by Kent, Julia
“Going well, actually. We plan to make some matches soon. But…”
“But?” John asked, eyebrow cocked. “Not enough men?”
“Never enough men,” Josie explained, suddenly serious. She could shift into work mode so easily, treating the strangeness of her job as if it were just another corporate venture. As if Good Things Come in Threes were a new web portal for music, or an app for shopping.
“Maybe I should sign up,” John offered.
Meribeth just rolled her eyes. “You don’t like to share appetizers when we go out for dinner. You really think you’re capable of sharing a woman?” Her arched tone carried mischief.
“Never tried. I’ll put it on my bucket list. Maybe we could sign up and Josie can match us with another guy.”
Alex had chosen that exact moment to take an enormous gulp of his wine, and as John’s words came out he choked, then sprayed the remains of his dinner.
Everyone looked at him like he was crazy.
“I already share myself with someone else, and I’m looking right at him,” Meribeth said sweetly as Alex mopped the mess from his hands.
The table burst into laughter. Minus Alex.
“I know we’re grown-ups,” Alex started.
“Some of us are,” Josie and Meribeth whispered in unison, looking at each other with surprise, then mirth.
Alex cleared his throat pointedly. “But talking about my mother being in a threesome really does cross a line I would prefer to maintain.”
John’s quiet nod in acuquiecense was enough for Alex.
“And then there’s creepy Frank,” Josie added, segueing nicely.
“Creepy Frank? Is that the name of a new band?” John asked.
Josie smirked. “I wish. It’s Laura’s uncle. We think he’s reappeared in her life, looking for money.”
Meribeth bristled. Alex caught it immediately and frowned. Why would she have that kind of reaction?
“Reappeared? After being gone for long?” Meribeth asked with a fake casualness, as if she were forcing herself to speak neutrally.
Alex’s body tightened. Something was suddenly off. He avoided John’s eyes but saw his stepfather’s hand clench. He felt it, too.
Josie appeared to be oblivious, continuing her story. “It’s been a few years. Last time Laura saw him was after her mom died.”
“Oh! I’m sorry. I didn’t know.” Alarm flashed through Meribeth’s eyes. “Was she young?”
“Under fifty, I think.”
John and Meribeth exchanged a look. “That’s young,” they said together.
“Car accident,” Josie explained. “Her mom had asthma and had an attack that escalated quickly. Lost control of the car, and…” She didn’t need to say the rest.
His mom’s face crumpled with compassion. “I’m so sorry. There’s nothing worse than losing your mom long before you’re supposed to.”
Alex’s eyes searched Josie’s face for a reaction, because he knew Josie had a very, very different opinion on his mom’s point. But she remained placid. A little too under-reactive, in fact.
“Right,” Josie said in a clipped tone. “Anyhow, Frank reappeared this week. Came to work and interrogated me without telling me who he was. He’s a real creep, making allusions to how Laura, Mike, and Dylan are living in sin, that the baby is being raised in an immoral home.”
Alex’s mom’s eyes flashed with righteous indignation. “How dare he!”
John shook his head sadly and emptied the wine bottle into his own glass. Wordlessly, he went into the kitchen and emerged with another chilled bottle.
This would be a two-bottle night. Maybe three.
“No kidding!” Josie was raring to go as John filled her glass nice and full. Her comfort zone—discussion centered on anyone but her, and mothers—was established now. “He came to see me and never told me he was Laura’s uncle. Wrote her an email but didn’t give her contact info. Crashed Mike’s office and made veiled threats. Then he finally came to their cabin and spouted all this crap about how the baby was being raised in a depraved home.”
“Sounds like a real asshole. Is he looking for money?” John asked, eyes narrowed.
Alex nodded. “And Mike and Dylan have plenty of it.”
“Doesn’t mean her uncle is entitled to any,” John added.
