After You

by Sam Mariano

  “What do you mean, you’ll write it? I thought the authors wrote the books.”

  On impulse, I grab my phone again and open my pictures to show her the cover for Dreamcatcher. “See this one?”

  Nodding her head, she peers at my phone and tells me, “She’s really pretty.”

  “She is. And she’s brave, and funny, and adventurous, too. That’s the heroine of a book I wrote myself. Usually I publish books other people write, but once in a while I put my author hat on and write my own stories.”

  “We should read that one for bedtime,” she tells me.

  I almost laugh, but I manage to stifle it and offer a little smile instead. “Maybe when you’re in college.”

  Wrinkling her nose up at me, she says, “Nikki, you’re silly. I won’t need bedtime stories in college, I’ll know how to read by then!”

  Before I can get us back on track, Derek leans in the doorway to look in on us. “What is taking you two so long in here?”

  “Hi, Daddy,” Cassidy says brightly. “We did some book shopping.”

  Derek shakes his head. “I can’t leave you two alone for twenty minutes and you’re buying more books.”

  “You need a lot more books,” I inform him. “This house is sadly lacking in the book department.”

  “We have a whole stack of them,” he argues, pointing at the ones stacked haphazardly atop Cassidy’s dresser.

  I grimace at the sad stack, then turn my rueful gaze on him and shake my head. “You build things for a living. Build your child a bookshelf.”

  Propping her hand on her little hip, Cassidy turns to look at him. “Yeah, Daddy, build me a bookshelf.”

  Derek cocks an eyebrow and points his finger at her. “You need to get to sleep, munchkin. No more book shopping tonight. Get that story read and get those little eyes closed.”

  Cassidy harrumphs and I grab the book. “Fine, fine, fine,” I say, shaking my head. “Ruin all our fun.”

  “Without remorse. I want to go to bed, and we can’t go to bed until she does,” he says meaningfully.

  “I will read as fast as I can,” I promise.

  “See that you do.”

  I can’t help smiling at his impatience as he ducks back out of the room. I read Cassidy her bedtime story, thankfully without interruptions tonight since Derek preempted her stalling. I kiss her on the forehead, tell her good night, and turn out her light.

  Sighing with something like contentment, I wander down the already-dark hallway and into Derek’s room, where he’s lying on the bed, shirtless at the very least, but he might be naked beneath that blanket. Assuming he is and his back is in good enough shape to bang me, I close the bedroom door. Next, I unbutton my jeans and strip them off, remove my top, then I proceed to unsnap my bra and let it fall to the floor.

  My fingers flirt with the lacey edges of the blue panties I’m wearing. “Should I take these off, too?”

  “You better take ‘em off right now if you don’t want me to tear them off you,” he informs me, casually.

  I smile, pushing the panties down and stepping out of them. “If you rip my panties, you owe me new ones.” I hit the lights and approach the bed. I don’t make it to my side. As soon as I’m close enough for him to reach, he grabs me around the waist and drags me on top of him. “Be careful,” I murmur, trying to catch some of my weight on the mattress. “Your back.”

  “Fuck my back,” he replies, before crushing his lips to mine. His hand fists in my hair and a pang of arousal hits hard and fast. I love the feel of his hands roaming my body, the hard bar of his arm locked around my waist, keeping me close to him. I love the taste of his kisses, the hard ones, the soft ones, and every kiss in between. I just love being here with him.

  I know with every fiber of my being I shouldn’t say this, but as his lips brush my jaw on their way to my neck, I close my eyes and sigh. “I don’t want to go home tomorrow.”

  “Then don’t,” he says easily, his hungry lips moving down my neck. Between kisses, he says, “Stay.”

  “I wish I could,” I tell him, reaching up to run my fingers through his hair.

  “You can,” he informs me. “You don’t need a genie or anything. You already have your laptop here. Nothing’s stopping you.”

  “I’m getting too used to being here,” I admit. “The longer I stay, the harder it is to go home.”

  “Then maybe you should stop going home,” he tells me. “Make this your home. Move in, then you’ll never have to leave.”

