Chapter 19
Cassidy
Finn stares at me like something rare and valuable while I run a finger through the come on my stomach. “Didn’t want to come inside me?” I ask curiously when I’ve gotten the power of speech back.
“Worried about pregnancy,” he mutters, eyes still wide as he watches me.
I frown. “I thought you said—”
“You said someday,” he interrupts. “I’ll wait for you to tell me when we get to someday, wife, but that’s your decision.”
Oh. I smile slowly, touched by his sweetness. I need to let all my old hangups go, because Finn consistently refuses to live up to them. “I’m on the pill,” I tell him. When he gives me a confused look, I shrug. “Periods suck.”
He still looks confused, and when I’m worried he somehow doesn’t know what the pill is, he smiles slowly, devious and beautiful. “So, I can come inside you?” he checks.
“Mhm.” That sounds… really good. No one’s ever done that before, and it sounds permanent, kind of the same way that him continuing to call me wife sounds permanent.
“Good to know,” he drawls, then leans closer so he can pepper my face in little kisses, barely-there brushes. “How’re you feeling, baby? Okay?”
“Okay,” I agree. Better than okay. Stretched and a little sore, an ache between my thighs I’d forgotten how to feel, but so, so okay. Grounded in a way I didn’t know I could be while simultaneously feeling light as air.
“Good.” He nuzzles into my neck. He’s not resting any of his weight on me, but his skin is pressed to mine nonetheless. He’s no doubt getting come all over himself, but he doesn’t notice, too focused on me.
My eyes flick to the window. It’s probably almost eight, judging by the sun. It’s time to start the day.
It’s astonishing that I have to go to work and pretend everything is normal in a few hours, but I do. I’ll have to pretend that I didn’t have an earth-shattering, reality-redefining night with my husband, and instead act like I’m so happy to ring up groceries for the afternoon.
And that’s after a good chunk of the town witnessed Finn blow up on Caroline last night on my behalf. The gossip will be crazy today.
Finn settles onto his side again, carefully arranging his wings. He tries to pull me into his chest, and I go willingly enough, but I do warn him, “I have to work in a bit.”
“So do I,” he murmurs, eyes already slipping closed. “Gotta get this project done. But we have some time, right?”
We would, but there’s something that I know I have to do this morning. “I need to call G,” I tell him. It’d been one thing when I kept the lie from her. She didn’t need to know why I needed a fake husband. But now that there’s something real between us? G always deserved to be the first to know.
“Got it.” He squeezes me close and then releases me without complaint.
I’m already cold without his arm around me, and I hesitate. “Do you want to talk to her with me?” I ask.
His eyes open and he stares at me. “For real?”
“Yeah.” He’s my husband. And it’s early days, and we could have both deluded ourselves into thinking things that aren’t possible.
But if this does work like we’re saying it will, if we get even a fraction of the forever we’re talking about, then Finn is going to be in G’s life, and they should get to know each other like that.
He sits up. “Yes. Absolutely, yes. Now?”
“After we clean up. And change.” I swing myself out of bed, glancing around the room for where any of my clothes went from last night, when my eyes catch on his feet—and a few inches of his shins—hanging right over the edge of the bed. “Finn.”
“Yes, wife?” He doesn’t bother to get up yet.
I force myself to ignore the tingle from him calling me wife again. “You don’t fit in this bed.”
His eyes crack open. “Oh. No, I don’t.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?” I ask, incredulous. He’s been sleeping here this whole time with his feet hanging off the edge of the bed. That’s ridiculous, and unacceptable. I’ve had my husband staying in my house, doing me a favor, and I didn’t even get him a comfortable place to sleep.
“What were you going to do? You can’t make the bed bigger.”
“What do you do at home?” I demand.
“Big bed, custom-made. It’s fine, Cassidy. It doesn’t hurt me.”
I frown, grumpy about this now. I don’t like that he doesn’t fit in my bed, but I don’t know what to do about that.
“Want to join me?” I ask instead of dwelling on it. The ensuite bathroom’s shower is decently sized. It’ll be a tight fit for both of us, but I still want him in there with me.
