The Offer (28 page)

I grin at him.
“Maybe I can have both?”

He grabs me by
the bottoms of my ass cheeks and lifts me up in the air until my
legs are wrapped around him. He then takes me to the bedroom and we
lock the door, hoping we can at least steal a few minutes with each
other.

***

When Bram says
early, for us it actually means the crack of dawn. It’s just about
6:30 am when he knocks at my door. Ava is in the bathroom brushing
her teeth with her new bubblegum toothpaste after it took about ten
minutes to rouse her awake. She only perked up when I mentioned the
word “Disneyland.” I can’t blame her though. You know those old
Disneyland commercials with the kids bouncing around in their
pajamas in the middle of the night, yelling, “I’m too excited to
sleep!” Well, that was pretty much last night in a nutshell. Zero
sleep was had in the Price household.

I tuck my
shower-damp hair behind my ears and open the door expecting to see
Bram.

My mouth drops
open.

It’s Bram all
right, dressed in jeans, boots, and a simple tee with a sleek
leather duffel bag at his feet. But it’s what’s in his hands that
has me practically swooning.

Okay, I’m
totally swooning.

“Is that for
Ava?” I ask, almost breathless.

He nods
proudly, maybe even a bit sheepishly. In his hands is a child-sized
princess dress, the pink Sleeping Beauty one that Aurora wears at
the end of the movie. It even has the crown and veil attached. I
think I might just die right here.

“I hope it
fits her,” he says. “It’s hard to find those Disney Stores
anymore.”

“I can’t
believe you did that,” I tell him, my heart thumping around in my
chest. “That’s the nicest, cutest, sweetest thing I think anyone
has ever done for her.”

“Well,” he
says, rubbing his hands along his jaw. “I did it for her and I did
it for you.”

I
swallow hard, surprised at the burning in my eyes. No lie,
I’m
this
close to
crying. It’s crazy how such a simple and somehow ridiculously
romantic gesture undoes me. No one has ever thought of my girl with
such regard.

And there goes
a tear, rolling hot down my cheek.

“Oh,
sweetheart,” Bram murmurs, stepping into the apartment and
enveloping me into a hug. “Don’t cry. It was nothing. I just
thought she’d like to dress up as a princess on the ride down.”

“
But you
remembered
Sleeping Beauty
and the spindle and the needle and it’s soooo pretty.” I’m
a blubbering, incoherent mess as I cry into his arms.

He puts his
hand at the back of my head and holds me there. “Well, I’m glad you
like it.” I know he sounds so breezy about the whole thing but,
then again, how can he understand what this means to me? So many
years and no one has done something like this, no one has ever
thought of me and Ava that much. It’s then that I realize how tired
I am, how much I’ve been pushed to the side, how much I’ve pushed
myself to the side. It feels so fucking good to have someone care
about us.

Just then, Ava
comes out of the bathroom. She slowly walks over to us, her head
tilted. She points at the dress.

“What’s that?”
she asks, hope sparking in her eyes.

Bram crouches
down to her level. “Who is your favorite princess?”

“Aurora,” she
says smartly. “She pricked her finger on the spindle, just like I
do.”

“That’s
because you are a princess,” he says, displaying the dress in front
of her in a shimmering waterfall of magenta, pink and gold. “And
this is your princess dress.”

Her
mouth makes an
O
and her eyes
widen comically. “What?” She looks at me, almost begging for it to
be true. I wipe away a tear with my hand and nod.

“It’s all
yours, angel.”

She carefully
takes the dress from Bram’s hands and examines it. “It must be made
out of cotton candy,” she muses, absolutely dazzled by it.

“Can you go
try it on yourself or do you need my help?” I ask her, knowing full
well she needs my help.

“I can do it!”
She runs off to her bedroom.

“Say thank you
to Bram!” I yell after her.

“Thank you,
Bram!” I hear her say from the other room.

A half an hour
later the three of us – with Ava dressed as a princess – are in
Bram’s car and we’re making our way down the 101, lucky that the
traffic jam is on the other side. The three of us can’t stop
smiling and the day is full of such promise that it almost makes me
dizzy.