  “You’re a crazy man,” I inform him, smiling faintly.

  “I’m a man who spent a lot of years figuring out if you don’t take what you want when you want it, you lose it. Nothing crazy about knowing what you want,” he informs me.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Of course,” he murmurs, apparently sensing this is not a conversation to have between kisses. He settles his arms around me and waits.

  “It’s not the most pleasant question,” I warn him.

  “I can’t tell you how shocked I am,” he replies sarcastically. “Seriously, a light breeze could knock me right over.”

  “Okay,” I say, rolling my eyes and elbowing him in the diaphragm.

  His arms merely tighten around me. “What’s your question?”

  “This is purely hypothetical. None of this will probably happen, but I need to know how it would go if it did. Say I did move in here. Say I agreed to exclusivity, I committed to a relationship…”

  “Say you did the smart thing?” he asks lightly. “Okay, got it.”

  I look back at him dryly. “Things are going pretty well, we’re all settled in. Then one day there’s a knock on the door and it’s Kayla.”

  Derek sighs.

  I keep going. “Now, Cassidy is thrilled to see Kayla. Tickled pink. Mommy’s back—hooray! Nikki is chopped liver now. She was a nice stand-in, but the real thing is here.”

  “That is not—”

  “No.” I hold up a hand to cover his mouth, halting his interruption. “Let me finish. So, Kayla comes back with a sob story about how leaving you and Cassidy was the biggest mistake she ever made. Every night she spent away, she missed you both more and more, she was just afraid you wouldn’t welcome her back.”

  Moving my hand, Derek says seriously, “Nikki, I never loved Kayla. I don’t now and I never did. You know that.”

  “Please let me finish.” He sighs with even more annoyance, but he nods shortly for me to continue. “Because you love me and not her, you tell her it’s too late, it’s over, things between you two are over and done with. Never getting back together. You’ve moved on.” He looks slightly mollified that I’m giving him credit, but I brace myself for that to change, and I plod onward. “But Kayla is still a manipulative bitch, so when crying doesn’t work, she turns to different methods. She tells you that if you don’t come back to her and be a family with her again, she’ll rip all our lives apart. She’ll fight for full custody of Cassidy, and when she gets it—not if, because she’s the mom, and she’ll probably win—she’s going to move back out to L.A. with Cassidy. Don’t worry, she tells you. You’ll still get her for a couple weeks every summer. She’s turning six soon, right? So that’s 12 more years. Over the course of those 12 years, you’ll see her a grand total of 24 weeks. You’ll go from having Cassidy every single night to seeing her once a year. What do you do?”

  “Well, for one thing, I hire a fucking lawyer. Kayla abandoned Cassidy four years ago, there’s no way in hell she’s getting full custody.”

  I shake my head. “Kayla has some lie cooked up to explain that. Insists she tried to see Cassidy but you wouldn’t let her. She has people lie and say they witnessed her attempts, so the court believes her. This is a hypothetical, so in my hypothetical, Kayla is awarded full custody, and she does move to California. Now, what do you do?”

  He lets go of me, so I know I’ve annoyed him. I take my cue and roll over into my spot, sitting up in the bed and watching him. He scratc
hes his jaw and searches for something truthful to say that won’t make me flee tomorrow and never come back. My stomach rocks with the effort I can see him putting into it. I know I put him in an untenable situation, but I have to know.

  Finally, he says, “I beg you to move out to California. If we move there, there’s no reason I can only see Cassidy during the summers. I take her back to court and fight for joint custody so Cassie spends half her time with us, half with her. I wait for her to get bored of parenting again. Once she does, we bring Cassidy back here.”

  “I say no,” I reply.

  Scowling at hypothetical Nikki’s decision, he asks, “Why?”

  “Because I have work here, a life here. Because I hate the sun, or I’m allergic to beaches. It doesn’t matter why, I say no. Now what?”

  “Well, now you’re being unreasonable. You could run your business just as easily from California. All you need is a computer and wifi. Plus, I don’t believe you. Cassidy may be my daughter, but you like her, too. Are you seriously telling me that if Kayla took my kid to the other side of the country, you would refuse to move there for no reason?”

