13. Chapter Thirteen Poppy
Chapter Thirteen: Poppy
J oe and I step off the dance floor, still catching our breaths and laughing softly about how flawlessly he pulled off the waltz.
As the music fades back into the far side of the room, however, so does our temporary bubble of peace.
Percy is positioned over by a set of glass doors leading out to the cliffside gardens, and he is watching us with a familiar expression—a mixture of smugness and jealousy that churns like a storm beneath his calm exterior. That’s how he’s looked at everyone he’s ever coveted something from.
As he moves toward us, I know that I can’t let myself cower or deflect or find some excuse to walk away. It’s time to face this head-on.
Percy’s gaze flicks between me and Joe, a faint scowl forming at the edges of his smile as he notices the way Joe’s hand is clasped so firmly around mine.
He raises his glass in a mock toast as he approaches, though his eyes are locked on Joe.
“Well, I see you’ve found new ways to entertain yourself at these sorts of functions, Poppy,” he says, his tone light but tinged with something bitter. “Teaching the lower classes how to dance, hm?”
I don’t have to look at Joe to know he’s bracing himself.
“Don’t be cruel, Percy. We’re here for charity, not for drama.”
“Right. Charity,” he replies in a condescending tone. His eyes flicker to Joe, his smirk deepening. “Do you have any idea what you’re doing, Poppy? This life you think you’re playing at—it’s not what you really want. You’ll get bored of this small-town fantasy soon enough. Trust me.”
He’s watching Joe with a half smile, clearly trying to get a rise out of him with the fact that my small-town fantasy includes an unimportant, small-town guy.
I take a deep breath, fighting the urge to roll my eyes, but Joe steps forward, his voice calm and steady. “I hope you don’t mind me letting you know that you’ve got a stain on your tie.”
Percy’s face hardens, his eyes narrowing, but he can’t help glancing down at the front of his tie where, sure enough, a slight dribble of champagne has obviously stained the pure silk.
When Percy glances back up at Joe, my date is no longer even paying attention him. He’s smiling down at me. “Would you like to go get a drink, Poppy?”
“Allow me,” Percy cuts in.
I purposefully ignore him, angling my body toward Joe as if Percy isn’t even there.
“Yes, please,” I reply, batting my eyelashes.
Percy scoffs. As Joe steers me away, he blurts, “Won’t you dance with me, Poppy? For old times’ sake?”
“The old times have been over for a while now. No, thank you.”
Percy openly glares at Joe, as if the rejection came directly from him. “Fine. I’ll be seeing you around, Poppy.”
Joe’s arm snakes around my waist as Percy stalks away. “He’s a piece of work, isn’t he?”
“Indeed,” I mutter, shaking my head. But the relief I feel as he disappears into the crowd is undeniable. “I’ll call that a success, though. He’s gone. And he was convinced enough by our dancing to throw a rude comment at you.”
Joe’s expression shifts, flickering with something unreadable for a moment before he finally decides on a stiff smile. “Mission accomplished, then.”
After Percy’s exit, the air in the room feels lighter and easier to breathe.
And yet… I no longer want to be here. I want to take this dress off. I want to kick off my heels and feel the cool sand squishing between my toes. I want to spend time with Joe somewhere that he doesn’t feel like a fish out of water, somewhere that we can both be comfortable.
I guide him over to the reception table so that I can leave a sizable donation, grateful for a tangible reminder of why I came to this event in the first place. There’s something grounding about actually giving something, about making a real difference beyond all the glitz and noise of the night. I wonder if Percy has even bothered to write a check, or if he’s going to spend the rest of the evening throwing a hissy fit and fussing over his stupid tie.
Joe hangs back while I sign my name at the bottom of a check and then hand it over to the foundation representative.
When I’m done, I step back toward him. “I’m ready to go.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
The drive back to the cottage is quiet, the winding road bathed in moonlight. I watch Joe’s hands on the wheel, relaxed but steady. There’s a calmness about him that settles over me like a warm blanket. The gala and all its pressures are behind us now, and the silence, broken only by the hum of his truck’s engine, makes the night feel more like a dream than reality.
