Bella and the Happily Ever After Page 4

  Mom’s eyes widen.

  “If and when we have kids,” I say quickly, just so she doesn’t get any ideas.

  Mom studies me for a moment. “You really think you and Bella are the real deal?”

  I nod. “Of course I do. Why? Don’t you?”

  “You’re both very young,” Mom says, turning her attention back to the stew she’s making. “I love Bella dearly. It’s you I’m worried about.”

  “I’m offended,” I say playfully. “But seriously, why?”

  “I just worry that you’ll miss motocross and want to go back to it. I don’t want you breaking her heart, son, but I also know how it is to be young and in love. Things change. You grow up, you move on. Your hearts want different things… I don’t think you should worry too much about the future. Just live in the moment.”

  “I’m not going to change my mind. Professional motocross didn’t make me happy, but Bella does.”

  My mom smiles. “Then I don’t think you two have anything to worry about.

  I wake up the next morning filled with anticipation and a sense of purpose. I spent all night last night looking up careers and trying to decide if Bella would like them. In some ways, it feels like I know her so well, and in other ways, I’m reminded that I don’t. We haven’t even spent a full year together yet. I still have so much to learn about this girl that I’m crazy about.

  My research wasn’t totally fruitless, though. I came across a ton of career options that sound both interesting, and like they’d be something Bella likes. I’m not too sure about the first one on my list, but it was the quickest event I could arrange for tonight. Instead of just showing her a list of possible careers or looking up YouTube videos on them and hoping something sounds interesting to her, I have a brilliant idea. I’m going to give her a hands-on experience. She just doesn’t know it yet.

  Bella’s mom answers the door when I arrive at her house. “Well hello,” she says, stepping back and letting me inside. “Bella tells me you’ve planned some kind of secret for her.”

  “More like an adventure.”

  Bella emerges from the hallway, her smile getting brighter when she sees me. “Mom, I’m off to find my dream career,” she says. “Whatever that might be.”

  “You two have fun,” her mom says. She doesn’t question the whole career thing. Like my own mom, Bella’s mom probably thinks we’re stressing too much about this. But I don’t care. If it makes my girl happy, it’s what I’m going to do.

  Bella always gives me this look when I open the passenger door of my truck for her. It’s like she’s impressed? Or maybe I’m just thinking too much about it. I smile at her and she smiles back and then I close the door after she gets in my truck. Once I’m inside, she turns to me while buckling her seatbelt.

  “Okay, show me the list.”

  “What list?” I ask, turning on the heater because she’s shivering.

  “The list you made of careers you think I’ll like. I want to see if it’s anything new I haven’t thought of.”

  I give her a wry grin as I back out of her driveway. “Oh, there’s no list. I’m way more fun than a stupid list.”

  Actually, there is a list at home. I wrote down all the ideas I came up with, but I’m not going to bring it and show it to her. That defeats the whole purpose of what I’m trying to do. Anything can look boring or exciting on paper. It’s real life where you find out exactly what it is. With racing professionally, I had only ever thought about it as a kid. It seemed amazing. In reality? Not so much.

  If all goes according to plan, over the next few weeks, I’ll take her on several career-oriented adventures. And maybe she’ll find something she wants to do and then she won’t be so stressed out. I drive us across town to a little bakery I’ve never been to. But they have a website and it looks like a pretty legit place. The owner was even on some TV show baking contest a few years back and she won.

  “Oooh, cupcakes,” Bella says, her eyes sparkly as she gazes up at the neon sign that spells out Aunt Sally’s Bakery. “Am I going to see if I’d like to be a professional cupcake taster?” she teases. “Because I already know I’d be good at that.”

  “We’re doing something cooler than that,” I say, meeting her in front of my truck. I open the door to the bakery and it’s clear that there’s an event going on here tonight. All the tables and chairs have been set up as little work stations. The whole place smells like sugar, and pastel colors are everywhere you look.

