Chapter 30 #2
At the word ours, Sean’s appraising glance flicks over to me, although his expression has tempered itself into something more host-ly.
He was welcoming and gracious when I arrived, introducing me to his father, his brother Aiden and Aiden’s husband, Elijah, and a roving band of children ranging from ages five to eleven.
His wife, Zenny, he told me, would be here any minute, but a delivery was keeping her at work later than planned.
He was excited to meet me because I was the first person Ryan had ever brought to dinner and he hoped I liked steak and potatoes because that was all he knew how to make, and he hoped I would tell him all about how Bell and I started dating.
It wasn’t threatening—he’d thrown in a gossipy grin and a wink as he said it—but I’d felt the gravity of our strange fake relationship pressing in on me all at once.
I’d coped with the introductions as best I could, trying not to betray the anxiety that had gripped me the moment we walked into Sean’s lovely old house and I’d understood in a way that I hadn’t before that I was meeting several brand-new people and that they would see me as either a potential new family member or as an unwanted interloper.
Neither role was one I felt capable of quietly enduring without needing to hide at some point.
But Bell had been touching me the entire time—a hand between my shoulder blades or at the small of my back, a kiss to my shoulder—and it also helped that Sean, Aiden, and their dad all looked so much like Ryan, Sean especially.
His eyes were a darker blue and he lacked Bell’s curls, but they shared the carved jaw and straight nose, the smile and the dimples.
Their eyebrows were the same. They even had the same arrogant swagger in the way they moved and talked.
There is a thundering of feet down the stairs, and suddenly Lilith is surrounded by interested faces and hands, and she responds predictably with plaintive yowls that seem impossibly loud for her small lungs.
Bell easily slides into the fray, fetching Lilith up to his chest with one hand and hugging his youngest nephew, Lali, with the other while the other kids plead and bounce on the steps around him, demanding a turn holding her.
He smiles down at them, his thumb rubbing soothing circles along Lilith’s side, and says, “Well, the vet did tell us she needs lots of cuddles while she’s little to help her grow.
But we have to be careful, because she’s not an ordinary cat, you see.
They did all sorts of special tests, and it turns out that she’s not a regular cat. ”
“She’s not?” Josie’s eyes are wide.
Bell nods seriously down at him. “She’s made of clouds, actually.
See, touch her ear—very gently. Do you feel how soft she is?
That’s because this kind of cat comes from the mountains, where the clouds are very, very close, and sometimes, during very big storms when the clouds are darkest and there’s thunder and lightning, the clouds will leave something behind. Like Lilith.”
Caro and Amani, the oldest of the kids, exchange a look. Bullshit, the look says.
Martina, the next oldest, seems to be on the fence. “Kittens come from mama and papa cats,” she says, but a little uncertainly. Like there’s an openness to being persuaded there, and Bell doesn’t miss it.
“The clouds use the mama cats to help grow the cloud kittens,” he says smoothly.
“That’s how the cloud kittens learn to be snuggly and also how to climb and meow and all the things that clouds can’t do that cats can.
But we can never forget that Lilith is made of clouds, and that means we must be very, very careful when we pet her, right?
Because clouds are so soft and you’re so strong.
So you have to touch her as gently as you’d touch a cloud. ”
“Right,” Lali breathes from where he’s clinging to Bell’s side. “We’ll be careful.”
Josie nods eagerly. “We promise, Uncle Ryan.”
Bell tosses a wink over at Caro and Amani, and they go from ready to reveal his lies to playing along.
“I learned about cloud kittens in school, Martina,” Amani says. “It’s a third-grade thing. You’ll learn it too.”
As the oldest, Caro seems to have appointed herself as the cloud caretaker, and she accepts the meowing Lilith from her uncle with great solemnity.
Together, the kids go down the stairs and into the living room—Lali only after one last hug from Bell—and we hear lots of whispers and awwws and shushes and decisive directions from Amani about exactly how to pet a cloud.
Bell’s eyes find me right away, and he looks so satisfied with himself.
And the way he looked with the children crowded around him, the obvious affection and confidence, like it’s never occurred to him that it might be hard to be good with kids, like it’s the easiest thing in the world to take five nieces and nephews and turn them into a self-ordering cloud protection society.
And then his smug expression changes, blooms—his sharp-edged lips curving, the creases in his cheeks deepening—and now he’s smiling at me like I’ve just agreed to give him a kidney.
Which is when I realize that I was smiling at him first, a small, bashful smile with my lips pressed together and my cheeks hot and my fingers knotted behind my back.
I’ve been smiling at him like someone imagining him with kids of his own. Smiling like someone falling in love.
Before I can consider this, Bell’s dad is bustling past the stairs on his way out to the patio, where we’ll eat, an aggressively large bowl of salad cradled in his hands.
I’m suddenly nostalgic for my own father.
His gruff affection, how unbothered he was by any level of volume or teasing.
It’s a grief so old that I mostly forget it’s there, but watching Bell’s dad wander in and out of the kitchen, joke with his boys, toss a grandkid up in the air whenever he comes across one of the littler ones, I feel it.
My father died when I was sixteen; I’ve lived longer without him than I ever lived with him, and it’s not a new revelation that I’ll never get to see him as a grandfather. But it still aches in this moment, in this big house, with this big family, with their big, heretical hearts.
It’s probably a good thing that he’s not still alive, though.
I think he would be heartbroken to know what became of his girls.