Why Not Now? (The Blue Vista Crew #2)

18. Chapter 18

Chapter 18

Derek

A va is on time for work, just like I promised. I wish she had been late so I could have spent longer in bed with her this morning, but I’ll take what I can get. I’m really worried about her and how much she does. Though, until she lets me, I can’t exactly help her any more than I already am.

After I drop her off, kissing her soundly before letting her go, I follow my GPS to Lacey’s friend’s house. When I get there, I knock on the door and wait. A woman a few years older than me answers.

“Hello,” she says, looking me up and down. I recognize the look. It’s one I’ve seen many times before, usually right before a woman asks me to buy her a drink.

“Hi. I’m here to pick up Lacey.”

She blinks for a moment. “Lacey?”

“I didn’t get the wrong house, did I?” I ask, taking a step back to check the house number.

“Derek!” Lacey saves me, coming to the door behind the woman.

“Hey, Ace. You ready to go?”

“Almost. I left my bag in Jess’ room upstairs.”

“Run and get it, Lacey,” the woman says. “I’ll keep Derek company.”

I almost call Lacey back, but she rushes up the stairs and the woman gestures for me to come inside.

“I’m Cathy, Jess’ mom.”

She holds out her hand for me to shake.

“Nice to meet you. I’m Derek, a friend of Ava’s and Lacey’s. Offered my ride services since the weather is shit today.”

“That’s so kind of you. A friend, you say?”

“Yep.”

“It’s so nice to have friends.” She places her hand on my arm.

I watch the stairs, hoping to see Lacey come down them and get me out of here. It occurs to me that Cathy is an admittedly beautiful woman and yet I am not attracted to her at all. Her hair is a little too short and a little too blonde. Her eyes are a little too brown and don’t have enough gold flecks to make them hazel. She’s a little too tall and isn’t wearing enough green. Long story short: she’s not Ava.

“So have you known Ava and Lacey long?” Cathy asks, drawing my attention back to her.

“Uh. Yes. Sort of. Ava and I were friends in high school. We recently reconnected.”

Finally, Lacey returns and I’m able to step away from Cathy.

“Got everything?” I ask Lacey. She’s followed down the stairs by another girl.

“Yep.”

We escape outside and I open the car door for her. She slides in with a grateful smile. When I get in the driver’s side and start the car, I say, “I have a question for you. Do you have homework?”

“Some,” she says hesitantly.

“You got it with you?”

She nods.

“You want to go back to your place, or come with me to my mom’s?”

She blinks at me for a minute. “You want me to come with you?”

“Sure. Ava’s coming over after work, though she doesn’t exactly know it yet. And my friends and my sisters will be there.”

“Why?”

“It’s my birthday on Tuesday. Today is my party.”

“Happy birthday,” she exclaims. “Does Ava know?”

I think about that for a moment. “Probably. I didn’t remind her, but she might remember.” I hadn’t considered she might have forgotten what day my birthday is. Partly because I haven’t forgotten hers. A flash of memory burns through my mind. Ava’s seventeenth birthday party. Everything was over and I was about to head home with my friends. Ava and I stood outside her bedroom door, saying goodbye until she asked me, “Are you going to kiss me?”

I shake my head to dispel the memory. “So what do you say?”

“Sounds great,” Lacey says.

Lacey looks out the window for about half the drive before she turns to me. “Can I ask you a really personal question?”

“Sure, Ace. What’s up?”

Even though she has my permission, she still hesitates. Finally, she says, “When did you lose your virginity?”

I have never been more grateful for stoplights than I am at this moment, because I’m already stopped when she asks the last question I expect.

After a beat of silence, I say, “I’m not sure I should answer that.”

“Why not?”

“Because it involves your sister.”

“Oh.”

I can feel her watching me, but I keep my eyes on the road. We don’t speak again until I park in front of Mom’s house.

I turn the car off and scrub a hand over my face. When that’s not enough, I take my hat off to run my fingers through my hair before replacing it. I have a feeling I know why Lacey is asking this question, and I want to answer it for her. Especially if I’m right.

