Chapter Seventeen
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Don’t ask me about this plot point. I’m just the author.
Fox
Was hiding in my brother’s bathroom being judged by a row of bright yellow rubber ducks while avoiding my temporary roommate the most courageous thing I’ve ever done?
Probably not. I don’t think I would have been embarrassed about it, though, if she hadn’t still been here when my alarm to get to work went off and I couldn’t avoid leaving my ducky sanctuary.
There is nothing that humbles a man more than facing a woman after a bout of particularly cowardly cowardice.
“Poem,” I grunt, opting to pretend like we don’t both know I’m a Wizard of Oz lion skipping down a yellow brick road. “What are you doing here?”
And if my tone is a little gruff and uninviting, well, that’s just because I’m feeling a little gruff and uninviting.
She wants to be my sister, for goodness’ sake. Uninviting is an understatement when it comes to me and that.
“Looking for you,” she replies readily, pointing a toothpick full of pale green melon at me. “I told you I was going to be working on you today.”
I scowl. “You’re not my sister,” I remind her. “And I don’t want you to be.” Another understatement, my new specialty.
“Yes,” she nods in agreement. “You’re right, those are the problems we face.”
“They aren’t problems,” I protest. They are, in fact, about half of my motivation for my current attempts at becoming a better, more trustworthy, more reliable person that my parents can be proud of.
If she’s my sister, then I cannot make her my wife.
And I’d really, really like to make this infuriating, beautiful, resilient, funny, bratty little woman my wife one day.
Which means absolutely under no circumstances will I be letting her think of me as her brother. Plainly, I’d rather be run over by a Mack truck.
“The first step to making you love me,” she says, “is putting you in my presence as much as possible. Congratulations, you’ve just won a day off spent with Poem!”
Terror hits me, followed closely by relief.
“I’m not off today,” I inform her, glancing at the clock on Wolfe’s stove.
“I actually have to be down in the office in ten minutes. So. Really sad, much sorry, but I can’t hang out with you.
” I turn to my irritatingly amused betrayer brother, satisfied to see that even though I lost our scuffle when I tried to stop him from opening the door for Poem, I did leave him noticeably disheveled.
I think I see the beginning of a bruise blooming on his neck, doubling my satisfaction.
Serves him right, the traitorous traitor.
“Goodbye, and thanks for nothing,” I say.
He rolls his eyes. “Goodbye, and you’re welcome. Maybe next time you can go be a baby at Almond’s house instead.”
I sniff. “Maybe I will.”
With a nod farewell to Poem, I head to the door.
Poem also heads to the door, frantically grabbing a can of peach-flavored caffeine from the counter and waving goodbye to Wolfe.
I jerk to a stop.
She does not, because instead of watching where she’s going, her head is turned to smile at Wolfe while her body careens full speed after me, then into me.
“Oof,” she huffs, and I grab her wrist to stop her from falling and stop her Alani from spilling sticky liquid all over me, her, and the carpet.
“What are you doing?” I grunt.
“Spending the day with you,” she replies, tugging her wrist from my grip. “I told you.”
“I have to work,” I repeat. “So you can’t spend the day with me.”
She gives me a patented Poem-thinks-Fox-is-more-than-a-little-slow-on-the-uptake look. “So I’ll spend my day off hanging with you while you work,” she says slowly, enunciating every syllable.
I frown. “I’m going to be sitting at my desk doing orders and payroll and other incredibly boring administrative tasks.”
“Yeah?”
“I won’t be able to talk, or listen to you talk, or entertain you in any way.”
“Ye-ah?”
I sigh. “Don’t you have anything better to do with a day off?”
She shrugs. “Not really. Usually I spend it cleaning my house, but my house isn’t super cleanable right now, and I’m definitely not cleaning your house, so I’m free to do whatever.
And the whatever I want to do is hang out with you and con you into loving me so that I can once again fully enmesh myself into your family without any silly thorns in my side complaining about it. ”
I stare. Scowl. Beg the universe to take me out of the cosmic joke that is my life.
When the universe doesn’t come to my rescue, I appeal to my brother instead.
“Can’t you take her?” I ignore fully the twinge of jealousy my question brings.
