Sugar Free (25 page)

In the meantime, I drop my knees down to the yellowed linoleum and give my man his prize.

Fifteen months since the charges were dropped…

“They're here,” Ally squeals from the kitchen window that looks down to the driveway. Being that this is a stilted cottage, the kitchen and living room level are actually one flight up. The three bedrooms on the next floor up, and the loft above. Our cottage is narrow and tall, and looks goofy from the beach, but I love it. It's been almost exactly a year since we moved in and I can say I am now an official Floridian.

“Come on, munchkin,” my dad says as he walks to the front door and holds his hand out to Ally. “Let's go down and welcome them.”

My dad's been here on vacation for nearly a week. He's almost ready to retire and he's contemplating a move here. Maria, he's told me, is not keen on the idea, and I think it's caused some friction between them. The few conversations I've heard them have on the phone while he's been here have been tense. I want my dad to be happy, but I want him to move to Florida more, so…sorry, Maria. I'm going to keep pushing at him.

Beck saunters out the door behind Ally and my dad, but I make it no farther than the entryway as I watch. Two vehicles are parked behind Beck and me: Caroline's little beat-up sedan that she drove and a large U-Haul trailer that Dennis drove across country to complete Caroline and Ally's move here. They're going to be living in a beach house about four blocks down.

Ally had flown out with my dad two days ago, as Caroline and Dennis had planned on driving hard and long hours to get here. I watch as Ally hugs her mom, and then Dennis, then Dennis and Beck are backslapping. My dad is already at the back of the U-Haul, opening it up and assessing the situation. It's late in the day and we won't go down to unload this stuff into Caroline's new house until tomorrow, but my dad's a planner.

They start making their way back up to the house, first Beck and Ally, followed by Caroline, and then Dennis. I don't miss the subtle move that Dennis makes, putting his hand on Caroline's hip as she moves in front of him to start up the stairs. It's intimate and I'd wondered if their friendship had turned into something more.

Later that night, we have a shrimp boil out on the back deck. Beck and I bought a copper fire pit and there's nothing like sitting under the stars with the rumble of the ocean and a glowing fire. We're all fat and happy from the good food and the several bottles of wine we'd opened.

Ally's laying on Caroline's lap, her head on her shoulder. Dennis is sitting in a lounge chair next to them, and not hiding in my opinion a genuine interest in Caroline. She seems a bit oblivious to me though. My dad balances his wineglass on his stomach and he looks like he's on the verge of going to sleep in his chair, while I sit on the love seat rocker and wait for Beck to come back with another bottle of wine.

When he steps out onto the deck, my breath catches.

It happens almost every time I'm away from him for more than a few minutes, and when he reappears, it's as if all my senses are on hyperdrive. In my opinion, he's gotten infinitely more handsome over the past year, and that's because his new life agrees with him tremendously. There's not a man who is more relaxed, happy, and content with his life.

“I'd like to make a toast,” he says as he steps through the door onto the deck. My dad sort of jerks upward at the noise, blinking his eyes. All of us look at Beck expectantly. He takes the new bottle of wine and tops off everyone's glasses before setting it down on the deck railing.

He walks over to me and holds his hand out for me to stand up. I do as he urges, holding my wineglass as he rests a casual hand on my shoulder. “I'm just really happy to have everyone here in our home. Everyone seated here tonight is my family…Sela's family. A man would think he has everything right here that he could ever want, but sadly…there is one thing lacking in my life.”

I turn my face to him quizzically, because I thought this was going to be a happy-go-lucky toast of friendship, but it turned very serious all of a sudden.

Beck turns to me, takes my wineglass from me, and sets it down on the deck rail near the bottle. His hands then take mine, where he squeezes them briefly before bending down on one knee.

I pull one hand away from him involuntarily and put it to my mouth on a gasp.

Holy shit.

Just…oh wow.

