The Girl with my Heart (Summer Unplugged #8) (6 page)

Park doesn’t even hear me because he’s staring at his phone, which just vibrated three times in a row. He smiles, his thumb swiping madly across the screen while he replies.

“Dude, you’ve got it bad.”

He doesn’t acknowledge me. I could say anything right now. “Yeah so I’m cheating on Bay with her mother,” I say, sliding my hands behind my head and hefting my feet onto my desk. “I think I’m in love with Bay’s mom, actually.”

“Huh?” Park’s brown eyebrows draw together and he looks as if he’s just awaken from a dream and can’t quite remember all of it. “What the hell did you say?”

“I said stop being obsessed with your phone and tell me about your business idea.”

He chuckles. “Yeah, sorry.” He holds up his hands in surrender and slides his phone into his pocket. “I’m done texting.” The phone vibrates. He doesn’t break eye contact with me.

I roll my eyes. “Just answer it.”

“Thanks,” he says, reaching for the phone. “I’ll just tell her we’re going to lunch and that I can’t talk for a while.”

I step into the hallway and call Bayleigh while I wait for Park and his insane amount of puppy love to settle down. She answers after several rings. “Hello?”

“Hey, babe.”

“How’s work?” She sounds stressed, almost like she doesn’t want to be on the phone.

“It’s all right. Park came by to visit—well, I think he just came by to sit in my office while he texts Becca.”

She laughs. “They’re a little intense, huh?”

“Not any more than we were when we started dating.”

She scoffs into the phone. “We were
so
not like that.”

I lean against the wall. “Are you saying you weren’t madly in love with me when we first met?”

“Of course I was, but I didn’t act like Becca does. I played it cool.”

Now it’s my turn to scoff. “Yeah, right! You were all about getting a piece of me.”

“Someone is full of themselves…” Bay says with a laugh. Jett starts crying in the background. “I should go,” she says with a sigh.

“I love you,” I say.

“I love you too, babe.”

When I hang up the phone I become aware of a set of eyes boring into me from across the hall. I glance over and find Natalie standing there, twirling hair around her finger. “Can I help you?” I ask with as much sarcasm as possible.

She shrugs. “I should be asking you that.”

“Don’t ask me a thing,” I say, turning back toward my office. “I should call the police for what you left on my computer.”

Natalie’s bleach blonde eyebrow arches. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Besides,” she says, walking closer to me, her flip flops sliding across the thin carpet. “You don’t have to put up such a front, you know.” She grabs my bicep and squeezes it. “I can be very discreet. Your wife won’t know a thing.”

My temper flares beneath my chest. “I wouldn’t fuck you if my life depended on it.”

She rolls her eyes and my office door swings open. Park steps out, phone in hand. “You ready to go?” he asks, sparing the slightest glance toward Natalie.

I nod.

“Oh my god, you’re Nolan Park!” Natalie’s eyes go wide and she bounces on her heels. “I'm a huge fan.”

“Thanks,” he says, turning toward the exit. We take a few steps and I’m in awe over how well he can blow off a fan. A slutty fan at that. This is no longer the Park I know—Becca has made a decent man out of him.

Natalie scurries along after us, rushing ahead and beating us to the door. She pulls it open and beams up at Park. “You’re even more handsome in person, you know.”

He gives her the slightest head nod of acknowledgement and keeps walking. She trails along beside us. “I loved how you managed to come back from second to last place after you wrecked at Ponca,” she says, batting her eyelashes. “I thought for sure you were screwed but somehow you managed to win that race. Very impressive.”

“Look kid,” Park says in what is an awesome display of showing how little he’s paid attention to her. She’s only a year or so younger than we are. “If you want to wait in the autograph line at the next race I’ll be happy to sign something for you but right now I’m trying to have lunch with a friend so I don’t have time for this.”

“Sure thing,” she says with a sweet smile, totally unaffected. “I’ll be here when ya’ll get back! Jace, let me know if you need anything.”

“Holy shit that woman is insane,” Park says as we climb into his brand new truck.

