by Roxy Sloane
I entered and went to the chair opposite hers. I hugged her gently and she felt so small in my arms.
“You look thin,” she said.
“You look thin,” I responded. “Are you eating?”
“Eh,” she replied. “How many overcooked green beans can one eat? Now if you’d brought me a pastrami sandwich or banana cream pie. . . ”
I laughed. “Maybe next time.” I wasn’t just saying it, either. I made a mental note to swing by the corner deli and pick us up some lunch on my way here next time, and to ask Maggie if her bakery was any good at cream pies.
“What’s your excuse?” she inquired.
I hedged. “I lost my appetite for a while.”
There were so many things I wanted to tell her. So many things that didn’t happen to Ceci, they happened to me. I wanted her guidance, but I didn’t know how to ask. She saw I was struggling.
“What is it?”
“Why is love impossible?” I asked.
She laughed. “It’s not impossible, just improbable. And we know a lot about improbable, don’t we, you and I? You were improbable. What kind of baby is born to a 45-year-old woman? One that beats the odds.”
For a moment, my breath and my heart paused. I looked at her.
“Mom?”
“Yes, dear?”
“Mom, do you know where you are?”
She cocked her head. “The facility, dear.”
I felt dizzy in my chair, and my hands tightened around the armrests. “Mom, do you know who I am?”
Confusion flitted across her face. “Of course, dear. Ellie, what’s going on?” she asked, concerned.
I tried to slow my racing heartbeat. I didn’t want to alarm her. “Mom, it’s just, the last time I was here you thought I was your best friend.”
She smiled. “You are my best friend. You have been ever since you were this high. You and I have always been in this together.”
I drank in her words like the parched ground swallows rain. I reached out and took her cool hands in mine. “I’ve missed you so much,” I said, trying to contain the flood of emotion washing over me. “There’s so much I’ve wanted to share with you. To talk with you about.”
“Why don’t you start with why you’re so sad?” she said, in that tone that would not be denied.
“I’m in love,” I started slowly. “And I think he loves me. But. . . ” I couldn’t go on. Just hearing Jackson’s name still hurt, and I wasn’t ready to rehash all the memories, good and bad. It would be opening a wound that hadn’t yet healed.
“So what’s the problem, darling? Is it another woman?”
“Something like that,” I replied.
“Oh, Ellie,” she said. “Your father broke my heart, too, in so many little ways. Yet he’s still the person I dream about. Human beings, just look at us. We’re imperfect. That’s how we’re constructed. Anyone can make a mistake. And men are especially clumsy, because emotions are difficult for them. That’s why I believe in second chances. Now, it’s harder to have faith in someone the second time around. It’s difficult. But I was never afraid of difficult. And the woman I raised isn’t either. Love, real love, is worth the risk.”
I nodded, blotting a few tears with my sleeve. She reached out and touched my cheek.
“I’m very tired, darling,” she said. “Would you help me get into bed?”
I helped her up, pulled up the blankets, and settled onto the bed beside her.
“Ellie,” she said, resting her head against the pillows, “you are so strong. And no matter what happens, I know your heart can handle it.” Then she closed her eyes.
On my way to the lobby, I ran into Dr. Williamson. I told him my mom had recognized me, that we’d had a whole conversation where she’d been lucid, speaking with perfect clarity, recalling past events. My voice shook. Dr. Williamson listened, nodding.
When I was done talking, he said, “Let’s go have a look.”
Upstairs, there was a lot of noise in the hallway as the nurses redirected a confused patient. When we reached my mom’s room, Dr. Williamson asked me to wait outside. He entered and I heard my mom say, “Hello, doctor.”
“Hello, Emma Rose,” he replied. “How are you feeling tonight?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “Tired. I can’t sleep with all that noise.”
“Sorry about that,” he replied. “It’ll quiet down in a moment. Emma Rose, I understand you’ve just had a visit from Ellie.”
“Who?” she replied.
“From Ellie.”
“I’m sorry, doctor. Who is Ellie?”
