When Life Happened by Jewel E. Ann
Chapter Twenty-Three
“How’s Levi and his parents?” The stealer of rooms, perched on her leather sofa with her feet up, book in hand, greeted Parker when she walked in the door.
“Piper.” Parker needed to practice saying her twin’s name without gritting her teeth. Old habits.
“Did you happen to notice anything about him?”
“Such as?” Parker hopped onto her rebounder and started jumping.
Piper fidgeted with the end of her long braid. “Um … like that he’s quite nice to look at.”
“Caleb been letting himself go? Doesn’t surprise me. I thought he looked a little flabby in the midsection. He should switch to lite beer.”
Piper’s lips pulled into a hard smile. “I mean you. Back before you disowned me as your sister, I would have been able to say, ‘Holy shit, Parker! He’s ridiculously hot. Sexy blue eyes, fluid and reflective like the ocean or sky or something mesmerizing, strong jaw, brilliant smile, and that body. Parker, his body! Did you see his body!?!’ And you would have blushed like you always do because we both would have known you definitely saw his body. But …” She shrugged. “Now you’re just bitter, and apparently you have no radar for that anymore.”
Parker saw Levi, but she felt Gus. Pieces of him lingered everywhere. She could close her eyes and taste him on her lips, smell the hint of leather and spice cologne in the crook of his neck, feel every muscle of his back beneath her fingertips, and hear his “I love you” echoing over and over.
He was the wind. The moon sketching shadows. The shiver along her skin at night when she shut off the lights and whispered his name. He promised her everything and left her with nothing. How could nothing—a deep, hollow hole—feel like something so tangible, like her pain had its own pulse.
“I wonder how it happened.” Parker kept bouncing, eyes fixed to a scratch on her newly finished floors, probably from Rags.
“How you lost your radar for hot guys?”
Parker shook her head, words slow and monotone. “How the accident happened. What caused it?”
“Oh,” Piper’s tone softened to match the gravity of Parker’s question. “Dad heard it was a semi-truck driver. He fell asleep at the wheel. Twelve cars were involved. Five casualties total.”
She rotated on the rebounder, her back to Piper. Drawing in a shaky breath, she wiped the corners of her eyes and smiled. Parker smiled as big as she could, until her facial muscles burned, chasing the tears away and soothing the throb of grief.
“When were you going to tell me?” Parker cleared her throat and massaged her cheeks.
“About the accident?”
“About you and Caleb.”
“Moving here?”
“Screwing around behind my back.”
“Parker,” Piper said with an edge of pain laced in her voice.
Parker turned again, bouncing even higher. “Had I not caught the two of you, when were you going to tell me? I mean, surely you weren’t going to wait until the rehearsal dinner, right?”
“We weren’t.”
Choking on a laugh of disbelief, Parker stopped jumping. “You weren’t? What does that mean?”
Piper frowned, closing her book and setting it aside. “You were engulfed in your quest to find a job. Driving here, there, and everywhere for job interviews—sometimes gone for entire weekends. Obsessing over finding a house for you and Caleb. Talking marriage when he hadn’t even proposed. And Caleb still hung around the house even when you were gone. Dad would cook up brats, and they’d eat and drink beer while mom watched some series upstairs. I’d go out and sit by the fire pit with them, but eventually Dad would get tired and go to bed. So Caleb and I would drink more beer and talk about stuff that didn’t involve marriage or finding the perfect house.”
She glanced over at Parker, a somber expression on her face conveyed more regret than Parker had ever seen before.
“One night we had a little too much to drink. Caleb helped me to my room. Then he was going to call a friend to come get him. A few hushed giggles turned into a kiss. We both stared at each other through glassy eyes like it was a complete accident. We didn’t say a word, but it’s like our minds shut off and something physical took over. My brain was so fuzzy, I just remember thinking over and over, ‘This is so wrong.’ But I couldn’t stop. I felt so completely out of control.”
Parker swallowed hard, expecting to taste bile, but she didn’t. Piper’s story was her story. She was Piper. Gus was Caleb. Desire. She knew the addiction. The power. The guilt.
“That wasn’t the night I walked in on you.”
Piper shook her head. “No. It happened again and again. Like a drug.” Her cynical laugh shook her shoulders a bit. “Remember when Mom told us giving up our virginity before marriage would basically make us sluts? We’d slip into a habit of casual sex. It wouldn’t be a first. It wouldn’t be special. Like after you commit a sin once, it’s easier to do it again and again. That’s what happened.
“The crazy part is we barely talked about it. We’d chat with Dad like we’d always done. He’d go to bed and we’d go to my room and … do the same thing. Very few words. Just like rolling up your sleeve and plunging the needle into your vein. The guilt was there for two seconds, and then it disappeared while we ‘got high’ so to speak.”
Parker thought about her sister’s explanation. She had never asked for it before that moment, but she imagined it. However, in her imagination, it involved love and intense emotions. Feelings that couldn’t be denied. It never involved too much alcohol and casual sex. “But you loved each other, right? I mean, you’re married.”
“I do love him, and he loves me.”
“That’s a weird answer. We’re talking about the past. We’re talking about why you had no intention of telling me, which makes no sense.”
“It was sex,” she whispered.
Taking a step down from the rebounder, Parker moved closer to the sofa. “As in just sex?”
Piper nodded.
“But you married him.”
“I was pregnant.”
“What?” Parker’s head whipped back.
“A week after you caught us, I found out I was pregnant. No one knew, not even Mom. Caleb, being Mr. Responsible, proposed. Me, being scared out of my fucking mind, said yes. Two weeks later I miscarried.”