I nod. “This is the hell that I have to live with now. Mr. Fisher better fire her or I’ll have to fire myself.”

“Not if we get our business up and running,” Park says, cranking the engine. “I have about fifty percent of the work already planned out. We could be in business in about three months. That is of course, if you have about fifty grand to pitch in.”

“You know I’m good for it,” I say, reaching for my seat belt. “I’d have to convince Bay but she’ll probably be on board. Shit…” I feel my pocket, then my other one. My heart accelerates when I realize that all of my pockets are empty, minus my wallet. “I left my phone in my office.”

“I’ll wait here while you get it,” Park says, turning on the air conditioner.

I shake my head. “The last thing I want to do is go back in there and deal with that girl. Screw it, I’ll just leave it there. We won’t be gone long.”

Park puts the truck in reverse and chuckles. “I don’t blame you one bit, man.”

We head to a little hole in the wall Chinese food place that has the greatest eggrolls in the world. Park lays out his business idea for me, one scribbled sheet of paper at a time.

“Okay so, there’s thirty acres in Groovewood county, it’s just on the outskirts of Lawson and about thirty minutes from Mixon,” Park says, pointing to a printed out section of Google maps. He also has the printed out listing of the land from the real estate company. “They want a hundred grand for the whole thing, which is a damn steal for thirty acres.”

“Yeah, I’d guess that’s a good price,” I say, not knowing a damn thing about real estate in our area. Or in any area. It’s part of the reason why Bay and I are still hanging out in an apartment that’s a little too small for the three of us instead of buying or building a house. “This might be cool because it’s between Bay’s home town and Mixon. I think she’s a little bummed that we live further away from her family and friends, so this could bridge the gap.”

Park lifts an eyebrow. “Dude, you’d just move back to Lawson if we do this. What’s keeping you in Mixon?”

I think about it for a minute, realizing that he’s right. “Nothing but this job,” I say with a shrug.

“Hell, you and Bay could build a house right next door to the land and live there.”

“You could do that too,” I say, thinking of the possibilities. “You could build a house next to mine and we’d be business partners and neighbors.”

He smirks. “Can’t do that actually.”

The look on his face has me dying to know more. I suddenly feel like Bayleigh does when she’s gossiping about girls they hate with Becca. “What do you mean by that? Don’t want to be my neighbor?”

He chuckles and grabs an eggroll off the plate of appetizers we ordered. “It’s a possibility. But I’ve already made an offer on this badass Victorian house that’s just down the street. It’s been abandoned a while and it has this perfect studio space upstairs and—”

“Studio? Like for photography or something?”

He shakes his head and looks off to the side, peering out of the restaurant’s windows as if something super exciting is happening in the parking lot. “It wouldn’t be for me, actually.”

My brows furrow as I try to extract meaning from that cryptic comment. Then I remember the painted canvas hanging in our living room that says Live, Love, Family in Becca’s unique artistic style. “Are you making a painting studio for Becca?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know. I mean, if we work out and stuff.”

“Do you plan on
working out and stuff
with Becca?”

He dunks his egg roll into sweet and sour sauce. “Let’s just focus back on the business plan.”

“Fine,” I say, giving him a sinister glare. It’s so much fun to watch my former player of a best friend freak out and actually turn into a normal, one-woman guy. I’m proud of him. But I’m not about to get all weird and mushy and tell him that. I take a sip from my Coke and lean forward in the booth. “So we buy the land, and then what? We’ll need a tractor to build a track, which is expensive as hell but I could probably rent Mr. Fisher’s for a while.”

Park nods. “We can clear out the land ourselves. Most of it is already cleared and there’s a few trees we can work around and build the track between them.” He points to an area on his hand sketched map of the land, which is basically a large rectangle that shares a border with one of the county roads. “I figure we can set up camp sites over on this side, and then in the summer time and over Christmas break and stuff, we can do weekly training camps and kids can spend the whole week here, riding and practicing twenty-four seven.”

