Chapter 13
“He’s going to kill me.”
“Who?” Poppy asked. “Brian, for your scaling a fence and trespassing in the middle of the night? Or Decker, for you tossing the phone at him and screaming, ‘You’re it’?”
“All I got out was, ‘I’m with Deck,’ and Brian lost it.”
“Describe ‘losing it’,” Poppy said, sticking her head in the box freezer, her breath turning to frost.
“What do you mean ‘describe it’?”
Poppy looked over her shoulder at Miles, who was sitting on the concrete floor, his jeans speckled with a light dusting of sawdust, his face contorted into an expression of dejection.
Her heart went out to him. She felt his pain on a cellular level.
It was a rusty but familiar ache in her soul that never quite went away no matter how far away from the situation she got.
As for Miles, it was still fresh. He looked like a supersized Eeyore in college gear.
“I was just trying to figure out if it was a one or two ice cream sandwich kind of talk,” she said. “I can see now it’s a two.”
She tossed the sandwiches, one after another, and the kid caught them with ease.
She grabbed two for herself and sat down next to him. The concrete was still warm from the day’s heat. She tore open one of the wrappers and took a huge bite, sinking her teeth into the chewy bittersweet chocolate cookie and through the cool ice cream. She moaned as it slid down her throat.
Before she could even get in another breath, she’d taken a second and third bite and before she knew it the sandwich was G-O-N-E.
She opened her eyes to find Miles staring at her like she’d just won the National Hot Dog Eating Championship. “What?”
“My therapist would call that emotional eating.”
She opened the other one and took a bite. Around the crumbs she said, “I call it adulting.”
“I’m clearly having a crisis of direction. What kind of crisis are you having?” he asked.
Poppy stopped mid-bite. “What do you mean? I’m not having a crisis of anything.”
“You seemed pretty upset when Deck brought up the crush accusation,” he said.
“Because it’s not relevant.”
Miles side-eyed her and she felt her palms go damp. “Not relevant is different than not true,” he said.
“You want truth? I’m in the middle of the biggest job in my career. My aunt’s livelihood is dependent on my success. And I’ve been nothing but blindsided from the word go.”
“That sounds rough. But I get it. I’m going to one of the best universities in the world and every time I show up to class I break out in hives. It’s like my promise to make my parents proud and my need to do something that makes me happy are at odds, and I’m not sure what should win out.”
“Is that why you’re here?”
He inhaled half of his second ice cream bar in a single breath. “Yeah. I decided to prioritize myself and happiness for once in my life. What about you?”
Decker had some pretty firm points earlier—points that she’d wanted to rebut but she’d been too stubborn feigning sleep.
Or maybe she hadn’t had the right answers to prove he was wrong.
“If you need time to think about it that’s okay, too. It’s your journey,” Miles said.
“One minute you’re throwing your phone at your uncle like a middle schooler in a game of hot potato, the next you’re analyzing my love life. Who are you?”
“I’m the product of a single parent household where the other parent wasn’t interested in being a part of my life. My mom put me in therapy when I started calling random men Dad at age five.”
Poor kid. Poppy knew what it was like to long for a father who cared.
Understood the envy of watching friends go home to a traditional family with two loving parents and wondering what that felt like.
She’d never called strangers Dad, but she had daydreamed about strangers she’d passed on the street being her father.
“My dad bailed, too. It sucks.”
“I’m sorry,” the kid said with so much genuine empathy she thought that maybe he was missing his calling, and it was therapy.
“Me, too.”
“Do you have a Brian in your life?”
“No, I never got that lucky,” she said, purposefully showing him the flip side.
“My mom never dated again and then she died when I was ten. I wish I’d had a Brian of some kind, bossy or not, to help me through it.
I mean I had my aunt, who was amazing. But to have another parent to be there, someone else who felt the grief on the same level would have been a game changer for me. ”
“You’re saying I might benefit from a little grass-is-greener syndrome.”
“Seriously. What’s with the therapy lingo?”
“I may have also taken an interpersonal psychology class last quarter that touched on the psychology of dating.”
Poppy choked on her tongue. “Decker and I are not dating.”
“I never said you were. But it’s interesting that that’s the word that stood out to you.”
