CYOA-The Finale
Ugh God everyone I apologize a million times for the lateness of this one. My pathetic excuse is that this fell right in the middle of prepping for a conference, my mother visiting, and then I had shitty allergy hay-fever for a few days where I did nothing but sneeze and take benadryl. Hey, guess what happens when you take benadryl almost nightly for years? It stops working! Hurray! I love being practically immune to almost all antihistamines!
Anyway, one Author's Note: there were MANY votes for kitty/puppy/pet, but I can't see Amy giving away a kitty/puppy that Zach gave her so casually. Raye, yes, but not Amy. I promise I will make it up to the kitty/puppy crowd by sticking millions of new kitties/puppies in future fics, including Curveball.
Thanks everyone for another great Fluffy February. I'm dreading April, let me tell you.
The ball of dough stuck tenaciously to the side of the wooden spoon, despite efforts to scrape it off on the side of the pot. “Uh, these are really sticky.”
“Keep your hands wet!” a strained voice called from down the hall, followed by violent hacking.
“Shut up!” Darien hollored. A brief fantasy of stuffing the grayish, gluey ball down Zach’s throat passed through his mind. “And I’m not making them, I’m just sticking them in.”
“That’s what she said,” the voice continued wearily.
Amy came over to the counter and put a gentle hand on Darien’s arm as he stirred the soup. “Thank you for doing this.”
“Thank YOU for doing this, Amy.” He smiled. “You sure you want to give it up?”
The “it” in question was a natural, beautiful, chocolate brown south sea pearl pendant, set in recycled, ethically-mined yellow gold chain. Trails of iridescent green and purple shimmered on the flawless surface like a rippled rainbow; Serena would go absolutely batshit for something so unconventionally beautiful. Zach had a friend in the South Pacific who went pearl diving and lived on a hut on the beach to avoid paying taxes in the States, and the treasure was the result of a year-long search. In return, Zach had wired him enough cash to keep him in beer and prostitutes for another year.
Amy responded by pulling her necklace out of her sweater: another pearl, dark brown, hanging on a delicate gold chain, completely identical to the one in the box. “This was my birthday present last year.”
“Zach used to smoke a lot of pot,” Darien offered as explanation.
“Zach used to smoke a lot of pot,” Zach said from underneath the covers when Darien came over to make the soup and negotiate a trade. “And that bastard Bert didn’t say a word to me when he took my freaking cash. Asshole. I’m going to steal his boat the next time I’m down there.
Hey, you want our reservations, too? If it’s even open with the freaking snow and crazy people.”
“Where?”
“Villa.”
“Is that the place that serves six kinds of wheatgrass?”
“Eight,” Amy corrected. “The green lentil curry is really good.”
That was about as appealing to Darien as munching into a bale of wet hay. “Thanks but no thanks. Few things bring me more pleasure than murdering a Porterhouse with my teeth.”
Despite the offer of twenty-dollar wheatgrass shots, everything seemed to be falling into place nicely. Noah had met them at the Stein’s house on his way home, and was currently sipping on coffee and doing something extremely complicated with small screwdrivers to the guts of the chocolate fountain while Aja stared, hypnotized, at the huge fishtank. Jesse received a call and booked to a back room to take it. Amy and Darien chopped chicken and vegetables in the kitchen while Zach helpfully shouted instructions from the bedroom. The flu couldn’t even shut that guy up.
“Did you put some sherry in it?”
“Would you shut the fish up?” He brought the coffee pot to Noah at the dining table. “Need a refill?”
Noah grunted in reply. His phone beeped, and he automatically reached for it. His brow furrowed when he read the screen.
He had been rather sullen since walking through the door, and Darien wasn’t completely convinced it was all due to sleep deprivation. He shoved aside a pile of tiny machinery and sat down next to him. “You OK?”
“Yeah,” Noah said shortly, never taking his eyes off of the fountain.
“Is it the baby? Keeping you up?”
“Yeah.”
“Daddy! Something’s wrong with the big fish!”
Noah stopped fiddling. “Go tell Aunt Amy about it.”
“But--”
“Go!”
Darien tried a different route as Aja scampered away. “What about Makoto? Everything good between you two?”
“Couldn’t be better.”
