I wake up and smell something that, for once, does not make me nauseous. It’s sweet and fragrant and it invites me to take a good long whiff. I look around, and Melanie is going in and out of the room. Riptide red is splattered everywhere. Riptide-red roses are bursting open inside my room.
“Good morning, Juliet. Your Romeo sent these. They’re still unloading the rest off the truck. And I’m calling in to the gym that I already put in my hour workout.”
I smile and try to stand, but Melanie says, “Tut-tut! No standing. What do you need?”
“To pee! And to smell these, be still my fucking heart! Is this a note?” I pull open a note that’s nestled among the roses on my nightstand and my eyes well up when I see a song name. Melanie gathers a couple more notes and brings them over, and I open one to discover another song name. I haven’t heard these songs, but I’m already excited.
I give myself permission, because I’m pregnant and so fucking stressed, to have a little cry. Everyone knows if you hold it in, you get sick, and I don’t want to be sick. I want to be healthy—I want to give Remy a baby and a family. Something he has never had. So I cry. Then I text him, I miss your eyes. Your hands. Your face. Your dimples!
Then I take a picture of my room, so full of roses so that I can barely see my window, and send it.
That’s what I see now from my bed.
I then kiss my phone.
“You’re a dope!” Mel says as she brings the rest.
“So what, who cares?” I saucily return as I set my phone aside, because I know he won’t be checking it when he’s training, and he’ll probably train extra hard, so I go rub progesterone on myself again. I read that I can get a headache if I overdo it, but Melanie and I were on some forums last night reading that the cream stopped tons of women from miscarrying, and I want to put my name on that list.
I grab some books, set my laptop on the bed, and basically set up a mini office so that I don’t have to stand. I feel like my ovaries ache, but they’re not cramping, and I’m starting to wonder if this cream is really working.
I hear Mel finish with the florist and decide to skip my shower, merely because I don’t want to be standing up all that time, so I just find fresh clothes and change with caution.
Nora is supposed to visit during the day so Melanie can go to work, but instead of Nora appearing after Mel brings some fruit and cottage cheese for us to breakfast on, I get to hear Melanie call me from outside my bedroom, saying, “Brookey! Your parents are here!”
Melanie goes to let them in, so I edge out of bed, very attentive to how I’m feeling. I don’t feel any cramps, so I walk to the living room and immediately take a couch, and there they are, wide-eyed and shocked at me, standing and staring.
“Brooke.”
The way my mother utters my name fills me with dread.
And the moment I see both my parents, coupled with the way they say my name, I know they know. Grief settles over me when I absorb their normally bright expressions and realize they seem to have aged an entire decade. How can news of a beautiful baby age them like this?
“We would have expected it from Nora, but from you?” my mother says, and ohmigod, they do know. How come they know?
She sits down across the coffee table from me, and my father drops down at her side, arms crossed, glaring the glare he uses to intimidate his PE students.
They don’t speak for about three minutes. Which feels, under the circumstances, like an entire lifetime, and I’m so uncomfortable I don’t even know how to sit.
I love my parents. I don’t like hurting them. I’d wanted to tell them the good news, face-to-face, that I’m in love and that Remington and I are having a baby. The last thing I want is to make them feel let down, to treat this as the tragedy that they seem to be taking it as.
“Hello, Mom and Dad,” I say first.
I shift and shift until I plant my elbow on the couch arm, put my head in my hand, and curl my legs under me, but even when I’m finally comfortable, the tension in the air could be cut with an axe.
“Hey, Mr. and Mrs. Dumas,” Melanie says. “I’ll let you have your family reunion and check in with my job.” She looks at me and makes the sign of the cross to ward off vampires, then she tells me, “I’m back at seven. Nora texted that she’s on her way.”
I nod, and then there’s an awkward silence in the room.
“Brooke! We don’t even know what to say.”
For a moment, I really don’t know what to say either, except “I really want this baby.”
They both give me that look of disappointment parents have been giving their children for eons.
But I won’t let them make me feel shame.
I felt shame when I tore my ACL. My father said sprinters didn’t show those kinds of tears, but I did. I fell from grace with them after that, and now I can sense that I’ve fallen even further.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I wanted to tell you in person, but it seems somebody already did.”
“Nora,” my mother says. “And she’s worried about you—all three of us are. She tells me she had to learn it from somebody else? How could you hide something like this from us? Let me tell you that despite you being somewhat mature, you were always too sheltered from boys. Boys . . . they just use and discard . . . especially when something inconvenient happens. Nora says this boy is known to be a troublemaker and linked to all kinds of problems?”
