Committed (Collided Book 3) Read online

  Committed

  Portia Moore

  Contents

  Prologue

  Alex

  Untitled

  Chapter 1

  Alex

  Chapter 2

  Madison

  Chapter 3

  Alex

  Chapter 4

  Madison

  Chapter 5

  Alex

  Chapter 6

  Madison

  Chapter 7

  Alex

  Chapter 8

  Madison

  Chapter 9

  Alex

  Chapter 10

  Madison

  Chapter 11

  Alex

  Chapter 12

  Madison

  Untitled

  Present day

  Untitled

  Present day

  13. Alex

  14. Madison

  15. Alex

  16. Alex

  17. Madison

  18. Alex

  19. Madison

  20. Alex

  21. Madison

  22. Alex

  23. Madison

  Alex

  24. Madison

  25. Alex

  26. Madison

  27. Alex

  28. Madison

  29. Alex

  Madison

  30. Alex

  Alex

  31. Madison

  Alex

  32. Madison

  33. Alex

  34. Madison

  35. Alex

  Also by Portia Moore

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  Alex

  11 months earlier

  The humidity in Florida is so bad it smacks you in the face. I’ve been in Miami for a few weeks, but I can’t get used to the summer heat. Manhattan gets hot in the summer—something about the concrete and glass buildings can feel almost oven-like at times—but nothing compares to this feeling, as if you’re underwater from the minute you walk out of the door. I can already feel the sweat gathering on my back, making my white t-shirt stick to me. It won’t be any better at work—the tiki bar I’m working at is open-air and in view of the beach, so the lack of air-conditioning is all “part of the experience.” But at least there, there’s the ocean breeze.

  In summers past, I would be in my air-conditioned office in my father’s real-estate firm, comfortably wearing a suit, getting ready to take a half-day on a Friday so that we could head out to his house in the Hamptons. Me, my wife, my dad, my stepmother, my sister—all off for a weekend of drinking and eating and hobnobbing with the other wealthy New Yorkers who escaped there on a weekly basis. Except that I wouldn’t feel comfortable wearing the suit—it’d feel like a straitjacket—and the job would be like prison. It always felt like a costume I put on, a way to fit into the life I had been convinced that I was supposed to have, a life that would make my wife happy.

  Ex-wife, now.

  Holly was the only good part of that life, until she became the worst. Holly had swept me up into a world that I hadn’t expected to be a part of. When I was a teenager, I’d anticipated the sort of life that my mom and stepdad had—a middle-class existence, a small house, a modest income, and maybe a kid or two once I found the right girl. The life that I saw every other weekend with my biological dad, Jackson, seemed rarified and distant, outside of my reach. The idea that I had some kind of inheritance from him, a right to his privilege and money by birth, had never occurred to me. Even when he’d begun to hint at it as I entered college, I brushed it off. I saw the obligations that it came with—the constant travel, the time away from home, the growing distance between him and Cassandra.

  But then, just as I was finishing college, I met Holly. She was beautiful, accomplished, brilliant—on the cusp of what would be a wildly successful career as a journalist—and I saw that to be with her, to be worthy of her, I needed to become more like my father. A man with something to offer—wealth, position, accomplishments. So I took the offer of a corporate job with a salary a hell of a lot higher than it should have been, bought the Manhattan brownstone that Holly had had her eye on for months before our wedding (with the help of my father’s negotiation skills and a hefty down-payment as a wedding gift), and proceeded to put my efforts into turning myself into a corporate man.

  Monday through Friday, I was up at six; lunch packed, at the gym, and then in the office by nine. I worked until five, headed home, had dinner and chit-chatted with Holly, watched a few episodes of TV or read a book, and went to bed. On the weekends, three seasons a year, we went to the farmer’s market or the movies or meandered through over-priced furniture and home decorating stores. In the summer, we went to the Hamptons, barbecued, drank, and napped on the beach. I saw those same routines stretching out, day after day, the same thing over and over, and sometimes I wanted to scream.

  It sounds awful, I know, to complain about that kind of privilege, however, I was suffocating, looking for something to pull me out. But I loved my wife, and I wanted to make her happy. I loved and looked up to my dad, and I wanted to make him proud. So I made myself good at existing within the life that would accomplish those things. When we began to try for a baby, I was a little scared. I wanted to have kids one day, but it always seemed far away in a future where I was happy, and I wasn’t really happy in the life I had crafted for myself. I was happy with Holly, but not in the prison I had to live in to make her happy. Having a baby would only extend my sentence.

  But then something happened. I went from thinking about my own happiness to creating a life to make someone else’s life happy, and it made things more bearable, and I began to want a child not just for Holly to be happy, but it made me happy.

