Bear, Otter, & the Kid 03 - The Art of Breathing (54 page)

“We sound weird.”

He drops the cloth off the side of the bed and crawls up beside me. “What do you mean?”

“Like we’re giddy.”

He pulls me into him with a grunt. “You sound oddly pained in addition to weirdly giddy.”

I roll my eyes. “And you sound disgustingly smug.”

He laughs. “A little smug,” he admits.

“Because you took my flower?”

He groans and shoves me away. “Moment over.”

I roll over on top of him and straddle his waist with my hands on his chest. My ass bumps his groin. “That hurts,” I mutter.

“I’m sorry,” he says, but the grin on his face makes him a liar.

“A lot smug,” I tell him as I slap his chest.

He captures my hand. The smile slides off his face. “Ty?”

“Yeah?”

“What now?”

Ugh. Reality. I sigh. “I don’t know.”

“This isn’t a one-off for me.”

“I know.”

“This isn’t something you can walk away from.”

“I know.”

“Then?”

“Needy,” I mutter, but I allow myself to be pulled down. I bury my face in his neck as he traces my back with his fingers.

We lie like this. I don’t know for how long. Each of us are lost in our own thoughts. For him, that was never a problem. For me, though…. Well, you know how it is. I think, of course, of all the reasons why this should never be. I think of all the reasons why this won’t work. I’m leaving Seafare at the end of summer. I’m a mess and can’t be cured by an overblown confrontation with my mother or a magical dick, even if it belongs to someone like him. I’m not a kid anymore. Not even really
the
Kid, even if people still call me that. It’s a shadow from the past.

So I tell him the only thing I can. The truth.

“We’re good together. You and I.”

“I know,” he says. “We always have been.”
And we always could be
goes unsaid.

“I need to fix me.”

“You’re not broken.” He puts his hand in my hair.

“Maybe. Maybe not. But I need to find out. And without you, I don’t think I would have known how.”

“Ty?”

“Yeah?”

“I do love you,” he says.

I smile sadly. “I know. And one day, I’m going to be worthy of hearing it.”

“You already are.”

I reach down and pull the blankets over us. “One day at a time,” I say with a yawn. “That’s what we have to do. Just take it one day at a time.”

He looks as if he’s going to say more, but then he sighs. “Okay.”

Later, when I’m on the edge of sleep, I hear him whisper, “You’ll see. One day, you’ll see what I’ve seen all along.”

And then I’m gone.

Where Tyson Faces the Music

W
HEN
I
wake, the afternoon sun stretches across the wall. Dom snores softly at my side, his hand stretched across my chest. Deciding it’s okay to be one of those creepy people just this once (I
have
just lost my virginity, after all), I watch him sleep for a little while. He looks at ease, the pinched lines around his eyes of late gone, at least for now. I don’t know if I was the cause of them or the cure. Maybe both.

I know what you’re probably thinking. This is going to be the part where I decide to do something stupid like run, or I’m going to freak out and try to sneak away and wonder why I ever slept with him to begin with. My angst will rise again (has it ever really gone away?) and I’ll feel sorry for myself and lash out at him and Bear and Otter, saying I’m not good enough for them and will disappear and blah, blah, blah.

Maybe. I doubt it. But it wouldn’t surprise me.

I might not be good enough for him. But I
want
to be. And we all know what happens when I want something. When I put my mind to something. I either see it through to the end or let it blow up in my face and wonder what the hell just happened.

That face, though. His face. So handsome. I
do
love him. I just need to make sure I deserve it.

I’m thirsty. And my ass feels like it just got punched with a penis.

I suppose it did. But I’m still thirsty.

I take his hand off my chest and place it on the bed. He mutters something, but doesn’t wake. I kiss his cheek. I’m allowed.

My boxers are on the floor, over in the corner. I’m puzzled how they got so far, but then I remember he essentially ripped them off me and flung them over his head. I don’t know where my pants ended up. My shirt is hanging off his dresser. Good enough.

The day is bright. It’s like Mother Nature knows I’ve been fucked within an inch of my life and is letting the sun shine down in total celebration. I have a feeling that if I were to go outside, birds would fly around me, singing to me like I’m some kind of Disney Princess.

