Chapter 31 Rose-Colored Boy
Rose-Colored Boy
Jamie
Eve gasped as they stepped into Jamie’s apartment, practically hissing as she said, ““There’s someone here.” The alarm in her voice as she stopped in her tracks sent a small chill down his spine.
With Jack asleep in his arms, he couldn’t maneuver as well as he would’ve liked, but he intuitively cradled Jack’s head and jumped in front of Eve until he could view the culprit: Lucy, asleep on his couch.
“Oh.” He sighed, relieved.
“?‘ Oh ’?” Eve said. “You were expecting company at this hour?”
“She isn’t company,” he muttered. He went to the couch to wake his ex, and more to the point, ask what the hell she was doing there. He looked to Eve as Lucy stirred. “You mind taking him upstairs?” he whispered to her.
Eve looked like she wanted to decline, but she motioned to retrieve Jack just as Lucy sat up.
“I am obviously here to take him with me,” Lucy inserted into their exchange. “But I’m glad you feel so comfortable having someone I’ve never met haul off with my son.”
Eve immediately backed off, and Jamie could only look at her apologetically. “I’m gonna take this chicken upstairs instead,” she said of the Popeye’s they’d stopped for on the way home.
“I’m sorry,” Lucy said. “I’ve just been sitting here for four hours, and I’m a little frustrated.” She stood from her seat to offer Eve her hand. “I’m Lucy.”
Eve replied with a terse smile. “Eve.”
“It’s nice to finally put a face to the name I’ve heard so much about.”
“Likewise.” Eve glanced at Jamie again. “I’ll be upstairs?”
Jamie nodded. But he felt something like butterflies when she gently rubbed his back and offered a quick kiss to his cheek, and then Jack’s.
“Don’t eat all the red beans and rice,” he joked as she passed.
He sobered when he returned his attention to Lucy, standing there glaring.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. “I told you I’d drop him off in the morning. ”
“You told me when?”
“When I texted to tell you we were gonna get home late.”
“Oh, so then not at all.”
“What?”
“I received no such texts. Or I wouldn’t be here, Jamie.”
He found that hard to believe, but he didn’t feel like going through his phone to prove his point. Maybe it didn’t go through. Another reason to hate his iPhone. “Fine. Miscommunication, I guess.”
“Oh, how the tables turn,” Lucy said with a smirk.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“You ripped me a new one when I was late once—”
“Once?”
“Yes, once , without calling. Fourth of July. Now, here we are, you waltz in here at midnight with no apologies, no good excuses…”
Unwilling to let her win the argument, Jamie pulled his phone from his jacket and went to their text thread, where, indeed, he’d typed out an informative and apologetic message about their delay and suggestion that she keep Jack for a full week when they returned from Paris.
Except he never sent it. “Shit.” He inhaled, then exhaled, working up the volition to apologize to Lucy, despite her haughtiness. “I’m…sorry about that.”
“So maybe now you can admit that it’s entirely possible to get caught up in the moment and forget to properly communicate?”
“I don’t think you wanna start lecturing me about what’s proper.” He was trying to keep his voice low for Jack, but he could see this conversation devolving into an argument quickly if they weren’t careful. “You need anything else?”
Lucy stared at him for several beats, as if she were trying to anticipate his response before she could ask him anything. “She’s pretty,” she said.
“Very,” he agreed, wondering where this was going.
“Where’d you meet her?”
“What do you want ?”
“Only the same courtesy that’s been extended to you. I shouldn’t have had to hear about her from my son,” Lucy said. “She shouldn’t have been a surprise to me.”
“You’re right,” Jamie said. “I should’ve given you a heads-up.”
“Makes me wonder what kind of woman would be around someone’s child without meeting the mother anyway.”
“I know you don’t believe in boundaries,” Jamie said, gesturing for her to take Jack, “but I’m drawing one here. You don’t get to talk about her.”
“Say what you will—”
“Lucy, I’m serious. Your problem is with me. Leave it there.”
Lucy seemed taken aback, but she complied. “Okay.”
But before she could leave, Jamie decided to go ahead and rip off the Band-Aid since they were already in the thick of it anyway.
“Listen, I was gonna talk to you about this in the morning, but…I wanted you to know that I talked to a Realtor. And in the new year, we’re putting the house up for sale. ”
Lucy laughed. It was a sarcastic laugh, sounding derisive to his exhausted mind. “Wow.”
“You and Tyler are more than welcome to buy it from me, but I think it’s for the best at this point.”
“I know I encouraged you to move on with your life, but I gotta say, I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known this would be the result.”
Jamie grimaced. “You wouldn’t have encouraged me to move on if you’d known I’d actually do it?”
“No. If I’d known you’d start acting like an…asshole,” she whispered the expletive as if Jack wouldn’t hear it with his ear all of three inches from her mouth.
“We agreed on December back in June. It’s December,” he reminded her. “I do deserve to be able to move on.”
“And what about Jack?”
“I agreed to this because uprooting him from everything familiar felt cruel. But he’s had a year here. I think he’s okay. Children are resilient.” As the words left his mouth, Jamie realized he was parroting his own mother. Though, to be fair, she wasn’t always wrong.