  “Well, no, not really. I’m trying to make this scenario as difficult as possible though, and it’s most difficult if for some reason I can’t follow you. Say my company went under and I had to take a regular job, but I got a really good one that I enjoy at a local college. So, I can’t move because I can’t take that job with me.”

  “Again, while I support you in whichever job it is you love, we’re talking about my kid, here. We can get another job, we can’t get another Cassidy. Do you and I have any kids in this scenario?”

  “Nope.” It needs to be just me, like it was before. Me and difficulty vs. Kayla, Cassidy, and simplicity.

  “So, you’re not going to tell me that you believe any job is more important than my daughter,” he states, crossing his arms and shaking his head. “That’s not you. This scenario doesn’t check out if you’re not acting like yourself in it. I want you for you. The chick in this scenario isn’t the woman I love.”

  My stomach drops, but I ignore that. “All right… Okay, you’re right. I agree to move. We sell everything, we both quit our jobs and move there to pursue joint custody. Kayla still won’t let you see Cassidy. You try to see her every weekend, and every time, she has a new excuse. You know they’re excuses, you go to a lawyer, but cases take time to build, court takes time and costs money, and neither of us can find jobs in California, so we’re burning through our savings, dumping it all into lawyer fees, living out of a cheap hotel room.”

  “Of course we are,” he mutters.

  “It’s hard,” I state. “It’s hard and it sucks. We’re both miserable, you miss Cassidy, and you know she misses you, because while Kayla won’t let you see her, she does let you talk on the phone every night before bed. And every night Cassidy cries and tells you how much she misses you.”

  “Nikki, come on,” Derek says, seriously. “Stop making it worse.”

  I shake my head. “Nope. I’m not doing it, Kayla is.”

  “No, you are,” he argues. “None of this is ever going to happen. You’re judging me on a situation that will never happen.”

  “You don’t know it will never happen, Derek. You don’t know that. Kayla is still out there, she is still Cassidy’s mom, she has rights, and she is who she is. Don’t try to tell me she wouldn’t do something like this, because she already did six years ago. Now, I’m not letting up, so back to the scenario. I want to know what you’ll do.”

  “You’re putting me in a corner here,” he states.

  “I know,” I tell him, softly. “You’re backed into a corner here, stuck between a rock and a hard place. All you want is to get Cassidy back, but no matter how much money we dump into it, it’s just not happening. Not fast enough, and maybe not at all. This goes on for months. Your phone calls with Cassidy start to drop off, because Kayla is with her all the time, and she’s poisoning her mind against you, telling her you’re the bad guy, that I’m the reason you guys can’t be a family again. Cassidy hates me now. Even if she could come over, she wouldn’t want to because I’m there.”

  Derek’s jaw locks and he rakes his hand through his hair, but he doesn’t speak.

  “You and I are fighting a lot, too,” I add. “The stress of the situation and the financial strain are getting to us, and you can’t help thinking about how much easier it would be to just stop fighting. Kayla married and divorced a multi-millionaire while you were apart, so she’s living it up on alimony checks, has a big mansion in Beverly Hills, a closet full of designer labels.”

  He cuts in. “I don’t care if she married and divorced every rich bastard in Silicon Valley; there’s no amount of money that could ever make me want Kayla.”

  “I know,” I tell him. “It’s not about wanting Kayla.” It was never about wanting Kayla. “I’m just painting you a picture of her situation. It’s the opposite of ours. For us, everything is a struggle. For her, life is easy—and she has Cassidy.”

  “Yeah, I get it,” he grumbles.

  “She lures you over one day, tells you she wants to talk about setting up a visitation. It’s a lie, of course. She just wanted to get you there. You walk through the house. There’s a chef she hires to cook her dinners every night cooking in the kitchen—it smells delicious. There are pictures on the refrigerator that Cassidy colored. Her backpack from school is in the corner—you missed her first day of school, and every day since. You walk out back where Kayla is laying by the pool. You see Cassidy’s pool floats, evidence of the life she’s living without you.”