  “Welcome!” a woman says. Her nametag says she’s Aunt Sally, but she looks too young to be someone’s aunt. “Let me guess,” she says, looking at both of us. “You must be my date night couple? Liam and Bella?”

  “That’s us,” I say, grinning when Bella gives me a surprised look.

  “Let me show you your table,” Aunt Sally says. She brings us to one of the tables, which has our names on it. There are other people sitting at the other tables, most of them alone, and middle aged. One table has what looks like a mother-daughter team on it. Oh well. I’m not too manly to play with cupcakes.

  “What is this?” Bella says, running her fingers across the plastic tools that are laid out on our table.

  I grin. “It’s an introduction to cake decorating. Let me tell you, if you decide to own a bakery one day, I will fully support that.” I pat my stomach. “All the free cupcakes and pastries I could ever want.”

  She laughs and takes a seat next to me.

  Aunt Sally stands in the middle of everyone and smiles warmly at us. “Welcome to my third ever cake decorating workshop! I’m so glad to see so many new faces here! Tonight, we’ll be decorating cupcakes and a mini cake that I’ve already baked for us, so the boring part is out of the way.”

  Some people chuckle at her joke. Two employees emerge from the back, carrying trays of naked cupcakes and cakes. They set a bunch down at every table and then Aunt Sally starts explaining every decorating tool and what it’s used for. She promises we’ll be able to make a perfect icing rose before the night is over.

  Bella looks over at me, and whispers, “Thank you.”

  I kiss her forehead. And then, with Aunt Sally’s careful instructions to guide our hands, we start decorating some cupcakes.

  7

  Bella

  The sterile smell of the hospital kind of freaks me out. I was here just a couple of weeks ago with Brent. That night everything was frantic, and I was filled with unknown worries about my brother. That smell made me nauseated while Mom and I waited in the emergency room for updates about my brother. The biggest memory I have from that night is the way the place smelled. It’s not really a bad smell, just all clean and antiseptic.

  Today, the same smell washes over me again as we enter the hospital. It’s like when you take a dog to the vet and they get all freaked out about being there, even if it’s just for a checkup. I know I’m not here because of some terrifying emergency, but the smell still gets to me.

  “What are we doing today?” I ask Liam as he walk up to the front desk. At least we’re in the main entrance and not the emergency room part today. “Brain surgery?”

  “Do you want to be a brain surgeon?” he asks, playfully bumping into me as we walk.

  “I don’t think so.” I curl my lip. “The idea of all that med school and having to cut open brains is just gross. But I’m grateful that some people are brave enough to do the job.”

  “Let’s hope we never need brain surgery,” he says.

  At the front desk, Liam asks for Nurse Quintana. When she arrives, she’s wearing bright pink lipstick that matches her pink Hello Kitty scrubs. She smells like candy and spearmint gum and she looks like one of those people who are always in a great mood.

  “Hi there!” She shakes our hands. “Are you ready to get bloody?”

  My eyes widen, and she bursts out in a grin. “Just a joke of my profession,” she says, winking at Liam as she walks us to the elevators. “Actually, I say it all the time, but people hardly laugh.”

&nbs
p; “What is your job title?” I ask.

  “I’m a blood bank technician,” she says, punching the button for the seventh floor. “I started out as a nurse right after high school, but I didn’t like all the bad parts of nursing. So, I went back and got my associates for this.”

  “You only need an associate degree?” I ask. “That’s not bad.”

  “Not bad at all,” Nurse Quintana says. “Two quick years of med classes and then you’re good to go. My starting salary was sixty-five thousand, but now I’m up to eighty.”

  “That’s an amazing salary.” I glance at Liam. “What made you think I’d like to be a blood bank technician?”

  The nurse answers for him with a chuckle. “The poor thing called up here asking about different jobs you could shadow. My sister in law is actually the receptionist, so she got your phone call,” she says to Liam. “She told me she recommends my job to everyone she knows because I make it sound so fun.”

