32. Cole

Oldies softly playedas we made our way down the highway. We were half an hour into our drive, and neither of us had said a word since we left the vineyard. I didn't know the cause of Bailey's silence, but I hadn't spoken for two reasons.

One, I was calculating the cost of refilling Sara's prescriptions. When Bailey was in the bathroom, I'd emailed Dr. Miller, hoping that he'd be able to call them all in today, even though it was a Sunday.

Carly was hysterical when she called earlier. She'd been trying to do a good thing by letting her mom sleep in. She'd been in the kitchen making the boys pancakes when she realized she couldn't hear them playing video games anymore. The apartment had gone silent. Whenever you didn't hear the twins, it was a problem. She found them in their room, and they said that they'd just been playing, but her sister Spidey-senses told her they'd been up to no good. Upon further investigation, she entered the bathroom and discovered empty prescription bottles on the floor. The twins had emptied out all of Sara's medication and flushed the pills down the toilet.

Her seizure medications, steroids, anti-rheumatics, anti-inflammatories, and pain management medications were all gone. Half of the prescriptions weren't covered by insurance to begin with, so I knew I'd be out of pocket for those. But since this was an unexpected refill, I wasn't sure her insurance was going to cover the ones they normally did.

That meant I'd have to use the glass savings money. This morning was a perfect example of why I couldn't be in a relationship. It was ‘Exhibit A' in the case against my having a personal life, which made the second thing on my mind totally insane.

As we drove along the highway, I was seriously considering telling Bailey everything. I'd almost told her right after I got off the phone. The look in her eyes as she stared up at me had been so vulnerable, so raw, and so real that I wanted to tell her about Sara and the kids and my responsibility to them. I wanted to tell her that they would always be my priority, but if she gave me a chance, she would be, too. I wanted to tell her that the weekend we'd shared together had been the best three days of my life. I wanted to tell her how I felt about her. That sometime over the past year and a half, I'd fallen in love with her. Hell, I was pretty sure it happened before I even knew her name.

But I didn't say any of that. I didn't say anything at all. I told myself it wasn't fair to her to put that sort of burden on her. She'd hired me, or at least thought she was hiring me, to come to the wedding this weekend. She hadn't asked me because she was actually interested in me.

Nerves and anxiety were coursing through me as I glanced over to Bailey. Her head was turned, looking out the passenger window. I had no clue what she was thinking. There was a very good chance my feelings were not reciprocated. And even if they were, there was always the possibility that she'd want to be with someone more stable and not gamble her future on someone who could make promises of what he was going to be but wasn't quite there yet.

I wouldn't know if there was a chance unless I put my cards on the table. The question was, did I have the balls to ante up? Was rejection worth the risk? Would I regret not telling her or telling her more? Which one could I live with?

When I was fourteen, I played high school football, and our coach took the team on a trip to visit his alma mater. We toured the dorms, classrooms, library, and training facilities and then had a barbeque in the quad and went swimming in the Olympic-sized pool. There was a high dive that all the players were daring each other to jump off. I was the first to take the bet. From the ground, ten meters didn't look that high. Once I got up to the top, it was an entirely different thing.

Even now, a decade later, I still remember exactly how it felt standing on the edge of that platform. My palms were damp. My heart was pounding. My stomach sank. My mind was racing. I stared down at the water below me while the entire world spun around me. I was dizzy.

The cheers and jeers from my teammates faded into white noise. The only thing I could hear was the inhale and exhale of my breath. At that moment, I knew I had two choices. I could climb back down the ladder to safety and live with the regret of allowing fear to control me. Or I could jump and live with the consequences of plunging into the unknown.

As we drove on the highway, surrounded by hundreds of motorists going about their lives on a sunny Sunday morning, I felt exactly like I had up on that high dive platform. My heart was pounding. My stomach was sinking. My mind was racing. My palms dampened as I opened and closed my fingers around the steering wheel.

Fuck it. I knew that I just had to go for it. I had to take the leap and jump into unknown waters.

"Bailey, I think I'm falling in love with you." I hadn't planned on a declaration of love opening the conversation. It's like the words had been waiting to come out, and as soon as they saw their opening, they took it.

I glanced over to the woman I'd just told I was falling for. She hadn't moved, she was still facing the window.

"Bailey?" I said her name as I leaned forward, trying to get some sort of read on what her expression would tell me since she hadn't spoken.

That's when I saw that her eyes were closed. At first, I thought she was faking it, like she had been this morning in bed. But when I noticed her mouth was slightly open and there was a tiny bit of drool on the corner of her lips. I knew she wasn't. She was also snoring quietly.

I turned my attention back to the road and wasn't sure if I was relieved or disappointed that she was asleep and hadn't heard my confession. Maybe both.

The rest of the hour-and-a-half journey went by faster than I'd wanted it to. I felt the minutes ticking by like seconds. Once I dropped Bailey off, that was it. Our time was over. The bubble we'd floated in over the weekend would burst, forcing us back to reality.

I pulled off the freeway near her apartment and felt my chest getting tight. When I was young, I suffered from panic attacks. I didn't know what they were at the time, just that I felt like an elephant was sitting on my chest and that the walls were closing in on me. I would sweat. My heart would race. And I'd get dizzy.

It wasn't until Sara adopted me and she and Peter insisted I see a therapist that I had a name for my episodes. Dr. Hill explained that it was my body's response to things being out of my control. I never knew when my mom and dad were going to be there or not. Where I would be laying my head. How I was going to get my next meal or get to school. If the electricity and heating would work.

As each minute ticked by, and each mile I drove, those same symptoms came back to me. I was starting to have trouble breathing when my phone rang through the Bluetooth, interrupting the music. It snapped me out of my spiral. I answered it without even checking who was calling.

"Hello." My throat was dry, and my greeting came out gravelly.

"Hey, I took care of everything." Sara's words rushed out of her. "I spoke to Dr. Miller, and he's already called in the refills; you do not need to come home.".

"I'm already here." I glanced beside me and saw the call had woken Bailey up.

"You are?"

"I'm back in the city. I'll stop by the pharmacy on the way home," I explained as I turned onto Bailey's street.

"I'm so sorry!" she exclaimed. "I shouldn't have slept in. I w?—"

"It's fine." I cut her off. "I'm driving, but I'll be home soon. Love you."

Sara sighed. "Love you."

The call disconnected as I pulled up across the street from Bailey's building.

"Did I fall asleep?" she asked as she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and blinked up at me, bleary-eyed.

"Yeah."

"I can't believe…I didn't mean to…I'm so sorry." She was still dazed, but when she saw my expression, it dawned on her that she'd apologized again, and a wide smile spread across her face. "Was that your sister? On the phone?"

"Yeah." I nodded, and I realized that this was my chance. I was back up on the high dive, and I could either live with regret or dive into the unknown.

Fuck it.

"Bailey, there's something I wanted to talk to you about."

She nodded and shifted toward me. When she did, I noticed, for the first time since we pulled up, a man standing outside her building. Not just any man.

"Simon," I breathed in disbelief.

Fuck my life.