Accidental Forever

by Parker, Hazel

  Just as he turned his attention back to his work, suddenly feeling a little too anxious to be hungry, his phone buzzed with a text message. He picked up the phone immediately, thinking it was from Abby, but instead, he’d gotten a text from Chandra.

  “No,” was all it read, and just like that, his worst fears were confirmed: Abby was almost certainly talking to Trevor.

  Chapter Eleven: Abby

  Abby left work feeling like she was on cloud nine, but as soon as she got into the truck with Devon, she could immediately tell that something was wrong. For one thing, he wasn’t listening to music in the truck, which was strange: usually, he was blasting country music as loud as the speakers would allow him to. Secondly, he didn’t greet her beyond a nod of acknowledgment when she opened the door when normally he’d ask her how her day was. He was quiet and looked tense, two things that made her feel on edge. She braced herself for bad news as she buckled her seatbelt in the tense silence of the truck.

  “Thank you for picking me up again,” she tried to converse lightly, but he wasn’t having it.

  “We need to talk about something,” he began, echoing the ghost of breakups past even though they weren’t dating.

  “Okay, what is it?”

  “You said that you talked to Chandra last night? On some app?”

  Abby nodded. “I mean, it was a fake profile, but yeah, it was her. I—and this is going to sound really petty, but it’s a girl thing; you wouldn’t get it—I posted a picture of you and me at the arcade yesterday. Nothing romantic or suggestive or anything, just kind of…well, I did it to get a reaction out of her. She does this; she’ll block someone’s profile on her main account so they know she’s mad at them, then she’ll make a fake one with a separate email account so that she can see what they’re up to without them knowing she cares.”

  Devon nodded, probably only pretending that any of that made sense. “So, you’re not sure it was her account?” he verified. Uncertainty made her stomach begin to churn.

  “Uh, I mean, not her main account, no.”

  “Chandra says that she didn’t send the message or the flowers.”

  “Of course she’d tell you that, but—”

  “Abby, I think you might have been talking to Trevor.”

  Abby’s mouth felt like it was filled with cotton. “No,” she argued. “I wasn’t. The flowers, they were signed—”

  “Trevor knew Chandra, didn’t he?”

  “I mean, I may have mentioned her a few times, but they never met, no. I don’t know how he would have known to assume—”

  “Did you use her name in the message you sent?” Abby paled. She had to open the app to double check, and as soon as she had, she cursed herself for being so naive.

  “Yeah,” she said, “I used her name.”

  “I called Chandra today. She didn’t answer, obviously, but I left her a voicemail explaining everything, and she messaged me back and told me that she hadn’t been in contact with you. I know she’s mad at you, but she wouldn’t lie about that. She’d at least have admitted it to me.”

  Abby felt like she could cry. It was a lot to take in at once. Chandra was still mad at her, first of all, and all the relief that she’d felt throughout the day knowing that they could work through this was suddenly out the window, replaced with crushing disappointment and anxiety. Secondly, Trevor had found a way to get in contact with her, and she’d told him—shit.

  “Devon, Trevor knows we’re not really dating,” she confessed frantically. “God, I’m so stupid. The message I sent, it was an apology, and I told her—him—that it hadn’t meant anything and that it wasn’t going to happen again. He knows that we’ve been faking it; he’s going to think I did it to make him jealous. He’s going to think I want him back.”

  Devon took one hand off the wheel and placed it on her shoulder to calm her down. “Listen, Abby, you’re not stupid,” he placated. “You just made a mistake. Trevor probably thought that you were dating me to make him jealous, anyway. This probably doesn’t change anything.”

  “Then why’d he send the flowers?” Abby asked, burying her face in her hands when Devon seemed to have no good answer for her.

  “We’re going to fix this,” he reassured, pulling into a parking space near Abby’s door. “We just have to get the police back here and report this.”

  “Why even bother reporting it?” Abby asked once they got inside. “They couldn’t do anything about the picture, and the flowers are signed from Chandra. There’s not anything that anyone can do.”

  Devon sat down on the futon next to her, tugging a blanket up to rest around her shoulders when neither of them could tell whether she was shaking from nerves or having been out in the cold.

  “I’m going to make the call,” he said, then stepped away to dial the police for her once again.

  This time, to Abby’s pleasant surprise, the police did do something. While they couldn’t officially declare the second strike yet because the account wasn’t confirmed to be his, they did agree to track down the IP address, and if it came from Trevor’s computer, it would be in violation of the no-contact order. However, because of the fact that she didn’t have a full restraining order on file, the case was considered low priority, so it wasn’t going to be handled immediately. They’d told her that it might be a few days or even up to two weeks before she heard anything, depending on how many other cases they had to work—the city had a small police department. It was late by the time the police got all the information that they needed, and by the time they left, both Abby and Devon were starving. Abby was rummaging through the fridge to find something suitable to cook for dinner, heavily debating whether or not they should just give up and go out to eat again.

