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“You already apologized.”
“I wanted to do it again. And again and again, until we were friends like we used to be.”
“Syd, we never stopped being friends. Plus, it’s the babies. They do that to you, you know? Make you irritable. When I was pregnant with Josiah, I tried dicing an avocado, but the cubes didn’t come out right. I…had a moment.”
Sydney laughed. “While I know there’s some truth to that, let’s not pretend I wasn’t a raging bitch before I got pregnant.”
Ayesha shrugged. “You were never raging.”
Sydney laughed harder.
Ayesha felt a smile try to take hold of her face.
“I miss everyone,” Sydney began. “But I miss you the most. I always appreciated the way you treated me. My parents coddled me, you know? Me and my sister. They sheltered us without realizing it was because they assumed, without them, we would fail. So failure, abandonment…it all became like a fate worse than death to me. But you, Eesh? You told me the truth every single time.”
“Selfishly.”
“How’s that?”
“I was falling for your husband.”
“Ex-husband,” Sydney corrected. “And had I gotten out of your way, he would have been happier much earlier. That night you guys walked on the beach in Malibu, I watched you from the window. I know Joel. I knew then that he was starting to feel more than friendship with you. Honestly, it scared me.”
“With how long you two were together, of course, losing him would scare you.”
“That wasn’t the only reason.” Sydney leaned forward and plucked lint from the toe of the right sock. “I knew, back then, that I was looking at the love of his life. I knew the minute he realized it, he would see that what we had was…okay. Good, at times, but too rocky to be considered successful. Marriages are challenging, yes, but if you feel like you’re in an active war zone, something’s wrong. Then I kept putting the blame on him because I was too afraid to change, but Joel is agoodman.”
She knew he was.
A rarity of his species.
“And look how I treated him.” Sydney wrinkled her nose. “I tried that ‘princess’ shit with Dmitri. He told me that he wanted us to be in an exclusive relationship. I told him I wanted to play the field. He said ‘okay’ and walked off.”
Ayesha chuckled. “The man’s abillionaire, Syd. He’s not used to taking orders.”
“Oh, I know that now.”
“What happened next?”
“My desperate ass chased him—literally. It didn’t help that we were in the Caribbean. Tequila might have also been involved. I told him I was sorry, and he told me it wasn’t enough to apologize. An apology didn’t mean he would do what I wanted. Either I would agree to be with him, or we were done because he wasn’t going to share me or waste time entertaining multiple women. ‘Time is priceless, Sydney,’ is what he said. ‘We can build something together or not, but I won’t waste time playing at a relationship. I didn’t get to be as successful as I am by bullshitting.’ Eesh, the man laid ground rules.”
“Bet you got pregnantthatnight, didn’t you?”
Sydney patted her stomach. “So pregnant. Birth control didn’t stand a chance, and even when we knew I’d missed a pill, we didn’t always remember to use backup protection. After that, all he had to do was say my name, and my legs opened.”
Ayesha laughed.
The stress in her body eased.
Sydney gave her a moment before asking, “Ready to talk yet?”
She rubbed her temples, trying to massage her thoughts and memories back into place. “A man got into the Malibu house and terrorized Theo. Joel told me earlier. I’m not handling it well.”
“I mean, I go for walks sometimes to clear my head. That’s normal.”
“In the cold?”
“It’s not that cold outside, Ms. Maui, but yes. Being pregnant is hot. No one told me that.”
