FINN

Winter wouldn't talk to me. I called and texted but got nothing back. I guessed she was either ignoring me or blocking me. Either way I was shut out. Ivy came to work every day, to my surprise. At first she’d looked smug, and then one day—the day after I’d showed up at Atra—she came in looking shattered.

I broke my silence. "What happened?"

"Winter moved out," she answered in a disbelieving tone.

I couldn't believe it either. "Where did she go?"

"She moved in with Tucker."

"She what?" I shouted, fists at my side.

"She moved into Tucker's spare room. She left me enough rent to last me until the baby comes. What am I going to do?" She laid her head on the desk and cried.

I’d lived through enough of Ivy Donovan’s tears. I didn’t need to see this show again.

I slammed out of the trailer and drove like a demon over to Atra.

"Where the fuck is Tucker?" I demanded.

"Right here, asshole." The man himself stepped up from behind one of the shielded stations. His hands were encased in blue rubber gloves, and there were ink stains all over them. I wanted to deck him.

"Where is she?"

"Not here."

"Then where?" I ground my teeth in an effort to be civil and not take the three lengths that separated us and drive his smarmy head into the tiled floor. He may have a few muscles on him, but I threw around fifty pounds worth of lumber, duct work, and pipe every day.

"When she's ready to see you, she'll call you."

I surged toward him, but a pair of small hands caught me. I looked down to see another pair of blue gloves resting against my chest. The ink seeped into my white T-shirt, but the curly-haired co-worker of Winter’s didn't care. She pushed me back.

"Not here. You know Winter wouldn't like that."

I nodded, jerkily as some semblance of sense seeped into my rage thickened brain. Winter told me this was her family and I couldn’t go around decking someone she considered her brother. The last thing I wanted was make her hate me for some other reason. I held up my hands and took another step back.

"I just want to know where she is."

The woman gave me a small smile. "Let her come to you."

That was shitty advice.

I did the only thing I could. I went home and rented that stupid movie.

"This is the worst fucking movie I have ever seen. There are no decent men in this flick. Everyone's an asshole," I complained when Adam wandered in.

"What are you watching?" He joined me on the couch.

"The Joy Luck Club."

"Do you still have balls, or did the Donovan sisters chop them off."

"Fuck you," I tossed back. "Winter told me this story about always feeling like the second wife, and now that she's found out about Ivy, that's how she feels. Second wife, never first. She got that stupid fucking idea from this movie. I blame the Donovans for this. They shouldn't have allowed their daughter to watch this trash," I ranted.

"What are you watching?"

It was Lana, our resident psychologist who by virtue of having been in therapy since she was eleven and now majoring in psych at Central College, who enjoyed analyzing our sick lives to her textbook diagnoses. She'd have a field day with my situation.

"The Joy Luck Club," Adam replied when I didn't.

"I love this movie,” she exclaimed and joined us on the couch.

Of course she did.

"So listen, Lana, I have a psychological dilemma for you," Adam began. I shot him warning looks, but he ignored me. And I couldn't forcefully shut him up because that would've tipped Lana off.

"Lay it on me." She turned toward him and tucked her hair behind her ears as if ready to take notes on this great case. My fucking life.

"I dated this girl in high school. Three years, and then her parents died. She turned into this raging alcoholic, cheated on me repeatedly, so I broke up with her."

"Is this why you can't settle down? I wondered why you flitted from one girl to another, but this explains it. A girl broke your heart, and now you can't trust again."

"What? No," Adam protested. "This isn't about me. This is a friend."

"Sure it is." Lana nodded with exaggerated patience. "Tell me more about your 'friend.'" She held up her fingers to form the quotation signs. Adam's aggrieved look made me laugh for the first time since the party when it all went to hell.

Adam sighed. "Okay, so my friend dated this chick in high school and then broke up with her. Fast forward several years."

"How many is several?"

