Her Baby and Her Beau

by Victoria Pade

  The meal that Seth cooked completely on the barbecue had been accompanied by pleasant conversation with the happily married couple. But afterward Lacey had tired. About the time Beau and Kyla had Immy ready to be put to bed, Seth and Lacey said good-night, too. So Beau had followed the couple inside with Immy in tow and left Kyla waiting for him.

  While she waited, Kyla had moved from where they’d all been sitting at a table to a comfortable-looking double-hammock swing chair hanging from a tree at the far side of the tiled pool deck.

  And she’d taken with her the old shoe box she’d brought from the apartment and made a mystery out of to Beau.

  “You’re going to show me something dead? Body parts?” he guessed without any apprehension as he came around the pool.

  Kyla shook her head smugly and patted the other side of the swing, inviting him to sit beside her.

  He’d showered and changed sometime while she was with Darla and was wearing a pair of jeans and a pale blue mock neck T-shirt. She wasn’t sure when or where he’d gotten it, but it looked new and bore no mention of anything military.

  It did have long sleeves, though, that he had pushed above his elbows. And even though that blocked the view of the biceps she liked to ogle, the display of forearms she ordinarily overlooked was almost as remarkable.

  The color of the shirt also brought out the blue of his eyes and Kyla had been very aware of that all evening.

  Accepting her invitation, he sat next to her, making the swing sway. They were separated by only inches and Kyla tried not to think about how much she liked being that near to him.

  “Okay, let’s have it,” he said. “This must be good since you’ve been trying so hard to build my suspense by shaking it at me and tapping on it every time Seth and Lacey weren’t looking.”

  She had been taunting him with the box and enjoying the game.

  She’d told Lacey ahead of time what was in it, and Seth had accepted her simple explanation of, “It’s just some things I took from the apartment today that I thought Beau might like to see later,” so no one had pushed for her to open it and she’d placed it under her chair.

  “It’s proof that once upon a time you had a soft center,” she said.

  “Did I?” he countered.

  She raised an eyebrow at him. “If you didn’t, then I’m going back to thinking that you were just some rich boy lying to get what you wanted.”

  He flinched. “Is that what you thought?”

  Kyla answered only with an arch of both eyebrows.

  “I wasn’t just some rich boy lying to you. You know I wasn’t. But if this stuff disappears during the night so it never shows up again to ruin my image I’m telling you ahead of time that it wasn’t me who did it.”

  Kyla smiled smugly again. “Just try to get your hands on it.”

  The smile that answered that was wicked and she knew her turn of phrase had amused him.

  It also occurred to her suddenly that more often than not lately there was expression on that handsome face. The stoicism could come back in a flash, but it wasn’t constant anymore. And that was nice.

  But she was still determined to have the upper hand, so she ignored the devilish smile and opened the lid on the shoe box that held mementoes of their summer together fourteen years ago.

  “I wondered where that went,” Beau said the minute the lid was off, immediately spotting a braided leather wristband. Kyla had made it for him and he’d worn it every day that summer.

  “I found it in the grass after you left. It must have fallen off that last night.” And while she’d been sorry he wouldn’t have it to remember her by, she’d also put it around her own wrist and worn it herself to feel closer to him.

  Or, at least, she’d worn it until her father had returned from Denver. Then she’d torn it off and thrown it in the trash.

  Where it had stayed until the next day when she hadn’t been able to stand the thought of losing it—and her memories of Beau—forever. Then she’d retrieved it and jammed it into the shoe box.

  “Looks too small now,” Beau observed, holding out his left wrist for her to put it on him.

  She tried, but he was right, it no longer fit. He really had changed physically from boy to man.

  “Would you wear it if it did?” she asked him.

  “Mmm...” he mused. “It’s not really my style now.”

  It wasn’t. But somehow she was okay with the fact that there were only shadows of the boy left in him, and that made her realize that in some ways she was coming to accept the man he’d grown into. And maybe even like him a little more than she’d expected to.

  Kyla had no idea why she did it, but she slipped the wristband over her injured hand to wear around her wrist brace.

  Then from the shoe box she retrieved a smaller box that had once held a child’s charm bracelet. Opening that she took out two butterflies he’d made her from foil gum wrappers.

  He held out his palm for her to set them in. “I learned how to make those at summer camp when I was nine,” he informed her. “Paper crafts. I was surprised I still remembered how to do it.”

  “I thought you were so talented,” she said, laughing at what she’d seen as an indication of something greater.

  Now, seeing how dwarfed they were in his hand, seeing the thickness of his fingers, the strength and toughness in them, she wondered if he still had the agility.

  For that or for the other things he’d done with those hands and fingers...

  That’s your fault, Darla! Why’d you have to go and make me think even more about that?

  “One butterfly was me and one was you,” Kyla reminded him.

  “We were flitting around each other pretty much,” he responded.

  “Only at first. Then I wouldn’t call it flitting—it was more like glued together.”

  “Every minute we could be,” he confirmed with a sentimental smile as she took the butterflies and replaced them in the jewelry box, then put that back in the shoe box, too.

