Alex (Heartbreakers & Troublemakers Book 3) Read online

  I saw the blue car parked in my driveway before I pulled up in front of the house. As soon as I saw it, I didn’t even want to go home anymore. I needed to get changed and get back on the road, and now I had to deal with this. As I pulled up, Cassie hopped out of the car and leaned against it waiting for me. If I treated her like she wasn’t there she would have to leave, wouldn’t she? What the hell was so important that she needed to come to the house? I never invited her over.

  I took my helmet off and made a beeline for the door, ignoring her. I heard her walking up behind me, calling my name, telling me to stop. Unlocking the door slowed me down and let her catch up to me.

  “Alex, why haven’t you been answering your phone?” she demanded.

  “It’s good to see you too, Cassie,” I told her, concentrating on getting the door unlocked. I opened it up, and she followed me inside. Of course, by all means, person I didn’t invite into the house, make yourself comfortable.

  “I’ve been trying to call you all afternoon.”

  “I was at work, Cass. What do you want?” I had to get changed. I started upstairs to my bedroom.

  “Where are you going?” she asked, following me up.

  “What did you want to talk about, Cass, I have to leave? Hurry it up. She followed me into my room where I had begun undressing. It was nothing she hadn’t seen before. I had to wear the white button-down shirt and the dark khaki pants. That was what she would be expecting. It wasn’t my favorite outfit; not that comfortable, and pretty boring. I looked like a different person wearing it, but it was what I had to wear.

  Cassie was in her uniform. She was a nurse. I never really listened that well when she told me her shifts, but she was either on the way to work or on the way back home from work. Her hair, which was short and blonde, was tied in a ponytail.

  “Alex, I think I’m pregnant,” she said. She had sat on the bed—another thing I had not invited her to do.

  I frowned and rolled my eyes doing the buttons on my shirt.

  “Why the fuck are you telling me?” I asked her.

  “Because it’s yours.”

  “Nope, that’s impossible.” I was too late to stop and be mad at Cassie for wasting my time like this. She was nuts. It wasn’t me. I pulled my jeans off and pulled on the khaki pants. The long sleeves of the shirt covered my tattoos. Combined with the dress pants and shoes that weren’t combat boots I actually looked like a guy you wanted to come visit you. I looked like I fixed computers and had a 401(k). The perfect son.

  “Condoms aren’t a hundred percent.”

  “They aren’t, but neither are you,” I said to her.

  “What?” she asked. I straightened out my collar and tucked the shirt into the pants. I looked like such a square. These were literally the only halfway formal clothes I even owned.

  “Are you really going to stand there and try to make me believe that I’m the only guy you’re fucking?”

  She looked pissed about that. I didn’t mean anything by it. She was a grown woman. She could share her pussy as far and wide as she wanted to; I just wanted her to be honest about it. Could she be pregnant? Sure, but there was no way it was mine.

  “I can’t believe you just said that.” I caught sight of her in the mirror. Her eyes were light blue, and she was staring daggers at my back. I turned around to face her.

  “Cassie, please, I don’t need this from you.”

  “I just told you that I’m pregnant.”

  “How far along?”

  “What?”

  “If you’re pregnant, how far along is the fetus? How old is it?”

  “Alex, a home pregnancy test doesn’t tell you all that.”

  “But it tells you who the father of the child is?” I challenged.

  “Coming here was a bad idea. I thought you would want me to tell you in person about the birth of your first child.”

  “Who said this would be my first?” I joked. She was getting agitated.

  “Screw you Alex!” she said getting up and heading for the door. I wanted a little bit just to let her go, but then she would just be mad the next time we saw each other.

  “Wait, wait, wait, Cassie,” I said, stopping her.

  “Let me go.”

  “All I want you to do is be sure before you tell me something like that. We talked about this. I told you that you aren’t the only person I’m seeing. I know I’m not the only person you’re seeing either.”

