Ever After Always (Bergman Brothers, #3)

by Chloe Liese

“Also, Freya,” Dr. Dietrich says, “this is something my female clients often realize in therapy—they hold in their feelings because our culture teaches us that we won’t be taken seriously when we’re ‘emotional,’ but I’m going to tell you, your husband needs your feeling words. Aiden, you understand their importance, I hope.” I nod. “I do. But maybe I haven’t made that clear to her. I want you to tell me, Freya. I’ll do better at showing you that.” Freya peers up at me. “Okay,” she says quietly.

“Well,” Freya says. “It’s been…months. I’m not sure what came first—my sense that Aiden was working a lot more or that he didn’t initiate the way he used to. So I felt rejected. Like he didn’t want me. And then I didn’t want to have sex, either. I didn’t want him to be gone from me emotionally but to think he could still have my body.” “That’s not how I feel!” I tell her. “I’d never want emotionless sex with you.”

“So what do you feel?” “That having a baby is no small feat,” I admit, before the words can be stopped. “That raising a child in one of the most expensive cities in America with our kind of student loan debt is not insignificant, that it’s going to take more than I’ve been doing. I got a little fixated on working to prepare us for that, and somehow it gets turned into rejecting her, wanting her body but not her heart?” Fuck, that accusation hurts. “Aiden, you talk about it like you’ve been alone in that responsibility,” Freya snaps. “And you’re not. I’m aware of the cost of living and childcare. I happen to have friends who have children, who’ve had to make impossibly difficult decisions about their careers and their motherhood. I’ve carried that with me and mulled it over a lot, considering I work, too, and help pay the bills.” Help? Her last paycheck was bigger than mine, which meant she got that promotion she’d been gunning for after all. And once again, like an asshole, I forgot to say something. I sighed with relief and moved it over to savings, my pulse steadying as I saw that number get a little bit bigger, before an email about the app swallowed up my happiness and dragged me back into the realm of never-ending to-dos.

“I don’t mean to imply you don’t, Freya,” I tell her. “It’s just that you approach looming expenses differently, confident we’ll weather them. I’m much more familiar with what can happen if you’re not financially prepared, and I act accordingly. You hum happily while you open bills. I grit my teeth and do mental math about what has to happen to maintain our savings. I’m trying to strike a balance between those two positions, and that means securing extra income, setting us up for stability so that when a baby is here, I’m not working constantly. I’ll have done that alr...

“I grew up poor,” I tell Dr. Dietrich. “With a dad who hit the road when I was a baby and a mom who never recovered from that. I’ve had to work really hard my whole life for every bit of financial gain, to finally, for the first time in my life, have healthy savings. Anticipating what having a kid costs is intimidating, so I’ve been pursuing financial security, and I’ve been working on a project—” “Which he hasn’t told me about,” Freya throws out. I glance over at her. “I haven’t, no. But it’s just been a mad rush and constantly moving parts to get where we are, to some semblance of something that might actually succeed. I wasn’t going to keep it to myself forever.”

“Why keep it to yourself at all, though?” Dr. Dietrich asks. “Trust and openness are fundamental in a marriage.” “Like I said, it was such a pipe dream at first, I just wanted to cultivate it for a while before I shared it with her, once it wasn’t at risk of being a total disappointment.” I turn toward Freya and tell her, “As soon as I knew we had a prayer of success, I was going to share it with you. A gift, a positive step toward making a better life for our family. The day I came home and you had my bag packed for the cabin, I was ready to tell you.”

“There’s no financial risk to us, I’m not sabotaging our funds. It’s nothing that affects you—” “Except that it affects you, Aiden, and thus it affects me, because I’m your wife, your life partner, who cares about you!” Freya stands and grabs her purse. “This is the shit I can’t stand. It’s one thing, what we talked about earlier, how we danced around your anxiety and my feelings. I think she has a point. And I can hear that. But this? This shit about money?” She gestures at me, fuming as she speaks to Dr. Dietrich. “He rationalizes shutting me out, acting like George Bailey, leaving the little wifey home alone while he stumbles around Bedford Fucking Falls and wrings his hands about money.”

