Chapter 1 #3
I pat her hand and pull the girls into another hug. “Of course, and I can’t wait to meet them and have the family grow.”
Elle digs around the alcohol fridge under the counter, popping up a moment later with a chilled bottle of Cristal. Her eyebrows raise to her hairline, and an excited smile curves her lips. Elle loves to celebrate. Most people do.
“Yes!” Kat shouts, grabbing the bottle from my friend, immediately getting to work on the top. Zennie kicks her shoes off and settles into the couch in the living room when Juliette comes back inside, her teeth chattering.
“D&B?” Zennie asks. Juliette gives her a displeased look, but ultimately smirks and confirms, “yeah, it was him.”
“We’re opening another bottle. The celebration continues,” Kat says from her spot in the kitchen, working on the cork with Elle.
Juliette smiles awkwardly. “I actually need to get going.”
Kat’s arms fall lifelessly to her side in what looks like a quiet dispute. “D&B, huh?”
Zennie sighs. “Yup.”
“I was heading out before you got here,” Elle announces, “I can give you a ride.”
“But you drove here, didn’t you Kat?” I ask, recalling her giving Juliette directions.
Juliette looks at me, eyes hooded. “I drove Kat’s car since she had some liquid courage before the proposal.”
Zennie loops her arm through Kat’s and cuddles next to her. “It’s so cute that you were nervous, babe.” Then they bring their faces unusually close, and begin batting their eyelashes while whispering what I think are… sweet nothings.
It’s official: I am jealous of my daughter and her fiancée. Not them, but their love. Their relationship. Their happiness.
“I’ll drive you.” I look at Elle, who gives the most perfected hidden shade I’ve witnessed. She should teach a class. “You’re out of her way,” I explain, loving her for not saying a single word in response.
“We’ll walk out together,” Elle says.
She kisses Kat and Zennie, hugging them both then Juliette next.
I get my coat on, and my shoes, and wait for Juliette to congratulate them again, and say goodbye again.
Elle and I walk out together, and I open the door to her car.
Before she gets inside, less than a foot between us, she wraps her hand around the back of my neck, her breath hanging in a white cloud between us.
“I just don’t want to see you get hurt.”
A knot clogs my throat, and in my periphery, I see Juliette take the steps off the porch, to the curved driveway where my car sits.
“It’s just a ride home,” I tell Elle, who rocks to her toes to press a goodbye kiss to my cheek.
She gets behind the wheel and blinks up at me.
“I’ll call you tomorrow. We’ll schedule lunch this week. ”
I nod, agreeing, and quietly close her door.
She pulls out into the street and is nothing more than fading taillights in a matter of seconds.
Slowly, I tread back to my car where Juliette stands quietly at the passenger door, one hand clinging to her purse and camera straps on her shoulder, the other holding her phone tightly.
I brush past her, reaching for the car door handle. She smells like the same vanilla musk scent she sprayed on in gobs when she and Kat were thirteen. I know she can’t still possibly wear the same body spray she did when she was in junior high school, but I can’t help but ask.
Once behind the wheel, I start the car and face her. She holds her hands to the vent, warming them, her phone resting on top of her leather pants.
“Do you still wear the same perfume?”
She wrinkles her nose. “Same as when?”
I scrub my hand down my face, watching the windshield as patches of white fade to transparent, the defogger working overtime in chilly San Francisco.
“Eighth grade. You used to spray it on by the bottle. Kat, too, but she wore a different scent.” I scratch at the side of my jaw, trying to remember the very same scent that made me sneeze when I’d walk through a cloud of it.
“Sun-Ripened Raspberry,” I remember, “she wore the fruity one. And yours was more–”
“Adult,” she finishes, smiling. “I thought if I picked vanilla musk, I’d attract all sorts of older boys.” For some reason, that explanation does things to the chemistry of my brain.
“Ah, a woman with a plan,” I smile.
Her tongue darts out, sweeping her bottom lip, rendering me privately breathless for a second.
“It was definitely body spray, too, by the way. Not like my parents would have bought me perfume back then.” She smiles, and I know I should keep the conversation going but the moonlight drifts through the newly defrosted windshield and turns her eyes the color of a storming sea.
I do my best to think of Elle, and her words. Because she’s right.
Juliette is not a good idea.
“I’ve graduated, by the way,” Juliette says, filling in the brief silence wherein I have to stare at her and force myself to do the right thing, for the millionth time in my life.
“Hmm?” She looks like a statue in the moonlight. Photoesque. A piece of goddamn art.
Her smile is controlled, and I wonder at that moment if she knows.
Does she know that if she hands me an organic smile that, in this car with just the two of us, I’ll completely and utterly unravel?
Does she realize how her smile alters my brain chemistry, how the sight of her on a bad day turns everything right again?
Does she know that I flip through photos of her in my mind when I want to get high, when I want to feel good?
She lifts her bare shoulder and lets it drop. “I upgraded from drug store body spray to real perfume.”
“Smells nearly the same.” Or maybe that’s just how Juliette smells. Sweet, and fucking perfect.
I clip my lap belt, and she follows suit, adding, “It’s Tom Ford.
It’s called Vanilla Sex.” I caution a playful glance her way, and she erupts into my favorite music–her gentle laughter.
“Even though I’m twenty-six, it still feels wrong to say the word sex around you,” she admits, whispering sex and nothing else.
I shift the car into drive, and head toward her apartment. I helped her move out of her dorm into this very apartment when her parents were out of town, and couldn’t make the trip out and help. But I haven’t been inside since.
