Jake

Present day . . .

Ava: Thank you for this weekend. I was looking forward to it all week, but then it was even better than I’d hoped. You know how to make a girl feel special, Jake. Let me know how Mom’s doing.

The text came sometime this morning while I was passed out in a chair in Mom’s hospital room. Levi and I arrived around three a.m. I made Ethan go home to be with Nic and convinced Shay she needed sleep if she was going to help with Mom today. Carter had gone back to the station to finish his shift before we arrived, but Levi, Brayden, and I have lingered at the hospital all night, unwilling to leave Mom alone despite optimistic reports from the nurses.

It’s just me and Mom now—Levi and Brayden went down to the cafeteria to scrounge up some breakfast—but any minute, the room will be flooded with my siblings. I take advantage of these last moments of peace and let myself read the text over and over again.

“You look like you’re trying to solve the world’s problems over there,” Mom says.

I look up from my phone and blink at her. She was awake when Levi and I made it into town last night, and thank God for that. I don’t think I would have slept a minute if I hadn’t been able to hear her voice and see her smile. By the time I got here, she was laughing about her fall. She’d been changing a light bulb in the bathroom and hopped off the stool and landed wrong.

“Forgot I wasn’t sixteen anymore,” she said with a laugh.

The doctors thought she suffered a mild concussion from hitting her head on the counter when she collapsed, and they wanted to keep her overnight for observation. This morning, they’ll take her into surgery to set the ankle and put in screws to make sure it heals right.

I smile at Mom. She might be in a hospital bed and have a colorful bandana covering her bald head, but she looks healthier than she did after her last treatment four weeks ago. There’s more color in her cheeks—less misery in her eyes. She has more energy. Now, if we could just get her appetite back so we could put some meat on those bones, I might feel the optimism I keep reaching for and missing. “Good morning, Mom.”

“Good morning, Jakey,” she says, using the old nickname from my childhood. Mom and Shay were the only ones who could get away with it. I’d take a swing at anyone else who called me Jakey. “What’s got my boy so worried?”

I open my mouth to lie, to tell her I’m not worried about anything, but then I decide against it. “Ava,” I admit.

“Oh.” She studies me for a silent beat. I wonder if Mom knew I was in love with Ava before even I did. Probably. She knows all her kids better than we know ourselves.

I wave a hand. “It’ll be fine. I think we need to talk when she gets back in town. That’s all.”

“Someone told me she’s trying to get pregnant and you’re going to help her.”

With a little huff, I drop my head into my hands and shake it, groaning. “Who told you that?”

“I get a little of my information here, a little there. I put it all together and then coerce your siblings until they fill in the blanks for me.”

I don’t have the energy to be pissed at anyone for that right now, so I let it go. Anyway, trying to explain to my mom that I’m using my best friend’s wish for a baby as a way to seduce her and trick her into falling for me boils it all down in a way that makes me feel a little slimy. “Well, don’t worry about it. I’m being careful.”

“Do you really think this is the only way you can have a chance with her?”

“Have a chance with whom?” Shay asks, walking in the door with a stainless-steel carafe.

Grimacing, I stand from the chair I’ve occupied for the last four hours and stretch to straighten the kinks in my back. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Jake’s trying to get Ava pregnant so she’ll give him a chance,” Mom tells Shay.

“I’m not trying to—” I groan and press my palms to my eyes. “I don’t want to have this conversation with either one of you.”

“You know better than to think we’re letting it drop.” Shay pulls a sleeve of disposable coffee cups from her purse and hands one to me. “Talk.”

I take it, grateful, and pour myself a cup of coffee. I can tell by the smell of it that Shay made it—it’s bold, rich, and contains enough caffeine to wake a dead man. “She’s looking at me as something other than her friend for the first time in . . .” I shrug and look helplessly at my sister. “The first time ever, I guess.”

“Risky as hell,” Shay says, and when I shoot her a warning glare, she holds up both hands. “I’m not going to interfere, and I didn’t say I didn’t think it was worth it. I just think it’s risky.” She pours her own cup of coffee and shrugs. “I understand why it’s a risk worth taking. It’s Ava.”

“That’s true,” Mom says. “It’s Ava.”

I feel like a bug under a microscope, and I want to squirm. Instead, I drink my coffee and stew. I’ll have to wait until Ava gets home, but we’ll talk. Maybe she’ll let me kiss her again. Maybe we can pick up where we left off in the hotel room. Because this is working. What’s happening between us isn’t just about the baby for either of us. She knew we weren’t going to have sex, and she wanted to be with me anyway. If I can keep nudging her, I might finally get the chance I’ve been waiting for.

“Do you remember when you were sixteen and dating that Emily . . .” Mom snaps her fingers and screws up her face in concentration. “What was her last name? The blond cheerleader? She was older than you.”