“Unbelievable,” Lucy sighed. “You spring this on me at Christmas? You want me to move when I’m having a baby ?”
“A new baby seems like a good time for a new beginning,” he said sincerely.
If they’d had the money when she was pregnant with Jack, they would’ve been in Brentwood a long time ago.
“I’ll email you the Realtor’s information.
She can help you find a place if you don’t wanna buy this one.
I made sure she had some nice properties. ”
“I guess I don’t really have a choice here.”
Jamie internally scolded himself for finding mild amusement in her frustration. “I think three months should be sufficient? Or you can talk to Tyler and get back to me.”
“Stop acting like you care what he thinks,” Lucy said. “If you wanna be a dick, just own it.”
“I’m not being a dick. I’ve bent over backwards to be accommodating to you. Against the advice of everyone I know. Even my lawyer said I was way too kind. Like I said, Luce. I just wanna move on. And hopefully never feel the way you made me feel again.”
Lucy bit her lip and nodded as she inched toward the exit. A slow simper took the place of whatever sarcastic gibe she surely wanted to send his way. “Good night then, Jamie.”
Jamie waited until she was on the elevator before pulling off his jacket and heading upstairs to join Eve. He found her straddling his lounger, plowing through her chicken strips like she hadn’t eaten in a few days. He grinned at the sight.
“Sorry about that,” he said. “It was my fault. I didn’t send the message.”
“Everything okay?” she asked, not looking up from her food.
“Yeah.” He took a seat in front of her and rummaged through their selection to find the red beans. “She’s just such a fuckin’ hypocrite,” he went on. “If I’d done half the shit she’s pulled, she would’ve been asking for sole custody. And I would’ve deserved it.”
“Well…” Eve exhaled, rubbing her thumb against her index and middle fingers to rid them of crumbs. “You let her get away with it, so what do you expect?”
Her tone was on the acerbic side, which left Jamie frowning as he stared at her empty box. Had the woman he spent the day with already disappeared? “Excuse me?”
“I mean she probably cheated on you because she knew she could.” When he looked up at her, stung, she pulled back on the throttle. “I’m sorry. That was mean.”
He tried to shake off the insult, because it had been a perfect day until then, and he knew the effect Lucy could have on people. “It was.”
“I just don’t like the way she treats you.”
“So your solution is to match her energy?”
“I’m sorry ,” Eve repeated, her bare foot reaching out to touch his knee.
She smiled at him, much of the tension in the room ebbing with it.
“I’m frustrated that our first meeting went that way.
I wish I’d been more prepared, I guess. And part of me hoped, despite everything you’ve told me, that I’d like her?
” Eve’s stare flitted downward as she shook her head again.
“She’s Jack’s mom, so I didn’t want to hate her. ”
“It’s okay if you do,” Jamie said.
“Stop.”
“Don’t let her ruin today,” he said seriously. “She doesn’t deserve that kind of power.”
Eve nodded but still seemed unconvinced. She plastered on a smile anyway and reached out to touch his cheek—the way she often did when she was trying to be soft. “I’m gonna miss you,” she said. “You know that, right?”
“You say it like we’re gonna be apart forever. It’s only a week.”
“I know. But I’ve been dreading it. Being without you is bad enough; adding my parents to the equation?” She released a sharp exhale.
“Are they that difficult?”
“I generally know how to be around them. I usually shrink myself to keep the peace. But the last time we spoke, I hung up on them. And that was five months ago, so…”
Jamie made a face as he absorbed the weight of such a thing. He’d also hung up on his mom, not so long ago, out of contempt, but even now, he wouldn’t do such a thing. “Just remember Paris is waiting on the other side of it,” he said.
“So long as they don’t drive me to a psych ward first.”
“They can’t be that bad,” Jamie said. When Eve eyed him, he ceded that she would know her parents better than he did. “Well, how do you think they’ll feel about us?”
“I try not to think about it,” she said, shaking her head. “I doubt I’ll tell them.”
Jamie tried not to be insulted or let his doubts swallow him whole. Based on what little she’d shared, it even made some sense. “Whatever gets you through.”
She smiled sympathetically. “It’s not you. It’s them.”
“I believe you.”
She leaned across the distance between them to offer a kiss, surely meant to appease him, and the bar was low enough that it actually did. “I love you,” she said, her brown eyes searching his. For what, he didn’t know. He hoped she didn’t wonder whether he felt the same.
But he was halfway waiting for her to realize her mistake. He wasn’t surprised that she loved him—she expressed as much in a lot of big and small ways, which was why he never expected to hear it out loud. He liked when she surprised him.
“I love you, too,” he said hoarsely, unable to contain the smile that wanted to burst past his lips.
Eve smiled, too, the one that showed all her teeth and the small dimple in her right cheek.
He’d seen it many times at Dollywood. That smile had quickly become one of his favorite things in the world, sitting alongside Jack’s laugh and random phone calls from Casey.
He quietly nodded to himself as he thought about what a good day it had been. What a good six months it had been. And he liked to think the next year would be even better.
In just a week, they would get to begin their lives together.