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“Start having babies in my mid-thirties, or skip that phase and adopt? Skip it all together? Honestly, I’m growing tired of the travel life. Hell, I’m just… too old to sleep on shitty hotel beds ninety percent of the time. I miss my apartment. The cracks in the bricks. The creak of the wood on those first steps in the entryway.” She huffed out a tired sounding breath. “Now, the network really loves the idea of basing in New York but will accommodate the West Coast. I just have to decide where I want to plant roots for the foreseeable future. And I have to have some kind of family nearby. Alice would at least be close to LA. But I need to decide quickly, because they need to get the ball rolling on all the legal shit.”
“Ahh. That’s where I factor in?”
“Obviously,” she groaned, her defined shoulders curling in. “You’re everything I’ve ever wanted for me. But… this show is more than I even dreamed of for the vision.”
“And you’re worried about the distance?” She nodded into her hands, and I settled my fingers around her wrist, gently guiding one away from her face. “Look at me, Pix.” Slowly, eyes downcast, she lifted her face before tentatively meeting my gaze. “For once in my life, my decision is perfectly clear, and I need you to hear me. Are you listening?” When she finally nodded, I said, “I come to you.”
“What?” she squeaked, eyes going wide. Wider, when I shrugged my shoulders. “Your life is Mistyvale.”
“My life is sitting in this chair, stressing over losing me or her dreams. That’s not a choice I’m willing to compromise. I’ve been thinking about this a lot the last few days, and the answer is easy.” My palm settled against her back. “I’ll move where you move. I have an exceptional track record at Mistyvale U. I’ll put in my notice, finish out the academic year in the spring, and find a new placement in whatever city you decide to build our life in.”
“Brod, that’s too much. Your family, your job, your gym, your team. The vision for the youth center. You’d be losing too much.”
“No, baby. Continuing life without you now that I know what it feels like to wake with you in my arms and call you mine… that’s losing too much.”
Elora
Hand-in-hand, we walked down the icy streets of Chicago on our way back from the restaurant down the block. Broderick’s declarations had scrambled my brain like eggs, and after one too many minutes of me resting in his arms without speech, he pulled me to my feet and declared it was time to eat. He wasn’t wrong. I’d been so focused on my meetings, on planning and researching, that I’d skipped right past lunch time into early-bird dinner. Luckily for me, my man didn’t mind a lunch-dinner combo, and said nothing about how quickly I inhaled a plate full of food before asking the server for seconds.
“Better?” he finally asked as we passed by a rather ruckus bar, despite it being an early Monday evening.
“Mm-hmm,” I assured, even though I wasn’t feeling remotely better about his proposition. Broderick and his family weren’t Rhodes family intertwined, but he was close with his parents, and even closer with his surviving grandfather. He coached the high school football team with Jameson and volunteered around town when he wasn’t occupied by filling the minds of the next generation. Taking him from all of that… it planted this white-hot kind of pain in my chest. Guilt, I realized. But he seemed so sure. So damn certain that I was worth hocking everything he knew aside.
“You bullshitting me, Rhodes?”
“Mm-hmm,” I repeated, shooting an apologetic glance his way and earning a laugh.
“Cut it out, baby. I overthink enough for both of us. Don’t do that. And definitely don’t tell me you’re okay if you’re not.”
“It’s just…a lot. There are solutions for this. I know there are. I just…haven’t found them yet.”
“You know one constant I’ve learned in all my reading, El?”
I shook my head before deciding the crack in the concrete was particularly fascinating as we stepped over it.
“In all my books. Philosophy. Plays. History. Literature. Fantasy and romance and historical fiction. The one constant is this; love isn’t a fixed resource, El. It’s not going anywhere. It never dissipated when you left town, or when I hid behind Sarah?—”
“The bimbo,” I cut in, shooting him a pointed glance. God, how I’d loathed that woman.
“Yes, that. When I hid behind the bimbo,” he chuckled. “And it won’t diminish now, no matter how tricky it is for us to get situated. I’ve loved you for nearly as long as I can remember.”
“Same.”
“So, trust me, when I tell you I’m prepared to do whatever it takes to stay beside you now that I have you.”
The bridge of my nose burning, hands shaking, I nodded before tugging him to a stop and stealing a kiss as the air nipped at my icy skin. When, at last, it seemed the oxygen returned to my lungs, I turned to continue our walk, but Broderick held steady, jerking his chin up. I followed his gaze to a tan sign that read The Happy Potter.
“Wanna throw some clay?” he asked, a chipper little hop between his words.
“I think I’m good,” I said, shaking my head.
“Come on El. Let me teach you something for once. To many firsts, right?”
“I suck at arts and crafts,” I protested, but didn’t resist when he stepped past me and led me over to the front door. “This is a terrible idea. My junior high turtle looked like a Picasso painting gone very, very wrong.”
“Oh, I remember,” he said cheekily, and I peeled my hand from his to smack him on the ass. “But I’m actually decent.”
“Not helping. So, you can sculpt some custom vase to sell at auction and I can make deformed Dumbo, the fucked-up turtle?”
