Adapting Desires (Endangered Heart Series Book 3) Read online

  “Do you really, though?” A strange look came over her face as she said this, and the way she stared at the tile made him uneasy.

  “Why do you say that, Emilia? You know my decisions revolve around you.”

  “It’s nothing.” Blinking hard, Emilia laughed, turning back to him and smiling faintly. “I’ve just been thinking about the logistics. Taylor said these surgeries, even if successful,” she was sure to add, “It could take months if something went wrong, even longer. I was just thinking—”

  Emilia paused to stare at her feet. With everything he loved about her, this might have been a habit of hers he genuinely disliked. Whenever she wanted something, attempted to make a request of any kind, she was always prone to this intense hesitation. He adored watching her facial expressions, more often than not, but he wished she would just go ahead and spit it out. “Thinking what? Notwithstanding my many gifts, I am not a reader of minds, my dear.”

  Playful, she sneered at him. “I was thinking that right now we’re ideal candidates for adoption. We might not be in five years or so.”

  He watched her as she moved from the counter to the cupboard where the dog food was stored. And like the well-trained vagrant that he was, the dog followed her without hesitation. Kasper, however, had difficultly following. Though he didn’t have any trouble with her acquiring another dog, he didn’t understand why she would want another mutt when she hardly had time to take care of the one they already had. Additionally, why was she speaking about adoption in such a broad sense? Didn’t animal shelters give those animals away to almost anyone who wanted them—quite literally?

  “Adoption? I know you’re against breeders and mills, but you can get another dog whenever you want. That’s hardly—”

  She crossed her arms over herself and stared at him with a vengeance. “Are you trying to be funny?”

  “No more than usual.”

  “I was talking about children.” She coughed awkwardly and leaned back against the sink. “A, um, child.”

  Kasper stopped, the cup halfway to his mouth, her words replaying like a sad song that would not become unstuck in his head. He knew this topic would arrive eventually, and he had simply hoped he could put it off for a few years, showing her what the entire world had to offer and what freedom would be like. Then Kasper would plant the idea slowly, showering it and her in the decadence of their financial wealth until she made the choice for herself.

  There would be no children.

  Now the timing of this subject could not have been worse, and though Kasper was willing to broach the conversation to its fullest extent, exploring both it and changing his physical appearance sounded like a rather exhausting affair. He sipped at his coffee and glanced at the pot where it was all put empty. Unquestionably, they would both need more.

  “I see.”

  “Don’t look so panicked.” She giggled awkwardly, a sound he could never decide if he liked or not. “This isn’t something I expect to do tomorrow or anything. I’m just trying to think about the long term future.”

  “No.”

  Startled, she nearly dropped the can of dog food on the floor.

  “No? No what?”

  “No children,” he said plainly.

  “Y-you mean right now?” Already the panic was rising in her voice, and he clenched at the terrible sound. “Obviously, I need to finish school, and if you want to get these surgeries done—”

  “No,” he said sternly. If he was going to put his foot down, he may as do it properly. “Not now, not then, not ever.”

  “W-what?” She turned so pale that Kasper thought she might have fallen over if she wasn’t gripping the sink so hard. “You don’t mean that. You can’t possibly—”

  “I certainly do. You know nearly as much as I do how appalling this world is, how cruel―”

  “That’s all the more reason to adopt a child, to bring a child into a family that really needs one. It makes the world a better place! Why are we even arguing about this?”

  “It is bad enough that I have stolen you all for myself, I won’t take an infant away from potential parents who are—normal.” He shuddered the last word like it disgusted him. “Expose him to a father who will horrify him.”

  Though she smiled, it was not a genuine one. “Are you trying to say I’m not normal?”

  Her attempt at humor hardly helped, so she rolled her eyes and tried again. “Our child would be our child, Kasper. He or she would know and love you for who you are—”

  “No.” Sensing her desperation, he kept himself resolute.

  “I can’t believe how unreasonable you’re being. You knew I’d want to adopt a child at some point. I know we haven’t exactly talked about it the way we should, but I’ve mentioned it before, hinted about it.”

  He gripped the handle of the mug so hard he thought it might break. “I was hoping I could talk you out of it, or you would change your mind.”

  Kasper watched while she turned her back to him, turning on the water again and sniffing at tears that wouldn’t come. “I-I don’t believe this.”

  More than experiencing his own, he hated to see her pain. Somewhere inside of him, Kasper had known it would be a necessary “Maybe we should suspend this discussion for another time. As you said yourself, you still need to finish your schooling—”

  She set her jaw, her expression otherwise blank. “What’s the point if you have your mind so set?”

  The tone in her voice had changed then, prompting Kasper to feel a surge of panic and stand up to reach for her. “Emilia—”

  She flinched from him and stared at the ground. “I-I think I’m going to leave for school a little earlier than I planned. I’m going to go upstairs and get my stuff.”

  “Please don’t.” Still she would not look at him.

  “I need a little space,” she said with sudden insistence. “I just—need a little space with this, okay? I’m fine, just give me some space.”

  With a cold kiss goodbye, she wished him well, heading to New York with a heavy feeling in her heart and a frown on her face.

  ***

  Emilia had learned her lesson after Kasper’s near demise, and so made sure that she and her husband parted on somewhat good terms—even if she was completely furious with him. With so much on her mind, twenty minutes into her drive, she stopped at a small diner on her way back to campus with the suspicion that she was much too upset to be behind the wheel of a car. She was also fortunate to snag a booth by the window—one with the outlet for her laptop where she could watch the leaves roll by.

  In addition to that much luck, it was one of the final nice days remaining in the season, and Emilia watched the moving clouds cast different shadows over the parking lot outside—her mind revived by the shapes and images she saw on the asphalt. It wasn’t difficult to picture that many people—mostly kids—were outside enjoying the weather. Perhaps if she were in a better mood, she too would have been outside picking the last of the flowers and carving pumpkins to the best of her sad ability. Maybe, with the holiday weekend, families were outside barbequing and playing freebie, walking their dogs and getting in the last of the fishing while the getting was good.

  Emilia sniffed back tears at the thought that she would never be able to carve pumpkins, play Frisbee, or go fishing with little ones of her own. She knew it had been something of a pipe-dream at best, but something she had held onto nevertheless. Still, maybe she should have seen it coming; the expressed lack of interest from Kasper when she pointed out the remodeling of playgrounds, his lack of amusement when she would joke about children’s cartoons having been better back in her day or her expressed curiosity about the price of local private schools.

  She tapped her pen against the backspace, effectively erasing the last sentence of the paper she was working on. Everything she had worked on over the last half an hour—what she had worked on—was complete rubbish. Emilia closed her laptop and gestured to the waitress for another refill on her coffee.

&
nbsp; Maybe, she considered, Emilia could get him to change his mind the same way Kasper had intended to change hers. Already she began by making a list of arguments on a napkin with a coffee ring on it. If nothing else, perhaps, it would make their discussion easier in the future.

  1. Making the world a better place

  2. Creating a lineage

  3. Giving someone a better childhood than we had

  By the time she was through she felt somewhat confidant about her list, though still unconfident about her situation. Jittery from the coffee, she tried again at her paper, thinking she should eat something but unable to rev her appetite up for anything she saw on the diner’s specials lists. And after only a few minutes of working on the bibliography of her paper, she became distracted by her other great matter.

  Emilia had spent years hoping her mother would get her act together, not so discreetly buying self-help books and placing them around the house, hoping she would take the hint on how her drinking was affecting Emilia’s life. It had been so easy to give Susan up, something Emilia probably should have done a long time ago. She had once been naïve, but Emilia wasn’t just going to invite her mother back in her life just because the woman claimed to be sober.