  “What is that?” he asked, pointing.

  “It’s an old deflated, dried up, shriveled balloon—it was a dachshund, remember? You bought it for me at that awful music festival you came to with me and my parents—”

  “The first time you kissed me—and it was you who kissed me!” he said as if there was some kind of victory in that.

  “That didn’t count—I thought I’d kept you away from the stage through my parents’ performance and instead they were just finishing it when we got back. They were doing a song where my father yodeled,” she said, her voice holding the embarrassment that had caused her then. “I just couldn’t think of any other way to keep you from looking in that direction and seeing that that bad music was coming from them.”

  He laughed. “That’s why you grabbed my face and yanked me into yours?”

  Kyla didn’t count that as their first kiss because, while mouths had met, it had been mostly a collision. Plus her eyes had been open, watching the stage she’d turned Beau’s back to in order to make sure she didn’t let go of him until it was over.

  “So you’re telling me that our first kiss was nothing but a diversion?” he asked, pretending that news had wounded him.

  “That didn’t count as the first kiss.”

  “How do you figure? It was the first time our faces crashed into each other.”

  “Exactly. And faces crashing into each other can’t count as a first kiss. I wasn’t even paying attention to it, so nothing registered but keeping you from looking at that stage.”

  “You might as well not have bothered—your father had been singing those songs the whole week before, while we fixed fences. I recognized the tune, so I knew it was him and your mother up there.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. And if that wasn’t our first kiss—”

  “It wasn’t. The first one was the next night, when we were sitting out on the pier at the lake. When you were trying to persuade me to go skinny-dipping.”

&
nbsp; He grinned. “Did anybody ever get you to do that?”

  “No. But nobody ever tried as hard as you did that night.”

  “Hard enough to make you so mad that I had to do some fancy footwork to get myself out of trouble.”

  “Then, when you stopped being a persistent seventeen-year-old jerk—”

  “I kissed you,” he said softly, looking at her in a way that told her he remembered it as clearly as she did. That it had meant as much to him. And as their eyes held for a long moment, Kyla was particularly glad that he’d regained the capacity for showing some of his feelings.

  Then he nodded down at the box. “I know what all is in there,” he said, as if he’d known the whole time.

  “No you don’t!”

  “There’s probably the strip of pictures we took in the booth at that diner—minus the one I cut off for myself. There’s probably the flyer for the carnival that came through here—you swiped it off one of the lampposts, so I’m figuring you kept it. That carnival was the first time we walked around holding hands.”

  He was sitting on her left and took her uninjured hand, holding it again the way he had then.

  She’d loved the way it had felt fourteen years ago.

  And, try as she might, she couldn’t help feeling the same way now...

  “I’m betting,” he went on, “that if I turned the box upside down somewhere in it are the straws we used for that duel we had at the Dairy King when you were still pretending you weren’t that into me—I wondered then why you took them with you when we left.”

  She gave him a look that denied it, but he was right.

  “And that finger puppet we were joking around with the night I went babysitting with you,” he went on. “When you were still making me work something fierce for every smile but finally gave in and admitted that you liked me. And the napkin I drew the heart on before I had the guts to tell you how I felt out loud. And maybe even the rock? You had to go back to that spot the next day to get the blanket, didn’t you? And that’s when you found my wristband—when I realized I’d lost it I knew that was where it had to have come off.”

  He was reading her like a book.

  Yes, everything he’d mentioned was in the box. And she had gone back to that spot beside the lake.

  That spot they’d snuck out to visit on his last night in Northbridge. His birthday. Where they’d spread a blanket because they’d decided to lose their virginities to each other before they had to say goodbye.

  “You think you’re smart,” she said in a quiet voice.

  “It’s in there, isn’t it? The rock that jabbed you in the back when I laid you down? Just after you gave me my birthday present—the marine coin.”

  He’d taken the rock out from under her so it wouldn’t hurt her and set it ceremoniously on the corner of the blanket, telling her as he did that he’d never let anything hurt her.

  On that night that had been awkward and clumsy and eventually painful for her anyway.

  That night that had been eager and anxious and fretful for him.

  And still somehow so sweet...

  As much as she didn’t want to stop holding hands with him she knew she shouldn’t be doing it anyway, so she drew out of his grip in order to rummage around in the box. When she found the rock she showed it to him, laughing a little as she silently conceded that he’d gotten it all right.

  Then he reached into his front jeans pocket and took out the coin she’d given him.

  She let the rock drop back into the shoe box when he passed her that instead.

  She’d been so thrilled when she’d come across it in town shopping for a birthday gift for him. Black and bronze, it had Honor, Courage and Commitment embossed on one side, and the eagle, globe and anchor symbol for the Marines on the other.

  Now it was worn almost smooth, the bronze and black faded, the letters and insignia barely visible anymore, especially in the dim glow of the pool lights.

  “It’s been with me ever since,” he said. “Everywhere in the world I’ve gone. My lucky charm. It always made me think of you.”

  Why did that cause tears to fill her eyes?

