Chapter Twenty-Nine
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Parents are embarrassing at any age, I heard.
Poem
The last thing I would have ever expected to happen after my first proposal was for me to burst into tears, try to crawl into my man’s skin, then, when I finally accepted that crawling into a man’s skin isn’t possible on this plane of existence, fall asleep sobbing in his arms instead.
The second-to-last thing I would have expected to happen is to be woken up by his parents bursting into his bedroom, taking one look at him shirtless and me disheveled, and backing right back out—after not a small amount of screaming and apologies on his mother’s part.
“So sorry!” she yells, knocking Gilbert into the doorframe as she reverses blindly. “We thought Fox would be alone in here!” Gil grunts as she runs into him a second time. “We’ll be in the living room!”
“We can hear you,” Fox grumbles, propping himself on an elbow to glare at them. “Gracious, no one is naked. You don’t need to cover your eyes. You’re going to give dad a concussion.”
Carefully and slowly and cautiously, she peeks between her fingers. Finding no one sans clothing, she drops her hands altogether, but her gaze remains strictly averted and her cheeks stay particularly rosy.
“The living room,” Gilbert says, rubbing the back of his head while aiming a gracious smile at his wife, as if she is not the sole reason for the massive goose egg forming there. “We’ll let you kids get ready. Then, we’d like to have a little family meeting in the living room.”
Fox grunts, dropping to his mattress with a thunk despite the blooming blush crawling up his neck.
I squint bleary eyes at the alarm clock on his nightstand, blinking against the neon orange bells atop it to decipher the time in analog like some kind of ancient clockmaster.
“Seven,” I whimper once the puzzle reveals itself to me. “Fox, it’s seven.”
The whole family is insane. All of them.
He groans a curse.
“Five minutes,” he tells his parents. “Give us time to brush our teeth, at least.”
Five? Minutes? I’m supposed to be up and relatively hygienic in a mere five minutes? If I weren’t already lying down, I’d fall over.
“Take your time,” Belinda says. “We’ll turn on the TV. No rush!”
“Mom,” Fox hisses. “Stop that. We’ll be out in five.”
I grimace, but agree. I am not letting them think anything besides tooth brushing is going on with them a single doorway away. Nope, nope, nope.
Belinda and Gilbert leave, making a hair-raising point of shutting the door tight.
“I’m going to die,” I inform Fox. “That was mortifying. And horrifying. And, also, way too early in the morning.”
He shrugs, squinting against the morning light filtering through his gauzy green curtains.
“On the embarrassment scale, I’ll give it a four, but that’s only because no grown man wants the woman he’s hoping will fall in love with him to know that his parents occasionally burst into not only his apartment, but his bedroom first thing in the morning. ”
I gape. “This happens regularly?”
The pink covering his cheeks deepens. “Yeah,” he answers. “They like to check up on me. I’m usually up before they get here, but if not…” He trails off, throwing a hand out toward the door. “Well, you see. They must have thought you were back at your house.”
Goodness. “They love you so much,” I mutter. “I think that’s sweet. Not embarrassing. The only embarrassing part is that they think we’re going to do things right now.”
He blinks very, very slowly as his head turns, wide blue eyes incredulous.
Ignoring what his parents may or may not think about his current presumed actions, he says, “You think it’s sweet that they use their emergency key in non-emergency situations to make sure I’m up and being a Responsible Human? ”
I frown at his abysmal take on the situation. “Your view of what’s happening here is marred by your belief that they don’t know you are a capable, trustworthy, incredible man.”
“Correct,” he agrees. “That’s because I’m right. Why else would they be hovering? Watching me? Judging when I wake and what I do once I’m up?”
“Because they love you?” I suggest. “Because they missed you while you were gone, and they want to spend what time with you they can now—beyond the family events that everyone is at? They want two-on-one time with you. So they get up with the sun and come over in the hopes that they’ll catch you before you go off for errands or office work or a workout or rec league softball practice or whatever else it is you do in the wisps of free time you have? ”
His face blanks as his gaze drifts to the pointedly closed door.
I sigh, force myself to sitting, and kiss his cheek. “Think about it,” I suggest. “Try to see the world through a different lens for a minute. I think you’ll find that it’s much brighter.”
I leave him lost and unsure, but I hope that he listens to me. I hope that when he meets us in the living room, it’s with brand new eyes to see the outpouring of love that his parents are trying to give him.
After brushing my teeth—and sneaking into the guest room to change into less crumpled clothes—I join Belinda and Gilbert in the living room.
I plop onto the couch next to Belinda and valiantly pretend like they did not just find me in bed with their son and that they are not giving me looks because of it.
“Nothing happened,” Fox grumps, slumping into the room seconds after me.
Fox, it seems, has not chosen the valiant path.
Or the fully-clothed path, either, since the man didn’t bother to throw on a shirt after getting out of bed.
Apparently he desires me to drool over his physique in front of his parents.
I cannot fully say that I mind.
“It’s okay if something did happen,” Belinda says, patting my knee. “We remember our younger days, too, you know.”
Gilbert’s eyes twinkle in agreement.
Fox gags[3].
My lips twitch.
