31. Keeley
KEELEY
I expect things to be weird in the morning, but they’re not.
I’m running late, he’s cranky—business as usual.
He offers to make Mark breakfast and suggests that it wouldn’t take me so long to get dressed if I’d just tell the office I was pregnant, though I’m completely hidden by a lab coat these days.
It’s like last night didn’t happen…except it did. And I can’t stop replaying it in my head. Big, lovely Graham with his sharp tongue and his constant disdain.
I never dreamed he’d want more than once from me. I never dreamed I’d want more than once from him.
And, goddammit, maybe I do. I doubt I could ever tire of having sex with him, and I like having him around. These weeks with him have been comforting and fulfilling in a way the weeks and years preceding him were not. But there are so many ways it could go wrong.
Anna Tattelbaum had him for months, probably. How many months? And how will she ever recover from the memory of it, when I simply stood next to him for thirty seconds and already know I won’t move forward?
“Will you be home at a reasonable hour tonight?” he asks, turning toward me from the blender, in which he’s crafting something I want no part of. “I was gonna grill steaks.”
I hesitate. “Not tonight. I’ve got a thing.”
A muscle flickers in his cheek. “What kind of thing?”
I wonder if he realizes just how often he growls his questions. Because it’s a lot. And I don’t owe him an explanation, not after he shot me down last night, but I don’t have the time or energy right now to bait him, either.
“It’s my mom’s birthday.”
He turns fully, bracing himself against the counter. “You must know it sounds weird when you say it like that, under the circumstances.”
“It’s a séance. I’ve got her skull right here.” I pat my tote bag. I wait until he laughs before I shrug. “I’m going to her grave. It’s a pain in the ass because she’s buried all the way up in the Valley, but it is what it is.”
He prods the inside of his cheek with his tongue. “I’ll drive you. You shouldn’t be in your tiny little car on the highway.”
I open my mouth to object, but I like having Graham around. “I guess if you’re driving, I can finish telling you about all the people on Glee who dated each other in real life.”
His mouth curves. “Something to look forward to then.”
I laugh and I’m pretty sure only Graham could make me laugh on my mom’s birthday. It’s probably for the best that he turned me down. I might get more attached than I already am.
I get a lunch break for once, and I spend it online, reading about Anna Tattelbaum. She is everything I am not—she likes art and doesn’t go to fancy galas simply for the free booze. She is British, something I can’t even fake, and I know this because I’ve tried several times.
The sentence that stops me in my tracks, though, is this: Anna Tattelbaum, rumored to be dating hedge fund manager Graham Tate, one of the city’s most sought-after bachelors.
Graham is one of NYC’s most sought-after bachelors? How? Sure, he’s good-looking, but that kind of status is reserved for royalty or heirs to fortunes and he is neither. Which means it’s time to do something I’ve avoided for months.
Looking a man up online, especially one you really want to have sex with, is the slippery slope that leads to the Pit of Obsession.
You learn one fact and you want to learn another.
You see one photo and you need to see more.
I sense, even before I begin my search, that my slide into the pit will be long and painful, and that I will thoroughly regret this later on.
The first thing that comes up is an article on “NYC’s Sexiest Male Singles”. They’ve got a photo of him looking bored and ridiculously hot at some charity function.
Graham Tate, the reclusive founder of Tate Capital, leads our list. With a net worth estimated at over a hundred million, we’d date him even if he didn’t look like the face of the next Tom Ford campaign. But he does. Therefore...Graham, give us a call. Any of us.
What. The. Hell.
The guy who was too cheap to get a chocolate fountain or tequila luge for our party is worth a hundred million. The guy who doesn’t own a car. The guy who bitched about the cost of the green juice I wanted this weekend and keeps telling me I don’t need both Netflix and Hulu.
I’ve known loads of millionaires and every last one of them flashed his wealth somehow. More importantly, I’ve never known one who didn’t think it made him special, who wasn’t under the impression his money exempted him from taking out the trash or carrying his own plate to the sink.
I slam my laptop shut and bury my face in my hands. I thought success was an attractive quality in a man, but it’s got nothing on the discovery that Graham has it in spades...and couldn’t care less.