"Five." I held up six fingers behind Lana's back. Adam rolled his eyes but corrected himself. "Six years. He has a one-night stand with the sister of this chick, falls in love. The ex-girlfriend is all upset that the sister is going out with my friend. She basically has the girl break up with my friend. Why?"

"Because the ex still has feelings for you."

"My friend."

"Whoever."

I shook my head. Ivy didn't want me. She had no interest in me. The only times she came on to me were when she thought she could break Winter and me up. Now that we were, Ivy had more interest in sticks. And I felt the same about her.

"She doesn't have feelings for me. I don't think she has feelings for anyone but herself."

"Oh, well then she was jealous that she had to share her sister with you. I mean, your friend," Lana added before Adam could correct her.

I knew all this. What I wanted to know was how to win Winter back. I made a winding motion with my hand.

Adam huffed. "So what should I do now?"

Lana drew back and looked first at Adam and then at me with astonishment. "How should I know?"

"But you're always giving us advice," I nearly shouted at her when she got up and walked out of the television room.

She turned, and I reared back at the pain in her eyes. "You can't make anyone love you. If she loves you, she'll eventually come and find you again. If she doesn't, then there's nothing you can do."

Bullshit.

I replayed the movie, and it ended in the same goddamned depressing way.

I found out where Tucker lived and started driving by the small two-bedroom house. It looked like a piece of shit and was in dire need of improvements. I wondered what they were doing in there. My anxiety levels fell from life threatening to a dull ache after I saw Tucker bring a girl home and then another. They weren’t having sex but I kept wondering what she was thinking, how she was coping.

Only Ivy seemed happy. I swear to God she hummed because she knew I was miserable that Winter was staying away. This was my punishment for not being open with Winter in the first place. If I’d confessed to everything that first night or even the night that I’d convinced Winter to come back to me, then we would have started out on the right foot. Ivy’s pregnancy announcement would have been something we would have both taken in stride. Winter said she believed me but that it didn’t matter. I wasn’t convinced of that. Deep down, I think Winter was scared that she wasn’t first in my heart, and I didn’t know what I could do to change her feelings.

Two weeks after the fallout, I decided to tackle the outdoor grill that had sat in disrepair for almost a year now at Woodlands. When we’d bought the place, the only thing that had been finished in the yard was the pool and the exterior of the pool house. The guys and I had dug up the yard, smoothed it out, laid sod, and put down brick pavers, but we’d never got around to fixing the outdoor kitchen.

Adam and I had gotten the brilliant idea to build an oven to cook pizzas, but we hadn't ever finished it. I had nothing better to do. The build downtown was going well. Henry had finally decided I was competent and told me I didn't need to be on site all the time. My girlfriend wouldn't talk to me, and I had no flips going on. I had decided to table them until the Riverside project was complete.

Basically I was sitting on my fat thumbs doing nothing.

I shook myself before I started to drown in my own self-pity.

"I always wondered why you stopped fixing that up." Noah handed me a cup of coffee and sat down in a patio chair.

"Wasn't the right time."

"Now is?"

"Yup." I flipped a brick a few times, slathered it with mud, and set it on the structure. I repeated the action in silence. Noah didn't say another word. We listened to the birds chirping and a light breeze rustling the leaves in the woods. The emerging sunlight was at the front of the east-facing house, and the back of the house looked dark, the pool water calm. The breeze was blocked by the trees.

It was early, yet Noah was always moving. He had a hundred things going at one time, trying to juggle his emerging professional fighting career with his classes and his business. I wondered if he would keel over from a heart attack like my dad if he didn't slow down.

"You know the movie Love Actually?"

"Sure, best Christmas movie ever." I didn't mind admitting it. Adam and I watched it religiously every year, debating over the characters' actions. Did Mark, the videographer, violate the bro code for sharing the wedding video with his best friend's wife to declare his love? Yes, and we concluded that Mark made the video for the sole purpose of spanking his monkey. "Mark probably used a cum sock."