That gets him up and moving.
After we’re clean, I position us both on the couch downstairs, fretting about camera angles. Is it better to have Finn there from the beginning, or to introduce him later? What will cause her the least amount of anxiety?
Finn stops my shuffling by slinging an arm around my shoulders and pulling me into him. “She’s an adult, Cassidy,” he says firmly. “This isn’t a television show. Just tell her.”
She’s eighteen. I’m still sending her money to do her laundry and buy snacks. She’s an adult in the most technical sense of the word, but that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t need me to make some decisions, still. I can’t dump things on her.
But I guess the decision has been made. Finn is going to be in this whole call. I nod and click dial on my tablet that I’ve set up on the coffee table in front of us.
It rings for a moment, and then G picks up, phone at a weird angle until she shuffles it and we can take in her whole face.
My throat tightens. She looks good. She looks like she’s getting plenty of sun and having fun. Hopefully not too much fun, but G is a responsible kid. I trust her to figure that out for herself.
She’s bright eyed and smiling. There’s a new streak of color in her hair, looking like someone dip-dyed a piece, and I fight a smirk. College evidently hasn’t changed that much.
“Hey, Cee,” she says, grinning. Then her eyes dart to Finn. “And… Mr. Delaney?”
He clears his throat. “You can call me Finn, Georgia.”
“Yeah, sure. Uhm, good to see you?” She says it like a question, and I don’t blame her.
I clear my throat so I can do this properly. “G, Finn is—we have something to tell you.”
She blinks, and then there’s movement behind her as she plops down on her bed, sprawled out on her back and holding her phone above her. My arm always gets tired when I try that, but G does it constantly. “Alright, what’s up?”
“We’re, uh, dating,” I say. It doesn’t cover nearly enough, but it’s too soon to talk about the marriage. What, am I supposed to pretend I was sneaking out to see him after she fell asleep? It’s one thing to tell the town that, but I don’t want Georgia to think I kept anything from her.
“Oh.” She doesn’t say anything for a moment, and I wait without breathing, ready for her judgment. I’ve never done this before, never had to find out how she would react. What if she hates it? What if she thinks I was waiting for her to leave so I could find something else? What if—
“That’s great,” she says, a sweet, genuine smile on her face. “I didn’t know you knew each other that well.”
Finn squeezes my shoulder. “We’ve gotten to know each other a lot better recently,” he says. “And it just sort of happened.”
“Congratulations,” she says, and I can see it in her eyes that she means it, so I can breathe again. “Are you coming with her to Parents’ Weekend?”
And like that, I can’t breathe again. Of all the questions, why did she have to jump to—
“I’d be honored,” Finn says without pausing. “If you want me there. And if I can work out getting there. I don’t travel through the human world well, as you can imagine.”
“Oh, Jazzy’s a gargoyle, too,” she says, and I’m still reeling on how we got to this topic, so lost in my own head that I don’t even think to ask who Jazzy is. “I’ll ask her how her parents are traveling and get back to you.”
“Then I’ll be there,” Finn says, squeezing my shoulders again as he grins at Georgia. I somehow doubt that the entire town has seen as many smiles from him in the last five years as I’ve gotten out of him since we started this.
Georgia grins at us both. “I’m happy for you,” she says again. “I have class—I was on my way out when you called, but I can—”
“Go,” I say. “Don’t be late to class, G.”
She rolls her eyes. “Don’t worry, Cee. I’m being responsible and everything.” She sits up, and I worry that’s it and she’s going to hang up, but she says, “Love you, Cee,” before disconnecting the call.
I sit there for a minute, stunned by how straightforward that was. “You okay?” Finn asks, voice low.
“That was easy.”
“It was,” he agrees. He tugs me lightly until I’m reclining entirely into his side. “Did you expect it to be hard?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never had to have that conversation with her before.”
His fingers trace up and down my arm. “She wants you to be happy.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do.” He keeps trailing his fingers along my arm for a silent moment, then says, “You didn’t tell her about the marriage. Or the house.” He says it calmly, without any accusation, like he’s stating a fact. I tense up regardless.
