Jaycee had been told to stick to bed rest for the first two weeks after leaving hospital and she had done that… kind of.
It didn’t help that she went from the hospital to a motel and had almost nothing to her name. Before she could think about bed rest, she had to buy clothes, and toiletries, and everything a person needed to survive.
Her boobs were hard and sore, so much so that she returned to the hospital a few days after she’d been discharged to ask about the discomfort. Apparently, it was normal. While she was there, Jaycee ended up expressing more milk for the boys, and it made her feel better, not just physically, but emotionally too.
She hadn’t meant to ask how the twins were, she’d just been concerned about her breasts… At least, that’s what she was telling herself.
Getting an apartment was next on the list and as nice as it was to have money in the bank that she could use for the deposit, Jaycee made sure to get somewhere cheap because she wanted to save as much money as she could. She never knew when she might need it.
The apartment was furnished. So on the day she got the keys, she went out, bought new bedding and collapsed into the bed and didn’t move for ten days. Literally, she didn’t go anywhere.
Three weeks after she gave birth, she started to go out again. Her breasts were still swollen and heavy. Any time she heard a baby cry, she had to walk away because milk actually leaked out of her. It was crazy.
The nurses weren’t a lot of help as no one could give her a guarantee on when she would stop producing milk. Apparently, some women dried up after a few days, others were still producing months later.
It didn’t help her low mood to have a constant reminder of the children she’d given up. Jaycee thought about them every day. Every single day. Her babies were out there. Her tiny little babies were out there in the world without their mother.
She’d thought leaving them would free them from her. But when she thought about them now she wondered if they thought about her, if they would recognize her. They’d lived inside her, heard her voice every day, and now she’d just vanished.
Could abandoning them have done as much damage as being with them would’ve caused? Jaycee didn’t want them to think they weren’t enough. They had to know it was her who was broken; that nothing they’d done had caused this separation.
“You’re not yourself.”
“Hmm?” Jaycee asked, turning to Mavis who was peeking over the rim of her glasses.
“You’ve been here for an hour and you’ve hardly said two words,” Mavis said.
“Yeah,” Jaycee said, but she had no idea what they’d been talking about. “I… sorry, I… what were we talking about?”
“I was talking about bridge,” Mavis said. “And about your friend.”
“My friend?”
Mavis nodded toward the far away wall, on instinct Jaycee turned around. Crap. Why had she done that? Closing her eyes, she tried to erase the image of Beck’s charcoal drawing from her mind before she turned back to Mavis, forcing herself to smile.
Every time she walked into this damn room that was the first thing she saw. Her grandmother loved the image and the home had little objection to it. Jaycee didn’t want to scrub the drawing away, she wasn’t sure she had it in her to destroy anything Beck created. But it would’ve been so much easier if the home had dubbed it vandalism and complained, then she could’ve told them to paint over it and that would be that.
Jaycee had asked for the home’s ruling on the art during one of her first visits here after she got out of hospital. She was advised that a generous donation had been made to cover remodeling on the proviso it was left in place until Mavis had vacated. It turned out that the donation had been made weeks before the twins were born, when she was still living with Beck, though she’d been ignorant to it.
Did he know how this would torture her?
She couldn’t believe he’d be that cruel and she hadn’t considered how it would torment her to see Beck’s creation every time she visited her grandmother, not until she didn’t have his work surrounding her every day.
“Do you think he would be willing to come back to finish the piece?”
Jaycee had dragged Beck away from the wall and he’d never come back to complete what he’d started. “I don’t think so,” she said, rearranging the checkers back to their places to reset the game. “Do you want to play again?”
“Jaycee—”
Her phone rang before her grandmother got a chance to say anything else. Tugging the cell from her purse, she read the name on the screen and jumped onto her feet as she answered. “Pete? What’s wrong? Is it the boys?”
A beat of silence came before he spoke. “Uh… no,” Pete said. “They’re at home, they’re doing great.”
Letting her head fall back, she cursed herself. Why the hell had she jumped to that conclusion? And she’d just inadvertently asked for an update. Beck would go nuts if he thought she was prying into their lives.
“Sorry,” she said. “I…” If she tried to offer any kind of explanation or make excuses, she’d just make her screw-up worse. “What’s up?”
“Thought you might come in for a drink soon,” he said. “The customers are asking for music.”
AD had a sound system that worked just fine. “You don’t have to hold my job for me.”
Singing in the club felt like such a distant memory. Pete had once been her boss, like just her boss. Nothing else. Back in the days before Beck, Pete had been just the man who owned the bar she worked in. Recently, those days felt more like a dream than a reality.
“Hold it?” he asked. “I didn’t know you quit, when did you quit? You ran out of here three weeks ago to give birth.” True. She had been on stage when her waters broke. “The customers want to see that you’re still in one piece.”
