster process?”

  “Because it could get Rachel in trouble. It could mean that she can’t take him back when she wants to.”

  Mary’s eyebrow rose. “And?”

  “And . . .”

  And it would be one more way Tessa had failed Rachel, but now didn’t feel like the right time to explain all that. “I need to research all the possibilities before I put us on the radar of social services.” They’d been there before, and it hadn’t done a thing to help them.

  Mary nodded and returned to her desk.

  Tessa looked over to where Darius was working with Calvin on his back. They both seemed fine with the situation, so she did what she always did when she didn’t know what else to do: she threw herself into her work.

  An hour later she looked up when Sanjay appeared beside her desk, frowning down at her.

  “Hi, Sanjay.”

  “It’s my turn.”

  “I’m sorry?” she blinked at him, wondering what she had missed.

  “It’s my turn to wear the baby. But Darius will not let me.”

  “Oh. Well, um . . .” She glanced over to Darius, who was bent over the 3D printer but with the air of someone who was concentrating much harder than he needed to. She rose to check on Calvin. “Darius?” she said, as she got close. He bent closer to the printer, fiddling with a tiny component. Calvin blinked at her and smiled.

  He smiled. It was the cutest thing she’d ever seen in her life. “He smiled at me!”

  “Let me see,” Darius said, spinning around, which made Calvin gurgle in something that sounded like a laugh. Darius stopped and craned his neck around trying to see behind him instead.

  “It’s my turn, Darius,” Sanjay insisted, coming up behind them.

  But Tessa wasn’t interested in the argument. “Calvin, you smiled at me. Come here.” She tried to lift him out of the wrap, but Darius had him tucked in too snugly. “Give him to me, Darius.”

  Darius grumbled but unwrapped the sling a few times until it was loose enough for her to get the baby out.

  “Come here, little guy,” she said, settling him against her side to smile down at him. “Did you do this? Did you smile?”

  He did it again, and the same dopamine rush she got from sugar washed over her brain.

  “He smiled at me,” she called to Ethan, but he spoke from right behind her shoulder.

  “I saw it. Good job, buddy. He likes you.”

  He likes me. It was crazy how good that made her feel. Calvin liked her.

  “I’ll wear him now,” Sanjay said, unwrapping the rest of the sling from Darius.

  “No,” Tessa said. “I will. Show me how to do this, Darius.” And a few minutes later she settled in at her computer with Calvin snugged against her chest as she updated the blueprint on her panel design.

  He stayed there for another hour before he got restless again, so she did the feed, burp, and diaper routine before returning him to Sanjay’s mat and Darius’s mobile. “You can wear him next,” she promised when Sanjay objected. “Right now, I want him to enjoy the freedom your mat gives him.”

  Appeased, Sanjay turned back to his circuit board.

  As she glanced around the lab, her eyes touched on each of her co-workers.

  And friends, she realized. They’d never been the type to socialize outside of the lab, but then engineers rarely were that type. She’d had a healthy respect for the genius each of them brought to the project, and she’d assumed they had felt the same toward her. But she liked them, she realized. She felt genuine affection beneath her respect for them.

  Every single one of them had stepped up to help her in some way today, and it wasn’t just so they could get the project done. Every one of them . . . except Ethan. Because Ethan had done that every day. Except today. He’d gone to get the gear from her car, yes. But she could sense he was largely staying out of her way. He couldn’t avoid her with their desks in such close proximity, but she had a feeling that he would if he could.

  That was her fault, and she couldn’t leave it unfixed, any more than Ethan had been able to resist trying to fix things this whole week. She very much owed him another “fix” anyway—of putting back together what she’d broken by mauling him yesterday morning. He hadn’t made it weird between them. She had.

  When he got up to head for the breakroom a while later, she seized the opportunity.

  “Sanjay, can you keep an ear out for Calvin? I think I’m going to get some coffee.”

  “Okay.”

  She slipped into the breakroom and found Ethan fishing out a water bottle from the fridge. The breakroom had always felt like it was a good size before now. Their whole team could fit at the laminate table in the center and eat comfortably. Cupboards full of paper goods for team celebrations they never had plus extra paper towels, cleaning solutions, and emergency supplies lined one side of the room. Mandatory information about worker’s comp and other regulations covered another, and a fridge and counter with small appliances filled the third.

  One time, Tessa had caught wind that it was Darius’s birthday and insisted they all celebrate it with a generic cake she’d rushed out on her lunch break to buy at the nearest grocery store. Sanjay and Mary had filed in, they’d all eaten their cake, stared at each other in awkward silence, and created an unspoken bond to never do any organized socializing again.

  That moment still paled in comparison to how awkward this moment felt as she stared at Ethan and wondered what to say. The room also felt smaller than it had. And somehow much warmer than the lab? That made no sense. They were on the same cooling system.

  “Hi,” she said.

  Ethan glanced over at her. “Hi.”

  Only now did she realize she’d been hoping he could magically guess what she wanted to talk about it and bring it up himself the way he had before she shut him down. A bunch of times. But ESP was stupid, so she sighed and summoned the same courage she’d needed for her thesis defense.