“That would be badass,” I say with a nod. Our own personal motocross training center—that sounds like the greatest career someone like me could have, second only to actually being a professional racer again. Of course, now that I have a family and a home, the last thing I’d want is to be traveling around the country racing professionally every weekend. That was my life before me and my bad temper had gotten kicked out of the pros and before I’d met Bayleigh. I’ve always wanted a career in motocross, something I can rely on when I’m too old to keep riding. This could be the perfect idea.

“What about business permits and taxes and shit? Plus we’d have to build a building and parking lot and lights and water and…” I stop myself as the list continues to grow in my head. “This will be expensive.”

“Definitely, but I think we can turn a profit soon.” Park slides out some more papers from the stack he keeps in a tan folder. “I’ve met with a tax lawyer. Here’s the permits and licenses we’d need. I also have a guy who would draft up our waivers for the kid’s parents to sign. But it doesn’t just have to be about kids either… we could do like, motocross bachelor parties or—hell I don’t know. Charity races and stuff.”

“We could do all of that and more if we had our own track,” I say. I take another bite of food, feeling temporarily guilty because I know how much Bay loves Chinese food. Maybe I’ll swing back by after work and bring her some for dinner.

I smile. “I think we should do it, definitely. I am all in for this. Of course I need to run it all past Bayleigh but—” I shrug. “I think she’d be cool with it. Don’t you?”

Park shrugs. “She’s a cool chick. As long as she believes in you putting a shit ton of money on the line, then I don’t see why she’d object.”

Shit. When he puts it that way…does Bayleigh have the faith in me? Would she support me spending a heap of our savings on a crazy business adventure that requires me to leave my job and my steady paycheck?

God, I hope so.

I can hear the unrelenting sound of Jett screaming his head off before my key gets in the front door. He’s doing that scream-for-no-reason thing he sometimes does, I can tell by the sound of it as I unlock the door and step inside our apartment.

“What’s my little man crying about?” I call out. No one answers me, but it’s not like I expected Jett to suddenly stop crying and say, “Why sorry, father. I am crying because I’m pissed off for no reason.”

I smile at the ridiculous thought and scan the living room for Bay. That’s who I expected to answer me, but she hasn’t said a word. If she has, maybe I just can’t hear it over the screaming.

“Bay?” I call out as I step into the kitchen. It’s empty, too, and there’s still no reply. Maybe she’s in the shower.

I head down the hallway, peeking into our bedroom and the bathroom and she’s not in there and Jett’s screams are louder than ever as I approach his bedroom at the end of the hall. “Bay?” I try again.

And then I see her.

She sits cross legged on the floor right in the middle of Jett’s room, on top of a baby blanket that’s been spread out and covered with baby toys. Her back is to me, but her shoulders are slumped and I can tell she’s looking down into her lap.

Jett stares at me with chubby cheeks and tears all over his face. He’s lying in his crib, his tiny little hands balled up into tiny little angry fists and he’s crying like a maniac.

“Bay, are you okay?” I ask, heading toward the crib. She doesn’t say anything.

I check Jett’s diaper but it’s clean. There’s a full baby bottle on the table next to the crib so I grab the bottle and offer it to Jett. He just shoves it away and keeps crying. Just as I had expected—he’s just crying for no reason. Or, no reason that we can figure out.

I bend over and scoop up my baby, cradling him in my arms while I rock him back and forth, trying to get him to calm down. He sniffles and stares at me for a few seconds and then bursts into tears again. I turn around and carefully hold onto the screaming bundle of baby in my arms as I kneel down to my knees and sit in front of Bayleigh.

“Honey, don’t be upset about Jett. He’s just in a bad mood or something. It’s not your fault.”

Jett’s screams seem to get even more annoyed, as if he’s mad at me for saying he’s in a bad mood. I bounce and rock him, making gooey baby faces at him, but he just closes his eyes and screams. I reach up for the bottle and try again, but he smacks it with his hand and sends drops of breastmilk all over his face.

