Chapter Nine
BRAD
Well, that went to shit pretty damn fast.
I was still seated at the table where the two women in my life had fled from, just moments ago.
I motioned for the check and dropped a fistful of bills on the table when it didn’t come fast enough. Wondering which one to go after first, a heavy sigh escaped from my lungs.
Nikki. I would always go after Nicole first. She would forgive me eventually. It’d been her and I against the world for twenty-one long, difficult years. That wasn’t changing now.
No matter how much I wanted to launch myself after Jordan and finish our conversation like the adults we were, that wasn’t happening until I spoke to Nicole.
The hurt in her eyes and the accusations she’d flung at me from her lips made my heart feel like it had a vice around it. I’d never been on the outs with her before, not like this. It wasn’t a wonderful feeling.
I pulled my phone from my pocket and called her. Nicole’s phone rang and went to voicemail. I called again, but this time, it didn’t even ring. It went straight to voicemail, like she’d turned her phone off. I rushed out of the restaurant, finding my driver Donald with a crease between his eyebrows. It was the most emotion I’d ever seen him show.
“Is everything all right, sir?” he asked.
“It’s fine.” I said. “Get me to Nikki’s apartment, and step on it.”
She wasn’t going to like what I had to say, but she was going to hear it all the same.
Or she would have if she was home. She wasn’t. Donald and I spent the next few hours searching for her, visiting all of her favorite haunts, but no one had seen her.
Fear clutched at my heart, even though I knew instinctively that she was fine. I couldn’t find her because she didn’t want to be found. It was as simple as that.
It didn’t ease the paralyzing sense of panic rising in me. Like every other father worth the title out there, the day that Nicole was born and they placed her in my arms, I swore an oath to protect her. I looked right down at the tiny, squishy pink human in my arms and promised her—and myself—that no harm would come to her. Ever.
If this shocking news caused her to go out and do something she would regret, I would never forgive myself. But while Nikki was spirited and her wild streak ran a mile wide, she wasn’t stupid. She’d never done anything completely reckless.
Because Jordan tames her.
I swallowed past the first actual lump of fear I’d felt forming in my throat in forever. This was my baby girl and the only person I trusted to keep her in line, apart from me, was Jordan. And it was a safe bet Nicole was ignoring Jordan as solidly as she was me.
Donald glanced at me in the rearview mirror, but he didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. The heavy, full moon chased away the last of the clouds in the sky, and we still hadn’t found a trace of Nicole. Donald was getting worried, too.
“Let’s make a last pass at her apartment,” I said. “Maybe she’s gone back home by now.”
I sent up a silent prayer that she would be home. Anger, I could deal with. Even if she didn’t want to talk to me yet, I just needed to know that she was safe.
That was step one. I would figure out what came next after that.
To my great relief, the lights from Nicole’s apartment shone brightly as we pulled up to her building for the second time that day. I was out of the car before Donald had completed parallel parking it in an open spot across from Nicole’s place.
The street was quiet at this time of night, and I sprinted across it, nodding to the doorman of her building as I swept through. No one stopped me. I was on Nicole’s approved list of visitors, however much she might not have approved of me in that moment.
When Nicole told me she found a building that she loved, I was surprised to find that it was an older one. It was one of the first signs that she was growing up, although I hadn’t seen it that way at the time.
She’d chosen to forgo a trendy studio, which she could’ve easily afforded on the budget I’d given her, and opted for the space, security, and charm of a centrally located place, even if she worked from home. I took the carpeted stairs two at a time, heaving myself around corners on the brass handrail.
Knocking on her door, I wondered what waited for me when, or if, she let me in.
“Nicole, it’s me. We need to talk.”
“Go away!” she yelled from inside.
“Please Nic, just hear me out.” I wasn’t in the habit of begging, but if that was what it took, I wouldn’t be opposed to it, necessarily.
“No!”
“Open the door, baby girl.” I sighed, knowing the chances that she was going to do it were slim to none, but I had give it a try.
“If I open it, I’m going to punch you or something,” she warned, her voice shaky and thick with emotion. “So just go away.”
“Nic—”
“I said leave!” She thundered, borderline manically. “I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to speak to you. You’re a fucking pervert and a liar. Go away.”
Leaning with my forehead against the door, I took a few deep breaths to calm down before I responded. One of us had to remain calm, although hearing how upset she was, combined with the name calling, was stirring up a war of concern and rage inside that was threatening to overwhelm me.
“That’s not fair. Jordan’s an adult. She’s free to make her own decisions.” Maybe reason would work.
It didn’t.
“Yeah? I just wish she didn’t make such gross ones!” Her emphasis on the word “gross” made the pincers pinch around my heart.
I exhaled loudly, dragging my hands on the stubble growing on my jaw, relishing the slight burn of the scraping of blunt hairs on my palms. Anything to numb the emotions warring in me, even if was just the slight physical burn.
“Please, honey, can we not have this conversation through a closed door?”
She didn’t answer me immediately. Hesitation was good. Hesitation meant she was considering it. Close, but no cigar.
“We’re not having a conversation, Dad.”
Her voice was marginally calmer, hurt winning out over anger. The pincers pinched harder. I never wanted to be the cause of that note of agony in her voice.
“Fine then,” I told her. “I’ll talk, and you can just listen, okay?”
