The doorbell rings and I know it’s him. I’m sure Angie called him right away. I lift my limp body off the floor and look out the window.
Thank God.
I see Chris picking up the flowers from this morning that still sit out on the porch. I swing open the door and pull him into a hug. “God, I needed to see you.”
“I kind of had a feeling you would,” he says. “What do you want me to do with these?” He holds the flowers out to me then he notices my face that must be smeared with mascara and puffy from crying. He quickly deposits the orchids on the floor and takes me into his arms again.
“Baylor, you look like shit. Want to talk about it?”
I laugh and wipe my nose with the back of my hand. “Thanks a lot,” I say, punching him lightly on the arm. He follows me to the couch and I sit down, pulling a pillow onto my lap. “Gavin was here today.”
“I know,” he says.
“How do you know? I didn’t call you. I didn’t call anyone.”
“He came to the restaurant.”
My eyes go wide and snap up to his. “He what?”
“He came to Mitchell’s to talk to your dad. I guess he wasn’t aware of their new location. You guys really have done a good job of avoiding each other all these years, haven’t you?”
“Crap. What happened?” I ask. “Did he hit you? Did you hit him?”
He shakes his head. “I wanted to punch him. But I didn’t think it would be good for business.” He laughs.
Why does everyone think all this is so funny?
“He asked if I would sit down and hear him out over coffee. So I did.”
“And?” I ask impatiently.
“And this whole situation is seriously messed up, Baylor.”
“Yeah, I know. I talked to his friend, Angie, today,” I say.
“Good. Gavin was hoping you would call her.” He studies my face. “Do you believe them?”
Tears threaten me once again as I ask him, “Do you?”
He sighs deeply and gives me a nod. “I gotta admit, it makes sense,” he says. “I never understood why he approached me sophomore year, asking me about you so angrily as if you had hurt him. And I’ll never forget the look on his face when I punched him. It was as if he had no idea in the world why I did it. Gavin said he always wondered the same thing. He couldn’t figure out why I had hit him when you were the one to leave him.”
I listen closely, as this is the first time I’ve ever heard of that encounter between them.
“Nothing added up,” he continues. “A few weeks before you got pregnant, he told me he was in love with you. That had to be hard for one young guy to admit to another. Then when you told me about the baby and the letter, I just assumed he freaked and pulled a dickhead move.”
My head falls into my hands. How could we have been so stupid? How could we have fallen for all of her lies? I knew it wasn’t like Gavin to up and leave me—to write that awful letter. We were talking about forever back then.
“So what do I do, Chris?” I ask. “What if he wants to take my kid away?”
He rubs a reassuring hand down my back. “I don’t think he does, Baylor. I mean, yes, he obviously wants to see him. It’s tearing him up that he didn’t get these last seven years with him. But it’s very apparent to me that he’s not only here for Max. He’s here for you, too.”
“That’s what Angie told me,” I say, wiping another tear and using it to try to remove any smudge under my eye.
“Well, don’t you think you need to talk to him?”
I nod through the sheer terror that I feel at the thought of how that conversation might go. “Think about it Chris. We’re both older now. We’re different. He’s married. He lives three thousand miles away. How is any of this going to work?” I slump into his shoulder. “I don’t think I could put Maddox on a plane and be away from him every other weekend, or however that stuff works.”
“First of all, Gavin filed for divorce. He showed me the paperwork. He said due to family assets they had a pretty detailed pre-nup. And since they don’t have kids, the divorce should go through pretty quickly.”
“And second?” I ask.
He smiles down at me and places a kiss on my hair. “And second, the rest will work itself out, Baylor. He seems like a reasonable guy and he says the last thing he wants to do is hurt you any more than you’ve already been hurt.”
He pulls my chin up so that I’m looking right at him. “But you need to understand that he’s been hurt, too. He is as much of a victim in this as you are. When you talk, you need to remember that.”
“Okay,” I say, sniffing.
“Okay, what?” he asks.
“Okay, I’ll go talk to him.”
“Good girl,” he says. “Do you want me to come with you?”
“No. But maybe keep your phone handy in case I need a quick shoulder to cry on.”
