by Evelyn Glass
She laughed, the sound almost sounding odd to my ears it had been so long. “Of course!”
“Are you okay to get yourself set up on the couch?” I yawned, rolling under the covers and shimmying out of my jeans. “I put out the covers—”
“Of course I am,” she assured me. “Seriously. Now will you just go to sleep?”
“Whatever you say.” I peered over the edge of the covers at her, and she went to switch out the light. I felt like a kid again, coddled and tired and taken care of.
“Goodnight,” she called softly.
“Night.”
She flicked the light off, casting me into darkness, and I found myself staring at the ceiling as I drifted off to sleep. I had no idea how I’d ended up here—pregnant, alone, mourning the loss of a daughter I never even really got to call my own. But all I knew was that I wouldn’t opt out of it if I’d had the chance. If someone had come to me all those months ago and told me that I would love and be loved by the two of them as much as I had been—I wouldn’t have walked away. I couldn’t have. And yes, things hadn’t gone according to plan—but there was still hope. That was all I needed, at the end of the day, the promise of something more, of something better.
We could still put the pieces together if we wanted to. The life we made after this, I knew it would be different—it would exist on a far different plane to the one we had lived beforehand. But maybe that was for the best. Maybe starting anew was the only way we could make this work. I thought of Jazz, and Ella, and the baby—and for a moment, could see the four of us together, a family, happier than we’d ever been. And it was on that image that I allowed myself to drift off to sleep, clinging to hope, and the promise of a future that I could be happy in.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The next morning, I woke up to the sound of two voices in my living room. I sprang to my feet and rolled out of bed at once; my brain flashed to images of the police, of more bad news, but I did my best to calm myself down and remind myself that not every little thing had to be an indicator of more imminent tragedy.
I pressed my ear to the door and listened for a moment; I recognized one of the voices as Lucy’s, but the other was deeper, heavier, and I couldn’t quite place it. I pulled on some clothes, put my hand on the door, and made my way out into the living room.
My jaw dropped when I saw who was sitting there. Jazz, arms crossed over his chest on my couch, face drawn and gaunt. I wanted to go to him, to wrap my arms tight around his neck and tell him that everything was going to be okay—but we both knew that I didn’t know that for certain, and I felt like I’d have been mocking him with the half-promise. It seemed, from looking at his face, that he hadn’t eaten or slept in a good few days. I wondered at once where he’d been, and realized that I’d been standing in silence in the doorway of the living room for a good thirty seconds. Lucy and Jazz were both looking at me, and I did my best to shake the last vestiges of sleep and surprise from my head and sit down to join them.
“When did you…?” I began, trying to keep my voice steady, but tears were already welling up in my eyes, my emotions getting the better of me. Lucy placed a hand on my back, and I pressed my fingertips to my forehead. The pressure helped calm me down, relaxing me far enough that I felt as though I could catch my breath again.
“This morning,” Lucy filled in for me. “He got back this morning. I called him after you went to bed and told him that he needed to get down here so the two of you could talk.”
“And you just…came?” I glanced up at him. That was all it took? Or maybe it was Lucy’s strident nature that had convinced him to finally stop by. I knew that I had trouble saying no to her when she got it in her head to do something.
“She said there was stuff we needed to talk about and that I owed it to you to at least try and talk things through.” He bowed his head, speaking at last. His voice sounded strained, as though he was already regretting coming out here.
“Do you know about the…?” I trailed off, glancing at Lucy. She shook her head. Jazz looked between us, eyebrows raised.
“The what?”
“The baby,” I blurted out, forcing myself to say it before I could back out. The words felt foreign between my lips—it hadn’t been long enough for the facts of the matter to really sink in yet. My heart thumped in my chest as I stared at my hands, waiting for him to respond. I made myself meet his gaze, but found that he, too, had his eyes trained on the ground.
“Jazz?” Lucy prompted. His head snapped up and he narrowed his eyes at me. It wasn’t in suspicion, but something else—doubt, as though this news coming on the back of everything else was just too much to handle.
“When did you find out?” he asked, standing up and crouching down next to me. He balanced his elbows on his knees and let his hands dangle between his legs, staring up at me intently as though checking for any flicker that this might not be true.
“Last week,” I admitted. “That’s what I was coming around to tell you when…”
I didn’t want to have to say the words out loud again, but there they were—the reminder of what had happened only a few days ago. I wasn’t sure what I thought was going to happen if I said it again—as if he might have forgotten by now, and would flee this place at the reminder. He flinched slightly, but his gaze didn’t waver.
“The day of the fire,” he finished for me, running his hands through his hair. “Jesus, Mona. Jesus.”
“I think I’m about a month along,” I went on softly. “I haven’t been to a doctor yet, but…roughly.”
“And you want to keep it?” he asked. There was a flicker of panic in his eyes, as though he feared that I might tell him no.