“I’m your partner,” she says to me angrily. “I should be tripping through the snow with you, not stuck in that house we poured everything into, wondering when you’re going to come back. You locked yourself out, Aiden Christopher MacCormack—” Shit. I just got full-named. “—and now you’re upset that I’m staying in there? Well, tough shit. You let yourself back in, or this is it, and I’m done.”

“Here’s the thing, Aiden.” Dr. Dietrich leans in. “A relationship is like a body, and without the oxygen of communication, it can only last so long when one person pulls away and deprives it as much as it seems you have. I know it’s hard to be vulnerable. I know you wanted to protect Freya. But your protection keeps you at arm’s length. If you want to feel close to your wife, you have to draw close, to trust her, even if you’re terrified—no, because you’re terrified. Breathe some life back into this marriage.”

“No sex,” she says, grimacing. “Never like telling a couple that, but you two aren’t a buy-new-curtains-and-touch-up-the-paint job. You’re a down-to-the-studs gut job. No sex for now. It’ll help, believe it or not. It’s…clarifying.” Sweet relief. If there’s no expectation of sex, that’s one less thing I have to figure out right now. I could kiss Dr. Dietrich. I mean, not really.

Because her insight made it clear, how warped I am. My mind sabotages me, always seeing the worst in a situation. My heart’s this traitorous asshole who beats too hard for the wrong things like money and security and order, when it loves a woman who could give a shit less about material comforts, whose heart thrills for wildness and passion and thrives in the untidy present moments of life. I have never felt so fundamentally wrong for Freya, so ill-equipped to love her how she deserves. And as I flop onto my office sofa and stare at the ceiling, my heart beating like a bird against its too-small cage, I know this is a turning point: Stay and fight for her. Fight to bring myself back to a place in which I know in my soul how much she and I—despite our deep differences—belong together. Fight to feel once again close and intimate with the woman I love with every fiber of my being… Or finally give in to that voice that lies and whispers horrible things. That I’ll fail her, that I’ll break her heart, that I’ll sabotage us and ruin what we’ve built together, even the future we haven’t yet built.

I want to be strong. I want to be courageous for Freya. Because she deserves to be fought for, her forgiveness earned, her trust won again. I want to go home and say sorry and tell her I’ll make it right. But can I promise her that, when I have no idea what fixing us looks like?

“When a woman says to leave her alone, when she pulls away from you and acts like she wants you miles away, that’s the last thing she wants.” “Well, see that’s actually pretty dangerous thinking—” “I’m not talking about forcing yourself on her. Jesus. I’m saying when your wife acts like she wants you to be gone, she’s asking you to prove that you want her bad enough to stay and fight.”

What’s more human than wanting to avoid pain? I figured, if I stayed away for a while, I could avoid it, let it blow over, then come back when the tension had died down. It didn’t seem so dangerous, wanting to shy away from the pain of facing what had fallen apart between us.” He tugs his ball cap lower and says, “But it’s like a drug, avoidance. And each day that goes without tension or worry or disappointment, lulls you with the promise of peace and ease. You give her time, tell yourself things will quiet down, and before you know it, things have gotten too quiet, then you have papers in your office, and not the kind you grade.”

“No. Freya’s not divorcing me.” Not yet. She can’t. She has to give me a chance. She has to. “Trust me,” he says, “when a woman tells you she’s at her breaking point, she’s been past it for a while. Now’s your moment, like Aristotle says. Now you have to make the leap and do whatever it takes to make it better. That’s the only way. You just told me.” “Tom, those are Aristotle’s thoughts on tragedy.” “Exactly. At some point, every love is a tragedy. It just doesn’t have to stay that way. We choose our endings. That’s Aristotle’s point. Tragedy is built—it has a structure. And if that’s not the ending you want, then you get out of that trajectory. You change the narrative.”

Freya and I can’t go back to what we were, but we can lean into this painful moment, learn from it, and become something stronger, something better, together. Tragedy is built, Tom said. Which means I can change course and find a way forward that doesn’t keep pulling us apart but instead brings us close again.

“I mean, how hard is it,” I asked her, “not to do the one thing that ruins everything? All he had to do was not look over his shoulder and keep his eyes forward, to protect the person he loved.” Freya smiled sadly. “I think that’s the lesson. It’s harder than we think. Eurydice was tired from her time in the Underworld, and she was slow behind him. Orpheus struggled to trust she would follow him all the way. His love wasn’t enough to overcome his fear. And so at the very end of their journey, Orpheus faltered and glanced back, dooming Eurydice to the Underworld forever. “Then he spent the rest of his life, playing the lyre—” She pointed to a smattering of stars that looked nothing like a harp to me. “Wandering directionless, refusing to marry another.”

