Chapter 18 #2
"Cal." Dad pins me with patience, like a man who has nothing but time and very few problems left in the world that aren't my problems. "What happened?"
I slouch into my chair.
"It was a kiss. That's all it was. We talked and then I kissed her and that was it."
"And?"
"And nothing, other than I am a dead man. Rome is going to find out and he is going to remove me from the land of the living and bury me in concrete at one of his builds and nobody will find me for decades."
"Rome isn't going to bury you," Dad says with a roll of his eyes.
"You don't know what Rome is capable of."
Trust me. Rome looks like the kind of man who would happily kill for his sister and only regret not doing it sooner. My dad does not know Rome Moreland like I do.
"I know he's your friend and men don't get killed over kisses anymore." Dad tilts his head. "Was it her idea?"
"No." I pause. "I don't know. It wasn't nobody's idea, it just..."
I stop, because I'm about to describe something that doesn't want to be described.
"It happened."
Dad is watching me closely, smiling in a way that's far too affectionate for my comfort.
"I knew there was something. From the first time I saw you in the same room, I knew."
"You knew nothing."
"I knew everything."
He is serene about it, deeply, maddeningly serene. "I watched that girl walk into my hospital room and decide she belonged there, and I watched you from the doorway, and I knew. The same way I knew when I heard about you walking into doors when she was there."
"That wasn't because of her. I had just come off a shift."
I fucking hate this town sometimes. A man can't walk into a door without it being news.
"She makes you throw out the rulebook. Every last page of it. That's not nothing, Cal."
I should have known Dad would do this.
"It's also not... It's not simple. There are reasons."
"Rome?"
"Rome is one."
"What else?"
I go back to scraping my thumb along the edge.
"She's twenty-two."
"And?"
"And she's twenty-two, that's the whole argument.
She's at the start of everything. She's going back to school soon, she's got interviews and decisions and a whole life she's building in a different city.
She didn't come to Harbor Hill to settle down.
She came here to rest and recharge and then she's going back to all of it. "
I turn my water glass, trying for a calmer approach.
"I'm not twenty-two. I haven't been twenty-two in a long time. She's got a decade in front of her that looks nothing like what I'm building. Those things don't line up."
Dad listens to all of that with great attention, then says, "You know your mother and I had you by that same age."
"That's not..."
"We were both her age with a walking one-year-old." He leans back in his chair. "It might have been a different time, but no one batted an eye. Because we were both adults."
He puts a hand over mine on the table.
"Lily knows who she is, you know that. You've always known that about her."
"It's not about that really."
"What is it about, then? Because I haven't heard anything that sounds like you actually don't want her."
I have no comeback to that, just as I had no comeback when Ramsey gave almost the exact same speech.
The problem is how much I want. The problem is that I've wanted for months, and one night in a car undid all of it and now I'm sitting here with my father seeing straight through me.
"Right," Dad drawls.
"I'm not saying I don't," I concede. "I'm saying what I want doesn't automatically make it a good idea."
Dad pushes his plate aside, elbows coming up on the table. "I'm going to say one more thing and then I'm going to let you be. I came home from the hospital and she started coming over and for weeks you didn't know what to do with yourself. You barely slept. You paced my kitchen."
He taps the table again.
"And she was here every day. On that floor with her highlighters and her laughs, bossing me around about everything. Making me laugh in a way I hadn't laughed in a while."
He pauses, voice softening. "Because she's like that."
I look away and try to swallow the lump in my throat. I remember those weeks. I remember not knowing how to exist inside my own skin, and I remember her cross-legged on the floor and a voice that filled up rooms without trying.
"I'm proud of you. The kind of woman you've chosen." Dad smiles. "Your mother would say like father, like son."
I meet his eyes with a big sigh. He always does this. “No, don't do that."
He knows exactly what he's doing, and he thinks it's the best thing he's said all week.
"I'm just saying. It tracks."
"Dad, please shut up.”
"A Holt man knows a good woman when he sees one. It's genetic."
"We're done." I push back from the table and pick up both plates. "The conversation is over. You've had your fun and we're clearing the dishes now."
Dad sits back in his chair and lets me do it, which means he's gotten what he wanted from this conversation and is perfectly comfortable letting me have the illusion of ending it.
I run water over the plates, stack them in the washer, and stand there with my hands on the edge of the counter, staring out the dark kitchen window at nothing.
It's not that I think she's young in the dismissive way people mean when they say it. She's sharp and certain and has more clarity about herself than most people twice her age, and I knew that from the first conversation we had that lasted longer than thirty seconds.
But twenty-two means something, practically. Med school, rotations, Chicago or New York or wherever the best program takes her. A life that moves fast and demands everything and has nothing to do with Harbor Hill or a firefighter who's already figured out his version of life.
"Cal..."
Dad's voice comes from behind me. I turn around.
"You don't have to have it figured out tonight."
I nod and finish stacking the last of the dishes. I don't say anything, because there's nothing to say that wouldn't be a lie or too much of the truth.
Later, in bed, I think about her forehead on mine in the fogged-up car. She's going to leave. But she's here now.
And I have, for the first time in a very long time, stopped pretending that isn't all I can think about. I pick up my phone before I can talk myself out of it.
Me
What's the name of the song?
She hearts my message. Why does that put a smile on my face?
Trouble
Work Song. Hozier.
I heart her message without thinking. I wonder if it made her smile.
I open the app, find the song, add it to favorites, and press play.