Chapter 10
One of the more surreal things about living with Jameson’s family is the cake.
Elise, the famous baker and childhood best friend of Charlotte, made our wedding cake. That was surreal in and of itself, having her in charge of our wedding cake. She’s the kind of person who makes wedding cakes for actual celebrities and the kinds of rich people who are so rich you don’t get the sense of its scale until they invite you into their mansion.
Kind of like the Hills, I guess. Although Mason lives in a penthouse overlooking Central Park.
The surreal part about Elise is that she still likes baking, despite being so famous for it. When times get stressful, she heads to the kitchen.
So after I wake up to discover that Jameson has tripped and fallen and now has an ugly bruise on his cheek and a fat lip, and after he goes his merry way with his brothers to the office, Elise and Charlotte and I gather in the kitchen so Elise can bake our sorrows away. There’s a lot of powdered sugar in the air, and everything smells faintly of almonds, and I can’t wait to eat it. I’m also slightly worried that I won’t be able to eat it with this lump in my throat. I take a seat at the kitchen table, facing Elise at the counter, and breathe.
“Elise?” Lydia, Elise’s younger sister, hovers in the kitchen door. “Is it okay if we order food?”
Elise puts her hands on her hips. She has a branded apron from her bakery over a pair of shorts and a cropped sweatshirt that has a rainbow cupcake on the front. Her perfectly messy bun bobbles on top of her head when she stares down her little sister.
“What, you and Nate don’t want to gorge yourselves on cake and hang out with us old people?”
“You’re totally not old,” Lydia says, blushing at Nate’s name. The crush is strong with this one.
“Cake isn’t good for you,” Nate intones, coming to stand next to Lydia. “It’s calorically dense, yes, but you cannot survive on cake alone.”
“I disagree.” Elise wipes her hands on her apron. “You can survive on cake alone. But if you want to order food, that’s fine. You just have to let Derek bring it up.”
Nate and Lydia exchange a glance.
“You have to let Derek bring it up. Family rules,” Elise says, faux-sternly but with an I-mean-it edge to her voice.
“Okay,” Lydia chirps. “We’re going down to the guest place, then. Our place. To watch a movie.”
“Be safe,” Elise orders. “Do not smoke weed.”
Nate clutches invisible pearls. “Smoke week? Elise, we wouldn’t.”
Elise rolls her eyes.
“We would do edibles,” he whispers.
“Stop it!” Elise tries and fails to hold in a laugh. “This is serious! No drugs. Do you hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Nate salutes her. “No drugs.”
Elise waves them out of the kitchen.
They tease each other as they go. The last thing I hear as they go down to the foyer to get on the elevator is both of them laughing, Lydia’s voice bright and melodic, Nate’s deeper and satisfied. I can’t help smiling at that sound, but when the penthouse is quiet again…
I don’t frown. I’m in a warm, beautiful kitchen with two women who’ve bundled me up into their family and the cutest little baby I’ve ever seen.
“Ugh.” I rub my hands over my face, hiding the expression that can’t decide what it wants to be. “Is that a thing with the teens now? Smoking weed?”
“Mostly a joke,” Elise says fondly. “Last fall, Nate and Lydia smoked on the roof of the brownstone a couple times. I was more scandalized about it than Gabriel was. He doesn’t want to be too heavy-handed with Nate, given everything, and it hasn’t been a problem since. Not that I think—I don’t think smoking weed a time or two is a problem, I just—I want the very best for him. Not just a lifetime of smoking weed. Or edibles.” Elise wrinkles her nose. “That makes me sound like a mom.”
“It makes you sound great. My grandfather—” It still hurts, talking about him, but I don’t want this to be some forbidden topic, so I push through. “He made it seem like smoking weed would cause an apocalypse. It was not, like, the most welcoming way to have those conversations.”
“Gabriel’s way is better,” Elise agrees.
Charlotte moves around the kitchen, dancing slowly to Elise’s music with a sleeping Robin.
“Given everything?” I ask, because now that I’ve thought of my grandfather and the cut on Jameson’s cheek, my emotions are doing that pregnant-hormones thing, and I need to get back on steady ground. “Jameson had mentioned that Nate didn’t have a place to stay, so that’s why he’s with you and Gabriel.”
“Oh, yeah.” Elise balances the bowl in front of her against her hip, stirring with the other hand. She’s moved on to making frosting now that the cake is in the oven. “Gabriel actually…found him in the alley next to his brownstone.”