From “happily ever after” to this. God, how did it happen? Sharp, tight pangs of guilt stab my chest. I did what I said I wouldn’t. Like Orpheus, I looked back. I looked back at the hell I knew as a kid and felt the flames lick higher, fear grabbing me by both hands. And I dragged Freya there with me. But this isn’t some ancient story, some doomed, grim tale. Tom said it—this doesn’t have to end in tragedy. We get to choose our endings, and I choose mine. I choose Freya.

I’m going home. And I’m not looking back. Not anymore.

Cassie peers at me in confusion but doesn’t ask why I didn’t call Aiden. I’m glad she doesn’t. Because I wouldn’t know what to tell her. I would never tell her I was scared to ask my husband to pick me up instead of waiting to carpool with my coworker, Nick. I would never confess I was scared that Aiden would be running late, or he’d say he couldn’t, any whiff of a brush-off that would be too much for me when I’m so raw from counseling, from sobbing in the shower afterward, then coming out to a quiet kitchen and a note in his tidy scrawl, saying he went for a run.

“I’m proud of you. I didn’t tell you. And I should have. Forgive me.” I wrap my arms around his solid waist before I can stop myself. I need hugs like I need air. I’m overflowing with unspent love and affection that hasn’t gone into my intimate life in months, and I bite back tears because this feels dangerously good. Sighing unsteadily as Aiden squeezes me to him, I soak up his presence, warm and clean, the soft scent of his ocean-water cologne, a mint tucked inside his cheek. I bury my face in his collar. “Thanks,” I whisper.

“Why?” He stares at me unblinkingly. “You know why.” “I need the words,” I whisper. “Because I miss you. Because I know dessert for dinner makes you happy and—” His voice catches. He stares down at his shoes. “And I just want you to be happy, Freya.” My heart flies in my chest as his words sink in, as I try to battle how weak I feel, how readily I want to throw myself at him and trust that this means we’re on our way and we’ll be okay. But then I remember so many late nights. Quiet dinners. Short answers. The loneliness that settled in, a bone-chilling ache that slowly turned to hypothermic numbness. He’s trying. Give him a chance.

Like always, he gets my door. Like always. That makes me pause. “Like always” is something you start to think when you’ve been together for a while. Certain behaviors become predictable, taken for granted. Even a gesture as kind as opening the car door for me. I make myself stop and savor it, the feeling of him standing close, the evening air whispering around us. Peering up, I watch the low sun bathe Aiden in its golden light, making his dark waves sparkle, glancing off the strong line of his nose, the tight set of his mouth. A mouth I used to slide my finger across, then kiss until it was soft and smiling.

Staring at him, I recognize that familiarity dulls the shine of your partner’s mystery, but it doesn’t make them any less of a puzzle. We just…stop seeing them that way. We stop exploring, stop wondering with the wide-eyed fascination of new lovers. I’m afraid to admit that somewhere along the way, I stopped seeing the mystery in Aiden, and I think maybe he stopped seeing the mystery in me. I wish we wouldn’t have. And I wonder if we’d be here if we’d done it differently. If we hadn’t decided we knew everything there was to know about each other and began to act accordingly, one predictive step ahead of each other. If we hadn’t let that take us so far from the other person, from the ways that we’d changed, from the truth that we still had needs and hurts and wonders and fears…

“Hm.” I stare at the massive ice cream menu, frowning. Aiden crosses his arms and frowns at it, too. “Hm.” I glance over at him, and my stomach does a somersault as I read the tentative playfulness in his expression. “Making fun of me, are we?” “I would never.” He gives me a quick sideways glance, before refocusing on the menu. “I’m just doing some mental math.” “What kind of mental math?” He leans in slightly, his shoulder brushing mine. He’s flirting with me. Aiden is…despicably good at flirting. He wears his charm like he wears his clothes—with a genetically predetermined comfort and grace. And when he leans close and drops his voice, when his sea-blue eyes glitter and a dark, rakish lock of hair falls onto his forehead, he turns me into a big, gooey, doe-eyed puddle. Always has. I try to straighten my spine and snap out of it, but it’s so damn genuine, and he’s so clearly feeling bashful, a splash of pink warming his cheekbones. When the wind picks up and bathes me in his scent, I have to stop myself from shoving my nose into his solid arm, breathing him in.

