His to Cherish

by Stacey Lynn

  Instead of voicing them, I licked my lips before nodding. I wasn’t only confused about why he was there, I was also curious.

  “Okay.”

  Aidan watched me as I brought my eyes to his. I blinked, almost blinded by the sudden brightness in them. It was new. And different.

  I liked it. A lot.

  The gold in his eyes shined and the green was like the grass. Maybe the sun was hitting him right, because I still saw the tightness around his eyes and the sad tilt to the edges of his lips.

  Even with the sadness, he was still the most beautiful man I’d ever met.

  “Come with me. There’s something I want to show you.”

  Curiosity won out over anger, humiliation, and confusion. I stepped forward, avoiding his outstretched hand.

  I didn’t think I could handle him touching me.

  When I moved in front of him and that same hand fell softly to my back, guiding me into the backyard, I knew I was right.

  My knees almost buckled, and he was barely touching me.

  Still, I didn’t speak. I let him gently direct me around the bushes in my backyard until we were at my patio.

  I gasped and my fingers covered my mouth in shock from the sound and the sight in front of me.

  Dozens of tasty treats from Kate’s Kakes covered my table. There were four carafes filled with different juices, and piles of cupcakes. Plates of muffins. Tubs of cream cheeses. Butter in a dish. Bowls overflowing with bagels.

  He bought out the freaking bakery and placed it on my patio table.

  “Holy crap,” I muttered.

  His hand pressed into my back as he pushed me forward, gently but with purpose.

  “I didn’t know what you liked.”

  It was the same thing he’d told me when he’d ordered more pizza than I could eat in a month.

  “All of it,” I said. Eyes wide with delight over the delicious items in front of me, I turned my head to the side so he could catch the pleasure in my smile and my eyes at what I was about to feast on.

  Because I was definitely going to feast. I planned on eating all of it until I fell into a carb coma that lasted until I had to get to school tomorrow.

  I might even have to call in sick. It most likely wouldn’t be a lie, either. Based on the amount of sugar I was going to be inhaling, I would probably end up puking by lunchtime.

  I didn’t even care.

  Without questioning what the gesture meant or why Aidan was here, offering my version of a sugar heaven, I scampered across the lawn and took a seat in my favorite chair.

  Aidan was only a few steps behind me, a cautious look on his face as he pulled out the chair across from me, the one he usually sat in.

  My mouth was already stuffed with a chocolate cupcake, buttercream frosting all over my fingertips as I peeled back the wrapper.

  I tried to ignore the way my stomach fluttered as his eyes stayed glued to mine.

  “I owe you an apology.”

  “Forgiven,” I mumbled, my mouth full. I didn’t mean it, not really. He had really hurt me. The sugar was already clouding my judgment.

  So good. Kate’s Kakes could win national awards for its amazing creations.

  As I swallowed my first, much too large bite, he reached out to grab a cupcake.

  Without thinking, I smacked his hand and pointed. “Not that one.”

  The move shocked me, and I opened my mouth to apologize. Good grief. What had gotten into me?

  Aidan simply moved his hand and pointed to another plate. Plate—because my table was covered with amazing baked goods and I couldn’t believe I’d just hit him over trying to eat one of the cupcakes he bought for me.

  “I see.” His eyes roamed the table. They were narrowed with a slight pinch of humor. “Anything you’re willing to share?”

  I almost told him no. Whatever I couldn’t consume, I could freeze for later.

  I mirrored his motion and scanned the table. “Those.” I pointed to a small selection of pink cupcakes. “I’m not a fan of strawberries.”

  He wrinkled his nose as if he really wasn’t a fan of strawberries.

  His eyes met mine and I shrugged right before I inhaled the rest of my first cupcake in the second bite. “That or nothing.”

  With pursed lips, he nodded and grabbed one, cautiously pulling off the wrapper. He stared at the pink creation as if Kate might have slid sardines or something equally disgusting inside of it.

  I almost felt bad.