NYC’s Sexiest Single is forced to wait for nearly forty minutes outside my office, because I’m so backed up…and that’s with me telling Trinny I couldn’t take Dr. Joliet’s six o’clock.
“I’m sorry,” I say, rushing out to the car, still in my lab coat.
“You’ve got to tell them,” he says as he pulls into traffic. “Seriously. This is insane.”
I sigh. “I know.”
“I mean it, Keeley. What’s the worst that can happen if you tell them? You don’t even like that job.”
I frown at him. “Oh, maybe I hadn’t mentioned this, but I’m actually about to have a child. It’s not a great time for me to be unemployed .”
“I’m not Jeff Bezos, but I can afford—” He circles his hand over me and my stomach. “—all this. If you want to just quit and wait until you find something.”
I laugh. I spent every free minute today researching Graham Tate. I now know he’s the guy billionaires entrust with their finances, and that there’s an entire subreddit devoted to What Graham Tate is Buying. I’ll continue to imply he does something with insurance, though. It keeps him on his toes.
“I appreciate the offer,” I reply, “but I think that would go poorly.”
He rolls his eyes. “ Why ?”
I can’t believe he’s arguing. Only a fool would offer to support me while I look for a job. He’s got to know I’d just sleep in until eleven and shop all day.
“Because then our power isn’t equal. The second you’re paying the bills, you’ll be like ‘No, Keeley, we can’t buy a Silver Cross stroller.’”
“I already told you we’re not buying a Silver Cross. Fourteen hundred dollars for a fucking stroller. It’s ridiculous.”
“Yeah, but right now I still can say, ‘oh, screw you, Graham, I just bought one.’ If you’re footing all the bills, I can’t do that.”
“I’m guessing you’d still manage to do that,” he mutters.
When the cemetery comes into view, he pulls into the spot closest to the gates. “I can just wait in the car,” he says. “Take your time.”
I reach over and unclip his seat belt. “Nah, come on. It takes two people to operate the Ouija board I brought.”
He laughs and climbs out, following me across the rolling hills to my mother’s headstone.
“So, this is it,” I say brightly. “Pretty exciting stuff. And that’s my aunt.” I point to her grave, which is right next to my mom’s.
He reads each headstone, his gaze growing darker by the minute. It’s different, seeing it in person. “They were my age,” he says quietly.
I nod. “My poor grandfather. He outlived his wife and both his daughters. I can’t even imagine.”
He glances over to my mom’s grave. “Is he the one who left the flowers?”
“No, those are from Dillon, the guy my mom was dating at the end.” I shake my head. “He still brings her flowers for every occasion. It’s kind of fucked up.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“He was twenty-eight when she died. He had his whole life ahead of him but never moved on, and if she’d lived, well, she probably would have moved on. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just easier to think she would have.”
He takes my hand and pulls me over to the bench on the other side of the gravel path. “Why is it easier to think that?”
“Because can you imagine going through your whole life only to find your soulmate a few months before you get diagnosed with stage four cancer? Can you imagine leaving that person and your teenage daughter, knowing you’ve hurt them and they won’t ever, ever get over it?”
His brow furrows. “Wouldn’t you just be glad you were missed? That, to me, seems like a sign you did something right.”
I shake my head again. “I never want to do that to anyone else. I don’t want my daughter to spend her whole life missing me. I don’t want a guy coming to my grave every month, unable to move on.”
He grips the edge of the bench. “That’s why you didn’t want kids, isn’t it?”
I force a smile. “I mean, Coachella was a factor, too, I’m not gonna lie.
But yeah, that was most of it.” I pat my stomach.
“Anyway, what’s done is done, and now you’re screwed.
The parent who dies first gets all the worship.
No one is going to talk about the times I drank too much or really fucked something up and all my flaws will seem charming.
You’ll be the parent who has to be multidimensional. ”
A muscle flickers in his cheek and his hands curl into fists.
“You’re so goddamn sure you’re going to die young, Keeley,” he grits out. He sounds angry . “Even if your mom had some genetic thing that made this happen…she only contributed half of your genes. Why aren’t you even considering the possibility that you’ll be fine?”
I stare out at the descending sun. “It just seems easier than getting my hopes up and discovering I was wrong. My mom was so shocked , Graham.” I swallow hard and my voice grows quiet.