“Okay, Freud.” Poppy jumped up with a clap.
“Enough psychoanalysis for the day. I’m going to hit the hay.
Sleeping bags in the cabinet there,” she pointed behind her.
“If Kiki gives you a hard time about sleeping on the floor of the pool house just let me know. She really is a softie behind that Aikido black belt persona. She just has a hard time seeing people as people and not opponents to be thrown.”
“Uh, thanks,” he said nervously.
Poppy brushed the sawdust off her pajama bottoms and walked through the woodshop and out the door. A warm summer eve’s breeze whispered through her riot of curls and kissed her lashes.
From this high up in the Trusdale Estates, the bright lights from the Griffith Observatory and Hollywood sign were illuminated in the distance. And the twinkling streetlights of the Sunset Strip flickered like a galaxy of stars. The chaos of Los Angeles felt like it was a million miles away.
She breathed in the night’s air and slowly made her way across the lawn, the prickly grass cool under her bare feet. As she neared the back porch the cicadas stopped humming, and she heard a muffled voice shouting through a phone.
That’s when she saw Decker. He was in the dark, leaning a shoulder against a porch column, his hand in his pocket, looking like the picture of calm. Which was strange given the volume and level of rage with which the person on the other end of Miles’s phone was yelling.
It made her wonder how often this kind of conversation happened between the brothers for Decker to remain so calm. Because if she were on the receiving end of that lashing, she’d pee her pants.
There was a long silence, then Decker said, “I’m not undermining you. All I’m saying is consider letting him make his own decision.”
And this was Poppy’s cue to leave. Only Decker moved slightly to his left, making her visible. Not wanting to be caught listening in on such an intimate and what must be an emotional moment, she crouched down behind a shrub to hide.
Shit. What had she stepped in?
“I know I’m not a parent, but I do love him.” Decker’s voice lowered a tiny bit at those last few words as if he knew they weren’t being heard. And something about that reached out to Poppy and yanked at her heart.
“He doesn’t want the same thing you want for him,” Decker said slowly and calmly. “Just like even though you took over Dad’s company it wasn’t your first choice. You don’t want him to feel stuck like you were, do you?”
There was a long beat where Poppy held her breath. She knew she shouldn’t eavesdrop but she didn’t want to go back in the woodshop and be therapized. And the only way back inside the house was straight past Decker. Plus, if she moved now, he’d spot her and the jig was up.
“You come out here and that kid is going to run so far and so fast you’ll never catch him. What’s so wrong with letting him stay for the next month? It’s not like they’re going to exploit him or expose him to Hollywood’s darker side. It’s a family show for fuck’s sake.”
There was a long pause, but when Decker spoke his voice boomed like a barrel drum.
“That’s it? That’s your fucking reason? You don’t want him around me?
Glad to know how you really feel. Well, guess what?
It’s not up to you or me. The kid’s no longer a kid.
If he wants to stay he can. You come and force him to go, he’ll resent you.
You support him and, hell, maybe it will bring you closer. But what do I know? I don’t have kids.”
Decker gently pounded a fist against chest, as if trying to loosen some tightening.
The was a pause so long and thick Poppy felt the weight press down on her chest. It was like watching an old Hitchcock movie where there were two men sitting at a table with a bomb under it. The audience sees it ticking down, ready to explode, but the men have no idea what was to come.
She was pretty sure that if someone didn’t speak in the next few seconds there would be an explosion of epic proportions and there would be no coming back for these brothers. She was about to intervene when Brian’s muffled voice said something.
Then Decker sighed and said, “He can’t call you every night to check in. In fact, he can’t call you after tonight. There are no phones allowed. But I can give you the number of the producer in case there’s an emergency… No, I don’t want to talk about Holly. Seriously, dude, no means no.”
Poppy watched as Decker thunked his head against the column. “What part of shut the fuck up did you miss? … She said that? But why would she do that? That tape hurt her way more than it did me.”
Poppy’s heart ached for Decker. Because if she was reading this correctly, he’d just found out that the woman he’d defended so adamantly had, in fact, leaked the video. And the tone in Decker’s voice told her that he was the more injured of the two parties.
“See you in five weeks.”