18. Chapter Eighteen #2
“Go on and get that shirt on. Robert’s in the den, your mother’s floating around here somewhere.” She turns to me and adds it like she’s reminding me to grab a coat. “And go say hello to your future father-in-law, sweetheart. He’s been pacing a hole in my floor for an hour.”
I stop. Dead. “What?”
“Robert is in the den.” She’s already walking. “Go on.”
She’s gone, back into the steam and the noise of her own kitchen, and the worst part is that she isn’t joking. She’s already planning our wedding. I know it.
I turn, and Stanley is watching me. There’s no grin loaded behind his eyes. There’s no punchline. There’s just the two of us, hearing the same sentence at the same time, and neither of us reaching out to correct it.
“Should I put the pie in the fridge?” he asks, smooth as glass, as though my mother hadn’t just married us off in passing.
I take it from him. “Yeah.”
“Son,” my father calls from the hall, and my heart stops cold. Stanley’s grin snaps into place like it was never gone, and he goes loping off after my father like a dog called to heel, and I carry the pie into the kitchen alone.
There’s no room in the first fridge.
“Second fridge, sweetheart,” my mother says, and then she catches sight of what’s in my hands. “Oh — did you make a pie?”
“Stanley did,” I croak out.
The second lie of the day. The first was walking in here at all.
“He did?” She presses a hand to her chest, delighted by him. “I can’t wait to try it.”
I put the pie into my mother’s second refrigerator, and I get out of the kitchen before she can see my face.
Robert Ermington is on the couch in the den with a glass of something dark, and he stands the second I come through the door.
“Aspen.”
“Mr. Ermington.”
“Please. Robert.”
“Robert.”
He opens his arms, and after a moment, I step into them, and he hugs me the way a man hugs his son’s girlfriend for the first time — gentle, brief, a little careful with me, like I might be fragile — and then he holds me back at arm’s length.
“You look well.”
“Thank you.”
“Stan around?”
“He’s changing.”
“Good.” He gestures at the couch, and because I don’t know what else to do, I sit, and he lowers himself into the chair across from me.
“I wanted a minute with you before the day runs away from us.”
My stomach goes down an elevator shaft.
“Your father and I have been friends a long time. Longer than you’ve been alive. I knew you before you were born.” He looks at the glass, then at me. “So when I heard about the two of you, it was the best news I’d had in years.”
Great.
“I’m not going to put weight on it. You’re young.
You should just enjoy each other and let it be whatever it’s going to be.
” His eyes don’t move off mine. “But I wanted to say it to you once, in a room with nobody else in it. You have a home in the Ermington family. Today, and after today. Whatever the two of you decide down the road. You have always had one with us, Aspen. I just wanted to make that clear.”
I want to cry. I open my mouth to do the only decent thing left to me — to tell this kind man, before he gets any further out, that none of it is real —
“Oh —” I start.
A woman laughs in the next room, bright and close, and it stops me dead.
I close my mouth. I swallow the truth back down where it lives. “Thank you, Robert.” I make my face into something that holds. “That means a lot.”
See. I can do this.
“Aspen, sweetheart.” Margaret Ermington is in the doorway, and my heart goes off like a drum, but I smile.
“Mrs. Ermington.”
“Margaret, honey.” She crosses to me and folds me into a hug that smells like expensive shampoo and lavender, and she holds it for four full seconds, and when she lets go, she keeps her hands on my shoulders and looks at me the way her husband looked at me. “Let me look at you.”
I hold still.
She looks. She nods, slow and satisfied. “You’re sharp.” A pause, weighted, like she’s awarding something. “I told my husband. I said it twice on the plane.”
I blink. I’d been told this was coming. I’d been told it was the highest compliment she gives. I didn’t think of what I would say back.
“Thank you, Margaret.”
“You’re welcome, honey.”
And then Stanley walks in.
He stops short when he sees his mother’s hands on me — but I’m the one who loses my breath, because he’s in the Navy Oxford now, sleeves rolled, tie hanging loose around an open collar.
I have genuinely never once, in all our time knowing each other, seen him look like this, like a grown man somebody dressed on purpose, and I have to look at the floor for a second.
I’m still finding my feet when his father shatters the quiet with a clap that cracks across the room like a slap shot off the boards.
“There he is!” Robert is up and out of his chair, arms flung wide, bearing down on his son. “Bring it in, son.”
They’re the same height, the two of them, and they crash together and swat each other’s backs.
Over Stanley’s shoulder, I’m fairly sure I see Robert’s mouth moving low against his ear.
Then they break apart and launch into a handshake that has, very clearly, been rehearsed: clasp, slap, knuckles, a forearm thing, an elbow thing, a sound a grown man should not be able to make with his mouth, and a final double point at each other like they’ve just closed a business deal.
“Still got it,” Robert chuckles.