Do I want Wolfe and Poem to spend copious amounts of alone time together, realize they’re attracted to each other, compatible with each other, and have the same values as each other, thus creating the perfect recipe for falling in love?
No. But I equally don’t want to be trapped in my tiny office with Poem staring at me for the next four to six hours thinking up schemes to convince me she’s my sister.
A little jealousy is a small price to pay for my own sanity. Probably.
The release of tension in my shoulders when Wolfe tells me that, no, he can’t take her, calls me a liar.
“Perfect!” Poem declares. “Just you and me, big man. Besties in the making.”
Grimacing, I decide at this stage my best option is to let her do whatever she wants to do and simply do my best to survive through her whims. It’s what I’ve been doing for years already, and the worst this plan has resulted in is my continuous torture, temptation, and torment. Tried and true, basically.
I turn on my heel and calmly go to my office, doing breathing exercises with every step I take.
Left step, breathe in. Right step, breathe out.
Left step, breathe in. Right step, breathe out.
By the time I’m encased in the soft, worn leather of my desk chair, I’ve managed to bring my heartbeat down to a livable level.
My eye only twitches a little bit when Poem makes the hair-raising decision to take a seat on my desk.
Papers scatter as she shimmies to find a comfortable position on the wood.
My nostrils flare, and I start my breathing exercises over.
She kicks her feet, looking around my office. “You know, I don’t think I’ve really been in here since you took over. It looks a lot different from when your parents were here.”
That’s because my parents had it decorated in sad beige baby. I think my dad touched color once, exploded in hives, and said never again. Or possibly he’s colorblind and terrified of making the wrong decorating decisions because of it. Same thing.
Regardless, I couldn’t work in a space with absolutely zero life to it. I tried, of course, in the first year when I was so terrified that my parents would swoop in at any moment to tell me I’d failed and that they were taking it all back—my bar, my apartment… my birth.
On my one-year anniversary of No Longer Being A Total Screwup, I bought myself a gallon of pale purple paint and spent a Tuesday covering the walls in it.
The following week, I bought plants. Knick-knacks from my apartment slowly made their way downstairs to add even more color to my shelves, slotting amongst the framed family photos like they were always meant to be there.
I switched out the old, cream desk chair for a more ergonomic green one.
If a corner of this room lacked depth and warmth and brilliance, I added it.
Eventually it became an eclectic mishmash of whimsy and joy, just how I like my spaces to feel.
Of course, my parents could still swoop in at any moment and take it all away from me.
Which is why I keep two neatly folded cardboard boxes behind the bookshelf, ready at a moment’s notice to carry my whimsy away and toss it off a cliff for daring to present itself in a place of business.
Afterward, I’ll toss myself off the cliff, too, for failing to make my parents proud.
“You need another chair in here,” Poem says, poking at a stack of papers she failed to upend when she heaved herself onto the desk.
“By all means, make sure you mess up every portion of my organization before you scurry away to bother someone else.”
“Thanks! I will!” she beams, prodding my stapler askew. “There won’t be any scurrying, though. I’m all yours for the day, as mentioned.”
“And as I mentioned, I need to work.”
“Exactly.” She nods. “Which is why I bring up the chair. You have nowhere comfortable for me to sit in here.”
My eye twitches. “This is an office,” I inform her.
“An uncomfortable office,” she corrects.
“Offices don’t need to be comfortable. They aren’t lounge spaces.
They’re work spaces. The only thing that needs to be comfortable in this room is my chair, and that is only to facilitate my long hours of work.
If you want to be comfortable, there’s an entire apartment upstairs that you can go to or a plethora of friend’s spaces you can invade instead. No one is forcing you to be here.”
Her pale gray eyes drop to my chair. “That’s comfy?” she asks.
“Poem,” I snarl. “Pay attention.”
“I am,” she replies. “It’s just that everything you’re saying is in direct opposition to my goals and desires, so I won’t be heeding your directives or advice. Super sorry. Maybe try again next week?”
My teeth grind. “You’re being a brat.”
She kicks her feet, knocking them into the desk with every swing. “Very sisterly of me, isn’t it?” she asks, eyes glinting with mischief and an innate desire to see me at her mercy.