“Okay, here’s how this goes,” I say. “I’ll give you an answer and we’ll pretend I’m not talking about Ava. Deal?”

“Deal.”

We shake on it. “I was seventeen. My girlfriend was six months older than me and had turned eighteen. We’d just graduated high school.”

“How did you know you were ready?”

There it is, the question I actually want to answer, so hopefully she doesn’t rush into something she’ll regret.

“We’d been dating for a year by that time. I was hopelessly in love with her. In fact, I had been for about two years prior to us dating.”

“Really?”

I nod. “I had a massive crush on A—uh, my girlfriend, for a long time before we got together.”

“So why didn’t you do it before then?”

“There’s a lot of consequences that come with having sex. My mom had a rough time while I was growing up. I have two older sisters. My dad isn’t around. He would come into our lives every once in a while, take what he wanted from us, then leave again. I’d never do that if I got a girl pregnant, but I also didn’t want to get a girl pregnant.”

“There’s plenty of ways to prevent that,” Lacey says, reasonably.

“True. But none of them are one hundred per cent effective. And as someone who hadn’t even finished high school, I figured my chances of using contraceptives wrong, resulting in an unplanned pregnancy, was higher than I felt comfortable.”

“You weren’t worried about STIs?” she asks.

I shake my head. “We were both virgins, so no.”

“Was it you who wanted to wait? Or your girlfriend?”

“At first, it was both of us. I was probably ready before her, though. I’m not sure exactly. I waited for her to tell me she was ready.”

“Really?”

I nod, remembering that time. I’d always gone as far as Ava would let me, and not a bit further.

“Is someone pressuring you to have sex, Lacey?” I ask gently into the silence that’s descended.

“No. I’m only curious. A, uh, friend, has a boyfriend who’s asked a couple of times, but she’s handling it.”

“I see. Well, you tell this friend, if she’s not ready to have sex and her boyfriend is being a dick about it, he’s not really her boyfriend. He’s just a dick.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes.”

She’s quiet for a moment and I can tell she’s considering asking something else, so I wait.

Very quietly, she says, “You never went further than she wanted to go?”

“No, Lacey. I didn’t. Has anyone gone further than you want to go?”

“No.” But she says it too quickly.

“Lacey, look at me.” I wait until she does. “Do I need to have a talk with someone?”

She huffs a laugh. “That’s okay. I can handle it. I just wanted to make sure I was thinking of this the right way.”

“Have you talked to Ava?”

She looks out the window again. “No.”

“Why not?”

She shrugs. “It’s hard to talk to her. When she’s around, I think about it but I need to psych myself up. By the time I’ve done that, she has to go.” She turns back to me. “I don’t blame her,” she says quickly. “I understand. She has to work. It makes it hard to have serious conversations though when she’s so busy. And I guess I also kind of wanted a man’s perspective.”

“You can ask me anything you want, Ace. I’ll try my best to answer. But you need to talk to your sister. She’s your guardian. If you don’t tell her how you’re feeling, nothing is going to change.”

She twists her hands together in her lap. “What if I tell her and nothing changes, anyway?”

“Then at least you’ll have a conversation about why .”

She nods and we get out of the car.

“Listen,” I say as we walk to the door. “My friends and I have this thing we say to each other. I’ve got your back, no matter what. Even if you fuck up. That goes for you, too, all right?” I stop and turn to her, locking eyes to make sure she understands. “No matter what.”

I hold out my hand and she shakes it.

“No matter what,” she repeats.

I open the door and we go in. As we start to climb the stairs, Lacey says, “So you had a crush on Ava for two years before you asked her out?”

“Hey. I thought we had a deal.”

“Derek?” my mom calls from the kitchen, saving me from needing to say more. “Is that you?”

“Yeah, Mom. I brought a friend.”

She comes out and pauses, looking from me to Lacey.

“Do you remember Lacey Calligan?” I ask.

