Happily Even After Page 9

  Creigh looked up from the arrangement she was making for tomorrow’s display to gaze at her cousin, who was staring at her intently. “Tell you what?”

  “How it feels to be dating your ex-husband?”

  “Ohh…that.” After doing a quick check to see if Sergio, who was helping out in the back room, was nearby, she set one of the last flowers in the vase. After two months of seeing Dean again, there were only two words she could think of. “Frustrating and weird.”

  A-mei frowned. “That’s not good.”

  “No, it is. I mean things are really good between us.” Better than it had ever been between them. “And that’s what’s so weird. Neither of us are going into this with blinders on. There are still times I want to throw a pot of grits at him, but those are less and less. We’re talking things out now. Before I would have stormed away and called him names, and he would mutter something I’m sure didn’t mean ‘my beloved’ in Italian and slam the door. If he gets upset, he might step outside for a moment still, but now it’s to grab me a flower from the garden to say he’s sorry or to do something equally nice.”

  Smiling, A-mei hopped up on the table and picked a lily Creigh had yet to place in the vase. “Wow, sounds like he’s really turning over a new leaf.”

  “He’s trying. He really is.” Creigh smiled at the memory that came to mind over the weekend. He’d caught her lifting a crib—still encased in the box—out the back of her car.

  He’d wanted to rail—she could see it in every fiber of his being—but he’d kept silent and asked her in a very strained voice to go open the door so he could bring it in. When she’d stupidly began to argue, he’d sent her a look that could have frozen fire. In the past, he would have taken one look at her struggling to remove the box and just erupted. There would have been yelling on his part, cursing on hers, both just going at it until they were too worked up to even handle being in the same universe with each other. This time, he’d taken a deep breath, leaned the box against the car, then took her face in his hands and kissed her, putting all his frustration into the embrace.

  If his goal at the time had been to circumvent an argument, it worked like gangbusters. The second he was done kissing her, Creigh was no longer thinking about him helping her with the baby furniture; she was thinking about him helping her act out how people got pregnant in the first place.

  A-mei used the flower as a feather and rubbed it against her bare arms. Her cousin was a very tactile person. This wasn’t the first time Creigh had caught her molesting the plants.

  “Hey.” Creigh held her hand out to A-mei, who smiled sheepishly and released the flower.

  “Sorry, lost myself for a second. Back to you now. Have you told him about”—A-mei glanced down Creigh’s stomach, then back up—“you know what, yet?”

  Creigh busied herself to avoid the censoring look she knew A-mei would rightly send her way. “About being pregnant,” she questioned in a flippant tone. “Yes, he knows.”

  “You know that’s not what I mean.” Leaning forward, her cousin lowered her voice. “Have you told him who the father is?”

  Creigh looked away and didn’t answer. The father of her unborn child was still something she’d prefer not to talk about. She hadn’t spoken to him in months, and she didn’t want to. In fact the only thing she wanted more than for him to disappear off the face of the earth was for his identity to be a nonissue for everyone else.

  True to his word, Dean had refrained from bringing the subject up again, but Creigh knew it was still a sore point. It would be for her if the situation were reversed.

  Her silence must have been answer enough. “Oh, honey.” A-mei’s face was sympathetic and completely nonjudgmental, which was why she and she alone was privy to the truth about the baby’s lineage.

  “I know,” Creigh said with a deflated sigh. Nothing anyone could say or do could possibly make her feel any guiltier than she already did. “I know it’s the right thing to do. I just…there just… The timing always seems wrong.”

  “Do you think it will ever feel right?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered honestly. “I try not to think about. It’s hard enough living in the now.”

  “And how’s the now treating you?”

  “Good, but frustrating.” She went back to her first word of choice as she placed the flower in the vase.

  “Why? It sounds like everything is going back to normal, or better than normal. What in the world are you complaining about?”

  “I’m complaining because everything isn’t normal.”

  A-mei’s brow wrinkled. “Come again?”

