How Forever Feels (3 page)

“Are you sure everything's okay?”

“Yeah, it's fine. Thanks.”

Sitting stock-still, Jayne let her eyes follow Shelley across the room; then she leaned over the table and practically hissed. “Fine? This isn't fine! How can you drop something like that and say everything's fine?”

If it had been Regan or Ellie to freak out first, Maya wouldn't have been surprised, but Jayne…She was usually the quiet one in the bunch, so to have her lean over the table like that, with her hands still glued to her face, and her eyes absolutely wild, Maya couldn't help it—she laughed.

“You think this is funny?” Jayne croaked. “You're talking about having a baby with—”

“Shh!” Still laughing, Maya raised her hands off the table in a “calm down” gesture. “I know, and if you could all maybe take a breath, I was kind of hoping we could talk about it like sane, rational women.”

“Sane?
Sane?
The three of us are perfectly sane, Maya, it's you who has obviously lost her freakin' mind!”

“Maybe, but does that mean we can't talk about it?”

With a sudden jerk, Regan yanked her arm free of her jacket and balled it up on her lap. “Yeah. You talk, I'm going to drink.”

Maya tipped her glass in Regan's direction, took a sip, and set it down again.

“Okay. You know we've gotten together at my apartment a couple times and you know we've talked on the phone, but what you don't know is that both times he came over, he stayed the night—and no, not like that—he slept on the couch.”

“Griffin Carr slept on your couch.” Ellie's voice was flat, even, as though by repeating the words it would be easier for her brain to digest. “Griffin Carr spent the night at your place—”

“Twice,” Jayne said.

“And you made him sleep on the couch.” Ellie exhaled over a slow nod. “Okay.”

“Trust me, Ellie. He was fine with it.”

“How do you know? Apparently you can't even tell when a guy's hitting on you—so how the hell would you know if he wanted to sleep with you?”

“I know when a guy's hitting on me,” Maya said, rolling her eyes. “Usually. The thing with Griffin is that…well, I like him, he's great, and we get along really well, but there's no spark there for either one of us.”

“There's no…” Jayne clamped her mouth shut, growled, then dropped her hands to the table. “Then why the hell are you even thinking about this?”

Maya closed her eyes for a second and exhaled slowly. “Because, Jayne, given where I am in my life right now, it might be my only chance.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Regan cried, her voice a dry croak.

“Just listen. When I found out about Will and Stella…it broke me, it really did.” She lifted her hands to wave off the three of them, who'd all leaned forward again. “I'm fine, I am, and I don't believe every guy out there is a cheating pig like Will. It's just that I was so sure I'd found forever with Will that it never once crossed my mind that I shouldn't trust him, and when I found out what he was doing, I lost that ability to trust. And not just other people, but myself, too.”

Ellie reached across the table and wrapped her hands around Maya's. “And we hate that he did that to you.”

“I know. The thing is, though, Jayne can set me up on dates from now until the second coming, and it won't matter. They're all going to end the same way, because I'll always be wondering if that guy is trustworthy, or if I'm just paranoid, and that's not fair to any guy. I mean, honestly, if I think about it, there are four guys I know who I would trust implicitly and every single one of them is off-limits.”

“Who?” Jayne asked. “Is Nick one of them?”

“Of course. And Carter and Brett, too.” She hesitated a second, then nodded. “And Jack. He might be loyal to Dickhead, and he might have avoided me for the last couple of years, but he'd never hurt anyone like that. Will used to tease him for being soft, but I never thought it was him being soft. I mean, given what he went through as a kid, I always thought it was more that he knew what it was like to be hurt or forgotten, and he never wanted to be the one to make anyone else ever feel that way.”

The three of them sat in silence, watching Maya sip her wine and waiting for her to continue.

“Anyway, in between the two times Griffin and I actually hung out together, there were
a lot
of phone calls that went on for a while, like some of them went on for hours.”

“Holy crap,” Regan murmured.

“By the time he came over the second time, we both knew there wasn't going to be a big romance between us, but we really enjoy each other's company, and I think that's the main reason he asked me.” She chewed her lip for a second then shrugged. “He knows he'd never make a good husband, he told me that himself, but he really wants to be a dad—you should hear him talk about his nieces and nephews, it's adorable. Anyway, with no romantic attachment between us, it sort of makes sense.”

“It does?” Jayne asked. “How?”