“No,” Meribeth said, pensive. “But if he’s making morality claims about the baby, that would make any parent’s heart shrink with terror.” She swallowed, hard, and gave Alex a look he didn’t understand. “When someone comes out of the past, unexpected, and makes statements about how you’re raising your kid, you freak out.”
He strongly suspected that she was not talking about Laura and Jillian.
“Did that…happen?” he asked quietly, his voice so hushed he thought no one could hear him.
Conversation halted, Josie’s brows knitted together, John’s face suddenly expressionless.
Meribeth reached for John’s hand and closed her eyes, trembling slightly as she took a deep breath. Alex’s toes began to tingle, his thighs tight and restless, his body itchy and twitchy.
“Your father. Your biological father. He reappeared. Once.”
The room telescoped.
“I remember. You told me,” he rasped. Josie’s hand found his, clasping it tight, and he felt three sets of eyes on him, resting like heavy rocks, pressing him deep into his chair.
“It was years ago. you were…fourteen? Fifteen?” Meribeth’s eyes traveled up, as if retrieving the memory. “He was in town for a business conference and asked to see me. The internet was gaining popularity and he’d found me online. Knew I had a son. Had backtracked the dates and…”
“Of course he knew you had a son!” Alex said. “You told him!”
Her mouth twisted with bitterness and she reached for her wine, draining it in an impressive feat of continuous swallows, like an Oxford student drinking a yard of ale uninterrupted.
“I did. At the time. He didn’t believe me. And so when you were a teen he looked me up, saw pictures of you, and…put it all together.”
John just nodded. She’d met him right after, Alex knew, when she’d consulted a lawyer about custody and protecting Alex from becoming the rope in a tug of war that never materialized.
“You never told me?” Josie said to him, clearly disappointed.
“He…it wasn’t like that, Josie. He wasn’t trying to get custody of Alex. Didn’t even want to see him.” His mom looked at Alex closely, knowing the words hurt. “He just wanted to make sure the opposite, in fact.”
“Opposite?”
“He had a life where he didn’t want me to find him,” Alex ground out, the words hard to say. His turn to gulp his glass of wine.
“He…what?” Josie’s confusion was palpable. “Then why did he find you?” she asked Meribeth, who shrugged.
“Booty call gone wrong,” John said, voice dripping with sarcasm.
Alex’s neck snapped toward his mom, who winced. “Really?”
“Sorry, Merry. I shouldn’t have said that,” John whispered in his mom’s ear. She looked like she wanted a hole to swallow her up.
Alex could use one of those too right now.
Josie just sighed in understanding.
Noi’s nose nudging his crotch at that exact moment was the most pleasant interruption he could have possibly conjured.
“Someone needs to go for a walk,” he announced, jumping up.
“And so does the dog,” John said quietly. He then shouted, “OW!” and looked at Meribeth, who had quite obviously just kicked him under the table.
Alex really didn’t care. He grabbed the leash off the wall and reached for Noi, whose yeti-like tail wagged so hard and covered so much territory it could trigger an avalanche.
“I’ll come with you,” Josie said, jumping up from the table then coming to a woozy stop.
“Too much wine?” Meribeth’s smile made her dimples come out, and for a brief second Alex caught a glimpse of the shy, beautiful sevent
een-year-old girl she had been when his father had—
“I’m fine,” Josie insisted, coming to Alex’s side and reaching for the leash.
Noi took off with a snap that jerked Josie off her feet as he bounded for the door, quickly held open by John so the dog and woman didn’t go crashing through the glass.
“Who’s walking who?” John called out as Alex followed Josie, laughing as he jogged to catch up.
“Whom.”
“Whom? When did you become Grammar Girl?” Her arm was wiggling like a wet noodle, but she seemed determined to hang on to the dog’s leash. Alex carefully unwound it and took over.
Noi slowed down.
“How did you do that?” Josie squeaked, clearly baffled.
“He can sense power. Dominance.” He jokingly puffed up his chest. “An alpha.”