  “We should talk.”

  He straightened and shut the fridge door. He looked at her calmly, then down at the water bottle in his hand. “How does a lab space devoted to improving the environment have a fridge full of single use plastic water bottles?”

  “I know,” she said. “Darius wants us to work on a sink-mounted water filtration system next.”

  “Sounds like a good project.”

  “Not really. There are already several on the market. He just doesn’t like them.”

  “Right.”

  This was painful. This was defending-her-thesis painful. She didn’t know how to fill the silence. Finally, she said, “We should talk.” Again. And winced.

  “All right. I’m listening. Should I be sitting down for this?”

  Suddenly he felt a million miles away from her, and the room that had felt small and suffocating became a big gulf, the kind an action hero would jump over in movies but that even an Olympic long jumper couldn’t clear in real life.

  It was her fault. That’s exactly where she had thought she wanted Ethan. She was wrong. It wasn’t where she wanted him. But it was where she needed him right now. Nothing else made sense. Not when Calvin had overtaken her life for the foreseeable future. Not when Ethan was
leaving in three weeks to live in Europe and work at his dream job. So while she wanted to cross the room and touch his hand, as an invitation, maybe, or possibly to just connect, she twined her fingers together instead and cleared her throat.

  “No, you don’t need to sit down. Now probably isn’t a great time. Would you want to come over for a dinner provided by GrubMates and served among a stack of clean diapers?”

  He fiddled with the bottle again before he sighed. “Sure.”

  “Sorry.” It stung that he was so clearly reluctant. “I’ll make it fast.” She turned to leave.

  “Wait,” he said, and she paused at the breakroom door. “You don’t owe me any apologies, but I’m not going to say no to an explanation. I’m sorry I sound unenthusiastic. You just feel like a test I keep failing, and I hate that feeling.”

  “It’s not a test,” she said. “And you definitely haven’t failed.”

  If anyone had, it was her. In failing to realize that she hadn’t ever gotten over him after college. In bringing him in on this project. In dragging him into this Calvin mess.

  And most of all, in falling for him harder by dropping the last defense she’d had against him. She hadn’t known exactly what it would be like to kiss Ethan or to be kissed in return. She’d wondered for weeks in college, and because the answer had mattered so very much back then, she’d run away rather than find out. Now she knew, and that knowledge had shoved her right over the emotional cliff she’d backed away from when she’d been younger and smarter.

  What was she supposed to do now?

  Chapter Fourteen

  Ethan knocked on Tessa’s front door and poked his head through when she called, “Come in.”

  “Is now good?”

  She had changed into jeans, and she jerked her head toward her table where the marinara jars had been pushed aside to make room for a cardboard box. “Yeah. Pizza okay?”

  “Pizza is great.”

  It was as painfully stilted as every interaction between them had been all day. He wished he knew how to dismantle the wall that had sprung up, but he wasn’t even sure what it was made of, so he settled in at her table and took a plate. Calvin was lying on the living room floor chewing a washcloth. “Looks delicious, buddy.”

  Tessa paused in opening the pizza box to glance Calvin’s way. “Yeah. He didn’t want a bottle, but he seems happy to chew on that.”

  She served up their slices and asked him a couple of questions about the relay he was working on. Even trying to give full and complete answers left them with conversational dead ends.

  Finally, halfway through her second slice, Tessa set her pizza down. “I’m not really hungry.”

  Ethan took the last bite of his and wiped his mouth with his napkin. “I’m done too.”

  “So the reason I wanted to apologize to you—”

  “Wait.” Sarah hadn’t ever been sorry for anything. Not even cheating. She’d tried to make it his fault, complaining about his emotional unavailability, which to her was things like not wanting to go shopping at the mall every time she felt like doing retail therapy, or not wanting to watch her Real Housewives marathon. He’d done those things sometimes, but not enough, and that’s why she slept with her trainer if Sarah was to be believed. But she’d proven she was the last person who should be believed.

  Now, here Tessa was with the exact opposite problem, apologizing for everything, even things for which she owed no one apologies. How could he get that through to her? He tried to explain one more time. “Tessa, you’re in a hard situation and you’re making the best out of it that you can. If anything, I apologize for being one more thing you have to manage. Okay?” When she gave a slow nod, he added, “That being said, I don’t need any apologies, but I wouldn’t mind a couple of explanations.”

  She bit her bottom lip, tugging at it with her teeth so long that he wasn’t sure he’d get any kind of answer. But finally, she asked, “About the kiss?”

  “Sounds like a good place to start.” What he really wanted to know was how to get her to do it again. But he kept his mouth shut.

  “It kind of has to do with Rachel.”

  “That . . . is not what I expected you to say.” That was an understatement. What did her sister have to do with Tessa giving him the hottest kiss of his life?

  That got a small smile out of her. “It’s kind of all one big thing, I guess. Do you have time for a story that begins, ‘When I was a little girl’? Because that’s where this one starts.”

  He settled himself into his chair. “Go ahead. Shoot.”

