Chapter 19 The Cyclone
The Cyclone
Blair was not in a good way when Jack arrived.
“It’s me,” he said as he opened the sliding door.
No. He couldn’t be here now. She tried to get up, but her limbs didn’t want to obey her brain.
What the hell was wrong with her? The party had been fine, surprisingly so. And more to the point, it was over. She’d gotten through it without incident.
She should be in bed. Or sitting by the pool with a cup of tea toasting the fact that Green Light might be back from the dead, if she could solve the script problem. That she’d gotten Jack to sing. That her truce with Mrs. Afonso was sticking.
But no. She was sitting on the floor of her kitchen among a pile of broken glass, freaking out about catering glasses.
She was so mad at herself.
She was so tired of this.
And she was going to have to face the fact that “this” was more than the cyclone. “The cyclone” was what she’d always called the panic attacks that had accompanied stressful periods of her life. But this—the glasses—was something different.
The glasses. The quilts. The dishwasher loading protocol.
“Hey,” Jack said quietly, looking like a disheveled angel, backlit as he was by the light he’d turned on in the mudroom. He was wearing plaid pajama pants, one of his ratty T-shirts, and a pair of flip-flops from the bin of pool stuff.
Edward and Morticia both got up from their spots on the sofa and went trotting over to greet Jack. Edward liked everyone—in one-on-one settings, anyway. But Morticia hated most people.
Wait. Was she Edward and Jack Morticia?
It made her smile, and smiling was a relief. A tiny relief, but she’d take any amount she could get right now.
“What’s the matter?” he said, and the part of her brain that was still here, still the detached observer, marveled that he knew immediately upon seeing her that something was wrong.
Of course, she was sitting on the floor of the kitchen in her party dress next to a pile of broken glass.
“Nothing,” she said automatically.
She reached out to grab the edge of the counter to haul herself to standing. Her hand was shaking. She glanced at him to see if he noticed.
He noticed.
“Blair. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I was washing some glasses and I knocked a row of them over.” I was washing a hundred catering glasses, even though the whole point is supposed to be that the catering company drops them off clean and picks them up dirty.
“Something’s not right with you.”
She went for the broom and considered her next move. She was annoyed that he was here, but… she was also glad he was here?
Which was it?
He took the broom from her and made a shooing motion. “You’re not wearing shoes.”
She met his eyes as she surrendered the broom, and she saw in them a deep compassion. Or was that pity?
Either way, if she’d had any doubts before about how much he’d seen through her, they evaporated in that moment.
Annoyed won out over glad. He didn’t belong here, not right now. He was overstepping.
She had to get out of here. No, this was her house. She had to get him out of here, and—
The buzzer rang.
“Damn it.” The curse sounded foreign to her ears. One part of her proper upbringing Blair had held on to was that she rarely swore. Why bother when there were so many better, more specific words available?
Jack stopped sweeping. “Ignore it.”
“It’s probably someone who left something here.”
She didn’t even mind. Having a mundane task like answering the buzzer, searching for someone’s glasses or keys, would focus her mind. She would deal with whoever it was, eject Jack, and go to bed.
She pulled up the feed on her phone. There was a taxi at the gate. No one she knew used taxis, except…
Her bones started to tingle. “Oh shit.”
Jack was at her side in an instant. “What? What’s wrong?”
Get it together. Stop swearing.
“Who is it?” he asked.
She took a breath. Counted to three. “It’s my parents.”
Clearly that was not what he’d expected. It wasn’t what Blair had expected, either.
“You don’t have to answer it.”
He didn’t understand, and she didn’t have the bandwidth to explain. She pressed the talk button. Her hand was shaking worse than it had been before. “Mom? Dad? What are you doing here?”
She exhaled to a count of four, even though she knew it wasn’t going to work. What else could she do but keep trying?
Her dad leaned out the side of the back seat to talk into the buzzer as his image was captured by a camera he didn’t know was there. “Our plane was late, but we made it.”
That didn’t answer the question.
“Darlin’, will you be a doll and buzz us in?” Blair’s mom, leaning over her dad, called.
Something about her mother’s brisk tone, which was polite on the surface—but only on the surface—pulled Blair from the brink. Snapped her back into her teenage self. Back when she was a doll. But it might be the price she had to pay for being back from the brink.
She could do this. She just had to find out what the hell they were doing here and make a plan to get them… to not be here.
She pressed the button to open the gate.
