Breathe.
I’m nothing but a tornado of fear.
I stand, holding the pill bottle, and make it to the door in a zombified state.
I hear them before I see them, Lily blabbering something at Locke while in her high chair. He’s at the stove, cooking eggs.
“Hey,” he says without turning around. He must hear the creak of the floorboards underneath my feet. “Take a seat.”
I cut a glance to the small table where Lily also sits near, and notice the place settings, the bagels already toasted and sliced, a tub of cream cheese from the deli around the corner. He’s poured me a cup of coffee. It steams near the chocolate croissants he also bought.
It’s the perfect breakfast I envisioned before I screwed it up. I ache at the sight because now it’s not me who’s the fucker.
“Locke,” I scratch out.
“Hold on.” Locke lifts the frying pan and flips the omelet. He can’t help it. He grins. “You think Lily likes mushroom omelets? Goat cheese? I’m gonna try.”
“Locke.”
It’s only a name, one syllable, but I’m tripping over the sound as it clogs in my throat. My hands are shaking—the one holding the pills—white with thinned skin and bone.
Locke drops the pan back on the stove and turns, concern etched on his face. “What’s wrong?”
Trembling, I lift my enclosed hand as an answer. His gaze shifts to it, pauses enough that I see his throat bob, then comes back to me. I move closer to Lily, putting a protective hand on her head. She thinks it’s a game and laughs as she tries to grab it.
Her noises, her giggles, echo in the kitchen like a fire bell. The tinkles of laughter amplify the tension in the room, the stark innocence of it so loud between us.
It makes my eyes well, and I angrily brush them away with the back of my wrist.
“Well?” I croak.
“Well, those must be left over from my surgery. Where’d you find them?”
My shoulders sag. During my trek across the main room, a sweet, naïve voice inside kept assuring that Locke might not hedge. Maybe he’ll fess up to his addiction to pain killers, tell me about his fight to end it, and this is nothing but forgotten leftovers.
Locke learned my body last night. Accessed the most precious place I possessed. Shouldn’t that mean I deserve honesty from him?
Locke seems impatient with my silence, and he jerks forward to grab the pills from my now loose fist and reads it himself. “Yeah, see? The ‘scrip is from six months ago.” He gives it a good shake. “Looks like they’re all there.”
His voice is friendly, explanatory, but his attention continues to flick in my direction, assessing the situation. And quickly figuring out that his excuses aren’t working. “Carter? Why don’t you say something already?”
“Because I…” I rub my neck like it’s the reason I can’t speak. “Because your sister told me.”
Locke’s eyes turn to slits. “Told you?”
There’s no turning back now. “About your injury. The surgery. The…the need for more pills.”
I don’t know how to put it. Screaming you’re an addict at him isn’t the right way to go. Not in front of Lily. I was fearful for her but didn’t want to be fearful to her.
Yet, I have to make sure Locke understands the seriousness of this discovery. That at any moment, I have every right to pick up Lily, walk out, and go straight to child services.
It’s that choice giving me a swaying sickness in my belly. The disappointment, fear, the terrible realization that Locke isn’t who he portrays himself to be, swirling into sewage. The rawness of it, the acid, burns my throat.
“Fucking Astor,” he seethes, rubbing at his face. He opens his mouth—
“You’ve been lying this whole time,” I say before he can start his excuses. “Forget about your personal battles. Everybody carries shit with them. But it’s the fact that you deliberately left it out of all our discussions this past week. You purposefully kept it from me, because you knew how I’d react, and God knows if you kept it from CPS.”
He lifts a hand, his expression darkening. “Now, hang on—”
I can’t contain the fury anymore. I unleash, “I left Lily alone with you!”
Lily startles at my shout and starts to cry. My lips pull back in a grimace, tears sliding onto my teeth, and I lift her out of her seat. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m sorry, honey. Carter’s mad.” I bury my face in her neck while I rock and soothe her.
“At least let me explain,” he says, softer.
“Such a cliché,” I spit. “Let me explain, says the man who sleeps around, the guy who keeps secrets, the idiot who’s too much of a coward to be honest in the first place.”
This time, his arms splay out in surrender. “I’m not on any meds, Carter.”
“Then what are those still doing here in the house?” I’m still bouncing Lily, glaring at him over Lily’s shoulder. Her cries aren’t helping, becoming louder, and I fumble for a piece of bagel for her to munch on. She quiets, her elbows bent against my breasts, crumbs dropping onto Locke’s tee. Her warm head is so close to my chin I can smell she’s freshly bathed, and the familiar scent is the only thing that’s keeping me from cracking in half.
“Because I’ve wanted to take them.”
Locke’s honesty freezes me mid-bounce. This time, I hold my stare against his. He swallows and continues. “You’re right. I haven’t been straight with you. But if you give me the opportunity, if you sit down with me, I’ll tell you everything.”
“Now that you’ve been caught?” I fight off a sneer, but my hold tightens on my child.
She’s not mine.
He works his jaw. “I guess the time has come to be totally transparent.”
“I’m pretty sure that time was when you were being approved by the court.”
“I haven’t hidden anything from them.”
