Chapter 37
M y traitorous heart was still yammering away when I went upstairs to change. Having walked into a concert in full bloom, I hadn’t even had a chance to unpack my duffel. When I went upstairs and placed the bag in my room, I heard my mom muttering to herself from her bedroom.
“Knock, knock,” I said to the ajar door and swung it open. She was on her colorful bed, propped up by a mountain of pillows, holding open a script, her glasses on the tip of her nose. It was so familiar it was like time travel.
I could remember the hundreds of times I walked in on her like this over the years, her patting the empty side of the bed, me lying down, my head in her lap, one hand playing with my hair, the other flipping pages, her muttering under her breath, memorizing lines for an audition, hoping, reaching for her dream.
I lost hope in her dreams so much quicker than she did.
By the time I was a senior in high school, I stopped coming in here when I heard that telltale murmur.
I didn’t want to see the excitement on her face.
Didn’t want to, eventually, deal with the crash of rejection, when she’d be in bed for an entirely different reason.
One week, she was jubilant, the next, unreachable.
Why would anyone choose that kind of life?
She patted the space next to her and I lay on the bed. She put the script down and faced me. I’d been wanting to ask her about this magical house business since Alex brought it up.
“Mom, did you know people have been calling this the Magic House since I was in high school?”
She shushed me. “It doesn’t work if you talk about it.”
“What?” I exclaimed. “You know about it?”
“I do,” she said. “People say that if you act as though you already have what you most want while in this house, it will happen.”
“And it’s true?”
She shrugged. “It’s a lot of coincidences. One might call it a pattern by now.”
“But, Mom, you haven’t gotten what you most wanted.”
She laughed. “Yes, I have actually.”
“But you’re not an actr—”
She lifted her hand and interrupted me. “Listen. When James first gave me this house, it was a blank slate. I hated it. Have I ever told you that? I had a lonely childhood. I didn’t want a lonely life.
All I ever wanted was to have a family. James didn’t even know I was pregnant when he died.
He left me the house and there I was, with my biggest wish in my belly. You.”
“Me?”
“Yes. I wanted a family. I wanted to never be alone. I wanted to be surrounded by people who didn’t reject me—daughters, especially.
Daughters I could raise my way, give them what I never had.
And then, all this year, I wanted you back home.
I thought of this exact moment, you and me in this room, connecting like old times.
And here you are.” She cupped my cheek with her palm, her eyes glassy.
“I didn’t know that,” I said.
“You and Benny are my magic,” she said. And it was so honest and raw that I felt like the most horrible daughter for all the ways I’d been resenting her.
All the ways I’d withheld from her. She hadn’t wanted to be rejected, but all I’d done for years was reject her.
My eyes stung. But, how do you stop a pattern?
How do you get out of the well-worn groove of your own anger and hurt?
“You’re afraid to let go,” Mom said into the silence. She had picked up her script again, but she was talking to me like she was reading my mind. Maybe she actually was. “That’s why you can’t pull away, Charlie baby. You’ve got some more work to do.”
Giving her a nod, not knowing what else there was to say, I got up from the bed, and went back to my room, shell-shocked.
I unpacked my clothes robotically, my mind staticky.
An hour or so later, the moment I heard the chime of a text from Alex letting me know he was here, I was suddenly alive again, racing down the stairs.
A nearly dizzying feeling of yearning gripped me, and I headed outside at a fast clip.
His back was to me when I arrived at his car and when he turned around and saw me, he dropped the two paper bags in his hands and hungrily pulled me to him, as if we’d been apart for years, as opposed to mere hours.
Within milliseconds, he had me up against the side of his SUV, hands roaming through my hair, fingertips brushed against my neck, lips hungry as they landed urgently on mine, him eliciting a moan of relief so acute I pulled his body even closer to mine until I was flat against the car.
I had always used Noah as the metric of passion, but even this was more intense and electric than what he and I had.