  “I’m three years older than Rachel, and we’re wired so differently that it seems weird to me sometimes that we’re even related. I was ready to move through the world like a grownup by the time I was eight, and Rachel always . . . floundered, I guess is a good way to say it. My mom named her after the Rachel on “Friends,” but my sister is kind of like, if Rachel never grew past the first season and got her life together. My sister ran away from home the day she turned eighteen, and she was exactly like she was as a kid. Impulsive, fixated on impractical dreams but never real goals, starry-eyed, boy-crazy. Which sounds harsh, I’m sure.”

  Ethan shrugged. Engineers called it like they saw it. “Not really.”

  “Anyway, my mother was no help, and both of our fathers were ‘loser drunks’ according to her. We never met either of them, so I’m guessing she was right.” She gave a hard smile here. “When I got older, I wondered how my mom made the same relationship mistake, not twice in a row like with our birth fathers, but over and over again. We dealt with a long string of loser guys. They were usually using her for a convenient place to crash or her crappy Hamburger Helper meals that sucked, but hey, they were free.”

  She stood and walked over to Calvin, standing and staring down at him. Ethan stayed seated, not wanting to do anything to pull her out of the story she was telling. “I wanted to get out of our town so bad. It was every stereotype you’ve heard in a ‘Florida Man’ news story. ‘Florida man busted driving a mobile meth lab.’ That happened in our trailer park. ‘Florida man illegally breeds pythons in Lehigh Acres trailer.’ That was my trailer park too.” She snorted. “Even living in a trailer park was cliché. Sometimes I think that’s what I’m maddest about. My mom didn’t even have the creativity to give us a more interesting backstory.”

  She crouched over the baby now, squatting to watch him but not touching him. Ethan couldn’t see her face well, but the tone of her voice didn’t match her words. Those were biting and mean. Her tone was tired and sad.

  “I wanted to get out of that town the second I graduated, but there was no way I could leave Rachel. She had three more years of high school. So I stayed. I had a full-ride to Georgia Tech already.” Now she looked over at him, and he nodded.

  “I didn’t. My parents paid for school. But I would have given anything to go there. It must have been hard to give up that scholarship.”

  She shrugged like it didn’t matter, but the heaviness in her words betrayed exactly how much it did. “Yes and no. It’s not like I had to think about it much. It was easy to make the decision, hard not to resent Rachel for it.”

  “Not your mother?”

  She shook her head. “My mom was a hopeless case. She was never going to change. I know it’s who deserved the blame, but at the time, I was frustrated with Rachel. She’s smart and funny and she had potential. But she was also wild and undisciplined, more interested in parties and boys than books and school. Since she seemed like the one who could change if she wanted to, I got mad at her for not living how I thought she should. But really, I was just mad because she was standing in the way of what I wanted.” She picked up Calvin and murmured something into his neck. His legs kicked.

  “I missed that last part,” Ethan said, and he didn’t want to miss any of it. She was unfolding a portrait of her past that he never would have guessed, and while she probably thought she was painting herself in a terrible light, she was wrong. Dead wrong. He was seeing h
er with new eyes, ones that saw her with even more respect.

  “I said Rachel hated me.” She hugged Calvin for a second. “I deserved it. She thought every time I would yell at her about going out or ditching class that I was just taking out my anger on her. Maybe I was. We had a state university twenty miles away, and I couldn’t even go to that. Didn’t have a car. Had to go to the community college for two years because I could ride my bike there, and because I could live at home to keep an eye on Rachel, because for damn sure my mom wasn’t going to do it. She would disappear for days at a time. Was I supposed to leave my fifteen-year-old sister behind while I went off to school and ate three meals a day, all covered by scholarships she didn’t have a prayer of earning?”

  He made a noise in his throat, something that must have sounded like swallowed rage, because it was, and it drew her notice.

  “I know,” she said. “I knew it then. I knew that what I felt wasn’t fair or right, so I’d try to make up for it by earning as much money as I could so she could have what she wanted. New clothes, stuff like that. I never cared about that stuff, but she did, so I made sure she had cute shirts and makeup and a full fridge, even if we were always on a coupons-at-Walmart budget. We got food stamps. That helped.” She looked at him over Calvin’s head, defiant. “I hated being on welfare, but it saved us. More than once.”

  “You’re talking to a guy who was raised by bleeding heart parents. I’m glad you got the help you needed. Nothing wrong with food stamps if your mom wasn’t feeding you.”

  “My mom didn’t do anything but come home drunk, sometimes with a guy we never saw again, or scream at me to give her my tips so she could go out, because we were ‘hard,’ and she needed a break. I’d give her a twenty sometimes to buy us a night off from her. But most nights we just fought about where I was hiding my cash.” She stroked Calvin’s barely-there hair, even brushing her cheek against it once. Ethan wondered if she even realized she was doing it. “I hid it the one place she wouldn’t think to look: in a bank. And I made good money. More than my mom ever did. I worked as a server at an upscale steakhouse near the golf course. Had to ride my bike ten miles each way to get there.”