After You (Because of You 2)

“Of course,” he murmurs, apparently sensing this is not a conversation to have between kisses. He settles his arms around me and waits.

“It’s not the most pleasant question,” I warn him.

“I can’t tell you how shocked I am,” he replies sarcastically. “Seriously, a light breeze could knock me right over.”

“Okay,” I say, rolling my eyes and elbowing him in the diaphragm.

His arms merely tighten around me. “What’s your question?”

“This is purely hypothetical. None of this will probably happen, but I need to know how it would go if it did. Say I did move in here. Say I agreed to exclusivity, I committed to a relationship…”

“Say you did the smart thing?” he asks lightly. “Okay, got it.”

I look back at him dryly. “Things are going pretty well, we’re all settled in. Then one day there’s a knock on the door and it’s Kayla.”

Derek sighs.

I keep going. “Now, Cassidy is thrilled to see Kayla. Tickled pink. Mommy’s back—hooray! Nikki is chopped liver now. She was a nice stand-in, but the real thing is here.”

“That is not—”

“No.” I hold up a hand to cover his mouth, halting his interruption. “Let me finish. So, Kayla comes back with a sob story about how leaving you and Cassidy was the biggest mistake she ever made. Every night she spent away, she missed you both more and more, she was just afraid you wouldn’t welcome her back.”

Moving my hand, Derek says seriously, “Nikki, I never loved Kayla. I don’t now and I never did. You know that.”

“Please let me finish.” He sighs with even more annoyance, but he nods shortly for me to continue. “Because you love me and not her, you tell her it’s too late, it’s over, things between you two are over and done with. Never getting back together. You’ve moved on.” He looks slightly mollified that I’m giving him credit, but I brace myself for that to change, and I plod onward. “But Kayla is still a manipulative bitch, so when crying doesn’t work, she turns to different methods. She tells you that if you don’t come back to her and be a family with her again, she’ll rip all our lives apart. She’ll fight for full custody of Cassidy, and when she gets it—not if, because she’s the mom, and she’ll probably win—she’s going to move back out to L.A. with Cassidy. Don’t worry, she tells you. You’ll still get her for a couple weeks every summer. She’s turning six soon, right? So that’s 12 more years. Over the course of those 12 years, you’ll see her a grand total of 24 weeks. You’ll go from having Cassidy every single night to seeing her once a year. What do you do?”

“Well, for one thing, I hire a fucking lawyer. Kayla abandoned Cassidy four years ago, there’s no way in hell she’s getting full custody.”

I shake my head. “Kayla has some lie cooked up to explain that. Insists she tried to see Cassidy but you wouldn’t let her. She has people lie and say they witnessed her attempts, so the court believes her. This is a hypothetical, so in my hypothetical, Kayla is awarded full custody, and she does move to California. Now, what do you do?”

He lets go of me, so I know I’ve annoyed him. I take my cue and roll over into my spot, sitting up in the bed and watching him. He scratc

hes his jaw and searches for something truthful to say that won’t make me flee tomorrow and never come back. My stomach rocks with the effort I can see him putting into it. I know I put him in an untenable situation, but I have to know.

Finally, he says, “I beg you to move out to California. If we move there, there’s no reason I can only see Cassidy during the summers. I take her back to court and fight for joint custody so Cassie spends half her time with us, half with her. I wait for her to get bored of parenting again. Once she does, we bring Cassidy back here.”

“I say no,” I reply.

Scowling at hypothetical Nikki’s decision, he asks, “Why?”

“Because I have work here, a life here. Because I hate the sun, or I’m allergic to beaches. It doesn’t matter why, I say no. Now what?”

“Well, now you’re being unreasonable. You could run your business just as easily from California. All you need is a computer and wifi. Plus, I don’t believe you. Cassidy may be my daughter, but you like her, too. Are you seriously telling me that if Kayla took my kid to the other side of the country, you would refuse to move there for no reason?”

“Well, no, not really. I’m trying to make this scenario as difficult as possible though, and it’s most difficult if for some reason I can’t follow you. Say my company went under and I had to take a regular job, but I got a really good one that I enjoy at a local college. So, I can’t move because I can’t take that job with me.”

“Again, while I support you in whichever job it is you love, we’re talking about my kid, here. We can get another job, we can’t get another Cassidy. Do you and I have any kids in this scenario?”

“Nope.” It needs to be just me, like it was before. Me and difficulty vs. Kayla, Cassidy, and simplicity.

“So, you’re not going to tell me that you believe any job is more important than my daughter,” he states, crossing his arms and shaking his head. “That’s not you. This scenario doesn’t check out if you’re not acting like yourself in it. I want you for you. The chick in this scenario isn’t the woman I love.”

My stomach drops, but I ignore that. “All right… Okay, you’re right. I agree to move. We sell everything, we both quit our jobs and move there to pursue joint custody. Kayla still won’t let you see Cassidy. You try to see her every weekend, and every time, she has a new excuse. You know they’re excuses, you go to a lawyer, but cases take time to build, court takes time and costs money, and neither of us can find jobs in California, so we’re burning through our savings, dumping it all into lawyer fees, living out of a cheap hotel room.”

“Of course we are,” he mutters.

“It’s hard,” I state. “It’s hard and it sucks. We’re both miserable, you miss Cassidy, and you know she misses you, because while Kayla won’t let you see her, she does let you talk on the phone every night before bed. And every night Cassidy cries and tells you how much she misses you.”