Okay, I might still be out of it. I’m not a Disney Princess.

I’m not even to the kitchen when the doorbell rings.

Shit.

I don’t want Dom to wake up. He needs his sleep.

But I also don’t want to answer the door. What if it’s one of his cop buddies? What if they see me in my underwear and they don’t know he’s… well, whatever he is? I mean, he’s got to be at least bi. Not that it matters. Labels aren’t important. Well, except they are. Like, what are we now? Is he my boyfriend? Or my partner? Or my fuck buddy? Or—

Shit. I’m doing that thing I said I wouldn’t do.

The doorbell rings again.

Fuck it. I’m decently covered. I got this.

Except if it’s Bear
, it whispers.
If he sees you like this, he’s going to murder you.

That puts a little falter in my step.

But even before I can open the door, I hear a key in the lock and it turns and opens on its own. Well, not exactly on its own.

Stacey smiles at me, and when she looks me up and down, that smile turns into something more. “Hey, Ty,” she says, brushing past me. “Saw the car in the driveway, figured the big guy was home. Thought I’d drop on by and find out how the trip went.”

My face burns with the force of a thousand suns. “Uh. Er. Flarg.” I’m pretty sure I look like a homosexual deer caught in the headlights after just having sex for the first time.

“What’s that?” she asks, heading for the kitchen.

“Please, come in,” I say.

“Thanks,” she says. “Oh, I’ve got a key.”

“I noticed.” I look longingly at the front door, giving serious reconsideration to running through it.

“Hey, can you help me?” she calls, and I can hear the sounds of her rooting around in the cabinets.

I would rather not, and I would actually rather have her not exist in my vicinity right at this moment at all, but that doesn’t seem like a polite thing to say. “Uh, sure.”

I follow her into the kitchen, and she’s taken coffee mugs down and is fiddling with the fancy espresso machine Dom has. She pushes a button and it makes a grinding noise. She frowns and hits it. “Technology hates me.”

“If it makes you feel any better,” I say, “I don’t know how to work it either. What’s the point of having one of those when you can just go to Starbucks?”

She reaches up over the sink and finds a box of tea. It strikes me then that she probably lived here at one point, or at least has been here many times, and knows the house well. I’m jealous, but I don’t know why.

“This will do,” she says. “I’m pretty sure Dominic would be slightly pissed if we burned down his house. Speaking of, where is he?”

“Sleeping,” I say. “We didn’t get to bed until really late last night.”

“Oh,
really
?” she asks, that smile returning.

I backpedal as quickly as possible. “What? No! What? We were driving! Got back late! Very early! That’s it!”

“Uh-huh.” She puts two mugs in the microwave and starts it. “So you guys just crashed, huh?”

“Yes, ma’am. That’s it. Just crashed. So tired. Long drive.” I fake yawn. It probably looks like I’m doing a bad impression of a T. rex. Or a good impression of an allosaurus. Subtle differences, those.

“I bet,” she says. “Long drives can do that to you.”

Goddamn stress sweat. “Sure can.”

“Tea?” she asks me as the microwave goes off.

“Thank you,” I say politely. And maniacally.

She takes sugar and honey down from a shelf without even having to search for it, and I’m somehow able to keep from growling at her. The smile plastered on my face probably wouldn’t look out of place in a mug shot lineup of known serial killers.

“Shall we sit?” she asks when she finishes the tea.

“Sounds wonderful.”
Sounds awful and I’d rather get punched in the uvula!

“How was Tucson?” she asks.

“Hot.”

“And Kori’s all right?”

“Peachy.”

“Have a good time?”

“Yes.”

I’m golden. She won’t break me.

She takes a sip from her tea. “You and Dom get on okay?”

I’m drowning in my own sweat. “We got it on okay—or, what I actually meant to say was we got on just fine.”

“Lovely.”

“Quite.”

“Indeed.”

“Totally.”

“His bed is really soft, isn’t it?” she asks innocently.

“I wouldn’t know,” I say. “I slept in the spare room.”

“Did you?”

“Sure did.”

“So, Ben’s room.”

Oh fuck. “Yes.”

“You slept in Ben’s room.”

“Yeah.”

