Trapped with My Best Friend’s Dad by Flora Ferrari
Chapter Twenty-Three
Rayla
My heart hammers heavily when Tanker hops down from my lap and stands completely still, the same way he did when he heard Millie’s car earlier in the day. It’s been several hours since she left – about two since that crazy moment at the lake – and I’ve been driving myself crazy with thoughts of where she’s gone, of what she’s going to say.
I leap to my feet and walk over to the window. Roman has already beat me there, standing silhouetted by the deep orange sunlight.
I can’t help but remember the way he looked when he was ready to face off whatever came out of the woods, without a hint of fear in him, without a hint of anything but primal rage and protectiveness.
Now we look out at the front of the cabin together as Millie’s car pulls up outside. She steps out and glances over to the front window. It’s too far away for me to make out her expression, but the thought slams into me that she’s frowning.
She hates me, hates us. And she’s here to tell us we have to stop.
My throat feels like it’s closing up as she walks toward the house, out of view as she heads for the door. Tanker sprints through the cabin, making happy yapping noises, oblivious to the tension coursing through us, through the room, through the whole house.
Roman and I stare at each other.
His eyes are wide and bleak, as though he can sense how close this is to coming to an end as well. He can sense that it’s only a matter of minutes before we’re forced to make the most difficult decision of our lives.
Millie walks into the living room with Tanker in her arms. Her blonde hair is tied up in a ponytail, making her facial expression seem larger, more imposing. I barely dare to look at her, so fear-filled is my heart, dark and pulsing with a thousand unspoken things, all of them filled with the possibility of this going wrong.
“Okay,” she says, walking over to the armchair and sitting down, running her hand softly over Tanker’s fur. “I’m ready to discuss this now.”
I swallow as Roman and I walk over to the couch, sitting down opposite her. There’s something wrong about this arrangement, with how much space there is between us, but I know it’d feel even worse if I were to sit on Millie’s side of the coffee table, as though it was me and her against Roman.
I feel trapped in the middle, being pulled at from all directions, with no idea what I’m going to do when she drops the bomb – when she tells us we have to stop.
Will Roman even accept a decision like that?
He almost turned feral at the lake, staring down whatever was in the woods, the tendons in his neck tight like he was about to erupt with all the animalistic tension working its way through him.
But surely he’d have to side with his daughter. He’s an incredible father. Millie has told me many times how supportive he is of her, how loyal.
“Well?” I say, unable to hold back my eagerness to know our fate. “Don’t keep us in suspense, Millie.”
“Where have you been?” Roman asks.
“I was at the library,” she says, a musing tone to her voice. “In the poetry section. You know how poetry has always helped me to disappear or to feel like I’m disappearing. I can fade into the words where I don’t have to think about everything else… but then I went to the park, you know because not thinking about this problem is hardly going to solve it.”
A hammer blow slams into me when she describes what Roman and I have as a problem when truthfully it’s the solution I’ve been waiting my whole life for.
It’s the solution that was born in a storm, shattering in the lightning and the rain, the solution that made the storm bearable when it was anything but in the years before that.
Romanmade the rain and the thunder and the memories drift away, replaced by the beautiful endless potential of the now, but Millie is describing it as a problem.
I feel like I might be sick, but then Millie smiles.
She smiles, and my whole world begins to reshape.
“Am I seeing things?” I can’t help but giggle. “Are you smiling, Millie?”
She laughs along with me, a sound I never thought I’d get to hear again. “Yes, yes, yes, I know it’s crazy. But I can’t help it. I mean… heck, look at you two.”
“What about us?” Roman asks.
Millie tilts her head in a come on gesture. “Are you kidding me? It’s like you can barely stop yourselves from looking at each other every second. I can see the effort. And both of you seem different, way more confident, way more comfortable in your own skin than you’ve ever been before.”
I nod, the truth of her words undeniable as I contemplate them. I’ve never felt comfortable in my own skin.
But when I feel Roman’s hungry hands all over my body, moving up and down my legs, over my hips, my breasts, there’s no denying that I must be beautiful. I must be attractive.
At least to him, and that’s all that matters.