  She looked like she wanted to protest but she held her tongue. I was right. There was that thing that people said about naming your child after a virtue; they would grow up and rebel against it as hard as they could. Cassie’s name was short for Chastity, and she was not a virgin, in any sense. She knew the inevitable jokes that would come when people found that out about her, so she went by Cassie.

  I knew for a fact that I was not the only person she was seeing, and I was okay with it. Was it weird that it was someone I used to go to school with? A little, but she kept coming back, so my only assumption was that the relationship was open or not serious.

  “I can’t tell Travis; he’s going to be so mad.”

  Travis Hartman. If the rumors were true, he had gone to school for football, but an injury stuck him in a job as a physical therapist. Like me. Unlike me, though, he had gone into something sports related where I had said fuck it and left that shit behind. We hadn’t been close or anything during college; we had just been teammates. I didn’t know what Travis would say, but I did know that I didn’t care. It wasn’t my problem. It wasn’t my problem, and it wasn’t my baby.

  “You told me. Why don’t you just wait till the kid is born? You’ll know pretty easily whether the kid is Travis’s.”

  Travis was black, the way the child would be when she had it. She shot me an unimpressed look.

  “It’s not Travis’s,” she said.

  I raised my eyebrows. Really? There were more? I knew there was definitely one other, and since Travis’s name was the only one that ever came up, I thought that was it. I wondered whether the other guys knew about me.

  “Well, then you have your answer. If it’s not mine, and not Travis’s, then it’s the other guy’s.” I made sure I had everything I needed in my pockets and left the room, heading down the stairs. She followed after me.

  “Where are you going; I need to talk to you?”

  Still? About what? We had already established that it wasn’t mine. What else was there to say? I was done, and I was late.

  “Now is not a good time, Cassie. Really. Come back tonight if you want, but right now I have to run.”

  “I’m not free tonight; I have to pick up another shift at the hospital.”

  “Then just text me or something when you are. Really, Cass. Leave,” I said. My back was to her, but I heard her leaving. Whatever it was, it could wait. It would have to wait. I left soon after her, locking the house up and heading for my bike. I always got flowers when I would visit. Red peonies; they were her favorite. I didn’t want to skip out on them because I was late, but I most likely would have to.

  Cassie hadn’t bother shutting the door after her which was fine because I was on my way out, anyway. Apparently, she was pregnant. What was she expecting me to say? Was I supposed to congratulate her? I wondered who the lucky or unlucky guy was because it sure as shit wasn’t me.

  I had the thought which really by now was just routine. Should I get a vasectomy? It was the option that seemed to make the most sense with my lifestyle. I had almost done it enough times that I would likely never fucking go through with it. That was my balls. I didn’t want kids, but I wasn’t going to let some guy at the cut-balls clinic take my nuts. I didn’t want kids, but I liked being able to have them.

  It was like, every time I had sex could be another child but nope, not if I had anything to say about it. That was power right there. Wouldn’t getting that like, fuck with gains at the gym too? Would my voice get higher? I didn’t want to know. I wasn’t doing it. I hadn’t gotten a g
irl pregnant yet, and I wasn’t about to start trying.

  Cassie and I had met here in Sactown. She was working at the hospital where I had taken Mom a couple of times for her scans and shit. She had been nice to Mom, but nice to me too. Maybe too nice. I didn’t complain—anything to make the move back home easier.

  It had been about a month and Mom was finally settled and moved into the facility. I had managed to finagle my way into a job at a forge, and it was beginning to feel like home again.

  Almost.

  Colin was married with kids now. Mom was losing her mind and lived in an assisted living community. I wasn’t an athlete anymore… a lot had changed, but the important things were still the same.

  Like the house. Mom hadn’t changed it when we had moved out. My room. Her room. Colin’s room; everything was still the same. I was living in the house since Colin lived with his family. It was hers, she owned it, and now it was mine.

