Stepdad and His Friends Bred Me During the Birthday Blackout novel · Chapter 1 of 48
Chapter 1: Everyone Bailed
On her 24th birthday Codi's friends and mother bail, she finds them at her mother's engagement party to another man, and she shows her stepfather instead of covering, just before the lights go out and three men gather around her candles.
On my twenty-fourth birthday, everyone bailed.
The last one texted at 7:52. "SO sorry babe, cramps from hell. Rain check??"
She was the sixth.
The pool lights were on. The string lights were on.
Forty paper plates sat on the patio table, and nobody had touched one.
The party had been my mother's idea.
"At the house, Codi. With the pool. You only turn twenty-four once."
She married Abram Crandall two years ago, when I was twenty-two and already pulling wire in hospitals for a living.
I never lived in his house.
I came for Christmas, ate fast, and left before pie.
But she wanted me here tonight, so I was here, in a black sundress I'd bought for it.
At 8:03 she texted.
"Migraine, baby!! Have fun without me. Love you to the moon."
At 8:05 the taco truck didn't come.
I called them.
"A lady canceled this morning," the man said. "Said she was your mom."
I sat on the edge of the pool and put my feet in the water.
Then I did the stupid thing and opened Instagram.
My lab partner from four years of night classes had a story up.
A rooftop bar in Old Town Scottsdale. A cake as tall as a toddler.
All six of my friends were in it, in the dresses they'd promised to wear for me.
The camera swung to a woman in a white jumpsuit holding up her left hand.
An emerald the size of a gumball.
My mother.
A silver-haired man in a pink golf shirt kissed her ear.
The caption said, "SHE SAID YES!!! Surprise engagement for Starla and Duane, open bar all night!"
My mother was still married.
To the man whose pool my feet were in.
I called her.
She picked up on the fourth ring, on speaker, with music under it.
"Codi! Baby! Say hi, everybody!"
Six voices yelled, "Happy birthday!"
Somebody laughed so hard she snorted.
"You said migraine," I said.
"Oh, don't start. You're twenty-four, not four."
"You canceled my taco truck."
"Duane's buying the bar, sweetheart. Your friends are grown women. They made a choice."
Behind her, somebody said, "Is she crying?"
Somebody else said, "She's literally at the pool by herself."
Then my mother's voice went low and sweet.
"And if Abram calls, I was with you all night. Okay? You're my alibi, birthday girl."
She hung up.
I'd been her alibi since I was nine.
For landlords. For my teachers. For a man from the bank who stood on our porch in Mesa.
I sat there with my phone in my wet hand.
Headlights swept across the gate.
Abram wasn't supposed to be back from Denver until Monday.
He came through the great room carrying a white cake box.
Two men walked in behind him.
Breck Mathis filled the doorway, sandy beard, sport coat over an old ASU shirt, a case of Coke on his shoulder.
"Starla said you don't drink," he said. "So I bought all the Coke in Arizona."
Rand Stokely came last, tortoiseshell glasses, navy suit, no tie, one small gift bag.
They'd built a club together in Old Town and half of Scottsdale's money called them by their first names.
Abram stopped at the patio door.
He looked at the forty plates. Then the dark taco spot by the curb. Then me.
"Where is everyone?"
I had the answer ready. I'd said it a hundred times.
She just ran out for ice.
I stood up, dripping, and held out my phone instead.
Abram watched the whole story.
Then he watched it again.
His face didn't move at all.
Rand read it over his shoulder and said a word I'd never heard a lawyer say.
Breck set the Coke down very carefully on the patio table.
Abram handed my phone back.
"Thank you," he said. "For not lying to me."
His voice was too calm.
"You knew," I said.
"Since April." He looked at the plates. "I didn't want to be the man who took your mother away from you."
"She took herself."
Nobody said anything.
Then Breck clapped his hands once.
"Well. That cake isn't gonna eat itself, Sparky."
We went inside, because the patio had started to feel like a crime scene.
Abram set the cake on the coffee table in front of the long gray sofa.
Chocolate, with "CODI" in yellow, and two candles, a 2 and a 4.
Rand handed me the gift bag.
Inside was a Klein multimeter, the good one, the one I'd been pricing for a year.
"Breck said women like jewelry," Rand said. "I asked Abram what you'd actually use."
I laughed for the first time all day.
"Counselor, that's the most romantic thing anyone's ever bought me."
"Then you've been dating idiots."
Breck cracked me a Coke. It was my second. I had a 5 a.m. call-out at a hospital in Tempe.
At 8:41, the house died.
The lights. The air conditioning. The pool pump. All at once, with a soft thunk I felt in my teeth.
"That's not a breaker," I said. "That's the main."
Through the front window, the neighbor's porch light was still burning.
I stood up to go find the panel.
I took one step in the dark and walked straight into a chest.
A hand landed on my waist and held me still.
"Easy, Renner."
Abram.
He was right there, close enough that I felt the words on my forehead.
I'd met him at twenty-two, in a steakhouse, where my mother called him her fiancé and he shook my hand like it mattered.
I'd wanted him before the bread came.
For two years I'd stepped back. At Christmas. At Easter. In the kitchen doorway, every time.
I didn't step back.
I put my hand flat on his shirt and felt his heart going hard.
Then I went up on my toes and kissed him.
He went completely still.
For one terrible second I thought he'd push me away.
Then his hand slid from my waist to the small of my back and pulled me in, and he kissed me too.
Slow. Deep. His beard rough on my chin, his thumb pressing the dip of my spine through the dress.
I made a sound I'd never made in my life.
He broke off and held my face in both hands.
"Codi." His breath was ragged. "Tell me what you want."
Another hand settled on my hip from behind. Big and warm. Breck's, from the size of it.
Then breath on the side of my neck, and the cool brush of glasses frames against my hair.
Rand.
Nobody moved. Nobody pushed.
Three men stood around me in the dark, waiting.
Rand stepped around me, and a lighter clicked.
He lit the candles on the cake, the 2 and the 4, and the flames threw gold up their faces.
Breck's jaw was tight. Rand's glasses held two tiny fires.
Abram's dark eyes didn't leave mine.
"Your birthday," he said. "Your call."
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend