Chapter Eighteen Bram
Chapter Eighteen
Bram
I’m humming as I carefully Jenga the month’s Costco run into the back of my car. Applesauce, Pirate’s Booty, enough bananas to make Sir Joseph Paxton wet his button-fly trousers, and then a box of Pocky sticks the size of a small shipping container for Fern.
I also picked up a box of plums for Maddie, because she steals them like a William Carlos Williams narrator, and also I enjoy watching her eat them very much.
Just this morning, she took a bite out of a ripe, juicy plum at a stop sign as we were driving to campus together, and I stared at her mouth with such undisguised hunger that she unbuckled her seat belt, shifted to her knees, and . . .
Well. Thank God for the empty parking lot behind the basketball arena.
I can still feel the soft stretch of her lips around me.
I’ve progressed to whistling as I push the awkwardly wide cart into a corral, and I’m still whistling when I feel my phone pulse in my pocket. I pull it out to see a text from Joey to the Andromeda Club group chat.
Joey Fucking Kemp: Emergency Andromeda Club meeting. Bram’s House. Now.
What???
NO.
I duck into my car and furiously try to tap out a response as the chat blows up.
Alessandro: I’M HERE IN MOUNT ASTRA I CAN FINALLY COME OMG
Leo: We are aware how sticky Bram’s house is, correct?
Sloane: I get off work in just a few minutes!
Sara: If my signal is good enough, I want to call in to the meeting!
Leo: . . . from the glacier?
Me: Guys. Wait. We can’t have an emergency meeting at my house.
Joey Fucking Kemp: It has to be your house, Bram!!! Alessandro and Leo live in KC and no one wants to drive out to Lucien’s weird compound.
I pause. This is true. Per the divorce arrangements, Lucien Méchant is giving Sloane four months of sole occupancy at his giant place outside KC, Persimmon Hill, but it’s a drive from Mount Astra, and also it’s really difficult to achieve casual human connection in a house with a dressage arena out back.
Me: Let’s meet at YOUR house, then.
Joey Fucking Kemp: It can’t be my house, dude! Riley is pissed at me and told me she couldn’t look at my face tonight!
Oh, fuck me. Ugh. Fine.
Me: In that case, emergency meeting at my house, but I have to get the twins to bed at eight. And no one is allowed to eat Fern’s Pocky.
Leo: Is Cole McKenney coming?
Leo: That’s right, he’s not.
Leo: Because he isn’t real.
“AND THAT’S HOW we’re related to the Medicis,” Dr. Alessandro Ottaviano is saying as I stride in from the back door to find Maddie perched on an ottoman and staring raptly at him as he holds court in my armchair.
He’s wearing a three-piece suit, shoes from a brand I can’t pronounce, and has his ankle propped on his opposite knee in a posture of erudite elegance.
He is also inexcusably handsome, with a long nose, thick brows, and smile lines bracketing a sculpted mouth that wouldn’t look out of place on an ancient statue.
He has russet-brown skin, tight curls that he’s wearing a little longer these days, and glinting dark brown eyes that Maddie can’t seem to stop staring at.
He throws her a quick wink after name-dropping the Medicis, and she beams back at him. I am abruptly grumpy.
“And of course, we’re still the princes of Ottaviano—”
“Okay, okay, that’s enough story time for now,” I cut in before Maddie can absorb that Alessandro is (very, very conditionally) sort of royalty. “Maybe you should check on the twins—”
“Bram, is Sara’s dog out? I need to run back to the car to grab the Perrier,” says Sloane from behind me in the kitchen.
“Hester’s upstairs watching a movie with the girls,” Maddie volunteers, and Sloane nods and turns back to the door.
Alessandro eyes me from beneath his long lashes, as if wanting to study my reaction, and then leans toward Maddie with a lift of one of his adept surgeon’s hands.
I step forward to block her from seeing his handsomeness and undisputedly talented fingers, and then my front door flies open to reveal Leo holding a bottle of scotch, and—for no reason that I can immediately discern—a pumpkin.
“I see I’m tardy,” he says. Then he sees Alessandro and stops. Looks down at his own pewter-blue two-piece and brown shoes. “You look better than me today. Fuck you.”
“I always look better than you,” Alessandro says, glancing down at his perfectly manicured nails.
“Bold words from a man who wears blue pajamas to work.” Leo sniffs and then walks over to me and hands me the pumpkin. “Here’s a pumpkin,” he says, unnecessarily, and then moves past me into the kitchen with no further explanation.
Torn between setting the pumpkin somewhere pumpkins should go and making it so Alessandro can’t impress Maddie anymore, I hover for a second or two, then decide to walk over to Maddie while holding the heavy orb.