  “We’re a bunch of grown-ass adults sneaking around.”

  “Sneaking around?” A-mei’s eyes widened with disbelief. “You mean the kids still don’t know you guys are seeing one another.”

  Creigh shook her head. “No, because we don’t want them to get their hopes up in case we realize this isn’t going to work after all. They’ve been through enough, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, and I can see why you think that. But where do they think you’re going once a week when you go out? And who do they think you’re talking to on the phone at all hours of the night?”

  “They think I’m talking to you on the phone.”

  “Thanks for adding me to the web of deceit.”

  Creigh laughed but continued. “And they think Dean and I are going to Lamaze. The kids think he’s agreed to be my coach.”

  “I thought you didn’t start going to that until your third trimester?”

  Creigh smiled sheepishly and picked up the vase. “They don’t know that.” She walked the pretty arrangement over to the floral cooler and set it in the last empty spot.

  “So is that the frustrating part? Lying to the kids?”

  After closing the door, she walked back over to where A-mei sat. With a pensive look on her face, she crossed her arms over her increasingly larger breasts and leaned next to her cousin on the table. “It’s part of it.”

  “Girl, I keep telling you guilt is a useless emotion. And just think—you’re lying to them now; one day they’ll start dating and start lying to you. It’s the circle of life, Simba. It’s just the way it’s supposed to be.”

  Creigh looked up at her cousin fondly. “A-mei, do me a favor.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t reproduce.”

  A-mei shuddered, as if the very idea gave her the creeps. “Girl, please. Having kids is the last thing I ever want to do.”

  “You know you just got yourself pregnant by saying that.”

  A-mei sighed. “Probably.”

  “Good thing you’re not seeing anyone.”

  A-mei shot a quick look to the back room before nodding in agreement. “Yep. Good thing,” she said, turning back to favor Creigh with a smile. “I guess I’ll just have to live vicariously through you. So can I hear about what I’m missing out on?”

  Creigh snorted. “Unless you want to hear about dinners, movies, walks on the beach, and shopping, then you need to turn your attention to someone else, because this girl”—Creigh pointed to herself—“ain’t getting jack crap. We’ve even gotten to the part where kisses have been cheek centered and not lips.”

  “You’re not”—A-mei lowered her voice and leaned in closer to her cousin—“fucking?”

  “No.” Creigh shook her head sadly.

  “Oral or maybe some mutual masturbation?”

  Ever since that first night in the car, they hadn’t done shit. “Zip, zilch, nada.”

  “Why?”

  Creigh shrugged her shoulders and turned around to face the table. She begin to clean up the mess she’d made, all the while thinking over the question A-mei put toward her. Yet the few extra seconds didn’t give her any more answers than the seconds before that. “Honestly, I don’t know.”

  “But you must have a theory?”

  That she had. In boatloads. “Maybe he’s trying to be a good guy and not rush things.” Any more than they al
ready had. “We did say we needed to learn to communicate outside the bedroom.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “Yeah.” But that wasn’t the theory that kept her up at night. “Or…”

  “Or?”

  “He couldn’t be physically attracted to me in my condition.” At six and a half months pregnant, Creigh was a lot bigger than she had been at four. It was almost as if she’d tripled in size. Even her doctor was giving her the side eye and had her on a carb-light diet. Even though it pained her to admit it, she wasn’t exactly bringing the sexy right now.

  “Girl, please. I can’t even count how many times I’ve caught the two of you going hot and heavy when you were pregnant with the other two and much further along.” A-mei shuddered. “I learned my lesson the hard way. I don’t care if you did give me a key. I will never just walk into your house, never ever again.”

  “It wasn’t that bad.” Creigh tried hard to keep her amusement at bay.

  “For you, maybe, but not for me. There are some things that once seen can never be unseen, and trust me, I’ve witnessed enough freaky shit to know that’s true.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “Then take it for this too. Dean is crazy about you. You should see the way his face lights up when you walk into the room. I can’t imagine why you think all of a sudden, because your belly is poking out a bit more, he isn’t into you.”