Beck reaches into his pocket and pulls out a gray velvet box, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out it contains a ring. He flips it open and holds it out for me to see in the glow of the firelight. It's beautiful, a simple round solitaire not too big and not too small. “Sela, you and I have been through hell and back, and those fires did nothing more than forge our bond as strong as steel. We've started a new life together and it's damn good. The only way to make it perfect is for you to be my wife.”

He pulls the ring out in a suave move and has it on me before I can even take in a breath.

“Would you do me the honor?” he asks, so very formalized and traditional and even a little bit dorky, but it's one of the reasons I love him so much.

“You bet your ass I will,” I tell him before I throw myself into his arms. “And no big ceremony either. Everyone we love is already here, so we should head to the county courthouse tomorrow and get it done.”

Three and a half years since the charges were dropped…

“This has to be the longest two minutes in the history of the world,” Beck says irritably as he paces back and forth.

“In the history of the universe,” I retort tensely.

“Universe means space and time moves differently in space, right?” he asks, well, blabbers.

He's nervous and I get it.

The alarm goes off on his iPhone and we both rush over to the kitchen counter, shoulders touching as we bend down to peer at the pregnancy test we'd placed there after I'd peed on it in the bathroom.

A “positive” sign.

It's positive.

“We're going to have a baby,” I whisper.

“We're going to have a baby,” he yells as he picks me up and spins me around. My hand swings out and catches the pee stick, sending it flying across the counter and to the floor. I watch it skitter across the old, worn linoleum that we've walked across for what seems like ages and I think to myself, we should replace the flooring before the baby comes.

Eeep.

We're having a baby!

Seven years after the charges were dropped…

My back aches and I don't remember it hurting this much when I was pregnant with Sophie. I press my fingers down into the muscles and arch my spine trying to relieve the pain. I do this with a smile on my face as I watch Beck and my dad down on the beach with Sophie. Even from here I can make out the muscled definition of Beck's broad back, and the darkened form of this dragon tattoo that he'd had completed after we got settled into our new life in Florida.

I had thought Sophie, at four years of age, might be a little young to learn how to boogie board, but they think not. Maria watches them from under an umbrella that covers her in complete shade as she lounges back in a beach chair. Turns out, retirement to Florida wasn't such a bad thing for her, and I think that had something to do with my dad finally asking her to marry him.

I'm happy for them both.

I glance at my watch and note that Ally and Caroline should be here soon. They drove over to the mall on the mainland to shop for a dress, as Ally's attending a dance at her middle school in a few weeks. I'm glad they got out together, as I've been worried about Caroline. While her transition to becoming a Floridian went as well as could be expected, I think that had a lot to do with having Dennis by her side. Granted, he didn't live here permanently because his job took him all over the world now, but his visits had steadily become more infrequent until they only saw each other a handful of times a year.

It was no way to maintain a relationship, and Caroline finally called it quits two months ago.

I want to smack Dennis around and ask him what the hell he's doing, but Beck told me to stay out of it.

“Sela,” he'd said somberly. “That man has too many demons and he doesn't want them resting on Caroline's shoulders. It's probably for the best.”

What-the-fuck-ever.

Caroline and Dennis are made for each other, but he's too stubborn to give himself completely to a woman. I'd kill to get my psychotherapy hands on him. I'd make him let go of those demons with some hard work for sure.

But I'm staying out of it as requested.

Sighing, I turn from the sliding glass doors and pick up a box I'd set temporarily on the coffee table so I could rub my aching back. Little Sebastian is due in six weeks and I'm in my nesting mode. It happened with Sophie's pregnancy, where I ended up decluttering the house and purging all of our pack rat items. I'm not sure how in the four short years since her birth we accumulated more crap than I know what to do with.

I bring the box into the kitchen and set it on the counter before reaching in and pulling out a handful of items. Mostly papers of various sorts, a binder with recipes, and oddly, a Rubik's cube. I set that aside, as Sophie might want it, and start leafing through the paper items.