“No,” I grunt. “It is not.” It is an entirely different sort of bratty altogether, one that hits me in the chest in a way that doesn’t feel familial at all, raising goosebumps on my skin and shortening the breaths in my lungs.
She frowns, her lush lower lip pushing out in a pout. “Not even a little bit?” she asks. “I’m trying really hard here, you know. The least you could do is feel a little bit brotherly toward me. I’m being a total pest.”
“Maybe this plan of yours would work if my actual sister had ever been a pest a day in her life.”
Her face alights. “Aha!”
I blink. “Aha? Aha what? Aha you’ve realized your endeavors are going to be fruitless because you haven’t a clue how to be as sweet as Almond is?
Aha you’re giving up, going upstairs, and leaving me alone until I’m done working?
Aha you’re going to forget this stupid bid to make yourself my sister? ”
“Aha I’m going to teach you about what having a sister who isn’t an angelic being from heaven above is like,” she retorts.
Her hand reaches out to pat my cheek, brushing against the stubble on my skin one, two, three times.
“You poor thing,” she murmurs, passing her thumb over my jawline as it clenches.
“You don’t have a clue what you’re in for at all, do you? ”
I grab her wrist, forcibly removing her delicate touch. “Don’t patronize me,” I snarl.
And don’t tempt me, either, I think as my fingers flex around her wrist, unwilling to let go. I pour what scraps of self-control I contain into my efforts to peel my hand from her skin, to no avail.
“This is going to be fun for me,” she says. “But a nightmare for you if you don’t adjust quickly.” She tsks. “And I think we both know you’re no good with change. We’re in for a long ride.”
“Don’t talk about rides with me,” I snap, glaring at my hand on her skin.
“We’re not going on one, because you’re going to accept that this thing you’re doing is stupid, impulsive, and ill-advised, and then you’re going to stop.
” I pry my pinky finger away. “There’s nothing wrong with our current relationship.
” Basically, anyway. Until I become a man worthy of more, but that more will not be siblinghood.
It will be marriage. And babies. And maybe a cat.
“It’s just a matter of when you’ll give up,” I grunt, managing to dislodge my ring finger as well.
She hums. “I suppose it’s really a matter of who will give up first,” she counters.
“And I’m betting on it not being me. I’ve always been stubborn and unwilling to quit.
You, though…” she trails off, nose scrunching.
“You’re a man who runs,” she continues, slicing right to the heart of me.
“And a man who runs isn’t a man who wins.
Not in something like this. You either accept my offer of sisterhood and I get your family as my own back again but with you in it—or you run away to escape having to deal with it, and I get your family as my own back again the same way it was before.
” She shrugs. “It makes no difference to me which door you choose, but I do think that your parents and siblings would prefer you take the harder route and opt to adopt me the way that they have. They missed you when you were gone.”
Pushing past the pall of ouch, I reply, “You know I have emotions, right? Feelings? You being cute doesn’t give you a free pass to trample all over them not caring what the consequences may be.”
She blinks. “You think I’m cute? Like, say, a little sister?”
My heart hammers, half devastated and half angry. “I could throttle you,” I hiss. “Can’t you take anything seriously? I’m not a plaything, kit. I’m a person.”
Her brows furrow. “Why can’t you be both?”
Frustration stabs my hurt, followed quickly by disgust with myself. This is the person I want to spend the rest of my life with—the person whose opinion matters more than almost anyone in the world’s to me—and this is how lowly she thinks of me. This is what I’ve made her think of me.
The road to redemption is long, jagged, and freaking discouraging to navigate, especially when one is navigating it alone.
Because if the person I spend most of my time with doesn’t see me as more than a flighty jerk who’s more plaything than person?
Then how am I going to convince my family that I’m any better than what her opinion of me is?
I could sit in this office until I’m a rotting corpse despairing over the answer to that question, but I won’t.
Instead, I’ll do better. Be better. I’ll prove her wrong—prove to my parents that I can be somebody they can count on and trust. Then I’ll woo my infuriating little brat, marry her, and work every day to balance her usually appealing snark with the sweetness love casts over her.
If she wants both a plaything and person? I’ll be a plaything and a person.
But I’ll do it my way.
Starting now.