“Stop flirting with me. I need to pick my flavors.” There’s a pause, before Aiden’s knuckles brush mine. “That’s what you said on our first date.” I glance up at him quickly. “I did? How do you even remember that?” His eyes hold mine. “I remember everything about that date, Freya. You wore a strapless yellow sundress and gold sandals, and your toes were painted hot pink. Your hair was down in these sexy beachy waves before you threw it up in a bun because it was sweltering hot. And you were so fucking pretty, I could barely remember my own name, let alone order ice cream. So I got—” “Two scoops of vanilla,” I whisper. “You said you liked vanilla.” “It’s fine,” he says, as his eyes travel my face. “What I liked was what happened when I got vanilla.” A blush stains my cheeks. “I ate it.” “Licked it.” He bites back a smile. “While your chocolate peanut butter swirl and salted caramel melted in your hands.” “So we switched.” He nods. “And then we shared. And it felt so…intimate. I was out with you, Freya Bergman, this knockout of a woman who was radiant—passion and vitality lighting you up from a place so deep within that I wanted desperately to know. A woman who painted her toes electric pink and sang along to music blasting from the outdoor speakers and stole my vanilla ice cream.” His eyes search mine. “You felt like the missing part of my life.”

“W-what—” He clears his throat. “What do you remember from that night?” I stare at him, warring with myself as his fingers dance along my palms, coaxing them to clasp his. Finally, I slide my hand inside Aiden’s. His grip clamps around mine like a vise. “I don’t remember what you wore or the precise date. I just remember standing next to you, looking into your eyes and knowing I was…exactly where I was supposed to be.”

“Because, like I said in counseling, I was trying to keep one more thing off of your plate. It was an idea, a dream, and I had no idea if it was going to amount to anything.” He holds my eyes intensely. “What if I put it on your mind, showed you how invested I was, then I failed?” “Then you’d have pursued a dream and tried and failed and learned something, and I’d be there for you.” “Watching me fail,” he mutters. “Burdened by that.” I roll my eyes. “Aiden, come on. You’ve failed at shit before. It hasn’t scared me off or worn me out, has it?”

“How I’ve gone about work lately has made you feel like you’re less than the center of my world. That’s wrong, and that’s what I’m going to fix. Because you have to know, Freya, that everything I do is for you. I want to give you everything you deserve. I want to lay the world at your feet.” I bring my hands to his wrists, stroking his pounding pulse with my thumbs. “But I never wanted the world, Aiden. I just wanted you.”

“I would have lived in a flimsy cardboard box,” I tell him, tears thickening my throat. “Under a shitty run-down bridge, with nothing but the clothes on my back, so long as it was with you.” His eyes dim. “Spoken like a woman who’s never been poor.” “No, I haven’t.” I swallow my tears. “But I’ve had a roof over my head these past six months. I’ve had a soft bed and heat and water and food in my stomach, and I haven’t felt comfort or warmth or satisfaction. I’ve felt empty and cold and lonely because you weren’t here, not really, Aiden.” His eyes glitter with unshed tears as he stares down at me. “Freya. Life’s not that simple.” “But my love is,” I say hoarsely, squeezing his wrists. “And you don’t get to say otherwise. It’s my heart. I know it. I can see now that it’s not the case for you, even if I don’t understand. So I’m telling you right now, the only reason I care about this app of yours is because it does something good for others, and because it means something to you. “I’ve never cared if you made us gazillionaires. I don’t want fancier clothes or a second car. I don’t need a bigger house or a new fridge. I’ve needed hugs and trust and kisses and laughter and that us against the world feeling I knew in my bones the day I stood in my parents’ backyard and held your hand in mine and said I do.” Searching his eyes, I whisper, “What is it you need, more than that?” He swallows roughly. “To keep you safe, and when there’s a baby, to keep them safe, too. I need that, Fre...

