Until Now (9 page)

I laughed and jiggled Ellie on my knee. She gurgled, her eyes on Ryan. When he smiled at her, she thrust herself forward on my lap, reaching for him.

“She wants her uncle,” Ryan said, and I handed her off to him. My lap felt cold without her warm, solid weight. “I don’t often get to hold her in peace. Mason gets jealous. He’s been really clingy since we moved back here.”

I peered across the yard at his son, who was distracted with retrieving the ball whenever someone hit it out of bounds. Right now, he was digging for it in one of the thick bushes lining the privacy fence.

“Where did you live before here?” I asked.

“Hyde Creek. We—I moved there after college. My ex’s family is from there.” He lifted Ellie up in the air, making her giggle and grab at his face. Again, I felt myself melt a little. I may not have been interested in dating him, but I wasn’t immune to a hot man with a baby.

“What did you do there? In Hyde Creek?” Hyde Creek was a mid-sized town about an hour from here.

“I was an assistant manager at a sporting goods store,” he said after a pause. I wondered if I was being too nosy.

“And now you manage the bookstore and live…here?” I asked, nodding back toward the house.

He lowered the baby and settled her against his shoulder, shooting me an amused look over her head. “I don’t live in my parents’ basement, if that’s what you’re asking. Mason and I have our own apartment.”

“Downtown?”

A genuine laugh burst from his lips, surprising me even more than the full-on smile from last week. “No, the bookstore isn’t doing
that
well. We live in Oakfield.”

I nodded, feeling a little naïve. Of course city apartments were expensive, unless you wanted to live in a bad neighborhood or in a run-down dump no one else wanted to rent, like the places I’d lived in with Mom. Oakfield was where Taylor had grown up, an affordable, safe, family-oriented town.

“How old are you?” I asked him, fully aware now that I was prying. But he didn’t seem to take offense. He just looked straight ahead, gaze focused on some arbitrary point as he absently patted the baby’s back.

“Twenty-five,” he replied. Then he stood up suddenly, Ellie still nestled against his shoulder and sucking her thumb. “But I feel about forty.”

With a distant nod in my direction, he turned and carried the baby inside, leaving me alone on the deck. I barely noticed, intent as I was on reviewing the math.

Twenty-five.
That meant he’d been twenty-two when Mason was born, and probably in his last year of college. Not the most opportune time to have an infant. Or a wife. Again, I wondered where she was, and what she’d done, and if she was anything like my own mother, selfish and spineless and always pacing her cage, longing for a chance at freedom.

Abby appeared beside my desk on Friday afternoon as I was scheduling an orientation for a heavyset man in his fifties, the kind of guy whose doctor suggested he buy a gym membership and do some heart-healthy cardio. I’d worked here long enough to distinguish the most common client types: gym rats who spent most of their lives here, moms trying to take off the baby weight, and potential heart attack victims who needed to shape up or else.

When the man left, Abby sidled closer to me and said, “It’s ladies’ night at Fusion tonight. No cover charge before one a.m. You up for it?”

“Fusion?” I said, my eyes on the computer screen. “That place is kind of a meat market, isn’t it?”

She leaned on the desk and grinned. “I’m counting on it.”

I continued typing, stalling my response. I didn’t want to admit that I’d never been to Fusion before, or any nightclub, for that matter. The teenage me would’ve been all over it, but Good Role Models didn’t go to clubs and get drunk and wiggle their asses against guys’ groins on sticky dance floors. Instead, they kept their heads down, did the right thing, and set a shining example for the impressionable youth.

Then again, like I was reminded every day like a smack in the face, the only youth I ever cared to impress were currently two hundred miles away and safe from my bad influence.

“Sounds like fun,” I told Abby.

That evening, after a late dinner with the Brogans—lasagna, made earlier in the week by Lynn and then frozen for future consumption, which is how most of their meals came to be—I showered and then sifted through my clothes for something club-worthy.

“This one?” I asked Taylor’s little sister, Emma, as I held up a pink lace halter top for her inspection.

“Sure,” she said, barely glancing up from her sketchpad. She was stretched out on the bed, half working on a drawing of some kind of thorny, winged dragon and half keeping me company as I got ready to go out.

“I agree.” I pulled on the halter top and checked the mirror to see how it looked with my stretchy white mini skirt. “Good call, Em.”

She grunted and continued to shade a section of the dragon’s tail, her long dark hair tucked behind her ears. As always, it gave me a start to see her lying there, on Taylor’s old bed, looking so much like Taylor at that age. Same wavy hair, same green eyes, same curvy body hidden under too-big sweatshirts. But that was where the similarities ended. At fifteen, Taylor and I had read magazines with the latest boy bands on the cover and spent our time gossiping and making messes in the kitchen. Emma read graphic novels and spent her time sketching in her room and being dramatically moody.