“We’ve actually been wanting to talk to you two about this,” she says, turning off a riveting rerun of Little House on the Prairie.
“The entire town has been on my phone for weeks, asking me about your relationship, and we decided to give you guys some space to come to us when you’re ready, but…
well, the town is two feet wide. There’s hardly any space to give. ”
Fox stares at them. In his living room. At seven AM. Uninvited.
Clearly, they are doing every single thing they can to give us the time and space they’re implying we need.
Clearly.
With a grumble, Fox moves to the kitchen, where the muscles in his back bunch enticingly as he pulls ingredients out of the fridge and cabinets. Gil joins him, and Belinda and I follow, taking spots at the barstools across the counter.
“I’m in love with Poem,” Fox tells his parents. He says it swiftly, like taking off a Band-Aid. “She’s deciding if she’s going to love me back.” His shoulders tense as he braces himself, robotically dumping super ultra protein pancake mix into a big, teal mixing bowl.
Belinda’s shock and joy become a palpable weight in the air. “Oh my gosh!” she squeals.
Gil cracks an egg into the pancake batter bowl, a smile blooming on his lips.
Belinda twists to engulf me in a hug. “Poem! This is amazing!”
I hug her back while Fox stiffly drops a generous cup of mini chocolate chips into the batter.
“Um,” I hedge. “Isn’t this a hugging Fox kind of moment? He’s the one with the news. I haven’t made any decisions yet.”
She scoffs. “Absolutely not. You’re the one receiving the best gift of your life.
” She pulls back but not away, squishing my cheeks between her hands.
“I’m so happy for you, my girl. I can’t think of a better man for any woman to be loved by than Fox, and I can’t think of a woman any more worthy of his love than you.
” Her sky-blue eyes well with joy that tips over to leave wet droplets on our tangled knees.
Shakily, she says, “I know you’ll make the right choice in the end. I have faith in you.”
“The right choice?” Fox asks before I can scrounge together any sort of response. “You think the right choice for her is me?”
Gil tilts his head at his son, plastic spatula scraper thing held aloft.
“What other good choice would there be?” he asks.
“Only someone supremely stupid wouldn’t want to be with you, and Poem’s no dummy.
Even if she does like to antagonize you every now and then.
” He shrugs. “She has eyes, though. She can see you’re a good looking man—like your father—and a catch beyond that.
You’re smart. You’re caring. You’re a hard worker.
You take care of your people. Heck, you take care of not your people, too.
” He waves an arm at the apartment. “You clean.” He tips his head at the stove.
“You cook. And more than all of that, you love with your whole being, not just your heart. What more could Poem want?”
Well… when he puts it that way…
Huh.
Hm.
Mm…
My breathing quickens as his words sink further into my psyche, drilling holes through paper-thin defenses.
Oof.
Slowly, bravely, Fox asks, “You guys… don’t think I’m an irresponsible idiot who needs to do better? Even after I broke a guy’s nose like… three weeks ago?”
Belinda drops my face to hold her own, horrified one. “Fox! Of course not! Your dad said Greg deserved that broken nose, and we should be proud of you for giving it to him. The exact opposite of whatever nonsense you just spewed.”
Fox blinks like… thirty times. “Oh,” he says, intelligent as ever.
Gil shakes his head, then gets to work folding the chocolate chips into the pancake batter.
Belinda glares at him. “Gilbert, fix your son’s nonsense.”
“We love you,” Gil announces promptly. “And we think… well, all of that stuff I just said. Don’t insult us by thinking otherwise.”
“Okay.” Fox swallows, eyelids working overtime. “I… won’t.”
“Good.” Gil nods. “Satisfied, my beauty?”
She frowns at both of them. “I am most assuredly not.”
He hums. “Convince your mother that you believe we believe in you, Fox. I’ll get these pancakes cooking.”
I wonder if I should tell Fox that all that blinking isn’t going to magically make him not be crying.
I wonder that I have time to wonder about telling Fox anything at all when I am ruminating over his father’s words, words that sound so much like the ones I’ve been trying to drill into Fox’s head, too.
He is all of those things. Every single one of them.
And any woman would be stupid not to love him back.
And I am not a stupid woman.
Which means…
Hm.
Hm.
Do I love him back?
My heart hammers in my chest at the notion as he moves away from the stove to stand opposite his mom at the counter. “I believe you, Mom.”
Her eyes narrow. “You were always pretty stubborn,” she says. “So you’ll excuse me if I worry that you don’t just believe us after a single conversation.”
His eyes dart to me as he replies, “I’ve been given somewhat of an education recently on what others believe about me and how it doesn’t always line up with what I think they do or should actually believe. This conversation with you isn’t just one conversation. It’s only the most recent of many.”
Gil hums knowingly while Belinda follows her son’s gaze to me.
I smile nervously.
“Well that’s settled, then,” Belinda declares with a nod. “We all think the world of Fox, and he knows that we think the world of him.”
I nod back. Yep, yep, yep. We think the world of him. He knows it. All is well.
Except for the part where I might have been in love with him this entire time and didn’t know it.
Maybe.
Possibly.
Probably.
Semantics, really.