Page 11 of I Can't Even

I pondered my options. Because the miserable old bat wouldn’t tell us or let the doctor share what was wrong with her, we had no idea how long this could go on. Days, weeks, or god forbid, months. Could I endure this? Could I come out on the other side emotionally intact if I had to put up with her brutality for weeks? I didn’t think so.

I opened my phone and checked for flights back to New York. It would be pricey but I could be home in a matter of hours. I found the flight. I chose my seat. I was about to click buy when a noise sounded from the stairs. I glanced over to see Emily tiptoeing down the stairs.

She’d skillfully avoided the one creaky step in the middle and then she was beside my chair. Her long blond hair was loose, and she wore a set of pink-and-blue striped pajamas that had a collar and buttoned down the front with a matching set of long pants. They made her look fifty instead of twenty-five and then I thought, no, even a fifty-year-old wouldn’t wear anything that buttoned up. She was pale and her eyes had dark circles under them.

“How is she?”

“As bitchy as ever,” I said. I thought Em would chastise me, but instead a small smile tipped her lips.

“That’s good, right?” Em’s eyes were locked on our mother’s sleeping form. She reached out and adjusted the plastic tubing that hooked into Babs’s nostrils, giving her a steady stream of oxygen.

“Depends whether or not you’re on the receiving end of the comments.” I turned my phone display side down.

My youngest sis glanced at me with sympathy. “What I meant was that if Mom’s feeling feisty maybe she’ll be able to beat this thing.”

“Oh, Em.” I looked at her face and saw the hope shining in her brown eyes and just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t tell her we were on borrowed time. Instead, I sent her a small smile. “That would be great.”

I realized I wasn’t going anywhere. Losing Babs would be a crushing blow for Emily, and even though I hadn’t been the greatest big sister, okay, I was absentee at best, I knew I couldn’t leave her to deal with this alone. Not this time. I took her hand in mine and gave it a gentle squeeze much like Soph had done for me when the reality of this situation had punched me in the face.

“You should get some rest,” I said. “I’ll take good care of her, I promise.”

Em looked at me with gratitude and squeezed my fingers in return before letting go. “Thanks, Jules, I’m so glad you’re here.”

The bloody welts left by Babs’s rejection healed a bit as I met Em’s gaze. Perhaps I couldn’t change things with my mother, but I could be here for my sisters. I closed the app on my phone as I watched her slip back upstairs.

One of my old habits returned with force during my days at home. Much like the sixteen-year-old girl who had been infatuated with the new boy next door, I found myself spying on Liam Mahony again. I learned his routine, fifty laps in the pool just after sunrise, and hour-long workouts in the evening in the room across from mine. Occasionally, there was a bonus sighting of him doing yard work, taking out his trash, or sitting on his back deck while he read a book and enjoyed a beer.

I told myself it didn’t mean anything, that I was just appreciating the view, but the heat that licked up inside made a liar out of me. I don’t care how pretty the sunrise was in the morning, it sure as shit never made me want to touch myself the way spying on Liam did.

It was on the sixth evening since I’d returned home that I got caught. Busted. Bagged and tagged. Nabbed. Nailed. Well, maybe I just wanted to be, nailed, really, really badly.

Em was downstairs with Babs while I caught up on clients in my room. It was an unusually overcast day, so I had the light on. I figured it was okay since Liam didn’t generally work out until six o’clock. I had hours before he’d show, hours before I had to snap off the light and hide in the shadows to enjoy the guilty pleasure that was watching him exercise.

Like jumping into a rabbit hole, however, my understanding of the space-time continuum vanished while I tried to fix a glitch on the website I was creating for a bakery in Brooklyn. For some inexplicable and maddening reason, the links I’d put up to showcase their products kept yanking me out of the website, tossing me into cyberspace like a bouncy ball with no sense of direction. So annoying.

My back started to ache and my butt had gone numb, but those twinges weren’t what pulled me from my work. Oh, no, the overwhelming sensation that someone was watching me, was what finally made me glance up.

When I did, I gasped. It was him, Liam Mahony, standing framed in the window across the way. He was wearing just a pair of basketball shorts, his skin was slick with sweat and his arms were stretched up as he gripped the windowsill overhead as if he had to visibly restrain himself from coming through the window to get at me. Oh, my.

His brown laser-like eyes focused on my face, studying me as if he didn’t really believe I was there. It occurred to me that if he did reach me, he was more likely to throttle me than do the wicked things I had been imagining for the past few days.

Inexplicably, Adele’s song “Hello” began to play in my head, my breathing became shallow, and I thought I might pass out but no—if I fainted I couldn’t drink my fill of him and I desperately wanted to look until my eyeballs dried right the fuck out.

He did not smile, but instead seemed caught on the razor’s edge between furious and aroused. The heat in his gaze made my insides liquefy and I nervously licked my lips and swallowed, trying to grab any sort of moisture to cool the heat of the slow burn that raged inside of me.

His gaze moved to my mouth and his nostrils flared; clearly aroused was beating out furious on his side of the glass. He dropped his arms to the waistband of his shorts. I sat riveted, not even blinking, when he slowly, oh, so slowly, pushed his shorts off and stood there completely naked. I knew exactly what he was doing, he was letting me see what I’d walked away from so many years ago. It was a gut punch, but I didn’t look away.

The edges of my vision started to blur, and I was pretty sure that, yes, I was going to faint after all. I gripped the edge of the desk, taking in the sight of his cock, locked and loaded, his fists on his hips, and the hot hungry expression on his face.

My mouth opened to form a small o and I made some sort of female-in-heat yowl that in any other species would have been attractive but I’m pretty sure coming out of me was just scary. Thankfully, he couldn’t hear me. I released the edge of the desk and pressed one hand to the window, as if I could push the glass aside to get to him.

We stared at one another for several long moments. Was he also trying to understand this new reality where we were once again the boy and girl next door?

Liam shook his head—rejecting the idea, rejecting me, and turned his back. For what it was worth, the rearview was just as captivating as the front, and I swallowed hard as he picked up a towel and draped it over one shoulder. Without another glance in my direction, he strode from the room leaving me to watch him walk away much as I had left him all those years ago.

Chapter Four

“Shut up! No, he didn’t!” Soph cried. She had been here most of the day and I should have gone to my room to rest, but I couldn’t sleep a wink.

---