“If I came downstairs wearing that,” she said, surveying my outfit, “Dad wouldn’t let me leave the house.”

“Really?” Not surprisingly, Mom had never cared what I wore at Emma’s age, and I left the house in some pretty revealing ensembles.

“Uh, yeah,” she said, going back to her sketch. “But he still treats me like I’m five.”

I laughed. Taylor used to say the same thing.

At nine, I took the bus downtown and walked the short distance to Milo’s Pub, where Abby and I had agreed to meet for a pre-drink or two. She was already seated at the bar, talking to a swarthy guy in a dress shirt with too many undone buttons. When she caught sight of me, I immediately recognized the expression on her face:
Please rescue me
.

I walked over, dropped my purse on the bar, and hoisted myself onto the stool next to her. Swarthy Guy stopped talking in mid-sentence to stare at me. “Praise Jesus,” he said, his gaze sliding up my long, bare legs. “It’s my lucky day.”

“Sorry I’m late,” I told Abby. “I was on the phone with my fiancé.” I turned to the guy and said, “I’m engaged to a bodybuilder.”

He laughed. “Sure.”

“No, really.” I dug my phone out of my purse and brought up the picture I used for occasions such as these—me at the gym, standing close to one of the big-as-a-house guys that trained with Wade. When I showed it to Swarthy Guy, his smile slipped a few notches. “She dates his friend,” I added, nodding toward Abby. “He’s just as huge.”

Abby nodded. “And they both have major jealously issues.”

“And they’d probably really appreciate it if you fucked off and left us alone,” I said sweetly.

The guy grabbed his beer and slid off his barstool, his face red. When he was gone, off to hit on some other unsuspecting woman, Abby and I covertly high-fived each other. The same trick had worked last week, at the cocktail bar. The regulars at Bay Street were more than happy to pose as fake fiancés for a worthy cause.

By the time we made it to Fusion an hour later, the line was already curled around the building. Ladies’ Night was popular, apparently.

“I’m so glad you finally started accepting my invites to go out,” Abby said as we joined the line. “I was beginning to think you were antisocial or something.”

No, I thought. Just trying to stay on the path of righteousness.

“This will be awesome,” she went on. “You’re a total hot guy magnet. We’ll have dozens to choose from. It’ll be like a fucking buffet in there tonight.”

I laughed and shook my head. She was just as magnetic with her long blond hair and lithe, toned body. Plus, her skirt was even shorter than mine.

The music was already jacked up to ear-splitting levels when we got inside the club, and I mostly lip-read Abby’s suggestion that we head straight for the bar. I pretended to know where this was as I stuck close to her side, letting her lead me through the sea of bodies and pulsing lights to the other side of the dance floor. People were stacked three-deep around the bar, but we managed to cut a swath through a cluster of college-aged guys, half of whom offered to purchase whatever we were about to order. We politely declined and paid for our own drinks, a rum and Coke for Abby and a White Russian for me. I’d missed vodka, I realized when I took my first pull from the straw.

“See what I mean?” Abby screamed in my ear once we were clear of the bar. She pulled back and jutted her chin toward the group of college guys. “Hot.”

I tossed a glance over my shoulder and noticed one of them watching me. I stared back at him, eyebrows raised, just to see if it flustered him enough to look away. It didn’t. He continued to watch me, gaze lingering on my ass and then my legs. I turned back around, heat blooming in my stomach from the brief connection. Like Abby had said, he was hot. The kind of hot I’d always been drawn to—effortless, confident, hypnotic. The word
trouble
exuded from every pore. Irresistible to the old me, but the new me was different. I was more cynical now, less romantic, no longer on the look-out for my perfect match. Or maybe I
had
become antisocial. In any case, I was extremely out of practice with the partying scene and everything that went with it.

“Let’s dance,” Abby said after we’d sucked back our drinks.

Feeling suitably buzzed from the drinks at Milo’s topped with the White Russian, I readily agreed and led the way to the dance area. The floor thrummed to the steady beat of music, the vibration starting at my feet and quickly settling in my head, making me feel woozy. Yeah, I so wasn’t used to this anymore, but I liked it. I liked it a lot. Here, with the pounding music and the press of bodies and the warm, claustrophobic air, nothing else could penetrate.

Or maybe something could. Fingers grazed my hip, light and deliberate, and I twisted around to find their owner. The hot guy from the bar stood right behind me, inches away. I stopped dancing and looked up at him. He was tall, at least half a head taller than my five-foot-eight (six feet in my highest heels) and well-built, like the guys at the gym whose abs could cut glass. Brown hair tumbled over his forehead like he couldn’t be bothered to brush it away and his gaze on me was intense and slightly mocking.

Oh yes. Trouble wafted off him like musk.