“Yes.” I nodded. “I do. And I want to raise it with you, whether we’re…together, or not.”
He fell silent, got to his feet, and sat back down on the couch opposite me. The space between us made me panic, and I had to fight the sudden, ridiculous urge to reach out for him as though closing the physical gap between us might close the mental one, too.
The silence weighed heavy on the room, and Lucy looked between the two of us, waiting for a reaction. Jazz was slumped in a heap on the couch, eyes fixed on the ground again, while I was clasping and unclasping my hands in my lap as a distraction. I didn’t know what to do or say next; I assumed he would either storm off in a rage or fall to his knees with joy. This silence… I didn’t like this. I didn’t know what to do with this.
“I want to raise it with you,” he finally filled in quietly, so quiet that for a moment I didn’t even realize that he was speaking. A flood of relief passed over my system at hearing those words come out of his mouth, and I let out a breath I didn’t even realize I’d been holding.
“Do you want to…be with me?” I asked, the words heavy on my tongue.
He nodded wordlessly.
“I should go,” Lucy got to her feet. “I’ll stop by later, okay?”
“Okay.” I looked up at her as she came over to give me a hug. “Thanks,” I murmured into her ear, and she nodded. I couldn’t verbalize how grateful I was with Jazz still in the room, but she understood it. I would make it clear when she came back just how much this meant to me.
We both watched as she made her way out the door, and Jazz slid onto the armchair next to me. He tossed an arm around my shoulders, and just feeling the weight of it there was a comfort.
“Why did you go?” I asked, glad that we didn’t have to look at each other; speaking these words into the void and pretending there would never be anyone else to hear them was so much easier than acknowledging that we needed answers from each other directly.
“I had to get away,” he responded, voice almost robotic. “I just couldn’t…it was too much. Being there without her.”
“Were you ever planning on coming back?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “If Lucy hadn’t called me on your phone, I don’t know that I ever would have. I assumed I’d fucked things up with you, and I was just goi
ng to ghost the Marauders…”
“Did they even know you left?” I wondered. I hadn’t heard from any of them, and had assumed that at least one would get in contact with me at some point once they realized Jazz was missing.
“Yeah.” He lowered his voice. “My deputy did. I was going to let him just step up and hope that no one bothered to come looking for me, but…”
“But you’re back,” I finished off for him. “It’s for the best. You’ve got a life here, even if—”
I stopped myself before I could finish off that sentence. I knew that hearing the rest of it wouldn’t do either of us any good.
“So, a baby,” Jazz jumped in, changing the subject. I nodded, put my head in my hands, and laughed.
“What?”
“It’s just so…ridiculous.”
I looked up at him at last, managing to keep the smile of my face. “You were meant to be my client and you got me pregnant.”
“I don’t even remember not using a condom any of the times.” He shook his head. “I never thought I would have another—”
“Kid?” I finished for him, and a smile curled on to his lips.
“Girlfriend,” he corrected me. I raised my eyebrows at him playfully, and for a moment there, it felt as though none of the last week had happened—that he was just visiting mine to pass the time, that the two of us were just hanging out and having fun as people in the first year of their relationship were meant to do. I wanted to wrap my arms around his neck and kiss him, kiss him to remind us both why he wouldn’t be going anywhere anytime soon.
He leaned down and planted a kiss on my forehead, and his lips traveled down to find my mouth; I sighed softly against him, relieved and in love and glad to have this bit of comfort to cling to. The angle was awkward, so he tucked his arms beneath me and pulled me onto his lap so he could kiss me harder.
It was so easy to forget everything when I was in his arms like this. I never thought it worked like that before; prior to Jazz, every encounter I’d had with my previous boyfriends had always been tangled up in what had been going on around us. But right then, everything dropped away as he pushed his tongue into my mouth and kissed me harder. I felt a heat growing between my legs, and I couldn’t remember anything but him and how he felt and how he smelled and just how much I wanted him.
“I love you.” He pulled back and caught my head between his hands, gazing intently into my eyes. I only needed to nod in return for him to kiss me again, tucking his arms beneath me and pulling me against his chest. He carried us over to the couch and laid me down, climbing on top of me so I could feel his full weight pressing down; I was reminded for a moment of our encounter in the safe house, when we’d made this baby, and wrapped my arms around him to draw him closer. The man I loved. The father of my child. He ran his hand across my stomach and I shivered at everything it implied.
“I missed you so much,” he murmured, kissing down my neck; he was already shimmying down my pajama bottoms, his hands slipping into my panties as he began to play with me. I was already wet from his touch, and I hadn’t realized just how much I’d been craving it till that instant. As soon as his fingers found my clit, I gasped loudly and my body tensed up beneath him. Every movement felt cathartic, every breath that skimmed my skin a release. I ground against his hand, and he let me use him, allowing me to set the pace and intensity. My lips parted and my breath came faster; I was already slick just at the promise of him. He brushed his mouth against mine again, moving down to suck lightly on my ear. I shuddered, shoulders hunching as pleasure coursed across my body in waves.
