33. Fox
FOX
I worked myself to quivering exhaustion on every machine, then ran on the treadmill until I was empty. After grabbing a shower and a protein shake, I booked my own room. They had one . I went back to the suite to pack up my stuff.
I was hoping the women had made their way to the villa. I couldn’t face Ashley’s baleful glare again.
I’ll go back to not even wishing .
I wasn’t trying to disillusion her. I was trying to hang on to what I had—which included her. And I wouldn’t be flat broke if Shane and I dissolved the business, but it would still hurt. I enjoyed a certain level of security because I had fought for it. I wanted to keep it.
As a child, I’d had a constant sense of being adrift with very few anchor points, all of them borrowed and tenuous. Creating this feeling of having roots and community had been years of blood, sweat, and tears. The next house I bought was going to be mine .
As for the business, I never wanted to go back to working for The Man. I liked being The Man. I loved owning T&B, loved having the control to set goals and achieve milestones.
Granted, some of that had felt a little colorless after Ashley had gone back to Canada. In the short time she’d been there, she’d become a fixture in my days. When she’d gone home, I’d known it was temporary, but it had been a taste of what life would be like without her and I hadn’t liked it.
A bleak space was opening in front of me, one that I was fighting looking into. That’s why I had stuck around this week, to put off having to face losing her from my life.
I pinched the bridge of my nose where the protein shake was driving a cold spike of ice cream headache into my sinuses.
If Ash and I couldn’t find our way back to being friends, if I couldn’t at least know she was on the other end of a text or a call, I didn’t know what I would do. I had to figure out how to smooth things over with her.
Without sleeping with her.
But oh, I wanted to sleep with her. Talons of want were lodged in my guts, reminding me why I had to pack and leave her room. Put more space where I didn’t want it. It was for the best, even if it killed me.
I stepped out of the elevator and immediately came across Fliss in the lounge, curled into a corner of the sofa, reading a book.
“I thought it was lady time on the lanai?”
“They’re all getting drunk.” She didn’t lift her eyes from her page.
“Perhaps I won’t rush in there, then.” I dropped onto the other end of the sofa, still nursing my protein drink, relieved.
But was I? Maybe Ash was telling her sister and Izzy that we’d made out. I didn’t care what the other women thought of me. Not really. But I cared if Ashley was hurt and angry enough to talk down about me.
I glanced at Fliss to see if she was giving me the stink-eye.
She was watching me over the top of her book. The cover had gold embossed lettering and a scene of a misty pond with a band of robed sorcerers. A huge eye was superimposed above them.
“I won’t bug you if you want to read.”
She dipped her nose into her book, but almost immediately dropped it into her lap.
“How did you feel when your foster mom got married? Did she ask if you wanted to move to Australia? Or did she just take you there against your will?”
“Does Oliver want you and your mom to move?” That was news. “Where?”
“No. Mom said we’ll stay in Pine Grove and I don’t even have to change schools, but I still have to live with a guy I don’t know. And now I’ll have a stepbrother who’s like, four. What if Mom gets pregnant? Then I’ll be like Auntie Ashley and have to look after a baby that isn’t even mine. And I know I’ll love it and everything. I don’t even mind Ryan. He’s cute, but kids are a lot of work. Everyone thinks babysitting is just watching TV and making sure the stove is off. It’s not. Babies cry and you have to figure out why. And stinky diapers stink .”
“Babies are messy,” I agreed. “Families are.”
“I know family is messy. Have you seen mine? This is one long week of diarrhea.” She rose to make herself a coffee. “But I think that’s what Mom is trying to do, make us look like a ‘normal’ family. It’s, like, the only thing she’s ever wanted in her life because Grandpa was a deadbeat and my dad flaked out on her. But I don’t care if I don’t have a dad. I like living with Auntie Ashley. I don’t care if people think it’s weird.”
“People give you a hard time about that?” My big brother protective instincts leapt to their feet and growled.
“Not really. Just this one girl asked me if I had two moms and laughed. I don’t even like her and so what if I did? I mean, read the room. We’ve moved on.” She rolled her eyes.
Damn, I liked this girl.
“What do you like most about living with Ash? What do you think will change if you live with Oliver?”
“Everything.” She tasted her coffee and stirred another sugar into it. “With Auntie Ashley, she stands up for me against Mom. Mom never lets me forget that I’m her kid and half the time she acts like Grandma and says I should listen and do what I’m told because she said so. But Auntie Ashley treats me like I’m allowed to have a say and makes us talk things out. Now Oliver will have his own opinion and who do you think Mom will side with? He doesn’t even know me or what I want.”