I am reeling from the way Nora’s presented Remy to them.
If I weren’t sitting down, I swear I’d have fallen on my butt.
My betrayed, stupid, foolish butt.
So it seems that Nora is home, acting the perfect princess, doing what’s right after my boyfriend helped her out of the worst relationship in the world and could have died saving her ass.
Her betrayal rips through me with such force, I can’t even talk for a moment. Hell, if anyone should know what kind of a man Remington is, it should be Nora!
“The father of my baby is not a boy. He is a man.” I clutch my stomach when it begins to hurt under their accusing gazes. “And we, this baby and I, are not inconveniences.”
My father has not said one word. He just sits there, looking at me like I’m a gremlin that got wet and turned ugly and has to be contained.
I feel like there’s a continent between us. Like I am going north, and they are determined that south is the best path for me and will never, ever be happy that I went the opposite way.
“But Brooke, this is so reckless and so unlike you. Look at you!” my mother says in complete agony and despair.
“What?” I ask in confusion. “What’s wrong with me?”
Then I realize I probably look like shit. I haven’t slept. I’m worried to death I’m losing this baby. I don’t want to be here. I haven’t showered and my face is swollen from all my tears.
“You look . . . depressed again, Brooke. You should stop wearing that athletic gear, now that you’re no longer a sprinter and put on a dress . . . brush your hair. . . .”
“Please. Please don’t come here and hurt me. You’re saying things you don’t mean to say because you’re confused. Please be happy for me. If I look depressed it’s because I’m dangerously close to losing this baby, and I want him, I want him so bad, you have no idea.”
They stare at me like I have lost it, because I’ve never, ever, opened myself up like this, and I feel so misunderstood and so unloved and so hungry to be comforted because I hurt inside. My hormones are out of whack and I am feeling angry because I am here instead of where I want to be. I am here, misunderstood and judged, instead of with him, loved and accepted.
I don’t even know how to tell them they’re being unfair to me, but I’m trembling as I suddenly get to my feet, go get his iPod, and set it on the speakers I have in my living room. Then I just click PLAY and raise the volume high, letting a song speak for me. Orianthi’s “According to You” begins, a little bit angry and rebellious, describing something of the tumult I feel, how they see me one way, as less than perfect, but he sees me another way, as beautiful and strong.
“Is this how we deal, like a teenager with loud music?” my mother yells.
“Turn the volume down now!” my father yells.
I turn it down, and for a moment, just focus on this silver iPod, which to Remy and me could be a journal, or a microphone, or any other way of expressing any other thing. “You don’t understand.”
“Talk to us, Brooke!” my mother says.
When I turn, they look as forlorn as I feel. “I just did, but you’re not listening.”
They are quiet, and I drag in a breath, trying to calm down, even with all these hormones rioting in me. I want them to know that I am no longer a young girl. That I am becoming a woman, so I tell them. “I’m seven weeks pregnant. Right now, his little limbs are forming. And I say ‘his’ because I think it’s a boy, but it doesn’t matter, because a girl would be wonderful too. While we speak, his heart is growing stronger, and he’s generating about a hundred new brain cells per minute. In two more weeks, his heart will have divided into four chambers and all its organs, nerves, and muscles will be kicking into gear. He will have a nose, eyes, ears, a mouth, everything already formed, inside me. This baby is his. His and mine. And it makes me so, so happy you have no idea.”
My mother looks heartbroken. “We are worried. Nora tells me they use drugs in those places he fights.”
“Mama, he’s not into that. He’s an athlete, heart, body, and soul.” Coming over to them, I pat her hair and grab my dad’s hand in my other one. “He doesn’t have a family like I do, and I want him to have mine. I want you to welcome him into our family because you love me and because I’m asking you to.”
My mother visibly softens, but it is my father who speaks first. “I’ll welcome him into the family when he proves to me he deserves to be the father of my grandchild!” He stands up, huffing, and walks to the door, slamming it behind him. I hang my head.
“I shouldn’t even be up. I’m going to bed, Mom,” I whisper.
“Brooke.” Her slow, hesitant footsteps follow me to my bedroom. She stops at the door and says nothing as I climb into bed; instead, I feel her worried gaze on my back for a moment. “Didn’t you use protection, sweetie?” she asks quietly.