“Given the way I am now, I can't see myself ever getting married again, and until Griffin showed up, I had written off any chance I had of having children, too. But why should I? It's the twenty-first century, single women have children all the time, for various reasons, and they do it alone. But I wouldn't be alone; I'd have him to share everything with.”

“And how will you share everything with you living here and him living in L.A.?”

“I don't know,” Maya admitted. “I haven't figured that out yet. I haven't even agreed to this yet, I just wanted to hash it out with you guys so you could help me with the figuring-it-out part.”

Regan and Jayne both spoke at the same time.

“Do it.”

“Don't do it.”

Ellie just sighed and shook her head. “I don't know, Maya. I just don't know. This is huge.”

“I know.”

“This isn't what you want,” Jayne said, her voice gentle but firm. “You've always wanted the whole thing—the husband, the home, the kids—and I think it's wrong for you to settle for anything less than that.”

Regan watched Jayne as she spoke; then she turned to Maya and looked at her with something Maya could only describe as fierceness.

“You've always wanted to have kids, Maya, and if you're both in complete agreement about what's what, you should do it. Don't let the chance pass you by, especially since these other two don't seem to be in any hurry to make me an aunt.”

It wasn't often Regan said anything about the fact that she and Carter couldn't have kids of their own, so Maya reached for Regan's hand and gave it a tight squeeze.

“I don't know,” Ellie kept saying. “It's just…wow.”

“Yeah. He's flying in at the end of next month so we can talk about it face-to-face, so I need to have some idea of what I want to do by then.”

“Do it.”

“Don't do it.”

“I don't know.”

Funny how the three of them echoed perfectly what she was thinking herself.

“All right, look, if you absolutely have to tell her, at least wait until the timing's right…and that's what deathbeds are for.”

Chandler Bing,
Friends,
“The One the Morning After”

Jack was still smiling the next morning.

He could have ducked out the side door last night, and Snip never would've known he'd been there. Hell, he'd spent the last two years avoiding her; he could've kept on doing it, but one look at her sitting there with her friends and he was right back at that damn Hawaiian party four years ago, wondering why a pretty girl like her wasn't surrounded by a bunch of guys and wondering if he should give it a shot with her.

It had taken him a long time to get over that feeling the first time, and yet one smile from her last night screwed him up all over again.

And he didn't even care. He should, because it meant he'd have to find a way to get over that feeling all over again, but for now, he just didn't care. It was Snip and he liked the way she screwed him up. He liked the way those blue eyes looked at him with wonder, like she was honestly interested in whatever he said, and he really liked the way one smile from her sent everything inside him into a complete riot.

He wasn't stupid. He'd learned early on that what he wanted or liked rarely mattered. If someone in his foster home wanted what he had, they usually took it—whether it was his LEGOs, his books, or even his dessert—and being as scrawny as he'd been, he'd always let them. It was what it was, and he'd learned to live with it. That all changed, though, when he moved in with the Carsons. They treated him fairly, and unlike some of the other people he'd lived with, Burt and Genie used the money they received for fostering him to actually care for him and make sure he had what he needed, and a lot of that included involving him in every sport out there.

They pushed Jack to do better, to
be
better, and he and Will used that to challenge each other in everything from school to sports to girls. It seemed to take forever, but with the help of the school weight room, Jack finally started to fill out, and while he'd turned into the better athlete, he had nothing on Will when it came to getting girls. Maya wasn't the only woman Jack had lost to Will, but she was the only one he ever regretted losing.

Maybe
losing
wasn't the right word, since Jack hadn't even tried to win her, but any chance he might have had with Snip vanished the second Will had shouldered his way between them at that party. Why wouldn't Maya fall for Will?

Will was a smart, good-looking guy who had the ability to make everyone around him feel both important and at ease at the same time. It was one of the many reasons he made such a great teacher. Jack, on the other hand, had gone from tall and scrawny to big, goofy, and awkward, especially around pretty women. Funny thing was, though, he'd never felt that way around Snip, not even when his clumsy attempt to pick her up that night had ended in disaster.

It was the damnedest thing, like Snip understood him even when he wasn't sure what the hell he was feeling. The night of the wedding rehearsal, he'd tried so hard to pretend Genie's words didn't affect him, but Snip knew they did, and she'd tried to soften the blow by poking fun at it.

It started with a copy of
Cool Hand Luke,
and then over the next nine or ten months, she sent copies of
Papillon, Escape from Alcatraz,
and
The Fugitive.
The last one,
The Shawshank Redemption,
showed up with a Get Out of Jail Free card taped across the front.

