Some would say cold.
But not really. Tilly had a crunchy protective shell that, if you knew the secret passage into her heart, turned into a gooey, warm, loving center.
By the time they’d finished lunch, they’d gotten Clarisse calmed down and convinced that moving wasn’t the worst thing in the world, and that maybe she should be open to what her men were suggesting.
Sully and Mac owe us, Loren thought.
Loren and Tilly had ridden separately from the other four Sarasota women. The two of them wanted to stop by the Ellenton Outlet mall on their way back, and the others weren’t able to.
Tilly had driven, in her SUV. As they crossed over the Skyway Bridge, Tilly glanced her way. “Whatcha thinkin’ so hard about there, sis?”
“We’ll probably be seeing even less of those three now,” Loren said. “Four kids is a handful.”
“Yeah,” Tilly quietly said.
After a few minutes, she reached over and found Loren’s hand, squeezing it, leaving it there.
“I sometimes think,” Tilly said, softly, slowly, deliberately, “about everyone having kids. Does it make me a horrible friend that I wanted to slap the crap out of Clarisse at the party that night when she told us she hadn’t told Sully and Mac about going off the pill?”
Loren squeezed her hand. “No, sweetie. It doesn’t.”
Tilly stopped at the southern rest area on the bridge, pulling into a parking space far from the building. They stared north into Tampa Bay, a cruise ship taking advantage of high tide and slowly making its way south toward the span.
Loren knew Tilly would speak when she was ready.
When she could actually get the words out.
“She has choices,” Tilly finally said after a few minutes. “They all had and have choices, even if it was accidental. They don’t know how fucking lucky they are to have choices. I never got a choice. You never got a choice. Where were our fucking choices?”
Tilly pounded her hands against the steering wheel, sobbing until Loren finally leaned over and grabbed her, holding on until Tilly went limp in her arms, crying.
Loren stroked her friend’s hair, back now to its previous length before Cris had first left her years ago. While Loren hated what Cris had done to Tilly then, the hindsight, and the healing with Landry and Cris now in Tilly’s life, Loren knew it was just one of life’s unexpected story arcs. Tilly was devoted to her men, trusted them, loved them. Either man would kill or die for her.
It had helped her friend heal in many ways, even if Tilly didn’t realize it.
Unfortunately, there was one thing their love couldn’t heal.
“It’s been years,” Loren gently said. “They’ve made advancements since then. Did you think about that? The three of you can go and talk to a fertility doctor.”
“I did,” Tilly whispered. “I went a couple of weeks ago.”
Loren thought about how to phrase her next words, not wanting to say the wrong thing. “You never said anything.”
“I didn’t even tell them,” she said. “I didn’t want to get their hopes up when I didn’t even know if there were any hopes to get up.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“I didn’t know how.”
“Honey, you can tell me anything.” She loved Tilly to death and knew damn well why Tilly hadn’t said anything. But what happened in her own past wasn’t Tilly’s burden to bear.
Especially since Tilly didn’t even know the whole story.
“I took all my records, they did ultrasounds and an MRI and said they could probably do surgery, but even then I was looking at maybe a ten percent chance, if I was lucky.” She sniffled. “My regular OB/Gyn suggested a hysterectomy at my last visit due to my pain getting worse every month and my…history. I wanted to be really, really sure before I made a decision. Any decision. If there was a reasonable chance…”
She broke down sobbing again. “That motherfucker took all that from me.”
“I know, sweetie.” She knew Tilly’s history.
Tilly wasn’t talking about Cris or Landry.
“Who the hell do these fucking assholes think they are?” Tilly moaned.
Loren knew the only way through this for her friend was through it. She’d long suspected this was something Tilly hadn’t finished dealing with, no matter what she’d said.
Frankly, Loren was surprised it’d taken this long to come to the surface. Things had been going smoothly with Tilly and her men for a couple of years now. Landry had beaten his cancer a second time and there were no signs of it coming back. Tilly had seemed happy, fulfilled.
Mostly.
“You guys could adopt.”
“I thought about it. I really did. I just…I can’t. That was the only thing I’d ever wanted, to be a mom, a wife, and that motherfucker took it from me. Maybe it makes me sound like a cold-hearted bitch, but it’s just how I feel. I wouldn’t adopt a dog or a cat if I wasn’t sure. I’m darn sure not going to adopt a poor baby and then not be able to bond with it. That’s not right.”
They sat there for the better part of an hour while Tilly talked and cried it out of her system. Then Loren urged her out, took the keys from her, and walked with her to the restroom. While Tilly was using the bathroom, Loren caught a glimpse of her own face in one of the mirrors over the sinks.
