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That everything just changed.
I take slow breaths until the smoke clears and I suck in nothing but fresh air. My knuckles are sore from how hard I grip the steering wheel and I roll my shoulders to force them to relax.
“Don’t be like him.” The words come out hard. They’ve driven me like a mantra since I was a teenager and first saw my own father for what he was. A bully, a coward, an abuser that hid behind the Lord’s word.
Out of nowhere a laugh escapes my lips because the first time I ever noticed Briggs beyond being a girl from my church was when I was a scared and angry ten-year-old boy. She was eight. I’d gotten into a fight at school with one of her friends. She stared me square in the eye, unafraid of me even then. She jabbed me in the chest with her small finger. Her eyes were squinted in a scowl so deep the devil himself would have flinched.
“You’re nothing but a bully and a coward, Alexander Ryker. I will hate you until the day I die.”
It was the exact moment I fell in love with her. It was my first experience with the feeling I feel sitting in my truck eighteen years later. The ‘everything is different now’ feeling.
Beer in hand, I make my way through the trees and under tangled underbrush until I hear the sound of flowing water. My heart speeds up immediately and nerves begin to take over. Thank God I have so much practice and training in dealing with chaos and emergencies. My life is constant chaos. My ability to remain calm in the midst of a storm is unparalleled and why I’m so good at my job.
My heart stutters. I’m not that great at my job. I blink back thoughts of that fire. Not right now. I can’t think about that right now.
Now is Briggs.
I see her through the trees, standing by the water, her back to me. Her shoulders hunched and her arms wrapped around her middle, hugging herself. There were only a few times I saw her truly vulnerable and like right now, they were always when she didn’t know I was looking.
The unguarded version of her was my favorite. Light shone through her and I wished she didn’t bottle it up and hide it away.
The branches crack as I step through the last of the brush and into the clearing. She startles and spins to face me. She’s still and will always be the most beautiful girl I’ve ever known.
Woman.
The woman standing in front of me is no girl, even though she’s still so young. Only twenty-six, she doesn’t appear old enough to have a nine-year-old daughter. But her eyes show the last ten years. Gone is the innocent sheen to her large brown eyes. Her stubborn girlish pout has been replaced with the thin line of her pointed lips, a woman who’s seen the harshness that life can throw. Her features are slightly more matured but beyond what she wears or how she looks, beneath it all, she still calls to me. I have to psychically fight the urge to sweep my arms around her and place a kiss to her neck in that place that always made her melt into me as if the last ten years never happened. As if the last time I saw her was Sunday at church.
“Brigitte,” I say her full name using a terrible French accent. Her mouth twitches, I assume at the memories stirred up for both of us. Our relationship was a secret for longer than it wasn’t. We would meet here at this creek and make out for hours, hours more spent talking, and dreaming, and hoping someday we’d both be brave enough to admit we wanted the impossible. But every Sunday we’d run into each other at church with our parents. I’d say her full name, accompanied by a formal almost undetectable bow. She’d respond...
“Alexander,” she says with a curtsy.
Then while our parents were busy pretending they were upstanding citizens and true children of the Lord we would meet back here and make love on a blanket under the burning sun. Or if it was raining, which it did a lot around here, we’d fashion a bed in the covered box of my old truck and explore each other like there’d never be enough time.
That passion and ignorance is gone as we stand in front of each other now. Her smile vanishes and the heat of my memories are washed away with reality. The awkwardness hangs between us, the rush of the creek the only sound to indicate time is still pushing forward.
I try to form an appropriate sentence for the moment, but there isn’t one, so I jump straight in.
“I had no idea you kept the baby,” I say at the exact same time as Briggs blurts, “I tried to tell you I kept the baby.”
We both startle and because what the fuck else are we to do. After a long pause we both burst out laughing.
She sits hard on a long smooth boulder near the water and I join her, popping a beer from the case and handing it to her.
“We might need these for the conversation we’re about to have.”
She takes the can, cracking it open and taking a long drink. I do the same. We sit next to each other, staring at the water roll and tumble over the rocks below, a short stick bobbed along in the current and I’m mesmerized by it.
“How the hell did we get here, Xan?” she asks.
“I have no idea.” I say and turn to her, fear radiating between us. “Is she mine?”
The question comes out with so much more vulnerable emotion than I mean it to. I realize in that moment that I hope she is. I hope that little girl is my little girl. It’s foreign and disorienting but there it is, a smoldering ember in my gut.
Briggs sighs loud enough for the heavens to hear. “She’s yours. Without a doubt.”
Emotion rages through me: elation, fear, anger, relief, all clamoring over each other to rise to the top. My eyes burn and I blink hard. I take down the rest of my beer in a single chug and grab another.
“Why?” I ask and she seems to understand what I mean seeing as my brain can’t keep up and form the right words.