“When she got that diagnosis, she was so shocked because she thought she’d done everything right. I’m just trying to be realistic.”
He wraps an arm around my shoulders. “Was it that she was shocked, or was it that you were shocked? You realize being prepared wouldn’t have fixed anything, right? She wouldn’t have wanted you to go through your whole childhood panicked you were going to lose her.”
“Yeah, I know.” But I think of my mom’s last days of consciousness when she knew what was going to happen. She was devastated. Anytime Dillon or I walked into the room, she cried. And that made it harder for us. It was just this horrible, inescapable circle of grief.
“I guess it’s just…if it happens, I don’t want it to hurt me the way it hurt her. I don’t want it to be so hard to say goodbye to everything, and have it be so hard on them.”
He pulls me closer, and I rest my head on his shoulder. It’s a nice shoulder, broad enough to hold me up, perfectly firm.
“The only choice is to love everything a little less, Keeley. I’m not sure that’s a better option.”
He might be right. More importantly, I’m not sure it’s even possible. Because I already love our daughter. And I’m starting to like her father an awful lot too.
“I want dessert,” I announce on the way home. “Like I don’t even want dinner. I just want dessert. And because I just cried, you have to give in and coddle me.”
He laughs. “We could make a pie.”
“Do you know how to make a pie? Because I sure as hell don’t.”
“Of course I do,” he says, and his eyes are light. “I think we probably have all the ingredients too. I just bought apples yesterday.”
Making a pie sounds like a pain in the ass, the kind of thing that will lead to a barely edible mess neither of us will want to eat or clean up. But when he’s like this, all twinkling eyes and dimples, I’m incapable of telling him no .
“Okay. But if it’s inedible, you’re taking me to Pinkberry.”
“Deal,” he agrees with a quiet, confident laugh.
When we get home, I change into one of the new maternity t-shirts I bought after Ethan’s Tulane sweatshirt disappeared, which Graham claims to know nothing about.
He sets me at the counter to peel and slice the apples while he works on the crust. I watch, mystified, as he scoops flour and sugar into a bowl and mixes it with the butter he set out to soften. He never has to check a recipe once.
“How do you know how to do this?” I ask. “I can’t even boil eggs without looking up the instructions.”
With his hands he kneads the dough then shapes it into a ball. “My great-aunt taught me when I was little,” he says, only glancing up briefly.
“And you remembered it? All this time?”
He hesitates. “My mom was…sick. After my dad died. She had really serious postpartum depression that got missed with everything else going on. Anyway…things went bad for a while, and then my great-aunt came to get us all back on track, and she told me the pies were my job.”
He doesn’t seem bothered by this story at all, but I am. He was eight , which was too young to be given a job of any kind. “I’m not sure an eight-year-old should be using a stove.”
He shakes his head. “It helped, knowing there was something I could do, some way I could make up for things. Anyway, until I left for college, I found myself making a lot of pies.”
“I still wish you hadn’t had to,” I tell him quietly. Our eyes meet and I have to look away. “The apples are ready.”
He says nothing, just starts dumping sugar and cinnamon and—weirdly—jelly into the bowl. “Now we mix it up.” He smiles when I reach for the spoon. “Just get your hands in there. It’s the only way.”
“My bare hands?”
“They’re clean. Come on, doc.” He tugs my fingers into his, placing our joined hands atop all the fruit. “You’ve put your hands into worse things than this.”
Together we mix, our hands sticky, brushing against each other. His hands are large, and rough, and all this wet fruit sliding through our fingers makes me think of other things entirely— of his fingers sliding beneath my thong, pushing inside me in some semi-public place.
“Come on my fingers, Keeley,” he crooned. “Just once. Then I’ll kiss you again.”
I remember the heat between my legs, the ache that felt almost like pain as my thighs braced. The sounds as I got wetter and wetter were exactly like the sounds we’re making right now.
I look up and find his eyes on my face, on my mouth, the same way they were that night.
My nipples tighten beneath the smooth fabric of my t-shirt, and the memory has left me soaked.
If he would just close the distance between us and kiss me, if he’d just reach beneath my panties with those filthy wet fingers, I’d go off like the grand finale of a fireworks show.
God. No fucking wonder I married him.
I’d probably do it all over again.