Birdie (24 page)

Wes             

I hold my shit
together in my office through my meeting and even for a solid fifteen minutes after everyone has left.

And then it’s just me and my laptop and my willpower in my office.

And then it’s just me and the laptop as I search for her address on the internet.

And then it’s just me as I shut off the machine.

And then my office is empty.

Birdie

I eat dinner by
myself late that night. I spent the day ignoring Tim’s text messages. I don’t know how to sum up my bitter disappointment in so little words so I don’t bother.

Then he starts calling. He never calls so by the third attempt I snatch up my phone and ask a little too angrily, “What?” just as an insistent pounding starts on my door. I sigh. If that’s Mrs. Waterman again to bitch about the landlord I’m going to lose it. My day has been an epic failure and I have no wish to top it off with her shrill voice.

“I hope it’s okay that I gave him your address,” Tim says into the phone.

“What?” I reply, not quite understanding his cryptic greeting.

The knock at the door is forceful.  I make my way over to it and crack it to peer out.  The visitor shoves it open, sliding his body into the crack.

I start to protest angrily, but my reply catches in my throat when Wesley’s face appears in the frame.  He roughly pushes the rest of the way in, but the door swings violently with overused force since my struggle ceased and I stepped back to allow him entrance.  He closes it with another bang, seemingly frustrated.  The seemingly turns to knowingly when I see him rake his hand through his short hair, a gesture I knew from times past and unfortunately caused in several of those occasions.  His brown eyes glitter at mine.

“He called. Wesley. Earlier and asked me for your address,” Tim is saying but I can barely register his voice. Wes and I stare at each other in my hallway. “I went ahead and gave it to him. Is that all right? Did I do the right thing? Did you get a hold of him at his work?”

“No, it’s okay,” I say quickly and snap my phone shut.

“Wes-” I start to stay, but I don’t get anything else out. Because now he’s kissing me.  Pushing me back against the entry way wall, hands grabbing at my body, his mouth moving rapidly over mine like he’s trying to squeeze seven years of desire into this narrow entryway. 

He pulls away, breathless.

“Why did you come find me?” he asks, his gaze steady on mine.  I try to look away, but his hand captures my cheek.  Stroking the sensitive skin with his thumb, he forces me to maintain eye contact.

“Because I love you,” I answer softly.

“Bullshit.” He dismisses my answer and kisses me again, harder.  “Say it,” he demands breathlessly.

“I do love you,” I insist.

“I know you do.” His hand snakes down into my pants and my knees almost buckle at what his fingers begin to do.  “That’s not what I want to hear, Birdie.”

I wrap my arms around his neck and he picks me up and places/falls with me onto the bed.  I unzip his pants, but he pushes my hand away and pins them above my head.

“Why did you come find me?”

His eyes are searching mine, determined.

I bite my lower lip.  I don’t want to say it. I don’t want it to be final. I don’t want to give up the last part of me because then he can take it and do what he wants with it. He was so indifferent only hours ago. I can’t lose the rest of myself in someone, I can’t let him hold everything.  It’s too dangerous.

He’s still looking at me in that way.

Deciding. Desiring. Restraining.

Restraining…

…just like I’m doing.  Only, I’ve been restraining the entire time we’ve known each other.  He’s given himself over to me again and again and I’ve snapped him each time because I’m too chicken shit to do the same. I lost him. Today, standing stupidly in front of his office, with only minutes to plead my case, I put it all out there. Or did I? Maybe I threw out most of my heart, hoping that would be enough. And it wasn’t enough. His smile was cardboard. His answer was aloof. I hadn’t said what he needed to hear. And I’d been dismissed.

Or almost. Because here he is. Desperate to kiss me.   And by the feel of his pants, desperate to be with me. And by the look in his eyes, desperate to love me.  But he can’t. Not until I finish what I came to do.

So I finish it.

“I need you. I’ve always needed you, Wes. I always will.”

In mere seconds, he has his pants pooled around his knees and he enters me.  He moves slowly and deliberately, intense emotion swimming in his eyes. We don't speak. He hovers over me, our breaths mingled. They come quicker as his thrusts deepen. My fingers pad along his chin. His eyes lid heavily as he bites his bottom lip and leans into my touch. The steady rhythm is heating me and I squirm wonderfully with the onslaught. Feeling my movements, he speeds up and his outcry comes moments after mine before the weight of him slumps onto me. We're a mess of tangled brown and cream limbs and in that moment it looks completely right.