I clench my teeth.
“They’re aware of my history. And received statements, affidavits, from my friends, family, that I’m clean. The slight risk is requiring more home visits, but the government has approved my ability to be a dad.”
His tone acquires a dryness at the end, and if it were any other discussion, I’d’ve sympathized with the law having to turn his life inside out to receive custody of his biological child, when other parents pop a baby out, and it’s theirs on sight.
But this isn’t how we used to be, as brief as that was. This is a brutal revelation, one he didn’t keep from CPS, but one he did harbor…from me.
“W—” I can’t even get out the question properly through the hurt. Why did you keep it from me? “I bet they don’t know about this Hail Mary you have laying around.”
He closes his eyes on a sigh. “No. They don’t. I keep it in an empty bottle of antifreeze at the back of the kitchen sink.”
I flip back to when I cleaned the apartment and the strange red bottle I found behind all the plumbing, and I almost release a hollow laugh. To think, how stupid I was for merely shrugging and putting the empty bottle back.
I stiffen. “But the pills weren’t there. They were under your bed.”
“They must’ve fallen from my nightstand. Sit,” he says before I summon enough breath for another accusation. “Please. I’ll be completely open with you. I promise.”
The only factor that keeps me from storming out of here with Lily in my arms is the idea that I need as much information as I can gather before going to the proper authorities. So, I sit, but I am so far from sympathizing with him that it’s hard for me to reconcile the man on top of me last night with the felled football star I’m staring at now.
And he’s fallen. There’s a gauntness to his face I’ve never noticed before, a sloping of his shoulders that this usually arrogant, cocky bastard never allows to slip.
I set Lily at my feet, handing her a whisk and a plastic bowl for entertainment. “The instant she gets bored, I’m out of here. With her.”
“Fine,” Locke says, but he’s look
ing at Lily with a gleaming sadness like he already knows he’s lost her.
I lean back, arms folded. “Go ahead. Speak.”
“It’s messed up that I still have those pills, I know. But it’s a comfort. To know, at any point, they were there. As a test.” He shakes his head, his hand, resting on the table, fisting. “And I know it’s messed up because I haven’t told anyone. Until now.”
“The fact that you have them, Locke…it means you’ll use them. If not today, then some other—”
“No. I haven’t touched them. And I’d never—fuck, it’s so hard to get across, but that’s all they were—a comfort. An easy out. A reminder of the fucked-up situation I landed myself in and how I should never go back.”
“Do you go to meetings? Talk to someone?”
“Yes.”
I blink, the only break in my composure. So much. So many things go on with him that I don’t know, and the reasoning is trying to break through the hurt feelings. “I realize I came here with a lot more baggage than your regular girl. These issues, the battles you’ve gone through—you don’t have to tell anyone until you’re ready. But I’m different, Locke.” I put a hand to my chest, then point to the little girl between us. “I’m different because I came with her. And I deserved a lot more answers than what you gave me.”
“I don’t consider you to be just any other girl.”
“But you treated me like one.”
“That’s not true.”
“Oh, no?” I gesture to the bottle of pills, placed innocently between us, but directly above Lily’s head. “These are things any mother would want to know when giving up their child to a stranger. And that’s what you were to me, Locke—some guy who slept with my friend and knocked her up. An aged college hero who had a brilliant career ahead of him until it was torn away. A dude who buried his issues in beer and women—and that was before the injury.”
Locke rubs at his jaw and looks at the wall behind my shoulder.
“When I came here, that’s all I expected,” I continue. “But you changed all that. In a matter of a week, you turned everything I thought about you into a caricature. You were nothing like the reputation you crafted for yourself. You showed kindness, sweetness, a love for this child and the determination to sacrifice everything for her—to learn. You cleaned up your act for her. You weren’t afraid to look stupid and ask questions if it meant caring for her better. And that’s all I could ever ask for. What I see in you when you look at her, you can’t fake that kind of devotion.” My voice cracks. “Because I look at her in the exact same way.”
At last, Locke pins me with his brilliant blue eyes. “I love Lily, Carter.”
I watch the brightness go out when I say, “You betrayed all of that love with this single bottle.”
He nods, but I’m not finished. “You betrayed me by keeping this to yourself. Especially after last night when you…when we…you saw all of me, Locke, because I let you in. I trusted you, but it turns out you don’t trust me.”
“Can you blame me?” Locke looks up from the table, and I’m about to flay him for that response until he adds, “I didn’t know shit about you, Carter. All I was aware of when we first met was that you hated me, you were losing a baby that’s like a daughter to you because of me, and you judged me a prick the instant you saw me.”
“That’s not fair—”
“No?”
“No! You had a half-naked chick tumbling out of the bedroom with you!”
He guffaws. “So, I have sex. That doesn’t give you the right to—”
“You didn’t even know her name.”
His expression hardens. “That’s not true.”
“Then what was it?”
His muscles grind through his cheeks. “Candace.”
“Tara,” I add, deadpan. “I asked.”
Locke bangs his fist against the table. “Damn it.”
“And you question why I assumed you were a loser player who didn’t deserve to touch Lily’s baby toe, never mind be granted sole custody of her.”
