His First Choice

He wanted the beach and the ocean to help ease them back to where they’d been before Tressa’s interruption the night before.

He’d been back and forth on his chances. They hadn’t looked that great in the middle of the night. By the time he’d left his house with Kacey and Levi happily visiting with Levi’s goldfish, he’d been feeling a bit more optimistic.

He took her hand as they set out from her house, and liked the feel of her fingers intertwined with his. It was a turn-on. And an odd kind of reassurance, too.

“So, let’s talk about what happened last night,” he said as they turned a corner and could see the beach a block ahead of them.

“Okay.”

He waited for her counselor stuff to come at him. It wouldn’t be anything he hadn’t heard before—like each time he’d encouraged Tressa to get help and then had been asked to join in for a session so the counselor could explain his wife to him.

Again.

Lacey wasn’t talking. So he told her a little bit about Tressa’s upbringing. About the abuse and the way she’d gotten herself out, paid her way through college and not looked back. “She’s been to counseling,” he assured her. He knew the ropes. “She’s one of those who chose to rise above instead of fall in.”

Those had been the words of one of Tressa’s counselors. He’d never forgotten them and had hung several years of marriage on them.

“She just gets...scared...sometimes. She’s petrified of being alone. And she and her best friend had had a fight.”

“Amelia?” Lacey asked. And he remembered that she knew a lot more about Tressa than he’d given her credit for. She’d investigated her, interviewed her, toured her home and...

“Yeah, Amelia.”

They were at the corner, waiting to cross the street to the beach. There was no light, just a four-way stop on a two-way street, and they had to wait for the traffic to clear.

“Anyway, she apologized. And she’s agreed not to come to my house.”

“She’s not allowed at your house?”

“Just as part of our personal agreement. I need my space from her drama.”

Lacey nodded and he looked at her.

“She mentioned it,” she said, stepping off the curb as the traffic cleared.

As they made their way to the sand, dropping hands to take off their flip-flops, and then rejoining them, he pondered what she’d said.

“Tressa told you about me? About our relationship?”

“Only in terms of her. She said the divorce was because her drama was too much for you day in and day out.”

He bit his tongue. Life was cleaner that way. He absolutely was not going to be dragged into the “he said, she said.”

Lacey was looking at him. “That’s not true?”

Just like that, life changed. Jem was at a crossroads, and nothing was going to be the same again. He had a choice to make. If he remained loyal to Tressa, he was committing himself to a lifetime of having her come before anyone else, other than Levi.

If he didn’t, he couldn’t go back.

He had no idea what a life of not taking care of Tressa looked like. The sun was setting, but that didn’t account for the red he was seeing. This is what Tressa had meant. What she’d known. He’d thought she’d been telling him that his future wife would try to tell him what he could and could not do.

That wasn’t it at all.

It was him. He had to decide. Where did his loyalties lie? With Tressa and the family they had created? Protecting the mother of his child from herself, or being compl

etely open and honest with a different life partner? What was best for Levi? Not a life with Tressa. He knew that. Clearly.

In the end, it didn’t feel like it was his choice to make. Whatever hold Lacey had over him had taken control.