“I’d say that’s pretty much a fact,” I murmur, not daring to let myself hope.
“Yeah,” Roman says. “She’s changed me more than I ever thought a person could. I didn’t know I was capable of changing at my age. I thought I was always going to have this feeling inside of me, this hole, this emptiness, but Rayla has filled it.”
“He’s done the same for me,” I whisper, blinking away tears. “You know how I’ve always had this dorky fear of storms?”
Millie sighs, shaking her head. “I know you’ve had a fear of storms, yes, and you know how much I hate when you devalue it by making light of it.”
“The whole time the storm was raging,” I go on, “I didn’t think about it. I didn’t think about the past and I didn’t let the silly fears…”
She glares and I giggle.
“Okay, not silly, just the fears… I didn’t let them take me over. I didn’t let them cripple me. Somehow, I was able to just be with Roman and Tanker. It was like the rest of the world didn’t exist.”
“That’s amazing.”
Millie’s voice flutters with disbelief and something else… acceptance, happiness? Can I really let myself hope and dream?
“Honestly,” she goes on, “the fact that you’re writing again, Dad, and that you didn’t freak out at the storm, Rayla… it’s incredible. I won’t pretend to understand it. But surely it’s proof something is happening here.”
She pauses, stroking her chin. I fight the urge to tease her about it, the way I often do when she does this.
Normally I’d lightly banter with her, telling her she knows there isn’t a beard there, right?
But I don’t think it would be the most appropriate timing right now.
Millie smiles at me, reading my expression, and then lets her hand drop. “Oops.”
I giggle, shaking my head. “I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“You didn’t have to.” She sighs. “Did this really only start a few days ago?”
“Yes,” I say firmly.
“Yes,” Roman replies quickly.
“And this is a long-term thing? You’re not going to get all lovey-dovey and then suddenly break it off, are you? Because think about how awkward that would be if I ever invited Rayla over for Thanksgiving.”
I blink back another wave of hot tears. “You mean there’s a chance you’d still want to do that?”
“Of course.” Millie looks at me, her eyes a mirror of mine, shimmering with the onset of tears. “I waited my whole life to find a best friend like you, Rayla. And this must’ve been so crazy, so fast, I can hardly blame you for not immediately telling me. It’s not like you waited very long when I got here.”
“We’re in this for the long haul, Millie,” Roman says with conviction.
Then he does something dangerous. He reaches across and squeezes onto my hand, wrapping his finger firmly around mine, his touch sending comforting signals through my body even as an alarm screeches through me.
This is going to be too much for Millie. We’re flaunting it.
But when I return my gaze to her, I see a slight smile touching her lips.
“We’re going to be a family together,” Roman goes on. “Give you little brothers and sisters. You’ve always said you wanted me to settle down and be happy. I used to think it was impossible. But now I’ve found her – the only woman who will ever be able to make me feel like a proper person.”
Suddenly it’s too much for us.
Millie and I let out a sob at the same time, the sound joining in a crackle, like the thunder which brought Roman and me together.
We cry at the same time, the emotion bursting out of us.
After a moment Roman stands and pulls me around the table to Millie’s side. She stands with Tanker cradled to her chest and the three of us – the four of us including the little terrier – embrace, holding onto each other.
We stay like that for a long time, frozen, and then Millie leans back and giggles.
“If you’d told me this was how I’d spend my first day at the cabin, no freaking way would I have believed you.”
“Does that laugh mean we have your blessing?” Roman asks.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Millie says. “Yes, you have my blessing. I won’t say I don’t find it a little weird. But nobody could look at the two of you and see anything but happiness. And as long as you’re not going to break up and leave me without a best friend—”
“Never,” Roman and I say at the same time, with the same passion brimming in our voices.
“Then I have nothing to complain about. Just promise me you’ll be happy, both of you.”
“Together?” Roman looks across at me, his lips twitching into a smile, not his usual smirk. “It would be impossible to be anything but happy.”
I love you,I cry in my mind. So, so much.
But I can’t push things too fast in that direction, because he might not say it back. Maybe the whiplash will destroy us both.
For now, this is enough – the closeness, the emotion, the acceptance.