She snorted. The dog lifted his leg and a stream of pee shot out, the sound distinct in the darkness.
“Or he just needed to pee really badly,” she noted.
“That too,” Alex grumbled. The cool night air should have grounded him, but he felt a deep sense of unease after the conversation at the table. Generally speaking, his mom didn’t mention his biological father very often. In fact, it had been years. While he knew the story she described, he’d tucked it away into a part of his brain that he didn’t air out very often, preferring to think of the rejection as an aberration, as a flaw in his sperm donor’s personality and absolutely, positively not a reflection on Alex as a human being.
Because that would be emotionally unbearable.
“I’m sorry,” Josie said, out of breath and panting to walk in double time as she struggled to keep up with the giant, overexcited dog and long-legged Alex. “You never told me that story about your bio—”
“I’m sure you have plenty of stories about your mom you’ve kept inside,” he answered with a little too much bitterness. Regret flushed through his pulsing veins immediately, but some part of him couldn’t apologize. It felt like weakness. Like he really was someone you pushed aside, like a kid you don’t want to acknowledge.
She flinched.
He had a dual reaction, like something inside him split, the fury and pain on one side and his rational, compassionate side on the other. Cold, calculated glee formed inside him, tender shoots of an evil seed sprouting from the look of hurt on her face. For some reason, it felt good to see her have such a strong reaction to him.
It felt powerful.
The other side rushed in, shoving the bad away and pulling her against his chest, hundred-pound Husky on a leash be damned.
“I’m sorry.” His stomach was on fire and his legs shook slightly from a combination of suppressed rage and shocked intensity. He’d really been that evil side, enjoyed it for those few seconds—and that was the most disturbing part of the whole story about his bio dad.
How little he really knew himself.
Her arms stayed motionless by her sides, and that same bitter seed that had begun to unfold inside him now tasted like poison. His breath rasped against her neck as he curled down to hold her, her palms tentative as they linked loosely around his waist. That’s right, he thought. Trust me.
Because God knows I’m not sure I trust myself.
On the surface, this was nothing. They’d made two sniping comments at each other, and an outsider would say he was overreacting, overly fearful that his sharp words were taken the wrong way by an overwrought woman.
Alex and Josie weren’t just anyone, though. Within the parameters of their relationship, he’d just screwed up, big time.
Worse? That damn sense of evil glory within.
Feeling powerless was a tremendous weapon. When people can make you feel powerless, it’s so tempting to turn to the darkness within to fight back. Alex had little experience with this.
Josie, he knew, was a master.
The realization struck him like a lightning bolt.
“I would never do to a child what my father did to me,” he said softly, his breath pushing thin strands of her hair over her ear.
“I know,” she replied, arms reaching out to him for comfort.
“You’ve been that child, too,” he added. “Rejected just for being there.”
She froze.
“Rejected for just being,” he said with a groan, a raw feeling in the back of his throat as the words came out.
Her head bobbed with a nod against his chest.
“My mom shielded me from that,” he continued. “But yours caused it.”
Josie took in a shaky, deep breath, still silent.
“I want you to feel so loved by me that you have enough inside you. That the empty cup is overflowing. That every day you know I loved you more than I thought I was capable of. And that when I die—”
She looked up in alarm, eyes shining with unspilled tears, Noi beginning to whine and tug at the leash looped through Alex’s hand.
“—you have so much love stored within you it lasts until the next life we live, so we can find each other.”
The tears dropped down her round cheeks now, spilling down her neckline.
“This life isn’t good enough for you? You’re staking a claim on eternity?” she asked with a loving smile.
“If I could bite you and make our love immortal, I would,” he joked, breaking the tension. Normally, Josie was the one who descended into jokes when the emotions got to be too much. This time, he was the one who broke first.
They were rubbing off on each other.
“I draw the line at sparkles and werewolves,” she said as she pulled back and wove her fingers with his, her bones so birdlike under his grasp. Noi yanked, hard, on the leash, and he let the beast lead them to the path where John had found them last winter, nearly, ahem…in a delicate position.