“Seriously? He has an alley?”
“He doesn’t own the alley.” Elise laughs. “But he thinks of it as his own, so I’m not sure there’s a difference. Still! Super rare.”
“And he found Nate there?”
Her face falls. “Yeah. We both did, one night. It wasn’t good. He stayed at Gabriel’s, and then—” She waves the spoon in her hand, indicating a long story. “Later, we came home and he was on the stoop. He’d been beaten. It was horrible, but Gabriel was…” She sighs. “He was great with him. And then there was everything else.”
She and Charlotte fill me in on everything else. It’s a distraction from my own ridiculous feelings. How are these people so great in the face of all that everything?
“We’re okay!” Elise comes over and gives me a hug. “Everyone’s fine. Jameson will be fine. We’ll make sure we’re all fine. Including you.”
I wipe my eyes with a napkin. “I am fine! I’m so okay!”
“We’re all fine, then! Yay!” Charlotte bobs Robin up and down. “But you don’t have to be fine if you’re not! I feel like I have to say that to you. If you’re having a hard time, that’s normal.” She brings me another napkin. “And if you want to talk about it with us, you can.”
“I’m afraid for him,” I admit. More tears. They’re not the sobbing kind. Just the overwhelmed-with-concern kind. “Jameson. I know—I know what it’s like to keep things inside. Not as much as he does, but it’s—I mean, we all know he didn’t trip and fall. He got in a fight somewhere.”
“It doesn’t seem like a trip and fall thing,” Charlotte says. “But I hope you know that Mason and Gabriel are doing everything they can to look out for Jameson. They don’t want anything else to happen to him.”
“I don’t think anybody can stop things from happening to him. But I can’t—we can’t just wait around to see how things shake out. That can’t be the answer.”
Elise and Charlotte exchange a glance.
“Maybe it’s less waiting around and more…being there?” Charlotte moves in a slow circle with Robin. “That probably doesn’t sound like what you want.”
I take a deep breath and let it out.
“I want to go get the kidnapper, and, like…tell my grandfather off. I want to make a huge announcement to the world that he can’t be trusted. I want to swoop in and be the hero. But I know that’s probably not realistic.”
“No, it is.” Elise stops stirring the frosting. “You got kidnapped and still had a wedding. You can be a hero if you want to. We’ll back you up.”
“You’ll have our full support,” Charlotte says. “Although I think Mason might have a different opinion about crusading with a baby in tow.”
We all laugh at that.
“Two babies, in a way,” Elise adds, and I remember all over again that I’m pregnant. With Jameson’s baby. I wonder if that’ll keep happening until I give birth. “How are you…with the pregnancy? And everything…related to that?”
“Bewildered?”
Charlotte and Elise both laugh at that, and I join in, because it is bewildering to be pregnant. Especially in the beginning, when you can’t tell from the outside that I am with child but I definitely feel the difference.
“Is it a good thing, do you think?” Charlotte asks, her tone gentle and sunshine-y. It’s obvious why Jameson calls her Sunshine. “Because if it’s not, you have options.”
“Oh!” Shock barrels into me in a twisting spin. “It’s good! No, it’s very good. That doesn’t sound convincing when I say it like that.” The next laugh that comes out of me is a nervous one. “But I am good. I’m very happy to be pregnant. My life plan is shaken up, but it was like that before I was pregnant, so this is just—this is a good surprise.”
Robin stirs on Charlotte’s chest, waking up from his nap, and she puts her hand on the back of his head and holds him close while he wriggles around.
“Okay!” Charlotte answers. “We just wanted to make sure that you felt, like, empowered. In your decision. And not trapped. Nobody here wants you to be trapped. Being married does not mean you’re obligated to have children.”
“No, it does not,” Elise says firmly, whisking another bowl out of a cupboard. “You’re the queen of your body.”
“My body wishes it could dance.”
Elise’s eyebrows go up. “Gabriel said you mentioned dancing. I can’t believe we haven’t talked about it already. What kind of dancer were you? Ballet? Modern?”
“I did take a ton of ballet classes.” Fond memories sweep over me of rows of little kids at the barre. I loved how many rules there were in ballet. That might seem counterintuitive, but it was always easier for me to know what to do when the rules were nonnegotiable. “But lately, I was into modern dance. I danced at a club, actually. A gentlemen’s club.”
