Chapter Twenty-One Bram
Chapter Twenty-One
Bram
Time for the big reveal!” Sloane calls from the glassed-in walkway leading out to my greenhouse.
I look up from where I’ve been helping the twins harvest basil for dinner to see Fern bouncing behind her honorary aunt, the apples of her cheeks a bright red and a big smile on her face.
She comes in front of me and the twins and gives a little spin, making her newly shortened hair fly out around her face.
The twins clap and then a solemn Berry throws scraps of torn basil at her, like aromatic runway confetti.
“What do you think, Dad?” Fern asks me, and I open my mouth to speak, and then find that my throat hurts a little, and then take a minute.
“I think you look beautiful and so grown-up,” I finally manage to say.
With her hair cut away from her face, I can see her sparkling eyes, the almost-adult shape of her features, so much like her mother’s.
She has Sara’s eyebrows and forehead and a little bit of my nose and she’s my baby and also she’s going to leave for college before I know it and—
“Aw, Dad, don’t cry!” Fern pulls me into a hug. She smells like a salon only Sloane Saint James could afford. “It’s just a haircut.”
“I know, I know.” My voice is gruff while I sniffle into her hair. “You look very pretty and I hope Simon shits his ileum* out when he sees you.”
“Actually, maybe we don’t want Simon to shit his ileum.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, so he wrote me this letter after I won our bet and I guess he started going to therapy after his parents separated over the summer and apparently he learned about this thing called weaponized incompetence and he apologized for using that to manipulate me into doing basically all of his work for him.”
“That’s a . . . good thing?” I venture.
“You need to be careful with the guys who overuse therapy vocabulary,” Sloane warns.
“Oh, we’re definitely not getting back together.
Ever. But I did ask him if he would stay on as copresident.
Plus, he’s so good at doing the public-facing stuff like talking at pep rallies.
” She wrinkles her nose. “Maddie said I’ve got the upper hand now and I should call all the shots including making him do my bitch work. ”
“Your bitch work?” I ask.
She nods. “Yeah, all the stuff I don’t want to do. And pep rallies are at the top of the bitch work list.”
“As long as you’re happy, sweetie. Just let me know if I need to change my stance on him shitting out his ileum anytime soon. And thank you,” I say over Fern’s head to Sloane.
Sloane’s expression turns a little devious. “You’ll thank me even more in a minute. Girls, do you want to go upstairs with me while we put makeup on Fern and see what look suits her best?”
There’s another cloud of bruised basil confetti, chants of glitter gloss glitter gloss, and then I’m alone in the greenhouse.
Well.
Not entirely alone.
Because coming through the walk is a brunette with a dark chin-length bob, bangs cut with an architect’s precision, and lipstick so red it makes everything around her seem colorless.
And the outfit she was wearing before—camel trousers and a button-down—have been replaced with a leather skirt that swings around her knees and a slouchy sweater that hints at a silk tank top underneath.
It’s still stylish, still TV-ready, but it’s Maddie too, sharp and crisp and definitive.
And those bloodred lips . . .
So fucking bratty.
I’m staring at those lips with hooded eyes as she reaches me and stops.
“Well, Professor?” she asks in a smoky voice.
“Full marks, top of the class,” I breathe, sliding my hand into her hair and leaning down. I don’t want to mess up her lipstick, so I press my lips to the underside of her jaw. I savor the soft warmth there, and the subtle hint of jasmine underneath the scents of expensive salon.
“You look amazing.” I speak the words against her neck, hoping I can speak them into her blood, into the air filling her lungs. “Gorgeous. Dangerous. Clever as a snake and bright as a star.”
“Do I look like I could run for office?”
I pull back so I can take in the full effect of her again. Green eyes, red lips, the flawless hair that looks like it’s been cut from the autumn shadows themselves.
“You look like the world belongs at your feet,” I tell her, and I mean it.
She stares up at me. My hand is still in her hair and I drop it to her chest, feeling the warmth from her skin under her sweater.
I want to figure out how to cold-wash and line-dry that sweater so that it stays soft for years.
I want to feed her an orange from the small tree in the corner of the greenhouse.
I want to sit her on this potting bench and push my fingers inside of her while she tells me every plan in her shrewd, feline mind.
“I don’t think you should look at me like that,” she whispers.
I can see my reflection in her blown pupils. “Like what?”
“Like you want to be the one to put the world at my feet.”
For a moment, we don’t move. And then she steps back, her bright red bottom lip tucked between her teeth for a single millisecond and then released again. I can see the pulse pounding in her throat.
“You don’t want me to look at you like that?” I ask to clarify.
She hesitates. “I don’t want to want you looking at me like that.”
I flex the hand that had been pressed against her chest just a moment ago. It feels cold.