“Always,” he says.
I look at the clock and see that it’s almost time for Callie to come home with Maddox. “I’ll go after I spend some time with Maddox. I didn’t get to see him much yesterday.” My hand comes up to cover my gasp. “Oh, what am I going to tell him?”
“That can all happen later, Baylor. It’ll all work out,” he says.
“Yeah, but for whom?” I muse aloud.
Chris laughs and pulls me tight. “For a romance writer, you sure are pessimistic about finding your own happily-ever-after.”
I roll my eyes at him. “You know what they say, ‘Those who can’t do—write’.”
My legs are like Jell-O. They are shaking so badly they can barely carry me across the parking lot. I pull my leather satchel close against my body as if it will protect me. It’s heavy with the things I put in it before leaving the house.
I stare up at the hotel sign as I slowly walk underneath it. He’s in here. Waiting. Waiting on me to come talk to him. Waiting to decide the future.
I check out my reflection in the glass doors as I walk through them. I was careful about my appearance. I didn’t want him to think I was eager to see him, so I simply put on an old pair of jeans and a short-sleeved sweater. Okay, so the jeans are my go-to jeans when I want to impress anyone with my runner’s ass. And the sweater might show a tiny bit of cleavage. I mean, I don’t want him thinking I became some cat-hoarding spinster when he left, either.
Crap! He didn’t leave you, Baylor, I remind myself again. I just can’t get used to thinking about it that way.
The elevator is the first one I’ve been on since I was in Chicago, and I briefly have a flashback of our altercation. I realize now that at the time, we each thought we were wronged by the other. It sure explains a lot when I think back to the things he said that night.
The doors to his floor open and I turn down the hallway to search for his suite. When I find it, I freeze. I’m terrified of what the next few minutes will bring. I concentrate on my breathing, for fear of hyperventilating if I don’t. I tuck my hair behind my ear and run my tongue over my teeth in my now bone-dry mouth.
I force myself to lift up my hand so I can knock on the door. I knock twice, very softly, while hoping I don’t pass out right here in the hallway. I surmise if he doesn’t hear it and answer the door, I can simply go home.
The door opens and suddenly we are face to face. We stand here staring at each other, both knowing the truth after all these years. I have absolutely no idea what to say. I rehearsed what I would say in the car on the way over, but right now I’d be surprised if I could remember my own name.
He shakes his head as if suddenly remembering something. Then, without breaking eye contact with me, he brings the cell phone in his hand up to his ear. “Charles, I’ll have to call you back.” I’m not even sure he waited for a response before he ended the call.
“Uh . . . come in.” He steps aside, making room for me to pass.
“Thanks,” I say, grateful to my brain for forming a word.
As we walk further into the large sitting room of the suite, we are both trying, but failing miserably, not to look at each other. I’m attempting to see him as an actual person and not the monster who I thought left me stranded and broken.
His eyes blink again and again and his brow is creased, as if he’s not sure I’m really standing here before him. I see his hand come toward me, but he immediately pulls it back and I’m surprised when that disappoints me. His eyes haven’t left my face. I wonder what he thinks of the way I look now. I never wore much makeup or took much time on my appearance back then.
I let my eyes stray from his to see that he’s wearing a tight-fitting Under Armour shirt that shows his defined abs. I briefly wonder if he still runs and works out every day. I take in his faded jeans that are frayed at the bottom with random strands splayed out over the tops of his bare feet. Heat courses through me—what is so blatantly sexy about a man’s bare feet?
Our eyes meet again and we both laugh awkwardly.
“Thanks for coming over,” he finally says.
I still haven’t found all my words, so I nod at him on the way over to the couch that he’s gesturing toward. I try to think of something to say to make this moment more tolerable and less humiliating. I look around the immaculate suite and settle for, “It looks like you’ve done well for yourself.”
Then I think, Duh, his family has money, so of course he’d be in a suite. I mentally smack my forehead as I sit on the far end of the couch from where he is settling.
He confidently hooks an ankle over his knee and rests an elbow over the back of the couch. He smiles and reaches over to the table next to him. “I could say the same thing about you,” he says, picking up a book I wrote.