The haunted look never far from the surface.
There were days she was sure she’d look in the mirror and see the scared, beaten co-ed looking back at her, the one who’d gone to a frat party, and woke up in a park with a dirty sheet wrapped around her and with no clue what had happened.
At first.
She’d met Ross, a friend of her roommate’s brother, only a few weeks earlier.
She’d immediately felt protected, safe, even though he hadn’t made a single romantic move on her and her roommate’s brother told her Ross was interested in her.
After she’d called her roommate to pick her up, and she couldn’t convince Loren to call the cops, she’d called Ross.
Her roommate had told him what happened. He’d driven her to the hospital and stayed by her side. He’d taken her to talk to the campus cops, where she’d sobbed the story out to their less than compassionate officer.
He’d didn’t leave her side. Even when no one else had believed her, when the frat brothers closed ranks and denied anything had happened, when the campus cop told her he’d look into it even though he also told her he doubted any charges would be filed, and she really should be more careful about how much she drank at a party.
Except…she hadn’t had any alcohol. She’d accepted a soda from one of the guys there, and it was the last clear memory she’d had of the rest of that evening except for snippets here and there.
And now…
She startled when Tilly emerged from the stall. Fortunately, her friend was too far out of it, trying to work through her own old-fresh grief, and anger, to catch it.
It’d been years since Loren had consciously thought about those days.
About what had happened.
What had resulted.
About the unexpected midnight visit a few weeks later from Ross, his clothes smelling like gasoline and booze, even though he was sober and hadn’t been drinking.
How he’d asked if he could wash his clothes there, and if she would be willing to swear he’d spent the night there with her, even though he stretched out on the couch and gently rebuffed her efforts to get him to sleep in bed with her.
She’d never left his side since.
Not willingly.
Not after seeing the morning news report on TV just after Ross had left to go to his morning classes, about the fiery car crash that killed four drunken frat brothers when they ran off the road and down a hundred-foot embankment.
Tragedy, really. Lives cut short.
Wasn’t the only thing cut short. Like her own hopes for motherhood.
After Ross graduated, they got married, moved from Pennsylvania to Florida, and
never looked back.
Tilly washed her hands, her face, blew her nose. Then she turned to Loren. “So, shopping till we’re dropping?” she asked, forcing the smile.
Loren smiled, slipping an arm around Tilly’s waist. She was a few years older than Tilly, had more time to come to grips with things.
But there were some things she couldn’t even tell Tilly. And what she had told Tilly had been heavily redacted under the guise of emotional baggage. “Shopping till we’re dropping. Does Landry still have that black AmEx?”
Tilly giggled. “Ooooh, yeah.”
“Hmm. How about we do a little retail therapy, then?”
“You read my mind, Lor.”
Loren deposited Tilly in the passenger seat before walking around and getting behind the wheel. She had to adjust the seat a little, because Tilly was nearly the same height but had longer legs than Loren did.
After starting the engine, she adjusted her mirrors and put on her seatbelt. “Better?”
The haunted look was almost gone from Tilly’s face. “Maybe I should get the hysterectomy,” Tilly softly said. “Just do it and get it done and over with. Move forward.”
“Talk to your guys first,” Loren advised as she shifted into drive and headed toward the rest stop’s exit. “That’s what they’re there for.”
“I know. But you know them.” Tilly held her hands up in front of her, clenching her fingers together. “They want to fix everything. Which isn’t a bad thing, I know, but some things…”
Loren glanced over when Tilly didn’t finish her sentence after several long moments. Tilly was staring at the water to the south of the causeway as they merged onto the highway again.
She knew what Tilly had been about to say.
But some things just can’t be fixed.
They could only be made right.
And even then, not all the way. Not really. Not completely.
Just enough you could keep your head held high and not let it eat at you until you rotted from the inside out.
“I know, sweetie,” Loren finally said as they passed the exit for US19 south. “I know.”
THE END
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tymber Dalton lives in the Tampa Bay region of Florida with her husband (aka “The World’s Best Husband™”) and too many pets. Active in the BDSM lifestyle, the two-time EPIC winner is also the bestselling author of over seventy-five books, including The Reluctant Dom, The Denim Dom, Cardinal’s Rule, the Suncoast Society series, the Love Slave for Two series, the Triple Trouble series, the Coffeeshop Coven series, the Good Will Ghost Hunting series, the Drunk Monkeys series, and many more.
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Tymber Dalton, A Very Kinky Valentine's Day
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