She rolls her eyes and keeps walking. Naturally, I don’t have much interest in baseball, but Matthew is obsessed with the LA Dodgers and I’m trying to relate to him on as many levels as I can. It’s definitely not easy to go from being such a distant figure to someone real in Matthew’s life. It’s a learning curve for both him and for me. We don’t yet have a relationship with each other and I doubt it will ever get to the level where he’ll start calling me dad, but you never know. I’ll certainly be working on it whenever I can.
But Taylor has made it very clear that they have their own life and though she wants me to be a part of it, I’m to have my own life too.
If only my life had Nicola in it.
I exhale, those bricks shifting around in my chest but never moving. I finish my tea, then pick up my suitcase and head back home.
***
The next few days fly by for once, instead of the slow, painful grind. There’s nothing like heartache to make every day last a million years, to make every breath feel like your last. But having your cousin, whom you haven’t seen in ages, bunk with you makes the clock tick on. I would have put him up in Nicola and Ava’s old apartment but I can’t quite seem to move on from that. It’s empty and I want it to stay that way, just in case they ever come back.
To say I’m delusional is an understatement.
Needless to say, Lachlan McGregor is quite the roommate. The man really opens up when he’s drunk, otherwise he’s extremely serious and rarely smiles. Normally that would be okay because, let’s face it, I can’t deal with any more drama. But I’m also the type who cracks jokes to win people over and with Lach it feels like I’m talking to a brick wall. It doesn’t help that he kind of resembles one.
Back at his home in Edinburgh, Lach is a rugby player, a wing, for the city’s main team but a recent tear to his Achilles heel has put him on their backburner for the time being. I had known for some time that Lach was pretty loaded, not just from the sport but because he’s actually an extremely smart man whose been making a lot of key investments over the years. If anyone is going to disprove the stereotype that all rugby players are dumb gits, well, it’s Lach.
Though we chat on FB on occasion, commenting on pictures or whatever else (“oh, you won the game again, way to go you dumb ape” – even though he’s smart, I don’t want him to think I know that) our relationship never really went beyond that. You know how it is with cousins, especially when you come from a fucked up family.
However, with the news feature on me and then a write-up opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle that fought for my funding, my whole low-income housing project has stalled. I’m out of a lot of money, paying my mortgage with my savings and no money coming in. If this all keeps up, I’ll lose my project and my dream and be in the hole for it. After losing Nicola and Ava, I refuse to let that happen.
So, I swallowed my goddamn pride and called him up. It’s not easy asking your cousin, who is far more successful than you and three years younger to boot, for help. But I did it. Because, fuck it, I’m not going to fail again.
To my surprise, Lachlan was bored waiting on the sidelines, and even though he should be returning to the sport by the time the new season starts, he said he would at least come over for most of the summer. Though I grilled him on my idea beforehand, now that he’s been here we’ve really put our heads together trying to come up with the best way to move forward. If things go well and if he can find a backer on his own, he says he’d be willing to join me, make a non-profit corporation and get this thing off the ground.
“Justine!” I suddenly say with a snap of my fingers.
Lach looks up from his beer, his face tired from our day of monotonous brainstorming. “What?”
I grab my beer off the kitchen counter and sit down across from him in my living room. “Justine is a woman I took to the opera once.”
“The opera.” He snorts, giving a rare smile. So glad it was at my expense.
“Yes, the opera. She comes from money. A lot of it. In fact, it was my father who set us up. He still believes that you’re supposed to date money to get ahead, and from what I understood, her family has a lot of money and power. She’s a gorgeous gal and you’re not too ugly a man, so maybe you can wine and dine her and see if we can get an investment out of her.”
He considers that. “What kind of money and power?”
I shrug and take a sip of my beer. “I have no idea. I didn’t ask.”
“Aye, I see. Too busy shagging her.”
“Actually, no,” I point out and there’s that bloody pressure in my heart. “No, I wasn’t interested in her.”
“She’s gorgeous and has money and you weren’t interested?” he asks. “What makes you think I will be?”
“Because,” I tell him. I exhale loudly. “I was with Nicola at the time.”
“Ah,” he says, knowing far too much about her already. I haven’t really shut up about her to be honest. Perhaps that’s why he always looks like he wants to kill himself.
“Actually,” I go on, “we weren’t dating at that time but…but that’s when she really started to get under my skin, you know. The whole time I was with Justine, I was just thinking about Nicola. Looking back, I can see that I was already a goner. Just too stubborn at the time to see it.”
“What’s your excuse now?”
“What?”
“You won’t stop talking about this bloody bird. If you’re not talking about the building it’s her and I’m sorry, but in my professional opinion, you need to either move the hell on or get off your stubborn arse and go do something about it. Stop being such a pansy.”
“Your professional opinion?” I repeat.
He gives me a look. “Hey, I’m in rugby, right? And aside from some of these scars,” he touches a few faded ones on his cheekbone, “I ain’t bad to look at. Which means, I get more pussy than you probably do.”
The old me would have challenged that but having a pissing contest with my cousin doesn’t seem right.
Not right now, anyway.
I’ll come back to this one later.
“And,” he adds, “with all the pussy comes all the problems. Go sort your shit out soon or I’m going to start using your head as a rugby ball. I need the bloody practice.”
I frown at him. “So uncouth.” But I don’t push it. We may be the same height, and I may almost have the same amount of muscle as he has, but he doesn’t seem to give a rat’s arse about messing up his face, whereas I do.
The only thing holding me back from what he suggests, from what Taylor suggested, is the same old story. My goddamn pride. My goddamn fear.
What if I go after Nicola and she turns away? She may not want to see me again. She may never trust me again. Even though right now I have nothing left but this dull, hollow ache inside, like some vital part of me has been removed. I also have the unknown on my side and that dangerous side of hope. In the here and now, I can bitch and moan like a little girl as long as I never do anything about it. I can just imagine that maybe one day, in due time, it will all work out.
But I don’t want to listen to my motto. Not this time. I’m not leaving this to sort itself out in due time, to take that chance that things will work out.
Nicola is worth so much more than chance.
I need to have no regrets.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Nicola
You know that part of the movie when the hero gets dragged through the mud, or kicked off the team, or captured by the crime syndicate, and all hope is lost and yet you know, no matter what, somehow it’s all going to come together and the hero is going to get his big fat happy ending. And while he’s being tortured or the town turns against him or his wife walks out on him, you feel for him but you’re kind of spurred forward by the knowledge that everything will work out in the end. It just has to.