Chapter Twenty-Four
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This chapter begs you to heed the trigger warnings.
Fox
I might be on a dinner date with Poem Devoe. Potentially. Possibly. Maybe? How does one know if they’re on a date or not?
“Red or white?” I ask my date (question mark), plopping two contrasting bottles of wine in front of her on my kitchen counter as food sizzles on the stove behind me.
I stare at the bottles. Which one would a person on a date drink? White wine gives girlie pop brunch time. Or fish, I guess, but mostly girlie time brunch. Red wine, though… dark, candlelit restaurants and cozy picnics on the beach, right?
“You pick,” I order. If she picks white, then this isn’t our first date. If she picks red, then it is. Science. Irrefutable science, even.
Her nose scrunches. “Do you have any rosé up here?”
“Rosé?” I echo, frowning.
“Yeah,” she says. “I like rosé. It reminds me of the singer from BLACKPINK. Do you have any up here? Or should I go down and grab some? I can put money in the till for it.”
“I don’t want your money,” I grumble. Her giving me money would push us closer to not-a-date than definitely-a-date, and I am not encouraging that tilt.
“It would be your money,” she retorts. “I don’t have wine money. I may not have to pay for construction costs, but I still have cosmetic repairs to make and furniture legs to replace.”
Oh. “Well. That’s fine then. I can go down and grab some. Do you have a preference?”
She rattles off a wine that I didn’t know we stocked.
My gaze narrows. “Did you sneak into the ordering system and add that to the stock request before I sent it out?”
She blinks, the picture of innocent never-did-anything-wrong-in-her-life virtuosity.
I forget entirely what I was upset about or why I would dare to be upset with her in the first place.
“I’ll be right back,” I grit, clenching my jaw so that it does not go slack in the face of her utter adorableness. “Don’t touch anything.”
She shrugs agreeably. “Won’t catch me in there poking around at things. I bake. Cakes, cookies, et cetera. I do not cook.” Her nose wrinkles. “If it has garlic, I’m out, and I saw you mince about four heads of garlic earlier, so I’m way out.”
It was half of a head of garlic, but I don’t correct her. Whatever keeps her far away from the potential to burn herself in my absence, something I’ve seen her manage several times trying to filch a fry from the fryer basket in the bar’s kitchen mid-shift.
I put away the date and not-date wines, then round the counter, kiss her temple, and head down to retrieve the maybe-a-date-? wine instead.
When I return to Poem, she’s standing over the stove prodding at the garlic potatoes as they sizzle. Prodding. With her bare finger.
“Poem,” I hiss, setting the thick bottle on the counter with a clatter. “Get away from that. It’s going to hurt you.”
“You’re making potatoes!” she exclaims with a level of excitement most would save for winning the superbowl or defeating cancer.
“You like potatoes,” I grumble, herding her back to her side of the counter. “I’m also making marry-me chicken.”
Excitement narrowing into suspicion, she eyes me.
“You’re not going to bust out a ring, are you?
It’s only been a few days since you started wooing me.
You can’t jump from wooing to engaged via chicken and potatoes in less than a week, Fox.
It’s uncouth. Not to mention blatant manipulation.
You know I’ll do anything for potatoes.”
“Is that all it would take?” I ask. “Well-cooked potatoes?”
“There’s the chicken, too,” she reminds me. “Very dastardly, what you’re doing here. Very red flags.”
“Making the woman I love a delicious and nutritious dinner for date night in is a dastardly red flag?” I ask, avoiding eye contact as I fish for confirmation of what this evening is or isn’t. “I thought women loved a man who could and would cook.”
“Is it really dinner if we’re having it at 4:00 AM?” she wonders aloud. “Surely there’s a cap on that somewhere. There are people eating breakfast right now. Can we be having dinner while others eat eggs and toast?”
I shrug as elation bursts beneath my skin at her non-acknowledgment of the word “date,” which I am taking as confirmation that this is, in fact, most definitely a date. “It’s our end-of-day meal. That makes it dinner. What other people may or may not be eating has no bearing on us.”
I pour her a glass of shimmering pink rosé and admire the sparkle in her eye as she lifts it for a sip.
