Part of Your World (Part of Your World, #1)

by Abby Jimenez

“Wait,” I said after him. He stopped and looked back at me. “How much are they betting?” He shrugged, pulling out his keys. “A hundred bucks.” “And what about you? You’re not in on this bet?” He shook his head. “That’s not my thing.” “No? Well, what if I left with you? Would you win the money?” He wrinkled his forehead at me. “I don’t follow.” “I think I’m going to leave anyway. You could walk out with me. Win the bet.” He smiled. “You’d do that?” I shrugged. “Sure.” He glanced over at the men across the room. Carhartt Jacket was holding a guitar. Daniel’s eyes came back to mine, and a smile played at the corners of his lips. “If we do it, we split the money.”

“Huh. So you have a kid?” I asked. He looked at his watch again. “I do. Chloe.” “How old?” “One week.” “Oh,” I said, pulling my face back in surprise. “She’s little.” He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring—not that that meant anything. He could have a kid without being married. “So you have a girlfriend?” I asked. He shook his head. “I wouldn’t have taken this wager if I did.” “Well, you’re not actually taking me home,” I pointed out. “But I’m pretending to. I wouldn’t disrespect my theoretical girlfriend.” He grinned. I had to stifle a smile. “So you’re not with your baby’s mother?” He looked amused. “Definitely not. I’m fostering.” Liz smiled. “Chloe is soooo cute. He’s such a good daddy to her.” She nodded at him. “Show her a picture.” He pulled out his phone and swiped. Then he held it out to me. A laugh burst from my lips. “Your kid is a baby goat? In pajamas?”

I’d panicked, and I ran while he was asleep. I woke up in a strange man’s bed in a dusty garage in a town in the middle of nowhere after having what was admittedly the best sex of my entire life—with a twenty-eight-year-old. He was twenty-eight. I’d gotten up to use the bathroom and put on his hoodie. When I was washing my hands, his wallet fell out of the pocket, open to his driver’s license. I knew he was younger than me. I just didn’t realize he was almost a decade younger than me. I’d had a one-night stand with a total stranger, who was a decade younger than me. What was I doing? I didn’t do things like this. I didn’t have casual sex. I didn’t do risky behavior.

I rubbed my temple tiredly. It wasn’t just Neil’s cheating. Bri and Derek were the only ones who knew the real reason why I wasn’t giving him another chance. Bri wouldn’t pee on Neil if he was on fire after what he’d put me through the last couple of years. But everyone else? Everyone loved Neil. My parents, our friends. He was the life of the party, everyone’s buddy. “I mean, they all started off sympathetic enough,” I mumbled. “How could he? I hope you threw him out on his ass. Blah blah blah. But then Jessica’s birthday came up and everyone went to the lake house, and Neil and I weren’t there, and I think it finally started to hit everyone that life as we all knew it for the last seven years is over. Then it suddenly flipped to, Well, have you considered counseling? It was just that one woman, he made a mistake and he knows it. I think he’s sleeping on a futon at Cam’s,” I added wearily. Bri made a disgusted noise. “The man’s a surgeon. He’s gotta sleep on his twenty-two-year-old’s sofa? He can’t get a damn apartment?” “I think the second he does, this whole thing suddenly becomes real.” “Good. I hope his dick shrivels up and falls off. For real.” She picked up her iced coffee. “What did your dad say about it?” she asked, talking around the straw. “It’s going to piss you off,” I warned. “Tell me.” “He said that Neil is brilliant and that sometimes brilliant people make mundane mistakes.” She scoffed. “Yeah, well, you’re brilliant too, and I don’t see you humping anesthe...

I shook my head. “I didn’t even date twenty-eight-year-olds when I was twenty-eight.” “Well, you missed out. They’re just old enough to not be annoying and they have all that sexual energy. And you can train them. They’re so eager to learn at that age, like puppies.” She dipped her head to look me in the eye. “Does he have any friends?” I laughed. He did have energy…My cheeks went hot thinking about it. “I’m going to be thirty-eight this year,” I said. “I can’t date a guy that young.” “Who says? If you were twenty-eight and he was thirty-seven, nobody would bat an eye. Nobody batted an eye when you dated Neil—and they should have, that guy was an asshole.” I pressed my lips into a line. “Look,” she said, going on. “You’re new to this whole single-in-your-thirties thing so you don’t know what it looks like out there, and I’m here to tell you, it doesn’t look good. It’s like picking through a garbage heap looking for the least disgusting thing.

I’d pulled out my vibrator last night. The one that a week ago I was perfectly satisfied using as a full replacement for an actual sex life. I stared at that little pink contraption and realized that the one reason why I’d been ready to hang up my dating belt was because I’d never had sex good enough for me to go in pursuit of it. Now I had, and a vibrator wasn’t going to cut it anymore. It sort of made me wish I’d stayed blissfully ignorant.

