Something Worth Saving (4 page)

But still no proposal. We hadn’t even talked about it unless someone else brought it up. Which they did a lot.

His brother Kasey, of all people, would take jabs at him, saying things like, “When are you going to make an honest woman out of her?”

“She is an honest woman,” he would say, his insistent side coming out.

Argumentative in certain situations, he always had a comeback, but never one with an actual answer. And I never pushed it, because if I did and he left, then what?

I thought for sure if you suffocated the flame, the fire would go out.

“S
TOP DAYDREAMING
and help me with this shit,” Shanna said just before we opened the doors for the morning. She had her hands full with about ten different bottles of dye and a bag of wicks.

I grabbed the wicks from her and tossed them on the counter, then hurried to the front. Fixing the display of our newest scented pinecones, I then sprinkled a few more shelves with hay before flipping the “Open” sign around. With just a week before Thanksgiving, we were in full festive mode and getting ready to switch everything over from fall to winter the day after Thanksgiving, which happened to be our biggest day of sales every year.

The day was going by rather slowly for a Thursday afternoon when I started thinking about Jace again. Mostly because I heard the sirens as they headed out on a call. It was never easy, knowing that any one call could take him from me.

This December would mark his sixth year with the Seattle Fire Department, a place his father had spent his entire career.

The Ryan family came from a long line of firefighters. It was in their blood, apparently.

Around one that afternoon I got a text from Jace asking me to stop by the station when I could. It wasn’t unusual for me to drop by the station when he was working, so I told Shanna I’d be back later. She made me promise to bring back coffee. Remember my theory on why I moved to Seattle? Starbucks. On every corner. Shanna appreciated that, too.

When I got to the station, I could see Lauren standing by the open bay doors next to Jace’s dad.

Lauren liked to bring the kids by to see their dad, too. At least that’s what she said, but she also wanted to check out the firefighters.

As my sister talked and my kids ran around the fire trucks, I glanced at Jace. He looked nervous.

“So . . . ” His head tipped in the direction of his phone and then at the ground. He was dancing around something, and while I had an idea of what he was wanting to say, I had no idea it was about his cell phone and the video Gracie had managed to capture that morning. “Lauren called me.
Apparently
our daughter is good at filmography these days.”

Okay. That wasn’t what I was expecting. I was expecting him to cancel on our night together. He did that often.

“Say what?” A little surprised, I handed him a tall Americano.

He smiled, taking the coffee before reaching into the front pocket of his navy blue slacks and handing me his cell phone. Leery of the contents, I felt my heart pound a little as I thought about what she could have possibly recorded this morning when she tossed the phone under the door. “She apparently played it for Gavin today.”

Shit.

Once I pushed “play,” I wished I hadn’t.

“You have to be shitting me!” My mouth hung open. A few gasping breaths might have escaped, but the reality was that our four-year-old daughter had recorded us having sex.

No, you couldn’t see anything in particular aside from the ceiling but the noises were not good. They were not noises a child should have heard. And though she technically didn’t hear those noises – we were behind a locked door – she had recorded them.

The worst part? I’m getting to that. If you needed anything worse.

“Don’t you fucking stop.”
And grunting and the dog barking and kids crying.

Awful. Just awful.

Jace, who could barely keep a straight face, broke out into laughter, completely entertained by all this. “The best part is the end.”

He meant the worst part. I’m sure of it.

And then it was there, the end he spoke of. The worst I spoke of.

What was it you ask? Jace walking across our bedroom floor, naked, in all his glory.

Yeah.

My
sister and
her
kid, and
my
kids saw this.

“Fuck . . . ” He turned the phone slightly. “I look good from that angle.” With his arms around my shoulders, he leaned in, pointing to the screen as he let his voice drop. “And
bigger
.”

Jace apparently thought it was hilarious and couldn’t stop laughing,
and
was impressed that he looked bigger from that angle.

“What the fuck are you laughing about, dipshit?” Slapping at his shoulders, I couldn’t understand
why
he thought this was funny.

