Only Her

She nodded. Skylar turned and started back inside. “Are you hungry?” She asked.

“Sure,” they replied.

She went inside and made lunch for everyone.

She wanted him to understand now hard this was on her. He just walked back into her life a few days ago and it was supposed to be okay? He had left her. Coming back ten years later and expecting her to fall back into his arms…in his bed…he wasn’t thinking clearly.

She was sixteen years old and head over heels in love with him. Pregnant with Ava. Suddenly she had to come to terms with the fact that Luka had left and she was going to be a teenage, single mother. She was alone and pregnant.

She waited until she had to tell her mother and father that she was pregnant and Luka was gone. They were harsh in their response. Skylar needed to understand a baby couldn’t affect their lives. If it didn’t she could keep it. She could keep it. As if she would ever give it away. She would have left home before giving up her baby. It was all she had of Luka. Even through the haze of pain he had caused her she had wanted their child because it was his. She loved Ava from the first time she heard her heart beating.

Skylar stood at the stove watching the taco meat brown. She could still see her mother’s disdain at her news. Her father’s disappointment. They pretty much ignored her completely after that. They wanted her to go to college. Become a vet or a nurse. Something of importance. Not an unwed mother of Luka Shaw’s, bastard child. That phrase had crushed her. It was unnecessary and painful but her mother always had gone for the jugular.

She had been crushed when her mother had referred to Ava that way. Her baby was the love of her life after Luka left. Not a bastard. Luna had reassured her of that. He didn’t know all that because no one had told him.

Sometimes, Skylar wanted to turn back the hands of time and make things different. If she could know then what she knew now she would have told Luka. What would have changed though? Would he have come back here? Would he have come back and taken her with him? Would he have still accomplished what he set out to do? So many questions that would never be answered.

Those numbers he spouted in Jason’s office still boggled her mind. Those videos online of him fighting were strange to her. They were of a man she didn’t know. He was mean and vicious in those fights like Jacob Shaw had been. This was a side of him that Skylar had never seen. He had always kept his temper tightly in check. In the cage he let it go.

Brett walked up behind her. He placed his hands on her shoulders. “What happened?”

She shook her head. Skylar didn’t want to talk, not even to Brett. “Come on. Ramona sent me in here to find out if you’re okay. She is keeping Ava occupied so we can talk.”

“I don’t even know him anymore,” Skylar told him.

“Sure you do,” Brett argued. “He’s not really any different.”

“Do you know what he has made fighting?”

“Somewhat,” Brett replied. “I know he’s loaded if that is what you are asking. Why? Does it bother you?”

“This is going to sound crazy but I told him I almost resent him now. I wasn’t enough for him. He never loved me enough to stay or take me with him. Now he waltzes back in here and wants to pick up where we left off like ten years never passed and I’m pissed.” She slapped her hands down on the counter.

“You have a right to be angry,” Brett told her.

She sighed. “But then if I had told him about Ava, Brett. How would things have been different for me and Ava or for him?”

He chuckled. “I don’t know babe. We’ll never know. You have to stop this Sky. You have to move forward.”

She whirled around and looked at Brett. “I told him I wasn’t doing this again that moving forward this was about Ava only and how we could make it up to her that she missed the first ten years with him.”

He was surprised. She could see it in his face. “He said what to that Skylar?”

She laughed. Not a happy laugh but one filled with sarcasm. “Like hell.”

Skylar turned back to the taco meat. She drained the grease into the sink then dumped the seasoning in and stirred and continued to do so until Brett stopped her.

“I think you’re done stirring.”

“What?” She looked at the meat. “Oh yeah. I’m done.”

She sat the pan on another burner and walked away. Brett turned off the burner. She gathered lettuce, sour cream, soft taco shells and diced tomatoes in a Ziploc bag from the fridge then she sat them on the counter. Brett retrieved the cheese for her that she forgot.

“I’ll call Ramona and Ava,” he told her.

Skylar nodded. Her mind was elsewhere.

Chapter 12