Darien crossed his arms; he had much more experience playing hardball than his doofy, lovable daddy-friend, and dollars to donuts he’d come out of this with the answers he was seeking, squishy feeling be damned. “Well then I can think of two things: either you’re pissed at me for asking you to go out of your way to fix the fountain, or you’re presently sitting on an external hemorrhoid the size of a baby shoe. So if one of these reasons is indeed the case, please get it over with already and call me an asshole or send me on a pharmacy run, because this single-syllable bullpoop is getting really old.” He reached over with the coffee pot and refilled Noah’s cup. “Talk to me.”
Weary brown eyes met his for a moment, and then dropped back to the mess on the table. “My brother got picked up last night.”
“Jacob?” There was only one Radway brother who had a rap sheet. “Poop, man, isn’t he on probation?”
“Yep,” Noah said, picking up a pair of pliers. “Fishing idiot decided to steal his ex’s car. Except it wasn’t hers to begin with, and there was a few grams in the glove compartment.” A rush of air escaped his broad chest as he tried to keep his emotions in check. “I was going to get Makoto tickets to the Knicks for tomorrow or something, you know. She’s been run down with the baby and I think she needed to get out. We could have heckled the fish out of Lebron.” His hand was shaking slightly as he reached for the mug of coffee. “I spent everything on bailing Jacob out and getting him a lawyer. He doesn’t want me to tell Dad. Stupid fisher. I don’t know what to do with him anymore. He won’t listen to me.”
There were many things that Darien could have said at that point: that his first decade of life was filled with more blue strobes on tops of Crown Vics than Christmas lights on trees, that he knew what vending machine pastries were stocked in what police stations (the cops on duty usually felt bad for the ragged kid waiting patiently in a lobby chair for either his mother’s questioning to be finished or CPS showing up, whichever came first), and that all of the love and generosity in the world couldn’t help a person that didn’t want it to.
But that would be saved for a time when there was much less of an audience. What came out was: “Fish.”
“Daddy!” Aja pleaded. “The big fish!”
Noah snapped out of his thoughts. “What did Aunt Amy say?”
“She says if it pooped that Uncle Darien would clean it up, but it didn’t poop! It’s eating baby fish!”
“What?” Darien took the little girl by the hand and went over to the huge community tank, which was filled with rocks, plants, and fish darting in between all. “Which one?”
“The big one!” She pressed a moist index finger against the glass at a blue-and-black striped fish about the size of his palm, who was lurking underneath a piece of driftwood.
“Darien!” Zach hacked from the bedroom. “What’s going on with the fish?”
“One did poop,” he said, staring with disgust at a clot of gritty pinkish matter on the gravel.
“Scoop it out with the net.”
Fish that. “Heck no. I’ll wait for another fish to eat it.” He peered close into the tank. “Um, Zach? The big guy?”
“Which one? Unfree Willy? Rude Boy? Jr. Gong?”
“The blue and black one.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“And! It’s his name! Or is it Chronic? Chronic hangs out by the filter, he’s weird.”
“Uh, the one that lives in the log.” A flash of movement caught his eye, and Aja yelped and grabbed onto his leg. “Gross! It just puked out a bunch of little fish! Oh, God, sick.”
“Oh no! It’s gonna eat the babies! Uncle, don’t let it eat the babies!” Aja screamed.
Zach seemed to know what was going on without needing to get out of bed. “Crap! I know what happened; it’s Kevin! Kevin’s a stupid fish slut! That’s the second time she’s secretly mouthbrood, that whore!”
“Zach, uh...”
“Dumb fish can’t stop rubbing her whore genitals with other fish and making babies! Is she putting them back in her mouth?”
Darien peered in the tank. “Uh, no.”
“Oh, Christ on a cracker. Can you fish them out and stick them in the five gallon?”
“What’s the five gallon?”
“I’ve got it.” Amy rushed away and returned with a small octagonal tank and a water pitcher. “OK, what we have to do is transfer some tank water into this tank, and then catch the fry with the fry net and set them up here.”
“Do they have yolk sacs attached?” Zach yelled from the bedroom.
“No, honey.”
“OK, they’re good. Try to get them all. I feel bad when they end up as snacks.”
Aja sniffled and started crying. “I don’t want the baby fish to die!”
“They won’t die, babe,” Zach shouted. “Aunt Amy will save them all. You can have one when they’re bigger.”
“No she can’t,” Noah countered. Her face fell.
Darien was sick of him being cranky. “Aja, what’s in the boxes?”