“Oh, just admit it. It’s funny.” His arms went up, trying to defend himself, when Logan and Kasey, Jace’s brother, came walking out, both grinning.

Fools. They’d already seen it.

“Parents of the year right here, boys!” Kasey announced, smacking Logan across his chest. Laughter broke out among all three of them.

Logan was Jace’s best friend. They were rarely apart, although they had completely different personalities. While Jace was laid-back for the most part, relaxed and thoughtful in his ways, Logan was lively and reckless. He wasn’t as tall as Jace, shorter by a few inches, but most thought they were brothers rather than friends.

Lauren, my sister, who’d followed Logan out, had all three kids with her and a basket. On the days she stopped by the station, Lauren would bring the boys some kind of homemade treat that she purchased from the bakery down the street and pretended she made the shit herself.

“So, Aubrey.” Lauren was eating this shit up. Slightly relieved she didn’t want to kill me for subjecting her son to that, I realized quickly that living with my crazy sister, he’d probably been subjected to worse in the past. “I see you had a
nice
morning.” Her arm wrapped around my shoulders. I was being handled a lot. “Feeling less stressed, are we?”

Let me tell you a little bit about Lauren. She’s creative and fun-loving, entertaining, beautiful, and absolutely everything you would want in a sister. But she’s also out of touch with reality, tends to run the gamut, and unfortunately, rarely taken seriously. Even by me. And my mother, her take on Lauren . . . don’t get me started on that.

“Shut up.” She let me go, stepping back slightly. “Why were they playing with cell phones, anyway? I told you not to let Gracie play with cell phones. Last week she called Guam.”

Not that we really went by that in our house. After all, who had she recorded this morning? Her parents having sex. Excellent role models we all were.

“Hey, I didn’t give it to her.” Lauren shoved Jace back a little. He literally couldn’t stop laughing. “This jerk gave it to her as a peace offering when she wouldn’t come inside this morning. It’s his fault.”

“You should think about
why
she didn’t want to come inside, Lauren,” Jace taunted, as if he had grounds for taunting. At this point he needed to keep his mouth shut. “What do you do to my princess during the day?”

“Your princess?” Lauren gasped, feeding into his bullshit. He did this on purpose. If he got a rise out of my sister, his day was complete. “Your little princess called me a bitch this morning, dumped over an entire gallon of milk, and tried to shave her brother’s head with a vegetable peeler, all in the matter of three hours.”

And people wondered why I didn’t want to be a stay-at-home mom or run a daycare.

Jace continued to laugh. It was amusing to him because he’d never spent an entire day with them alone. Either of them.

“Where are the kids?” I finally asked, looking around, only to see them nowhere in sight.

“Yeah, Lauren.” Jace was in full-on piss-my-sister-off-completely mode by pulling her shoulder-length blonde hair and poking at her shoulders. Anything to get a rise out of her. “Where are the kids?”

Trying to calm herself, with flushed cheeks and messy hair, she straightened out her leather jacket by running her hands over the front pockets, kicking at Jace. “They’re inside with Wade and Axe.”

“You left my kids with Axe!” I nearly had a heart attack. Axelson (Axe) Peterson was never someone you wanted your kids around. Unless, of course, you wanted them to grow up to be lunatics with whorish ways and substance-abuse problems. Believe me when I say not all firefighters are morally sound. There are guys like Axe who have seen some fucked-up shit, and it takes its toll on them. “Nothing good comes from his mouth. They’re probably learning worse words than ‘bitch’ by now.”

As I began to claim my children inside the station, Jace piped up again, laughing with his boys. “We should look for better childcare!”

“You’re lucky I don’t turn you over to CPS.” Lauren followed behind me, grumbling all the way until we got to the door and Jace added his next spark to the fire.

“Oh, admit it, Lauren, you liked the video,” he yelled across the apparatus bay.

“I’m going to kill your baby-daddy.” Lauren glared at him and then turned back to me “You will never marry him because I’m going to kill him myself.”

“Oh, don’t do that . . . you saw the video.” I laughed and pushed the double doors to the station open. “He’s got nice pipe.”

