by Elle Casey
“Yes.” I hold my breath, wondering if he’s buying my lie.
“Okay. I’ll be in bed waiting for you.”
My heart races. Is he going to be naked? I can’t remember what he looks like without his clothes on. I think I was too busy rolling around getting sweaty with him to pay much attention. I know he’s got awesome pecs and a serious set of abs, but the rest of him . . . I have no idea. I just know that we fit together like two pieces of a very complicated puzzle.
I brush my hair out, amazed at how long it’s getting. The prenatal vitamins I’ve been taking are making everything grow, I guess. I brush and floss my teeth and then brush a second time, following it up with a heavy-duty dose of mouthwash that I gargle for twice as long as it says to, leaving my gums stinging.
From a drawer in the attached walk-in closet, I pull out my sexiest nightgown. It’s dark red and silky, with black lace around the edges of the bodice. Hopefully it won’t stay on me for very long, because it’s not the most comfortable thing to sleep in. Plus, I definitely want to do this sex thing. Screw just sleeping together. If we’re going to live together, we might as well enjoy some of the added benefits, right?
I slide the nightgown over my body and let it fall into place. The hem ends just below my butt. It’s loose enough that Lucky won’t see my belly, which I consider a bonus. No need to remind him that there are two babies floating around in there. Talk about a turn-off.
I lean in close to the mirror, checking for flaws. May says I’m really pretty, but I don’t see it. My face looks average to me. I swear I’m starting to get wrinkles around my mouth. May would say it’s because I frown too much. I stick my tongue out at my reflection. I think I frown just enough, thank you very much.
When I’m finally satisfied that everything is as good as it’s going to get, I walk through the bathroom door and into the bedroom. I let out the deep breath that I took in and stare at my bed.
Sprawled out on the left side of it is Lucky. He’s on his back, his eyes are closed, and his mouth is gaping open. A snore comes from somewhere deep in his sinus cavity.
I walk closer, taking in the details. He’s removed his shirt and unbuttoned his pants but left them on. He doesn’t have a lot of chest hair, but what he does have meets in a line in the middle of his pecs and goes down the center of his belly and disappears into the top of his Calvin Kleins. He looks positively edible. My pulse quickens as I imagine him with his pants off.
I war within myself. Should I wake him up and get this party started or just stand here and gawk for a little while longer? He’s got to be tired with all the hours he’s working. He wasn’t up here for longer than ten minutes, max. There’s a cup of tea on the nightstand next to the bed and it’s still half full.
I walk around the bed and lie down next to him carefully and slowly, trying not to jiggle him too much. He’s close enough now that I can feel the warmth coming off his body. I can smell him, too. Lucky has a scent I could never describe adequately, but I know what it reminds me of: all the times I’ve looked at him and smiled, all the times he’s come up to me and put his arms around me, all the hours, days, weeks, months, and years we’ve spent together, first as friends and now as lovers and partners in child rearing. He smells like home.
He moves a little in his sleep and then cracks open an eye. “Hey,” he says tiredly.
I smile. “Hey, sleepyhead.” I reach up and push his nose. “You snore.”
He frowns, his voice sleepy and sexy. “No, I don’t. That was you.”
I giggle, loving his sense of humor and the intimate way he’s sharing it. “That would be pretty difficult, since I was standing on two feet when it happened.”
“Lies and rumors. Rumors and lies. I’ve never snored in my life.” He rolls over, putting his back to me, and lets out a big, long snore, this time fake.
I snuggle up behind him, spooning him and burying my face in the back of his neck. I know it’s bold, but it feels right, like I should be here doing this with him. I inhale a deep breath of Lucky, smiling as it hits the pleasure spot in my brain. I’m so glad I opened my big mouth and told him how I felt about him not disappearing every night.
“I could get used to this,” he mumbles into the pillow.
“Good. Me too.” I mean it. I like this peace that I’m finding between us. We’re completely alone and nothing can intrude. I feel safe and warm. Maybe even loved. Respected at the very least. I haven’t found this place very often in my life.
“Do you want to fool around?” he mumbles.
I smile, my teeth grazing his skin. “Maybe.”
He lifts my arm off his waist and turns around so that we’re face to face. “I think you’re going to have to make the first move.”
“Why? You chicken?”
He nods very earnestly. “I’ve never had sex with a pregnant lady before.”
“Me neither.”
He barks a laugh right into my face.
I reach up and pretend to wipe something off my eyelid. “Thanks for that.”
He takes my hand in his and kisses the backs of my fingers. “I really like you. A lot.”
I try hard not to smile but I know I’m failing. He didn’t say he loves me, but I like this better. It feels safer. Liking each other is a great place to start. “I like you a lot too.”
“I want to take your clothes off now.”
“Don’t let me stop you.”
The soft material of my nightgown tickles my skin as he slowly lifts it up. I wiggle around to help him get it off, and soon it’s going over my head and being thrown across the room. It sails through the air as if caught by a breeze before falling gently to the floor.
He looks down at my completely naked body. “My god, woman. You are a work of art.”
I shove him on the shoulder gently. “Shut up. You’re so goofy.” I can feel my face burning at his compliment.