I make a stack for stuff to keep and a stack to purge, dropping the things into neat piles without getting emotionally attached to what I'm throwing away.

I do pause momentarily when I pull out a white piece of paper that has Sophie's handprint done in bright blue. I had had it hanging on the fridge for weeks and then somehow, it got taken down to make room for another piece of art and made it to this box.

It goes in the pile to save.

I discard mail flyers for various housing services we've received over the last few years, saving promo items for pressure washing and lawn care maintenance and the like. They all seemed like a good idea when I'd saved them, but now I put them in the purge pile. When I finally break down and get the house pressure-washed, I'll Google a company like other modern people do.

The next item I pick up causes my heart to flutter for a brief moment before it stills into calmness. It's a newspaper article from just about five months ago. The headline reads:
PREVIOUSLY UNIDENTIFIED ASSAILANTS SENTENCED TO PRISON
.

My eyes only skim the article because I know the details well. Almost seven months ago, two months before this article, I got a call from a detective in Los Angeles. He'd had a hit on the DNA from my rape case.

It had belonged to a man by the name of Boyd Martin, who had been arrested for raping a young woman he drugged in a nightclub. They sent a picture of him to me via email and I recognized him immediately, the way I had recognized JT on the TV all those years ago. Dark hair, tanned face…eyes with a slight Asian tilt. A tattoo of a red phoenix was on his wrist, which only further proved to me that this was one of my rapists from that night.

Things happened quickly thereafter. Because he was now up for two rapes, the DA had some room to offer him a reduced sentence on my case if he gave up the name of my third rapist. He jumped on the deal, gladly giving up the details of the crime, which included verification that JT had indeed raped me. I didn't need that little bit of vindication, as I knew in my heart he had. I'd merely had a few things confused in my memory thinking it was JT's DNA in my hair when it was Boyd Martin's.

Best of all, Boyd Martin identified the pale blond ghost who assaulted me and he was arrested. His name was Lyman Porter. It was confirmed that while Boyd Martin was a member of Beck and JT's fraternity, Lyman Porter was just a drunk college kid at that party who was easily roped in to committing a gang rape with JT and Boyd egging him on.

I never went back to California to face my attackers. They both pled guilty to my rape and were sentenced to fourteen years, with Martin's reduced by two years for turning on Porter.

The closure on that part of my life felt wonderful, and Beck and I celebrated that night after Sophie went down with a bottle of wine and some wild monkey sex. I'm pretty sure that's when we conceived Sebastian.

Who at this moment decides to give me a soccer kick, and I drop the article in surprise. Laughing at myself and putting a hand to the edge of the counter for balance, I stoop and pick it up from the floor.

The edges of it contrast starkly white against the yellowing of my linoleum floor. It makes me smile as I stand and scan the perimeter of our kitchen. Before Sophie was born, I had someone come in and finally fix the kitchen floor. But I couldn't bear to part with the old, yellowed vinyl that had borne so many new footsteps from my life.

That flooring was worn, cracked, and peeled. It was curled on the edges and was a hazard. But I had found over the years I had come to cherish every nick and scar that was cut into the patterned linoleum.

So I had the floor guy merely cut out the curled and peeling edges and put in a tiled border, therefore keeping most of the old vinyl covering throughout most of the kitchen.

Beck thought I was crazy but he didn't argue.

Because I was pregnant, and you don't argue with that type of crazy.

I think the reason I wanted to keep it was because I liken this old linoleum to my soul. It's been cracked and stained and hardened by years of rough use. It tells a story and it provides foundation. With care it's been fixed and polished to a soft glow. It's been revered and respected, because it held up to the toughest of times, and most important, it holds the memories of the footprints that have walked, trampled, and tiptoed across it.

It's held up.

It's persevered.

It's faced what life had to throw at it and it held steady.

Just. Like. Me.

Thank you Sue, Gina, and Matt for taking a chance on me and continuing to make me a better author with each book we put out.