  Then I remembered the way it felt when he hadn’t come to the door on Friday. He totally shut me out. My heart clenched at the memory.

  If he wanted to stay, he could eat pink cupcakes.

  Without taking a bite, he set it down on an empty small plate in front of him and helped himself to a glass of orange juice. He lifted his eyebrow in question as he reached for the carafe, and I narrowed my eyes and nodded, giving him permission.

  “Thanks.” There was humor in his tone that I wanted to enjoy, but I didn’t.

  “Why are you here?”

  His Adam’s apple dipped as he swallowed. So freaking sexy.

  Going back to his standard action of staring at my yard, he was quiet for a beat.

  “This last week was hard.”

  He shook his head, clearing something from his mind, and stopped speaking.

  I always allowed his silence, but today I wanted more than that. I wanted to know why.

  I had so many questions. Why had he pushed me away? Why had he seemed so angry when he saw me? What was the point of the overindulgent breakfast?

  “You’ll probably have a lot of hard weeks.” I almost bit my tongue, but between him and Shane, I didn’t think I had the time to be quiet anymore. Too much healing needed to begin. Perhaps enough time hadn’t passed; it’s not like I knew the full extent of what either of them was going through, but I also figured it couldn’t hurt anything further by trying.

  Except for potentially my heart.

  His eyes narrowed on me, and that glacial look he’d mastered so well began to freeze the space between us.

  I pushed forward. “I’m not an expert, but I’m guessing pushing away the people who care about you will only make those hard weeks harder.” I took a sip of my coffee, which was quickly becoming lukewarm. “Like Shane.”

  My lips twisted. And like me. The words were on the tip of my tongue, but based on the expression he gave me with a quick nod and glance away to his own frosted pink creation, I figured he understood what I left unsaid.

  His jaw tightened as he stared at a row of tulip bulbs planted along the border of a pathway. Due to the hotter than normal March and April temperatures, they’d blossomed earlier this year. Soon I’d be able to experience the short season of bright colors lining one side of my yard. They were my favorite.

  He was staring at them like he wanted to rip every single bulb out.

  “I don’t blame Shane.” He sighed and ran his hand through his hair. “Not really. I’m just pissed…at everything.” He bit out the words like they tasted like dirt. I knew I was going to cross a line, but I couldn’t help myself.

  The sugar rush was making me stupid.

  “Don’t you? It was Shane who loved to skateboard, wasn’t it?”

  His gaze snapped to mine. The arctic burst of air in his eyes was thick and suffocating. “Why are you doing this?”

  I shrugged and reached for a bagel. “Maybe because I think you’ve already been asking yourself these same questions and now you have someone to yell at, someone to unload on instead of keeping it all inside.”

  “You read some psychology books on your lunch breaks?”

  My shoulders flinched at the insult. I bit back the smart retort I wanted to say and leaned back in my chair.

  He examined me with penetrating eyes. Eyes that seemed dark and bright at the same time, and I didn’t know how it was possible.

  They stirred something inside of me as he tilted his head toward his right shoulder. Something I shouldn’
t be feeling, not with a wounded man in front of me.

  When he ran his hand through his thick, dark locks, I longed to reach out and follow his movements.

  I wanted it to be my fingers…my hands taking away his stress and his sorrow.

  Slowly, he sighed and shook his head. Clearing it of the anger.

  “I’m being an asshole. And I don’t mean to be. I really am sorry about the other night.” He turned away, back to talking to my evergreen shrubs and tulips. “You help, you know. I took advantage of that…last week.”

  When he kissed me.

  My lips tingled at the memory, even if he still sounded upset that it had happened.

  I was, too. It had changed something. I didn’t know if whatever we were maybe, probably not, but potentially building before then could be repaired.

  His gesture this morning was over the top and yet necessary. I had needed to know that at least our time together hadn’t been just about me wanting to help him, but him wanting to be with me—in some way. There was nothing else that could go wrong with a dose of honesty.

  “You can’t take advantage of someone if they’re willing, Aidan.”