  Having Mom live at home and hiring nurses was an option, but the facility offered treatment that they said would slow down the progress of her Alzheimer’s. It wouldn’t cure it. Nope. Alzheimer’s didn’t have a cure. She was dying. She was dying and forgetting everything that had ever happened to her slowly, every day.

  Taking care of her was too much for Colin since he had his own family to worry about. Having her be around people and things that were familiar was the main reason I had moved back. After I couldn’t play football anymore, there was no reason to live over there, anyway. I had just stayed. I don’t know why I hadn’t moved back earlier. The weather was shit, and I didn’t know anybody.

  She had raised us alone. Two knucklehead boys and she had done a pretty good job. I mean, look at Colin; two kids and a wife. I didn’t have any of those things, but at least I wasn’t in prison, or anything. I also wasn’t playing in the NFL but that sort of wasn’t my fault. Any fuck-ups that I had had though were my fault and had nothing to do with her parenting.

  I wore the same thing when I would go to see her so she would remember me. She usually did, but the nurses told me that sometimes she would be looking at pictures of us and she wouldn’t be able to name Colin or me. I didn’t know if looking the same every time she saw me actually helped, and it was probably more for me than for her, but I didn’t need to tell anybody that.

  I got to the facility at forty minutes past five. That meant it was nearly dinner time. Usually, I would find her outside with one of the staff. Since she had a degenerative brain disease, they would do all these different activities with them, like putting puzzles together and painting to help them remain as sharp as possible.

  Coming here was a downer like you wouldn’t believe. It was so hard seeing people—grownups—being cared for like they were little kids again. I couldn’t imagine. A nurse led me out to where she was in the garden. She was at a table playing chess with a carer. There was a cat in her lap, and she had on a sunhat. She was way too young to live in an old folk’s home. I didn’t have any flowers today; hopefully, she’d still be happy to see me.

  “Hey, Mom,” I said, walking up to her and her chess partner. She didn’t look up. Her chess partner, a part of the staff, told her gently that she had a guest. She looked up at me.

  “You’re here to see me?” she asked. She was smiling, and I wanted to smile back, but I couldn’t. She didn’t recognize me. It came and went. It wasn’t permanent this early in her disease, but it still sucked. The staff had warned me, but nothing really prepared you for a time when your own mother would look at you and not know who you are.

  “It’s me, Mom. It’s Alex,” I said carefully.

  “Alex? My son Alex lives in Maine,” she said. At least she still knew she had a son named Alex. Trying to convince her that it was me would just agitate her and stress her out.

  “Does he? He works there?” I asked.

  “He’s going to college. He’s a football player.”

  I nodded and kept her talking about her son Alex. It was a bad day. She was usually more lucid than this, but it wasn’t her fault. I stayed till it was time for her to go to dinner. I felt like shit. Maybe talking to Cassie about how I had made her pregnant would have been a better use of my time.

  I knew it wasn’t, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t feel it.

  3

  Olivia

  Friday night was date night for the happy couple.

  Unfortunately for me, this particular date night was the one that Iris and Rick had decided to spend at home. I wasn’t mad or anything. I couldn’t be mad; I had no place to be, but I was looking forward to them being away for a few hours. I would have been at the house with Hayden, but once he went to sleep, I could pop popcorn and eat it while watching Absolutely Fabulous, or something trashy on Bravo.

  I just had to take the party to my bedroom because Iris and Rick would be using downstairs. It was times like these that the offer James had made once for the position of roommate under his roof sounded better and better. I liked living with her, but I was a twenty-three-year-old woman. I wasn’t going to willingly live with my sister and her fiancé. That place wasn’t going to be available for that much longer. I had to get it while the vacancy was still open. I would ask him later tonight, or maybe tomorrow.

  If I had a date tonight, this wouldn’t even be a problem that I had to experience. It was my own fault. Where the hell was my date? That’s right. I didn’t have one. Dating was hard. I knew I was getting desperate when I found myself typing the letters T-I-N-D-E-R into the search bar of my phone’s app store. I had dated throughout college, but once I graduated all that tomfoolery had stopped. I wasn’t looking for a relationship because I was in a really transitional period at the moment, but that didn’t mean I didn’t want someone to watch The Real Housewives of Orange County with on a Friday night.