“Jesus, Piper, why didn’t you say something?”
“I was ashamed and embarrassed. I didn’t want anyone’s pity.”
“You didn’t love him.”
“I cared about him.”
“Not the same thing.”
She blew a slow breath out of her nose. “I wanted it to mean something. I ruined you and Caleb, so I wanted something to come from it. Love justified it.”
“But you didn’t love him!” Parker ran her hands through her hair.
“You didn’t know that!” Piper’s hand went to her belly as she took a deep breath and sat back again.
“Me? Are you serious? You married him for me? Do you hear yourself? Can you see how ridiculous that was?”
“I thought if you could see that it was for love, it would make it easier to forgive him. You’d think his heart was in it and it wasn’t just some random guy act of not being able to keep his dick in his pants.”
Parker laughed, a crazy woman laugh. “He couldn’t keep his dick in his pants. Why were you so damn concerned about him if you didn’t love him? Why did it matter to you if I forgave him or not? He pissed me off, but you’re the one who hurt me. Don’t you get that? You cheated on me. You broke my heart. You destroyed us! I didn’t need you to pretend to be happy. I needed you to ‘for real’ feel some remorse and make an effort to repair us, not … marry some dick with legs that you didn’t love and who would be like a fucking misspelled tattoo that you’re too broke to have removed!”
“A dick with legs? A misspelled tattoo?”
Parker and Piper turned. Caleb stood in the doorway to the kitchen, hands in his pockets, a weary look on his face. Piper held out her hand. Caleb walked over to her and caressed his fingertips along her palm, then bent down and pressed a kiss to her lips and then her belly.
“I wasn’t head-over-heels in love with the man I married.” Piper’s smile grew wider until it reached her eyes as she looked up at Caleb and his expression matched hers. “But I’m deeply in love with the father of my baby and the life we now have together. All it took was taking my conscience out of the equation, letting go of the guilt, and welcoming the chance at love while it was standing right in front of me.”
Thathad Parker tasting bile. Too mushy. Too … everything. “You guys are messed-up. I hope all of your weird traits are recessive in my nephew. Otherwise, he is doomed!”
Piper stood and wiped some of her red lipstick from Caleb’s lips. “I’m going over to Mom’s. She had cookies in the oven when I last talked with her.”
He perked up. “Then I’m coming too.”
She shook her head and patted his chest. “I’ll bring some back. You stay and explain to Parker why you cheated on her too.”
Parker headed up the stairs. “I’m done talking for today.”
Caleb started his own protest.
“Why did I bring it up?” Parker whispered, plunking down on her bed. “I need a job. I need to move out of Iowa. I need to forget my past before I drown in it.” She ran her hands through her hair.
“Hey.”
She looked up and sighed. “You’re off the hook, Caleb. I don’t want to know. It won’t change anything. I’m perfectly satisfied knowing the fairy tale between the two of you was a hoax.”
“I love her.” His shoulder rested against the doorframe as he slid his hands into the pockets of his white shorts.
“Well, you should. She’s carrying your baby.”
“I thought I was missing out on something.” His brow tensed as his gaze affixed to his feet. “We’d been together for so long. High school. College. I’d lost my autonomy. Everything was a ‘we’ not an ‘I.’ I felt like my future was all planned out and the pressure began to suffocate me. But I liked your family, and I actually enjoyed being at your house the most when …”
Parker sighed a small laugh, rolling her eyes toward the ceiling. “When I wasn’t there.”
He nodded. “Your dad would tell me about his life growing up and all the stupid things he did. Or we’d discuss sports or just random shit. Since I grew up without my father, I craved that kind of attention. And Piper would join us, and she never mentioned you either. I think she needed her autonomy too. You were the perfect twin. The one who had more friends. The one who was most successful in sports. The one who had her life together and all planned out. She was messy. You were organized. She was spontaneous. You lived by your planner.”
Parker no longer had a planner—she no longer had plans. Her house was organized, but her life felt like a tornado ripped through it. She had no direction. No future. No Gus. Life knocked her flat on her ass, and some days she questioned if the effort to try and get up was worth it.
“I shouldn’t have followed you to college.”
“I told you not to.” He looked up.
“You never told me not to! You went on and on about volleyball being my life and how I’d probably forget about you. You made it sound like I was making a choice. You or volleyball.”
“I just wanted you to think I’d miss you.”
“Are you kidding me?” She shot off the bed and paced the room. “A simple, ‘Hey, I’m going to miss you, but this is an opportunity you shouldn’t pass up. We’ll make it work,’ would have sufficed.”
“I’m sorry. I was afraid of hurting you.”
She scrubbed her hands over her face. “Wow, it’s crazy how you’ve derailed my life in some grand effort to not hurt me.”
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
Parker stopped her pacing and rested her hands on her hips. “I am too.” Never did she imagine apologizing to Caleb. In the deepest recesses of her mind, she thought someday an apology to Piper for the laxative incident at their wedding might feel right.
Caleb glanced up with confusion etched on his face. He probably never imagined her apologizing either.
“I like organization. I like direction. I like feeling a sense of accomplishment at the end of every day.” She lifted her shoulders. “That’s who I am. So I’m sorry if my dreams weren’t yours. I loved volleyball. I loved the idea of playing it in college. But I gave it up because I may not have been your dream, but … you were mine.”
“Parker,” Caleb whispered.
She moved to the door and pressed her hand against his chest, applying enough pressure that he stepped back. “I learned my lesson. I hope you learned yours.” Her tight-lipped smile bid him a farewell as she closed her door.