Both Elise and Charlotte stop what they’re doing and turn wide eyes on me.
“I didn’t strip,” I say hurriedly. “I danced on an aerial hoop. With a special outfit. Not a—not a stripping outfit, just a special leotard that I really liked. I tore it during my escape attempt from Jameson’s cottage.” Oh, Lily, come on. “Forget I said that, would you?”
“Not the part about the gentlemen’s club,” Elise says. “What was that like? Did you feel like a queen there, too?”
“Well, it was—” I laugh out loud. “It was a classy one called The Membership. I wanted to dance there because they—it was how it sounds. They charged a membership fee, and they were strict about how guests could behave, so it was—it was safe there. It turned out to be way safer than the house I grew up in. But we don’t have to talk about that! I don’t want to get emotional about a gentlemen’s club!”
Elise waves her spoon like a sword. “No emotions! None! Just tell us what it was like. How high was the hoop off the ground? Did you ever fall? This seems so daring, Lily. Like, so brave.”
I explain the hoop, and the music, and the mats on the stage, and the feeling of anticipation just before the music started, and how hot it would get in the spotlight.
“I loved it.” I can still see it. The outlines of the faces. Eyes shining in the dark, all on me. “The hoop wasn’t actually that high off the ground, but it looked high. Dancing felt like flying.”
“Do you think you’ll keep dancing?” Charlotte asks. “Is it a career aspiration, or something you do for yourself?”
“I want to keep dancing.” I didn’t know how much I wanted to keep dancing until this moment. “Maybe not in a club, but the dancing part…yes. I want to keep doing that. I’m not sure about careers. My whole life, I thought I’d become a lawyer. And then a judge. That was my focus during undergrad. I was going to go to Columbia Law.”
“Nice,” Elise breathes. “You could still go, you know. Jameson wouldn’t stop you. That would be highly hypocritical.”
“I was dreading it,” I admit. “It felt like stepping on a conveyor belt that I wouldn’t be able to get off of. Still, all that work…”
I’m just thinking out loud.
I don’t want to go to law school, do I?
“It doesn’t have to be Columbia,” Charlotte offers. “If you’d rather do something less intense but along the same path, I bet you’d get plenty of offers.”
“Huh.” I hadn’t thought about law school but not at Columbia. “That honestly never crossed my mind.”
“Were you a super-student?” Elise peers at me. “Because that lifestyle can be extremely stressful. It doesn’t have to be that way.” She puts her hands out and does jazz-hands, still holding the spoon. “This is not an ad for higher education. But from experience, it doesn’t have to consume your entire life. You can also learn to bake. Or dance!”
I could have a life with time for everything. Dancing and Jameson and…law school?
A voice in the back of my head whispers that it might not be such a bad idea. I did spend all that time studying, pushing myself as hard as I could, so I could be prepared for Columbia. Even if I felt like I was faking it, I did well enough to be invited to a prestigious pre-law program, so the skills I gained were real.
Did my mother have a backup plan like this? Or did she just walk out of my life without one?
Did she have any choice?
Isn”t it better for me and my baby if I give myself as many choices as possible?
“You look sad.” Charlotte’s blue eyes are soft. All of her looks soft—the leggings, the tunic top, even her hair. Sunshine is the perfect nickname for her, and she seems like the perfect person for Mason. “We can stop bringing up law school if it doesn’t feel good to talk about.”
“I’m just thinking.” I lean my chin in my hand and watch the scene in the kitchen. Elise, stirring another color of frosting. Charlotte, dancing with her son. Jameson’s sister is at an archeology lecture by a visiting professor. “Maybe it’s too early to rule out law school altogether.”
“It’s never too late to start.” Elise shrugs. “You can wait until the time is right.”
Normally, I’d agree with her. But Jameson’s staying out all night and getting beat up. I’m pregnant. In nine months, we’ll have a baby, and my grandfather might be after all three of us and not just me and Jameson.
In nine months, I’ll have a baby.
Then, like it or not, my life will be totally different. Again. Will I want to think about law school when I have a baby? What kind of law school would accommodate an infant? It’s pretty famously not a place that looks welcomingly on mothers with tiny kids.
The timer on the stove beeps.
“That went by fast!” Elise says, and goes to find an oven mitt.
I don’t think time has any intention of slowing down.