Wild Card

by Elsie Silver

Eventually our clock runs out. He boards his flight, and as I watch him leave, I see the way he glances back over his shoulder, brows drawn low as he searches for me. A thrill races down my spine at the stoic parting wave he gives me. And I tell myself it’s just goodbye for now and not forever. Because the world works in mysterious ways, and it would never squander a meet-cute like ours.

I’m not a big texter. But I text Gwen as soon as I land. Fifteen years ago, I might not have. Now, I’m too fucking old to play mind games. I’m interested. Simple as that. I don’t know her last name. Or if she lives in Toronto or was just visiting. I only know that she was on her way back from a yoga retreat in Mexico and that I had more fun with her than I have with anyone in a very long time. And I want to do it again sometime. Hell, we could just meet and hang out in another airport for all I care.

West: When are you back? We suck at bowling without you. We need our daddy back. * * * A disappointed sigh rushes over my lips. Weston Belmont is one of my closest friends, and even though I pretend to be irritated by him, I’m actually pretty attached to the guy. Despite the fact that he’s taken to jokingly calling me daddy.

Daddy Bash has a nice ring to it

Our other member is Clyde or, as everyone refers to him, Crazy Clyde. It’s a nickname he’s embraced with gusto. Sometimes I think he just says wild shit to get people talking, to live up to the name. Either way, he’s another stray I’ve adopted along the way. A loner with no family who—for as bonkers as he is—has become something of a father figure to me. Or a paradoxical boomer child, depending on the day.

We’re a ragtag crew of three who are constantly on the hunt for a fourth. West brings in random people to try on for size, but they never make the cut. I usually have to tell him afterward how much I hate them and why.

Another one smiled too much. Like constantly. It was unnatural and creepy, so he had to go. I’m pretty sure Clyde scared off the others with his zany conspiracy theories.

West: Cool. How’d it go with Tripp? * * * How did it go with Tripp? It went? It was weird? It felt like an out-of-body experience to be faced with a grown man who is supposedly my son. Hell, he looks enough like me that the DNA test is probably entirely unnecessary. He looks like me, if I were a twenty-four-year-old NHL star who grew up in the lap of luxury. And his mom? She can barely look at me at all.

I hate to admit it, but I’m bitter. I’ve spent the better part of my adulthood wanting to be a father. I’m sure I wouldn’t have been a good parent at fifteen, but I’d have shown up the best way I knew how. And considering my dad went to the grocery store when I was nine years old and never came back, there’s no doubt in my mind that I would have been better than nothing. But Cecilia and her family decided it was better if I wasn’t around at all. And that stings like hell. They robbed me of the opportunity. Now I’m left feeling like I missed out on something I never even knew was within reach. And it’s only made worse by the fact that I’ve wanted a family of my own. That yearning cost me my marriage. I wanted something she didn’t. So we parted ways, and I’ve been too shit-scared to try again. But now I’m faced with what I wanted but not at all in the way I expected it.

It was equal parts awkward and incredible all at once. It left me feeling…I don’t know. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to feel. Deep down, I’m worried. He comes from so much—what could I possibly have to offer him? Especially when he already has a man who’s been a father to him. The entire week has left me feeling low. Until Gwen sat her fine ass in the chair across from me and made herself at home. She made me feel better. But now, her lack of response gnaws at me, leaving a pit in my stomach and a sour mood I can’t seem to shake.

Eight months later… I eye Gwen’s contact in my phone as I sit at the Calgary airport. It’s been eight months since that freak November snowstorm. Thirty-two weeks since I sent the first text to her. Thirty weeks since I sent that follow-up. And I still come back to our very one-sided chat. I look over the messages for what feels like the millionth time. All marked as delivered. Since she didn’t respond to either, sending another now just seems pathetic. The answer is probably to read between the lines. And with the way my life has been turned upside down in the last year, I’m not sure I need to volunteer myself for a full-on rejection. I’m already grappling with heavy feelings of inadequacy.

Making a hot twenty-seven-year-old spell out that she’s avoiding me might just be my killing blow.

I put my phone away and stare at the moving walkway at the end of the terminal. And I think of her. I think of that night. She wasn’t wrong about it becoming a core memory. I should be focused on heading to my newfound son’s birthday party but, fuck, if she’s not perfectly burned into my mind.

Because I find the sight of her distasteful too. I thought that this whole thing might feel easier today, but it doesn’t. I’ve had months to stew in my bitterness. It’s thick in my chest and tight in my jaw. I don’t know how a person is supposed to feel after finding out they have an adult son whose existence was intentionally kept from them.

Because I want so much more. I want all the birthdays I missed. I want the first steps back. High school graduation. His NHL draft—the one I looked up on the internet, only to watch his name be called and see him hugging his mom and stepdad. It was the happiest of moments. And I was nowhere to be seen.