The little girl brightened up and guided him to the coffee table. “I made these for Mommy at school. This one’s my hand,” she explained, holding up a green clay disk with a small imprint in the middle. “And this is for her, for a necklace.”
He picked up the piece of string strung with wooden beads; the middle five were flat and purple and spelled out “M-O-M-M-Y”. “Very nice.” He picked up the other box. “What’s in here?”
Aja scowled like a stormcloud. “I made that one, too. It’s supposed to be from Anna but I made it.”
Darien opened the box to reveal an identical “Mommy” necklace with far fewer beads. A faint hint of an idea began forming, and then exploded into eureka. “Aja, do you want to trade?” He pulled the velvet box that had been Amy’s only shortly before and slid it across the table. “Can you give that to your Mommy? Your Daddy got it for her, but he wants it to be a surprise. A big surprise. So big, that he doesn’t even know about it yet.” He winked at her. “Can we do that?”
Aja nodded and closed both of her hands around the velvet box with a sinister look that would put Wall Street execs to shame. “Now Daddy got her something, and I got her something, and Anna got her nothing!”
“OK, that’s not nice. You have to be nice to your sister, Aja.”
“I will but not now. I will when she’s...four.”
“If you let her live that long,” he said, ruffling a big hand through Aja’s soft brown curls. “Be a good girl for Daddy, OK? He’s got a lot on his mind.”
A cluster of dry coughs broke the moment. Zach weaved into the living room, wrapped in a crocheted afghan, and leaned unsteadily against the wall like a drunk. His face was pale, and the coils of sandy blond hair stuck up in all directions on one side of his head, and were matted flat on the other. “Wanna take home a bastard fish?”
The towncar slowed to a stop in front of Jesse’s building. The blue glow of the moon mixed with the orange burn of the streetlights against the snow, illuminating the street with a eerie, surreal light. It was like being on another planet. Flakes swirled into the car as Jesse opened the door to jump out. “Hey, thanks for the lift.”
“Good luck with your date,” Darien said, rubbing his fingers against the wrapped box. What the hell was he going to do with that? “I’m sure the organic wheatgrass will be sublime.”
Jesse flashed him a smile. “Oh god I hope he’s not a vegetarian. I’ll give up roast duck when they pry it from my cold, dead, gay Chinese hands. See ya.”
The doorman smiled when Darien jumped out with a chocolate fountain the size of the Stanley Cup. “Let me help you with that, Mr. Chiba.”
“Eh,” Darien handed it over. “Throw it in the dumpster, it’s busted. My friend couldn’t fix it.”
The elevator ride up to the penthouse seemed to take forever. Hopefully they had enough food in the house for him to bang up something, since their Sunday cook was on leave that week. Now his only hope was that Raye followed through on her end of the bargain...
The front rooms were dark. “Serena?”
“In here,” a miserable voice called from the main rec room.
She was laying across the couch with dried tear stains running down her face, her leg up on a pillow, and a nasty contraption of Ace bandages and metal splints around her ankle. Darien was at her side in less time than it took for her to cross her arms and pout.
“What the hell happened?”
Her lower lip jutted out as she turned her head away. “I fell.”
“On the ice? Serena, I keep telling you not to wear freaking stilettos when it’s icy out, and you never--”
“No, dumbhead, I fell in the studio.” It was almost impossible, but she pouted even harder. “Raye was teaching me to pole dance and I slipped off and sprained my ankle.”
“Raye was what?”
“Teaching me to pole dance. I was going to surprise you tomorrow night.” She jerked her chin at a long, flat black case on the floor. “I even bought a pole.”
Darien blinked and tried to process. “But Raye was helping me. She was going to send a Sugar over to the house and--”
“Yeah,” Serena sniffed. “I was supposed to be that Sugar.”
He smiled in the darkness and slid onto the couch next to her, and let her rest her head on his lap. “I was supposed to take you to Belize.”
“I know. You texted my brother and I went through his phone when he was in the bathroom.”
“Serena!”
“What? You didn’t mind when I did that and found all those dirty pictures of Mina.” She curled onto her side and rested her cheek against his thigh. “Plus the stupid idiot still uses Mom’s birthday as the unlock code.”
He ran his finger through the silk-soft strands and chuckled in the darkness. “Baby, we’re made for each other.”
“We are,” she agreed. Her hand felt around on his jacket, and she pulled out Aja’s box. “What’s this?”
“Oh, uh--”
“Is this for me?” She scooted into a half-seated position with her head on his chest and popped it open. “Oh, Darien!”