  We both sort of just expected it to happen right off the bat. We were young, healthy, successful, and on the verge of being wealthy. My parents—both sets—knew it would be easy for us, until it wasn’t. Months passed with test after test coming back negative, and I saw my wife losing a piece of herself each time she took it. Finally, we agreed to stop and that it’d happen when the time was right, but trying to force it was slowly killing us.

  Life went back to normal, and I was feeling more miserable than I ever had, but I didn’t let anyone see it. I kept up the routine, and things went on as usual until Holly came to me one night after I had gotten off work. I was watching an episode of The Walking Dead, and she laid a test in my lap. It was positive; we were pregnant. Something that we sort unspokenly prepared ourselves for to not happen without help—maybe even a miracle—was sitting in front of us, and I was ecstatic. Holly was the happiest I’d seen her since our wedding day. It made living our mundane life exciting again, it gave me hope, and I fell in love with life.

  For a week, we were blissful, making plans and enamored with the prospect of being parents, of having someone that was the epitome of both of us. I had visions of a little boy with my hair and killer pitch and a little girl with Holly’s eyes and smile. I promised myself that the child I raised would be encouraged to follow their heart to do what would make them happy regardless of what others expected of them.

  A few days later, Holly got the call of what she’d called the opportunity of a lifetime. An investigative assignment that would pay her twice what she’d be making except it’d require extensive international travel. She turned it down, of course, because traveling internationally once she became further along would not only be impractical but dangerous, and even after her pregnancy, she’d be a new mom who’d never see her baby.

  We both discussed things; I saw what the job meant to her. I knew what it did. One thing I loved about her was how passionate she was about her career. I envied it and hoped it would rub off on me even though my
career wasn’t what I wanted at all. We both thought the best thing was for her to turn it down, but I let her make the final call. She said there’d be other assignments, and our baby was more important. I was elated but felt so guilty, knowing what turning it down meant to her, but she was right. She wanted to have a baby before I did. She insisted on us continuously trying and was heartbroken when those tests came back negative. So we pressed forward, and I vowed to do whatever I could to make her happy, and once our little boy or girl was born, if she decided to still go for it, to have a position like that, I’d do whatever I needed to support her.

  Things were great until about two weeks later, when the worst day I ever experienced happened. In tears, sobs rocking through her body, completely devastated, Holly told me she miscarried. I cried with her, comforted her, mourned with her. I can’t explain what it’s like to love a person who you never met before, to miss someone you’ve never known, but we did. We pulled ourselves together, and the one silver lining was she could accept the position. I was happy for her. She had something to help her focus on aside from what happened, and when she sat down with me and asked if I’d come with her, if I could travel with her, it was like something inside of me that had been sleeping woke up.

  My dad let me go on an extended leave from work, and I was free. I traveled with her, and she was the happiest I’d ever seen her. We both were. While she worked, I explored the communities, I ate food I never had, spoke to people of different cultures—it was amazing and exhilarating. I learned to meditate, to live in the present. I was able to hear myself think and realized what I wanted to do, and that what I wanted to do was important because I desired to keep living instead of existing how I had.

  So I told Holly, and of course, she thought it was a little silly. Apparently, opening a bar wasn’t a traditional career, and it would take a long time before it’d become successful, and require long nights and hard days, but she said she wanted me to be happy. We agreed to sell the house, and we’d use half as a down payment to start my bar and half we’d save in case things didn’t go as planned. Life was great until it all came crashing down.

  It was a few days before we were scheduled to close. We were in Puerto Rico, and it was one of the few days she had to actually enjoy herself, but she was annoyed and irritated and kept having these text fights with one of her friends. I was pissed because it was one of the few times we’d have together to enjoy each other, and she was arguing with her friend. That night she tried to make it up, apologizing for her mind being elsewhere. That’s when my phone started ringing back to back, and I got the call from the pissed off friend that there wasn’t a miscarriage…that Holly had an abortion and lied about everything.

  Even now, months later, thinking about not only the lies she told me, but the awful, selfish thing that she did to our baby, causes me to feel sick to my stomach. I have never in my life wanted to hurt anyone, but thinking about that makes me want to kill her. The fact that she lied hurt more than anything—that she soaked up my sympathy, faked her pain, and would never tell me.

  I wanted that baby more than I ever knew I could want anything. And I thought Holly did too. But she wanted that job more. More than her child, more than our family. She cried and pleaded with me to forgive her. She said that we could have another baby, as if our child was a purse or pair of shoes to be swapped out for something she liked better. When it was more convenient. She proclaimed how unfair it was for her to miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime, asked how I could be so selfish. She had no clue how miserable I’d been for her, how everything had always been about her, how she didn’t realize that her lying about it made it all worse, how she thought I could ever trust her again. She didn’t understand how I saw her as a fucking monster to make me think our baby died when she killed it.