She let out a controlled exhalation, counting down from seven. She was pretty sure she’d forestalled the cyclone, but she was paranoid enough to keep doing the breathing. “You should go,” she said to Jack as she smoothed her hair in a mirror by the front door.
He did not go. Of course he didn’t.
“Don’t let them in. You don’t need this right now.”
“Oh, and you know what I need?” she said, abandoning her breath control.
“Well, I can tell you’re not happy about this.”
She turned and shot him what she intended to be a withering look. “You can tell I’m not happy when I haven’t said a word?” She was being so bitchy, but she couldn’t seem to stop. She didn’t want to stop. Being bitchy, in this moment, made her feel powerful. Like she had some control.
“Yes, I can. You look the opposite of the way you did when Esme showed up. Your response then was… expansive.”
“My response was expansive?” she echoed. The nerve of him. He sounded like he was describing one of his characters.
“Yes. This is the opposite of that. I’m seeing a… curling in. A bracing.”
Since she couldn’t get rid of him, she decided to ignore him.
She opened the front door and… there they were.
Kitty and Carson Kellermoon. Her mother wore a yellow shirtdress with a white cardigan and her ever-present strand of pearls.
Her father, with his sparkling-eyed Southern-gentleman charm, was wearing his travel uniform of dark jeans and a baby-blue seersucker sport coat.
“Surprise,” Kitty said dryly. “Judging by your face, anyway.”
Blair stepped back to let them in. “It certainly is.” She resumed her breath counting—on the sly—just in case.
“Well, if you would check your texts, you’d have known we were coming,” Kitty said, her tone taking on an edge that probably only Blair could hear.
“You think we’re going to let our daughter the new divorcée spend Christmas alone?” her dad asked, and bless him, he probably thought he was doing a good deed. He just didn’t understand that he was merely a pawn in the Kitty Kellermoon chess game.
“I’m not alone,” Blair said. She glanced at Jack, who was watching the proceedings from the kitchen. She still wished he would leave—didn’t she? “And it’s not Christmas for another week and a half,” she added. As if arguing semantics were at all helpful.
Kitty eyed Jack. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”
Jack came over with his hand extended. Look at him with some actual manners. “Jack Branksome.”
“The novelist?”
“Jack is staying in the pool house,” Blair said. The last thing she needed was her parents thinking she was sleeping with Jack—or anyone—so soon after the divorce. Of course, the fact that he was shirtless and in pajama pants wasn’t helping on that front. At least she was still in her party dress.
“I’ll get out of your hair,” Jack said. Finally. Blair would have laughed if she wasn’t still so annoyed. Jack had been so determined to stay, earlier, but a few seconds in the presence of Kitty Kellermoon and he’d changed his tune.
“Oh, goodness, don’t let us drive you off, Mr. Branksome,” her mother said. “We’re checked into the Beverly Hilton. We were just intending to say hello, but clearly we’re…” Her eyes darted back and forth between Blair and Jack. “Better off waiting until morning.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?” Blair said. Why didn’t you ask me?
“We did,” Kitty said. “We texted several times.”
Oh no. She knew what was happening here.
“Did you text me or Reggie?” Her parents had their numbers mixed up, had since they’d joined the cell phone era, and no matter how many times over how many years Blair had pleaded with them to flip them in their contacts, they never did.
It hadn’t been a huge problem, before, because Reggie had been around.
She looked at her own phone, at the several unread texts she had from Reggie.
Reggie had gotten the hang of the co-parenting app, and in an effort to keep him from intruding too much on her life and her mental space, she had taken to ignoring his texts.
They were almost always links to articles about inside-baseball Hollywood stuff Blair had already read.
She feared she had made a strategic error. She clicked open the thread, and… yep.
Reggie: Your parents have been texting me. I’m forwarding this latest one. Sounds like they’re inviting themselves for Christmas. Have fun with that.
Reggie: And can you tell them to finally fix their damn contacts? One of the perks of being divorced should be that I don’t have to communicate with your parents anymore.
Reggie: In fact, forget it. I’m blocking them.
“You texted Reggie, not me. Remember how I keep telling you that you have our numbers mixed up?”
Only her parents would text and, hearing nothing in response, assume they were still welcome.
“Oh dear,” her father said.
“I can’t imagine why he didn’t reply and correct us,” Kitty, affronted, said.
The bone tingling started again. No. “Why don’t we regroup tomorrow?” Blair said. “That was a good idea.”