Chapter 8
EIGHT
ASH
“Ashley.” Mom blinks so many times in a row that she might pull a muscle. “Ashley B—”
“Mom.” I cut her off before she whips out my middle name. “Take a breath.”
She does take a breath, but she does something worse—tears well up in her eyes. Fuck.
“You’re getting married to Jada and you didn’t breathe a word of it to me?” she asks. Lady, sensing that Mom is distraught, nudges Mom’s hand with her nose.
I sigh and rest my hand on the back of my car, which is packed with all my stuff. I don’t have much—a lot of the space is filled with instruments and my most important vinyl, but I just have one big suitcase with my clothes.
“Yes,” I say.
Mom squeezes the bridge of her nose and starts pacing. “Married. You’re getting married! To Jada! She’s like family already and I didn’t know! She didn’t tell me, either, but I haven’t seen her in a while. But you’ve been living under our roof and haven’t said a word!”
Mom’s voice is carrying through the garage and into the house, and I don’t want Dad to hear her. I put a hand on her shoulder, half to steady her and half to get her to stop pacing before she trips over Lady.
“It’s complicated, Mom,” I say in what I hope is a soothing voice. “She’s been going through a lot and we were long distance.”
“Is it just because of your grandfather’s will?” she asks, suddenly serious. Her neatly groomed eyebrows furrow. “Because you can’t just marry Jada because of that. She deserves more.”
“What? No.” Absolutely, but we have to pull off this ruse with Mom, too. “It’s not just that alone. We were dating and it’s been serious, even though we’ve been long distance. I got the news about the inheritance, so we moved our timeline up. That’s all.”
Mom purses her lips and rests a hand on her hip. She looks impeccably put together, as always. I’ve never seen her look out of sorts, unless she’s sick.
“I love both of you dearly, and y’all are grown, but this is…” She leans against my car, too, and Lady leans against her leg. “This is sudden.”
I just nod. There’s nothing else I can really say to make it any easier for her.
“Did you already set a date?” Mom asks after a long pause.
“Yeah, Monday.”
“On Monday?” Mom literally clutches her pearl necklace. “Ashley, it is Friday morning. How am I supposed to plan a wedding over a weekend?”
I slump against my car. “We’re just going to the courthouse. It’s not a real wedding.”
“Oh, but it is.” Mom pulls her phone from the pocket of her pants. “Oh my goodness. I’ve got to mobilize. We need florals and food… I wonder if Sarah Jane would be able to even make a cake… Ashley, you’re making my hairdresser very wealthy with all these grays she’ll have to cover up.”
I hold in a laugh—she’s been saying that since I was a child. Her hair is entirely salt and pepper now as far as I can tell. But she hardly lets her roots show before getting them touched up.
“I’ve gotta run,” I say, leaning down to give her a kiss on the cheek.
“Mmkay,” she says, her fingers flying over her phone screen. The font is enormous because she refuses to wear her reading glasses, so I can see where she’s typed URGENT: PARTY EMERGENCY!!!!! in the subject line of an email with five different recipients.
I give Lady a few more pets before getting in my car and driving to Jada’s. The guilt is eating at me more than I thought it would. To be honest, I didn’t think Mom would care as much about my wedding as she would about Waylon’s or Wes’s or JD’s.
Not that Mom doesn’t love me—she does—but I’ve always kept her on the edge of my orbit. Most of the time it’s so I don’t worry her, but now I’m seeing how little she knows me. She seemed more confused as to why Jada didn’t tell her about us rather than me.
I shove that thought into the back of my head by the time I pull up to Jada’s. My stomach flip-flops into my chest, then down again. I’ve lived in a lot of places, mostly crammed into places with roommates or my bandmates.
But living with Jada feels different. It’s her permanent home, and based on my little perusal of the space, it’s highly personal. Every inch of the walls and the furniture were bursting with Jada—colors and knickknacks and even her surprisingly sweet cat felt like reflections of her.
I really liked it, too.
Even though I’ve never settled down in a place long enough to make it my own, I’ve always had specific ideas about how I’d want my space to be. And a lot of what Jada already has fits what I’d want, too.
Maybe it’s a good omen. A small one, but I’ll take anything at this point.
I text Jada and she appears moments later in one of those little rompers she wore the other day. It looks soft and comfortable, but clings to her curvy body like lingerie.
“Need help?” she asks as I get out of the car.
“Maybe carry this?” I pick up a small box of vinyl.
She stares down at it, then at the heavier stuff still in my trunk. For a moment I think she’s going to try to pick up something heavier, but she takes the box and goes upstairs. We bring everything in, with her putting all of my stuff in the living room next to the couch.
“So, this is your space.” She gestures vaguely to the couch. The cat, who I remember is named Pipsqueak, leaps onto it, purring. “And my bedroom is my space. The kitchen and bathroom are obviously shared spaces.”
I nod. Pipsqueak—or Pip, as Jada has called him—prowls toward me, tail up, and reaches out with a paw. I pet him and he purrs even louder, like he’s known me for more than three hours in his whole cat life.
“Let me give you a tour, actually,” she murmurs, waving me toward her. “Not that it’s huge, but…yeah…”
She bites her lip, glancing at me over her shoulder like she’s nervous. Pip follows us, weaving between her ankles and looking back at me, too.
“My bedroom. Please don’t go in here,” she says, pushing open a door at the end of the hall.
It looks so cozy that I almost want to walk right in, regardless of what she just said.
A huge king-sized bed takes up one wall and is piled high with an explosion of brightly colored pillows and stuffed animals.
The lighting is low, with a few lamps placed strategically to bathe the room in a warm glow.
