The following Tuesday, like most mornings after 9:00 a.m., I sat in Ben’s office, getting as much focused work done as possible for both Invitation Only and Loading Zone. Only at the moment, I struggled to ignore the loud clanking sounds from Ed and his maintenance crew as they performed their scheduled grease trap cleanout in the kitchen. By almost 11:30 a.m., I’d dealt with all my emails, put final notes in the business plan draft, and stood to stretch. A burger and fries were in my immediate future.
My phone lit up.
Madison.
Only she wasn’t texting; a call was coming through. I debated ignoring it. Then I just answered the damned thing.
“Yeah?”
“Cade?”
“Yeah, Madison. What do you want?” I sighed. My gruffness came from the shit she pulled Saturday night. And the series of apologetic texts in the days since. Her behavior was bordering on stalkerish.
A sniff sounded on the other line. “Cade, I’m sorry. I…I don’t know what gets into me sometimes.” Her voice caught. A whimper sounded.
Fuck. I sat back down. “Madison, are you crying?”
Silence. Another sniff. “Yes. I’m sorry. I’m trying not to. I’ve never felt like this before.”
My mind spun. Memories flooded in of a time in our pasts, before we began dating in college, when she’d come to me after a bad breakup. But even so, Madison had rarely cried. Back then, her breakdowns began happening after the same upsetting situations with guys repeated themselves.
A twinge of guilt tripped through me, from treating her so harshly, over not giving the vulnerable girl I knew existed somewhere inside of her the benefit of the doubt. “Felt like what?”
“Out of control.”
I huffed out a dry laugh. “We never have control. It’s all an illusion. You know that.” We’d talked about it many times on the lawn at Penn State, when she’d been trying to sort out her personal life with me as a sounding board.
She inhaled a shaky breath. “I just want so much. I want people to like me again. I want you to like me again. But all I keep doing is screwing things up.”
I leaned back in Ben’s chair, staring at the ceiling. “You’re trying too hard, Maddie.”
“Maddie?” Her voice wavered with a mixture of surprise and hope.
I cringed. I hadn’t meant to use the nickname. But within the span of a couple of minutes, we’d fallen back into ingrained roles: Madison hurt and needing comfort, me providing it.
Not skipping a beat, I glossed over the slipup. “Stop trying so hard. You’ve done this before. You get so focused on the next thing you want, you forget how to treat other people. You forget yourself.”
“I have done this before.” Her amazed tone made it sound like a new revelation.
“Yeah. It’s why you had such trouble keeping friends. Why you don’t have any now. Relationships of all kinds, friends included, take acts of selflessness. Generosity. Your wants don’t figure into that equation. If all you’re focused on is what you want, and what you want involves people, you will never get it.”
Ed popped his head into the office. “We’re all set here.”
I gave him a nod and held the phone away from my mouth. “The bill’s covered?”
On a nod, he tore a report off a clipboard and handed it to me. “Yep. Part of the contract Ben set up. We’re square.”
“Thanks, man.” He headed out as I put the report under a stapler on the center of Ben’s desk.
“Sorry. Taking care of things at the bar.”
“It’s okay. I didn’t mean to interrupt. So do you forgive me?”
I sighed. “Look, Madison. You say you want to be my friend, yet you verbally attacked someone I care about. Don’t. Walk softer. Be kinder. No one will want to be around you unless you attract them. And that happens when you find the good in yourself and share it with others.”
I heard her shaky inhale. Then she blew out a breath. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
She sniffed again. “Yeah. I could do that. Slow down. Be nice.”
Madison was so not nice to Hannah. Reforming would be difficult for Madison. But she had been nice for a time. I’d helped her get there once. “Nice would be a great start.”
***
Tuesday night. Another three-day stretch without seeing Hannah had gone by and it seemed like forever. Dinners had been suspended, and we communicated by text and phone call. She’d been slammed at the bakery, though, and I had inventory at Loading Zone and planning for the next two events. Shit had to get done. Yet even with our minimal contact after Loading Zone’s party, it had become clear that although no lasting damage had been done with Madison’s meddling, superficial wounds had been inflicted. Whenever we spoke about the double bar mitzvah, or my communications with Madison, Hannah’s easygoing spirit hardened.
Sitting on Hannah’s living room floor, my laptop and electronic notepad being furiously used with all the emailing and note-taking, was another one of those tense moments. On the cusp of an upcoming ten days of crazy, we had to buckle down and deal with collateral damage as best we could.
“…but Madison called you?”
“Yeah. Crying. She apologized for screwing things up. I feel sorry for her, actually. She doesn’t know how to make friends like normal people do.”
“Because she tries too hard.” Hannah’s tone deadened. “She could begin by apologizing to me.”
“Agreed. But she may need shock therapy to make that kind of recovery.”
Her gaze drifted down to the rug under us, eyes narrowing. “Did your sisters make any progress with Madison at the club the other night? Any discoveries?”
I shook my head. “Kristen said Madison was on her best behavior before she left the VIP area. Either she has nothing to do with the sabotage, or she’s very good at deception. Speaking from personal experience, I’m going with the latter.”
“I wish you didn’t have to deal directly with her.” She lifted another piece of pizza out of the box from the pepperoni and mushroom side.