“God, I’m not going to even answer that,” I say.
She remains at the door while a heavy silence settles between us, and I curl into a ball and stare off into my pin wall, at the picture that Remington touched. I won’t cry. I swear, I’m sick of crying, and I’m trying not to hate them just because I’m lonely, misunderstood, and hormonal. I know they love me. All they know is that some guy got me pregnant and dumped me here and that this baby will be a challenge for me. They don’t know anything except that my life will change, and they’re afraid I can’t handle it. They can be so judgmental even though they love me, I feel myself building up my walls, refusing to share Remy with them. Refusing to share the most precious, valuable, and imperfectly perfect thing in my life. “Go home, Momma,” I say, and she quietly leaves as I remain in bed, staring at all the roses he sent me.
And I see those blue eyes. . . .
You’re mine.
Both of you.
My throat hurts, and my eyes follow.
“Brooke, I’m here,” Nora says from the hall.
I don’t answer her. I’m so angry. She seems to sense danger in the air, because she lingers by the door and doesn’t enter. “You okay? Did you lose the baby?” she asks. My rage roils inside me.
“Thanks for betraying me, Nora,” I mumble. “And thanks for showing your complete and utter appreciation for Remington and what he did for you!”
“They had to know you were pregnant, Brooke!” she cries.
“It was my secret to tell, not yours!” I burst out, shooting up to sit on the bed. “Why are you attacking him? He did nothing but save you! What, you wanted a chance to look good to them, so you screwed me over? Who told you? I know it wasn’t Melanie; she’d never do this to me.”
Nora’s eyes are also a shade of amber, just a fraction darker than mine, but that’s where all our similarities end. How can we be so different? She was always the dreamer, and I the realist, but even so we’ve never felt so apart as we do today.
“Pete told me,” she says.
I groan, forgetting they have something for each other.
“It slipped! He assumed I knew and I felt embarrassed I didn’t know! You wouldn’t be hiding it if it weren’t wrong, Brooke. He’s Riptide! You’ll be discarded just like I was, if not worse. Those men are dangerous, Brooke. You’re never free of them, never.”
“Remington is not like your sick asshole of an ex-boyfriend! I am freaking in love with him and he loves me and I will have his baby if it KILLS ME, Nora!” I scream.
She blinks and I can’t even go on. Maybe I’m resentful that because of her, I almost ruined my life. Because of her—and me wanting to “rescue” her—Remington got hurt. “I’m sorry, Nora, I just . . .” I rub my face and shake my head drearily.
“I thought he was in love with me too, you know.” Her sadness creeps up on me, and I feel an awful wringing sensation inside me. “Benny, I mean. I thought he would give anything for me, and the moment it was difficult to keep me, he threw me away.” She looks at me, her face tired and sad. “He told me he loved me, and then he didn’t even look me in the eye to say good-bye. If I said anything to Mom and Dad, it’s because I don’t want that to happen to you.”
“Remy is different, Nora,” I say softly.
“Exactly. He has a thousand more women after him, Brooke. No. Not a thousand. A million more than Scorpion. He’s the SEX GOD of the Underground. Those guys don’t do wives and babies, they just don’t. I was there too, you know. He just can’t love you that much to go rescue me, me, somebody he hadn’t even met! And lose a prize that was practically already his, all for you? Nobody in their right mind can love anyone like that!” she cries and runs out, slamming the door shut.
The door shudders afterward, and I blink at it, completely floored.
What. The hell. Is my sister smoking now?
I sit there, reeling about it all. Then I get up, turn the lock, strip my clothes, and brush my hair, setting it loose because I need to feel pretty and I need my Real. Holy god, how I need him. I just want something good to happen today and I want him to think I’m all right and safe, just like he wanted me to be.
I text him telling him I’d downloaded Skype to his iPad before the flight and left his user name and password on a Post-it. I then open my laptop and log in and wait. I seem to doze off with the phone next to me, and when I wake up later, I see Remington Tate: 11 missed calls.
“Oh, no!” I dial, and it rings, but he doesn’t pick up. I dial and dial, then I groan and shove it aside, pulling the covers up to my neck, suddenly cold.
I’m falling asleep again when I hear a little buzz. I see his name blinking, and my heart jumps and I click to answer, the sheets falling to my waist. “Are you there?” I ask.
I adjust my laptop screen while butterflies roar inside me. “Hey. I can’t see you! Move your—”
“This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done,” he says.