  His head dropped and turned in my direction, and what I saw sucked the breath out of my lungs.

  I needed oxygen. I needed a cooling fan to dissipate the heat blasting from his eyes and his tightened jaw.

  Aidan looked away quickly, but that same swirling mass of heat was pooling between us. It traveled from my fingertips up my arms to my chest, where my heart miraculously and thankfully started beating again.

  I could feel it pounding against my chest.

  “I just stopped by for pizza with a friend.”

  A move I would never be stupid enough to make again. The cupcakes and scones and bagels soothed the pain. Slightly.

  “I don’t have anything to give you,” he said, and my heart clenched again. His voice rumbled like a thunderstorm. “Not anymore.”

  “The good thing about friends is that they’re there for you when you don’t have anything. I already told you I’m here for whatever you need.”

  One eyebrow slowly rose. “Anything I need?”

  Oh God. When he put it like that…

  I flashed him a playful look, knowing he was teasing and trying to lighten the subject. He didn’t mean it the way I thought he did. He couldn’t, not after just telling me he didn’t have anything to give me. “Not like that and you know it.”

  As his lips pulled into a light grin, the thoughts of what it’d be like took off like a runaway train inside my head.

  I would love to know what it was like to be surrounded by his warm, thick arms, strong from daily hard labor. He was all man. I could only imagine his chest hair, probably as dark as the hair on his head, and what that coarse hair would feel like scraping across my nipples.

  They hardened and tingled at the thought.

  I gulped, clenched my jaw, and avoided looking at Aidan as I reached for my second cupcake.

  “Want one?” I asked, offering him a vanilla one when I saw he hadn’t touched the strawberry.

  But nobody was getting my chocolate.

  “Yeah,” he said, leaning forward and taking the sugary confection out of my hand. As his fingertips brushed over mine, his eyes pierced mine. “I’d like this.”

  —

  We spent the day in conversation, drifting back and forth between the inside of my house and my backyard. As the day passed, Aidan started to talk.

  Not much, but he told me about his dad’s death and taking over the construction company. He talked about what it had felt like when Derrick’s mom, Mandy, had left one day, waking up and declaring, “I’m too young to have a kid.” She walked out the door, duffel bag in her hand, leaving a screaming two-year-old behind, and apparently hadn’t looked back except for the random times she showed up with a birthday gift for her son, usually a few months late.

  I already didn’t like the woman, but now I despised her. She didn’t even know her kid had died.

  Thick sludge filled my gut when Aidan told me. Eventually she was going to just randomly show up at his house, expecting to see a son she barely had a relationship with, only to find out he was dead. What would that be like for Aidan when she appeared, gift in hand for a son who wasn’t there to take it from her slimy, selfish, and probably manicured, fingertips?

  I told him about Cory. I told him about not being able to have kids, but only because he asked. I didn’t give him the specifics about my endometriosis, lack of normal periods, and the ovary I had to have removed at the age of twenty due to a large ruptured cyst. It simply wasn’t something you shared with a man you weren’t seriously dating.

  He let me give him what I could, just like I did for him.

  By the time the sun began to dip behind the trees and the yard was shaded and cooling, Aidan offered to build a campfire so we could stay out back.

  I let him and loved watching him bend over in his perfectly fitted jeans while he arranged the logs, started the fire, and then pulled two deck chairs over to the fire pit near the back of my yard. I used it frequently in the summer, sometimes by myself with music playing from my phone when I needed to relax, but mostly when I had the girls over and we drank too much wine and made s’mores like we were still teenagers. Last summer, Declan and Tyson also joined us when they could.

  There were nights I craved the quiet paved and landscaped area—alone with my thoughts, my music, and the crackling of firewood.

  It relaxed me in a way nothing else could, but nothing could beat the sight of Aidan walking out of my sliding door, holding a bottle of wine and two glasses.