Six hours
later, after countless toilet breaks and pit stops and the never
ending, “Are we there yet?” we pull off the freeway and onto
Katella Avenue. This is Ava’s first glimpse at Disneyland and I’m
pointing out the top of the Matterhorn and Space Mountain, the
Monorail and the Ferris Wheel and California Screaming Coaster in
the distance. She looks absolutely terrified at those rides but I
assure her there are many of them that she’ll love and at that she
starts boogying in her seat.

Bram didn’t
spare any expense and got us a suite at the Disney Grand
Californian Lodge, located right in Disney’s California Adventure
Park. When I was young the park didn’t even exist, so it was as
much fun for me as it was for Ava to step inside the hotel and have
everything be brand new. And let’s face it, even if the park was
here when I was younger, there was no way we could have afforded to
stay there. The same goes for the Disneyland Hotel. Though it’s
dated now, it’s still an arm and a leg for a room and when I was
young, my parents believed in spending as little on the hotels as
possible. Who cares if you were sleeping in a Super 8, as long as
you were spending all day and evening at the park.

But Bram
cares, and in turn, I care. The beds are clean, fresh and
comfortable, the room tastefully decorated in the style of some
grand lodge near Yosemite or Mammoth Lakes and we have a view
through ponderosa pine and over the bear-shaped rock peak of the
Grizzly River Rapids.

I’m pretty
much exhausted because I’ve been on a six-hour road trip that has
drained me like nothing else but Ava slept for a lot of the drive
and now she’s bouncing around the room, losing her goddamn
mind.

“No rest for
the weary,” I say to Bram, feeling bad since he had to drive the
whole way.

“I don’t know
if you’ve noticed, sweetheart, but I have stamina for days.”

That he does.
I go about making a day pack for Ava including the right snacks,
water, her insulin kit, floppy hat, a spare pair of shoes and, of
course, sunscreen. Then we head on out to enjoy the park.

Because we’re
tired, we plan on only spending the day in California Adventure.
Ava doesn’t know the difference between the two parks, plus there,
she got to head into A Bug’s Land and go nuts for hours.

As she does
just that, Bram and I hold hands and watch as she plays in the
different areas, pretending to be bug-sized, darting in and out of
water fountains. When it’s time to go on a ride, she grabs my hand
and pulls me onto a Chinese take-out box that zooms around in a
circle. Though these aren’t the rides I ever dreamed of riding,
she’s having the time of her life. If it was up to me, of course,
we’d be hitting up California Screaming and The Tower of Terror,
but seeing everything through my little girl’s eyes makes it that
much more fun.

We end the day
with Bram and I grabbing a beer and wine in the faux vineyard
before we hop on the Cars Mater’s tractor ride (which, in
hindsight, isn’t the best idea after a drink). Bram and I have been
taking turns on and off riding with Ava and though she’s less
likely to shriek like a banshee around him, you can still tell
she’s having a lot of fun. Scratch that – she’s having the time of
her life.

The first two
days at Disneyland and California Adventure are pretty much the
same. We wake up early and head to the parks, breathing in the
smell of churros, popcorn and turkey legs all while the tinkling
music fills the air. We hit up all the kiddie rides – for some
reason they have the longest lines – and then gorge on whatever
food we can find. Somehow we manage to convince Ava to ride the
Grizzly River Rapids with us and we all got so completely soaked
that she was the only one who ended up loving it. Thankfully, the
hot SoCal heat dried us off in minutes.

And of course
she meets all her favorite characters including Eyeore and Sleeping
Beauty. Bram and I both posed in some of the photos with her,
though that wasn’t my doing. He volunteered to be in the pictures
and Ava looked like she was over the moon about his wanting to be a
part of it.

The truth is,
I’m still a bit uneasy about the whole thing and I’m glad that
there are pictures of her on her own as well. As much as I’m
falling for Bram – and I know I am, I mean how can any woman worth
her salt not love this man? – I don’t know what the future brings.
I would hate to have us break up, break apart, or whatever it’s
called, and then be stuck with these photographs. At least now if
that happens, I can burn them, pretend he never existed, and still
have photos of Ava left over.

