Ash: A Bad Boy Romance (25 page)

I can’t hear the fucker, but I think he’s saying the lines he’s supposed to say.
 

Ash never loved you. He doesn’t want you. You won’t see him again, Summer. Don’t even try.

Damian will be good at delivering the lines since he’s a fucking asshole with a very limited range of emotion.
 

Summer tries to fling herself away from him, but he keeps her grip on his arm.
 

If you can’t say something yourself, send your bigger, uglier cousin to do your work for you, you miserable fucking asshole. You didn’t even need to marry her—and there she is—the only fucking good thing that ever happened to you—leaving.
 

I watch as Summer’s demeanor changes. Instead of pulling away, she clutches Damian’s arms like she can’t stand anymore, and she starts crying. I’ve never been good at reading lips, but I can almost hear what she shouts across the station.

“I’m an idiot. I’m such a fucking idiot!” She screams the last part and stomps hard, narrowly missing Damian’s foot.

Damian looks like a deer in the headlights. He’s not exactly the
type
to comfort a woman. But I give him one thing—he stands there like I told him to, and then he walks Summer to her bus and watches her get on.
 

I watch her get on too. Cullen’s deal—written and signed by a lawyer, per Bianca’s wishes, said I had to stay away until her program was complete. However long she decides to stay.

I crack my knuckles and watch the bus depart.

“I love you, Summer,” I say. “And I’m not signing any goddamn divorce papers.”

Present Day
 

Summer wakes up in the morning, totally fucking frantic, like there’s an emergency at the hospital and she can’t possibly get there in time. It’s the only time I’ve seen her act like this, but I check her phone, and it’s free of notifications. But she keeps pacing back and forth in front of the bedroom door, wearing one of her long night-shirts and near tears. I hop up and pull on my clothes, heart pounding.

We’d gone to bed like normal. She was
happy
.
 

Wasn’t she?
 

The only thing that was different was what I said, and that was a
good
thing, wasn’t it?
 

Shit, you fucking idiot.

I run out into the living room—or what passes for a living room in my shitty condo—and catch her when she’s passing by. “Summer—” I start.

She nearly freaks out when I touch her, but then she calms down and lets me lead her back to the sofa. She sits as far away from me as she can, then curls up in a ball and pulls a blanket over her feet.
 

“I’ll just wait,” I say. “You can tell me what’s going on in your brain when you get your shit together.”
 

It takes her a good goddamn long while of breathing and calming down, but then she finally talks. “I had a dream,” she says.

“Okay. Whatever it is, it wasn’t real.”

“It was real.” She says it with deadly certainty. “I’ve been dreaming it over and over in the past week, and tonight was the worst yet because—because you couldn’t leave well enough alone.” She spits the last words out at me, but then she takes another breath. “I’m sorry. We just got back together—”

“Tell me the dream.”

When she looks at me, her eyes are puffy and red, like she hasn’t slept at all. “It’s always the same. I’m in a hospital in Damascus, and I’m alone.”

“Damascus—” Shit. Summer was in Syria after she left, and then she vaporized out of there so fast it was like she was never there at all—no explanation, and no information on where she went after that for five months.

“And the doctor is coming in. I’m bleeding and I can’t stop. They tell me that there was a baby with a heartbeat, but she’s gone.”

“She?”

“And then the doctor tells me it would be dangerous for me to try to get pregnant again.” She pronounces her words slowly, and her hands are active and fidgety like they are every time she’s nervous.
 

“It was a dream. Just a dream, Summer.” Because of the way her voice sounds I know that’s not quite true, but there’s nothing else I can really say.
 

“It wasn’t. It was real. Not quite like that, but... I can’t get pregnant.”

“How do they know that?” I knit my eyebrows together.

“Ash, do you hear what I’m telling you? I can’t get pregnant. I can’t sustain a pregnancy. Screw the fact that we’re fucking broke. I mean, forget that, right!” Her voice is wracked with the grief she’s been hiding all this time.
 

“Doctors aren’t always right,” I say. I try to take her hand, but she pulls it away.
 

“Ash, I was pregnant when I left.”

It feels like the walls are crashing down around me, like the world is melting away and I’m back at that bus stop, watching her go.
 

“You weren’t,” I whisper.
 

“I didn’t know.” She pulls away further and puts a pillow over her knees. “I had no
idea
. I’ve always had endometriosis, and my old doctor said I’d probably have a lot of trouble getting pregnant because of that.”
 

She looks up at me, and I nod, like I’m taking all of this in—like I could possibly understand it or get it in any real way. Like my heart’s not about to explode, because nothing she’s about to say could possibly be good.
 

“What happened?”

“I didn’t think I could—and then I did. I was.” Her voice is quieter now, like she almost can’t bear to say any of it. But the words come out quick and steady. I give her credit for being able to get any of it out, because I couldn’t speak that clearly right now if someone held a gun to my head and told me to string two sentences together. My heart is pounding out of my chest.
 

She takes a deep breath. “I lost it. It had a heartbeat, but I had so much scar tissue—I lost it. I had surgery in Damascus, and then I transferred to the Ukraine. And I put it behind me.” Her voice breaks at the end, but then she clears her throat and wipes away her tears. “That’s why we can’t—I can’t.” She sighs and keeps wiping away tears, but they keep coming.
 

