He lifts his hand and when he cups my cheek, I turn my head instinctively, the touch so familiar, so achingly familiar, the tears stream a little faster. He draws me gently into the back of his car, parked right in front of the warehouse.
He shuts the door behind us and, as if he needs the distance, sits right across from me as I keep crying. He’s looking out the window, his eyes red.
He scrapes his hand down his jaw. He doesn’t seem to be breathing, his jaw set, his posture closed off and tight. It seems to be costing him everything to keep himself on a leash, because he doesn’t even speak.
We stay like that for a while, sitting with our prides, our reality, and holding onto our love as tightly as we need.
“Loving you fucking hurts,” I accuse, trying to stop crying.
He reaches out to take my shoulders, his forehead to mine—his eyes livid with pain. “You think this is easy for me?” He grabs my face, frustrated and trembling, his voice a hiss. “You’re the only thing that makes me feel really alive. I’m not living without you. I’m just here—a money machine, all for what. Huh? When I die tomorrow who would’ve cared for me, really, other than my brother? If I’m in some accident, if something happens to me, who will make me cling to life? Who will make me want to stay here?”
“Stop it, Christos. You’ll have your son, or your daughter.”
“But I won’t have you, love.” He takes my chin and looks at me, at my whole face, and says, “If I have joint custody, would you be there for my child? As if it were yours?”
“I’d love it as hard as I love you,” I sniff, my tears streaming down my cheeks as he rubs them with the pads of his thumb. “I’m sick of feeling like it’s wrong to love you because you’re not mine to love.”
“I love you,” he says. “I want a family, and I want it with you.” His eyes gleam mercilessly as he wipes the rest of my tears. “It kills me to hurt you when that’s the last thing I’ve ever wanted to do. It kills me to let you go because I fucking can’t let you go. I’m choosing you. It’s always been you. Will you choose me too? Choose me and my child too?”
I swallow, and his eyes have all of this tenderness inside them that I can barely breathe. “Are you certain?” I ask, sucking back a breath.
“I’m certain. I have this disjointed idea of being the kind of father I never had. Maybe I even don’t believe I deserve to have a family, a real family, like I’d have with you because I failed Leilani and my daughter once.” He cups my face and sets his forehead on mine, inhaling me. “Maybe why I was settling for Miranda in the first place. Something surface. Nothing real.” He eases back, and I keep getting tears, even though the emotion behind them is woefully different than when I started crying. Because Christos looks all raw, all open, all mine as he keeps the back of my neck in his hand and pins me down with the most glorious eyes.
“We sometimes don’t get the family we choose, even the kids we have, or how they sometimes come. But you choose who you marry. Who you spend your life with,” he says, trailing off.
There’s silence between us, my heart pounding madly as I wonder if we’ll make it work. If Miranda will let him go. Give him joint custody. If he’ll really let me take care of his kid and let me love him like one of mine. Like we would also love ours, his and mine.
We seem to eye each other hungrily from across the car.
I wonder where we stand.
A conversation away from him being mine to hold again, mine to touch again, to love as hard as I want to and can.
“Do you want to take this talk elsewhere?” he asks softly, watching me. “Preferably after I’ve had a word with Miranda?”
I smile shakily, and God, I’ve never been so eager to send him to Miranda, and I nod so fast I almost get dizzy as I wipe away the moisture from my face, and I quickly get out of the car.
I hear Christos step out of the car as Cole and Miranda walk forward.
“Where the fuck were you two? The evening is a huge success and nobody can find you two!” Cole demands.
Miranda and I lock eyes, and she lifts her nose up in the air, gloating. Her eyes saying, who got him in the end, little bitch?
“Hello, Miranda,” I say politely, keeping my gaze away from Aaric as he walks up behind me, and that’s when I notice Cole’s shoes.
My eyes widen in recognition, and as I pull my gaze up, it snags on the ankle of the woman’s leg standing beside him. On the ink tattoo on Miranda’s ankle.
“Nice shoes,” I say as I look up at Cole, and then at Miranda, a little bit too stunned by the snotty look she keeps wearing. “Nice tattoo, Miranda. I have a feeling I’ve seen it before. Maybe at the corporate restroom of Christos and Co.” I smile at her as genuinely as I can, and I look at Christos, who’s wearing a puzzled frown. And then something flickers, and I see it in his eyes.
I walk away, not glancing back.
“You two. We need to talk,” I hear Christos growl behind me.
Christos
Present day
“I’m not marrying you to pretend a happy life. That’s not what I want to teach my child. I will be there for this child, regardless. As an uncle, or as a father,” I tell Miranda.
Miranda purses her lips, too proud to say a word to me.
“I was about to let the girl of my dreams go. Jesus!” I growl. She tilts her chin up, and I glare down at her before I turn to look at my younger brother. “And you. You motherfucker.”
“Come on, Aaric. You didn’t love her. She’s insisting the kid’s yours because she’s got this idea of you being better than I am. A better father figure. More responsible. She knows you want a family, and I don’t.”
“Yeah, well now you might get one. Fucker.”
I pace, still reeling, before I spin around to point a warning finger at him. “Don’t you ever—ever—fuck in my corporate bathroom again. Lock your damn office door—or take it somewhere else. As long as I pay the rent, you screw around elsewhere.” I glare at them both, then move around to watch the spot where Bryn disappeared.
“If it’s mine, I’ll be the father you were to me. The damn best,” Cole says behind me.
I shoot him my blackest look. “If you don’t, I’ll personally make sure that you do.”
“Miranda, hell, I know I’m a bit more c’est la vie than Aaric, but even if Aaric is the biological father…I can—well, be there for the stepfather role.”
I glance at Miranda as Cole waits for her reply, and she tips her chin up, raises out her left hand, and points at her empty ring finger.
I keep staring out the window, unable to see Bryn, remembering how fast her tears streamed, how warm they felt falling into my palms.
Choose me.
Did I ever not choose her? Can I ever not choose her?
Damn me, did I ever have a choice of anything other than her?
Bryn
I head home and replay the scene over and over in my head, and not only the moment when I realized my secret-restroom lovers were Cole and Miranda. No. Not that mind-boggling, what-the-ever-living-fuck moment.
Also, before that.
Years before that.
Wondering when I sat in the back of his car, fighting for Christos, why I couldn’t have been braver before he even met Miranda, so that things would have not come to be this complicated. Wondering what would have happened if I hadn’t been afraid of falling for Aaric years ago. Wondering if I could have rescued us from heartbreak, like I’ve wondered for years what would have happened if I’d called my parents that night.
I’m retracing all the steps I have taken—and all the steps that led me here—trying to figure out where I went wrong, which step is preventing me from achieving the one outcome I want and seem to be waiting on bated breath for. The outcome where Christos and I finally have a chance to be together.
I’m circling it all in my head like you’d replay a shocking moment or a favorite one, remembering our times even while fully aware that there is no changing what is now, no changing those past moments, aware that I only have choices in my future ones, and perhaps that is not even possible at all, when I get a call from Cole.