“Emily Higgins,” I supply.

“Oh, I remember her,” Shay says. “Pretty but no sense of humor.”

Mom smooths her sheets over her stomach and smiles softly as if lost in the memory. I have no idea where she’s going with this. “You and Emily couldn’t keep your hands off each other.” She grins at me. “I threatened to make you wear my oven mitts on your hands every time she was in the house, remember?”

I laugh. One time, she didn’t just threaten. She taped those mitts on me and told me my girlfriend could only go down in the basement with me if I wore them. Mom underestimated Emily, though, and that night turned out just fine for me. I couldn’t pull a pan out of the oven without getting hard for months after that.

Shay laughs. “Oven mitts never scared the girls away from your boys, Mom.”

Mom winks at her, then turns back to me. “One night you were in the basement, doing God knows what. Ava came over from next door, went down there, and raced right back up the stairs.”

“I remember,” Shay says. “Carter found her out in the tree fort. He brought her inside and up to my room. Her eyes were red, and her face was streaked with tears. God, she was miserable. She swore up and down that her tears had nothing to do with Jake, but no one bought it.”

“I made her those cookies she always liked,” Mom says, “and Carter put on that Jim Carrey movie—the one where he becomes God and gives everyone what they pray for.”

“Bruce Almighty,” I supply. No actor can make Ava laugh like Jim Carrey, and I love that laugh. Before I heard her come, it was the best sound I knew.

Mom nods. “Yes, and by the time you and Emily came back upstairs, she was laughing and happy, but we all knew how much it hurt Ava to see you with someone else.”

I swallow hard. I’ve never heard this story before. Back when I was sixteen, Ava truly was just my best friend. Or at least that was what I thought.

“You two have been inseparable since you met,” Mom says. “Even before you considered yourselves friends, you couldn’t stay away from each other.”

Shay grunts. “I couldn’t believe she wanted anything to do with you. You were always playing tricks on that poor girl.”

I stare into my coffee, grateful for the familiarity of it. We might be stuck in the hospital, but having a cup of Shay’s coffee in my hand makes me feel like we’re at home. “Well, she was fun to tease.”

“Of course, being the old lady that I am,” Mom says, “I always wanted you two to stop skirting around the issue and tell each other how you felt.”

I look up at Shay, then at Mom. “I already tried that, Mom.”

She arches a brow. “Have you? Directly?”

I nod and absently pull my phone from my pocket to look at Ava’s text again. I hover my thumb over the picture of her that appears next to the words. “I told her the day I found out she was engaged to Harrison. I went to her apartment and I kissed her. I told her I was in love with her.”

Mom’s completely silent, and I can’t tell if it’s shock or sadness, but I take Shay’s silence as commiseration. She was the only sibling I told about that day—the only one I trusted to hear the story and not hold it against Ava.

When I look up, Mom has her hand pressed to her chest and her eyes are sad. “Oh, Jakey.”

“My timing was bad,” I say. “I get that. But sometimes . . . I don’t know, Mom. Sometimes I think I’m just being dense. Holding on to her. But I can’t make myself let go.”

And then there was last night. When she confessed to touching herself and thinking about me. Too many times to count.

“Do you want to let her go?” Mom asks. “Would you be happier?”

“No.” I shake my head. “Not at all.” But I don’t want to scare her away either, and I don’t know if she’s ready to learn that my feelings for her have never changed. And I don’t know if she’ll be able to forgive me when she finds out about my night with Molly.

Shay squeezes my shoulder then refills my cup. “Hang in there, brother.”

I meet her eyes, grateful. “Thanks.”

Ava

“Why are you in a crappy mood this morning?” Ellie asks.

We’re at the breakfast buffet in the hotel lobby. We were supposed to meet Levi’s date here, but she decided to get together with some friends who live in Livonia, just outside Detroit. My brother’s already left for the track and we’ll see him over there later. So it’s just Ellie, me, and my bad mood the size of Texas.

She grabs the carafe of coffee and fills her mug. “These walls aren’t very thick, you know, so I have pretty good reason to believe you should be in a spectacular mood.”

I try to laugh, but it falls flat. “I thought you were still at the club when Jake and I came back.”

“We weren’t far behind you.” She squeezes my wrist and gives a small smile. “I’m sorry he had to leave. That sucks.”

I shake my head. “It’s not that. I just had bad dreams all night.”

She wraps her hands around the mug and holds it to her chest as if she’s using it more for warmth than to drink. “Nightmares?”

I shrug. “I don’t know if I’d call them nightmares, but kind of. I was having dreams that I was pregnant, and I was setting up the nursery but I was at Jill and Dad’s house. They were giving me all these rules about how I had to raise my child, and how the baby had to be quiet when we had dinner parties. The whole time I knew I didn’t want to be there, but it was like I had nowhere else to go.”

