Page 28 of Second Chance Fate

Casper greeted Taylor just as enthusiastically, and she bent down and kissed the soft fur on the top of his head beforeshutting the door behind them. When she clicked the lock in place, she inhaled the comforting aroma of home: laundry detergent mixed with a bouquet of roses Owen picked with Nonna from the bushes in front of the retirement home and the faintest whiff of vanilla from a Yankee candle she’d splurged on combined, and her entire body instantly relaxed. This was her safe place. The warm, inviting scent was the polar opposite of the sterile, disinfectant smell that permeated her home with Martin due to his strict cleaning guidelines.

She slid off her shoes, dropped her purse and keys in the bowl on the entryway console, and headed to the kitchen. When she got to the fridge, instead of opening it, Taylor closed her eyes, leaned her forehead against the cool stainless steel surface, and did a mental tally of its contents. If that didn’t demonstrate how exhausted she was, she wasn’t sure what would. She remembered there were chicken breasts that needed to be cooked, veggies to steam, and a box of rice pilaf for a side.

Pushing off the fridge, she switched into autopilot mode and got to work by first filling a pot with water and setting it on the stove with the heat on, then gathering her ingredients. She pulled out her veggies, which included broccoli, carrots, zucchini, and green beans, and began to rinse them so she could chop.

Standing at the sink and then the cutting board, Taylor started to play out different scenarios of how she was going to approach Caleb. She had a few ideas; the frontrunner was definitely making an appointment to go see him at the church. It was the most…formal.

She pictured it playing out. She’d walk into his office, sit down, and say, “You probably don’t remember me, but I met you in Daytona Beach. I looked a lot different.” Then she would jog his memory by showing him the photo strip she’d kept that they’d taken on the boardwalk.

It was the only thing she had from their time together. She’d had to keep it hidden from Martin, obviously. If he had found it…she didn’t want to think about what he would have done. She’d never shown Owen because when they were living with Martin, she was scared that Owen might say something accidentally and Martin would find out. Once they moved to Hope Falls, she hadn’t shown him because she was scared he’d recognize Caleb.

If Caleb did remember the photos, then maybe he’d remember what happened right after they took them. They stayed in the booth, which was tucked in the corner of the boardwalk, away from prying eyes. Neither of them made any move to leave. It was as if they were in their own little bubble with the curtain drawn and no flashes going off. The only sounds came from their labored breaths, the crashing of the waves, and the sounds of the arcade games and boardwalk a hundred yards away.

Even now, she could feel her pulse beating wildly as she sat on Caleb’s lap and stared down at his large, tanned hand on her bare knee. The roughened pads of his fingertips grazed the base of her neck as he used his free hand to brush her hair off her neck, revealing the sensitive area just below her ear. Every cell in her body was alive with sensation as he gently pressed open-mouthed kisses to her neck. Looking down, she watched his fingers slowly move up her inner thigh. Her knees parted in a silent invitation, and she gasped when she felt his fingers reach the apex between her legs.

She wasn’t the only one who was affected. Caleb’s breaths were ragged and shallow, and she felt him growing bigger and harder as the denim covering his erection pressed against her hip. His mouth covered her neck, kissing, nipping, and sucking, working in tandem with his fingertips massaging her wet core still covered with a cotton barrier, bringing her to the brink ofrelease. Pleasure coiled in her belly like a snake ready to strike with each pass of his touch and lick of his tongue. She could feel tension radiating off of him as her own orgasm grew closer with each second that passed.

Taylor had never done anything like that before or since. For eighteen years, she’d followed all of the rules. She’d never broken a single one. Growing up in the system, she’d tried to stay under the radar, terrified at what would happen to her if she didn’t. Every decision she made, she made out of fear. She lived in survival mode, always trying to predict what the worst possible outcome could be in any situation.

But with Caleb, for the first time in her life, she wasn’t scared at all. For once, she trusted another person, a man, implicitly. She wasn’t thinking about the consequences. She was fully present and living in the moment. There was wind, and she was throwing caution to it.

In that photo booth, on that boardwalk, Caleb gave her her first orgasm. He took her over the edge while she was fully clothed. She surrendered to him completely, body, mind, and soul. And that was just the beginning…

Casper whined, intruding on her walk down memory lane. She glanced down and found him staring up at her with huge puppy dog eyes. Those were either begging-for-food eyes or I’ve-got-to-go eyes.

“Did you let Casper out?” she shouted to Owen, who was in his room changing out of his school clothes.

“No. Coming!” Owen’s reply was muffled behind the closed door.

Under thirty seconds later, Casper was harnessed, leashed up, and the two were walking out the door.

“Don’t forget your inhaler,” Taylor reminded her son.

Even a quick walk outside could be dangerous if he didn’t have it on him.

Owen dropped the leash and headed back down the short hall to his room. Taylor expected him to emerge within a minute, and when he didn’t, she turned off the water and walked down the hall. Casper trailed behind her, his leash dragging on the floor. When she got to the door, she found her son dumping out the contents of his backpack on his bed, and she got a sick feeling in her stomach.

“It’s not here,” he said, his voice wobbling just a little. “I checked twice.”

Taylor closed her eyes and pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead. She pictured the blue inhaler, its battered sticker peeled halfway off, sitting right where Owen had left it on the corner of the windowsill of the coffee shop after he’d taken it this afternoon.

How could she have forgotten to make sure he had it before they left?

That was the only fast-acting inhaler he had.

“I think I left it at the coffee shop. I’m sorry.”

“Not a big deal.” She made sure not to sound upset. The last thing she wanted to do was stress him out. “We’ll just go grab it.”

Thankfully, nothing in Hope Falls was that far away, so round-trip, it would take less than twenty minutes. When they got to the front door, Casper was right beside them with his leash in his mouth, indicating he was not going to be left home again.

The drive back to the coffee shop was brief, but Owen filled her in on his first day. He told her that his new friend Jonah was his lab partner in science. They had to build a volcano and used a two-liter Diet Coke and Mentos, something Jonah had seen on a YouTube show calledTaskmaster.

The English teacher, Mrs. Corcoran, had a pet corn snake that she kept in her desk drawer, which, according to Owen, was “totally safe,” and she “let people hold it during reading time.”

Most notable was a story Owen relayed about his math class. They were studying fractions and ratios using a Rubik’s Cube when a girl named Hadley, with purple on the end of her hair, went to the front of the class and asked for a volunteer. Owen raised his hand, but so did a lot of kids, and she picked him. She handed him the cube, closed her eyes, and told him to scramble it, which he did. Then she opened her eyes, told him to set a timer for sixty seconds, and she solved it. He said that he had homeroom, P.E., science, and math with her. In social studies, she read an essay she’d written on Ralph Baer, who was credited as inventing the first home video game system. When they were in science, she battled a kid and beat him by knowing all of the names, atomic numbers, and symbols of the periodic table of elements by heart. He was halfway through telling his mom about her wiping the floor with everyone at H-O-R-S-E in P.E. when they pulled into a parking space in front of the coffee shop.

When Owen talked about Hadley, Taylor could practically see the cartoon hearts floating around his head. She had to admit, for his first crush, someone who could solve a Rubik’s Cube, knew the periodic table of elements, wrote a report on Ralph Baer, had purple tips, and could beat everyone at horse definitely had her stamp of approval. Not that she needed it. It seemed Hadley was doing just fine on her own.

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