“Look at that man-trum. Eight thousand nerves in the clitoris and still not as sensitive as a white man not getting his way.”

again? Because that was a lot of excitement for one night.” “Okay, first of all, that pig has a name. It’s Kevin Bacon. It’s rude not to use it.” She was laughing again. “Kevin Bacon?” “Yup. Doug has a petting zoo, and he names them stuff like that.” “Like what?” she asked. “What else?” “Well, there’s Scape Goat—that’s Chloe’s mom. Chloe’s full name is Chloe Nose Bleat.” I ticked off on my fingers. “The chickens are Mother Clucker and Chick-a-Las Cage, there’s Barack O-Llama, the miniature horse is Al Capony—” She howled. I grinned. “The rabbits are Rabbit Downey Jr. and Obi Bun Kenobi—” “STOP,” she begged. “You’re kidding me.”

“This is all so nice.” I sensed a “but” coming. “But I feel like I do have to remind you that I’m really not looking to date right now. You didn’t have to make such a big deal about me coming,” she said. I stopped what I was doing. “Okay. We need to clear something up,” I said, looking her in the eye. “When you come down—no matter what you come down for—I’m going to make a big deal over it. Because it is a big deal. You’re driving four hours, round-trip, to be here. That’s not nothing. And if you’re staying the night, this isn’t going to be a quickie situation. While I’d like to say that I could spend all twelve hours of your stay pleasuring you, I can’t.” She laughed. “We’re going to do other things,” I said, going on. “We’re going to eat, and we’re going to hang out. And I’m going to put effort into that because you’re putting in effort to be here. And it’s going to be like that every time. Okay?” The corner of her lip twitched. “Okay.”

The door to the house opened with a slow creak, and the third woman came in. I looked up to smile at her—and it was Alexis. I blinked at her in surprise, and she pressed a quick finger to her lips. She looked almost panicked. I didn’t really have time to process this, because Hunter saw her and lost his ever-loving shit. He dove at her. The counter jerked sideways with the sudden yank of his leash, and my laptop fell to the floor with a clatter. Then he dragged the hundred-pound counter across the wooden floor of the foyer like some deranged sled dog and pummeled her. He was going so wild in the confined space, the other two women retreated shrieking into the dining room to escape. “Hi…dog,” Alexis said, petting him, clearly trying to hold him so the check-in counter massacre of the parquet floor would stop. Hunter was crying like a puppy at the sight of her. Then he let out a long, excited ROOOOOOOOOOOOO! “Wow…that dog really likes you,” the brunette said from the dining room. Alexis laughed nervously. “Yeah, I must have one of those faces.” What the hell? What was she doing here? And why was she acting like she didn’t know us?

“Can you imagine? ‘Dad, I know my last boyfriend was chief of surgery, but here’s this guy who can build me a deer stand.’” They both laughed. “He could be really nice,” I said, a little too defensively. Jessica lowered the corner of her issue of Vogue. “You think your dad cares one ounce if he’s nice?” She scoffed. “Remember that lawyer I set you up with at Marcus’s firm? Adrian? Right before Neil? He was nice. Your dad acted like you brought a registered sex offender to brunch. He gave you so much crap, you never saw him again. And Adrian was a lawyer, not a guy with a GED, tattoos, and wood ticks.” Gabby looked at her nails. “Your family’s like royalty. They’ll only marry you off to someone who will strengthen a medical alliance.” I snorted, even though it wasn’t funny.

“You know, we never really talked about this, Daniel. Maybe we should set rules.” He studied my expression. “Okay.” “So what rules do you want?” I asked. “You really want to know?” “Yes.” “I want to be your boyfriend.” It punched me right in the heart, and my stomach did a somersault. But my brain shot it down. He wants to be my boyfriend? Why? I’m too old. Too old for him anyway. I live too far away, our lives are too different. What did he want with me? It was almost naïvely sweet. Like when a kid says they want to be an astronaut or a ballerina when they grow up. And then of course you get older and you end up doing something else that actually makes sense. Maybe he just meant that he didn’t want us sleeping with other people? That he wanted to be exclusive? That I could understand. I realized, almost in that moment, that I really didn’t want him to see other people either. Even the thought of him hugging someone else launched me into an internal fit of jealousy so sudden it shocked me. If I’d shown up here and he’d been with another woman, it would have devastated me. I didn’t even realize it until just now. Looking at his open face, feeling his warm arms around me, something inside of me screamed MINE.

If Neil was at your party, it meant you were important. You were someone he wanted to be seen rubbing shoulders with. But if you ever had to rely on him, he’d let you down. If Daniel was at your party, it meant you were a good person. It meant you were someone who had earned his affection. And I was starting to realize that his affection equaled a level of devotion that I don’t think I’d ever known outside of maybe Bri and Derek. And it seemed to encompass a whole town. Like this cloak of loyalty was big enough for everyone.