My chest felt like it was cracking in half. I listened as he spoke with her a few minutes longer, and then he came out to me and led me back downstairs.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Whatever period of lucidity your mother seems to have had, it looks like it’s passed.”
“Isn’t this good news, though?” I asked hopefully. “If it happened once, it can happen again, right?”
“Ellie,” he said gently. “It won’t necessarily repeat. Of course it’s possible, but it’s not probable.”
He seemed confused by my smile. “I’m okay with improbable,” I said. “Thank you, doctor. Thank you for everything.”
I headed toward the stairs, my mother’s words echoing in my mind. “Real love is worth the risk,” she’d said. And suddenly I knew what I had to do.
In the lobby, I snagged a couple of donuts and a cup of coffee and walked out.
When I got into the Wrangler, I put my coffee in the holder, my donut stash on the seat, and pulled out my phone. After entering Jackson’s address into my GPS, I started to drive.
After about four hours I had reached Massachusetts. The temperature was plummeting and I cranked the heat. I didn’t want to stop, so I rationed my donuts, but by dinnertime I was starving. After grabbing something from a fast food drive-through, I kept driving. I didn’t want to lose my momentum, or my nerve.
When I approached the mountain roads, fog had begun to roll in. It was difficult to follow the winding road and the drive was treacherous. For a long stretch, I was able to follow the taillights of the car in front of me. Then it turned off, and I was forced to continue the climb alone.
Finally, after what seemed hours, the fog lifted and my headlights revealed patchy snow blanketing the rocky ground on either side of the road. I checked my phone—I was close. I felt alive. I felt like I had been sleepwalking for months and my mother’s voice had awakened me.
Ahead, I recognized the turn I’d made so many weeks before. I followed the bend and Jackson’s beautiful home appeared before me. I pulled up to the low stone wall and parked. I noticed the lights weren’t on, and that there was no car in the driveway. Did Jackson even keep a car up here? What if I’d come all this way and he wasn’t even home? What if he was still hiding out at that cabin upstate that Olivia had mentioned?
That’s when it hit me.
The cabin upstate. The cabin I’d told him I was being forced to sell in order to care for my mother. It was my cabin near Woodstock. Jackson Ford had bought my family’s cabin for $750,000. He had the means to pay that much for it, a penchant for secluded places, and he’d been very interested in hearing all about the property. He also had a motive: me. Despite our breakup, he’d wanted to take care of me and my mother; he was the one who’d saved my life.
The realization warmed me.
When I hopped out of the Wrangler, I took a deep breath of the cold night air, wrapped my coat around me, and headed toward his door. I was now painfully aware that I hadn’t thought my trip through. But as I got closer, I thought I could see a dim light glowing from inside the living room and I started praying he was at home. And if he wasn’t, I’d just have to find him at the cabin. Mind made up, I silenced my fears and kept walking.
Then a light came on in his entryway. My heart leapt in my throat. The door opened and Jackson appeared, wearing a tight white T-shirt and sweats.
“Jackson,” I called o
ut in the dark.
“Ellie?” He stepped back into the foyer, and I waited to hear the door slam, but then he reappeared after a moment, throwing on some boots. He came down the porch steps toward me.
As he approached I could see the surprise in his face, his disheveled hair, his boots still untied. We stopped, and he looked at me. I had no idea what he was going to say.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Ellie, I am so sorry.”
He pulled me to him and I felt his arms wrap tight around me. I felt my anger dissolving, but I still had questions, and I knew I deserved answers.
“Why did you buy my parents’ cabin? That was you, wasn’t it?”
I felt him nod. “I was in the market,” he said, as if to shrug it off. But he held me still, not letting go, burying his face in my hair. “And I wanted to take care of you,” he added, his voice strained with emotion. “I wanted you to be secure.”
“Thank you,” I said, overwhelmed.
“Come inside,” he took my hand and in the warmth of the foyer, he helped me out of my coat. Then he took my hand and led me up the stairs to his bedroom. I hesitated at the door, and he looked over at me, his eyes unreadable.