A TV is mounted on the wall opposite the bed, with built-in bookcases surrounding it.
She clears her throat—she’s down the hall already, so I follow and nearly trip over Pip.
“The bathroom. For the love of god, flush the toilet and don’t pee all over the place. No beard hairs anywhere. Don’t use my shampoo or conditioner, not that it would do much for your hair.” She looks me up and down. “What’s your schedule like, anyway?”
“Uh…” I run my hand through my hair. I’ve drafted a text to JD but haven’t had the balls to hit send. I need to. “To be determined. I need to talk to JD.”
“Fine. I usually have my work schedule in here.” She gestures toward the kitchen. “My work schedule and everything else.”
I was in her kitchen when we first talked, but I didn’t get the chance to take everything in.
Everything is stuffed to the brim, but clearly very intentional.
Bins. There are so many clear bins on the open shelving and on top of the fridge, all of them labeled in big, broad categories like “meds” or “soup stuff.”
Her fridge is a mess of magnets on one side, and a big whiteboard on the other. On the third side she has papers and what look like schedules and info lining the side at her eye level.
“Please, please do not mess with my organization systems,” she says, gesturing at her fridge. “Or any of my reminders, especially the medication ones. Okay?”
“Okay. I wouldn’t.” I put my hands up, almost defensively even though she was nice about it. “It looks…extensive.”
“It’s an ADHD thing. Which also means we need to talk about your tolerance for mess.” She turns away from me and grabs a pad of paper attached on a string to the fridge. “And chores.”
“Two of my bandmates were practically feral, so literally any system is better than what I’ve been working with on tours. I don’t mind a little mess, either,” I say. “Whatever you have, I’m glad to work with it. I don’t want to think of any new shit if whatever you have going on works.”
“Hm.” She pauses, surprised. “You lived all up under your bandmates? You didn’t have your own bus or whatever?”
I snort. “Eventually I had my own space on the bus. We kept it lean to keep more profits—our lead singer’s idea. But I think she got off on people’s misery.”
She blinks a few times. “That doesn’t sound glamorous.”
“Not a lot of it is.”
She gnaws on the end of her pen and rocks back on her heels, like she’s bursting to say something else. But she pauses and opens her fridge instead.
“Also, don’t eat my snacks. Not the ones in here. Not the ones in the pantry. If I open the pantry and find my special treats gone, I will crash out all over you.”
The way she gestures makes her tits wobble, which makes me think of different ways she could “crash out all over me.”
“Don’t,” she says.
“Don’t what?” I blink and refocus on her face.
“Give me those eyes. In my own home.” She gestures again at my face but crosses her arms over her breasts. “Also, I’m not wearing a bra around the house. The moment I walk through the door, it’s coming off.”
I bite the inside of my cheek, hard. I’m a big tits guy, and hers look incredible in everything she wears. Having them behind a thin layer of fabric when I’m trying to relax…
A whole year. A whole year with just my hand in her little shower.
Fucking kill me.
“And clothes remain on unless you’re in the bathroom, of course,” she adds.
“Right.” I swallow. “Is that it? I need to make some calls.”
“Yeah, just read over the chore chart thing over here. It’s kind of loose because sometimes my brain just doesn’t want to.” She waves her hand toward the side of the fridge.
“Doesn’t want to what?”
“Just…doesn’t.” She scoops up Pip. “See ya.”
She goes down the hall to her cozy room and I go to the couch. Calling JD to set up my start date for my job at the company decimates any hint of a boner that I had. I need to rip off the bandage.
“Calling about the job?” JD answers on the second ring.
“Would I call you for any other reason?” I ask.
He doesn’t respond to that quip. When we were growing up, we fought like crazy over everything. Every little slight had to be one-upped or responded to. But he doesn’t take the bait I reflexively cast.
“It’s been a week since the will was read,” he says. “Have you given any thought to what you might want to do?”
“You’re giving me a choice?” I blurt.
JD once again pauses. This time I hear what sounds like a printer in the background.
“I’m not a dictator,” he finally says. “And presumably, you’ll be more effective if you have an interest in what you’re doing.”
“Sure,” I say.
“I’ll email you a list of departments. Think of what you might want to start with.” I hear him typing furiously on his end of the line. “Come in on Monday at ten.”
“Can’t. We’re getting married Monday.”
“Who’s getting married?” He stops typing.
“Jada and I.”
Yet another infuriatingly long pause, aside from who I assume is Bubba letting out a soft boof in the background.
“Jada. And you. Married. Monday?” JD asks. I don’t know what to say, so I stay quiet. “That isn’t my problem. I’m guessing you aren’t going on a honeymoon.”
“No.” It hadn’t even crossed my mind, not that I’d want to spend money on that kind of thing. What would we even do, anyway?
“So…let’s say Wednesday. At ten. Be there on time.” He hangs up, and moments later, my phone buzzes with an email from JD.
After glancing at it quickly, I mark the email as unread, feeling uneasy.
That wasn’t friendly, but it wasn’t a battle.
JD wasn’t trying to shut me down or put me through the wringer, at least not yet.
JD from ten years ago would have. He took every moment he could to remind me that I’m basically spare parts.
Now he’s giving me options when he could just put me anywhere and not have to deal with me.
I used to think I understood what JD was about, but now I’m seeing that I don’t know him at all.
And somehow, that makes the idea of working at the family company even more stressful. What will I walk into next week?
I hear Jada sneeze and murmur something to Pip. The walls here are incredibly thin, which only worsens the ache in my gut. I can’t escape Jada.
I have to figure out how to live with my wife.