A couple weeks after that one arrived, her marriage imploded and he'd been pulled into the Carson camp, where, for some crazy reason, everyone agreed that while Will had screwed up, Maya's reaction to it had been too extreme by half.

And as he'd always done when he disagreed with the family, Jack just kept his mouth shut and his head down.

One of the hardest things he'd ever done was ignore that first email that came in from Maya after she'd left Will, and the only reason he'd done it was because he had no idea what he was supposed to say to her. He had saved each email she'd sent, four in total; he just hadn't responded to any of them.

He thought Will was a fuckwad for what he did, but he couldn't say that out loud; it would've been disloyal to the Carsons, and after all they'd done for him, the least he could do was keep those kinds of thoughts to himself. The easiest way to do that had been to avoid Maya until he was sure he could talk to her without throwing Will under the bus, where he clearly belonged.

So for two years he'd avoided Snip and tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to distance himself from Will, especially where Stella was concerned. He'd skipped any Carson family gatherings if Stella was going to be there, and whenever one of them mentioned her name, Jack did what he did and kept his mouth shut.

Two years was a long time, and even as Maya had come tripping and spiraling toward him last night, he still hadn't been sure how he was going to handle it; but she'd made it easy for him, as she always had.

God almighty he'd missed her.

Pretty as ever. Her blond hair hung a little longer than the last time he'd seen her, her eyes were a blue he'd never been able to describe, and her scent…it was the same warm, smooth perfume she'd stopped wearing because Will hadn't liked it.

Jack liked it. He always had, and knowing she was wearing it again made him smile even more.

He parked his Jeep next to a black truck at the Luna Building and let Pete out to have a sniff around. Keith had sent pictures of the grounds a month ago, but since then, the landscapers had been in and turned the rock-filled lot into an oasis of granite slab walkways and what would be, come spring, an abundance of color.

This late in September, though, the only colors were green and brown.

The side door of the building opened and out stepped a guy in a faded Garth Brooks T-shirt with a clipboard in one hand and a travel mug in the other. Pete barked once then wagged his butt over to make friends.

“Hey, pup.” Shifting the clipboard under his arm, the guy seemed only too happy to oblige Pete with a good head scratch before grinning up at Jack. “You Jack?”

“Yeah.”

“Nick Scott, good to finally meet you in person.” He chuckled slowly as he shook Jack's hand. “This must be Pete, then. I hear he's part of the reason you made it out of there alive last night.”

“Yeah.” Jack laughed. “I'm pretty sure I would've got my ass kicked if it wasn't for him.”

“Probably.” He waved the clipboard toward the door. “Wanna come up?”

“Sure, I'll just put Pete back in the—”

“Bring him,” Nick said, already waving Pete through and up the stairs. “How's Keith doing?”

“Surgery's booked for tomorrow morning down at St. Mark's, and if I know Keith, he's not going to stay down there a second longer than he has to.”

Nick nodded slowly. “My cousin's a doctor at St. Mark's, and he tells me Keith's got the best orthopedic guy working on him.”

“Good, but he seems more concerned about what you were doing here than what they were going to do to his knee,” Jack said, forcing a grin. “Made me promise to keep him updated.”

“Go on in, then, and have a look.” Pushing open the door, Nick led Jack into the massive space, then stood back and let him take it in.

“Holy shit.”

The entire south wall of the loft was nothing but glass giving an unobstructed view of both the sound that fed in from the Pacific as well as The Chief, an enormous granite dome that attracted rock climbers from all over the world.

Jack was all for exercise and challenging himself, but to his way of thinking, it was a whole new kind of crazy to let your life dangle two thousand feet up with just a rope and a couple carabiners.

“Is this your first time in town?” Nick asked.

“No.” It took him another second, but Jack finally blinked away from the view. “Pete and I used to come up when Will first moved here, but it's, uh, it's been a while. I'd forgotten what the view was like.”

With a brief nod, Nick tugged the blueprints off the wall, where they hung by the door. “From what Keith told me, this place will be a smaller replica of the Seattle unit, so you probably already know what's what, but if you want, we can do a quick walk around.”

“Yeah, sure.”

As Pete wandered, nose down, tail swishing, Jack followed Nick back through the framework of two-by-fours erected throughout the space.