  “If he is, then why haven’t we made love?” Creigh asked.

  “Maybe because he’s leaving it up to you.” A-mei hopped down from the counter and faced Creigh. “Have you said, ‘Dean, make love to me’?”

  Of course she hadn’t. “No.”

  “Okay, then.” A-mei’s face turned serious. “This is what you’re going to do. You’re going to take the kids to your mom’s house tonight; then you are going to find a sexy maternity negligee—”

  Creigh rolled her eyes. “That’s an oxymoron for so many reasons.”

  “And,” A-mei stressed the word, as she always did when she was overriding anything someone said. “You’re going to invite him over to dinner. When he asks what you’re having, you say pussy, then climb up on the table, pull up your gown, and spread your legs. If he’s not over there on the floor before you can get ‘bon appetit’ out, something is wrong.”

  “You have the dirtiest mind of anyone I know,” Creigh said, but with a smile. Leave it to her pervert cousin to get her out of her funk.

  “And the freest schedule of anyone in the world. If you want to get this little experiment in the works, you should head out early so you can get back in time from dropping your kids off.”

  Eyes wide, Creigh stared at her cousin in shock. She was serious. “You don’t mind closing the store again, even thought it’s not your turn?”

  “Not at all. That’s what cousins are for.”

  Creigh stared at her for a second, weighing the pros and cons. Then common sense kicked in and put her ass in gear. “You are so right. I owe you a massive one.” She pulled her cousin into a quick hug. “I need to go pull the kids out early and take them home to pack.”

  “Then you better get to it.”

  “I am.” She smiled at A-mei. “I’m out.” Acting quickly, Creigh gathered her things from behind the counter and hightailed it out of the store before A-mei could change her mind. Talking to A-mei had really put things into perspective for her. Either she was going to get laid or she was going to find out why.

  ———

  “Guess what?”

  Dean looked up from the coffee machine in the break room and over to his coworker with a bored expression on his face. He didn’t want to play guessing games. Dean just wanted to put in his 7.5 hours and get the hell out of Dodge. It was a feeling he’d been dealing with a lot lately since he’d been promoted to management.

  A suit-and-tie kind of guy, Dean wasn’t. He’d even turned the job down the first time Roland Sparks offered it to him. Dean was more comfortable working on the floor with the boys than sitting in some minuscule little room making schedules and crunching numbers. But Roland wouldn’t hear of Dean turning down the position and had used the magic of the almighty dollar to do the convincing for him.

  “I said, guess what, man?” Buckley repeated a bit louder.

  “What?” Dean said at last as he poured in a generous amount of creamer into the white coffee cup the kids had gotten him last Father’s Day. It read in big blue print, When God created fathers, He said let there be love. It was Dean’s favorite and sometimes the only thing that helped him make it through the day. “What’s the news of the day?”

  The ruddy-faced, heavyset man came closer and lowered his voice. “Elvis has entered the building.”

  Dean groaned. The nickname brought only one person to mind, Trace Sparks, Roland’s son. “No. Say it isn’t so.”

  Buckley wiggled his upper lip in a poor intimation of Elvis, the nickname they’d given Trace for his kinglike behavior. “Uh-huh.”

  “Fuck,” Dean groaned, not happy at all to hear the news. He couldn’t stand Trace; the feeling was more than mutual. “When and for how long?”

  “Rumors are ‘the king’ is finally taking his rightful spot as heir.”

  The last bit of happiness he had hidden deep, deep, deep inside his soul slipped away. Man, it was time to go home. “How’s Roland taking it?”

  “Old man is as happy as a lark.”