His chest is pressed against the front of me and I can feel his heartbeat pumping away simultaneously on point with mine. He lifts himself off me and I turn and place his hand on my chest while feeling his chest with my own hand.

"Feel that?" I ask softly, smiling. "We match."

His answer is a long, deep kiss before he pulls back and smiles broadly at me. "I’ve been trying to tell you that for years, Woman.”

*                            *                            *

An hour of nighttime television and round two in the shower makes us very hungry so we stumble out into the late night and into Kerby Lane, a twenty-four hour diner that serves stacks of oversized blueberry pancakes and strong coffee.

We keep catching each other’s eye and grinning as we shovel large bites of syrupy starch into our mouths.

One time when I glance up, he’s no longer grinning and he’s not eating either. My own smile slides off my face and my fork lowers slowly. He’s looking intently at me.

My heart starts to pound. What if he thinks he’s made a mistake? I remember Katy’s trembling chin and fierce eyes. How she fought for him. She loved him. And she let him know it. She let the whole world know it. She didn’t hide it like me.

“What is it?” I ask cautiously.

“Marry me.”

His answer causes my fork to clatter to my plate in surprise. Now my heart is going apeshit. “What?”

“Let’s go to our ten year reunion as husband and wife.”

“Wes, that’s in six weeks!”

“So marry me in five weeks. Marry me in a month. Marry me tomorrow, I don’t care. Just marry me. I can’t lose you again, Birdie. It will break me. I want to be with you every day. I want you to have my little Lott babies. I want to buy some house near some library where you can’t tell the customers no when you’re trying to close so I take care of dinner and make lasagna every night because that’s the only dish I get right but you come home and eat it anyway because you love me and it’s actually really fucking good lasagna.”

My head is swimming with his speech, just trying to keep up. I take a deep breath. “I just want you to be sure. You just ended a really serious commitment-”

He interrupts me. “I’m sure.”

All the words of caution I had to say die on my tongue. Only one word fits in my mouth now and I say it. Clearly. Confidently.

“Yes.”

He smirks and resumes eating his pancakes like I just agreed to go to the movies with him instead of handcuff us together for life.

“I knew you’d say yes,” he says with twinkling eyes in between bites.

“Oh yeah?” I counter.

“Yeah. It’s all over your face now, not just in your eyes. I can read you like a book, Birds.”

“So what am I thinking now?”

“That you want to eat my last pancake since you finished yours and you’re still hungry.”

Damn. I was thinking that.

“Well, what’s yours is mine now, right?” I ask him stabbing at his plate while he tries to protect it with his forearm.

Wes laughs. “No! Not for five more weeks.”

“Four weeks. I think I need a couple weeks before the reunion to get used to saying Birdie Lott.”

Wes’s face changes and his arms quit shielding his plate and fall to the table like they’ve gone liquid. His head rolls back onto the booth. “You’re going to completely undo me. Take the pancake. Good lord, two words and I’m useless against you.” He brings his head back down and looks at me. “Say it again.”

I lean forward and focus my gaze on him. “Four weeks.”

He laughs and shakes his head. “Smart ass. Say it.”

I smile and look at him. Look at Wesley Lott, the unexpected surprise in my move to small town Shenoah, Texas. The one I love and who loves me back. The oh-so-patient man who held me together when I wouldn’t admit I was breaking. My best friend for life. And I give him his two words without a hint of fear.

“Birdie Lott.”

To my husband
. Who nodded and smiled when I said I wanted to be an astronaut. Who nodded and smiled when I said I wanted to start a food truck business. Who nodded and smiled when I said I wanted to host a travel show for a cable network. And who nodded the hardest and smiled the widest when I said I wanted to author a book. You knew I had it in me. Thank you for supporting me and helping me discover what you already knew.

And to the reader. Good, bad, or ugly you’re here. Reading this. Which means you made it to the end. Thank you for taking the journey with these fictitious friends of mine living in my head.

M.C. Carr is a Houston, Texas native. She grew up in the corners of libraries reading through the books on the shelves. She loves romances, fantasies, realistic fiction, science fiction, historical fiction – or in a nutshell, she loves a good story. What she loves even more are the fictional characters in her head that keep her company. Telling their stories has been a passion of hers for years.

Carr is always on the lookout for stories with characters that reflect diversity. She is the daughter of a white mother and black father and is in an interracial marriage with the love of her life. They have three children.