  Sighing, Emilia sipped at her now cold coffee. She had to admit her mother had sounded significantly better than the last time Emilia had talked to her—a conversation on the phone where she had explained what George had tried to do and she hadn’t believed her daughter and called Emilia a variety of names. Now Susan’s voice was clear and without a cough, better than she could ever recall from living memory.

  Emilia sighed. So at least it seemed she had cut back on the smoking. If she was familiar enough with AA, then maybe Susan had at least attended a meeting or two. Would it be so unwise to meet with her? At least see how she was doing? Emilia would have been lying if she said she hadn’t thought about Susan over the years, maybe not as much as she should have, considering she was Emilia’s only biological family. Yet she was still there, in the occasional forethought of her mind around the holidays and Mother’s Day, whenever she saw an elderly hairdresser or someone smoking Susan’s brand of cigarettes.

  Emilia picked up the phone and searched her contact list. If nothing else, she doubted she was capable of feeling anymore disappointment from her mother. Regardless of her attempts, she wasn’t going to get any schoolwork done—at least not today.

  The phone call was the easy part. Emilia was surprised however, that her mother requested her to wait at the diner for her, since apparently Susan was at work until the end of the hour, though she was very eager and happy sounding to meet up with Emilia.

  Until then, Emilia continued to work on her paper, glad to finally be able to concentrate, and hopeful that at least she would be able to rid herself of at least one of her problems.

  When Susan walked in, Emilia hardly recognized her. The hair she normally kept long had been cut short, allowing her to look her age—a significant improvement overall. Emilia also couldn’t help but notice how she no longer attempted to dye it strawberry-blonde, but let the gray fall through naturally—another vast improvement on her appearance. And while years of drinking and smoking had taking their irreversible toll, the lack of drinking seemed of have a slight effect on Susan as well, reducing her weight slightly and making her color look healthier.

  “Mom?”

  Susan stopped mid-removal of her light jacket and rushed at the sound of her old title, enclosing Emilia in a crushing hug so she couldn’t breathe. Regardless of the stares of the other patrons, and her own anger, Emilia lightly hugged her back. Was that perfume she smelled on Susan? Yes, the smell of smoke was still there, but not nearly as bad as it had been in the past. Emilia pulled away and offered Susan a seat in the booth.

  “I’m starving! Have you ordered?”

  “Uh—” Emilia stared at her mother. In all of her childhood, she hadn’t remembered Susan looking so well. “No. Just coffee—”

  “Well, we should get something. I don’t know about you, but I could go for a grilled cheese and tomato soup.”

  Still staring, Emilia nodded. “Um, okay.”

  They ordered quickly; the waitress glad to get an order for something other than coffee. Even then, Emilia continued to stare at her mother. Was it her imagination, or was Susan whitening her teeth? Maybe even using a moisturizer on her face?

  “So, uh, you look really good, Mom. How are you?”

  “Oh, I can’t complain. I’m working at a little shop in town cutting hair a few mornings a week. It’s all under the table so I can still collect disability. But that’s neither here nor there; tell me about you—you look so beautiful, so grown-up, tell me everything!”

  Emilia did her best, telling Susan what she could without giving too much of herself away. Naturally, her mother would already know she was in vet school, and that she was living out of state. Emilia thought it was fairly harmless to tell her about her work at the shelter, and briefly of her friends, and Tut, but she waited until her tomato soup had long grown cold before she brought up the topic of her marriage. Emilia had hoped to avoid the topic closest to her heart, however her mother may very well have discovered Emilia’s change in last name eventually, and there was no sense in putting it off forever.

  “I, ah, I also got married.”

  “Married? Married?” Susan’s eyes widened. “I guess I have a grandchild too then!”

  “One doesn’t necessarily come before or after the other.” Emilia rolled her eyes and added more crackers to her sludge of soup. “No, Mom. We love each other and wanted to get married. There was nothing else to it.”