  She blinked them away and handed the coin back to him.

  He stared at it as he turned it over and over between his fingers, something he’d clearly come to do by habit. “I can’t tell you how many times I looked at this when I was home again that year, going back and forth in my mind about what I should do—”

  “About the baby?” she asked, alarmed, thinking maybe he’d lied, that he was confessing that he really had known.

  He looked at her again, shaking his head. “Just about you,” he said, confession in that alone. “I didn’t think anything could tear me up the way leaving you did. I told myself it was stupid and that we were just kids and that it couldn’t really mean what it felt like it meant, but...”

  Another shake of his head. “This coin right here was the whole problem to me—a symbol of the Marines, of what I wanted to be. Given to me by you, the person I wanted to turn my back on everything else for.”

  Suddenly it was as if all those raw emotions were there, in his face. He really had cared for her the way she’d cared for him, the way she’d thought he did. And she knew without a doubt in that moment that she’d been right all those years ago—had he known about the baby, he wouldn’t have left her alone to deal with it. They might even have had the life together that she’d fantasized about.

  But it would have cost him his dreams, she reminded herself, realizing it more concretely than she ever had before. Those dreams that had been so important to him.

  And maybe that wouldn’t have been such a good thing.

  What had begun as fun tonight had somehow turned too serious, and Kyla wanted the fun back, so she made a joke of what she now believed was true. “What kind of life would we have had if you had come back to be with me when there was still all that frustrated marine in you? You would have gotten me up at dawn with reveille and put me through calisthenics before making me march through the streets in some kind of formation.”

  She’d succeeded in lightening the tone again because he laughed, raising his arm to the back of the swing’s cushion behind her. “That’s not what I was picturing, but it’s how it might have ended up,” he agreed.

  Then he flipped the coin he was still fiddling with with his other hand. “Anyway, this has been my lucky charm,” he repeated as he replaced it in his pocket. Then, with a glint of that wickedness again, he said, “I know it made me lucky that night.”

  “That was the plan,” Kyla said.

  “Oh yeah.” His voice turned wistful as he reminisced. “Both of us slipping out when everybody else around here was asleep. It was so quiet by the lake that late...the air calm and the smell of wildflowers in it, the grass so cool all around us, the crickets chirping—and there was that frog that kept croaking, remember?”

  They both laughed at that, the way they had that night.

  Then he looked into her eyes, also the way he had fourteen years ago, and said, “And you were the softest thing I’d ever had my hands on...”

  The memory of his hands on her gave her goose bumps.

  “There were times when I went back there in my mind,” he said, as if that memory had been vital to him. “I hate to think that you probably ended up cursing all of it—and me—instead of thinking about it the way I have. But I’ll bet you did, didn’t you?”

  She was sorry if that tarnished it for him, but still she answered truthfully. “A little. At first I didn’t have any regrets. But then I cursed the fact that we were both too afraid of buying condoms,” Kyla said drolly.

  “Small gossipy town. We weren’t even sure they’d sell to a couple of kids. You were worried word would get back to your parents and we wouldn’t have our night.”

  “So we fooled ourselves into thinking that it couldn’t happen the first time.” She rolled her eyes at their adolescent reasoning.

  “And since then you haven’t thoug
ht back on that night the way I have,” he concluded.

  “Sometimes I have,” she admitted, though she didn’t tell him that those times had mostly been recently. “Sometimes when I see a clear summer sky it brings back not-so-bad thoughts.” The thought of looking up that night at the stars over his shoulder and how much she’d liked the weight of him on top of her...

  “You weren’t a marine that night,” she said, allowing in other, fonder memories of kisses more tentative than they’d been during long make-out sessions, of callused hands that explored with wonder, of stolen peeks at what she knew he’d wanted to study, of care and concern for her comfort, and regret at hurting her.

  Beau smiled. “No, I wasn’t a marine that night,” he agreed. “But you did still make a little of the man in me.”

  He was looking down into her eyes when the arm behind her curved and came forward so he could brush her cheek with the backs of his fingers.

  And whether it was that soft stroke of her face or the mesmerizing effects of his gaze or being back in Northbridge on the ranch with him, there didn’t seem to be anything telling Kyla not to tilt her chin up to meet his mouth as it slowly came to claim hers.

  There was some of the past in that kiss as it heated up all on its own, as lips parted then went wider, as tongues met again with unveiled eagerness.

  Beau reached for the box of mementoes in her lap and dropped it to the ground so he could wrap his other arm around her and pull her closer. And Kyla went willingly, letting her own arms creep under his until her hands were on his back once more.

  It was quiet. The air was calm. And there were crickets chirping in the distance. And Kyla was so lost in kissing Beau that they might as well have been lying on that blanket long ago.

  Kissing him was not like kissing anyone else—not anyone before him or anyone since. She didn’t know why that was, she just knew that it was true.

  Being in his arms wasn’t the way it had ever been with anyone else, either. There was just something about it that released her from everything and still gave her a sense of safety and security, leaving her free to go wherever he took her.