“Reception area of course, and this wall we're putting up here will divide the bulk of the space in two; this side will be the ‘business' end: conference room, three offices, and the theater, just like Seattle. The other side of the wall, though, is where the good stuff happens.”

TMJ Games never skimped when it came to encouraging creativity in their people, and this place would be no different, but listening to Nick describe it made Jack appreciate it all the more. Bright open spaces, gaming stations, screening rooms, a full kitchen stocked with food and beverages for the taking, and a large fully equipped gym would surround the two huge semicircle couches in the middle, where they could gather to brainstorm or just be comfortable while they worked.

Hammock chairs would hang by the window and there'd be a separate room at the far end filled with arcade and board games.

“Art Hague will do the inspections,” Nick said. “He's tough, but he's fair. He has our schedule and has already penciled us in, so that'll help keep everything moving.”

When Jack blinked back at him, Nick frowned.

“What?”

“No offense, it's just…Maya tells me if anyone can get this done on time, it's you, but I'm looking around here and there's…”

Nick nodded. “A lot to do.”

“Yeah.”

“You're right,” he said. “It's a big job on a tight schedule, and you don't know me from Adam, so I get your concern, but here's the thing: I have jobs lined up for the next eighteen months plus, and if I'm late on this one, that makes everything else late, too, and I don't do ‘late.'

“You want to be in here by the first part of November, then that's what's going to happen, because that's what you're paying me to make happen.” He paused, shrugged and grinned slowly. “And because Keith promised me one of the first copies of the new Apollo game.”

If Jack hadn't already liked this guy, that little speech would have sold him ten times over.

“So what you're saying then is that the biggest help I can be right now is to get the hell out of your way and let you work, is that about right?”

“Pretty much.” With a low chuckle, Nick lifted the rolled prints with a shrug. “Sounds like my crew's coming up the stairs now, so hang around if you want, but don't be offended if they don't stop to chat.”

And they didn't. Delmar, Kyle, and Brett filed into the space, shook Jack's hand, ruffled Pete's fur a little, then got straight to work.

“Is that it?” Jack asked, glancing over his shoulder. “There's only four of you?”

Nick laughed as he strapped on his tool belt. “It's a good day when we have four; Brett's a cop, works four on, four off, so he's not always here. You met Ellie last night, well, Brett's her…I don't know…what are we supposed to call you and Ellie, Brett?”

“I'm the love of her life.” The guy's expression didn't so much as flicker, just stayed stoic and even. “Best thing that ever happened to her. She's lucky to have me.”

He hadn't even finished saying it before Nick and the other two barked out laughs.

“Yeah, right,” Nick choked. “I think you got that backwards, buddy.”

For a second there, it looked like Brett was going to smile, but that was as far as it got before he bent down to get his tool belt.

“Do you need anything from me?” Jack asked. “No? Then come on, Pete, let's get out of their way.”

After making sure Nick had his number, Jack led Pete down to his Jeep and headed back to the hotel, where his own work waited.

Starting a new project was always a little scary, and this one was no different, but he'd stared down enough blank pages over the years to know the only way to squelch the fear was to just start scribbling until an idea germinated and took on its own life.

The difference this time, though, was they'd all agreed
Apollo4
needed something new in it, something the previous three games, and games like it, didn't; and for the life of him—and the rest of the team—he had no idea what that should be.

Sitting there at the narrow hotel desk, there was no scribbling or germinating going on. All he could do was tap his fountain pen against his legal pad until the ink seeped through the paper, leaving a growing black blot through to the next sheet. It might not be the “norm” in his profession to write with ink and paper, but he never took an idea to the computer until he had it sorted out first, and at this rate, it was going to be a while before that damn cursor did anything other than blink at him.

To save the tip of his pen—a shiny black Montblanc Will and Snip had given him—he finally gave up and walked away from the desk. Music was always good inspiration, so he dug his headphones out of his bag, plugged them into his phone and tried to get comfortable in the wooden-backed chair by the table. Eyes closed, feet up and Avenged Sevenfold cranked loud enough to drown out a nuclear explosion…that should do it.

Song after song…nothing.

Okay, maybe some TV. If he focused on something else, his brain might relax enough that the missions for the new game would make themselves clear.

A couple episodes of
Criminal Minds,
a round of
Family Feud,
and an hour of laps in the hotel pool later, Jack's brain still felt like the black inkblot on his notepad. All he could think about, all he could do, was stare at his cellphone and wonder how long he should wait for Snip to call before it'd be okay for him to call her.