The Slow Burn ~ Kristen Ashley

by Ashley, Kristen

  This was definitely the truth.

  Toby wasn’t done laying it out.

  “Instead of taking a look at herself and how she treats people and making good changes, she lashes out at who she thinks is weak to make herself feel superior. I’m with you and your son and have been in a way since the summer, and she knows you have your hooks in me and probably gets why. To make herself feel better, she wanted to take you down a peg. Knowin’ you, she probably failed. But it’s my job as your man to do whatever I have to do to make sure shit like that doesn’t happen. And if it does, make sure it doesn’t happen again. I did that. And I don’t care how it had to get done, as long as it gets done.”

  He dipped down so he was nose to nose with me.

  “It . . . got . . . done,” he finished.

  “It certainly did,” I said quietly, no longer feeling concerned Toby got down in the mud to verbally and publicly flay Jocelyn.

  Instead feeling other things.

  I decided to share some of those things with Toby.

  “We need to go to Grayburg. I’m not thinking cavemen or cops and fugitives. I’m thinking armor and damsel in distress,” I declared.

  He stared at me a second.

  Then he burst out laughing.

  I grinned up at him as he did it and put pressure on us to get us moving, saying, “According to Deanna, there’s a wreath that has my front door written all over it. Let’s fair this mother up.”

  “Okay, baby,” he muttered, setting us on course back to my boy, Deanna and Charlie.

  That drama done, in short order, I’d see the wreath was made of vintage glass baubles, some narrow tinsel trees sticking out around one, a discolored carousel ornament, some bells, a plastic snowman, a gold-faced skinny Santa, a glittery house, and the ugliest elf in history hugging his spindly, striped legs to his chest tacked on one side.

  It was atrocious.

  I loved it.

  I bought it.

  And after we meandered, consumed mince pies and popcorn balls . . .

  And after we met up with Johnny and Izzy (who was totally aglow), purchased a mammoth box filled with summer sausages, a selection of cheeses, mustards and crackers, a huge bag of some Christmas-themed Chex mix that looked the bomb, and seven tacky ornaments that would totally destroy the theme of my tree . . .

  And after we sat Brooks on Santa’s knee in the gazebo smack dab in the middle of the square, every one of us frantically taking pictures on our phones as Santa desperately tried to stop Brooklyn from yanking down his beard . . .

  Toby, my son and I headed to his place to get the Xbox then home to put Brooks down for his nap in preparation for making cookies.

  And that was when Toby put that wreath up on my door.

  On that farmhouse door, as I suspected, the tacky took a hike and the wreath worked perfectly.

  It fit.

  And the way it did I vowed never to get rid of it.

  But that wasn’t the only reason.

  Mom would love it because it was all about recycling.

  Still, there was another reason.

  I had a feeling that wreath was going to be the foundation to every Christmas that was to come. It would be the first thing I’d get out and put up. It’d be the last thing I took down and put away.

  It was Brooks. It was Toby. And it was me.

  It was family.

  A Match in Heaven

  Toby

  THERE WAS A half a plate of sugar cookies with red and green M&M’s in them, a half-full bowl of Chex mix, a mound of cashew caramel clusters and a greasy-sided bowl that had nothing but popcorn kernels at the bottom on Addie’s coffee table.

  Dapper Dan was flat out on the floor by the couch, snoozing.

  John McClane had saved the day.

  And Toby was on his back, Addie stretched out on him, her cheek on his chest, his hand down her jeans at her ass, and since they were done with movies, he really wanted to fuck her, but his stomach was so full, and it felt so good lying on her couch with her, he didn’t want to move.

  He’d have to get her in the mood to fuck him.

  Which, of course, would get him in the place he’d fuck her.

  She lifted her head, pushed up, and with her hair falling down on either side of them, she looked in his face.

  “At this juncture, I regret to inform you I started my period during dinner,” she announced.

  “Fuck,” he muttered.