“I suppose I can accept that this is dinner,” she concedes.
“But only because I am morally opposed to drinking wine with breakfast.” She shivers.
“That’s some nonsense my parents would do.
Which means it’s some nonsense that I would never.
” She lifts her glass. “Cheers to dinner in the breakfast hours.”
I snag a bottle of sparkling cider from the fridge and cheers her back, taking a swig.
“Can I ask you a question?” I ask, because coming straight out with your invasive and rude curiosities is not what one does on a date.
“It’s about power and proof,” she replies. Because coming straight out with responses that make a lick of sense is also not what one does on a date, I guess.
“What is?”
“You were going to ask why I drink at all, weren’t you? Why I work in a bar? When my parents are alcoholics?”
Well… yes.
I wince.
“It’s okay,” she says, taking another drink of her wine.
“Like I said, it’s about power and proof.
The power I hold to put it down when I’m done and not pick it back up.
The proof it gives me that I’m not them and I never will be.
Even, on some level, proof to myself that they aren’t sick, they’re just weak.
Which sounds awful, really, but if they’re sick?
Then I have to forgive them, don’t I? Addiction is a disease.
An awful disease that you don’t get to pick, not once you’re in it.
But weakness? That’s a choice. Giving in to that weakness is a choice.
And I don’t have to forgive a person who chooses to give in to their weakness when they’ve got three perfectly good reasons not to.
I don’t have to be compassionate toward people who choose the easy path knowing the horrors they’re putting literal children through when they choose it.
” She sniffs. “Some people are sick, and it’s awful.
Some people take one drink, or one puff, or one pill, and that’s it for them.
One mistake that costs them everything. Other people, though?
Other people have the power to prove that they can do better for themselves and for the ones they’re meant to love, and they give that power away again and again to bottles and smoke.
I have compassion for the sick, but I do not have compassion for the weak who won’t exercise their power or get their kids to safety knowing full well that they’re too weak to raise them. ”
My nostrils flare, and I stand very, very still.
“It’s not easy having parents like mine.
Abusive alcoholics who woke up every day and chose to be that way.
They’d take a swig, blame us for it, and smack us across the face if we dared to say anything about how it wasn’t right.
I don’t know how many times I saw my mother take a shot before turning to one of us and saying she had to because we made her need it.
” She scoffs. “Or how many times she’d be several shots in and one of us would have the audacity to ask if dinner was going to be made that night, and we’d get screamed at if we weren’t within arm’s length—and we learned pretty quickly never to be within arm’s length.
” She shakes her head, then lifts her glass.
“I can drink this, though, and I can say confidently that it’s my choice.
No one made me drink this as surely as no one made them.
And I can drink this knowing full well that at the end of my glass, I’ll stop, and I won’t harm anyone around me at any point in the process.
I have the power. I have the proof. They can haunt my nightmares, but they can’t change this.
” She sips the pink liquid. “My power. My proof.”
Murder is only illegal if you get caught, I heard.
Poem takes a heartier swig of her drink, then gives the blessing of her attention to me.
Immediately, she laughs, sliding out of her stool to come and soothe the anger out of my pores.
Her gentle hand rests on my jaw, encouraging it to unclench.
The pads of her fingers dig between my fisted ones, burrowing with comfort it is a miracle she has within her to give.
“Your parents,” I growl, “they live in Indiana?”
She sighs, pressing her body into mine until I accept the softness she offers.
“They do,” she says. “Drinking and smoking their lives away, powerless and weak. They’re lonely, making up dramas and offenses any time they manage to make new friends, souring the friendships fast. They have no one.
They are no one.” Her thumb brushes my scowling lips.
Her mouth follows, pressing a featherlight kiss in its wake.
“They’re punished every day by the choices they make,” she promises.
“And I’m rewarded every day I am no longer in their wake. ”
“This is a date,” I proclaim, wrapping my arms fully around her.
“Dinner and the movie we’re going to watch.
It’s a date. With a man who is not ever going to let anyone treat you like that again.
Even if this doesn’t end how I want it to end,” I vow, “you won’t know the taste of abuse another day in your life. ”
Her eyebrows rise. “I don’t need you to keep me safe from them. I managed that all on my own.”