She laughs. “In his racecar bed, huh?”

Son of a bitch! Did he have a racecar bed? “I pretended I was driving really fast,” I told her, spilling my tea all over myself.

“Did you?”

“Yes.”

“Fascinating.”

“I agree.”

“Tyson?”

“Yes?”

“Ben doesn’t have a racecar bed. It’s just a normal bed.”

“You liar!” I shout at her.

“You little shit!” she says with a grin. “So it finally happened, huh?”

“I have no idea what you mean.”

“Oh, bullshit. Tyson. I don’t care. Well, I do. But not in the way you think.”

“How can you say that!” I cry at her. “This is your ex-
husband
! His loins did stuff with your loins and you have a
child
!”

“Ew,” she says, her nose wrinkling. “Let’s not talk about loins anymore.”

I bury my face in my hands. “Oh, Jesus.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Everything. Nothing. I don’t know.”

“Well, that was… all-encompassing. And succinct, as usual.”

“I hated you,” I say, dropping my hands on the table. “For the longest time.”

She seems taken aback by my candor. “I know,” she says. “But I won’t apologize for it.”

I shake my head. “And I don’t want you to. I was wrong. I’m the one who’s sorry.”

“Tyson, can I tell you something? Just between you and me?”

“I guess.”

“And you have to promise to let me finish.”

“When people tell me that, it usually means I’m not going to like it,” I say glumly.

Stacey laughs. “Probably. But you need to hear it.”

“Okay.”

She takes a deep breath and then lets it out slowly. She looks out the window into the afternoon, then back at me. It’s only a second she looks away, but in that second her face hardens, and her eyes turn steely. “You broke him,” she says. Gone is the laughter in her voice. “When you left. When you
abandoned
him. When you took yourself away from him, when you cast him off like he was nothing so you could lick your wounds, you
broke
him.”

“I—”

“No interrupting, remember?”

I nod and sit back, helpless.

She watches me for a moment to make sure I’m sincere before she continues. “I sent your invitation out early. We hadn’t even agreed on a design yet. He told me he’d already told you. That you were happy. That you were okay. I should have looked closer, but everything was swirling around me then. The pregnancy, him. His mood since you’d gone away to school. It was all too much. And then the day came when you stopped it all.

“He tried to hide it. He tried to go on like nothing had changed. Like he wasn’t unhappy. Like he wasn’t upset. Like he just hadn’t had his whole world turned upside down. Because whether you realize it or not, Tyson, that’s what you were.
You were his world.
The rest of us just drifted right on by. When you pulled away, so did he. He acted like it was nothing, but I
knew
him. It wasn’t nothing.”

She looks down at her hands. “We were never meant to be, he and I. I know that. I’ve had a long time to accept it, and I have. I’ve moved on. I have a wonderful life. I can stand on my own two feet. I have a man who loves me. I have a son I would do anything for. But even though Dom and I didn’t work out, that doesn’t mean I don’t still love him. Do you understand?”

I nod. Then, quietly, “He loves you too.”

“I know. We’re friends. But even if we weren’t, we’re always going to be bound together because of Ben. Ben has to come first. No matter what. You were Dom’s world before, Tyson, but now you’re going to have to share it. Nothing, and I mean
nothing
, can bring harm to Ben. Are we clear?”

I nod.

She looks a little sad. “He told me, one day. I don’t know why he came clean or what he thought would happen. He told me how he felt. You know. About you. But I had already figured it out long ago.”

“How?”

“The looks he gave you,” she says. “Like you were the only magic he’d ever known. I knew that look for what it was. And when you left, it was like a light had gone out in him.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, unsure of what else to say.

She shakes her head. “You don’t have to apologize to me. I’m not the one who needs to hear it.”

“I know. He knows. I’ve told him.”

“Is that all you’ve told him?”

I look sharply up at her. She watches me with those clever eyes. “Yes,” I say. “For now.”

“Are you staying?”

I hesitate. “I… don’t know.”

“Does he know?”

“I don’t know.”

“Tyson? What
do
you know?”

“That I love him,” I finally say aloud. It’s easier than I thought it would be. “With everything that I am. With everything that I have.”

“Is that enough?” she asks.