“You won’t think that when you see me,” I dare.
I see him then. Propped back against the headboard . . . bare-chested and, I suspect, recently bathed . . . and my breath is history at the sight of his achingly boyish face. The hotel room is completely illuminated behind him, and my eyes narrow in suspicion.
“You’re not sleeping, are you?” I ask him.
He surveys me, and I survey back, trailing my gaze over his tan chest, all along his muscled arm, to the half-full blue Gatorade in his hand. The sight of all those muscles, the Celtic tattoos, his pectorals, his throat—god, those thick tendons of his throat, where I tuck my nose in at night—makes all my body tingle with remembrance of what it feels and smells and looks like.
A ribbon of need unfurls painfully inside me, and it spreads throughout my being until I can think only of this need: to kiss and hold him, touch and nuzzle him, smell his neck; his hair, feel his breath on me and every little callus of his.
Then I realize he’s still looking at me, the top of my body fully naked, and I’m instantly wet when I see the territorial, fuck-my-mate look in his eyes.
“Is this supposed to make me feel good?” he asks gruffly, staring at my breasts. “It’s fucking torture looking at you behind a screen.”
“Remy . . .” I say.
His eyebrows draw low over his eyes. “I don’t want you on your own. Is somebody there with you?”
“Nora was here, and I think Mel is outside with her now.” I leave it at that, because right now, I don’t want to tell him anything about my parents until it has all calmed down. He was rejected by his own parents and I swear that whatever I have to do, he won’t be rejected by mine. “Don’t worry, I’m not alone,” I assure him.
He nods, raking his fingers through his hair in frustration. Then he drops his face and rubs the screen with both hands. He lifts his head and narrows his eyes. “I want to touch you. I’m about to take a bite out of this fucking screen.”
A small laugh leaves me, then I groan and cover my eyes, too. Skyping is not such a great idea. Oh god, it makes you yearn. I see him and yearn and hurt and it aches. “It hurts to see you. I want to smell you too,” I say.
He lifts a camisole of mine. “I found this in my suitcase.” He lifts it and smells it, and I gasp and can almost feel his nose at my neck, scenting me. Licking me.
“Shit, Brooke, I want to be there, take you in my arms, spread you open on your bed, and fuck you until tomorrow.”
Desire explodes in my stomach as those rough words hit me. “Oh, god, me too.”
His eyes flash as he leans forward, the muscles in his upper body rippling with the move. “I wish I were there so I could squeeze your breasts and bite the tips and tell you how much I want you.”
My bones have disintegrated inside me. The place between my legs now burns and yearns. My voice is achy and needy, full of arousal. “I want you like I’ve never wanted anything in my life,” I breathe, my bare breasts already puckered in the air and sensitive even to the brush of the air-conditioning.
“Do you want my cock in you?” he asks roughly.
Exhaling a shaky breath, I curl my fingers around my breasts merely because they’re suddenly heavy and hurting. They’re hurting so much for him. “Remy, you’re killing me.”
“No. This is killing me,” he says softly, rubbing the screen in a way that lets me imagine his thumb scraping my lips, running down my jaw, circling the hard points of my nipples. “Tell me you want my cock in you and then pretend your fingers are me. Drop your hands, Brooke. Show me your nipples.”
“Remy,” I say, my heart squeezing in need as I close my hands around my breasts.
A low, rumbling growl rips up his throat as he leans even closer. “Brooke,” he rasps, rubbing his thumb over the screen again. “When I see you I’m going to get my fucking hands all over you. I’m going to run my tongue all over your pretty body. Then I’m going to rub it for hours against your clit.”
“Oh, god, Remy . . .” My clit throbs between my thighs as I rock my hips as I think about licking his neck, his chest, the star tattoo on his navel.
“Why are you holding your breasts in your hands? Are you pretending that it’s me?” he demands huskily. When I nod, he tells me, “Good. Then pinch them slowly, like you like it. And then go south and rub yourself for me.”
“But I want to touch you,” I say, his command sending prickles of excitement racing across my skin. “I want to run my tongue all over your chest and lick your nipples as I stroke my hands down your biceps and rub up your quads and abs. . . .”
His eyes twinkle with mischief and he shakes his head. “No, Brooke,” he chides me. “Don’t talk sexy to me if you’re not going to do what I tell you first.”