“What was that about?” she asks.

Ellie only moved to Jackson Harbor a few years ago, so while she knows a lot about my family and life, she doesn’t know all the details. “Remember how I told you I moved in with Dad when I was finishing high school.”

“Yeah, and you had to live with Mother Teresa.”

“I felt like a burden the whole time I was there. It was like he was making an exception by letting me stay. Like he was doing me a favor by letting me live in his house with his real family. The better family. In my dream, I was the unwelcome guest again. The burden. But this time I had a baby.”

“Oh, shit. Your subconscious has the subtlety of a bulldozer, sweets.”

“I know, right?” I shake my head.

“Jake is nothing like your father,” Ellie says softly.

“I know. I do.” In every way that counts, I’d say Jake’s entirely different. Except that I feel like I’m seventeen again, knowing my whole life is about to change and that the easiest path is to let someone who doesn’t really want me take me in. Last night, Jake made it clear that he’s attracted to me, but is that enough? Admitting that he’s thought about me naked is a far cry from wanting to have a life with me.

“So why the insecurity?” Ellie leans forward on the table and studies my face. “I know I wasn’t on board with the idea of you becoming a single mom, but honestly, I didn’t realize how serious you were about this. I think you and Jake would make great parents.”

Parents. That makes it sound like we’d do it together, side by side. “Jake didn’t sign up for parenting with me,” I say, my voice cracking a little on the words. Audible heartbreak. “That wasn’t our deal.”

“But you have to believe he’d be involved, right?”

I nod, feeling the unwelcome heat of tears pricking my eyes. “I know he would. Jake doesn’t take family lightly either. When he rushed out the door to be with his mom, I realized what should have been so obvious from the start—there’s no way he’s going to give me a baby and not feel responsible for both of us for the rest of his life.”

“He’d be your rock,” Ellie says. “Maybe even more. You two are so good together. The chemistry between you on the dance floor last night . . .” She shakes her hand as if it’s been burnt. “Scorching.”

“I don’t want to become an obligation he can’t ignore. I can’t spend the rest of my life like that. I want better for myself and for my child.”

“So what does that mean?”

I draw in a ragged breath. “I think it means I need to postpone Operation Pregnancy for the immediate future.” I blink away tears. “I can’t believe I’ve been so stupid. I just wanted what I wanted so badly that I didn’t think it through. I don’t think I wanted to.” I shake my head. “How dare I ask him to give me a child?”

“You didn’t ask—not sober, at least.” She squeezes my wrist again. “Jake offered. And I promise you, he thought it through. He knew what he was doing when he made you that offer.”

I look away. I know exactly what Jake was doing—he was giving me what I so desperately wanted. He was taking care of his family.

If I have a baby on my own with the help of the fertility clinic instead of him, it’ll be the same. Jake will be right there to help me every step of the way. Because that’s who he is. But at least that way he’d be able to walk away when he met someone else. He wouldn’t have the forever kind of obligation a child of his own would give him. “I don’t want him cornered into a life with me like Dad was when Mom moved. I don’t want to feel like I did when I was seventeen. I never want to feel like that again.”

She shakes her head. “Jake wouldn’t make you feel that way, though. He wants you around, Ava. He’s been your best friend forever, and there’s a reason for that.”

My best friend. But last night we opened Pandora’s box, and now I don’t know if I can handle going back to the status quo. “My dad got me a lead on a job,” I say, desperate to stop talking about Jake. “He’s convinced I’m going to get laid off.”

“Jerk,” she mutters.

I sigh. “Totally, but that’s Dad.”

“What’s the job?”

“I’d be teaching theater and drama, and starting a new children’s theater from the ground up.” I laugh softly. “I can’t even imagine a life without endless composition papers. This would be all theater and teaching kids who love it.” I sit up straighter. “Their budget for plays and musicals is insane, and even though they only called me because of Dad’s connections, they act like they’re really impressed with me and my experience. They want me to interview.”

“That’s amazing. What’s the holdup?”

“The job’s in Florida.”

“Oh,” Ellie says. “Wow.”

“No kidding.” I let out a breath. “It’s near my mom, so there’s that, but I always assumed I’d spend the rest of my life in Jackson Harbor, know what I mean?”

She nods. “I do. I didn’t grow up there like you did, but it even feels like home to me.”

“Yeah, but what’s keeping me here? Every time I have to see Harrison with his baby, it’s going to kill me.” And if I stay in Jackson Harbor and have a baby on my own, Jake’s going to sacrifice his own life to be my rock.

“You’re seriously considering this.”

“I don’t know. Maybe?”

She squeezes my hand, and I can see the anguish on her face. I know she wants to say more. She wants to tell me that Jake and I can work it out, but to her credit, she doesn’t. Instead, she waves to the waitress and asks for two mimosas.