“You could just tell them that,” she said. “I don’t know if I’m ready to—”
“Guy isn’t working yet,” he said. “Just in case, you know… that matters to you.”
Yes, it mattered. Two weeks without looking into his face was like living two weeks without food. Her appetite had been next to non-existent anyway. But she was so tired and still taking iron tablets; she probably should make more of an effort to nourish herself.
She’d managed to pick up a couple of massage clients for this week, so she hoped to get back into the swing of her life. Maybe once she started working and being out there in the world, she would get back to being herself. She had to do it some time.
“Pete, I… I just don’t know if it’s a good idea for me to—”
“You promised him,” Pete said.
Great, so Beck had told her boss about her promise not to quit. “You don’t need that job. You don’t care if he shuts the place down and you know he won’t really do that anyway. He made me promise in a… it was a tense moment and…”
Jaycee had never got to the bottom of why it had meant anything to Beck that she stay at AD. After assuming he just wanted to keep an eye on her, she didn’t give it more thought; now she figured she should have. When they were together it was so much easier to be accepting, or ignore obvious facts, like how they’d be torn apart after delivery.
“The contract is done,” Pete said and from the lowered tone of his voice, she wondered if he was at AD, or surrounded by others, now. “And anyway, there was nothing in there that said you couldn’t see each other.”
See each other like physically see each other, or… see each other. It was hard enough to close her eyes without picturing Beck’s face above hers, without thinking of his mouth on hers, without feeling him sliding into her, even when they were half a city apart. How would she cope if they had to share the same air?
No one knew about their relationship, so she couldn’t tell Pete how much it would hurt her heart to see Beck again. If she went to AD it would happen eventually, but maybe if she went back to work for a week or two and made it seem like she had no issues, then she could quietly quit and slip out of their lives.
“A week,” she said. “Give me another week. After that I’ll come back.”
“Seven days, Jayc, then you’re back, no more excuses.”
Going back to AD hadn’t been as difficult as she thought. Not for her anyway. Pete didn’t have it as easy.
Jaycee had come in early to creep around the place just in case she had a massive breakdown. Pete came out of the store room and greeted her with a smile when she was staring at the stage, and that was the moment she lost the battle and burst into tears.
It was hormones that were still zipping around her, she was sure that was all it was. Pete hadn’t quite known how to comfort her, but he’d hugged her and then taken her on a tour of the latest additions on the wall.
Since that embarrassing episode, she’d slipped back into her rhythm, even her boobs weren’t as sore anymore.
It had been six weeks since she’d given birth and while she still felt like an alien most mornings when she woke up, her body was beginning to recover. Her mind was a different story, it was still screwed up.
On the plus side, the bleeding had stopped.
Her doctors had told her it was normal to feel tired and sluggish. Truth be told, she wasn’t sure how much of her mood was connected to the trauma of the birth and how much was heartbreak related.
Jaycee couldn’t look at herself in the mirror without seeing herself transformed into one of his portraits. Beckett Trent was in her blood and he didn’t seem to be going anywhere fast. Though she had made some progress because she’d stopped expecting to see him pop up every time she walked into AD.
No one asked her about him or about the babies. She had a feeling that Pete had warned everyone not to utter a word that might upset her. And if she had to put money on it, she’d guess that order had come from a certain Beckett Trent, not that her colleagues would’ve known it.
Just when she was starting to relax, it happened.
Jaycee announced the break of her set and stepped forward out of the light and the first thing she saw was him. Damn. There he was, right there. Beckett fucking Trent. Her former roommate wasn’t looking at her. He was leaning over the bar, his face just a few inches from Pete’s whose weight was propped on his spread arms.
Turning on the background music, she put it at a level that could be heard while ensuring it was low enough to let people converse without straining. That was what she always did. Not that it mattered to the men who’d caught her attention at the bar. Whatever they were talking about, they were trying their best to keep it private from those in their periphery, but they were pros at that by now.
There wasn’t a chance in hell Jaycee was going anywhere near Beck. Yet, she couldn’t alter her behavior without making her discomfort obvious. So, she jumped off the stage and started toward the bar, far, far away from where Beck was positioned.
The whispering men had probably heard her announce her break, or if they hadn’t been listening, they should recognize that the background music was on and she was no longer live. Pete was usually good at noticing when she was on break. But tonight, it took him an extra minute before he started down the bar toward her. She didn’t begrudge him his conversation with Beck, but did hope she wasn’t a subject of it.
Jaycee didn’t dare turn her head. Yes, there were a bunch of other people at the bar between her and her ex, meaning it was unlikely she’d see him if she did look in his direction. But he was so tall that if he stood up straight, he’d see right over their heads and catch her looking at him.
