Page 18 of Salvaged Heart

18

BECKHAM

W hat in the actual hell had I been thinking? This looked so much easier in the YouTube video I had watched three times before deciding how hard could it possibly be to frost a cake.

Turns out, really fucking hard.

There wasn’t an inch of me that wasn’t covered in powdered sugar, butter, or whipped frosting. It coated my clothes, clung to my hair, and was smudged all over my face where I had stress-wiped it. I’m sure the point was to get more on the cake than myself, but every time I tried to spread the mixture, more came off it than went on.

Cake Boss made this look like child’s play.

False advertising.

I needed to quit while I was ahead. The problem was, I had been ahead about thirty minutes ago and hadn’t heeded the warning. Now, I was a whole lap behind, running in the opposite direction of everyone else. The monstrosity looked like someone had sat on it and then run over it to make sure it was dead. It didn’t look edible at all.

“What in the world?”

My head snapped up. Fuck, he wasn’t supposed to see this. Anders had been working in the library for hours, fussing over the old, dusty books. He’d announced a few days earlier that the haphazard system Aunt Millie had used to ‘organize’ her books had been the subject of many nightmares for him over the years. Now, he was jumping on the fact we’d taken them all down to clean and refinish the shelves to implement a new complex system of arranging them. A system I couldn’t wrap my head around no matter how hard I tried, so I had been banished before I could mess it up again.

I was learning that Anders was kind of a control freak. But I guess after feeling out of control for so many years, finally having autonomy again felt good.

“Did you lose a fight to Betty Crocker?”

I pointed my spatula at him. “This would look better if I had the right tools like—I don’t know—a fully assembled kitchen.” Instead, I had been forced to bake it in an oven older than my mother and frost it on top of a box containing the not-yet-installed cabinets.

“I’m not entirely sure I know what ‘this’ even is.” He waved his hand in the direction of the cake, looking way too smug for his own good.

“Why don’t you come a little closer and insult your cake one more time?” I cocked an eyebrow in challenge. If I could get him within arms reach, it was over.

“My cake? Why on earth would you be baking me a cake?”

I let out an exasperated sigh. “Well, it was supposed to be a surprise. Which you clearly are, so you’re welcome.”

He scooted around me, sticking to the room’s edges until he reached a roll of paper towel, ripped off a single sheet, and tossed it my way like that tiny scrap would make a dent in the sugar-coated chaos I’d created.

“And that explains why it looks like Keebler the Elf exploded in here…How?”

“Kara called. She said you’ll get your next chip today for reaching thirty days. I don’t know the correct protocol for celebrating something like that, but I figured you can’t go wrong with cake.”

“Well…” He gave the frosted nightmare between us a pointed look. “Obviously, you can.”

That was it. I was in motion before he even registered I’d moved. Bowl of frosting in one hand, brandishing the coated spatula like a sword in the other. He was quick, but I was way faster and tackled him to the ground easily, smearing the spoon up his cheek and over his forehead before bopping him on the nose with it. I let the utensil clatter to the floor.

I had him completely pinned under me, and he writhed, half screaming, half coming undone with laughter. He’d gained a little weight in the last few weeks, but I still greatly outweighed him. My legs, thick and muscular from years of conditioning, restrained his arms effortlessly at his sides.

Digging my hand into the bowl, I brought out a fistful of frosting. His eyes caught on it, widening. “You wouldn’t dare.”

“Wouldn’t I?” I leaned down, bringing my face within inches of his. My frosting-covered hand was placed menacingly in his periphery. “Apologize.”

He squirmed more. I let him wriggle just a little, but not enough to get free. The friction of his hips moving under mine set every nerve ending on fire. I could tell by his smirk that he felt the effect his movements were having on me.

“Tell me it’s the most beautiful cake you’ve ever seen.”

“My mother told me good boys don’t tell lies.”

I hummed, “You’re not a good boy, though, are you, Anders?”

The words came out huskier than intended. Based on how his eyes dropped from mine to my lips then back up again, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat, he'd heard the change in tone too. The world stood still for half a moment, his lips parting as if to whisper my name in that way I was becoming addicted to. I found myself leaning into him as if pulled by some magnetic force. My lips desperately seeking his and…

The mother fucker licked me.

Not a sweet, sexy lick, either. A sloppy, wet, spit-covered long lap from my jaw up the side of my face, like an overexcited Labrador. I recoiled in surprise, loosening my lock on his body just long enough for his arms to escape and him to shove me onto my back. He threw his leg over me, flipping our positions but unable to control my flailing arms. I shoved my frosting-covered hand up over his mouth, the thick mixture caking his face, him half choking, half laughing around it. He reached behind him, grasping for something, a wicked twinkle glinting in his eyes before his own two hands came crashing down on mine, coated in sticky buttercream, pinning them over my head.