  “I’m afraid the bad news is gonna keep coming as I’m not a sex-during-that-time-of-the month girl.”

  “Not a big fan of that either, honey,” he told her.

  “The good news is, first, my mood will improve and second, you’ve been worried I’m losing weight and,” she flicked a hand to the coffee table, “I’m a consume-everything-in-my-path-during-my-monthly-visitor type of girl.”

  He wrapped his free arm around her and squeezed the cheek of her ass he had in his other hand.

  “Fatten you up for Christmas,” he murmured.

  “Yeah,” she replied, lifting her hand to stroke his beard. “Though I would prefer it ended differently, you should know, this has been my best first date ever.”

  First date?

  “Say what?”

  “The Fair. Caramel nut clusters. You vanquishing the Mean Girl for me. Finding a hideous wreath that’s totally dope. Cookies. Dinner. Watching TV for the first time in five months. Your hand down my jeans. Awesome.”

  “Addie, our first date is gonna be at The Star on Thursday,” he reminded her.

  “That can be your first date, baby,” she said softly. “This is gonna be mine.” She tipped her head to the side, hesitation coasting over her face before she went on, “You’ve been out there with me. Now do you want my real?”

  He wanted everything from her.

  “Yeah,” he whispered, “I want your real.”

  She went right for it, gave him her real.

  And he would find, in the end, just like everything about Addie . . .

  It rocked his world.

  “Outside of being Daphne Forrester’s daughter, I realized today I never knew who I was.”

  Toby couldn’t believe that. She seemed to totally have it going on.

  “Izzy, she knew who she was,” Addie continued. “She likes nice things. She likes clothes and stuff around her. She likes order. She wanted to make something of herself. She earned a scholarship and went to college and got a good job and worked hard and got what she wanted, built the life she’d dreamed of, found the man who loved her just for her. Today, I began to understand what makes me.”

  “And what makes you, honey?” he asked when she didn’t go on.

  “I don’t want any of that. I dig that our first date ended with a food and movie binge on my couch with your hand down my jeans, but it did after I’d slept beside you six nights in a row. It wasn’t conventional. It wasn’t storybook. It wasn’t romancelandia. It was real. It was unique. It was ours. It was Toby and Addie.”

  At that, Toby started to have difficulty breathing.

  Because he loved she dug it like that.

  Since he dug it too.

  A lot.

  It was him.

  It was her.

  It was them.

  And she got off on that.

  Like he did.

  Addie wasn’t half done.

  “I want a job that pays the bills and gives me time to be with my son,” she tunneled her nails into his beard, “and be with you. But that’s it. Mostly, I want the opposite of what Izzy craves. I want what my mom thrived on. I want chaos. I want to be busy. I want experiences. I want adventure. They can be simple adventures, but they have to keep coming.”

  She lifted farther up on him and sifted her fingers through the bottom of his beard, still talking.

  “I want to get a cat because I want my kid to be comfortable around animals and love them like I do. And I don’t want to start an Etsy store because I don’t want to be tied down to making cards, sin
ce I relax when I do that. But I want to see if I can get cards in more shops around the county so doing something I enjoy can make me some extra cake. And I want to hang with Lora and her posse and find some girls close who are my girls and I can let loose. I want to dance in the rain and play in the snow and lie in the moonlight and stare at the stars. And I want to take off to ‘See Rock City’ just because it’s there to be seen. Or go to the Christmas Fair and buy an atrocious wreath that totally works for me.”

  Toby stared up at her, feeling her fingers in his beard, warmed by the light shining in her blue eyes.

  A light, until right then, he’d never seen.

  Jesus Christ.

  She was gorgeous.

  But that light was stunning.

  She kept shining that light on him.

  “Thanks to you, the pressure is off. I got weighed down by it and forgot important things. I forgot what my mom taught me. I forgot that it’s about Brooks doing a chocolate wiggle. It’s about taking my son out in the snow and accepting God’s offering. It’s about holding on to those traces for as long as you can. I can’t lose sight of that. And since you helped me, I have room to breathe and make the right decisions about what’s next for me. Today, I went to the Fair with you and my boy and doing it, I remembered who I am. I stopped walking the path I’d veered onto and got back to the path that’s me.”