Closing her eyes and shaking her head, Jaycee cursed herself for overthinking. Beck didn’t care about her, he wouldn’t be looking over here, and he sure didn’t have the time to be overthinking whether or not they might make eye contact.
Focusing on Pete who was heading for the fridge to grab her a bottle of water, Jaycee smiled when he handed it over. She’d tried to pay for her drinks after starting back at AD, thinking things might be different now that she wasn’t living with the primary investor, but Pete still wouldn’t accept her money.
“It’s busy tonight,” she said, which was the kind of thing she’d always say if it was true, but she suddenly got paranoid he might think she was referring to one specific patron.
“We like busy,” Pete said. “You need anything else?”
Shaking her head, she uncapped her bottle and tipped some water into her mouth. Some nights they’d talk for a few minutes, other times they didn’t exchange any words. It was odd that tonight she wished her bartender friend would stay to talk to her even though he obviously had a buddy here to visit him.
But it was late, and she was worried. Where were the boys? Had something happened? Surely if it had, Beck would be dealing with it and wouldn’t be hanging out at AD. But it made no sense why he’d be here unless he was going to start working again.
So many questions and she couldn’t ask any of them.
Jaycee grabbed for Pete before he could walk away. “I’m going to duck out early tonight, just to let you know.”
Since starting back, Jaycee hadn’t left early; she’d had no reason to. Not that she had a reason tonight, other than feeling claustrophobic.
Pete smiled and covered her hand with his. “He’ll be leaving in five minutes. He’s not hanging around.”
“I didn’t… I didn’t say he was,” she said.
It was only after stuttering a response that she realized it would’ve been better to feign ignorance with a “I don’t know who you’re talking about” than to walk right into the admission that she’d been obsessing about the man at the other end of the bar.
“He came to test a theory, that’s all.”
Jaycee didn’t understand. “A theory?” she asked. “About what?”
“Leaving the boys alone.”
Her paranoia dwindled; the shock of his words made her angry. “Leaving them…”
Jaycee didn’t think about what she was doing, she just spun around and began to march up the bar, ignoring the people she had to squeeze around to get to the man who was hunched over something and paying zero attention to anything around him.
“They’re not toys!”
Beck lifted his chin slowly and it took a moment for his head to tilt in her direction. “Excuse me?”
Oh, what was she doing? The minute their eyes met, she took a reflexive step backwards. Why the hell was she standing beside the man she’d sworn to avoid at all costs? “I… I said—”
“They’re not toys, I heard you,” he said, twisting to shift his weight from two elbows to one. “You’re talking about the boys and you think I’m playing with them because…”
“I… nothing… forget it,” she said and tried to turn away, but he grabbed her arm to pull her back.
“No, if you’ve got something to say then say it. Do you have a comment about my parenting skills that you feel you want to share?”
He had every right to be mad at her and while he wasn’t yelling, there was something hostile about his tone. “No,” she said. “No, I don’t.”
“I guess you think I’m here getting drunk, looking for a date… maybe this fatherhood thing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, so I just came here to shoot up in the restroom, is that it?”
“No!” she said. The one thing she never had to worry about was Beck developing any kind of habit like that.
“You sure, girl? ‘Cause you came storming over here with a bug up your ass ready to tell me what’s what. You’ve never shied away from giving it to me before, so do it. Lay it out for me. Tell me what I’m doing wrong!”
Her eyes burned, he was so angry, why was he so angry? How could he go from the man who’d told her she’d always be his muse to the man now growling at her with fury in his features?
“You’re not doing anything wrong, I know nothing,” she said, pulling her arm from his loose grip. “I’m sorry.”
Swallowing her discomfort, Jaycee turned around and tried her best not to run as she squashed through people and ducked under arms. The anger in her had wanted to do exactly what he said. When Pete had said Beck was testing a theory she was ready to go up to him and tell him he couldn’t pick up the children and dump them any time he felt like it.
But he’d been a father for six weeks. She’d never been a mother to the boys and had no idea how difficult it must be dealing with twins alone. That was probably why he was so fried. The boys would be keeping him up all night, demanding every minute of his time.
Beck was used to suiting himself, sleeping late, staying up all night, grabbing a nap or eating whenever he wanted to. Now he had two tiny humans dictating every minute of his day to him. She was some kind of stupid for thinking she had any troubles in her life. Compared to what Beck was going through, her life was a walk in the park.
When she’d told Pete she was leaving early, she hadn’t meant that instant, but Jaycee found herself in the breakroom pulling on her jacket a minute after the confrontation. She couldn’t stay to face Pete or the embarrassment of her reaction to something that was nothing to do with her.
Jaycee wasn’t a part of Beck’s life anymore; she had no right to judge anything he did. And she wasn’t a part of his children’s lives. His children. Not hers. She had to keep her nose out. It was as simple as that.