Her eyebrows lift in surprise before she schools her features and smiles. “Of course I remember Lacey. Look at you. You’re practically all grown up.”

And because she’s my mom and the coolest person in the world, she comes and gives Lacey a hug, welcoming her to her home.

“Where’s the snow shovel, Mom?” I ask.

“Probably where you left it,” she answers, taking Lacey’s hand and leading her to the kitchen.

“She still needs to do her homework,” I call after them.

Mom waves her hand, shooing me away. She’s going to feed Lacey, and I don’t have a problem with that. So I go down the stairs and back outside to the shed in the backyard where I find the shovel and get to work on the driveway.

There’s not a lot of snow, so it’s not too difficult, but it’s wet, so it’s heavy. It takes me about twenty minutes to shovel the driveway before I start on the sidewalk. Mom and Lacey come out, steaming mugs in their hands. They sit on the two Adirondack chairs I’d bought Mom for her birthday three years ago and watch me work.

“I don’t even know why I’m doing this,” I say as I shovel the minuscule amount of snow away. “It’s all going to be gone by tomorrow, anyway.”

“I don’t know why you’re doing it either,” Mom says from her seat. “I didn’t ask you to. You just showed up and started shovelling.”

Lacey laughs.

“He always does this,” Mom tells Lacey. “He just shows up and does stuff for me. Then he complains about it the whole time. I never ask him to do it.”

“If I waited for you to ask me,” I say, “it would be so far past the easy stage that it would take me twice as long.”

“This is what he tells himself,” she continues, not speaking to me at all. “The truth is, he’s just a good boy who loves his momma.”

Lacey laughs again and I roll my eyes, but I’m smiling, because it’s true. I do love my mom.

I listen to them chat about school and plans for the future. Lacey is really into environmental sciences and wants to focus on that. She’s in grade eleven and hasn’t figured out what college she wants to go to yet, but she’s been looking at a couple programs that might be interesting. I finish with the sidewalk and put the shovel away, returning to the front to see them gathering their things to go back inside. I move my car from the street into the driveway, grabbing a bag from the backseat.

“Did you bring me a coffee?” I ask.

“No,” Mom says. “You were working. It would have gotten cold. There’s some in the kitchen. Let’s go and I’ll make you both something to eat.”

When we’re seated at the dining table, Mom pulls a breakfast casserole out of the oven and serves it up with steaming coffee.

“What’s this?” I ask.

“I figured you’d be hungry when you got here,” she says, sitting down with us to eat.

“How did you know I was coming? I’m not supposed to be here until this evening.”

She rolls her eyes and picks up her fork, looking at Lacey when she speaks. “You see what I mean? I bet you two cookies he woke up this morning, saw the snow, and simply thought, I’m going to Mom’s today to shovel her driveway. No debate, no should I? Just got up and came over.”

I consider this morning, waking up with Ava. If she hadn’t gone in to work, I probably would have come over later than I did, but Mom’s right, I would have come over and done it, regardless.

I pull the container of cookies out of the bag I’d brought in from the car.

Mom and Lacey start laughing.

“Ava and I made these,” I say. “Two are for you, Lacey. One is for Lis, since she gave me the recipe.”

“For me?” Lacey asks. “Why?”

“You didn’t get to help with the decorating. Which I want to help you guys do at your place, by the way. I was thinking tomorrow night after work, but you have gymnastics, don’t you?”

“It’s over until January. Tomorrow would be great,” Lacey says. After we eat breakfast, she opens the container taking out a cookie. “Would you like my other one, Ms. Moritz?”

“Oh, please. Call me Justine. And no thank you, love. You should eat them both. It’s not every day Derek shares his cookies.”

“Hey,” I protest. “I can share. I just didn’t like to because Trish and Gina always stole my stuff. When are they coming over? I need to see my niece and nephews.”

We continue to chat and I’m not surprised at how easily Lacey and Mom get along. She should have always been here. I feel protective of her and Ava. I want them to be safe and happy and, most importantly, part of my family.