“I got you now.” He smirked.

I could be free in a second, but my desire to escape his control was nonexistent. “I guess so.”

He leaned in, running the flat of his tongue up the side of my neck, this time in a slow, intoxicating way. My hips bucked on their own accord, ripples of desire rolling through me. Moving to the other side of my neck, he repeated the motion, lapping the frosting slowly up to my ear, where he bit down playfully on my lobe.

“You are the most beautiful cake I’ve ever seen.”

He took his time running his tongue over me, slurping up the buttercream in open-mouth kisses, gently nipping at my skin as he went. Whispering things like, “So fucking tasty,” and “I want to eat you up” against my neck. His hips grinding against mine in a slow, tantalizing rhythm, drawing out whimpers and moans from me. I was so freaking turned on it took me a minute to notice he had released my hands to run his up the inside of my shirt, painting a trail of sticky mess over my stomach.

I wanted to touch him, feel his tongue run between the valleys of my abs, but as my hand dropped to his fly, he pulled back. His fingers moved quickly to wrap around my wrist. One word left his mouth, firm and uncharacteristically harsh, “No.”

I froze, searching his gaze. “No?”

I didn’t move other than to pull my hands away from him, holding them up either side of my head in surrender. His whole demeanor shifted before my eyes until he looked almost scared.

“We need to get showered and changed if we want to make the meeting.”

I nodded, not knowing what to say, as he rose to stand.

I didn’t know what I’d done to ruin the moment. Mere seconds ago, we had been lost in each other, and now he was pulling his walls back up around himself. His expression looked hauntingly like the one he'd given me in the alleyway after our first kiss. He hadn’t let me touch him then, either.

I filed that away for later.

Anders disappeared upstairs, and the sound of water rushing through old pipes a moment later let me know he was in the shower. I lay where he left me, gazing up at the ceiling, trying to quiet the thrum of blood in my veins. I’d never wanted anyone the way I wanted Anders, and while that should terrify me, for some reason, I found it did not. The truth was, if he hadn’t stopped us, if he hadn’t pulled away and left me, I don’t think there would have been a single thing he could have asked me for that I wouldn’t have given him.

Things were changing between us, evolving into something strange and complicated. There had been something about Anders from the moment I met him, something that called to me that I hadn’t been able to put my finger on. I'd chalked it up to the desperate need I'd always had to fix broken things, and just like the house that creaked and rattled around me, I’d recognized Anders for all he was. All he could be beneath the thick layer of dust that hung heavy over his soul. I’d wanted to make him smile, laugh, eat, and let me see beneath that cracking exterior to the man hidden inside. But it hadn’t been that way for a while. Now, I didn’t just want him to smile. I wanted him to be happy. I didn’t want to make him laugh. I wanted to make him feel joy. I continued to pile food on his plate and shuttle him back and forth to meetings because I wanted him, above all, to be healthy. And that need to see inside the enigma that was Anderson Carmichael had become so desperate that I no longer wanted just to know his heart but also carve myself a place in his soul.

As if the universe knew I needed a reminder of the reality of things, my phone buzzed in my back pocket with an incoming call. I pushed myself into a seated position, shuffling backward slightly until I could lean against one of the packed cabinet boxes behind me. For the first time since Anders and I had wrestled on the floor, I took in the devastation our frosting war had left. It would take hours to clean up. But a grin spread across my face at the memory and the knowledge that, regardless, I wouldn’t change a damn thing.

Well, except for whatever caused him to run away.

I fished my phone out of my back pocket as it rang out, sending the call to voicemail. ‘1 Missed Call, Laurel Mitchell’ flashed up on my screen. Knowing I had spent too much time ignoring and blowing her off over the last week to do it again, I hit the call-back button and put the phone on speaker.

“Beck?” She answered like she didn’t expect me to be on the other end of the line.

“Hey, Laurel. Sorry, I didn’t get to my phone quick enough.”

“I was starting to think you were screening my calls.” She was scarily accurate with that statement, and guilt twisted in my gut as a result. However, I was surprised to find that the source of it wasn’t what it should have been.

I had no regrets that I had been so focused on getting Anders sober that I’d been too busy to answer her calls. I didn’t even feel remorse about the feelings that stirred in my chest when I thought about him or that his lips had been on me just a few minutes ago, and I had been completely lost in him. No, the guilt was that I had to keep all of it inside, like some dirty, shameful secret, when every part of my body wanted to scream from the rooftop how incredibly proud I was of him for getting sober. For all the demons he’d taken down over the last few weeks and how alive he felt now. How the man he had transformed into over the previous few weeks took my breath away. But sharing those things with her would mean confessing how bad things had been for Anders when we arrived at Arbor Ct, and I could already imagine all the nasty comments Laurel would have to say about the matter.