He was just about to launch into an explanation when he noticed the tear glittering in the corners of her eyes. “Are you--?”
“Darien,” she whispered. Her finger traced the letters imprinted on the beads as her watery eyes lifted to meet his. “Does this mean you want to keep trying?”
The look on her face made his heart want to explode. He knew what she was thinking, and remembering: the two bloody mishaps, the painful shots, the side effects, the charts and graphs, the waiting, the monthly disappointment. He had put a stop to it because he couldn’t stand to witness what the whole process did to her, but as he watched her clutch the necklace in her hands with near reverence, he realized it wasn’t the process that was killing her. It was him. His jumping off the baby train was, to her, a sign that he was jumping off another one.
“Yes,” he said, drawing her closer. “Some very lucky person is going to call you that some day, and I’ll make sure that it happens..” A tear ran down her face, and he brushed it away with his thumb. “Even if it requires something...weird.”
She nodded as the tears began to fall in earnest. “I’ll call the specialist tomorrow.”
Darien grabbed her in a hug so tight that he almost missed her happy giggle. “No more shots, though. We’ll try something else.” His face lit up. “I’ve an idea: we can steal the Radway baby. Aja wouldn’t mind, and those two rabbits would just go and make another one anyway.” She laughed again; a good sign. “Except she’d probably grow to be like, six-five with F-cups, and everyone would know it was us.”
“Maybe we can feed her a lot of coffee and stunt her growth.”
He bent his head and kissed her, full and hard, on the lips. “That’s my girl.” He leaned his head back and sighed. “So, should we get Chinese?”
“I’m not hungry,” she lied; Serena was always hungry. “However, I could use something to distract me from the pain of my sprained ankle.” She reached over and unzipped his fly; his cock hardened as if on cue.
He stood and swept her up in his arms. “We have to be careful with your ankle.”
“Oh I took a percocet. I can barely feel it.”
Later, after his jaw was aching from eating pussy, she brought him up to her face for a kiss as she sprawled naked across their bed, wearing nothing but her ankle splint. “OK, now I’m hungry.”
He nipped at the tender white skin on her shoulder. “What do you feel like?”
“Amy told me about this place called Villa? I made reservations for tonight while I was waiting for you. I only had to bribe the maitre d’ a couple hundred to get us in!”
Darien groaned. There was no avoiding wheatgrass this year.
Anyway, one Author's Note: there were MANY votes for kitty/puppy/pet, but I can't see Amy giving away a kitty/puppy that Zach gave her so casually. Raye, yes, but not Amy. I promise I will make it up to the kitty/puppy crowd by sticking millions of new kitties/puppies in future fics, including Curveball.
Thanks everyone for another great Fluffy February. I'm dreading April, let me tell you.
The ball of dough stuck tenaciously to the side of the wooden spoon, despite efforts to scrape it off on the side of the pot. “Uh, these are really sticky.”
“Keep your hands wet!” a strained voice called from down the hall, followed by violent hacking.
“Shut up!” Darien hollored. A brief fantasy of stuffing the grayish, gluey ball down Zach’s throat passed through his mind. “And I’m not making them, I’m just sticking them in.”
“That’s what she said,” the voice continued wearily.
Amy came over to the counter and put a gentle hand on Darien’s arm as he stirred the soup. “Thank you for doing this.”
“Thank YOU for doing this, Amy.” He smiled. “You sure you want to give it up?”
The “it” in question was a natural, beautiful, chocolate brown south sea pearl pendant, set in recycled, ethically-mined yellow gold chain. Trails of iridescent green and purple shimmered on the flawless surface like a rippled rainbow; Serena would go absolutely batshit for something so unconventionally beautiful. Zach had a friend in the South Pacific who went pearl diving and lived on a hut on the beach to avoid paying taxes in the States, and the treasure was the result of a year-long search. In return, Zach had wired him enough cash to keep him in beer and prostitutes for another year.
Amy responded by pulling her necklace out of her sweater: another pearl, dark brown, hanging on a delicate gold chain, completely identical to the one in the box. “This was my birthday present last year.”
“Zach used to smoke a lot of pot,” Darien offered as explanation.
“Zach used to smoke a lot of pot,” Zach said from underneath the covers when Darien came over to make the soup and negotiate a trade. “And that bastard Bert didn’t say a word to me when he took my freaking cash. Asshole. I’m going to steal his boat the next time I’m down there.