  “Thank you,” I said as he pulled the stopper out of the already-opened bottle of wine and handed me a glass. I stared at the burning, dancing embers in the fire pit, trying to enjoy the heat from the flames and the silence in the air besides the chirping of the cicadas.

  I freaking loved my yard.

  When Aidan broke the silence as we both sipped on our wine, he managed to stun me.

  “He talked about you.”

  He…Aidan hadn’t talked about Derrick all day except when he told me about Mandy. Nothing. Not when he’d been young, not more recently.

  “Always thought you were nice,” he continued, “and pretty.”

  I forced myself to take a small swallow of my wine, unable to look at him, but feeling my fingertips buzzing with unnamed emotion.

  Quietly, so quietly I almost didn’t hear it over the crackling fire and chirping bugs, he kept going. “He wasn’t wrong.”

  My lungs expanded until they burned. I blinked. Tears fell down my cheeks before I was able to stop them.

  There was sweetness in his words and pain in his voice.

  Seeing him so broken over remembering his son, even if he was being nice to me, slammed the entire tragedy to the forefront of my mind.

  His loss.

  Shane’s loss.

  The school’s loss.

  Everyone who knew Derrick had lost so much. Such a great kid, gone, all because of some completely pointless accident.

  Where was the justice? The fairness?

  Shame rushed through me, choking me. I was crying, sitting next to a man who’d lost his son, who’d given me a compliment—and I couldn’t handle it.

  I jumped up from the chair, needing space. Or a stiffer drink. More chocolate, maybe.

  I didn’t know what I needed, but I couldn’t sit there anymore, feeling all the things my mind was unable to process, yet I couldn’t say any of it because compared to what Aidan was going through, it was all so damn minuscule.

  “Hey.”

  I jumped from the burning contact of his hand wrapping around my wrist.

  “I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

  Aidan stood in front of me, concern thick in his eyes and that same damn sadness that was so apparent all the time.

  I hated it for him.

  Despised it. He was such a good man. None of this was fair.


  My lips parted when he reached toward me, his thumb gently swiping beneath my eyes. He stared at the tears on the pad of his thumb before dropping his hand.

  “I don’t know why I’m crying.”

  “I don’t always know why I cry, either. Sometimes I’m thinking of him and laughing and before I know it, I’m a fucking wreck.”

  Oh God. If hearts could be shredded to pieces, mine would have been at my feet.

  A sob hitched in my throat.

  Aidan pressed his lips together and stared over my shoulder for the briefest of moments before he bit down on the inside of his cheek.

  His chin wobbled and more tears fell from my eyes.

  Crap. If this man lost it in front of me, I was going with him. I knew it. I couldn’t see him cry.

  His nose twitched as if he was fighting back the tears and his voice was scratchy when he said, “Last week was really bad.” His hand tightened on my wrist. I didn’t move. Or speak. Or breathe. “I didn’t want you to see me like that. I don’t even know why, I just didn’t, but I could have told you that instead of being an asshole.”

  He had been, but maybe I’d expected more than he could give me.

  “I’m so fucking tired of being alone in that house. The silence chokes me, and everywhere I turn, I see him. Sometimes I swear to God I hear him laugh like he’s on his phone in his room, but when I get there, it’s empty.”

  “Aidan.” I reached up, pressed my palm to his cheek, and felt the wetness now slowly falling. “If I could take away that pain for you, I would.”

  Truth. So much damn truth in that sentence. I’d do anything not to see him broken and hurting, looking like he could collapse against me in exhaustion at any second.

  I finally saw it. Truly saw him and the bags under his eyes, the wrinkles at the edges, the tightness everywhere.

  With the fire behind us, the sun almost fully set, and us bathed in light from the solar lamps sprinkled throughout my backyard, I saw a completely different side of him.

  My hand dropped from his cheek and I left him in the yard, staring at me with a funny look on his face. I grabbed the hose and brought it back, handing it to him. “Can you put the fire out?”

  He frowned at my question, but as I bent to pick up the wine and glasses, he did as he was told, and when the fire was out, I reached for his hand.