Noah spit out his coffee as he laughed. "Really? Not a tissue guy?"

"No way. He was clearly into mementos."

Noah set down his mug. "True or false, Karen should have left Henry."

I shrugged. That one hit close to home. "Karen was a saint, right? But maybe too selfless." My mind spun toward Winter.

"Can we at least agree that the only worthwhile couple were the sex doubles?"

"Yes." I reached out and slapped my palm against Noah's open hand.

"How about Sarah and Karl?"

"What about them?"

"Do you think Sarah is stupid for abandoning Karl for her brother every time?"

I could see where he was leading me now. "Ivy is not an institutionalized man."

Noah kicked out his legs and reached down for his mug. "I always thought Karl could have been more supportive and waited for Sarah."

"Maybe Karl was done with being last."

Noah shrugged. "First, last. Are you keeping count?"

You're first wife to me.

I ran the back of my hand over my mouth, feeling unaccountably parched. I'd told Winter time and again that she was first to me, but when I told her I needed her, wasn't I doing the very same thing I accused Ivy of doing—asking Winter to subsume her own needs and wants and desires in favor of making me happy?

How was that putting her first? I’d wanted her in my life on my terms.

"Is she worth waiting for?" Noah asked.

Just thinking of her made me feel like part of me was cut away. Until I had her with me, I'd only be half a person. Somewhere on the other side of the city, my heart was walking around, drawing up tattoos and trying to hold herself together. "Without a doubt."

"Then wait for her, or you'll regret it forever." Noah knew what he was walking about. He’d written to his girlfriend for four years when he was deployed to Afghanistan and then came to Central College a couple years later to win her back. He knew all about waiting.

"Was it hard for you?" I asked Noah, uncomfortably. No guy liked to talk about sex unless it was how much he was getting and how hard he was putting it to his partner.

"To go without?" Noah asked.

I nodded.

"Not at first. When we first started writing, Grace was pretty young, and I just thought of her as someone back home who actually gave a shit but not much more. But when she started writing about Lana dating, I realized that Grace wasn't a schoolgirl. By the time I started thinking about her that way, I was still deployed. I'd had a few hookups on leave, but that's about as satisfying as pissing. The same kind of relief. I'm not sure I was even very good at it." Noah smiled ruefully. "When I got out, I had a few more hookups, but by then I started feeling guilty both about sleeping with girls I had no real interest in outside the bedroom and what I'd tell Grace when we got together. Because we were going to get together." Noah's voice held no doubt, only firm conviction. It was obviously what had carried him through nearly six years of separation.

He laughed a little then, something rare for him. Noah was a serious, driven guy. The complete opposite of his joking best friend, Bo. "Then when I got here to Central, waiting was a bitch. I wanted to carry Grace off and never let her see the light of day until I'd imprinted on her. If that's the way you feel about Winter, then I'm sorry you'll suffer, but in the end it'll be worth it."

Unlike Noah’s experience, there wasn't a long distance between Winter and me that would make the separation easier.

Into my prolonged silence, Noah spoke again. "If you want something bad enough, you can have it. You just need to want it more than anything. You need to want it more than you need to sleep, eat, shit, and breathe."

"She's worth it," I said. And then I knew it was true. It felt a weight lift off my chest, and the pain that had been eating me alive eased. Waiting for her was nothing. Lana was wrong that there was nothing I could do. I could show Winter she was first in my life. Even if Ivy's baby was mine—which I didn't believe it was—Winter would still be first. Just like she'd be first when we had our own kids. And I needed to start proving that to her.

And frankly, I needed to get off my ass and stop moping. The sooner I helped Ivy become a solid, sober person with an independent income, the sooner Winter wouldn't feel so responsible. I had a plan of action. Not just vague years of wondering when Winter and I would ever get together.

I didn't even have to tell Noah thanks. I looked at him, and he gave me the downward chin nod of acknowledgment. He knew.