I go to her and pull her into my arms, but she tries to push me away. “I should have been there,” I tell her. I kiss her on the top of the head, and she pushes hard against me.

“Stop it, Ash. You made a decision—and I didn’t tell you. You couldn’t have been there.” Again, she struggles against me, but I don’t let her go.

“I had every plan to go, Summer. Cullen made me stay.”

“You didn’t,” she mutters. “You
left
me there. You didn’t even say goodbye.”

“I watched you get on that bus. I had Damian make sure you were safe. And I paid Cullen off and came to North Carolina a month after that. I knew you’d be back—”

“No. No, you weren’t there. Bianca told me you kept working for Cullen, that you went to Jersey.”

“I didn’t. I watched you. And I let you go.”

“Why?” Her voice cracks, and she starts crying again, but this time she folds into me and holds on to my arms.
 

“You were better without me.”

“I wasn’t. I was so alone. Losing a baby is the loneliest thing in the world.” My shirt is wet with her tears.

I remember that feeling in the pit of the chest, the one I sat with when I watched Damian walk Summer onto the bus, when she left New York for good. And I watched her go—to a fate far lonelier and more painful than any I could have imagined. I hated myself so much for letting her out of my sight, and that hate comes raging through me all at once again, far worse than I’ve ever felt it before.

“I fucked up, Summer. But I did it for you. I swear I did it for you.” My throat constricts like it did that day, but this time, I let tears come to my eyes. I hold Summer, and I my tears fall. “I love you so much. Please, please stay.”
 

I hold her close, and we’re both quiet for a long time. I close my eyes and feel her breath evening out, her body relaxing. She wipes her eyes again and looks up at me.
 

“Why wouldn’t I stay?”

I laugh even though everything inside of me still hurts. “Well, I am amazing. I understand your decision.”

“What about—”

“A kid? Well, aren’t you a doctor? There are things you can do, right? Fertility things?” She bites her lip and laughs, maybe a little morbidly. “And we can adopt. I don’t care.”

“Those kinds of things, they take years. And money we don’t have.”

I shrug and kiss her on the top of her head. “Life is better when you have someone worth waiting for.”

She lets that sink in. And I think it might be somewhat better advice than you’d find on the side of a coffee cup.

“Why did Cullen make you stay, Ash?” Her voice changes, and my stomach drops. I was hoping we’d come to that at a different time. “What did he have hanging over you?”

“Maybe it’s best if we discuss that some other time, Summer.”

“I think it’s best if we discuss it
now
. I know this is the secret you were using to—get to me. Not that I
mind
what we’re doing. But it’s time we got this out in the open.” She shifts away from me and raises an arched eyebrow. If her face wasn’t puffy as hell, she’d look like she does on any day—calculating, intelligent, and frankly curious.
 

I shrug, like what I’m about to tell her is no big deal. “Bianca worked out a deal with Cullen. You’d leave New York, I wouldn’t follow you when you left the country and—you’d be provided for.”

She nods like it makes sense. “Okay. I get that part. Bianca is my biological mom, so...”

I pull back from her in confusion. When Bianca told me that night that she’d given Summer to Linda some twenty-five years ago, I was confused as hell. And angry—in fact, I still am. “Shit—you know that?”

“I’m not stupid. My mom—Linda—she has the same thing I do. Endometriosis. I don’t think she could have kids. And her husband died the year before I was born. And Bianca isn’t exactly the mothering type. She did her best that one year I lived there, but she nearly got us both killed.” She looks small when she says it, another bit of pain she’s had to live with—another hurt I didn’t know about. “Bianca doesn’t know I know. But I know. But still, it doesn’t make sense. She doesn’t have any money.”

“Cullen’s the one with money, Summer. And the obsession with family. And while we’re at it, the obsession with Bianca.”
 

Her eyes grow wide as saucers when she looks at me. “Jesus
Christ
. No—”

“When he’s gone, you get half of everything he has.”

“What happens to the rest?”

“It’s Bianca’s. Your mother’s. He keeps everything he owns in the family. He’s your
father
, Summer. That’s why Bianca always knew you were safe. That’s why she told you he wouldn’t hurt you—he’d never mess with his own family.”
 

Summer’s ordinarily rosy skin has turned to pale, ashen gray. “This isn’t possible,” she whispers. Looking into her eyes, I can see she knows I’m not lying.
 

“It’s true, Sunshine. It doesn’t mean you’re any less a Colington woman. But you’re Flood too. Bianca’s deal was that you’d have no contact with the Family, even though Cullen wanted you in his life after he found out. In exchange, she stayed with him. He’ll be gone soon—pancreatic cancer I think. And she gave him the one thing he never had.”

“A real family,” she says, tears beading on her eyelashes.

“It’s what any man wants, even the worst of us. Everything he did was misguided. Most of it was fucking evil. And a lot of it was centered around losing Bianca two and a half decades ago when she fell pregnant and ran away to North Carolina. She told him she got an abortion and that she never wanted to be with him again.”

Summer takes a deep, shaky breath and then she cries, tears streaming down her face. I go to her and hold her because I know she’s connecting all of these secrets in her mind. “She gave you up to save you, twice. I don’t like anything she’s done—but it was all for love. Cullen, too. In his sick way, he never recovered when he lost you. He gave you up too, in the end because he knew he was no kind of father, not really.”