“Yeah,” I agree cautiously.
“Why not?”
I squirm, pulling away from him. He lets me go.
“Because it’s not her job to worry about that,” I say.
“It’s her job to worry about getting to class on time and Jazzy and her roommate Stephie and whatever weird homework magic kids get.
And crushes and parties and new friend groups and whether her new hair looks good and all the other things college kids do. It’s not her job to worry about me.”
“Okay,” he agrees, and despite the fact that there’s no judgment in his tone, I’m sensing a but coming.
Sure enough, he continues, saying, “But look how happy she was when you told her about us. Don’t you think she’d want to know about what’s going on with you, even if she can’t help? Just to know?”
I exhale a long, slow breath, trying to gather my thoughts. I don’t want to snap at him, but I need him to understand this. “You know I didn’t meet G until the funeral? Like, at all?”
“No,” he says slowly, clearly having no idea why we’re talking about this, but being willing to indulge me regardless. “Your dad never introduced you?”
“Dad would meet me at places on the west coast, once or twice a year. He’d come to me and we’d take a little vacation.
He’d take me skiing or to Disneyland or the beach.
I was never invited back here. So no, I didn’t meet her.
” I can still picture that little girl. We have the same brown hair and our father’s brown eyes.
I got the freckles from my mom and she got the button nose from hers.
But on that day, it’d been like looking at a younger version of myself.
Her hair was in two pigtails and she was in a black dress that didn’t fit, with an expression of abject confusion on her face.
She understood death conceptually, but was having trouble applying it to what her parents were. Dead. Gone. She’d been so lost.
So I’d told the little girl they weren’t coming home, and that I’d stay with her. And I’d weathered the tantrums and grief and acting out while figuring out the whole parenting thing on the fly.
“She calls me Cee,” I tell him without explaining my thinking.
“People called me CeeCee when I was a kid, but I put a stop to that in middle school, and it’s been full name ever since.
But she liked that she was G and I was Cee, and I liked anything that connected us, so I put up with it until I liked it, too.
Anyway, she’s not that little girl anymore.
But she still is, and it’s still my responsibility to make sure she’s okay.
And I don’t know what she’ll do after college.
But whether she comes back here the day she graduates or ten years after, or thirty, I don’t want her to know that her neighbors looked at her Cee and decided she wasn’t worthy of staying here.
This is her home, and I won’t ruin it for her. ”
“So, if they did kick you out of town, you were… what, never going to tell her?” he asks, incredulous.
Truthfully, I haven’t thought that far ahead, but it does seem like the best option. “Sure. Tell her I’m human and I went to live with humans. She could come visit me whenever she wanted. Sounds like the best way to protect her.”
Finn’s eyebrows are practically in his hairline at this point, but he keeps his opinions to himself. Good. I might not be a perfect guardian, but I’m not here to take judgement from someone who’s never done it.
He hesitantly wraps an arm back around me, and I don’t protest, leaning against him again. He makes a pretty good pillow. “You’re a good sister,” he murmurs into my hair. “You’ve been everything she needed. You’ve done your best by her, and she knows it. It shows in how much she adores you.”
I close my eyes. I know that. I know she loves me.
It doesn’t always feel like it when she’s having teenage angst and emotional growing pains, but I know it.
And the poor kid deserves her parents, but I know I’ve tried my hardest to be everything I can for her.
Still, sometimes it’s hard to remember all of it.
“You always know what I need to hear,” I murmur.
He kisses the crown of my head. “Do I?”
“Yeah. The things that scare me, you always know what to say.”
“It’s not a special talent, Cassidy. I just say what’s true. And you are a good sister. She does love you. You’ve gone above and beyond, and I’m so proud of you.” He pauses for a second. “Is that weird to say? That I’m proud of you? I don’t know if my opinion on it matters, but—”
“Not weird,” I interrupt. He’s the first person to say it since I was a kid, and it matters. It matters so damn much.