Authors: Lauren Gilley
“I don’t think you have to.”
“No, I guess not.” His fingers drummed against the laminate countertop as he searched for his next move. “You know,” he said after a long moment, in a quiet, almost ashamed voice. “I’ve spent my whole life blaming everything on my old man. Now that he’s gone…I dunno.”
“What?” Jordan prodded.
He shuffled his cards and chewed at the inside of his cheek. Finally, he dragged his gaze up to meet Jordan’s and his expression was laced with embarrassment. “What if I let her down? And it’s nobody’s fault but mine?”
Sweet Jesus!
Jordan wanted to groan.
You are such a damn girl
. “You won’t,” he said instead.
Tam blinked. “You sound awful sure about that.”
“’Cause I am. You let her down, Mike and I’ll beat your ass. ‘Course, we’ll have to wait in line till you beat your own ass…”
Tam grinned. “Point taken.”
“You need to cut yourself some slack, dude.”
“Yeah.”
The card shuffling resumed. Jordan listened to the soft, paper sounds of it and forced down more of his Coors Light, wishing it was something warmer and more potent instead. He didn’t expect the conversation to be turned around on him.
“What’s up with you and Ellie?”
Just hearing her name sent a jolt through him, but he played it evasive. “What do you mean?”
“Really?”
It was his turn to sigh in defeat. “I just don’t know that it can work.”
Tam looked more than a little curious. “I thought you got your job all worked out.”
“I did.”
“But…?”
“You know.” Jordan frowned and it pulled at his still-tender scabs. “We don’t have to do this whole sharing and caring thing.”
“You started it.” Tam rolled his eyes. “Look, it’s not like you guys were casual or anything. What happened? Did you cheat on her?”
“
No
.” He was surprised how fast and defensively the answer came. The suggestion was the sort of thing that pulled his internal strings. Tam’s brows launched up his forehead. “No,” Jordan repeated. “No, it’s just…I dunno. Her family’s fucked up. And she’s got this ex-boyfriend and…” He trailed off when he realized how pathetic he sounded, picking at the tab of his beer can with a thumbnail.
Tam forced a chuckle through his nose. “Her family? Really? Jordie, you just ate pavement trying to help me with my family issues. How bad could hers be?”
He twisted the tab until it snapped off and he flicked it down onto the countertop. It skidded into Tam’s ace stack of hearts.
“She’s eighteen and in that stupid, mindless attachment stage. She dropped my class – put her whole college plan in jeopardy – so we could keep seeing each other.”
Tam snorted. “
Or
…she cares about you, didn’t want you to lose your job, and as a straight A student figured she could make up your, no offense, total gimme class next semester.”
Jordan scowled down at his beer. “Mature adults don’t just give up their dreams for someone else.”
“And how did she give up her dreams?” Tam retorted. “She wants to be a writer – she’s still writing, isn’t she?”
“Yeah, but - ”
“Then what’s the problem?”
Had it been daylight, had he had a good night’s sleep on his side and the safe, lie-supporting warmth of the sun against his back; had he not thought he might die as his face was ground into the pavement three nights before; had Tam not been the last person on the planet sympathetic to the petty, bullshit excuses people gave themselves and their loved ones, Jordan was sure he would have been able to shrug and button up and be self-righteous about the whole thing. But instead, he was sleepy, and he had a stomach ache. He was very likely the direct cause of a man’s death, and it didn’t matter if that man had been a monster, all he wanted right now was Ellie’s fingers through his hair and her sweet, pink lipstick smile.
He took a deep, terrifying sort of breath and met his brother-in-law’s gaze head-on, hands shaking with the overflow of sudden, unwanted honesty that was surging through him.
“I don’t understand her,” he admitted, and watched a knowing gleam come into Tam’s eyes. “She is so young and she knows
exactly
what she wants. She has all of her shit together.”
“And she’s more together than you?”
“Her doctor thinks she’ll have cancer someday.” He fought the sudden, desperate urge to gag as he said it. Tam’s expression froze, his face going eerily white in the dim lighting. “She’s on a timeline if she wants to have kids and she didn’t even tell me because she didn’t want to scare me off.”
Tam’s throat rolled as he swallowed. “Well…that’s the kind of thing that would scare people off. It scared
you
off.”
“No it didn’t,” he said so quickly he knew it was true. He hadn’t learned about it until after it was too late, but her biological clock wasn’t an issue regardless. Ellie had never made it an issue.
Tam was watching him.
“I don’t - ” He hadn’t known exactly how all of the little things added up to one great big unforgivable difference until this moment. His epiphany slammed into him as hard as he’d slammed into Hank Wales. The fall was just as painful. He took a breath and started over. “She’s not the kind of girl who does things halfway. She’s gonna be a novelist and she needs to have kids quickly and…and she loves me and she’s
sure
.” He swallowed. “And I’m just…not sure.”