“Never lost it.” Stanley’s laughing, and it’s a real laugh, loose and young.
Margaret beams at the pair of them, and then she catches me watching, and my nerves spike, but she only smiles and turns to fuss at her boy, reaching up to pat his cheek with one hand. “Always so handsome.”
“It’s the suit.”
“It’s your face.”
“Mom. Be honest with me.” He bends down to peer at her. “Are you getting shorter?”
“You grew.” She bats at his arm, laughing.
“No.” He shakes his head, deeply concerned. “You’re shrinking. We should get you measured. I’ll find a chart.” And then he straightens, and his eyes come up and land on me, and the grin sharpens to a point. “So. You’ve met my girlfriend, then.”
Heat floods my whole face. I shake my head at him — small, pleading, don’t — because I do not want him to do whatever he is about to do.
He clocks it instantly. He grins wider.
“Mom. Dad.” He crosses the room toward me in two long strides.
“Ermington,” I mutter under my breath. He’s broad enough now that his shoulders block my entire face from his parents’ view.
He leans down into my line of sight and mouths, “Sell it.”
And then loops behind me, plants both big hands on my shoulders, and walks me forward a half-step like he’s wheeling out a prize on a game show. “This,” he announces, “Mom, Dad — is Aspen Linwood. The girl of my dreams.”
My heart slams against my ribs as I try to arrange my face into a woman who finds him charming and not like the most annoying man to walk this planet.
He’s acting as if they haven’t known me my whole life for God’s sake.
His mother is beaming, and his father has the full Ermington grin locked across his face, and I just — I go full lobster. Absolutely cooked.
“Oh —” Margaret presses a hand to her chest, lighting up. “Remember when you kept that picture of her —”
Stanley’s hands clamp down over my ears. “Mom. Not now.”
Margaret throws her head back and laughs. There’s that infamous laugh I’ve been dreading. Once she starts, she doesn’t typically stop.
Stanley says, “We do not declassify material within five minutes of meeting my girlfriend. There are boundaries.”
He’s left my ears uncovered just enough to hear every word of it, which I am fully certain is on purpose, because Stanley Ermington has never successfully hidden a single thing in his entire life. When I tip my head back to look up at him, his ears have gone pink.
“Aw,” I say, soft, watching it happen. “You kept a picture of me?”
“I plead the fifth.”
“Oh, he absolutely —” Margaret starts.
And Stanley is gone, one stride across to her, an arm slung around her shoulders, steering her toward the noise of the gathering party. “Okay. Mingling. Big day. Many relatives. Aspen needs to get changed — isn’t that right, babe?”
The word lands warm in the middle of my chest. I nod.
“Perfect.” He points two fingers at his own eyes, then turns them on his mother, surveillance. “I’m going to get my parents under control. You go do your thing.”
Upstairs, my childhood bedroom is exactly how I left it. My carry-on is tucked just inside the door. I close it behind me and finally breathe. This room is going to be my safe zone.
I notice Stanley’s duffel isn’t anywhere in here, which means my father set him up somewhere, and that’s a relief.
I change into a black square-neck top, a brown plaid skirt, and the boots I find in the back of my closet. I lose myself for too long in the clothes of a girl I used to be, and then I sit at my old vanity and curl my hair. I’m halfway through when there’s a knock at the door.
“Come in,” I call out.
Stanley’s head appears in the gap.
“Hi,” I say to his reflection. “Come in.”
He lets the door swing, and his whole frame fills it.
“You okay?” I ask. “I’m nearly done.”
“I’m good. Your dad sent me up to collect you.”
“I’ve been listening to that doorbell go off for twenty minutes straight.”
“Yeah. Everyone’s arriving.” He leans a shoulder into the doorframe and folds his arms. “I found myself in three separate conversations at once down there, and you’d be proud of me. Not one of them was about hockey.”
“Oh.” I deflate a little, ashamed of myself. “I take the rule back. I was being ridiculous about it.”
“I figured you’d lower your weapons the second your mother told me what a beautiful pie I baked.
” He pushes off the frame and crosses to me, and my breath catches as I watch him do it in the mirror.
He sets both hands on the back of my chair and grins at me through the glass.
I can smell him from here, clean and warm and too close.
“It’s going to be a fun night, Linwood. It’s all downhill from the pie. ”
I take another strand of hair and wind it around the iron. Then I hold his eyes in the mirror, and I make the decision before I’ve finished thinking it.
“I’m following your lead tonight.”
His head tilts. “You are?”
“Yes.”
“Well, if that’s the case, then come on.”
I finish my hair and look in the mirror.
“Are you ready?” he asks.
I inhale, looking at myself. I grab my brush and brush out the curls. I put on my lip gloss and set it back down on the vanity.
“I don’t think I’m ready.”
He grins. “Come on. It’s time.”