Page 2 of His Everything

I make it to the end of the block in time to catch the light turning to walk and hurry through once more. Two more blocks and I should be home, safe inside with Liam. That is what I want right now, to make sure Liam is safe. If I have to see Jayden, I’d much prefer it to happen when our son isn’t present.

I have to stop at the door to the apartment building to unlock it and my back tenses hearing my name. My entire body shakes knowing that voice. This isn’t happening, not like this, not now. It can’t be happening like this.

I do my best to pretend I didn’t hear it and finish opening the door. Thankfully Liam’s stroller isn’t visible from the street, and I push it inside to get away, not have this happen. I move faster than normal, nearly tripping over my own feet in my hurry—and it’s all for nothing.

A gentle hand wraps around my arm as Jayden says my name again, this time in absolute shock. I drag in a deep breath before turning to face him, finding Liam’s green eyes staring at me from his father’s face.

He’s definitely changed, even taller now, with just a hint of the boyishness he still had last time we saw each other. There’s a maturity in his eyes that wasn’t there, and it makes me curious to know more about it, and him, which is insane.

Chapter 2

Jayden

Alow roaring fills my ears when Lucy turns, letting me see her stunning grey gaze, see the specks of blue within it at this distance. I thought I’d lost it when I spotted her earlier this week. She disappeared just as fast as she’d appeared, but something about that split second had me going back to the restaurant, hoping to find her there again.

Hell, I knew it was a longshot to find her that way, but I hadn’t had any luck finding her on campus in the last month since I got here and was willing to take any lead possible to track her down. The bartender gave me nothing the next night and I figured she was just there for a meal like I was. One of the other workers was moving past as I asked him about her and recognized Lucy’s picture, letting it slip that she worked there.

That was all I got though, the man was determined to not reveal her schedule, so I’ve been stopping by as much as possible hoping to run into her. Last thing I expected was to see her standing outside an apartment building, but it does explain why I couldn’t find her in the dorms.

Her golden hair is bundled up on top of her head, showing off the curve of her neck, and I can’t help but remember running my lips down it, kissing her as the most incredible pleasure flooded me. I haven’t seen her since she left town, only for a few minutes here and there between that night and when she left. She was always with Jessa when I did see her, which meant being unable to talk to her about what happened between us.

Now that she’s here in front of me, everything I’ve imagined saying, rehearsed, has evaded me, and all I want to do is kiss her again. Hell, even after three years that’s all I want.

A sharp, childish shout breaks the hold her eyes have on me, and my head turns looking for the source.

The stroller in front of Lucy, her free hand on it is the last thing I expected and the dull roaring returns. This time it’s not from shock but anger which is insane. She wasn’t mine when she left, despite the two incredible nights. She was free to see whoever else she wanted but damn, the thought of another man with her, giving her a baby infuriates me.

“Jayden…” she begins pulling my attention back up to her. There’s a new hint of something in her eyes that I can’t read, and it keeps me from walking away. She’s not wearing a ring showing she’s taken. If I’d had a kid with someone, was still with them in any capacity, I’d damn well have a ring on her finger to show she was off limits.

“Hey Luce, you look good.” The stupid words fall, and I can’t believe after all this time,that’swhat I finally lead with. How much of a fucking idiot can I be? I don’t have trouble talking to any other girl, just her.

It’s always been this way. Jessa used to torment me about my crush on her friend, thankfully not in front of Lucy, but from the moment that I started noticing girls in a romantic capacity, it’s always been Lucy that’s left me tongue-tied and stammering.At least until I drank enough to get the courage to go talk to her alone at that party.

Even then, I couldn’t really talk. I stumbled and stared at her until I’d said the hell with it and kissed her. Doing my best to put everything I felt for her into it since my brain couldn’t string together two coherent words. I was floored when she kissed me back, and then even more so when I claimed her virginity in the near dark of the bedroom we snuck off to.

I savored that for days, hoping that when she came over we could talk, see what was happening between us, but she deftly avoided me, and I ended up going to her house to talk it out. Which resulted in me kissing her when I couldn’t get her to listen to me, and that led us to her bedroom and the absolute most incredible night of my life. It was better than the party because I wasn’t drunk on anything except her.

I thought it would be the start for us, even with her heading to the city for college. I was dreaming of visits and winter vacations cuddling together. Hours spent on the phone with her, teasing her until she admitted she missed me as much as I knew I was going to miss her.

What I got was an awkward statement about it being a mistake, me being too young for anything that’d happened, and that it couldn’t happen again. It was bullshit though. Okay, technically she’s like a year and a half older than I am, and technically I was just over two months shy of being sixteen, but she was barely seventeen. If the situation was reversed, no one would say shit about it. About the older person going off to college and coming home to see the younger one.

It’s not like I was fourteen, which some of the kids in my grade were even as we finished freshman year, and she was eighteen about to turn nineteen. I turned fifteen at the start of the school year and while Lucy might have been three grades ahead of me, she was sixteen until February.

She avoided me even more after the night at her house, and before I could figure out how to get her to talk to me, work up the nerve to talk to her, she was gone. It didn’t help that our parents drug us out of town on our annual vacation that June. I normally loved it, especially the years that Lucy would come on it with us, having her so close for three or four weeks with no one else around except Jessa. She declined coming that year saying she had too much to do before she moved to away for college.

My parents were so proud of Lucy, mentioning how she finished high school early and won scholarships to so many places that Jessa stopped talking to her for a few weeks once we were home as well. Which meant she wasn’t even around and every time I stopped by her place, she was mysteriously not there.

Then, she was gone. Left town earlier than anyone else that was headed to college had, and I didn’t have a clue which school she’d chosen to attend. Even now, I hadn’t been certain she’d be here. It was the one school she’d talked about most though, which had me busting my ass the rest of high school in order to get accepted to it, hoping to find her since she’d not once come home.

Hell, she hadn’t talked to Jessa in years either, but my sister didn’t seem to notice anything unusual about it. She was too busy with senior year stuff to notice that her best friend wasn’t talking to her anymore. Even our parents said that Lucy was likely just swamped with work because college was different than high school, harder, and more demanding, with more damaging consequences if you slipped up.

For someone on a full scholarship, I understood that part, but not why she’d cut all of us off. Even if she didn’t ever want to talk about what happened between us, that didn’t mean she needed to cut Jessa and our parents off as well.

I’ve missed her more than anything, and even though I’ve had girls clinging to me, the only one I’ve ever wanted was Lucy. Who is now staring at me like I’ve lost my mind, her hand on a stroller, with a baby that I want to resent but can’t seem to find the ability to. The man that gave her the baby, fuck yes, but not the baby. How could I hate something that came from Lucy—from the girl I love?

“Jayden,” she starts to say, but the baby let out a full shout and her attention moved back to it before she slid around the front of the stroller, giving it a smile. “Hey, it’s okay, sweetie. We’ll be upstairs in a minute,” she tells him, handing over a toy that must have fallen when I stopped them.

“Lucy,” I start, stopping when the baby began talking, telling me he wasn’t as little as I was anticipating.

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