As we pull up to the cottage, I catch myself hesitating, not quite ready for the night to end. The memory of us dancing and the weight of our earlier conversation hangs in the air, lingering.
Nobody has ever asked me what I wanted to be before. They’ve always just taken me at face value, never bothered to look any deeper. For my entire life, I’ve been Jack Minton’s tragically orphaned daughter. A pampered princess with a dark backstory, but enough shiny money to make up for the shadows.
Joe doesn’t see me that way. It sounds pathetic, but I think he might be the only person who has ever seen me as a human with my own thoughts and feelings and ambitions. Other than my dad, of course. Deb, too. And Aiden.
The point is, that one small question he asked me meant the world, and I don’t really know how to express that to him. All I know is that I want to keep sharing parts of myself with him, if only because I know it will earn me more pieces of him in turn.
“Do you want to come in for coffee?” I ask.
He hesitates for a moment, then twists the key in the ignition to shut the engine off. “Sure.”
In silence, we walk to the door.
Inside, we head toward the back of the house, where the moonlight-drenched conservatory is one of the only places in the house that serves as an escape from the demolished, half-finished chaos. I slip off my heels once we’re away from the treacherous terrain that dominates the rest of the job site at the moment, relishing the feeling of smooth, unmarred hardwood under my feet.
“I actually just realized something,” I say, biting my lip.
“Hm?” Joe seems a little distracted, glancing around the mostly empty room, still strewn with various paint samples.
“I don’t have any coffee.”
Joe laughs. “Right. You barely have a kitchen.”
“I don’t know how I forgot.”
He shrugs.
Naturally, this means that he doesn’t have any more reason to stay. It’s late, anyway. We may have only spent an hour or so at the gala, but it’s already half past ten, and he probably wants to get back to his own house. His own life.
Despite that, I can’t bring myself to let go of him yet.
“I have an idea for the color scheme in the main living room.”
It’s more of a conversation for Misha, but Joe is nice enough to pretend to look intrigued. “Oh?”
I nod. “It’s, um—well, it’s hard to explain. I think I’d have to show you.”
“Now I’m really curious.”
I slip my heels back on and gesture for him to follow me through the dark house. I make my way through the skeleton that my kitchen has become and open the side door for the garage. Flicking on the lights, I kick off my shoes again and hitch up the long skirt of my dress as I approach the boxes stacked from floor to ceiling. The smooth concrete is cold underfoot, and I probably shouldn’t be doing this barefoot, but I don’t care.
Joe is quiet as I take a few minutes to locate a large box. I ignore his offer of help as I rip off the tape and fling off the cover to reveal a beat-up leather guitar case within. Kneeling down on the floor in front of it, I smile up at Joe.
“It’s my dad’s favorite guitar.”
Joe is wide-eyed. “Isabeau?”
I smile. He really is a fan of Schism. After all this time, he still remembers that my dad named his most beloved instrument after his grandmother, who passed away shortly before I was born.
“The one and only.”
I pat the floor beside me. Joe crouches down slowly, as if he isn’t sure he should be allowed so close to such an artifact.
With practiced fingers, I unlatch the case and carefully lift up the lid.
In a bed of worn, dusty felt the color of the night sky lies a 1961 Gibson Les Paul, restored and customized by my father to be the color of pure onyx. The shade of black is so deep and matte that many journalists used to joke that Jack Minton was making music with nothing but shadows.
“Wow,” Joe breathes.
I reach out and ghost my fingertips along the strings, which are terribly out of tune at this point. I could replace the strings and tune it myself, but Isabeau has laid in this case since the day my father died. For whatever reason, it wasn’t with him when he boarded that plane. He left it in Paris with me and Deb, promising to come back to his three favorite girls by the end of the weekend.
I swallow hard, remembering how it felt to learn why he never came home when he was supposed to. Why none of them did.
“So… you want to paint the living room black?”
Not for the first time, I’m grateful for Joe’s bluntness. A laugh breezes out of me.
“Just one wall, as an accent. The other walls, I want to paint white like the tuning pegs.”
Joe takes a moment to think about it, then begins to nod slowly. “It’s not something I would ever think of, but that could be very cool. Very chic , Poppy.”