  “I…is this that same rich boyfriend you were with the last time I saw you?” Emilia couldn’t help but feel annoyed at the way Susan leaned over the table, an expression of interest on her face while she looked for a ring.

  “He works very hard, yes.” She made it clear that would be the end of the subject and started a new one. “You said on the phone you were in the program?”

  “Four months now. It was hard at first, but after I kicked George out—”

  Emilia visibly flinched, prompting Susan to stop immediately. She stared into her mug, blaming her rapidly shaking hands on the caffeine instead of the all too vivid memories.

  “You kicked him out or he left you?”

  “Baby—”

  “Don’t lie to me, Mom. I’ve had enough of that from you. I won’t put up with it again.”

  “He admitted what he d-did,” Susan whispered quietly. “What he t-tried—” Stuttering over her words, Susan stared out the window. “When I asked him about his broken face, he told me he got jumped outside of a bar. I guess I should have known then…but a couple of months later he was drunk and told me. I made him leave that night.”

  Emilia absorbed everything Susan was saying. As much as Emilia wanted to believe Susan, she wanted even more not to have her good-nature abused again, to not be taken advantage of when she was trying to be good to someone.

  “I got really bad after that,” Susan continued. “I felt so ashamed. More than once in those couple of weeks I drank myself into alcohol poisoning, I couldn’t get any work at all—”

  “Geez, Mom.”

  “I know.” Susan half-laughed. “Rock bottom was getting evicted from the house and accidently overdosing on some aspirin.”

  “Oh…”

  “I had an awful hangover you see—”

  Emilia shrugged. “Makes sense, I suppose.”

  “I stumbled into a church after the hospital released me. Met a nice lady there who took me to a meeting. I’ve been going to them ever since.”

  “Well,” Emilia said, trying to smile. “Like I said, you do look a lot better, healthier.”

  “I tried to get in touch with you,” she explained hurriedly. “Picked up the phone so many times to say sorry in person…I had no idea where you were, the cleaning company said you had left, and the university said they couldn’t tell me anything unless I
was your emergency contact.”

  Emilia only nodded and looked away. Was it even possible that Susan had put forth that much effort into anything involving her daughter?

  “Oh, you should come by my new apartment. It’s only a one bedroom, but—”

  “I can’t, Mom,” Emilia stopped her mid-sentence. “Really. I have a five hour drive back and I should have left an hour ago.”

  “Oh,” she said with some disappointment. “I see.”

  Emilia, feeling that obligatory need to make others feel better immediately, went to cheer her up. “Maybe another time though…when I come back around for Thanksgiving.”

  Susan’s face lit back up. “We should spend the holiday together! I can’t wait to meet your husband.”

  Halfway through the process of packing up her school bag, Emilia stopped and startled, nearly dropping her laptop on the sticky diner floor. She knew Kasper wouldn’t approve of her and Susan’s reunion, albeit an unsteady one. And with the two of them just having fought about such a delicate subject, she considered that perhaps she should put off telling him about it altogether.

  “I think it’s too soon for that,” Emilia admitted. She zipped up her bag loudly. “Frankly, Mom, if you’ve made genuine progress, I think that’s great. I’m really happy for you, honest. But I’m not ready to have you back in my life yet. I’ve got too much going on for you to, well, for you to screw up.”

  Susan’s lip quivered, and for a minute Emilia thought she might burst out crying like she always used to. Emilia looked over her shoulder, making a quick study of the exits in case she needed an escape.

  Instead Susan surprised her, straightening her posture and folding her hands across the table. “I-I understand.”

  “Really?” Emilia blinked one, twice, and repeated the dialogue in her head. “That’s very…mature of you, Mom.”

  She moved her hand to rest on top of Emilia’s. “I know I was never much of a mother to you, and if you’ll let me, I’d like to make that up to you. But if not…” She smiled sadly. “Well, I suppose I’d deserve it.”