After You (Because of You 2)

“Nikki, come on,” Derek says, seriously. “Stop making it worse.”

I shake my head. “Nope. I’m not doing it, Kayla is.”

“No, you are,” he argues. “None of this is ever going to happen. You’re judging me on a situation that will never happen.”

“You don’t know it will never happen, Derek. You don’t know that. Kayla is still out there, she is still Cassidy’s mom, she has rights, and she is who she is. Don’t try to tell me she wouldn’t do something like this, because she already did six years ago. Now, I’m not letting up, so back to the scenario. I want to know what you’ll do.”

“You’re putting me in a corner here,” he states.

“I know,” I tell him, softly. “You’re backed into a corner here, stuck between a rock and a hard place. All you want is to get Cassidy back, but no matter how much money we dump into it, it’s just not happening. Not fast enough, and maybe not at all. This goes on for months. Your phone calls with Cassidy start to drop off, because Kayla is with her all the time, and she’s poisoning her mind against you, telling her you’re the bad guy, that I’m the reason you guys can’t be a family again. Cassidy hates me now. Even if she could come over, she wouldn’t want to because I’m there.”

Derek’s jaw locks and he rakes his hand through his hair, but he doesn’t speak.

“You and I are fighting a lot, too,” I add. “The stress of the situation and the financial strain are getting to us, and you can’t help thinking about how much easier it would be to just stop fighting. Kayla married and divorced a multi-millionaire while you were apart, so she’s living it up on alimony checks, has a big mansion in Beverly Hills, a closet full of designer labels.”

He cuts in. “I don’t care if she married and divorced every rich bastard in Silicon Valley; there’s no amount of money that could ever make me want Kayla.”

“I know,” I tell him. “It’s not about wanting Kayla.” It was never about wanting Kayla. “I’m just painting you a picture of her situation. It’s the opposite of ours. For us, everything is a struggle. For her, life is easy—and she has Cassidy.”

“Yeah, I get it,” he grumbles.

“She lures you over one day, tells you she wants to talk about setting up a visitation. It’s a lie, of course. She just wanted to get you there. You walk through the house. There’s a chef she hires to cook her dinners every night cooking in the kitchen—it smells delicious. There are pictures on the refrigerator that Cassidy colored. Her backpack from school is in the corner—you missed her first day of school, and every day since. You walk out back where Kayla is laying by the pool. You see Cassidy’s pool floats, evidence of the life she’s living without you.”

“Can’t you use your powers for good rather than evil?” he asks me.

I smile faintly. “I wish. Unfortunately, my brain is one of my powers, and my brain tells me I need to know how you respond to this scenario.” I miss a beat, then get back on track. “Now you’re standing out back, Kayla’s lying there in her bikini that costs what we pay for two months at our cheap, shitty hotel. She takes her sunglasses off and smiles at you, tells you to take a seat. You tell her no, you don’t want to sit, you just want to know when you can visit Cassidy. She tells you something came up, it doesn’t look like the visit is going to work out.”

“Then I leave,” he states.

“You start to leave, but she calls you back. She tells you she hates how things are between you, she hates keeping you from Cassidy. All she wants is for the three of you to be a family again. She stands up, comes closer, puts her hand on your shoulder.”

“I swear to God, Nikki, if you start a me and Kayla sex scene…”

Biting back a smile, I shake my head. “No, I don’t have the stomach for that. But she tries to kiss you.”

“Then I turn away,” he states immovably.

I nod my head, giving him that. “You do. You head for the door again, but she follows you. She tells you that since summer is coming—we’ve been fighting this fight for nearly a year at this point—they’re going to go to her summer home in, I don’t know, Genoa, Italy. They’re going to spend the summer there, so they won’t be able to deal with the court stuff right now, Cassidy won’t be able to talk to you because of the time difference… She says we can resume the fight in a few months when they get back from Italy. Or… if you’d like to, you could come with them. Since you haven’t found a job and we’re on the brink of bankruptcy, it’s not like there’s anything keeping you here.”

“I wouldn’t go, Nikki.”

“It’ll never stop, Derek. Right now it’s Italy, and when she gets back, it’ll be something else. The long and short of it is, as long as you stay with me, Kayla will keep Cassidy away from you. Whether through a court of law, a change of address, or sheer mental manipulation by turning Cassidy on you so she doesn’t even want to see you anymore. We can fight until we’re bloody, pour our all into it until we’re both drained, but this is the situation. It’s inescapable. At the end of the day, no matter how long you put it off, no matter how much of Cassidy?

??s life you miss out on, no matter how long you leave her in Kayla’s care, it will always come back to this. The only way you get Cassidy back is to go back to Kayla. Every other scenario is her making your life hell and keeping her away from you. All of them. So, your life can be hell with Cassidy but without me, or your life can be hell without Cassidy, but with me. The choice is yours. What do you choose, Derek?”

He rakes his hands across his face and I wait for his answer. I wait and I wait and I wait, until I realize he isn’t going to answer me. I know why he won’t answer me. He can lie, but I’ll know he’s lying. The truth is unspeakable—if he speaks those words, he gives legs to every wild fear in my head, gives me irrefutable evidence that I’m right to refuse to be with him.

As I’m swallowing that, he finally says quietly, “None of that will ever happen, Nikki. Kayla doesn’t want me anymore, and she doesn’t want Cassidy. That was high school. It’s not like that anymore. If you’d been here, you would have seen. She wouldn’t…” He trails off, shaking his head, but he knows it’s not good enough.

There was a right answer and a wrong answer. They were both terrible, but sometimes you only have two terrible choices. Last time I loved him, he only had two terrible choices.

He would still make the same one.

I get it, I do. If he chose me over Cassidy, he would despise himself for it. There’s no part of me that can hold that against him. It’s why he’s such a wonderful father—but it’s also our weakness, because it’s the one thing that Kayla can always use to beat me. Maybe he’s right and she never would… but maybe he’s wrong. The point is, if he had the choice to make over again, he would make the same damn one. He would break both our hearts all over again, and I would be helpless to stop it.

It doesn’t make me mad, it just makes me sad. I love Derek as a dad, and if he had been the father of my child, it would be perfect. It would never be a problem. But Cassidy will always be Kayla’s, and even if Kayla never comes back, the threat of her will always hang over our heads. Unless of course I want to wait around for 12 more years until Cassidy is legally free of Kayla’s clutches, but even I won’t do that.

Derek and I don’t have a future, we only have a past, and as many times as I choose to relive it with him, it’s always going to end the same way—with me alone, and my heart in a million shattered pieces.