But I didn’t want him to be my secret.

So, I kept it all pushed down and focused on a half-truth instead. “We’ve just been busy. Things are really starting to come together here.”

“That’s part of the reason for my call. I thought I could drive over there this weekend?”

“No.” The word barreled out of me, harsh and finite, before I could catch it.

The tone had not been lost on her. “No?”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. This weekend is just going to be a busy one.” I tried to sound as inconvenienced as possible. “All the cabinets were delivered a few days ago, and I’m anxious to start the installation.”

She sighed a little too dramatically. “And I couldn’t help with that?”

“I wouldn’t ask that of you. It’s hard labor,” I swallowed, the words feeling like acid on my tongue. “If you were here, we both know I wouldn’t get anything done.”

It said a lot about how shit of a person I was that the thought of spending a weekend in bed with my girlfriend turned my stomach to lead, but not as much as the same thoughts about her brother sending my heart soaring in a wave of butterflies.

What in the world had I gotten myself into?

“You know, Beck.” She was pissed now. I could practically hear her displeasure rolling down the phone. “I’m starting to think you care more about this renovation than you do me.”

“That’s not true, it’s just…” The words died on my tongue. Laurel would never understand. Everything I was feeling deviated from a path she'd spent years meticulously planning for us, and I had already thrown enough of a wrench in it with the loss of my baseball career. “Never mind, you’ll think it’s stupid.”

“Why don’t you try me?”

I could think of a million reasons why opening up about this to her would be a bad idea, the main one being that she wouldn’t understand and the most crushing one being that she wouldn’t support me. But I knew Laurel better than I knew anyone, and because of that, I also knew she wouldn’t let this go until I told her, so I opened my mouth anyway.

“The project is good for me. I felt so lost with what to do next when we came here this summer, but… I’m good at this. Working with my hands, fixing things, breathing life back into this old place —it’s good for the soul. I am starting to find myself again, what I want to do with my life, and…”

“Beck, haven’t we talked about this?”

Yeah, we had, probably a hundred different times already.

“You could do so much more with your life than run a construction business like your Dad. Don’t you want that for yourself? You had big dreams once. I know the MLB didn’t work out, but that doesn’t mean you couldn’t coach or go back to school and get a master’s in something a little more focused.”

That thought was almost comical. “Get a master’s? Laurel, I barely passed my undergrad.”

“Yeah, but that’s because you were too distracted by baseball to commit fully. If you put your head down and worked hard, you could get an MBA in two years, and then a whole bunch of doors would be open to you. I’m going to be in school for another four years anyway. You might as well do something productive with that time.”

“But I don’t want that.” I bristled. Leave it to Laurel to think following dreams I had made for myself wasn’t productive. Sometimes, I wondered if she even knew me anymore or if the version of Beck she was dating was one she had created in her head.

“Want what? A better life than your parents?”

“My parents don’t have a bad life, Laurel. My parents are happy, have a loving marriage, and both work jobs that fulfill them.” Why would I want a life any better than that?

“You don’t honestly believe that, do you?”

“Yeah, I do. Because it’s true.”

“God, Beck, you can be so dense. What happened to us creating a future together?”

“I… that’s still…” However, the words to convince her that was still my intention caught on my tongue. Less than an hour ago, I’d had someone else pinned under me, my fingers tangled with his, lips desperate to consume every part of him. How could I sit here trying to convince her that I was still working towards the same future she was when I didn’t even know if that was the truth anymore?

She cleared her throat, a clear indicator that this conversation was over. “Look, I’ve got to go. I’m sorry this wasn’t supposed to turn into a whole thing. I just wanted to catch up with you on my lunch break.”

“Okay.”

I thought she would hang up without another word, but instead, she added, “You know I’m only being harsh because I believe you can be so much more, don’t you, Beck?”

For the first time in our entire relationship, I was starting to think that wasn’t true. She was being harsh because she needed me to fit into the box she had created in her head for me. She needed me to become the perfect husband, with a fancy job that paid me well so I could buy her fancy things, and more than that, she needed me to be someone she could brag about to her friends and show off like some pedigree dog. Well-trained, well-mannered, well-bred. There had been a time when that had been all I’d wanted for myself as well. When I had just wanted to be good enough to continue being with a woman like her. But I was starting to think that wasn’t what I wanted anymore.

“I know.” The line clicked off, the lock screen of my phone illuminating a photograph of Laurel and me as the call disconnected. My arms were wrapped around her. My face turned into her cheek with an expression like I was looking at the most precious thing I'd ever owned plastered across it. She looked directly at the camera, posed perfectly, with a practiced smile. I had loved this picture when I’d set it, but now I saw it for what it was. Fake.