Page 74 of The Love Dare
He rolls his eyes heavenward for a moment, praying for patience. He’s not a religious person, but at the moment, he’ll take whatever he can get. “Open my contacts. Go to my favorites. She’s right there.Mom.”
Nina presses the name.
The screen switches to that of an outgoing call and she hands it over. As he lifts the phone to his ear, Nina walks over to the window and throws the curtains open, making herself comfortable. An orange glow floods the room. He turns his back, not sparing a glance at what he knows must be a gorgeous view of world-famous Barcelona at sunset. His mind is all the way across the Atlantic, across the US, in a one-bedroom, doorman-secured apartment with a view of the Pacific Ocean—the one he helped move his mother into a week before he left for filming. It hadn’t been his idea. He asked her to stay in the sober living facility while he was away, told her she could move in with him when he got back, wanted to keep an eye on her. But his mother had never done well with supervision—not from her parents, not from her boyfriends, and certainly not from her son.
She answers after the second ring.
“Tyler Baby?”
He hates how much he reads into every inflection. She sounds excited—but is she too excited? Is her pitch too high? Is she nervous? Is she hiding something? Or is she just glad to speak to him after almost a month of no contact?
He’s praying for the latter, but he doesn’t trust it.
History has shown him to never trust in that hope.
“Hey, Mom,” he finally answers, voice catching in his throat. He swallows all the doubts back down. “Happy birthday.”
She sighs. “Thanks, baby.”
Was that a sad sigh? An overwhelmed sigh? A sorry sigh? All three have the potential to be dangerous. Her birthday has always been her hardest day. The day she usually falls off the wagon. The day she always falls into a stupor. The one that left him driving to a hospital with her at eighteen, breaking down the door to their trailer at twenty, and finally calling the police for a life check at twenty-three. It’s why he got this call written into his contract. He knew he would need to hear her voice, to confirm with his own ears that she was okay.
But is she?
“How’s the apartment?” he forces himself to ask, when the question he really wants answered is,Are you high? Are you using? Are you choosing the drugs yet again?
“Beautiful.”
“And the job?”
“Good.”
He frowns at the one-word answers. They sound cagey to his ears.
“Tell me about the show,” she interjects instead, turning the focus on him, not exactly the encouraging sign he was looking for. “Where are you? Have you met someone? Will I like her?”
He glances briefly at Nina, who’s watching his every move like a hawk, and rubs at the back of his neck. “I think that’s all confidential.”
“Come on, you can’t tell your mother one little detail? Not even a hint?”
“Sorry, Mom. Not today.”
“Hmph.”
He’s not afraid of the pit bull standing in the corner, and he definitely isn’t concerned with following her rules, but right now, they’re working in his favor. He isn’t sure how his mom will react to this romance with Winnie. If it were up to her,he’s sure she’d prefer someone brand new to their world—not the girl who’s been there every step of the way, who knows their deepest secrets, who will stand next to him like a mirror, reflecting back all his mother’s greatest mistakes and all the times the Rusu family was there when his own family wasn’t. So today of all days, he’s not going to go there. Eventually, he’ll tell her the truth and they’ll figure things out. He’s spent too much of his life concerned with his mother’s reactions. He won’t let that interfere with his relationship. But there’s no harm delaying until they can do it in person, with Winnie by his side and his mother able to bear witness to the happiness she brings him.
“What are your plans tonight?” he tentatively questions, edging closer to what he really wants to know. “Any celebrating?”
“I’m going out to dinner with my sponsor and a few people I met at the facility.”
Her voice is a little too flat, but he still can’t fight the huge sigh of relief that slips through his lips. All the way across the Atlantic, his mother lets out her own heavy breath.
“You don’t need to worry so much about me,” she says, the words so soft he can hardly hear them.
But I do, Mom, he thinks.I really, really do.
When he was younger, he didn’t fully understand why her birthday hit so hard. He remembered catching her with that old shoebox full of photos—remnants from her former life. He remembered leaning up against his closed door, straining to overhear the voicemails she was leaving to a number that had long since stopped picking up, the catch in her voice as she whispered the namesMomandDadinto the receiver. He figured her birthday reminded her of the life she had before, the family she once belonged to, the strict parents who cut her off. He didn’t know much about them. He’d never met them. He wasn’t sure if they even knew he existed. His mother never toldhim if he was the reason she got shunned or if something else had caused that wreckage long before he came along.
As he got older, he realized the truth. For whatever reason—thewhydidn’t matter—her birthday was the one day she couldn’t see beyond her regrets. And unfortunately, he was one of them. She’d told him so herself, many a time, so deep in the drugs she probably didn’t remember, but he did. He remembered everything. The good and the bad. He simply chose to focus on the times when she made him feel as if he were her whole world, instead of the times when she made him feel as if he’d destroyed it.