I feel my face turn beet-red. Of all my books, he had to buy the one that is just shy of being classified as erotica.
“Now, that’s the Baylor I remember,” he says, with an upturned mouth.
I roll my eyes at him and he laughs. Then his expression hardens and he looks at me with regretful eyes. “We were played, Baylor. And you’ll never know how sorry I am that I didn’t fight harder for you,” he says. “All it would have taken was a simple phone call or text for us to figure out what happened, and all of this could have been avoided. I’m so sorry, darlin’.”
Oh, God. Hearing him call me that, the way he used to, brings unwanted tears to my eyes. I swallow hard to keep them from spilling over. Then I clear the elephant-sized frog in my throat. “It wasn’t your fault,” I say, wringing my restless hands. “I could have just as easily picked up the phone. But I didn’t.”
“Of course you didn’t,” he says. “You thought I was the bastard who abandoned you when you were pregnant.”
“And you thought I’d played you all along and then went back to Chris.”
He shakes his head and runs a hand through his hair in frustration. “I’m going to fix this, Baylor. And I hope you’ll let me back in your life while I do that. I hope you’ll let me into both your lives.”
I can see now how crushed he is by this. “It was never my intention to keep Maddox from you. I would have let you know him,” I say. “Even if we weren’t together back then, I would have let you know him.”
“Let me know him?” he says, incredulously, his eyes full of pain. “Baylor, I would have married you.”
That did it. Tears overflow the barrier of my lashes and stream down my cheeks, and before I realize what’s happening, he has his arms wrapped around me. When his smell permeates my nose, I’m taken back eight years. His cologne may have changed, but the underlying smell of Gavin is still there, and my body responds to it without any consideration of what my mind may want.
He runs his hands over my back, soothing me while I silently cry into his shoulder.
All those years. Wasted. We can never get them back. Maddox can never know a father who was there at his birth, or at his first birthday, or at his school play. Will they ever be able to have the kind of father-son relationship that every kid should have?
I hiccup a few times as my tears finally dry up.
“I can’t imagine what you must have gone through back then,” he says. “Chris told me how wrecked you were over the letter you thought I wrote.” He pulls away but doesn’t move back over to where he was sitting before. “I will never forgive her for this,” he says, with a look of abhorrence for the woman who is still his wife.
“Do you want to see it?” I ask.
“See what?”
“The letter you wrote . . . uh, she wrote,” I say. “I brought it with me.”
“You kept it?”
“I did,” I say. “I thought I might need it one day to prove to a judge that you didn’t want your own kid.”
“God, Baylor,” he says, his voice breaking, “I would have wanted him. I would have wanted him more than anything. I do want him.”
Reaching into my bag, I pull out the envelope and hand it to him. He looks at it like the very thing that it is—the complete and utter destruction of our young lives. A muscle in his clenched jaw spasms as he opens it slowly and pulls out the sole piece of notebook paper inside.
As he reads it for the very first time, I look over his shoulder and let my eyes wander over the words that gutted me so long ago.
Baylor,
A friend of mine who works at the clinic called and gave me a heads up before you ruined my fucking life.
Did you really think I’d drop everything and take care of you and some snotty-nosed kid? Other girls have tried to trap me before, too. What none of you seem to understand is that I have a responsibility to my family. A family I can’t disgrace like this. Even if I don’t get along with him, I could one day be the son of a senator, or the goddamn president. That means I can’t ever be with someone like you. My friends tried to warn you off but you didn’t fucking listen.
So, it was fun while it lasted and now it’s over. Take this money and get rid of it. Then get the fuck over it and get on with your life, but do it without me in it. Go back to Chris or find someone new, I don’t care. Just don’t ever contact me again.
Gavin
The letter falls out of his hands and his shoulders begin to shake. I look up at him just in time to see a tear roll down his cheek.
I can see how devastated he is. I try to lighten the mood. “Of course I thought you wrote it. You did say fuck a lot back then.”
He laughs. I giggle. We smile.
And just like that, dare I say we’re . . . friends?