“No. I refuse to have sex with someone who doesn’t have a headboard. I’m not that desperate—yet. My vagina has officially been closed so long I’m afraid a Spirit Halloween is going to move in.”

Part of me hoped he wasn’t attached. Why have us both get hurt when it ended? But the other part of me hoped he liked me back. The other part of me was desperate for him to like me back. Because the only thing more terrifying than never seeing him again was for this to be one-sided. Oh, my God. I was falling for him. I was. I totally was. UGH.

“Let me guess. You’re taking a top-down shot, using the flash, standing in your shitty garage bathroom, you can see your feet in the picture and you’re wearing socks.” I looked down. Shit. I heard his engine turn over. “That’s what I thought. Don’t do anything until I get there.” “Doug—” “DON’T DO ANYTHING UNTIL I GET THERE.” He hung up on me. Fifteen minutes later Doug walked in. He had a ring light. “No.” I shook my head. “I’m not using that shit.” He walked past me into my workshop. “She’s going to show this to her friends. You want to send her a shitty dick pic? That’s what you want?”

“By the way,” I said, “Daniel finally sent me a dick pic. A really good one.” “Ooooooh, can I see it?” “No, definitely not.” She jabbed a finger at me. “See?! You do like him! That was a test and you failed!” “How did I—because I won’t show you a penis sent to me in trust?” “Dick pics are community property unless you’re staking a claim on the guy who owns it. You’ve got a little flag that you just planted on Daniel’s peen, it’s waving in the breeze and it says Ali on it.”

“What does happy even look like, Bri? I fall in line and do what’s expected of me, give up Daniel, but I get to keep my family? Or I give it all up, become the shame of the Montgomery legacy, lose my dad, devastate my mom, but I get the boy I like? Which one is happy?”

“Why did you just say that to me?” He sat back in the bed. “What?” “That you love me. Why did you say it?” “Because I feel it?” “You can’t feel it.” He looked amused. “Well, I do. And it’s not a big deal. If you’re not there yet, it’s fine.” But it wasn’t fine. “What are you doing?” I said. “We’re not doing this.” “Doing what?” “This!” I gestured between us. “Alexis—” I shook my head. “No. We talked about this. You knew this wasn’t going to be a relationship. You knew this wasn’t going to last. I get the job tomorrow. It ends after that, so why throw that word around? What is the point?” He blinked at me. “The point is that I’m in love with you.” My jaw set. “No.”

He was my boyfriend. We were in love. And it didn’t change a thing. Not really. I still couldn’t introduce him to my parents or my friends. The job was still going to take me away from him. He still had to live in Wakan, and I had to live in Minneapolis. I absolutely refused to let him move. We went around about it for hours last night until he finally gave up. I wouldn’t let him sacrifice his life to try to salvage something that wouldn’t work out anyway. What did it matter if he lived in Minneapolis if I wasn’t going to be home six days a week? He had to stay in Wakan.

She started sobbing softly in the background, and I had to put my phone on mute so she wouldn’t hear me cry. The hole inside of me was so deep, it was all I was. I didn’t know how I’d live the rest of my life without her. And then I knew unequivocally that leaving Wakan wouldn’t change any of it. It wouldn’t get better somewhere else. Because you carry love with you. And the realization that I couldn’t escape this was so devastating, so overwhelming, I couldn’t breathe. “I have to go,” she said. Then she was gone. I bawled into my pillow like a baby. And when I was done, I blocked her number so she could never do this to me again.

“If you could wipe your whole life clean and rebuild it from scratch and nobody would question how you’ve done it, what order would you put it in? Royaume first? Then your parents? Then Daniel?” I shook my head. “No…” “Then what?” I paused to think about it a moment. “Daniel. Then Wakan. Then Royaume and everything else.” She jabbed a finger at me. “That’s why you feel like shit, Ali. You’re all out of order.” I blinked at her. “What do you mean?” She propped herself on her elbows. “What I mean is you have been conditioned your entire life to live for everyone else. To do what’s expected of you, to blindly serve.

I looked back and forth between my openmouthed parents, shaking my head. “Mom, I really hope you find your voice. I know it’s in there. For your own sake, I hope to God you look for it.” I turned to my father. “Dad, you are going to be a very lonely old man. Your world is about to be as small as your mind. You won’t have your children. You won’t get the privilege of knowing the people they love. You won’t hold your grandchildren, you won’t see them grow up.” I shook my head. “But at least you’ll have Neil.” I turned and started for the stage. Then I stopped and looked back at them. “Also, you should know that effective tomorrow I’ve resigned from my position as chief.” Mom’s face fell, and Dad went bright red. “Do me a favor and let Neil know the house is his. I’ll be moved out by the end of the week. I’ll go ahead and disown myself to save you the trouble. Now excuse me. I have to go deliver a speech.”