It’s one of those days, when the weight of my anxiety is a vise grip around my ribs, when I can hear my pulse pounding in my ears and my heart feels like one big palpitation. There’s nothing to pinpoint, no particular reason.

Sometimes it keeps me from sleep. Other times, I wake up and I’ll fixate on that one time I messed up explaining a term in lecture and had to email my entire 300-person class, telling them what I’d gotten wrong. Another time when I found a typo in my section of a co-authored academic journal article, and I spiraled into worry that it was somehow going to get me fired. It makes my skin crawl. Sometimes it gets me on the verge of throwing up.

And today is one of those days. Fuckups front and center in my brain. On the razor’s edge of a panic attack. I can’t lie, I feel the tug of despair. That choking, tear-out-my-hair anger that I’m stuck. That anxiety is managing my life, instead of me managing it.

Once I sit, my legs start bouncing. And it makes me miss Freya. She never sets her hands on my thigh or tries to make me stop. Her fingers simply slip through mine, followed by a hard, reassuring squeeze. Fuck, I love her.

drank. I was addicted. And I chose it over her. Over…everything.” Those words send a chill over my skin. I chose it over her. Over everything. “But uh…for the past three years, I’ve been sober,” he says, “so that’s something I try to celebrate. Well—” He laughs, husky and thick. I can hear the tar coating his lungs. “‘Celebrate’ might be a stretch. I remind myself when I walk by the bar I used to get lit in every night that I don’t actually want that drink; my brain just wants the calm that alcohol gave me. And then I go home and read instead.” He sips from his thermos. “That’s when I celebrate.”

“So you…didn’t have much growing up. Yet you got here? How?” “Classic underdog story. Hustled. Took under-the-table jobs. Worked my ass off. Had enough smarts to snag some scholarships. Met a woman way out of my league who, for some reason, wanted me, who believed in my goals and supported every one of them. And now here I am, on the cusp of huge success, with all my baggage about to drag me down and pull us apart before I can even share it with her.” Well. That last bit wasn’t supposed to come out. Tom frowns. “Your baggage… You mean your past.” “I’ve always been really fixated on work and climbing the ladder here. People can say I’m just living as a slave to my past, that I’m caught up in some toxic capitalist lie that you’re nothing if you don’t earn, but those people can kiss my ass, because they have not known what I’ve known, and neither has my wife. And it’s going to stay that way.”

“Just flying itself.” He shudders. “I hate those tin-can death traps.” I peer over at him. “Yeah. That’s…how I feel.” “But you’re going,” he says. “For her.” “I’m going, yes. For her. And I do like her family. I love them, actually. They feel as close to family as I’ll ever get.”

“I didn’t mean offense when I said that. When I said it was obvious, I meant it’s clear that you had the odds stacked against you, because the man who should have been there for you wasn’t. Obvious, as in, you’ve achieved incredible things despite struggling against the quicksand of poverty and a rough start in life.”

She must have put it in before we left, but it’s the first that I’ve noticed. She’s wearing her septum ring again. She took it out a few weeks ago, mumbling something about being taken seriously for the promotion she was up for. I mourned it, because with that delicate silver nose ring, her short, messy waves, and gorgeous face, she looked hot and badass and beautiful. She looked like Freya. And when she slipped it off, it felt like she was setting aside the part of herself that made her happiest. The free-spirited, karaoke-belting, no-bullshit woman inside her. Now the ring’s back in. And I wonder if that part of her she’s felt she had to subdue is back, too. I hope so.

This bird doesn’t really come with the house, does it? If it does, I feel like someone should have told me an oversize, objectifying parrot lives here. “Dat ass,” it squawks. My eyebrows shoot up. “Excuse me?” Swiveling its head, the parrot lays down a beat, then says, “Pussy tight, hit it right—” Holy shit. I start toward it, not sure exactly what I can do, as it just keeps going. “—Booty slappin’, make it happen—” I clap my hands at it. “You can’t say that here. This is a-a-a family vacation.” The parrot does not care. “Make it cream, pussy supreme, love it, lick it, make me scream!” “Hey!” I’m close enough that the parrot startles at my next clap, then cocks its head before giving me another long whistle. I set my hands on my hips. “Honestly.” “Hey, hot stuff,” it squawks. “Hey yourself,” I say. “No more…of whatever that was, okay?”

LMFAOOOO