I giggle. “Thanks. I don’t know how I thought of it. I almost forgot I had this guitar. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame hounded me for years, begging me to let them put Isabeau on display in their museum. Maybe I should have said yes, since I’m sure the fans would have loved to see it up close, but I couldn’t bring myself to let go of it.”
“Just because your dad was loved by so many millions of people doesn’t mean that you have any obligation to share him with everyone.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
“It must have been strange to have a father like that.”
His comment is soft and inquisitive, an invitation for me to share more, but only if I want to. He’s not prying for information. Not the way that so many people did for so many years.
“It was definitely different,” I say, still gazing at the ebony guitar. “He was larger than life, even when it was just the two of us hanging out in the hotel suite in some random foreign city. He was just this fearless, passionate man who somehow managed to be everything to everyone, and still be my dad at the same time.”
“He sounds like he was a great guy.”
I smile. “I used to sit backstage and watch him perform with earplugs in because I loved watching him transform from the guy who reads me bedtime stories to the creature that shreds guitar strings on stage and screams into microphones in front of thousands. It always fascinated me, that duality. I thought he was the coolest person alive.”
Joe chuckles softly. “He was.”
I lightly punch his knee lightly. “Were you serious before? When you said you were a fan of him?”
He nods, his voice becoming reverent. “I remember first hearing them when I was a young teenager. Maybe middle school? It was like he was singing the things I couldn’t say, even though I was just a kid experiencing childish troubles.”
“Your troubles weren’t childish,” I argue lightly. “You lost someone important to you, too.”
Joe shrugs. “His songs really did help me with that grief, I guess. The loneliness, too. He had such an unapologetic way of describing emotions. I think he was probably one of the only rockstars in existence who was secure enough in his masculinity to admit that he cries.”
I smile wistfully. “I know. He was so easily vulnerable. He’d cry onstage and never cared about wiping away the tears.”
“And another thing is that—even though Schism rose to fame after my dad had already passed, I knew that he would’ve loved their music,” Joe says.
My chest twinges with the desire to reach out for him. To touch him. To hold him. The room feels heavy with shared memories, the weight of our fathers’ absences filling the silence between us. There’s also a sense of comfort in it, though. A sense that we’re not alone in this quiet grief.
“He didn’t just love the music,” I continue. “He loved his fans. He used to say he was singing for them, for the people who needed the music more than he did. You may have just been a kid, but I know he would’ve been so happy to know that you were so moved by his music.”
“That’s nice of you to say.”
“I mean it.” I let out a long breath, frowning down at Isabeau. “Gosh, I really miss him.”
Joe’s hand finds mine a second later. I glance up, caught in his steady, reassuring gaze.
“I miss my dad, too,” he says softly.
He doesn’t need to say anything more than that. He doesn’t need to explain himself. In turn, I know that I don’t need to explain myself to him, either. I nod, squeezing his hand in silent gratitude. We sit there for a little while longer, just two people who understand loss in a way that most people don’t.
Eventually, we make our way back inside, heading to the nest I’ve created for myself in the nook lined with window seats. Instead of excusing himself for the evening, Joe sits down beside me on the blanket-cushioned floor. He loosens his tie and wriggles around for a moment as he discards his tuxedo jacket.
Is this too far? Should we not be sitting so close to each other at such a late hour? Should I not be flicking my gaze down to his lips and wondering what it would be like to kiss him right now?
Who is Joe to me? A friend? An employee? A potential business partner? A guy who is nice enough to lie for my sake? A rough-hewn man who will dance a waltz with me in dazzling candlelight simply because he knew I wanted to?
Instead of broaching the subject of goodbyes, we drift into a comfortable silence. I can feel my eyes growing heavy, the warmth of the room lulling me into a deep sense of peace. The distant sound of the waves whispers across the dunes and slips inside, lulling me into sleepiness as I sink down on the floor. I don’t even care that my dress is tangled around my legs, or that I can’t remember the last time I’ve been so raw and unfiltered in front of another person.
The last things I remember are Joe’s hand resting beside mine and the quiet sounds of us breathing in sync, as if sharing a dream. He’s relaxed, drifting away as easily as I am.