On a sigh, I stretched my legs out and crossed them. I perched my arm along the couch cushion above me, putting her within touching distance. Then I rubbed my thumb on the soft skin on her neck, bared from her ponytail. “I don’t. Suzanne is my contact, but Madison replies when in a mood, which is a lot lately. Kristen offered to step in, but the extra burden isn’t fair to her. She is point on my parents’ party, and with Mom’s demanding details, Kristen has her work cut out for her.”
Hannah took a deep breath. “A week from Saturday. Then we’re free of Selfish Bitch.”
I clinked bottle necks with her. “Here’s to a week from Saturday, when we have weeks and weeks with no plans.”
She leaned her head onto my shoulder. “Eleven more days until freedom.”
I nodded while I clicked out of the document I’d saved. “What will we do with all the time?”
She let out a soft laugh. “Sleep in bed for days.”
Growling low, I lowered my mouth to her ear. “Only sleep in bed?”
“Mmm…” She turned her head, touching my lips with a soft kiss. “Passed out for days, after wild monkey sex for days.”
“Wild monkey sex?” I snorted.
“You know.” She leaned forward, got onto all fours, and slid her arms forward across the rug as she lowered her upper body. Then she folded them before resting her chin on her forearm to glance back at me. She wiggled her ass, and those little white shorts of hers slid higher. “Where I bare my engorged sexy-time goods, and you pound on your chest, howling.”
I laughed and got onto my knees behind her. “First of all” —I ground against her, my jeans to her raised ass— “the only pounding that will happen is me into you.” I gripped her hips, pumping against her twice in demonstration. “Second of all, I do not, and will never, howl.”
She grinned, looking back as she rotated her hips, teasing me. “Grunt?”
I shook my head. “Growl. Roar. Snarl maybe, if I don’t get what I want when I demand it.”
Pulling away, she held my gaze. When she twisted fully around to face me, she crossed her legs. “Serious for a minute?”
“Anytime you want.” I relaxed back into my sprawled position at the foot of the couch.
“Think you’ll ever get bored with me?”
I held my sigh in check, wanting to do all those things I’d mentioned: snarl, growl, and roar. Not to mention crush one Madison Kensington for casting even a hint of doubt into Hannah’s mind.
“I don’t think anything. I know I won’t get bored with you. Not in a few weeks, not in any amount of months, and not in the years I’ll be lucky enough to spend with you.”
Her expression softened, but then tightened again.
I leaned forward. “Look, Madison has no idea what love is. Don’t accept what she thinks she knows. It’s from her misguided perception.”
Hannah’s jaw tensed. “But you thought you loved her.”
The physical distance stretching between us was brutal, even though it was only a few feet. Hannah had her legs crossed in front of her as a barrier, but we needed contact more. I pushed off from the bottom of the couch and crowded in close. She stared at my chest as I pushed her legs up and bracketed mine around hers.
With a gentle finger, I tipped her chin up, forcing her gaze to meet mine. “I loved a mirage of a girl back when I’d been young and foolish. Until that point, she was the best thing that had ever happened to me. But I didn’t see that she only supported me when it suited her motives. The moment hers weren’t aligned with mine, she no longer cared about me. No matter what I thought I felt for her at the time, that’s not love. My time with her had been a joke. Her callous actions made me see her true self.”
She gave a heavy blink. “How do you know I’m different? That you love me?”
Good question. Even better, how could I trust in what Hannah and I had? I’d been a great judge of people until Madison had pulled her con job on me. Back then, I thought she’d changed with me after she’d burned through all those guys. I thought she’d been capable of love.
But Madison and Hannah were night and day. Madison was hard-edged and manipulative. Hannah, easygoing and genuine. Where Madison found fault in others and turned a blind eye, Hannah saw the good in people, offering to help any way she could. And Hannah didn’t have to try at all. It came naturally to her. There was no comparison.
And in hindsight, my proposal to Madison had been driven by logic. Feelings I’d had for her had been rooted from our childhood friendship. Beyond that, maybe they’d only been superficial. My grasp of life back then had been an initial version: Cade 1.0.
What I felt now was worlds-apart different. With Hannah, my heart both ached and soared. In every incredible way that made me never want it to end.
I inhaled deeply, smiling. “There aren’t enough words to describe what you do to me, for me. Every day, I wake thinking about how I can make you smile, cause your laugh. I know I love you because of the things I want to learn about you, endless ways I want to touch your body, your heart. There are so many adventures I want to take you on, experiences I want to have with you—just to live in that moment with you.”
Her mouth fell open slightly, but no words came out. I began to worry I’d overwhelmed her, when all I’d wanted to do was reassure her. Prove to her with words how I felt.
“You okay, Maestro? I think I stunned you speechless.”
She nodded, throat working as she swallowed. Her voice rasped out. “I’ve never…that was the most beautiful thing anyone has ever said to me.”
Lifting my hand, I watched her carefully as she closed her eyes in anticipation of the contact. My fingers brushed her cheek as she leaned in toward my touch. “I mean every word.”
I sighed, wishing I could obliterate all the crap. Hannah didn’t deserve to be dragged into the mud that Madison seemed hell-bent on flinging. A part of me thought fuck it, I’ll kidnap Hannah to our tropical island, and the rest of the world would still spin, going on without us.
But I wasn’t built to escape responsibility. Letting people down didn’t exist as an option. Kristen may have offered to take over, but I knew she and the girls would struggle to handle it all. They needed me. Hannah needed me.
I just needed to figure out a way to keep the balance.