“It takes time to get used to each other, that’s for sure.”
She came back and curled a leg beneath her as she sat.
I’d seen Ash sit like that a thousand times. Fliss was so like her, it was laughable. Endearing. It made me picture a little girl with Ash’s big brown eyes chirping back at me over some adults-know-better edict, melting my heart while she tested my patience. The idea was so sweet, my throat ached.
I shook my head to clear the vision. “For what it’s worth, Oliver seems like a good guy. Like he wants to be a good parent.”
“I should still get a choice over whether I want him to be my parent.”
“You know that almost no one gets that choice, right?”
“I guess,” she mumbled against the rim of her cup.
“I always wanted a ‘real’ parent,” I said, using my fingers to quote around the word.
“You didn’t feel like you had one?” She was wearing Ashley’s exact look of compassion, chin tucked and eyes wide.
“Not really.” I didn’t tell her it would have felt different if Vicky and Gary had been fighting to keep me, rather than fighting over who had to take me.
“But you must have been stoked to see kangaroos and koala bears in real life, when you went to Australia?”
“I was,” I admitted, nodding as I recalled the excitement that had hit when I was getting on the plane. “No one warned me about the freaking spiders, though.” Or snakes or jellyfish or crocs.
A smile of morbid curiosity spread across her face. “Auntie Ashley said some of them are really big. She showed me a photo of one she saw at a campsite that was as big as her hand.” She splayed her fingers wide.
“That was only a teenager. I’ve seen bigger.” I set my hands in the air as though framing a dinner plate.
“For real?” She hung her tongue out. “Barf. I’m never going there.”
It was a throwaway remark, but knocked me onto my proverbial ass. It was one more reminder that her aunt wouldn’t be there as a reason for Fliss to come visit.
She sipped her coffee. “Do you like your stepfather?”
“Mitchell is okay.” I tried not to rehash the past since there was no changing it and I’d mostly made peace with it. “We never fought or anything. I did all my chores and got good grades. Spent a lot of time at Shane’s so I wasn’t in the way too much. He still calls me his wife’s foster son, though. Even though his kids look like they could be my biological siblings. It’s always made me feel like he wants people to know I’m not his, you know?”
“He sounds like a dick. What was your stepmom like?”
“Stephanie calls me her stepson and treats me more like a member of their family, but she’s hard to be around. Really high strung. She’s a doctor and they have three kids plus they breed standard poodles. She keeps a lot of balls in the air and runs everything like a military operation.” I chopped my hand against my palm. “Are you coming for Christmas? What time do you arrive? How long are you staying? Can you watch the kids on Tuesday so we can go to a holiday party? That was a conversation I had with her last week.”
“It’s March .”
“That’s Stephanie.” I sipped my shake and found it empty so I rattled it, hoping for a final taste. “As a kid, it was really hard to relax around her because I felt like I was one more thing she had to manage. I kind of preferred Mitchell’s indifferent attitude. He didn’t make me feel super welcome, but he didn’t act like I was a huge burden, either. I was just a fact of life he couldn’t avoid, like paying taxes or sweeping the garage. And I had Shane next door so I was glad to stay in Oz.”
“And Eddie and Sandy were nice to you?”
“Very nice,” I assured her, privately smiling at the anxious look she was giving me. So much like Ashley. “They invited me to come along all the time. Eddie calls all of Shane’s mates ‘son’ and means it. Like they’ve adopted all of us. It means a lot.”
It was why I couldn’t bear to further damage my relationship with them by taking up with the woman they had thought would be their daughter-in-law.
“Are you saying I should make friends with Josh who lives next door to Oliver?” She made a face of revulsion.
“What’s wrong with him? Is he one of the potheads who hangs around behind the gas station?”
“Jock,” she said pithily. “Doesn’t even know I’m alive. Not that I care.” She tried to sound dismissive, but I read confused speculation in her disgruntled expression.
You poor, poor kid. I wouldn’t go back to middle-school insecurities for all the money in the world. But where was I right now? If not co-starring in a high school love triangle? God knew I didn’t have the lead.
“Tell him you learned to surf over spring break. That’ll get his attention.”
“Are you referring to my failed attempts to drown myself?”
“You’ll get better.”
“When?” she scoffed.
“What are you doing right now?”
“Really? You want to go surfing? With me? Right now?”
“Why not?” I could use the distraction as much as she could. I wasn’t in a hurry to face Ashley again, especially if she was talking to her sister and Izzy about me.
“I already have my suit.” She plucked the string that was tied around her neck beneath the collar of her striped T-shirt.
“Text your mom so she knows where you are and let’s go.”