  “I can make pancakes,” she offered, “but other than that, we’re pretty low on groceries. We should go pretty soon.”

  Devon, who was still diligently working on anything that he hadn’t finished earlier in the day because of all the distractions, nodded without looking up.

  “I’m fine with anything at this point,” he admitted. “I barely ate all day; I just forgot. If you want to get groceries tomorrow, we can.”

  “Works for me,” Abby agreed, balancing the pancake mix, eggs, milk, and butter on her arms as she removed them from the fridge. She found herself enjoying cooking for Devon despite that it had been something that she’d hated when she lived with Trevor, since he’d always seemed to find something wrong with anything she made. With Devon, it was different. He never had anything bad to say to her no matter how many times she messed up. This, the domesticity of grocery store trips and quiet nights in while he worked: it made her feel contentment.

  She made a batch of large pancakes, not perfectly but well enough that Devon ate four of them and she managed two and cooked up some bacon from the fridge to go with them. Devon managed to put his work down for a long enough moment to sit down at the table with her.

  “I think this counts as my breakfast,” he realized aloud in between huge bites. She laughed.

  “You could have told me that you hadn’t eaten yet. We could have stopped by somewhere on our way home from my work and gotten dinner.”

  “Yeah, but it’s kind of just nice to stay in and cook, don’t you think? It’s been a rough day. Plus, I’m barely going to finish my work tonight as it is, so I didn’t want to go out and continue to procrastinate.”

  Abby flushed pink. “Sorry about all the distractions,” she said sincerely, but Devon shook his head.

  “It’s not your fault,” he reassured her. However, this time, Abby wasn’t so sure.

  “This one sort of was,” she pointed out. “I’m the one who messaged some fake account that I wasn’t even sure was Chandra and told the person behind it that I wasn’t dating you. Anyone could have seen this coming, so why didn’t I? Am I really that dumb?”

  “You’re not dumb, not at all,” Devon argued. “You don’t see these things coming because Trevor is a fucked up guy, and you’re not
like that. How can you expect yourself to see things coming if you’re not even able to fathom someone acting that way toward another person? You have to cut yourself some slack, Abby. You’re not dumb. You’re just a good person.”

  Abby didn’t feel like a good person. Neither of the people who had just a few months ago been the most important people in her life were speaking to her. That didn’t happen to good people, did it? Good people didn’t sleep with their friends’ brothers or lie to them about it or need all this help just to get themselves out of a relationship that they shouldn’t have gotten into in the first place. Maybe she wasn’t good at all. Maybe she was just toxic.

  Suddenly finding that her appetite was gone, Abby picked up her plate and slid the remaining half a pancake into the garbage. Though it was still quite a bit earlier than she’d normally sleep, she wanted nothing more than to go to bed and be alone in the quiet darkness of her room. At least if she were asleep, she couldn’t continue to make things worse.

  “I’m going to turn in early,” she announced quietly, and Devon frowned.

  “It’s barely even nine. Are you—”

  “I’m fine,” she cut him off before he could ask, not wanting to deal with his concern. Honestly, she wasn’t sure that she could even stand to let him be kind to her like that right now. “Just tired. Like you said, long day.”

  Devon nodded, understanding but suspicious. “Well, you know where to find me if you need anything,” he said as she shut the bedroom door behind her. She thought she heard him call a muffled, “goodnight” through the door, but she wasn’t sure.

  Since it was early, Abby wasn’t tired enough to fall asleep. Instead, she just changed into her pajamas and laid in bed, scrolling through her phone to check her social media notifications and browsing other people’s posts. When she opened the photo app that she’d used to upload the picture of herself and Devon, she shuddered at the barrage of messages from accounts that she didn’t recognize. There were five of them total and possibly more where that came from, but she didn’t bother to read the messages: she wasn’t sure that she had the stamina for that. The police were already on the case, so she didn’t need to overreact to this. She deleted the app from her phone entirely, feeling a small weight lifted from her shoulders. It felt so good, in fact, that she deleted a few other social media apps while she was at it; all the ones that she and Trevor had been “friends” on and all the ones on which she shared pictures of her personal life with the internet. Though she didn’t consider herself to be an avid selfie-taker, right now, what she needed to do was to reign it in, to ensure that her life was as private as she could possibly make it. If Trevor were going to take advantage of her at every chance he got, she’d give him no chances. It was freeing, she thought, to know that the only way he could get to her now was through the locked door, and to do that, he’d have to get through Devon, first. For the first time in months, she fell asleep in her own bed, by herself, feeling safe.