“No, I’m serious. Deadly serious.” He slides his hand down my arm to my waist and then to the front of me, stopping at my belly. His finger circles my navel and then moves down to the triangle of hair below.
I have to force myself to remain still, even though his touch is sending pleasant sparks of electricity through me.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he says.
“There is nothing you could do that would hurt me, except . . .” I stop myself before I mess things up with too many words and too much information.
“Except what?”
I shake my head. “Never mind. I wasn’t going to say anything.”
His hand comes up and rests on the side of my cheek. He stares into my eyes. “Just tell me what you were going to say. I promise I won’t judge.”
I think for a few moments about whether I want to say anything. My first instinct is to make something up, to lie. But I’m a mom now; I need to do the right thing and tell him what I was thinking. What’s the worst that could happen? He could leave me, and I’d be alone, which is what I’ve been most of my life, so I can handle it.
“I was just going to say that the only way you could hurt me would be to leave me. But if you need to leave me, I get it. I don’t ever want you to stay because you feel obligated.”
His smile looks almost sad. “Why do you think I’d want to leave you?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. People leave people. It happens.” The ache in my heart is heavy. I don’t say the words that are really there: that I don’t think I’m a person worthy of hanging around with for long. Not for a guy like Lucky, anyway.
“I’ve been around you for more than half our lives. What makes you think I’d want to leave you now? We’re part of a team. We’re making a family together.” He looks like he wants to say more, but he stops.
For some reason his words and his hesitation afterward make me want to cry. I work really hard at keeping that emotion buried. “But sometimes shit happens. I get that.”
“You should know me better than this, Toni. I don’t disappear when things get tough. I s
tick. I’ve learned my lesson.”
His last statement throws me off. “Your lesson?”
“Yeah. With my sister. I wasn’t there for her when she needed me, and look what happened.”
“You’re not blaming yourself for what she did, I hope.”
“No, not exactly. I’ve talked to Jenny quite a bit about it, and she’s helped me see a lot of things more clearly. So did you when we talked about it a while back. But the fact is, my sister needed to talk to somebody, and I wasn’t there. And maybe she wouldn’t have talked to me anyway, but if I’d been around more, if I had prioritized our relationship a little bit more, maybe I could have taken her to someone who she could have talked to. At least helped her find some peace.”
“There’s no way you can know that now. There’s no point in beating yourself up about it.”
“But what if I’m a terrible father? I was a terrible brother. It’s not a big stretch to think I might suck at it. My father was no prince, that’s for sure.”
“Are you kidding me? That’s nuts. You were a great brother. Remember? I was there. You brought your sister everywhere until she was old enough to decide she wasn’t interested. And who cares about your dad or what he did or didn’t do? You’re going to be a great father. You’re kind, considerate, funny, patient . . . You can’t let things that happened to you in the past that you had no control over determine who you’ll be in the future.”
He strokes my arm. “I could say the same to you about Charlie, you know.”
My blood instantly goes cold. “What’s he got to do with anything?” I pull away a little bit and the space between us turns almost frigid.
“Nothing. I’m just saying . . . that you’re a lot like me. You blame yourself for things that aren’t your fault.”
I snort in disgust. I don’t really know who the emotion is for, though—him or me. “I killed Charlie. There’s no way to sugarcoat that. I’m going to pay for that mistake for the rest of my life.”
“But he hurt you. He hurt you badly. All you did was protect yourself.”
“One bullet was for protection. The other four . . . not so much.”
“No, I don’t buy it. I know you think the judge believed that and you’ve convinced yourself of it too, but it’s not true. It doesn’t matter how much training you’ve had, Toni.” He moves some hair off my forehead and continues. “You know that when you’re in a situation like that, where stress levels are maxed out, you don’t have the presence of mind to say, ‘Oh, one bullet is all I need. There you go. Bang.’ All you know is you’ve got a threat coming at you and you need to end that threat. You need to put a stop to it.”
“I wish it were that simple.”
“It is that simple. Look at all of the police shootings we’ve had in the city over the past five years. I’ve read the reports—have you?” He waits for me to shake my head no before continuing. “In every single case, the police officers, arguably the most well-trained individuals in the use of firearms under stress, used more than one bullet to subdue their suspects.”
“Because they were shooting from far away, probably. They weren’t sure they hit the suspect, so they had to keep going.” I can’t look Lucky in the eye anymore so I stare at his chin. “Charlie was shot from practically point-blank range.”
“No, that’s not true. In several of the cases that I read, the officers were within five feet of the suspects. No one ever uses just one bullet. There’s too much adrenaline flowing and too much at stake.”
Why was he reading those reports? I don’t remember anything like that being part of a case we’ve worked on. Did he do it for me? A little piece of me really wants to believe what he’s saying, but I know what he’s doing; he’s just trying to make me feel better about the horrible thing that I did.
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” And I’m not in the mood to do what we were going to do, either. The warmth hasn’t returned to the space between us. Now I just feel empty of emotion. So much for shaved legs.
He runs his hand up and down my arm and then pulls me into him, hugging me close. “I’m sorry I brought this stuff up. Talk about a mood killer.”