“The point,” he continues, “is that you had a version of me in your head—which you just admitted to—that I was going to have to fight like hell against to prove to you I deserved Lily.”
“Can you blame me? I had to give a child up that I love more than myself because the law wouldn’t let me keep her. A piece of paper, Locke.” I trip over my words. “That’s all it took to take Lily away from me. So, big surprise, I hated you on sight. And you had to fight against that judgment every step of the way. But it was working. You were so close to—”
“A single piece of paper was all it took to keep me away from my daughter indefinitely.”
I quiet. He’s talking about the birth certificate, and Paige refusing to name the father. Since Locke wasn’t on it, he had no immediate claim. He had to establish paternity, then be approved for parental rights, before he could even meet her.
“You continue to believe I have no idea what you’re going through,” Locke says. “When Paige fucked us both over.”
“Don’t talk about her like that,” I seethe out.
“Why not? You see her as this angel when in reality, she didn’t plan this shit out. When was she diagnosed? How much time did she have to figure out a future for Lily? And why the fuck didn’t she do it?”
“Stop—”
“Months, right?” Locke barrels on. “Months to contact me, or hell, secure your custody of Lily, instead of dying and leaving it to us and a delayed court system to figure it out.”
“We were going through a lot during such a short period—”
“She didn’t get her affairs in order. That’s her fault, Carter. Not yours, not mine.”
I’m half out of my chair. “Maybe it’s because she thought she’d live, Locke. Did you ever think about that?”
That shuts him up.
I continue, “You have no idea! None, on what she—we—went through. You think there was time—?”
“There shoulda been.”
I nearly screech. “Stop speaking about this like you have any idea what went on during the last months of her life!”
“Then don’t minimize my six months of sobriety because you found a full bottle of pain killers.”
I choke on a scoff. “That’s your argument? You’re maligning Paige because you don’t think I understand your personal demons?”
He crosses his arms, annoyingly relaxed while I’m practically melting with contained rage.
“I think it’s very on point,” he says. “We both think we know a lot about the other when we don’t know the half of it.”
This time, I scoff perfectly. “When that girl fell out of bed with you? You were still half drunk. The fact you’re calling yourself sober—”
“That’s…look, I’m not an alcoholic.”
“Isn’t an addict still an addict, by any other name?”
“No. You do not get to do this.”
“What? Call you out?”
He whips out a pointed finger, then balls his hand into a fist while his lips turn white. “You don’t get to sit here and put all my hard work, everything I went through, into a few seconds of worthless sarcasm. You have every right to be mad at me right now because I didn’t tell you about this stupid test I made for myself. That’s on me. But you do not have the right to strip all I’ve worked for, the night sweats and the shaking and the agony of being straight-up sober after undergoing two more knee operations, away from me.” He takes a breath, and I remind myself to blink in front of his brimming fury. “I did it all for that little girl at your feet. Somewhat for myself, but my dreams, my hopes, my life, is now for that child. And I will keep fighting to keep her; don’t you dare doubt that.”
His last words, their visceral tone, rock me.
“In the grand scheme of things,” he says, still furious, “you’re not anything I have to deal with.”
I can’t help the flutter of hurt in my heart, and I look away before Locke catches on.
He adds, “And yeah, I felt it was worth proving to you anyway. Not just to redeem my ego, either. Because you mean a lot to Lily, and even more to Lily’s mother. You, Carter, were not deserving of how the government treated you. The way you hated, the way you despised, was all for one reason.” He glances down at Lily who’s distracted by banging the whisk against the table leg. “And out of respect for her, I wasn’t about to treat you the same as them.”
My mouth twists.
“So excuse me for thinking that adding a pill addiction to your first impression of me wasn’t the best choice in trying to win you over.”
“You’ve been hiding pills, Locke,” I manage to say. “That act takes everything we’re talking about to a whole new level.”
“See for yourself—count them. Look at the quantity listed on the bottle, then count them out. They’re all there.”
I shake my head. “That doesn’t matter.”
“Fine.” He stands, swiping the pill bottle, opening it, then dumping them in the sink. He turns on the tap. “Consider them gone.”
I watch his actions with sadness. “How do I know there’s not more?”
He leans against the sink, his forehead nearly touching the cabinets above. I can practically see the fury draining off him in waves. “Trust.”
Now it was my turn to guffaw. “After all this, you think I can trust you?”
“You did last night, and what I showed you was true.” He clears his throat, as if uncomfortable he’s admitting as much, and turns. “How I’m feeling about Lily is true. How I’m feeling…about you…is true.”
“Locke,” I groan and bury my face in my hands, elbows on the table. His voice alone has created visions of us on the floor last night, how I bared myself to him even though my clothes stayed on. How every worry, each piece of grief, the weight of pressure, all spiraled outside my body before centering their energy at my core, until there was nothing but pleasure. My mind was coated with it. My shoulders were eased by it.
It was a mistake. It’s all a mistake.
I stare at the empty pill bottle. It’s evidence he won’t ever let me know him the way I allowed him to know me last night.
Trusting You Page 17