Maybe because Alex and I shared a history of unfinished business with each other, and maybe the finality of it was a turn-on, too.
Somehow I was both a teenage version of myself, all hormonal need, and also the version of me now, who hadn’t been kissed with this type of hunger in a very long time.
It was frighteningly easy to get used to a passionless life.
How could we ever sustain this long-term?
This was the kind of thing that burned too bright, got too close to the sun, exploded into fractured pieces.
I wouldn’t survive the end of this if I didn’t know it was coming.
When Alex came up for breath, he stroked the pads of his fingers across my swollen bottom lip and whispered, “Hello.”
“Ohhh,” I replied. “So, when you said you wanted to say hello, what you meant was make out like teenagers before my mom sees us?”
He smiled. “Exactly. Once we go in there...” he nodded toward the house “... I’ll have to be on my best behavior.”
“Well, that doesn’t sound like any fun.”
“Feel free to pull me into an empty room at your earliest convenience, then.”
“And in this empty room you speak of,” I purred. “What will we do in there?”
“Anything you want,” he said. “You should know that by now. Anything you want, take it.”
Warmth flooded my body like basking in direct sunlight.
Alex stroked the plane of my cheek. “This flush of your cheeks right here drives me crazy.”
“Yeah?”
“ You drive me crazy,” he whispered, eyes blazing with intensity.
The way he was looking at me, it didn’t feel like just lust. It was something more, something too soft and forbidden at the same time. Too intimate. Too real. Like he couldn’t hide his emotions even if he tried.
“Let’s go inside,” I said, voice high-pitched as I grabbed one of the paper bags and headed up to the house. When Alex caught up, he seemed unaware that I was trying to avoid seeing that look on his face again.
“Benny and my mom are here,” I told him, smoothly changing the subject. “Then there’s Willow and Ravi, both musicians. Jasper, a young actor. And Aya. Her dad owns our favorite pizza place and she’s taking it over. We’ve known the family for years.”
“An eclectic group,” Alex said. “What else would I expect from the Magic House?”
“Watch, next year Ravi’ll win a Grammy,” I said. “He’s halfway in love with Benny, by the way.”
“Godspeed to the people who fall for the Quinn women,” Alex replied. His tone was light, but there was a bit of an edge to it.
“What are you making?” I asked. We reached the doorway and went inside. I knew his words contained subtext, but I had to ignore it.
“The best macaroni and cheese you’ve ever had in your entire life,” he said. “Also, fried chicken. Also, corn bread. Also, my secret coleslaw recipe.”
When I turned around, his eyes were locked on me like nothing else in the entire world was worth looking at.
“Is that it?” I quipped, laughing. “Doesn’t seem like nearly enough.”
He swatted me on the ass. “I also made an apple pie.”
“Show-off,” I said, sticking my tongue out at him. “Everyone will be very impressed.”
He dropped his bag in the hallway and I did the same, then he lifted my arms and crossed them behind his neck, got real close to me. Everyone was talking in the kitchen, but there was a door between us and them.
“Will you be impressed?” he asked, soft, right into my ear. “Because you’re the only one I’m trying to impress.”
“I’ll have to taste everything and let you know.” I licked the side of his neck and his knees buckled. I laughed.
“Making me earn it,” he whispered. “I like that, Quinn.”
He kissed me, slowly, his hand sliding up my T-shirt to the skin of my back. I arched toward him until I heard the kitchen door fly open. We immediately jumped away from each other like we’d been caught doing something we shouldn’t.
“Oh, don’t stop on my account,” Benny said, laughing. “I approve completely of clandestine meetings in darkened hallways with family in the other room. But, we’re starving. Any chance you all want to stop making out for a second and cook this dinner?”
She picked up both paper bags that Alex and I couldn’t seem to get from the car to the kitchen without dropping, then looked over her shoulder and smiled with a goddamn twinkle in her eye, like nothing could get by her, especially not this.