Silence.
A slightly rattled sigh shuddered its way out from my lungs as I tried to collect my thoughts. This was my one shot, and I suddenly had no fucking idea what to say. Shoving a hand into my hair and gripping tightly at the roots, I decided to simply wing it.
“Look, Nicole, Jordan and I never meant to hurt you. We didn’t plan this. It sounds like a shitty cliché, but it just happened. It shouldn’t have, and we both knew it, but it did. I would’ve broken it off if I didn’t have feelings for her, but I do, Nicole. I have real feelings for her.”
I gulped past my own surprise at my admission, but it was true. The looming darkness in my soul that had taken hold the second she’d run away from me in that restaurant was a testament to that. I was worried about Nicole, sure, but I knew that we would be fine eventually.
Jordan was a different story. If I lost her now, it would be like losing a limb that I never knew I had or needed until that very minute. The pincers squeezed so hard it hurt.
Fuck.
Nicole stayed quiet for a long minute, hopefully mulling over my words. Then she muttered softly, “Good for you. Still, just go, okay?”
This time, I listened to her. There was nothing more I could do here. I’d told her the truth, and she probably needed time to process. What I needed was Jordan. I suddenly needed her more than I needed my next breath of air.
With a last, soft double tap on Nicole’s door, I turned and made for the stairwell, taking them faster that I had coming up.
I shot out of Nicole’s building and back to the car, all in less than a minute. “Take me to Jordan’s, Donald.”
He didn’t question me or hesitate to do as I asked, bless him. There was no judgment in his eyes when he glanced at me in the rearview mirror. Then he stepped on the gas and hurried to Jordan’s as if he could feel how badly I needed to get there.
Blood pounded in my ears as the heavy weight of realization set in. For the first time in more than two decades, I actually had romantic feelings for a woman. The thought made me as queasy as it excited me.
Being with Jordan felt right, as fucking wrong as it might’ve been. I couldn’t help it.
Now all I had to do was convince her to forgive me. My stomach knotted with tension, but I pushed it away. I could fix this. Somehow, I had to fucking fix it.
Jordan’s five-story walk up loomed in front of me in no time. Throwing my head back to the stars blinking down at me, I breathed in the crisp night air, squared my shoulders, and headed up to my girl.
Fuck. My girl. I shook my head slowly from side to side at my possessive thoughts. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt such a fierce need to make someone mine. Well, I could. I just didn’t like thinking back to that time.
Where Nicole’s building was all old-world opulence, Jordan’s tiny home in the U district was simple and boasted potted flowers on her porch. I pounded on her door when I got to it, desperately hoping that she would open it.
“Jordan, open up. It’s me.”
“Hang on,” she called, her soft footfalls audible as she approached the door. When it swung open to reveal a distraught looking Jordan, dressed in a cotton t- shirt and sweats, with her bright blue eyes watery and red-rimmed and her hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, it was all I could do to keep from sweeping her up into my arms and crushing her to my chest.
It was the anger that flashed in those devastated eyes that stopped me. “What do you want, Brad?”
“Can we talk, please?” I asked, my voice strained with emotion.
She regarded me for a long moment, then sighed and stepped back to let me in, the corners of her mouth turned down. “What’s left to talk about?”
“Everything,” I said.
Jordan shut the door behind us, leading me to her kitchen, and she busied herself with making coffee, even though she hadn’t offered me any. She flipped on the kettle, and the sound of it boiling filled the silence. Then Jordan leaned with her hip against the counter and lifted her sad eyes to me.
“What do you mean?” she asked. “The way I see it, it’s all been said and done. We made a mistake, you told Zach about it, Nicole found out, and now, she won’t even talk to me. I’ve tried calling her a hundred times.”
“So did I. She doesn’t want to talk to me, either. Trust me. I tried.”
Jordan sighed, her shoulders slumped, and her voice cracked as she tried to hold back a sob. “What’re we going to do?”
I couldn’t stand it anymore, watching her fall apart and not providing any sort of comfort. Reaching for her, my hands planted on her hips, and I tugged her to me, wrapping my arms around her and holding on tight.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do about Nicole. But do you want to know what I do know?”
She nodded, her head buried in the crook of my neck. I needed to look into her eyes for this, so I loosened my grip a little and slid a finger under her chin to tilt her head to look up at me. Cupping her face in both of my hands, I stroked her cheekbones lightly with my thumbs. “I know that I like you, Jordan. A lot.”
Her eyes flew wide open, the disbelief in them lodged like an arrow in my heart. I needed her to believe me, to trust me.
“It’s true. There’s something between us. Do you feel it, too? Because if you do, we can get through this. We can weather the storm together. Nicole will come around eventually. She’ll just have to learn to accept it.”
Jordan sucked her lips between her teeth, staring at me dubiously. “I don’t know how I feel, Brad. I thought I did, but now… This is all just so confusing.”
She looked torn, and it burned me up inside to know that I was possibly standing on the precipice of losing her. I had to do something to remind her of what I knew to be true, all the way down to my bones. There was something undeniable between us.
So I threw my Hail Mary pass, reaching one hand around her neck so that it rested at its base, kept the other on her cheek and slanted my lips over hers, kissing her so hard that our teeth gnashed together. It was raw, powerful, and irrefutable evidence of exactly how deeply I felt for her.