“I’ll go south if you go south too,” I dare him, my pulse beating frantically in my throat while the heat he’s kindling inside me starts to slowly, surely, burn me.
He doesn’t hesitate and moves. My body tightens, and a cataclysm of arousal seizes me as I watch his forearm flex and his arm disappear beneath his waist. I can perfectly picture his big hand stroking over himself, and my pussy suddenly weeps.
“Remy, I want to kiss you there,” I choke, need clogging my throat, “and then I want to eat you all up, and afterward, I want to get all sticky and feel all loved and beautiful because of you.”
His voice gentles as I watch his arm move slightly. “Brooke, whether I’m there or not, you are loved and you are beautiful.”
“Remy,” I say, going south too with my fingers because I’d promised him. When I find myself slick and tender and swollen, I inhale sharply. “I need you. Call me on the phone.”
“What do you mean, little firecracker?”
“Call me on the phone.”
We hang up in Skype and I answer my phone on the first ring, and his voice sounds closer. So close it spills into me, sexier than sex itself, deep and dark with lust, and I can hear his breath in my ear, and a passionate fluttering arises everywhere inside me.
“I need you, Remy,” I explode. “I just need all of you—your heat, your mouth, your voice, you.” I close my eyes and slide my finger over the outer folds of my sex, stroking myself like he strokes me.
“God, tell me how much you need me,” he says, and his breathing sounds faster and a little rougher.
And suddenly his voice is just so close that in my head—he’s with me, his lips near my ear, his husky timbre sending a weak quivering to my thighs, and I whisper to him, “So much it’s torture to see you, to hear your voice.”
His voice is raspy. “Baby, I need you around me, clutching the fuck out of me.”
“I’m dying to see you.”
“In three weeks we’re fighting in Seattle, and I’m coming to you. And I’m going to strip you to your skin and reacquaint my whole body with yours. Every part of it.”
“I hate that you can’t be in me,” I admit thickly, my eyes fluttering shut as my body loses itself in the sound of his voice and a flush of heat spreads throughout my skin.
He’s breathing roughly. “Doesn’t matter. When I’m there, I’ll be all over you.”
He’s taken over my mind. I’m transported to our hotel room. To him. I’m there, in my head, with him. I imagine it all, remember it all. The way his thumb tweaks my nipples. How it rubs little circles of pleasure into my clit. How his tongue laves my areolas. Rubs against my tongue. Traces the seam of my lips. How it licks my nape. The back of my ear. The shell of my ear. Dipping into the crevice.
“Please,” I gasp as I start thrashing, clutching the phone against my ear with my shoulder as I use one hand to cup my breast, the other to rub myself.
His voice makes me imagine his face as it tightens with need and pleasure, and it only yanks me further into this whirlwind of pleasure as I hear him growl, “Brooke, I’ve got my cock in my hand and I’m pushing it inside you, and I swear I can fucking smell you. Tell me what you’re doing. . . .”
“I’m taking you. In me. I’m biting your neck and . . . Remy, Remy . . .”
I never knew I could come like this, but the instant I hear that low, drawn-out, sexy groan he sometimes releases when he’s starting to come, I lose it. Because I’ve never seen anyone come like he does. Tremors wrack my body, and I thrash in place while I struggle to remain clutching my phone, because I refuse to miss a single breath of him, a single sound he makes.
We pant afterward, sated, but as I lie there trying to recover, an utter loneliness creeps over me, suddenly overwhelming me. I can’t cuddle my lion, or kiss his lips good night, or feel his skin hot and hard on mine. I look down at my hand, wet with my own juices, and instead of feeling connected to him, for the first time, I’m more aware than ever that we’re apart. “I miss you,” I whisper sadly.
He’s quiet for a moment, then softly, tenderly: “I want to punch things all fucking day. There’s an ache in my chest I want to rip out of me, but it’s so fucking deep, I could tear my heart out and it would still be there.”
“Remy . . .”
“This is the last time I live without you. I’m half mad already and halfway into the fucking grave. I don’t like this. Every single monster in my head tells me you’ll run and I won’t be close enough to catch you. Every instinct in me screams at me to go get you. Every bone in my body tells me you are MINE—not a part of me, but my brain understands why the hell I sent you away from me. The rest of me can’t take it. You can’t convince the rest of me being away from you is right.”
“Remington Tate, I swear to you—I swear—that when I’m able to get up from this stupid bed and run again, you’re always, always, going to be the one thing I’ll run straight to.”