  Liam shrugs. “The medical field is huge, and I figured you wouldn’t want to be a surgeon or anything, but we had to stop by at least one medical job, just to see if you’d like it.”

  “Cool,” I say. “Not working with sick people is a definite bonus.”

  Nurse Quintana nods. “Oh yeah, no worries there. Sometimes I never see patients. It’s just me and the nurses and the rest of my coworkers.”

  We get off on the seventh floor and she shows me the lab where she works. There are locked cases of blood everywhere. She explains to me that her main job is to categorize and keep inventory of all the blood the hospital has on hand. When a patient comes in needing a transfusion, they’re responsible for finding compatible blood and dispensing it to the doctors. It’s a pretty laid-back work environment, and she gets her own office. Plus, it would be cool to wear scrubs all day, especially if I can get some featuring my favorite cartoon characters.

  “So, what did you think?” Liam asks when we’re walking back to his truck an hour later.

  “It was cool, but it doesn’t feel like a dream job,” I admit. “I’m not sure I’d want to be at a hospital all day.”

  “I get that,” he says. “I have a good feeling about our next stop.”

  “We’re going to another place?” I ask.

  He grins. “Yep. I have made a lot of phone calls in the last few days.”

  We get on the main street that goes through town and I wonder exactly how many job shadowing adventures my new boyfriend has set up for me. “You are seriously too amazing to be real,” I say.

  Liam pinches his arm. “And yet… I am.”

  “Did you know back in the summer?” I ask.

  He glances at me briefly while we pull up to a stop sign. “Did I know what?”

  “That we would be officially together one day?”

  He blows air out of his lips. “Nope. I wanted it though. I think I had told myself from day one of our summer fling that you were unattainable. You felt like a prize I’d never actually get.”

  My chest floods with warm, mushy feelings. I don’t even know how to reply to that. It’s so sweet it makes my heart hurt.

  “Here we are,” Liam says, putting on his turn signal.

  I look out the window and see our county’s animal shelter. I can’t help but grin. “Oh, I think I’m going to like this job.”

  Liam has signed us up to play with the dogs at the shelter. They need at least an hour of playtime a day, but more if there’s enough volunteers for it. We sign in and get nametags and the woman at the front counter tells us she’s grateful that we’re here because they haven’t had volunteers all week.

  I ask her a few job-specific questions, and she tells me there’s no special college degree needed for her job. She’s the only day shift crew member, and there are three other part-timers as well as someone who stays overnight with the animals. Since the animal shelter is founded by tax dollars, and the city is always cutting the budget, they don’t earn much money. That part kind of totally sucks. But playing with the dogs is so much fun.

  Liam and I take a few dogs out of their pens at a time and go outside to the fenced in yard where they can run and play. We play fetch and chase and get tackled with furry, smelly dog kisses. By the end of it, we’re both sweating, and we smell like dogs ourselves. But it’s so, so very much fun.

  I talk to the woman who works here, and her name is Beth. She’s been here for twelve years, and she told me it took her five years just to get the job because there’s so few opportunities and people tend to stay until they retire. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what she plans to do. So, unless I want to move far away and find another animal shelter employee that’s on the verge of retiring, I might be out of luck with this type of job.

  Liam and I look up vet technicians and put them on the list of things to try out. I’d still get to work with animals in a job like that but seeing sick and hurt animals might be too sad for me.

  We end up staying for three and a half hours. After playing with all of the dogs, we also play with the cats who are nice enough to want company. Some of them are grouchy and prefer that we just stay away from them. Those cats remind me of my brother. He’s been a grumpy mess since his car accident. The prescription painkillers don’t seem to help much, and he’s mad about not being able to work out. The next time he annoys me, I’m going to tell him he’s being a total shelter cat. Ha.

  Liam and I stop at the park near my house for some snow cones. We’re both exhausted from playing with all the dogs, but it’s a good kind of exhaustion.