  Chapter Twelve: Devon

  Even though Abby had woken up seemingly in good spirits, Devon could tell that there was something that she wasn’t saying. Of course, she said she was happy that she’d deleted her accounts online, but there was something behind the relief that made him think that perhaps she wasn’t as thrilled about that as she claimed to be. The only conclusion he could think of was that it felt like she was letting Trevor win, and though that made enough sense on its own as a theory, he thought that it didn’t quite fit for Abby. She wasn’t competitive or overly proud, and she definitely wasn’t viewing her safety as a game that could be won or, horrifyingly, lost. However, he didn’t want to pry, especially when she appeared, at least for now, to be feeling so good, so he simply told her that he was happy for her and drove her to work without asking further questions. She’d open up to him eventually, he thought. Who else could she turn to, after all?

  As he dropped her off at work and watched her, as he always did, until she was safely inside the building, he couldn’t help but think that she could use some cheering up. They both could, really. Though he’d never admit it, he was a little upset by the fact that Chandra hadn’t spoken to him again since the one-word text about the photo account. Days ago, he’d been living with his sister, and now they weren’t even on speaking terms. He’d always been close with her, and though she did have a tendency to blow up and get mad, usually she ran to him to cry about other people, not away from him. And for Abby…well, Abby could use all the support she could get right now. Losing one of the two people who were committed to taking care of her right now had to be painful.

  While he didn’t claim to know much about women, one thing that Devon did know was that he’d never met a single person who didn’t like a home-cooked meal. On his way home from dropping Abby off, he stopped into the grocery store for a few special things to cook fresh tonight. Abby had told him before that she wasn’t a huge fan of cooking, so most of her meals were pretty simple things like pastas, soups, and stews that could be tossed into a slow cooker and left alone, and microwaved frozen dinners. She didn’t love eating like that, he knew, but work was tiring, and she never had a whole lot of time to cook, so she usually just opted for instant gratification over quality meals. Tonight, Devon would change that. He grabbed some salmon, red potatoes, asparagus, and a nice bottle of white wine to cook one of the only fancy-ish dinners that he knew how to make and left the grocery store to get to work for the day.

  By the time Abby got back into the car after a day of working, the cheerful mood from that morning had dissipated. She’d been hiding something after all, it appeared, and spending so much time at her desk alone with her thoughts had been enough to bring it to the surface.

  “How was work?” Devon asked, sure that it wasn’t her job that had turned her disposition so sour but unsure how else to bring it up. Abby sighed, staring out the window and not bothering to look at him to reply.

  “Fine,” she lied, “same old, same old.”

  He nodded, waited for her to elaborate, and continued when she didn’t. “I got some good work done today, too,” he offered without being asked, and she hummed politely.

  “That’s good,” she said simply, again not able to be bothered to say anything else.

  “Yep,” he agreed. “It is.” Another long, uncomfortable beat of silence filled the space between them.

  “How about we listen to the radio?” he offered, reaching out to turn it up. Abby didn’t say yes or no to that suggestion, nor did she sing along to the pop song that he knew she liked because he’d heard her singing it in the shower before. The icy quiet lasted until they arrived back in her apartment complex and he cut the engine off. He watched her look around the parking lot for Trevor in the way that she’d become accustomed to doing and getting out of the truck when she deemed it safe. He walked with her to the door of the apartment and opened it up for her, allowing her to walk in first to bask in the surprise that he’d prepared for her. Indeed, as soon as she’d shrugged her coat off and taken off her snowy shoes, she stopped cold.

  “What did you do?” she asked, her emotions a bit tough to read. She was obviously surprised, but something about the way she’d said it seemed almost upset.

  “I thought that you could use a break from everything,” he said. “You cook every night, and I know that these last few days haven’t been easy, so I decided to splurge a little.”

  Splurge was an understatement, he thought proudly: he was positively spoiling her. Though he hadn’t prepared the food fully yet because he’d been afraid it would get cold while he was out, he had set up the table with a nice white tablecloth and some fabric napkins he’d found. He’d even dug around in a few drawers until he’d found some nice candles to set in the middle of the table for ambiance, which he crossed the room to light. Two places were set at the table, and he’d set the wine in a bucket of ice to chill. Perhaps it looked a little romantic, but at this point, what did they have to lose? They’d already slept together, and it wasn’t as if
there was any chance that Chandra could get angrier with them.