I think Bram
can kind of sense my train of thought though, because he’s being
extra attentive and yet distant at the same time. I don’t want to
bring it up with him the whole, “what is this, what are we?” talk
because that tends to ruin the very carefree and fun thing you
have, so I don’t.

But that
night, as we’re lying in bed together after some slow, passionate
love-making, Bram says, “I know why you’re hesitant with me.”

I stiffen, not
sure what direction this is going to take. “What do you mean?”

“Oh come on,”
he says. “You think I haven’t noticed the way you practically
flinched when I asked to be in the photos.”

I take in a
deep breath, wishing he didn’t bring it up. “Look, it doesn’t mean
anything so don’t take it personally.”

“Well, I am
going to take it personally,” he says. He turns over to look at me,
propping his head up with his hand. “You don’t want me in the
pictures because you still think I’m going to up and leave you,
that this is just a bloody fling.”

“No, not
exactly,” I say feebly. “It’s just that…okay, maybe it’s a bit of
that. But you have to understand that it’s just been me and Ava for
a long time.”

“Steph had
said you were dating someone else for a while between Phil
and…well, this.”

Did she now?
It had me wondering how often Steph and him talked.

I sigh. “His
name was Ben. He was a nice guy and that was that. Neither of us
were really into the relationship.”

“But Ava liked
him, didn’t she?”

I give him a
steady look. “What makes you say that?”

He shrugs with
one shoulder. “Because you seem scared that the same thing will
happen again. That Ava will grow attached to me – that even you,
yourself, with your damn heart in a cage – will grow attached to me
too.”

I feel my skin
go hot. “My heart is not in a cage,” I say, defensive. “And Ava has
been attached to you from that moment we first went in your car.
The damage with her has already been done.”

“But what
about the damage with you?” he asks gruffly, peering at me even
closer. “And how can what we have be called anything close to
damaging?”

He really
doesn’t understand, does he?

“Because….” I
grapple for words. “Because, when you invite someone in and they
leave, they take a part of you with them. It ruins the foundation.
Don’t you see? It’s damaging when you pull the bricks out and the
whole building collapses.”

He rubs a hand
angrily over his face, letting out an immensely loud sigh. “Hearts
aren’t bloody buildings, Nicola!” He throws the covers off of him
and gets out of bed, pacing back and forth. He’s nude but for once,
my eyes are drawn to the tension in his face. I don’t even think to
look at his dick.

“I’m sorry,” I
hiss at him, sitting up in bed. “I know they aren’t but, God, I
wish you knew what it was like to be me. To just know what it’s
like to be dealt the shitty hand.”

He stops and
gives me an incredulous look. I regret saying anything. He’s that
wide-eyed, his brow knitting with anger. “You think you’re the only
one who has been dealt the shitty hand in life?” He leans forward
with his hands on the mattress, looking me dead in the eye. “My
mother never told me she loved me growing up. My father was never
proud of me, no matter what I did. I had to live with that, deal
with that. I was shipped off to boarding schools half the time
because no one in my family knew what to do with me. You want to
talk about the shitty hand, well I got it. I was fucking unwanted.
And yes, I had money and I had everything else at my fingertips.
But that doesn’t mean dickshit when you don’t have someone to tell
you they love you.”

My breath is
caught in my lungs. I can see his pulse ticking along in his
throat, the desperation in his eyes that want so much for me to see
him, the real him, to understand. And I do. Not in the exact same
way, but I do.

He swallows
and looks away for a moment. “Hey,” he says, his voice low. He
climbs on top of the mattress toward me and I’m reminded of the
first time we made love. But instead of that carnal desire as he
approached me, there’s something else. That extra level of
connection that I thought may have been only in my head.

“Nicola,” he
says, placing both his hands on either side of my face, gazing into
my eyes with such deep focus. “I know you’ve been burned. But I’ve
been burned too. Maybe our ashes can make something beautiful
together.”

He kisses me
then with such force, such passion, I feel like the wind has
literally been sucked out of me. I want nothing more than for
something beautiful to rise from us together. I have my demons and
apparently he has his.