He leads me through the house, spouting off about Tripp’s statistics from last season and practically overflowing with pride. And why shouldn’t he? He raised Tripp as his own. Tripp plays with Eddie’s last name on his jersey. He’s his dad.

I might not be one of them, but I’m proud of who I am, and I’m not in the habit of letting ridiculously rich people make me feel small.

Beautiful doe eyes, more lavender than blue. Eyes I haven’t seen in eight months. All the air leaves my lungs in one rough exhale. Because I’d know those eyes anywhere. I’ve dreamed of them.

She looks just as shocked as I am. What are the chances?

“Bash, I’d like you to meet my girlfriend, Gwen. Gwen Dawson.” The word girlfriend falls through me, landing hard and heavy in my gut. Yeah. What are the fucking chances?

Sebastian. The full name feels too formal for the night we shared. A night I think about more often than I should. A night during which we barely touched, and yet it rivals the intimacy of any night I’ve ever spent with a man.

It feels like someone just slapped me. He shows no signs of recognizing me, and the warm rasp I remember in his voice is notably absent. His body language is as closed off as a fucking prison cell. He doesn’t even tell me to call him Bash. It appears he’s relegated me to Sebastian terms. Which honestly pisses me off. Ire surges through me as the shock of the moment wanes.

There’s a kind way to let a girl down, and it isn’t by letting her constantly check her phone like a desperate teenager hoping that the cute boy she’s obsessed with might text her. For months. I stayed positive and “glass half-full” and all those things I pride myself on being while I waited for him to reach out. And he didn’t.

To the outside observer, it would appear that I’m staring at the guy I showed up here with. But they would be wrong. I’m staring at his dad.

Before today I didn’t realize that Tripp is a full-fledged mama’s boy. And not in the way that means he respects and speaks highly of her. No. Instead he borderline reverts to being a little boy around her.

I’ve always had a wanderer’s spirit, moving from city to city and filling in at different studios. Settling down is low on my to-do list, and Tripp seemed like a perfectly passable Mr. Right Now. But now the season has ended, and he’s around. A lot. Possibly too much for my taste.

Before today, I hadn’t met his parents, and truthfully, there’s been nothing relationship-like about our setup. Him introducing me as his fuck buddy would be a lot more accurate. But instead, he picked me up in his expensive sports car with a laundry list of rules about how to act around his parents.

Turning Bash into the villain makes the Colemans look mature and gracious, downright hospitable to even welcome him into their home. I know that was my first thought when Tripp told me his biological dad was coming today. And now he’s parading him around, introducing him to people and acting like including him makes Tripp worthy of nomination for sainthood. It’s bizarre. It’s cruel. And it’s a lie. It’s a lie that shines a different light on Tripp Coleman—and a bad one.

Am I using alcohol as a coping mechanism today? Yes. Do I care? No.

Earlier, when I tried to head down there, Tripp specified it would be more “appropriate” to keep my shoes on, as though I planned to go skinny-dipping in front of his parents’ friends. That should have been my first clue from the universe that today was destined to go sideways.

Maybe it was the way he looked at me or the way he listened to me. Hell, it could have been the way we laughed together. Or maybe it was the spark I felt when his hand enveloped mine. I’ve wondered if it was one of those moments in the universe where all the stars align—where every little choice made in life led us to that airport on that exact night. Maybe it was just a little bit of magic. Inexplicable and undeniable all at once. What I do know for sure is that it’s been eight months, and I still think about Sebastian Rousseau every damn day.

“Easy, girl. Don’t eat too much.” Easy, girl? I pause, my brows furrowing as I stare down at the two bite-size pieces of food on the napkin in my hand, wondering if I misheard my “boyfriend.” Did he really just tell me not to eat too much? “The fuck did you just say to her?” Bash’s voice is cold as ice from across the table.

“All in good fun, right, babe?” He winks at me, like I’m in on his joke, and turns his attention to his dad, who is staring daggers at him. “No. Not in good fun,” Bash says. “That was plain rude.” Tripp scoffs and waves him off. “It was a joke. I just meant save some room for dinner. Don’t make it into something else.” I shift away from Tripp, not liking the version of him that comes out to play around his family. It was rude. And manipulative. An unwelcome commentary on what and how much I’m eating disguised as a joke—a tactic my dad employed masterfully when I was younger.

If today has proven anything, it’s that he acts like an asshole around his family. It’s like I’m dating Dr. Jekyll—and Mr. Hyde has just come out to play.

“The number is wrong.” He blinks as I hold his phone out, open to the contact card. “It’s six-nine-nine not six-six-nine.”