“You drunk?” he asked, leaning down to speak in my ear. He smelled like beer and spicy cologne.

“Trying to determine if I’m of sound mind and body?” I turned away and started dancing again, even though Abby had ditched me for a cute dark-haired guy who’d been in the same group at the bar. She was now several feet away, grinding up on him while the guy stood in place, admiring her low-cut top. She’d made her pick at the buffet, apparently.

“Your body is definitely sound,” Mr. Trouble said, his fingers trailing across my hip bone again. Usually I reacted violently when a stranger touched me, but the vodka must have dulled my senses. “As for your mind, I couldn’t say.”

I gyrated out of his grasp. “Shouldn’t you at least ask a girl’s name before you try to fondle her?”

“What’s your name?” he asked, not the least bit chastened.

I thought about giving him a fake one, or whipping out my fake bodybuilder fiancé picture, but I did neither. Instead, I leaned in close and said, “Robin.”

His hands found my hips again, lightly resting there like it was a space they owned and inhabited often, and this time I let them stay. “Robin,” he repeated, like it was something erotic. “Well, Robin, you’re so fucking gorgeous that I had to race about ten different guys over here just so I could get to you first.”

I laughed, even though he looked dead serious. His eyes, grayish-green and slightly bloodshot, stayed firm on mine. “This is the part where you tell me
your
name,” I said, swaying into him a tiny bit. I may have been drunker than I let on.

“Cody,” he replied. He took advantage of my unsteadiness to wrap his arms around my waist and pull me closer.

“Well, Cody,” I said, whirling away from him again, “I didn’t have to race anyone to get to you.”

I heard him laughing as the song changed into something even more frenetic, turning the crowd into a single, pulsating mass. I weaved my way over to Abby, who squealed at the sight of me and immediately pulled me into the dry-humping dance she was doing with the dark-haired guy. He didn’t seem to mind.

“I’ll buy you drinks for the rest of the night if you guys kiss right now,” he shouted over the music.

Abby and I shared an eye-roll. No, we weren’t drunk enough to perform for an audience of horny guys. I’d only done that once, on a dare, and discovered that it wasn’t really my cup of tea.

“Come on,” the guy coaxed, trying to maneuver us toward each other. “Just a small one. Tongue action is optional but greatly appreciated.”

Annoyed, I twirled away and danced smack into a wide, hard chest. Mr. Trouble again. Clearly, the guys at this club had a hard time taking a hint.

“You look thirsty,” he said, and took my hand, towing me off the dance floor. I didn’t resist, because I
was
hot and thirsty and ready for a break.

It was a little bit quieter near the bar, but not much. Mr. Trouble—Cody—ordered another White Russian for me, and I watched him carefully as he took the glass from the bartender and handed it to me. Okay, so he hadn’t slipped me any date-rape drugs. I sipped the icy drink gratefully.

“You want a bump to go with that?” Cody asked, his eyes on my lips as they closed around the straw.

“Here?”

“No,” he said with exaggerated patience. “Outside.”

“No, thanks,” I said, finishing my drink. I’d only done coke once too, when I was sixteen, and I swore I’d never try it again. It made me jittery and paranoid, like I wanted to jump out of my own skin. And the crash afterwards sucked. I mostly stuck to weed and pills after that, but I hadn’t smoked or popped anything stronger than Tylenol in at least two years.

“Ah, so you’re a good girl, then.” He tugged a strand of my hair, which I wore loose and straight to the middle of my back. “Just say no to drugs.”

“That’s right,” I said, smiling angelically. If he only knew.

“Alcohol is a drug.” He took my empty glass and placed it on the overflowing tray of a passing waitress.

“One I can control.”

Someone bumped me from behind. I stumbled forward and then burst into giggles, effectively contradicting my words. Cody smirked at me, which made me laugh even harder.

“Come along, good girl,” he said, taking my hand again. And again, I let him pull me away, this time back toward the packed dance floor.

Abby and her buffet boy had disappeared, but that didn’t concern me. At that moment, nothing did. Not even Cody’s hands, back in position on my hips, guiding them toward his. This time, I didn’t spin away. I just let it happen, let the familiar warmth of oblivion wrap itself around me and make itself at home. As much as I tried to be good, as much as I told myself I didn’t miss that surge of release, that pleasant numbness in my brain that dulled the raw edges and let me escape, I knew I was just kidding myself. I
had
missed this, at least all the good parts. The bad parts resonated in my memories the most, but right now, I felt removed from them. Tonight, they didn’t exist.

I danced—and drank—with Cody for the rest of the night, and the more I drank, the closer I let him get. In the past, this was how it had always worked with me and guys, and I guess adulthood hadn’t cured me of it. By the time I rounded up Abby, who was equally as smashed, my hair was tangled, my lips were swollen, and I was already feeling the stirrings of what promised to be an epic hangover.