The silence that followed was made more awkward by the chugging whine of the fridge and the unusually quick thump of his pulse in his ears. Jordan felt like the biggest idiot in the world: for what he’d said to Ellie, for admitting his idiocy out in the open like this. For being a sap.
But Tam stopped shuffling his cards and gave him a very serious look that made him feel just a little bit less like a fool. “I don’t think anybody’s ever sure, Jordie.” He canted his head to the side. “I love Jo more than anything in the world. But being responsible for someone – putting a stake in the game and knowing that you might hurt them…that’s scary shit. That scares me every day.”
“If that’s true, then how does anyone make it work?” Jordan meant it as a rhetorical question, but Tam had an answer.
“That’s where you have to be a little selfish. You can let her go and hope the next one will make you certain.”
Jordan glanced away; he didn’t like how transparent he felt under those blue eyes.
“Or you can realize that Ellie isn’t Kelsey, and you can decide you just want her. Figure the rest out as you go.”
“And that works for you?”
“It’s the only thing that
can
work for me. I’m a selfish bastard; I won’t let her go again.” The cards made more sounds. “I watched my mom fight her own body for a long damn time,” Tam said quietly. “No one would blame you if you walked away.”
“I don’t care about the cancer.” He heard the bite to his voice.
“Well.” Tam gave the vocal equivalent of a shrug. “The kid thing, then. You’ve got plenty of time – you don’t want kids anytime soon.”
He didn’t actively entertain thoughts of children. But he could see Ellie with them. He thought about her picking up after Paige, about her cooking and constant cleaning and the way she looked at him so softly sometimes and said he was cute, even when he told her not to. “She should have kids. She’d be a great mom. If she wants them, she should have them.”
“Jordie.” Tam was smiling when he glanced at him. “I think you’re more sure than you thought.”
37
“…
w
hen were you going to tell us this?
When?
You cannot
buy
a house, Noelle, you can’t!”
Natalie Grayson had degrees of rage. On the upper end of the scale, it became so intense that it burned through the haze of her meds and had her up and spitting past her bedtime. Times like now.
“Well, believe it or not, it
was
physically possible.” Ellie threw a tired wave to her manager as she shouldered her way out the back door of Angelo’s and stepped into a night so cold it made her teeth hurt. She pressed her cell hard to her ear and reached into her coat pocket for her keys, breath pluming in an icy cloud as she started down the walk toward her car.
“Well-well-
well
, it’s also…
physically
possible to be a stripper. Are you going to be a stripper now, too?”
“Mom, between Nikki and me, why would I be the one most likely to become a stripper? No,” she said, when Natalie started to protest, “nevermind. I didn’t do anything wrong, Mom. Grammy wanted to sell me the house and - ”
“That old bat just didn’t want your father to have it!”
There were a scant handful of cars in the lot, all of them lonely islands that cast long shadows beneath the streetlamps. As a sharp gust sent her staggering a step sideways, Ellie noticed a black SUV on the other side of her Civic. It figured: a whole empty parking lot and someone had parked right next to her.
“Dad doesn’t need the house,” she said, feeling her throat get tight the way it always did before her eyes started to burn and her anger manifested itself in tears. “He was just going to sell it when Grammy died and - ”
“And that would be his right as her son!” Natalie sounded like she did when she dragged a gnarled hand through her hair and came away clutching dull, dyed blonde strands of it between her rings. “You’re doing this all
wrong
, Ellie,” she fretted. “You’re supposed to
marry
a man who buys
you
a house. You don’t buy
your own
house.”
“I love that house, and I don’t need - ”
A man-shaped shadow stepped out from behind the SUV and the phone slipped out of her hand to land with a
crack
against the asphalt.
Ellie startled to a halt, breath catching in her throat, a thousand terrified goose bumps breaking out along her skin. Her mother’s voice was a tinny, irate murmur at her feet. The wind reached a howling crescendo of sound, her hair streaming out over the collar of her jacket and straining away from her.
Oh my God, oh my God…
And then the shadow stepped into the lukewarm puddle cast by the streetlamp and light touched tousled, messy hair and a thin frame inside a canvas jacket; long, lean legs. Light skimmed along the ridge of his thin nose. “I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said, and knowing it was Jordan twisted her fright into a whole different kind of anxiety.
The urge to cry was immediate, her heart raw and thumping and leaking blood. She missed him in a devastating way, and that kind of vulnerability could only stand to hurt her more.
“You didn’t,” she lied, and knelt to retrieve her phone, disconnected the call with her thumb – her mother cut off mid-tirade – and slipped it in her pocket. She punched the unlock button on her key ring and the interior lights of her Civic came on. Jordan was moving around the trunk of the car and she hastened her step in hopes of beating him.
Her fingers had just brushed the handle when he said, “Ellie, wait,” in a voice that hammered at her dignity and left her frozen, shaking, head turned to watch his final approach. His face didn’t look like it should. Even in the shadows, the right side of it seemed too dark. “I wanted to talk to you a minute.”