Hey, you want our reservations, too? If it’s even open with the freaking snow and crazy people.”
“Where?”
“Villa.”
“Is that the place that serves six kinds of wheatgrass?”
“Eight,” Amy corrected. “The green lentil curry is really good.”
That was about as appealing to Darien as munching into a bale of wet hay. “Thanks but no thanks. Few things bring me more pleasure than murdering a Porterhouse with my teeth.”
Despite the offer of twenty-dollar wheatgrass shots, everything seemed to be falling into place nicely. Noah had met them at the Stein’s house on his way home, and was currently sipping on coffee and doing something extremely complicated with small screwdrivers to the guts of the chocolate fountain while Aja stared, hypnotized, at the huge fishtank. Jesse received a call and booked to a back room to take it. Amy and Darien chopped chicken and vegetables in the kitchen while Zach helpfully shouted instructions from the bedroom. The flu couldn’t even shut that guy up.
“Did you put some sherry in it?”
“Would you shut the fish up?” He brought the coffee pot to Noah at the dining table. “Need a refill?”
Noah grunted in reply. His phone beeped, and he automatically reached for it. His brow furrowed when he read the screen.
He had been rather sullen since walking through the door, and Darien wasn’t completely convinced it was all due to sleep deprivation. He shoved aside a pile of tiny machinery and sat down next to him. “You OK?”
“Yeah,” Noah said shortly, never taking his eyes off of the fountain.
“Is it the baby? Keeping you up?”
“Yeah.”
“Daddy! Something’s wrong with the big fish!”
Noah stopped fiddling. “Go tell Aunt Amy about it.”
“But--”
“Go!”
Darien tried a different route as Aja scampered away. “What about Makoto? Everything good between you two?”
“Couldn’t be better.”
Darien crossed his arms; he had much more experience playing hardball than his doofy, lovable daddy-friend, and dollars to donuts he’d come out of this with the answers he was seeking, squishy feeling be damned. “Well then I can think of two things: either you’re pissed at me for asking you to go out of your way to fix the fountain, or you’re presently sitting on an external hemorrhoid the size of a baby shoe. So if one of these reasons is indeed the case, please get it over with already and call me an asshole or send me on a pharmacy run, because this single-syllable bullpoop is getting really old.” He reached over with the coffee pot and refilled Noah’s cup. “Talk to me.”
Weary brown eyes met his for a moment, and then dropped back to the mess on the table. “My brother got picked up last night.”
“Jacob?” There was only one Radway brother who had a rap sheet. “Poop, man, isn’t he on probation?”
“Yep,” Noah said, picking up a pair of pliers. “Fishing idiot decided to steal his ex’s car. Except it wasn’t hers to begin with, and there was a few grams in the glove compartment.” A rush of air escaped his broad chest as he tried to keep his emotions in check. “I was going to get Makoto tickets to the Knicks for tomorrow or something, you know. She’s been run down with the baby and I think she needed to get out. We could have heckled the fish out of Lebron.” His hand was shaking slightly as he reached for the mug of coffee. “I spent everything on bailing Jacob out and getting him a lawyer. He doesn’t want me to tell Dad. Stupid fisher. I don’t know what to do with him anymore. He won’t listen to me.”
There were many things that Darien could have said at that point: that his first decade of life was filled with more blue strobes on tops of Crown Vics than Christmas lights on trees, that he knew what vending machine pastries were stocked in what police stations (the cops on duty usually felt bad for the ragged kid waiting patiently in a lobby chair for either his mother’s questioning to be finished or CPS showing up, whichever came first), and that all of the love and generosity in the world couldn’t help a person that didn’t want it to.
But that would be saved for a time when there was much less of an audience. What came out was: “Fish.”
“Daddy!” Aja pleaded. “The big fish!”
Noah snapped out of his thoughts. “What did Aunt Amy say?”
“She says if it pooped that Uncle Darien would clean it up, but it didn’t poop! It’s eating baby fish!”
“What?” Darien took the little girl by the hand and went over to the huge community tank, which was filled with rocks, plants, and fish darting in between all. “Which one?”
“The big one!” She pressed a moist index finger against the glass at a blue-and-black striped fish about the size of his palm, who was lurking underneath a piece of driftwood.
“Darien!” Zach hacked from the bedroom. “What’s going on with the fish?”