  “Can’t you use your powers for good rather than evil?” he asks me.

  I smile faintly. “I wish. Unfortunately, my brain is one of my powers, and my brain tells me I need to know how you respond to this scenario.” I miss a beat, then get back on track. “Now you’re standing out back, Kayla’s lying there in her bikini that costs what we pay for two months at our cheap, shitty hotel. She takes her sunglasses off and smiles at you, tells you to take a seat. You tell her no, you don’t want to sit, you just want to know when you can visit Cassidy. She tells you something came up, it doesn’t look like the visit is going to work out.”

  “Then I leave,” he states.

  “You start to leave, but she calls you back. She tells you she hates how things are between you, she hates keeping you from Cassidy. All she wants is for the three of you to be a family again. She stands up, comes closer, puts her hand on your shoulder.”

  “I swear to God, Nikki, if you start a me and Kayla sex scene…”

  Biting back a smile, I shake my head. “No, I don’t have the stomach for that. But she tries to kiss you.”

  “Then I turn away,” he states immovably.

  I nod my head, giving him that. “You do. You head for the door again, but she follows you. She tells you that since summer is coming—we’ve been fighting this fight for nearly a year at this point—they’re going to go to her summer home in, I don’t know, Genoa, Italy. They’re going to spend the summer there, so they won’t be able to deal with the court stuff right now, Cassidy won’t be able to talk to you because of the time difference… She says we can resume the fight in a few months when they get back from Italy. Or… if you’d like to, you could come with them. Since you haven’t found a job and we’re on the brink of bankruptcy, it’s not like there’s anything keeping you here.”

  “I wouldn’t go, Nikki.”

  “It’ll never stop, Derek. Right now it’s Italy, and when she gets back, it’ll be something else. The long and short of it is, as long as you stay with me, Kayla will keep Cassidy away from you. Whether through a court of law, a change of address, or sheer mental manipulation by turning Cassidy on you so she doesn’t even want to see you anymore. We can fight until we’re bloody, pour our all into it until we’re both drained, but this is the situation. It’s inescapable. At the end of the day, no matter how long you put it off, no matter how much of Cassidy�
��s life you miss out on, no matter how long you leave her in Kayla’s care, it will always come back to this. The only way you get Cassidy back is to go back to Kayla. Every other scenario is her making your life hell and keeping her away from you. All of them. So, your life can be hell with Cassidy but without me, or your life can be hell without Cassidy, but with me. The choice is yours. What do you choose, Derek?”

  He rakes his hands across his face and I wait for his answer. I wait and I wait and I wait, until I realize he isn’t going to answer me. I know why he won’t answer me. He can lie, but I’ll know he’s lying. The truth is unspeakable—if he speaks those words, he gives legs to every wild fear in my head, gives me irrefutable evidence that I’m right to refuse to be with him.

  As I’m swallowing that, he finally says quietly, “None of that will ever happen, Nikki. Kayla doesn’t want me anymore, and she doesn’t want Cassidy. That was high school. It’s not like that anymore. If you’d been here, you would have seen. She wouldn’t…” He trails off, shaking his head, but he knows it’s not good enough.

  There was a right answer and a wrong answer. They were both terrible, but sometimes you only have two terrible choices. Last time I loved him, he only had two terrible choices.

  He would still make the same one.

  I get it, I do. If he chose me over Cassidy, he would despise himself for it. There’s no part of me that can hold that against him. It’s why he’s such a wonderful father—but it’s also our weakness, because it’s the one thing that Kayla can always use to beat me. Maybe he’s right and she never would… but maybe he’s wrong. The point is, if he had the choice to make over again, he would make the same damn one. He would break both our hearts all over again, and I would be helpless to stop it.

  It doesn’t make me mad, it just makes me sad. I love Derek as a dad, and if he had been the father of my child, it would be perfect. It would never be a problem. But Cassidy will always be Kayla’s, and even if Kayla never comes back, the threat of her will always hang over our heads. Unless of course I want to wait around for 12 more years until Cassidy is legally free of Kayla’s clutches, but even I won’t do that.