Page 23 of Secret Triplets, Second Chances

LARA

I ’m still sitting on the couch, wallowing in a glass of wine that I’m too nauseous to do anything but take tiny sips of, when there’s a knock at the door. Assuming it’s Zachery, I stand and shuffle to the door with a blanket wrapped around me, trying to figure out what I’m going to say to him.

It’s not like him to come back, but with the chance to apologize, I’ll take it. We’ve never fought before, and I already feel horrible about the way things were when he left.

But when I open the door, it’s not Zachery standing there.

“Lara,” Jake says, and I drink him in, thinking for a second that I’ve imagined him. His scruffy facial hair, getting thicker each day. Those amber eyes, glinting at me in the light from the stairwell. His sweatshirt is damp on his broad shoulders from rain, and his hair is darker than usual.

“Jake,” I answer, barely believing he’s standing here in front of me. We stand in the doorway and stare at each other for a second, that thing between us stretching out and growing, turning into something new.

Because this isn’t just about us anymore. It’s about the triplets, too.

It’s like it always is between us, the unspoken thing, something that we both see and acknowledge without ever having to say anything about it.

“Can I come in?” he asks, and I shift to the side, unblocking the entrance.

“Yeah, of course.”

Silently, we move into the living room together, and his eyes glance over at the wine glass before finding me again.

“Are you okay?”

“Are you okay?” I counter, already feeling my eyes tearing up again at the memory of the look on his face. “Because, Jake, I?—”

“Can I go first?” he asks, holding up a hand and tilting his head. “I think we should have a conversation, but first I have some things I want to say.”

I pause, tugging the blanket tighter around myself and nodding as he clears his throat and sits down on the couch. I follow him, sitting a few seats away, staring at him like he might disappear if I don’t keep an eye on his face.

Everything feels surreal. Zachery told me once about the idea of liminal space. A place like a rest stop in the middle of the night, an airport, an empty hallway or a waiting room. A place that doesn’t quite feel like reality is touching.

This feels like that. Like Jake and I exist outside the bounds of our normal reality. Like we’ve walked right off the set of our lives, breaking the fourth wall.

“When you told me that earlier…” Jake takes a breath, looks up at the ceiling, and as much as I want to give him a hug, I force myself to keep my distance. He pauses, and a long moment passes before he’s ready to talk again.

“The thing is that I always thought hockey was my passion. My destiny. Like it was the one thing I could do to get out of this town, and it’s all that mattered. But now, well, after being in the NHL for a year, I know I’ve still got this empty feeling. Like it wasn’t quite right .”

He shifts on the couch, turning to me, and I see the tears shining in his eyes, his mouth wobbling. “It’s because you weren’t with me, Lara. For five years, you have always been there, in the back of my mind, through everything - college, the draft, my rookie season.”

I’m already crying again, unable to believe this is true.

“But, aren’t you mad at me?”

“I am mad,” he says slowly, taking a deep breath through his nose like it might help to center him. “But not at you. As much as I wish things had gone differently, I understand why you made the decisions you did. I get why you didn’t tell me back then. And I think that…”

“What?” I whisper.

“Well, it’s impossible to go back and see what could have been, but I’m not going to rule out that I might have always thought about it. If you’d told me about the triplets?—”

“—back then, I thought it was only one baby.” I laugh.

He pauses, laughs, too, then shakes his head and goes on, “If you’d told me about the baby, and I had stayed — because I would have stayed — I might have always thought about what could have been. Not knowing what I missed with hockey.”

“Do you want to see more pictures?”

He nods, and we spend the next hour cycling through the pictures and videos on my phone.

“Aster, Chrysanthemum, Daffodil. But we call the girls Chrys and Daffy,” I explain, showing him Aster and Chrys’s first steps, which I caught on video. Daffy went straight from crawling to running, and I never got to see the in-between.

I tell Jake about how we learned Aster was lactose intolerant and how Chrys loves to wear pretty dresses, but Daffy is all about overalls; how every night, they get into bed and hear the same bedtime story.

“Right now, they’re all sharing one bedroom.” I gesture down the hall, and Jake's eyes follow with curiosity, so I show him. Three beds — one pink, one blue, one green. Posters and glow-in-the-dark stars on the walls. A little reading nook in the corner that they mostly use as a fort right now.

“Chrys is the only one who really reads,” I tell him, watching as he steps in, holding himself carefully like he’s in an antique shop or a museum. “But I really want all of them to have a love of books.”

“That tracks.” He laughs, turning and giving me a look. “I remember how Spiderman comforted you.”

Warmth floods through me. I don’t understand how, but less than a day after finding out about what I’ve kept from him, Jake is already back to joking with me.

I have the feeling that things are going to be hard — that moving forward, we’re going to have to work through this and figure out how to proceed, but right now, the only thing I can focus on is Jake in front of me.

“Can I see… your room?” he asks, and though there’s no hint of innuendo in his voice, it still sends a shiver through me. More than the idea of Jake in my bedroom is the knowledge that he wants to know me — that he wants to see the one place in this apartment that is truly mine, and mine alone.

I nod, then I’m leading him down the hallway to my bedroom. When I open the door, I see it through his eyes.

Queen bed in the center of the left wall, bookshelves lining the right.

“Custom?” Jake asks, taking a step toward the shelf and running his hand over part of the frame.

I nod and swallow, tucking my hair behind my ear. “Yeah.”

“I could have built something like this for you,” he says, smiling, his hand still on the shelf. “I’m not sure I want to hear how much this cost.”

That makes me laugh, and we linger in the moment together, smiling at each other, until Jake clears his throat and takes a step toward me, his eyes going serious.

“So, back then, the reason you didn’t come with me was just the babies?”

The breath whooshes from my lungs, and I nod. He takes another step toward me, his eyes searching my face as though looking for the truth there.

“There wasn’t… something I did?”

“No, Jake.” I’m earnest, stepping toward him, too, until we’re close enough that I can feel his body heat radiating from him.

High metabolism. It reminds me of the time we sat in the bed of his truck, how his thigh next to mine had kept me warm.

“I— it broke my heart. That night was torture, not coming after you. Not telling you the truth.”

He nods, his eyes locking on mine, holding me there in his gaze until it feels like my lungs might explode right out of my chest.

“Is there anyone else, Lara?”

“No.” I pause. “Is there… for you?”

“Never.” His voice is low, almost imperceptible. It feels like time has become a loose, stretched-out thing moving around us. I’m afraid to breathe in case I might shatter the moment.

The logical version of me, in the back of my mind, is screaming that this might be a bad idea — that there are already so many complicated, tangled emotions between Jake and me. That we should wait. That maybe this ship has already sailed.

So, I listen to my logical self, clearing my throat and taking a step back, shattering the moment.

Until Jake reaches out, takes my wrist in his hand, and pulls me back to him, capturing my mouth with his.