  “I think I want to volunteer there on a regular basis,” I say, taking a bite of my cherry snow cone.

  “Totally.” He slurps some melted ice from his snow cone cup and then reaches his plastic spoon over and steals a bite of mine. “This was the most gratifying day I’ve had in a while. Did you see how happy those dogs were? We totally made their day. I wish I could adopt all of them.”

  “Let’s plan a day of the week where we’re both free and we’ll go volunteer.”

  He nods. “Say the word, and I’m there. Plus, we got a cardio workout in.”

  I roll my eyes. “Don’t mention working out right now. You’ll just remind me of my brother.”

  “Is he still being a jerk?”

  I nod. “Oh yeah. You’d think his life is over if he’s not at the gym. The other day he ordered a set of dumbbells off Amazon and had them delivered so he can work out his arms while he’s sitting in the recliner.”

  Liam laughs. “I wish I had that much drive. Now that I’m not racing professionally anymore, I’m losing my six pack.”

  I lean against his shoulder while we sit on this park bench and watch two children fly a kite. “I still think you’re extremely hot. Six pack or not.”

  8

  Liam

  I have to wake up entirely too early on Monday morning because I’ve got a full day of job opportunities planned and I totally forgot about an essay that’s due for one of my online classes. I fill my mom’s coffee pot with dark roast and write until the sun rises. Once I’m fairly sure this essay will get me at least a B, I upload it and then get dressed with fifteen minutes to spare. We have a long drive today, and I can’t wait to take Bella on this adventure.

  She opens her front door looking exhausted and like she needs some of that coffee I drank earlier.

  “Why so early?” she whines, tossing her head back with a groan.

  “First of all, most careers will make you get up early and get to work by eight in the morning, so I’m actually doing you a favor,” I say, poking her in the stomach. “You ready to go?”

  She turns around to where her brother is watching us from his recliner in the living room. “You need anything before I leave?”

  “Nah, I’m good,” he says, not looking at me. I know I can’t expect us to be friends, but a slight head nod of acknowledgment would be nice.

  Bella steps onto her porch and closes the door behind her. “Do I look okay?”

  “You always look way mo
re than okay.”

  She rolls her eyes. “It’s too early for your romantic compliments,” she says, leaning up on her toes to kiss me. “I mean my clothes. Are they good for whatever you have planned today?”

  I pretend to take a moment surveying her dark jeans and purple shirt. “We’re going to the beach so…”

  She puts her hands on her hips. “The beach in February? It’s way too cold to swim.”

  I wiggle my eyebrows. “Good thing we’re not swimming.”

  It’s a three-hour drive to Galveston beach, which is off the gulf coast of Texas. It’s not the prettiest beach ever, since the sand is often filled with dead seaweed and the water is sludge brown, but it’s still a beach. I loved coming here as a kid because my dad would rent a luxury condo on the water and we’d spend all week in the sun and ocean, pretending to surf. But the other bad thing about Galveston beach is that the surf totally sucks. You’re lucky if there’s a wave big enough to even stand up on your surf board. We’ve got nothing on the west coast.

  Now that Bella and I are dating, it feels wrong for her to sit way over on the passenger seat in my truck. “Hey,” I say, reaching over and taking her hand. I tug on it. “Come closer.”

  She grins and slides across the bench seat, wrapping her hand around my arm while I drive. “That’s better,” I say. “You smell amazing.”

  “You smell amazing,” she says.

  “This is the best part of having a girlfriend,” I say, kissing the top of her head while I focus on the road.

  “Smelling me?” she teases.

  I shake my head. “No, just all of it. Sitting next to you. Hanging out every day. Planning adventures. And smelling you,” I add with a wink.

  Long drives don’t feel long when I’m with Bella. We listen to music and she snuggles against my shoulder and we stop off at the largest gas station I’ve ever seen and load up on snacks. Before I know it, we’re in Galveston, parking on the seawall that overlooks the Gulf of Mexico.