  She dipped her face closer to his and kept talking.

  “I’m a witchy woman, a rock ’n’ roll gypsy who’s all about embroidered jackets and nut clusters and the joy of knowing my son saying ‘sissis’ is him trying to say Christmas, and sleeping beside a man who’s not afraid to fuck me hard or joke about sex stores.”

  “I’m not joking about sex stores,” he thought it important to inform her, and that bought him a beaming smile which was also something he’d never seen.

  In his arms, he had Addie unleashed.

  And it, too, was stunning.

  “I love that even more, Toby.”

  “And I love that you’re finding the way to you, honey.”

  “I have you to thank for it.”

  Hell no.

  She wasn’t going to do that.

  “That’s not on me, that’s all yours, Adeline.”

  “And that’s what I love. That you’d think that, when I would have worked today if you hadn’t been open about your priorities and made me think. I would have missed a day where parts of it will fade from memory, but every year that wreath will be somewhere in my home for Christmas, so it’ll never go away. You did that, Toby. You reminded me what’s important. I’ll always have that reminder. And I thank you for it.”

  “I’ll accept gratitude for that, baby.”

  Her fingers found the end of his beard and she tugged it as she bent to touch her lips to his.

  She lifted her head and remarked, “Your issue with women drivers is probably about Margot.”

  He was so down with the warmth and goodness of where they were, her shift in gears was hard to follow.

  “Uh . . . sorry?”

  “Deanna tells me she’s a menace on the roads.”

  “She’s not a menace. She’s a catastrophe. If I didn’t think she’d disown me, I’d turn her into the DMV. And I’d have done that when I was thirteen.”

  Addie grinned and nodded. “So that’s probably why you don’t like women drivers. At some time when you were a kid, she freaked you with her driving and you transferred that to all of womankind.”

  “No,” he said slowly. “I don’t like women drivers because I was in the passenger seat of a vehicle with a woman I was dating up in Alaska, and when I told her I didn’t want her spending the night, she lost her mind and control of the car, which after she screamed at me for a stretch of five miles, she wrapped around a tree.”

  Addie’s frame went solid on top of him.

  “I got a concussion and broke my clavicle and was off work so long, they put me on half-pay and I nearly had to ask my dad to send money so I could cover my rent.”

  “Shit, Toby,” she whispered.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “I was a logger. Every day was a physical day, but that day had been worse. It was her birthday, or I wouldn’t have gone out at all. I wasn’t in the mood. She’d decided what she wanted for her birthday present and she wasn’t pleased she wasn’t gonna get it. She shared that by getting hysterical because she wasn’t gonna get laid and then giving me a hospital stay.”

  “Not every woman is going to do that, and I certainly wouldn’t with my son in the car.”

  “Once bitten, twice shy,” he murmured.

  “Why didn’t you mention this before?”

  “Because we were goin’ to a Christmas Fair and it wasn’t time to land the heavy on you, and honestly, I was yankin’ your chain, mostly about the only-riding-with-a-guy stuff because you’re fun to tease.”

  She gave him a little smile before she said softly, “God, that must have been terrifying.”

  “Sittin’ there with her shrieking and swervin’ everywhere and goin’ way too fast, and her not listening to me begging her to calm the fuck down, so not having any control over any of that, my life in her hands, yeah. It was pretty fuckin’ frightening.”

  Addie stroked his beard. “I’m sorry that happened to you, honey.”

  “Worst part, it fucked her up,” he told her. “She had a skull fracture, think she broke all of her ribs, her arm. I came to, turned my head, saw the state of her, blood all over. So much I thought she was dead.”

  “God, baby,” she breathed.