“Can we talk? I need to tell you some things. To explain. And then you can go, if you want. I won’t ask anything of you.”
I nodded and followed him into the room, where a fire was blazing in the hearth. Ignoring the huge four-poster bed and the dark wood furniture, I walked with Jackson hand in hand over to the fire. We stood a moment, watching the flames.
“I don’t expect you to forgive and forget,” he started, “but I hope you can understand why I reacted the way I did. Why I lost my mind. Because you didn’t deserve it, Ellie. Even if I hadn’t been wrong about what I saw. The thing is, when Christina left—”
“I know about your ex,” I interrupted. “Olivia told me she left you the day you were planning to propose.”
I didn’t need the details. I knew the woman he’d loved had abandoned him, that he’d been hurt. That he didn’t trust anyone.
I saw a muscle in his jaw clench. “Did she tell you I came home to our apartment and found her there with her boyfriend? That she was in the middle of moving out of our place, taking everything with her?”
“No. I didn’t know that.”
He nodded, taking a step back, then one forward. “I brought yellow roses. Her favorite. Three dozen of them. I just stood there at the door, holding all these roses. Watching them hold hands. The engagement ring was in my pocket. ”
“Oh, Jackson.” The image hurt my heart.
He shook his head at the memory. “I’d been up here by myself for a week, giving her space to write alone at our place. Her career had been struggling, so she’d take these retreats once a month. I was always supportive. But that time was different. I couldn’t stop thinking about her, about how distant we’d become. I thought it was my fault. That she might get better, that we might go back to the way things used to be, if I showed her I was ready to commit.”
I nodded, encouraging him. “So you went home early to propose,” I said.
“Yes. I left the Berkshires a few days sooner than I’d planned, picked up the ring from the jeweler who’d custom made it for me, and headed home. The whole drive back down to New York I went through it all in my head, what I’d say, how I’d say it, whether I should get on one knee. But when I got there. . . there was a moving truck at the curb, and men were carrying our furniture out onto the street, loading it all up.”
“You never saw it coming,” I said. “That’s awful. She wasn’t even going to say goodbye.” Suddenly his behavior made sense. Not because it was acceptable, or reasonable, but because seeing me with Luke had triggered something traumatic and raw for Jackson.
He quit pacing and settled onto the sofa, the fire throwing light and shadow across his distraught features. I sat beside him, close. I knew that telling me all of this had to be hurting him, forcing him to relive everything that had happened.
“I was in shock,” he went on. “The man she’d been seeing was Peter Lauristan, who writes for The New Yorker. I found out later it’d been going on for months. He’d come and stay while she was taking those retreats. They’d sleep in our bed.”
“I can’t imagine going through that,” I murmured. “Building a life with someone, believing you’d always be together no matter what—and then. . . ”
“It wasn’t just the betrayal.” Jackson looked up at me, searching my eyes. “For years she was my sounding board, my beta reader. But everything I wrote, she hated. I knew it was her own self-doubt, but her approval meant something to me, and I could never get it. Every book I wrote got worse and worse as far as she was concerned. She convinced me that my success was giving her writer’s block. That she was the literary genius and I was the hack. I kept hoping she’d change back into the woman I knew, that things would go back to how they started. But she kept pushing me away. Her drinking got out of control. I couldn’t fix her.”
I nodded. “I heard stories, but I thought they were exaggerated. About her showing up drunk to her signings. Heckling her fans, setting her own books on fire at the bookstores. And she never sold another manuscript.”
“When she left it destroyed me.” He looked away, remembering. “For years I’ve been shut down and bitter. I couldn’t deal with what happened. But you changed that, Ellie. You made me want to open up to you. So when I saw you with another man. . . it broke me. It felt like the same thing was happening all over again. I believed we had a future together. . . ” he trailed off. “But now I’ve ruined it.”
“Maybe we still do,” I said. I took his hand and pressed it to my chest so he could feel my heart beating. “Do you trust me, Jackson?”