Sloane opens the back door again with a nudge of her hip, carrying a cardboard flat of glass Perrier bottles that thunk and rattle on their way to the kitchen island.
“Where did you just find enough Perrier to supply an emergency Andromeda meeting?” I ask, instead of the real question, which is Why didn’t you bring a cardboard flat of Diet Coke instead?*
Sloane freezes, like I’ve just asked her where she scores molly. “Uh,” she says. “Um. Just a place.”
“Just a place?”
“A place. A normal place. Like most people have. You know, normal.”
Before I can follow up on this, the front door opens again. This time to reveal a tearful Joey, who is carrying nine pizza boxes.
“Hell is empty!” Alessandro says cheerfully.
“Joey, that is a lot of pizza,” I observe.
He sniffles, tears running into his beard. “Why are you holding a pumpkin?”
“It’s Leo’s fault.”
“You’re supposed to bring your host flowers, Joey,” Leo says, coming back from the kitchen with a glass of scotch. “Which you’d know if you weren’t born amongst the proletariat.”
“But you didn’t bring me flowers,” I say to Leo. “You brought me a pumpkin.”
Leo takes a sip of his drink. “It’s seasonal.”
“It’s a squash,” Alessandro says.
Still holding nine pizzas, Joey says, “Pretty sure a pumpkin is a vegetable?”
“Botanically speaking, there’s no such thing as a vegetable,” I inform them for the ten millionth time since college.
Groans erupt all over the room.
“A pumpkin is a fruit—a berry,” I say over their collective complaining. “And it’s really a berry, unlike raspberries, for example, which are aggregate fruits. Aggregate fruits are easy to confuse with multiple fruits, by the way, but the difference—”
“Someone stop him before he gets to plant ovaries,” says Leo.
The only other person in the room who had to remember the word eukaryote after graduation, Alessandro says, “Wait, I’m enjoying this. Do drupelets next.”
“Will someone help me with the pizzas?” Joey asks in a disconsolate voice, and Maddie is the first to move, going over to take the stack of boxes.
“I’ll bring some pizza up to the girls,” she says as she passes me. “And I’ll let Fern know there’s some here when she comes home from the newspaper meeting.”
“Thank you,” I say, and then quieter: “I’ll come up and check on the girls in thirty minutes. You’ll be done working then.”
I’ve learned that Maddie struggles with maintaining one particular boundary, and that’s walking away from work (which I understand when work follows you around and asks you to read an Elephant and Piggie book just oooone mooooore tiiiime) but it’s cleanest and best for everyone if we keep Maddie’s childcare hours carefully delineated from her non-childcare hours.
I asked her to move in so that she wouldn’t be shivering in a truck stop parking lot, not because I was trying to Sarah, Plain and Tall her.
Anyway, I’ve also learned it’s easier if I simply tell her she’s not allowed to work any longer, and so that’s what I’ve started doing.
If she needs someone to boss her into taking time for herself—someone to be the bad guy so she doesn’t feel guilty doing things like eating, showering, sleeping, et cetera—then I’m happy to be the asshole.
The asshole who makes sure she takes care of herself.
Plus, I would be lying if I said that it doesn’t turn me on a little bit how squirmy she gets when I tell her what to do.
Like right now, when she ducks her head to hide her blush as she answers, “Yes, Bram.” I want to press my lips to the blush, but I can’t, because Joey Fucking Kemp has turned my living room into a nest of snakes and pizza. And they don’t know about . . . well, they don’t know about any of it. Us.
“Good girl,” I murmur approvingly, and Maddie’s cheeks flame even brighter.
She does dare a glance over to the others in the living room, where Alessandro is trying to steal Leo’s scotch while Joey is looking on with tears running freely into his wet beard.
“Is he going to be okay?” she whispers, concerned.
How to explain? “Joey cries when the Chiefs lose a game. And when they win a game. He cries when his girls bring him art from school. Once he cried because he saw a very tall tree.”
Maddie, whom I’m beginning to suspect only cries once annually, blinks at the giant bearded man wiping his face. “Oh.”
“He’ll be fine. We’ll get some pizza in him and then we’ll figure out what he and Riley fought about and then everything will be okay. You’ll see.”
“AND SO NOTHING will ever be okay again,” wails Joey twenty minutes later.
We’re circled in my living room, Sara on a phone propped against a bottle of Perrier, and Joey on my couch while Leo leans against the wall near my office, freshly en-scotched. Alessandro is still in my armchair, Sloane is next to Joey, and I’m sitting on the floor.
There’s a moment of profound silence as we all process what Joey’s just told us.
“Well,” Sara finally says from the phone. “This is very triggering for me.”
“And me,” I add.
“Another Kemp baby,” drawls Leo. “What does this make? Seven?”