He definitely does not want to eat. Curiously, I turn him over, lifting up his shirt and then checking his arms and legs. Maybe he’s injured and hurt and that’s why he’s crying. But his skin is soft and pale and I don’t find any bruises or scrapes or, hell I don’t know, like a spider bite or something.

I remember reading in a baby book for dads that the three reasons babies cry are because they’re either hungry, sleepy, or need a new diaper. Jett’s probably sleepy. I lift him up on my shoulder where he loves to fall asleep and gently pat his back. But he’s having none of it. He kicks and screams and shoves, doing everything in his power to get away from me.

With a resigned sigh, I stand up and put him back in his crib. “I guess you’re just going to cry no matter what, little man.” I frown as my heart breaks. I hate when my kid cries like this. I hate not being able to fix it.

Bayleigh’s mom has told us before that sometimes you just have to let a baby cry and get it out of their system. But I hate every second of it.

I walk over to my wife and put my hand on her shoulder. “Honey let’s just close the door and let him cry for a while. He’ll probably wear himself out and go to sleep soon.”

“I’m staying here,” she says, the first thing she’s said since I got home.

“Honey, it’s pointless to stay here. You’re going to go deaf listening to his screams.”

“I don’t care.” She stares at her hands, her hair falling over her shoulders and blocking her face from me.

“What’s wrong?” I try to look at her but she won’t look up at me. “Is this about the baby or something else?”

“The baby doesn’t hurt me, Jace.”

Her words are ice and my skin crawls from the venom in her words. “If the baby didn’t hurt you then why are you acting hurt? What’s wrong? What happened?”

She looks up at me now, her eyes red and swollen from crying. She looks like an adult version of Jett, only her anger isn’t for no reason. It’s directed straight at me.

“I don’t want to see you right now.”

“What? Why?” I step closer and she glares at me, stopping me in my tracks. “Baby, what’s wrong?”

“Don’t
baby
me!” She grits her teeth and silent tears flow from her eyes. “I don’t want to talk to you and I don’t want to see you. Just go.”

I cross my arms. Briefly I run through the dates—it’s not her birthday, it’s not our anniversary. I haven’t forgotten anything or overlooked anything. And I never would because I fucking care about this woman and I love her to pieces and I’d never hurt her. I heave a deep breath. “I’m not leaving until you talk to me. I don’t know why you won’t talk to me. I haven’t done anything, babe!”

She rolls her eyes and glares at me. “You are a really good liar.”

“I’m not lying.” I hold my ground because it’s the truth.

Her lips purse together. “Hmm…here’s one. You lied when you said you still thought I was attractive. When you said I was the only woman for you. That was a big fucking lie, wasn’t it?”

Relief floods into me for a moment. She’s mad because she still thinks I don’t find her attractive. I mean, this isn’t good, but at least I haven’t accidentally found a way to royally fuck things up. I can smooth this over, eventually. I can prove to her that she is beautiful in every way, because it’s the truth and as the saying goes—the truth shall set you free.

I relax my shoulders. “Baby, get up please. Let’s go to our bed and I’ll show you how beautiful you are to me.”

Her stony expression turns sarcastic. “Why don’t you go to that bed and see for yourself why you’re a big fucking liar.”

I swallow the lump in my throat. What the hell does she mean by that? I watch her for a minute, too scared to ask anything else. She looks back into her lap, her shoulders falling and I hate the sight of her being so hurt over something she thinks is true, when it is so not.

Curious, I leave the room even though all I want to do is wrap her in my arms and tell her how beautiful she is to me and how much I love her. I head down the hall and push open the door to our bedroom. There’s nothing on the bed except my iPad.

I pick it up, and slide the screen open. It opens to my pictures, which are synced with my cell phone. The phone I left at the office today while Park and I had lunch.

The lump in my throat grows to the size of a watermelon and no amount of swallowing will get it down. Pure anger rises through my body, threating to unleash and send me into a hurricane of rage.

I was wrong.

This is a royal fuck up.

She’s never going to believe me.