He’s gutted. I see it on his face. I feel it in his body. Hell, I can feel it in my own. This is a cruel, cruel joke. Because I may not know him well, but I ache for him all the same. I would have chosen him.

“Bash, I waited months for you to contact me. If I’d gotten those messages… You have to know I would have responded.”

He looks how I feel. Sucker punched. He takes the phone from me, gaze boring into the incorrectly entered number. An understandable mistake for someone who stayed up all night. I should have taken his number. We should have planned better.

It’s taking all my self-control to not get out and help him. But the thing about Clyde is that he doesn’t want any help. Convincing him to give dialysis a go was the challenge of my life. The passenger door opens, and he heaves his short body into the seat with a grunt. He’s got a wiry but strong build, topped with deeply lined, leathery skin from years spent in the sun (and not believing in sunscreen). It’s actually weird that his kidneys are the issue and not some type of skin cancer. But his doctors assured me that, aside from the kidneys, he’s as healthy as a horse. I’m worried about him, though. I can’t help it. I’ve grown attached to the ornery old git.

“What are you waiting for? Me to die while you stare at me?” He crosses his arms and shoots me a petulant glare from beneath his trucker hat. I just sigh. Anyone who thinks I’m hard to handle should try helping Clyde. “I’m waiting for you to put your seat belt on.” “Pfft. I don’t need a seat belt. I grew up in cars that didn’t even have ’em. And look at me.” He holds his arms out wide. “I turned out fine.” My brows drop. “I think our definitions of fine might be different.” Clyde’s lips twitch. “You’re so crabby. Still stewing over the wall-punching incident?”

“Oh, so we’re still pretending that didn’t happen?” My molars clamp down on each other. “I’m not pretending shit, Clyde. I’m just internally berating myself for even telling you about it.”

Obviously, I couldn’t admit why I’d had a completely out-of-character outburst. Sorry, I’ve been obsessing over your girlfriend for months, blew my shot because, in the fog of pulling an all-nighter, I missed one fucking number, and now I’ll never have her.

I headed straight to the airport to come home, thinking my luck couldn’t get any worse. But I’d been wrong. Because there in the terminal, I ran into my ex-wife for the first time in three years. She looked happy, healthy, remarried, and very pregnant. Pregnant. Something she told me she never wanted to be. Something she clearly just didn’t want to be with me.

Things may have been tenuous between Tripp and me after I put a hole in his mom’s wall, but with persistence, we’ve managed to forge something of a connection. Even if we only talk about work. Work is safe. Personal lives are dicey. Gwen is personal. And I sure as shit don’t want to talk to him about her. I don’t even want to think about her. With him.

Of course, Clyde has to live way the hell and gone—up the back side of the mountain. Something about fewer cameras tracking him. As if anyone wants to track Clyde and his daily puttering around his land.

Although I barely know Tripp, it’s clear he has his mother’s family’s fingerprints all over him. He’s not all bad, but the silver-spoon, image-obsessed genes are there. I could tell by the way he introduced me to people and the way they patted him on the back with that knowing look in their eyes. Like he was downright heroic for welcoming me back into his life. Truthfully, I didn’t care. They can all say what they want about me. But teasing Gwen about her eating habits felt like a backhanded way of criticizing her body. And that set me off.

Because her fucking body. I’ve dreamed of it. Of her. I know I shouldn’t—especially now—but my subconscious is having a grand old time torturing me over what could have been. What I could have had.

He comes by his moniker “Crazy Clyde” pretty honestly. If anyone were going to wear a tinfoil hat, it would be him. I find a comfort in it, though. The world around me can get turned upside down, and Clyde just…stays the same.

Something about him doing it all alone, with no one in his corner, doesn’t sit right with me. So I continue to show up for him. I promised I would, and if there’s one thing I am, it’s loyal.

“I know you don’t want to talk about it, but I’m going to anyway. So listen up. Just because you got horny at fifteen and that kid has half your DNA, it doesn’t mean you need to let him treat you like shit while you constantly beat yourself up over his existence. And for what it’s worth, when doomsday hits, he’s not invited to my bunker. But you are.” Then, with a firm nod, he slams the door, leaving me feeling a mixture of amusement and—strangely—affection.

What started as a casual bowling night with West and Clyde has become a hell of a lot more organized. Over the past several months, we’ve picked up two more regular members—ones I don’t hate. Ford, West’s childhood best friend, and Rhys, a stray that our local bistro owner dropped off one day. Don’t know much about the guy, but I like him a lot. He’s not annoying, and he doesn’t ask a bunch of questions. We’ve struck up a friendship that mostly consists of rolling our eyes at West and exchanging to-the-point text messages. He reminds me of my friend Emmett, a professional bull rider on the WBRF circuit. He travels a lot, so we don’t see each other often, but when we do, we just pick up where we left off.