“One did poop,” he said, staring with disgust at a clot of gritty pinkish matter on the gravel.
“Scoop it out with the net.”
Fish that. “Heck no. I’ll wait for another fish to eat it.” He peered close into the tank. “Um, Zach? The big guy?”
“Which one? Unfree Willy? Rude Boy? Jr. Gong?”
“The blue and black one.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“And! It’s his name! Or is it Chronic? Chronic hangs out by the filter, he’s weird.”
“Uh, the one that lives in the log.” A flash of movement caught his eye, and Aja yelped and grabbed onto his leg. “Gross! It just puked out a bunch of little fish! Oh, God, sick.”
“Oh no! It’s gonna eat the babies! Uncle, don’t let it eat the babies!” Aja screamed.
Zach seemed to know what was going on without needing to get out of bed. “Crap! I know what happened; it’s Kevin! Kevin’s a stupid fish slut! That’s the second time she’s secretly mouthbrood, that whore!”
“Zach, uh...”
“Dumb fish can’t stop rubbing her whore genitals with other fish and making babies! Is she putting them back in her mouth?”
Darien peered in the tank. “Uh, no.”
“Oh, Christ on a cracker. Can you fish them out and stick them in the five gallon?”
“What’s the five gallon?”
“I’ve got it.” Amy rushed away and returned with a small octagonal tank and a water pitcher. “OK, what we have to do is transfer some tank water into this tank, and then catch the fry with the fry net and set them up here.”
“Do they have yolk sacs attached?” Zach yelled from the bedroom.
“No, honey.”
“OK, they’re good. Try to get them all. I feel bad when they end up as snacks.”
Aja sniffled and started crying. “I don’t want the baby fish to die!”
“They won’t die, babe,” Zach shouted. “Aunt Amy will save them all. You can have one when they’re bigger.”
“No she can’t,” Noah countered. Her face fell.
Darien was sick of him being cranky. “Aja, what’s in the boxes?”
The little girl brightened up and guided him to the coffee table. “I made these for Mommy at school. This one’s my hand,” she explained, holding up a green clay disk with a small imprint in the middle. “And this is for her, for a necklace.”
He picked up the piece of string strung with wooden beads; the middle five were flat and purple and spelled out “M-O-M-M-Y”. “Very nice.” He picked up the other box. “What’s in here?”
Aja scowled like a stormcloud. “I made that one, too. It’s supposed to be from Anna but I made it.”
Darien opened the box to reveal an identical “Mommy” necklace with far fewer beads. A faint hint of an idea began forming, and then exploded into eureka. “Aja, do you want to trade?” He pulled the velvet box that had been Amy’s only shortly before and slid it across the table. “Can you give that to your Mommy? Your Daddy got it for her, but he wants it to be a surprise. A big surprise. So big, that he doesn’t even know about it yet.” He winked at her. “Can we do that?”
Aja nodded and closed both of her hands around the velvet box with a sinister look that would put Wall Street execs to shame. “Now Daddy got her something, and I got her something, and Anna got her nothing!”
“OK, that’s not nice. You have to be nice to your sister, Aja.”
“I will but not now. I will when she’s...four.”
“If you let her live that long,” he said, ruffling a big hand through Aja’s soft brown curls. “Be a good girl for Daddy, OK? He’s got a lot on his mind.”
A cluster of dry coughs broke the moment. Zach weaved into the living room, wrapped in a crocheted afghan, and leaned unsteadily against the wall like a drunk. His face was pale, and the coils of sandy blond hair stuck up in all directions on one side of his head, and were matted flat on the other. “Wanna take home a bastard fish?”
The towncar slowed to a stop in front of Jesse’s building. The blue glow of the moon mixed with the orange burn of the streetlights against the snow, illuminating the street with a eerie, surreal light. It was like being on another planet. Flakes swirled into the car as Jesse opened the door to jump out. “Hey, thanks for the lift.”
“Good luck with your date,” Darien said, rubbing his fingers against the wrapped box. What the hell was he going to do with that? “I’m sure the organic wheatgrass will be sublime.”
Jesse flashed him a smile. “Oh god I hope he’s not a vegetarian. I’ll give up roast duck when they pry it from my cold, dead, gay Chinese hands. See ya.”
The doorman smiled when Darien jumped out with a chocolate fountain the size of the Stanley Cup. “Let me help you with that, Mr. Chiba.”