Not that I think I’ll be going inside tonight.
“Well, we’re both adults now.” I have to look at the homeless man idling on the corner with an old coffee cup full of change in his hands. It’s a must, because that vanilla scent is rewiring me.
“We are. Well, you always were. But I caught up,” Juliette says, a smile in her tone despite the fact that I don’t glance over to see it. I recognize it. Her happy voice. “And hey, tonight was exciting. Kat and Zen are such a good couple.”
The light flips to red just as I turn to her. Two miles of empty road ahead, no one behind us, it feels like the world is holding its breath. Or maybe just I am.
“It’s the best news,” I say, voice low. “I love Zennie for Kat. They just… fit.”
Juliette nods, soft, and dusk spills across her face, the blue of her sweater catches every fleck of color in her eyes.
Her camera rests at her feet, purse too.
The afterglow of today’s happiness still hums between us, electric and quiet.
She is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, and good god, I hate myself for it but. ..
I am interested in Juliette. In ways I’ve never been allowed. Ways I’m still not sure are appropriate, considering.
Our eyes lock. The blinker ticks, steady and patient.
She exhales a small, rueful laugh. “God. Why does watching them get engaged make me feel like my own life is a blank page?”
I bark out a laugh, because I can’t deny that Kat’s engagement had me reframing my own future, too. I thought she was doing the same when I noticed her staring into her champagne earlier.
“You, too?” she asks through a wild laugh that makes her dimples appear. I love those dimples. What I wouldn’t give to reach across the cab and take her face in my hands and crash my mouth to hers.
I nod. “Oh yeah. Definitely. But I was prepared for this one. See, Sutton and Avery got married last year, and I had to face my singledom then.” I make a show of dusting off my shoulder. “This engagement? Easy, because I already stared down my own mortality last year.”
We both laugh, and I’m only partially kidding. And though I’m sure most humans face their own life plan when someone in their own space makes a big change, I’d like to think she and I are unified in our thoughts tonight.
She sighs. “See, I got away with not feeling this way when Sutton and Avery got married, because I had just gotten into a relationship and it was new and hopeful.”
“Was?” Hope springs eternal at the use of a past tense word.
She shrugs. “I didn’t mean was as in–well, I guess…” she trails off and rights herself in the seat, sitting up a bit taller. “We’re still dating but that new phase is all worn off now. You know how it goes,” she says, but I think she’s trying to convince herself, not me.
“You said new and hopeful. What have you lost hope for?” I ask, emboldened, feeling like I’m overstepping or pushing this time alone a bit further than I ever have before. Not that there have been too many times.
Juliette just stares at me, and after what feels like both too much time and equally not enough, the car behind me honks, and I accelerate in silence through the green light.
A minute later, no cars around, no street lights showing me the soft curve of her throat or the wispy delicateness of her lashes, I try again.
“You’re too young not to have hope,” I say, then repeat the words back to myself in my head.
I find them to be too fatherly, or perhaps too obviously coming from a man who has been painfully interested from afar for years.
But I can’t clean them up or clarify, because Juliette lets her head fall against the headrest, and sighs out the most painful words I’ve heard in years.
“I still have hope.” She smiles, a little sad. “I hope things get better between us.”
Irritation claws through my soul at the mention of Juliette being in a relationship where she isn’t getting what she needs. Who the fuck would have the luck and good fortune of having Juliette, and blow it?
“Can I ask–D&B? What’s that about? I heard Kat and Zen both use the expression.”
She cups her head in her hands and lets out an embarrassed and exasperated sigh. “Wow. So I’ve known you for fifteen years without incident but tonight, after all this time, I’m just using all the inappropriate words around you.”
I arch a brow. “You said sex.” I give her a puzzled expression. “Jesus, does D&B stand for–”
“Dick and Balls,” she says, nodding her head. “That’s what they call my boyfriend because he… has a grouchy side.” I stare at her, but this time I’m envisioning punching a faceless man named Dick and Balls. “His name is Harry, so–”
“Ahhh,” I nod my head. “D&B, that makes more sense.” I turn the heater down, feeling the back of my neck grow hot. Her phone rings, but she stuffs it in her bag unanswered, and the choice to pay attention to me instead of whoever is on the other end of the line sends a small thrill down my legs.
“So why are you still single?” she asks, quickly adding, “you know, because we were just talking about our futures because of Kat and Zen and–”
I hold out my hand to give her frantic backtracking a break. “I knew what you meant. And you should know by now, you couldn’t offend me, Juliette.”
“Phew,” she breathes out, making a show of it, earning another smile from me. “Well, so, why are you single, Mr. Mercer?”
My eyes cut across the shadowy cab to find hers. “Call me Ford. Please.”
Her nostrils flare in the moonlight. “Okay.” She licks her lips. “Ford.”
I park my car in front of her apartment building, and don’t answer her question just yet.
Getting out, I walk around the front and hold her gaze through the windshield before opening her door.
I take her purse and her camera, and place her hand on my arm as I guide her over icy pavement toward her place.
“Love only found me the one time, I guess,” I finally answer, my voice thin from the emotion of the night, and the sheer proximity to her.
At her door, she thanks me, and I stand on the other side until I hear her twist all four locks, and the two chain locks, too. I drive back to my place in silence, somehow foolishly disappointed.
She didn’t invite me in.
Why would she?
I’m just her best friend’s dad.