  She was shocked when I served her divorce papers. She was hysterical, angry, and in disbelief.

  I was in disbelief that she didn’t see it coming.

  And the truth of it that I realized in those last moments of my marriage was that I didn’t care. I didn’t care about the house, or the car, or our well-padded bank account. I didn’t care about my job. It was all just weighing me down, holding me back from the kind of life that I really wanted.

  So I left the divorce papers on the coffee table, and I walked out with the clothes on my back.

  I got a job bar-backing, and I worked my way up to bartending. It was the kind of thing I liked—thinking on my feet, coming up with options for a picky customer, wowing them with a drink I created on the fly. I loved making the drinks as elaborate as I could, mixing ingredients that no one would think to put together, layering colors, or adding garnishes to make even the simplest drink seem luxurious and fancy. It wasn’t long before I was working at two or three bars in the city, on different nights, and then my managers started asking me to work the private events, the gigs that they couldn’t trust anyone else to take. I picked up a few weddings. And before long, I revisited the possibility of having my own bar, my own business, and it not being a pipe dream. Something that was mine, that I could build from scratch, make my own, that no one could take away from me.

  I could make my own life the way I wanted it. I could be free.

  I started saving every penny I could. A customer of mine had a vacant building out in Jersey that needed a lot of work but was bigger than anything I could get in the city, and I jumped at the deal. I ate ramen seven nights a week, and when I couldn’t stand any more ramen, I went to the hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant where I could get four tacos for five dollars, and a margarita the size of my head for half of that. I watched the number in my savings account grow—slowly, but it did—and dreamed of the day when I could purchase the space that would become my own bar.

  I could have gotten my dad to finance it. I was smart, talented, and even though I hated the business side of things, I was good at it—it would have been a slam-dunk investment for him, never mind that I was his son. But Holly had realized that taking away my home, my money, my car, and my job wasn’t enough to hurt me or make me come back. I didn’t care about being poor, or taking the subway, or living in a tiny apartment that sometimes had mice.

  What I despised her for was the wedge she put in between my family, how she ran to them to convince me not to divorce her, where she got them on her side and made me hate them for it.

  So I’ve come to Miami for the summer to try to get away from all of it. New York is full of memories, and I need some space, some breathing room. One of the managers of a bar I work at regularly in Manhattan has a tiki bar smack in the middle of Miami Beach—party central for all the college kids, celebrities, and hard-partying twenty-somethings—and he asked me if I wanted to go there and work for a few months. It was the exact thing I needed.

  By the time I get to the tiki bar, my hair is sticking to my scalp and forehead, and I want to chug an entire bottle of water. The bus is air-conditioned at least, but so many bodies packed together into one space is suffocating no matter what. By the time I hop off and cross the street over to the beach, I’m seriously considering renting a car for the summer. Yesterday, a drunk college kid on summer break puked all over his seat and the aisle.

  I mentally pull up the plans for my bar in my head to strengthen my resolve and dig out my keys to unlock the back door. I’m the first one here, as usual. In another twenty minutes, my other Friday bartender, a pretty, thin blonde girl named Cassie, will show up, and right around that time, my bar-back Aiden will come around, too—if he didn’t oversleep. He’s stoned most of the time, but he still does a good job, so I’ve decided not to say anything unless he starts fucking up. It’s hard to find someone willing to wash glasses, clean up vomit, and swab the bar for eleven dollars an hour who isn’t a stoned surfer kid, so I’ve learned just to let it go. Cassie does a decent job, as does Nate, the other bartender. Nate is quicker since he doesn’t spend most of the time staring at my ass.

  The first day I showed up to work, Cassie wa
s wearing a baggy t-shirt over denim shorts a size too big for her, flipflops, her hair was up in a ponytail, and she didn’t have a lick of makeup on. By my second shift, she was wearing cutoffs painted to her ass, crop tops that showed most of her flat, tanned stomach, and her hair suddenly was curled and her makeup done. It was the least subtle thing I’d ever seen, but pretty girls that show a lot of skin bring in more customers—except it’s not the customers she’s been showing interest in.

  I’ve told her that, but she says I just need the right girl to remind her how good women can be again. There’s nothing I want less than to get involved with another woman, especially one who’s barely scratched the surface of her twenties. I’ve attached myself to my one goal with a monk-like focus, and nothing is going to change that. Not even a pretty flirty blonde with a nice ass.

  As if summoned, she appears right as I push that last thought out of my head. She’s wearing especially short, frayed red shorts today, and a cream-colored tank top that buttons down the front and ties up just below her breasts. She has on straw wedges, her hair is up in a high, bouncy, curled ponytail, and her makeup is done flawlessly, right down to her full, glossy, sticky lips.