From the Embers

by Aly Martinez

Was Luna, with all her thick, brown hair and a set of honey-colored eyes that were so uniquely hers it was as if she defined the color, the most spectacular thing that had ever happened to me? Unquestionably.

“Is dinner almost ready? Starving kids is illegal, ya know!” Yep. That was my boy. Five years old and hangry just like his mama.

In theory, your best friend marrying your husband’s best friend was every high school girl’s dream. But not with these two.

Eason passed her off with pure fatherly pride beaming from his eyes. For all of his struggles in the professional and financial departments, he did love his daughter something fierce.

That was all I got out before time expired on us all. With a deafening boom, the entire house exploded.

It was bad, but losing the people I loved didn’t seem like a realistic outcome.

“Eason,” she croaked in my arms. My feet were still moving as I sprinted away, but time stopped as her voice permeated my senses. No. It wasn’t possible.

I saved the wrong woman. I left the mother of my child in a burning building. My final broken promise to the woman I’d vowed forever to was, “I’ll be right back.”

I would never be able to forget the absolute devastation on Bree’s face when she realized we were the only two standing outside the burning house.

he’d saved my life. Even through my heartbreak, I knew I should have been on my knees, thanking him. My kids still had their mom because of him. I still had a chance to watch them grow up—graduations, weddings, grandkids. Because of Eason, I still had a future.

It wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right. But don’t worry—I hated myself for surviving too.

Having company in hell didn’t change the fact that you were still actually in hell.

Well, hello there, Endorphins. So nice of you to join me again.

Eason was one of the best.

That man—always a hugger. He rocked us from side to side, more like he was trying to calm a crying baby than slow dance. “We got this, Bree. Me and you. We got this.” And for the first time since our world had exploded, I felt like maybe he was right.

This was different though. I had no fucking idea why, but as I pulled my hands from my pockets and wrapped her up tight, our bodies sagging as if they’d finally come home, it was definitely different.

And I’d be lying if I didn’t say I loved every fucking second of it. The song eventually ended. So did our embrace. Within an hour, we were both headed off to our respective beds. But something changed between us that night. A shift in the atmosphere. A peek of the sun behind the clouds. The turning of the tide. Or, as I would later learn, the first spark in a wildfire.

No, seriously, what the actual fuck was wrong with my subconscious. Eason?

Only he wasn’t the man on the backs of my lids. “Hurry up, Bree. Before I’m gone.” Fuck.

“Please God tell me this was an absolutely filthy dream about that fine hunk of man Eason Maxwell.”

This didn’t feel like nothing. It felt like a dormant part of me had been awakened for the first time in years. Years. Plural. As in more than one, and that was not possible because my husband had only been gone for one.

The one I have now is sexy as all hell, standing in front of me, dead tired in old Birkenstocks.

But carved into my soul for all my days to come was the life-altering moment when a naked photo of my wife appeared on the screen.

Then again, was there ever truly a convenient time to find out your dead husband had been in love with your dead best friend?

And as I flipped the page to the next set of their messages, my lids almost as heavy as my heart, the embers of their betrayal suddenly ignited into a conflagration that would consume us all.

“You’re all I have left, Bree. And dammit, you were his too.” As he straightened, I fisted a hand in the front of his shirt. “No, I wasn’t. You know it as well as I do. I was a fucking puppet in his show, and I’m done wearing the strings.”

Fuck them. Bree was mine. My friend, my family, and if I had my way about it, my everything.

There were so many nights when everything hurt and I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to breathe again. But there you were. With me every step of the way.”

“This picture, Bree. It’s not what we have to lose. It’s what I’ve already gained.”

“I can’t wait any longer to kiss you from head to toe, to make you feel good and know for sure it was because of me.”

nothing in my life had ever felt so right.

“Those naughty cotton panties. You have found my weakness.”

but feel like with this woman by my side, together, we’d get through it all.

“I don’t want to grow this thing between us in their shadows. We can’t move, at least not right now, but we deserve a space that isn’t tainted by them.”

Nothing had been solved. There wasn’t enough furniture or paint in the world to cure the pain Rob and Jessica had carved into our souls. But there was something to be said about having space to breathe. Something promising in the fresh start of it all. Something that simply moving Rob’s things out hadn’t done.

After the final note, I wasn’t quite done, so I played straight into Boyz II Men’s “I’ll Make Love to You” before shifting gears to a little Color Me Badd’s, “I Wanna Sex You Up.”

After everything we’d been through, everything we were still going through, how was it possible to be that damn happy?

one look at Bree and I felt like maybe someone had been looking out for me after all.

At the moment, it wasn’t the stage I was falling in love with. Though I wasn’t sure falling was the correct terminology. Looking back, I’d been in love with Bree before we’d even shared our first kiss.

“All that sweet of yours, you give me dia-bree-tus, but I’ll work on the girlfriend thing.”

“Mom, Eason’s not even wearing pants. How’s he supposed to go downstairs?”

“Because at breakfast you’re going to make us talk about you and Eason getting married.”

“she’s my girlfriend. This means we’re getting to know each other and spending time together. But, Ash, if and when your mom and I ever do decide to get married, and even if we don’t, I’m here for you in every way you could possibly need me. But I’m never going to replace your dad, okay? You already have a pretty amazing dad. Him being in heaven doesn’t change that.”

And that was the exact moment I fell all-the-way, head-over-heels, unapologetically in love with Eason Maxwell.

“Good. Keep that in mind, because you know I’m totally getting them a cat, right?”

“I see you in her, Eason. The way she giggles when she steals one of my M&M’s when she thinks I’m not looking. The way she loves with her whole damn heart and smiles with her whole body. The sparkle in her eyes when she sees you sit behind the piano, ready to dance wild and carefree. All the things I love about that little girl have not one thing to do with how she was made, but rather they’re because of who you made her to be.”

“God, Bree. I love you so fucking much.”

We read these results and then it’s just me and you and those kids making a life together from here on out.”

“She’s yours.”

“She’s yours. Luna’s yours. Look.”