She laughed, too, as we had the same sense of humor. I didn’t have much time and needed to get back to the shop, so I gave my kids a quick kiss, slapped Jace again in the stomach, and then made my way back across the street.

Y
OU MIGHT
think by the interactions with Jace that all was good. We were happy, we had two kids, he teased me, flirted, all that.

You would think that.

But there was more to it.

I love him. I do. Very much so. There was no one else for me.

Let me tell you about the darker sides, the ones that had me wondering what I actually meant to him and where this was going. You’re curious now, aren’t you?

Most stories start out with how they fell in love. That’s the easy part. That’s the part where oxygen meets heat, spark occurs, and a fire is started. What happens when one part of the triangle we know so well is taken away?

What happens when the heat’s gone?

Fire goes out. Eventually.

He loved our kids, and I had no doubt he loved me. But there were times when I wondered if I was just what had fallen into place. Good for the time being. You know?

I didn’t want to think that way.

Let me put it to you this way. You know those couples who have sex all the time? The whole “can’t wait to be inside you, screaming your name at the top of your lungs” — is that real?

In the beginning, yeah, it’s pretty accurate.

But the reality is that after a while, you not only get sore, or get a UTI or something equally as frustrating, and the newness slows to a comfortable pace.

My point?

One day all relationships get comfortable. You can’t have sex all the time, unfortunately, but for me, when the comfort came, that was when I really fell in love with Jace. It happened one morning. I remember the day it hit me, and I remember telling him.

Dates, remember?

This day?

July 2, 2008.

He’d just gotten off his shift, and came over to my apartment and sat down on the couch like he owned the place. But what really got me was how comfortable we were. And he brought me coffee. That helped, too.

“I love you,” I said, all but blurting it out. He smiled and I stared at the coffee, pretending to play it off that I more or less told my sweet creamy addiction I loved it and not Jace. But he knew me.

“It’s about time you admitted it out loud. Your eyes said it months ago.”

“And when did you see that, smartass?”

He wiggled his eyebrows. “When you were screaming my name.”

Always a gentleman.

Later that same night, I asked, “So what about you?”

He smiled, coyly. “I love me, too. I’m a lovable kind of guy.”

Moving from my place next to him, I straddled his lap. “Oh, just tell me you love me, you pussy.”

As he drew me close, his chest pressed to mine. “So dirty,” he growled. “I love it . . . ” His lips were at my ear then, a low whisper that made me feel dirty, in a good way, while shivery tingles attacked everywhere nerves were present. “And I love you.”

As you can see, it was good.

December 17, 2008, I found out I was pregnant with Gracie. And both of us were excited and had no doubts about having her.

After Jayden was when the happiness began to fade. With the realization that we had two kids, not a lot of time and even less time together, the relationship was slipping from what it had been before. I don’t know when it happened, either. If I did, I wasn’t seeing it clearly then, and I certainly wasn’t doing anything to change it.

So how do you change that? How do you keep the fire going?

How do you rekindle a relationship before it’s too late?

“T
HIS PLACE
looks amazing!” I knew that voice for sure. Brooke walked in, smiling as usual as she looked over the shop.

Brooke Jennings was my best friend and married to Jace’s best friend, Logan.

Brooke. What can I say about that girl, other than she was an amazingly strong woman with a personality that matched. No one who knew her would ever say a bad thing about her. If you ever needed someone to confide in, she was the one. You told her a secret, and she kept it.

Shanna reached for her, wrapping her arms and one leg around her slender frame. “Goddamn, girl, you get sexier every time I see you!”

She was right, too. Brooke, who struggled with being a knobby-kneed little tomboy as a kid, was now a tall brunette with long hair flowing down to her mid-back, long layers that wrapped around a heart-shaped face, and doe-brown eyes.

“Oh, stop.” Brooke laughed, hugging Shanna tightly.

In my world, I had three best friends: Brooke, Shanna, and my sister. I told all three pretty much everything. Same with them. We were the fab four.