“Eh,” Darien handed it over. “Throw it in the dumpster, it’s busted. My friend couldn’t fix it.”
The elevator ride up to the penthouse seemed to take forever. Hopefully they had enough food in the house for him to bang up something, since their Sunday cook was on leave that week. Now his only hope was that Raye followed through on her end of the bargain...
The front rooms were dark. “Serena?”
“In here,” a miserable voice called from the main rec room.
She was laying across the couch with dried tear stains running down her face, her leg up on a pillow, and a nasty contraption of Ace bandages and metal splints around her ankle. Darien was at her side in less time than it took for her to cross her arms and pout.
“What the hell happened?”
Her lower lip jutted out as she turned her head away. “I fell.”
“On the ice? Serena, I keep telling you not to wear freaking stilettos when it’s icy out, and you never--”
“No, dumbhead, I fell in the studio.” It was almost impossible, but she pouted even harder. “Raye was teaching me to pole dance and I slipped off and sprained my ankle.”
“Raye was what?”
“Teaching me to pole dance. I was going to surprise you tomorrow night.” She jerked her chin at a long, flat black case on the floor. “I even bought a pole.”
Darien blinked and tried to process. “But Raye was helping me. She was going to send a Sugar over to the house and--”
“Yeah,” Serena sniffed. “I was supposed to be that Sugar.”
He smiled in the darkness and slid onto the couch next to her, and let her rest her head on his lap. “I was supposed to take you to Belize.”
“I know. You texted my brother and I went through his phone when he was in the bathroom.”
“Serena!”
“What? You didn’t mind when I did that and found all those dirty pictures of Mina.” She curled onto her side and rested her cheek against his thigh. “Plus the stupid idiot still uses Mom’s birthday as the unlock code.”
He ran his finger through the silk-soft strands and chuckled in the darkness. “Baby, we’re made for each other.”
“We are,” she agreed. Her hand felt around on his jacket, and she pulled out Aja’s box. “What’s this?”
“Oh, uh--”
“Is this for me?” She scooted into a half-seated position with her head on his chest and popped it open. “Oh, Darien!”
He was just about to launch into an explanation when he noticed the tear glittering in the corners of her eyes. “Are you--?”
“Darien,” she whispered. Her finger traced the letters imprinted on the beads as her watery eyes lifted to meet his. “Does this mean you want to keep trying?”
The look on her face made his heart want to explode. He knew what she was thinking, and remembering: the two bloody mishaps, the painful shots, the side effects, the charts and graphs, the waiting, the monthly disappointment. He had put a stop to it because he couldn’t stand to witness what the whole process did to her, but as he watched her clutch the necklace in her hands with near reverence, he realized it wasn’t the process that was killing her. It was him. His jumping off the baby train was, to her, a sign that he was jumping off another one.
“Yes,” he said, drawing her closer. “Some very lucky person is going to call you that some day, and I’ll make sure that it happens..” A tear ran down her face, and he brushed it away with his thumb. “Even if it requires something...weird.”
She nodded as the tears began to fall in earnest. “I’ll call the specialist tomorrow.”
Darien grabbed her in a hug so tight that he almost missed her happy giggle. “No more shots, though. We’ll try something else.” His face lit up. “I’ve an idea: we can steal the Radway baby. Aja wouldn’t mind, and those two rabbits would just go and make another one anyway.” She laughed again; a good sign. “Except she’d probably grow to be like, six-five with F-cups, and everyone would know it was us.”
“Maybe we can feed her a lot of coffee and stunt her growth.”
He bent his head and kissed her, full and hard, on the lips. “That’s my girl.” He leaned his head back and sighed. “So, should we get Chinese?”
“I’m not hungry,” she lied; Serena was always hungry. “However, I could use something to distract me from the pain of my sprained ankle.” She reached over and unzipped his fly; his cock hardened as if on cue.
He stood and swept her up in his arms. “We have to be careful with your ankle.”
“Oh I took a percocet. I can barely feel it.”
Later, after his jaw was aching from eating pussy, she brought him up to her face for a kiss as she sprawled naked across their bed, wearing nothing but her ankle splint. “OK, now I’m hungry.”
He nipped at the tender white skin on her shoulder. “What do you feel like?”
“Amy told me about this place called Villa? I made reservations for tonight while I was waiting for you. I only had to bribe the maitre d’ a couple hundred to get us in!”
Darien groaned. There was no avoiding wheatgrass this year.