Josie’s eyes lit up as she recognized the path, then she frowned. “Dog,” she said.
Alex laughed. “Yeah, we won’t replicate our…outdoor sport from last winter. Not with Noi as an audience.”
As if he understood their words, the big white puffball stopped in his tracks and looked at Alex, cocking its head.
“He knows we’re talking about sex,” Josie said.
Noi shook himself like he was wet, turned his head with a sniff, and pulled them onto the dirty path.
Alex felt completely wiped, like someone really had drained him of his blood. Explaining love was so far beyond his grasp. His understanding of how intimacy worked was something he invented as he went along. Josie was so hard to figure out, and although they’d spent so much time together, and two months actually living together, he felt as if she were still a mystery. A language he couldn’t yet speak but was starting to read, single word by single word, parsing out meaning from a handful of vocabulary that he hoped was enough to gain meaning.
“I love you,” he called out to her as Noi raced ahead, chasing some smaller animal.
“I love you, too!” she cried.
Marry me, he nearly shouted back, then dug his heels in as his body came to a reeling halt from the thought that slammed against his skull.
Marry.
Me.
The surreal sense of the two selves receded, his stronger side emerging. Love always won, didn’t it?
It had to.
The alternative was just too painful.
Formalizing a life with Josie—an entire lifetime, measured in years, not months. Decades, not years. He could imagine it so easily that the life he lived before meeting her seemed more washed out. Faded. As if it were real but in sepia tones, a little less shiny. A lot less loving.
If he asked her to marry him, right here, right now, as she ran behind him to catch up, he could imagine her reaction. Surprise. Horror. Withdrawal. She wasn’t ready, even if he was.
And he was.
Like birth, though, timing was everything. Allow life to unfold on its own timeline and the result was always better. Rush anything and complications could emerge.
Complications were something they could do
without. More than enough of those already.
Noi’s nose was buried deep in a bush as he rustled some tiny creatures out of the foliage, the furry bodies a blur as they scampered up a pine tree, needles splintering down like poking rain on Alex’s head. Illuminated by streetlights above him, on the road, he could see the white dog, could feel his muscled pull against the tether of the leash. Josie’s cold hands wrapped around his waist from behind, her frozen little ice-cube fingers sneaking under his shirt to tickle him like a cadaver’s bones in motion.
He made a sound like a teenage girl squealing. It was so abrupt that Noi’s neck snapped up and he sniffed, looking at Alex with curious wonder.
“That cold?” Josie asked. Even in the mild late-spring weather, on the verge of summer, she managed to be cold most nights. Fingers and toes, mostly.
“It’s like you’re stroking me with a Popsicle,” he said with a shiver. Noi made a huffing bark sound. That’s right, boy, Alex thought. Defend me from the Icicle Fingers of Doom.
“I suppose that means,” she said teasingly, her fingers at his jeans button, “you would prefer I not put them—ah, you’re so warm,” she groaned as her tentacles of cold wrapped around his soft penis, sending a rapid chill from feet to thighs, up his spine, making him convulse.
“By all that is holy, what in the hell? That’s torture!” he said through gritted teeth. “I can’t believe I ever thought about marrying a woman who would be so cruel!”
The words were out before he could think. Her hand paused.
Her hand paused for a long time.
And then she touched him, stroked him with her small, skillful fist, the heat and blood flowing where his body needed it most in that moment. Noi tugged on the leash and Alex’s grip slackened as he was distracted. The dog shot off into the bushes.
Alex was about to shoot something off, too.
A distant part of his brain told him to chase Noi, that he wasn’t smart around the road above, that he would jump in the murky spring waters of the recently melted lake and get filthy.
Josie was getting filthy, too, in an entirely different—and achingly better—way.
He turned around, facing her, instinct overcoming his pleasure. She looked down, hand determined to finish its task.