  He is the only one. After all these years and everything they’d been through together getting over the death of Dean’s parents—who also happened to be Roland’s best friends—Dean thought of Roland now as his friend. And it was the immense respect Dean had for Roland that forced Dean to keep his mouth shut and not let the older man know just what a wastrel piece of shit he’d fathered. He loved Roland too much to break the other man’s heart, but if there ever were a bigger waste of space than Trace, Dean never had the displeasure of meeting them. “Are we sure he’s not just here for his monthly lording sessions?”

  Trace was a fan of rubbing what he considered his birthright in the face of the men and women who actually made the cans that bankrolled his elaborate vacations and made his carefree life possible. Normally Trace was only in town long enough to check in with his doting parents before whisking away again. Then there were the rare occasions when he actually stayed for a few months to get a refresher course on the company. Dean was seriously hoping Trace was here for the former and not the latter. The last thing he wanted was the little rich kid poking his nose in Dean’s office, offering sage advice on something Trace knew nothing about.

  Even growing up, the two men never got along. It wasn’t anything that had improved with age. With a growl, Dean rustled his hair. “If I ask you nice enough, will you shoot me and put me out of my misery?”

  “You don’t have to ask me nicely at all,” said a deep voice from behind them. “It’s the least I can do for such a good friend.”

  Wouldn’t it fucking figure. Not only was he back, but was in spitting distance, breathing Dean’s recycled air. “No, the least you can do is nothing. And we’re not friends,” Dean said casually with his back still turned to the other man as Buckley fumbled around, his mouth opening and shutting like a gasping fish trying to find the right words to fix this. Dean, on the other hand, didn’t want to fix dick.

  He wasn’t going to give Trace the satisfaction of a stumbling apology. If there was one thing proven time and time again, eavesdroppers never hear any good about themselves, which in Trace’s case wasn’t that all surprising. There was nothing good about him.

  “Dean. Dean. Dean. Now why would you want to say something so mean? After everything we’ve been through together, shared together, you think we’d be on at least friendlike terms.”

  “Think again.” Dean turned around to face the other man, but on his terms and in his time. With coffee cup in hand, he leaned back against the sink and took in Trace, who was leaning against the doorjamb, hands crossed over his chest. As usual, th
e dark-skinned, handsome African American man wore his usual my-shit-don’t-stink smug expression. It coordinated perfectly with the suit that was way too expensive and out of place in a cannery facility. But Dean knew Trace thought dressing for success would impress the low men on the totem pole. He was wrong. It only made them dislike him more.

  “Nice to have you back, Trace. You going to be here long?”

  Trace turned his head to face Buckley and said, “Uh-huh.” His impersonation was far better than Buckley’s and twice as funny since it could only have meant he overheard the two men talking about him.

  That suited Dean just fine. He thought it was about time someone knocked Trace off his high fucking horse. Buckley on the other hand looked as if he’d swallowed his tongue. “I…uhh…I…”

  His stammer seemed to amuse Trace, who grinned and walked into the room. “No worries.” He slapped Buckley on the back as if the two of them were old friends. “I can take a joke as well as the next person, but don’t you have a line you need to go check on?”

  “Yes, sir. Right away.”

  Buckley scampered from the room as if the hounds of hells were on his trail. Dean watched the entire encounter with cool amusement as he sipped his coffee. It was official—Buckley had caught Trace’s attention. His days at the plant were numbered. Pity. Dean had always thought he was a nice enough fellow. As soon as Buckley was gone, Dean turned to Trace. “A line to check. You don’t even know what he does here.”

  “I was giving him an out he so desperately needed. That was me being kind.”

  “No wonder I couldn’t tell.”

  “So I’m the king, huh?”

  “That’s the way you act.” Dean made his way over to the sink to pour out the rest of his coffee.

  “Says who? The haters.”

  Dean rinsed out his cup and sat it upside down in the dish drainer before turning and facing Trace once more. “As far as you’re concerned, haters come in two characters. Type As are the ones jealous of what you have and who you are. Buckley might fall into that category, only because he hasn’t been here long enough yet to become a type B, which I’m a proud member of.”

  “And what type would that be?”