“Yes. Of course I do. And now you know everything,” he said, gazing into my eyes. “But if you need to go now, I—”
I didn’t let him finish.
I moved toward him, took his face in my hands, and pulled his mouth onto mine. He grabbed me by the hips and slid me onto his lap, meeting my kiss with passion and a reckless hunger that made me gasp for air. “Jackson—”
“I’m sorry I hurt you,” he whispered, trailing kisses along my jaw, down my neck, over my collarbone. I tilted my head back, moaning softly. Then he stopped. “I used to think I wanted to be alone forever, so I’d be safe,” he told me. “But in protecting myself, I kept everyone else out. And I don’t want to do that anymore.”
I leaned away from him, searching his eyes. I was still breathing hard. “So what do you want, Jackson? I need to know what this is. Tell me the truth.”
His hands slid up to grip my shoulders, warm and strong. “I want you,” he said simply. “And if you’ll have me, I want that too. For as long as we can make it work—for always, I hope. I want to give you everything, Ellie.”
He waited for my response and I saw the uncertainty in his eyes, the unguarded vulnerability he’d always kept hidden from me. But I also saw a promise there.
I tilted my head toward him and whispered in his ear, “I will have you.” My chest was pressed to his, and I felt him let out a breath. “Now take me to bed.”
He lifted me in his arms and carried me to the huge four-poster, laying me down against the pillows. Then he climbed up next to me and tugged off my clothes in desperate, jerking movements, his mouth blazing a trail of kisses along every inch of exposed skin.
“You are everything I’ve ever wanted,” he said. His hands pushed my legs apart and he dipped his head between my open thighs, his tongue tracing the line of my pussy. Then we kissed again, relentlessly, both of us grappling with his shirt and pants until we were both naked under the sheets.
I stroked myself for him as he rolled on a condom, and then I straddled him. He reached up and slid a finger into my mouth, watching me with lust burning in his eyes as I sucked on it until he groaned. His cock was hard and ready, and the feel of it pulsing hot against my inner thigh made my mouth water.
“Fuck me, Jac
kson,” I whispered, leaning back on my hands and spreading my legs even wider to give him the perfect view of my wet, open cunt. He stroked my clit with his thumb, the tip of his thick cock teasing my opening, and as I closed my eyes and moaned he suddenly thrust into me, so deep we both cried out.
“Come here,” he said, pulling me forward until our lips met.
He kissed me softly, intently, his tongue massaging mine, and then he began fucking me. Slowly at first, building a rhythm, his hands gripping my hips to hold me steady as he ground into me. Then faster, harder, until I was moaning helplessly into his mouth with every thrust. He eased up again, and I pulled away from his kiss.
“Don’t stop,” I said breathlessly. “Give me more. I need you.”
Jackson rolled me onto my back without missing a beat and picked up the pace, spearing into me so deep and hard I saw stars. His hot, needy mouth was on my neck, my shoulders, my chest, sucking my nipples until I moaned his name.
I wrapped my legs around his hips and he drove into me, pounding me into the bed. I braced my hands against his powerful chest and we locked eyes, gasping together with every thrust.
“Oh my God,” I panted. We were so connected that I could feel his pleasure as well as mine, the delicious pressure building and building between us. I was so close to the edge, every nerve ending on fire, and as I felt my orgasm start to crest I pulled Jackson’s lips down to mine and whispered, “I’m coming.”
“I love you, Ellie,” he said.
My climax slammed into me, radiating from my core, and as my pussy contracted tight and fast around his thrusting cock I heard him groan as he came with me. His cock pounded into me so hard and deep I cried out with the pleasure and the pain and the bliss, and I felt him shudder in my arms as he spent himself completely.
He lowered himself to my side and when I turned to face him he pulled me tightly to him. We stayed that way, chest to chest, looking into each other’s eyes and feeling the pounding of each other’s hearts as we caught our breath. When I finally shifted and rolled away onto my side, he pulled me back against his body and spooned me. Soon after, we fell asleep.