  I was in the kitchen with Iris. I was making myself a dinner of things that were not traditionally eaten for dinner. Rick was getting the two of them Thai food for dinner, and I had passed because the Pop Chips and Cherry Coke in the fridge seemed a lot more appetizing. I spent so much time around kids I ate like one. I unearthed a pot of hummus made with picante sauce to have with the chips. There. Better. Hummus was almost a vegetable, and if you counted the cherry flavoring in the Coke as a real fruit, I was doing great.

  “What time is Rick coming back?” I asked her.

  “Not sure. Did you want him to bring you something back?”

  “A hot Italian would be nice,” I grumbled.

  “God, all you do is complain about being single. You girls have it great,” said Iris. She was holding my phone, looking at something. I didn’t know—or care. I had nothing to hide. If she really wanted to go in there and read what little Danny’s mom wanted me to know about the food her son could and couldn’t eat, she could knock herself out.

  “Hm, you have a loving fiancé, a gorgeous four-year-old and one on the way. By all means, trade with me. Your life sounds so hard and empty.”

  She giggled but didn’t say anything. It truly was not fair. She was my big sister, and I had always looked up to her but when I was in high school, and she in college, she had fucked up. She had gotten pregnant at twenty, just before the end of her sophomore year. I was graduating high school, and the fallout from that was spectacular to watch. Our mom had been a single mother when she had both Iris and me, and it made sense to think she would be more sympathetic with her, but nope. She and Dad, my biological dad and Iris’s stepdad, had told her that she had to raise her kid.

  By raise her kid, they had meant drop out, get a job and earn money in order to raise her kid. They had helped her find a house and helped care for the kid while she worked, but it was still way too much for me; the high school kid who thought I had a role model. I had idolized her for being so pretty and smart and then suddenly I was an aunt and had become ‘the good daughter’ while she was the bad one.

  She became the one who had become pregnant at the wrong time. Our parents didn’t shame her for it or anything, but
they weren’t jumping for joy. Things had worked themselves out in the end because look who had the happy family and who was eating potato chips and sugar flavored poison for dinner, alone on a Friday night. When was I going to get my come up? I had been busting my hump at work. Maybe when I finally moved out things would start working out for me. It was too late for me to follow the Sanger women’s family tradition of becoming inconveniently pregnant and then meeting a really great guy afterward like magic. I would have to go the more traditional route.

  It had worked for Mom and for Iris. Was hoping for a third time too much to ask for? I was twenty-three already, getting pregnant now just wouldn’t have the same clout. Iris giggled again, looking at my phone.

  “What are you looking at?” I asked.

  “I miss dating,” she said. She must have had one of my apps open. One of them—I had a few. Not that many, just like, three, and the OKC one I didn’t even use anymore. The dating apps. The ones that I kept in a folder together so they weren’t just there embarrassing me when someone could see the screen of my phone in a line at the bank or the post office or something.

  “Whatever you do, just don’t swipe right,” I said to her. I had emptied the chips into a bowl and the Coke into a glass because that seemed a little classier than eating and drinking from the packages they had come out of. Who was I kidding? I didn’t want Coke; I wanted wine. There was no alcohol in the house because Iris was pregnant. Lucky me.

  “God, some of these guys are so hot,” she said. Iris and Rick had gotten together in real life, so she didn’t know about the right-swipe-life. Right after she had had Hayden, she had had to leave college to get a job and take care of her kid. Mom had gotten pregnant with Iris under similar circumstances but had handled it in a different way than her mother had. She had this whole tough love approach where she didn’t cut Iris off completely, just made her stand in her decision. It was her belief that since she was having that baby, she was going to mother it, even if that meant discontinuing her studies until a later time.