“When you look at me like you want to use those giant shoulders to ram people out of my way, I get this—” She gestures to her chest, fluttering her fingers.
“That. Whatever that is, that’s what I feel.
But then immediately on its heels, I feel .
. .” She trails off. Her hand is flat against her stomach now, like there’s a knot under her ribs and it’s been tied too tightly and now something essential inside her is choked off. Bloodless.
And now I have a knot of my own. Because I’ve known what this is from the beginning—she wrote it out on my glass board, for fuck’s sake—I knew what I agreed to.
Just sex, nothing else.
And it seemed like a good idea at the time.
I have the kids and work, and I haven’t dated since the divorce, and well, if I’m honest with myself, maybe I thought nothing else was all that life had left to give me.
I’d had a pretty good marriage; I had good, adorable kids; I had tenure and moss grants. What more was I allowed to want?
But over the last few weeks, the idea of more has crept in, the way autumn creeps in, under the heat, under the soil, until one day you wake up and the air is keen and the trees are burning orange and gold.
I woke up one day and wanted Maddie grading in my office as much as I wanted her bent over my desk, and I wanted her talking politics to me as much as I wanted her naked and wet in my lap.
I wanted cuddling and complaining and helping at the Fall Frenzy and her meeting the Andromedas for real and for the things we shared to spore like moss and spread and spread until everything was covered in a soft, living blanket of more.
I don’t say any of this, though. Because she doesn’t want it, because it’s not what we agreed to.
Because I abruptly feel foolish and . . . and old. Every bit a man infatuated with a younger woman.
And I don’t need to say it, because Maddie guesses.
“Bram, I just got out of a relationship that defined me.”
“I know.”
“It ruined my life.” Her eyes search mine. “I don’t know if I can express to you how rare the thing between you and Sara is; if you can appreciate how unlike your divorce this breakup was for me. And I can’t do it again. I can’t.”
I brush off the reflexive sting that she thinks anything between us—good or bad—would resemble her experience with that entitled jackoff. I carefully sequester the pain blooming in my chest. Instead, I simply say, “I know, Madelyn.”
“And I can’t have scandals if I want to start playing the game,” she says, and now she’s turning away a little, nervously sanding her fingertips over the wooden potting bench.
“I can’t be twelve years deep into a political career and have the press find out about that one time I fucked a dad while I was his nanny. ”
“Of course not.”
She swivels her head to look at me and swallows hard. “Isn’t the sex good enough? What we’re doing? I don’t want to change any of that. I just want things to be clear between us, that’s all.”
I haven’t moved all this time, and I think it’s because if I move, I will rip something vital, like an artery, or my lungs will tear open like paper, and I won’t be able to inhale ever again.
But if I stand still, if I stay right here, then I can say the right things.
I can hold on to our agreement and give her what she needs.
I can sound level and certain when I reaffirm that yes, the sex is good enough, that no, I don’t want anything more.
But I take too long to answer, even standing still, and Maddie spins back toward me, something like panic in her face. “Bram? I don’t want to stop. That’s not what I’m saying at all. I want this. Please, don’t think that I’m trying to end things.”
“You just don’t want me to look at you like I want to give you the world.
” I say it gently, a little teasingly, and it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, acting as if this doesn’t hurt right now.
As if I’m capable of screwing her like nothing’s changed, like of course I’m happy merely to fuck her while I scissor off my own feelings and prune away any unsanctioned desire for more.
Relief ripples through her, and she approaches me again, taking my hand, her entire expression one of see, I knew you’d understand.
“It’s so good, what we’re doing, right?” she murmurs, pressing my hand to her cheek.
“It’s perfect. We both get off, and no one has to work for it. No one has to hurt for it.”
No one but me.
But I accept it. I won’t be petulant or covet what I’m not allowed to have. I give her the kindest smile I can. “It’s very good, Maddie,” I assure her, even as the pain in my chest radiates down to the soles of my feet and out to my fingertips. “It’s so good.”
She smiles back, beams even, those lush lips a shock of scarlet in my greenhouse, where even my roses don’t get that red. “Plus,” she teases, “you still have to teach me how to run a classroom.”
I drop a kiss to her forehead and then step back, pull my hand away, under the pretense of cleaning up the dead basil parade the twins threw for Fern.
In just a minute, I’ll be fine, and by tomorrow, I’ll have buried this somewhere deep, grown roots around it, trapped it somewhere where it can never see light again.
Just sex, nothing else.
“I have plenty more lessons in mind, Ms. Kowalczk,” I say with a decent stab at flirting.
And then I stoop to sweep up the basil, damp and dark around the torn edges, and avoid the jasmine plant in the corner as I go to throw it all away.