“I need you inside me,” I murmured into his ear, the words coming out of me before I knew how much I wanted it. He kissed me again, hard, as he pulled his jeans and boxers down and grabbed my legs. He ran his hand up the length of my calf as he pulled them back, and I shivered as anticipation coursed across my body. I looked up at him as he positioned himself against my slit, and then slowly pushed his entire length inside of me.
I let out a guttural groan, closing my eyes and tightening my legs around him at once, drawing him in deeper. For a second, I luxuriated in my own pleasure, ignoring everything else around me, even Jazz—and then, I flipped my eyes open to watch him, because there was nothing better in the world than watching him lose himself to how good I felt.
“Jesus,” he muttered as he began to thrust inside of me, sitting up and pulling my hips towards him so he could get as deep as he wanted. I loved it when he moved me like this, on instinct, as though nothing mattered other than getting us both off; his cock slid even deeper into me, and I groaned at the sensation. I slid my hand down to play with myself, barely thinking about it until I noticed Jazz’s eyes moving to my busy fingers. I knew he liked a show, but I’d have been doing this regardless, losing myself to it like this; my eyes rolled back as he screwed me, going slow and deep.
I didn’t want to wait—there was a time and a place to fuck all night long, to take your time and tease each other till you couldn’t take anymore, and this was not it. I wanted to come, wanted to feel him come, more than anything else in the world. I stared up at him, running a hand down his chest—he caught my fingers and pulled one to his mouth, sucking it lightly, letting his teeth graze along the sensitive pad.
I closed my eyes and let out a small gasp as I came, letting the sensation take me over for a fraction of a second. He just felt so fucking good—I would never get over that, the way he seemed to draw me out of my own head and into the moment the way nobody else had ever managed to before. He thrust once more inside of me as my pussy contracted around him, and then came—I could feel his cock twitching as he filled me up, his pelvis flat against mine. I swiveled my hips back and forth, milking him of every last drop, before he pulled out. He leaned down to kiss me, pulling up his boxers and his jeans as he did so, then caught my chin in his hand. He looked down at me intently, and I furrowed my brow at him.
“What?”
“We’ve just got a whole hell of a lot to do, that’s all.”
Chapter Thirty
“What are you talking about?” Mona screwed her face up at me as I dressed myself. I could easily have stayed laying on that couch with her the whole rest of the day, but I felt invigorated, full of life—and there was shit that we needed to get on with.
“For her.” My voice mellowed a little, and I could tell she knew exactly who I was talking about as soon as the words came out of my mouth. We hadn’t spoken her name since I’d walked through the door, but I knew she had to come up; we had to acknowledge her between us.
“Ella?” Mona confirmed softly, and I nodded. Her eyes widened. “What are you talking about?”
“For our baby’s sake.” I leaned down and planted a kiss on her stomach where her shirt had ridden up slightly. “I want to try. I don’t want to give up yet.”
Her eyes lit up and she scrambled into an upright position; her face looked animated and lively, reflecting mine. “What are we going to do?”
I ran a hand through my hair and let out a little puff of air. “I don’t know. But it’s got to be good.”
“Where do we start? I mean, what do you want to do to get started?” She continued. She was deferring to me, but she knew Ella better than anyone outside the family. I needed her input too.
“We have to go back to the start and put together as many of the pieces as we can,” I went on. Electricity prickled through my veins—for the first time since the fire, I felt awake. I had driven around town for hours looking for the car that took her, followed the path it had been taking out my driveway to every conceivable location—but nothing. I had wept leaning on that bike, praying that I was somehow wrong. But now, I needed to enlist more than just my own sad self. I needed everyone I could get my hands on—the time for pride was long past. Now, I needed a whole team to put together. I just wasn’t sure who I was going to need as part of it.
“How far back?”
“As far as we can go,” I replied firmly. “I thin
k we need to get everyone together, everyone who’s connected to this, and see what we can find out if we put our heads together.”
“Everyone?”
“Everyone.”
And so that started off the most hectic day of my life; you try getting hold of a motorcycle club, two elderly neighbors, a best friend, and a CSI and convincing them that coming out to a diner on the other side of town was the best way they could be spending their night because it might be the only way that I could get my daughter back.
I had never been so set on one goal in my life before, and it stunned me what we could get done when all I wanted in the world was one thing. I knew the chances of finding her were slim—the chances of finding her unharmed even more so. But I had to hold out hope, otherwise this whole thing would fall apart, and then what would we be left with? Maybe I was just playing a distraction game, hoping that as long as I kept myself occupied I could ignore the truth that was becoming more and more set in stone by the day.