I pull away and roll over, turning my back to him. I hate feeling vulnerable, but that’s exactly where I find myself right now. “Could you just . . . hold me tonight?”
“Of course,” he says, moving closer. “I’d love to.”
Memories of Charlie intermingle with thoughts of Lucky, our past and the future we might have. I’m obviously deeply scarred from my last relationship and the way I handled it. I feel like I can’t move forward until I fix what’s in the past, but I also know it’s impossible to undo what I’ve done. Spin, spin, spin, round and round my thoughts whirl . . . If only there was a way to fix things . . .
A lightbulb goes on in my brain, and the clarity it brings is immediate. It hits me like a bolt of lightning, right in the center of my brain. I know what my problem is now and why everything in my life feels so doomed and bound to be awful, no matter what I do to try to fix it. This thing with Charlie is like an open wound for a reason. I can’t believe I didn’t figure this out sooner. This is why I felt the need to drunk-dial a guy who tried to kidnap a friend of mine to get to me. Even drunk off my ass, I knew what my heart needs. It needs closure.
I can’t undo the things I’ve done, and I’ll never not regret those things or not feel terribly guilty for what I did to Charlie, but maybe if I could find a way to put some things behind me, I could move on with Lucky and the babies with light in my world and not all this overwhelming darkness that threatens to take over all the time.
The sparkle of hope that lights up my heart is like a drug I want to overdose on. My mind goes into overdrive as I think of my options. How do I find closure for taking the life of a man who claimed to love me? It doesn’t take me long to reach the conclusion that there really is only one way to get this done: if I could just get someone who loves Charlie to forgive me, someone who was important to him, I could start to forgive myself. And therein lies the path to closure, the elusive elixir that I’m convinced will make healing possible.
I run down a mental list of his relatives and fixate on the most logical one. Of course. It’s so obvious now. My hand slides down to my belly, and a tiny little poke comes from inside me. I smile as I realize one of my babies is talking to me.
This is good. This is right. It’s crazy and nuts, yes, but it’s the only way I know of to make things right for my future. And I’ve never shied away from crazy and nuts before. I can do this. Besides, I have more than just myself to think of now; I have the babies and maybe Lucky, too, if he wants to stick around and move our relationship on to the next level. I owe them this effort. My whole body goes warm at the idea of starting over with an almost clean slate.
“Lucky?”
“Yeah.”
“One of the babies is kicking.”
His hand slides around and rests on my belly. I place my fingers over his, trying to predict the next spot where a kick will appear. It’s there again. A little flutter.
“Did you feel that?” I ask.
“Oh my god. I think I did. It felt like a little bubble.”
“Well, it’s either gas or a baby.”
“That is so cool,” he whispers against my neck. “You’re a mommy.”
“Yep. And you’re a daddy.”
I feel certain of what I need to do now. I need to talk to Charlie’s mother. I need to apologize for what I did to her son, to her family, and to her. She was there in the courtroom when I was convicted. She has it in her mind to hate me until she takes her very last breath, but maybe if I talk to her, mother to mother, she’ll find something in her heart that will allow her to at least hear my apology. That could be enough.
Hope makes my heart soar.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
I’m happy with the way things are progressing at home with Lucky and at work with all of my teammates. I never thought I would enjoy a routine, but
this one feels comfortable. Each night, Lucky and I have dinner together and then either play cards or a board game, and then we go upstairs to my room together. So far, it’s been only PG-rated cuddling going on in the bed, but I have other plans for us.
He’s been letting me call the shots, and normally I wouldn’t shy away from having sex at the drop of a hat, but I find my attitude about things like that changing. I still like sex, of course, but it means more to me now. I’ve been waiting to figure out what Lucky and I actually are to one another before complicating it with a more intimate relationship. Lucky’s not just some guy I met at a bar or an old childhood flame looking for a roll in the hay; he’s the father of my children and the guy I live with, the guy I play board games with and tease about having a crazy-ass beard that doesn’t even come close to making him ugly. The next time we have sex, it’s going to be very different than the last time; we’re going to be making love. I’m not sure I’ve ever done that before. Not even with Charlie.
“Will you go shopping with me this afternoon?”
May’s question startles me out of my reverie. She’s looking over at me from the neighboring cubicle. The two of us joke now that we’re the cubical crew . . . cube crew for short. Ozzie has given us the power to decide for ourselves whether we want to go out into the field or stay in to do the tamer stuff, and we’ve both volunteered for cubicle duty. Morning sickness aside, it just seems safer and smarter. Whenever I think about working in the field with May, I picture Marc the gangbanger reaching into his waistband for his weapon; then it’s an easy decision to stay on the cube crew. With all the arrests that have come from our work, there’s not a whole lot left to sift through, but we keep at it, hoping one last piece of the puzzle will present itself; Marc Doucet is still at large, and while we’ve been able to track his movements via his telephone to some degree, thanks to the quick thinking of Alice Inwonderland Guckenberger, he still hasn’t implicated himself in any actual crimes.
I shake my head. “No, thanks.” I can’t think of a better way to torture myself. Clothes shopping with May? Nope. Motherhood hasn’t changed me that much.