  “She wasn’t. But gripping the steering wheel before impact with the adrenaline spike, she did some kind of damage to the nerves in her arms that couldn’t be fixed. She could barely squeeze a ball, that never got better, and she blamed me.”

  Her head jerked. “She blamed you?”

  “Said I made her angry, and because I did the accident was my fault.”

  “That’s insane,” she snapped.

  He shrugged.

  “It’s insane, Toby,” she stated firmly.

  He gave her a squeeze. “I know it was, Addie. I’m not shouldering that blame. I’m also not hip to get in a car, any car, with anyone, where I’m not drivin’. Dave. Johnny. I’m good. Anyone else, I want control.”

  She nodded. “I see that.”

  He studied her closely as he said carefully, “She was not the first or the last dose of crazy I have in my history.”

  “Well, you met Perry, so I bet I beat you,” she mumbled.

  “One of my girlfriends stole my truck because I shared with her I didn’t want to marry her, not after actually asking her to marry me, which I didn’t, and I wasn’t even thinking about it. But because she decided that was going to happen and she rented some hall for our reception. She took my truck because she was gonna sell it since she reckoned I owed her the deposit she wasn’t gonna get back.”

  Addie stared down at him, her lips barely moving when she said, “Holy shit.”

  “Yeah. Then there was the woman who told me I got her pregnant, even though I’ve always been all about the condom, and as far as I knew, one never broke. By the time she told me this shit, she was nearly due. But when the kid came out black, and she’s white, and as you know, so am I, I didn’t bother asking for a DNA test. She knew the kind of guy I was and that I’d be into having a kid, maybe even if it wasn’t mine, so she was hedging her bets. But after he came out, I knew she just wanted my money. The kid was cute as fuck, but his mother was a user and a scammer, and she kept trying, carrying on about how she didn’t know, but the jig was up. I walked away. Fortunately, she was smart enough not to push it, and I never saw her again.”

  “Okay, maybe you win,” she said quietly.

  “And you’ve seen firsthand what a winner Jocelyn is.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “What I’m tryin’ to say is my history with women has been rocky, that’s on me and you gotta know I get that,” he admitted. “But because I do, in the e
nd, I’m gonna get it right.”

  Addie assumed a confused look. “How’s it on you?”

  “Just like my dad, until you, my choices weren’t sterling.”

  Unexpectedly, and instantly, she got pissed.

  Also instantly, she explained why.

  “Well, you know, when Perry asked me to marry him, he told me he loved me, his world revolved around me and he couldn’t think of a life without me. He didn’t tell me that would wane once we decided to start a family or that he’d eventually quit the band, sit on the couch all day, not look for a job and bang some woman who was not me in a bed I bought. And I’m sorry, but none of that is on me. I loved him. I trusted him. I believed in him. And he fucked me over.”

  “You’re right. It isn’t on you,” Toby agreed.

  He had more to say but that was all he got out before she kept going.

  “And my father was handsome. He was a dreamer. He was a talented musician and songwriter. He had a beautiful voice. He wrapped my mom up in that dream and carried her away from her family. And it isn’t on her she believed him. It isn’t on her that he didn’t get discovered and whisked to LA and lauded as the next Lou Reed. It isn’t on her he lost faith in his own damned self in his twenties and took that out on her with his fists. She loved him. She trusted him. She believed in him. And he fucked her over.”

  “Baby,” he murmured, about to roll her and attempt to pull her out of the place he’d inadvertently taken her, but she kept talking fiercely.

  “I have not met your father or your mother, but I know both men he made, and I can tell you this, his choice of wife and mother to his sons was not some curse he bestowed on you. Some men suck. Some women suck. I couldn’t even begin to understand why they do what they do. But it isn’t on the people they do it to. I actually hope one day your mother comes back and explains herself to you, because there is nothing she can say that won’t make her seem anything but what she is. Shallow and selfish and wrong. And if you know that, you’ll get it. You’ll get it’s all on her. Though I bet your father loved her. Trusted her. Believed in her. It was just that she fucked him over.”