Chapter 4
chapter
four
Heath
We made love two more times until we were spent, sweaty and exhausted.
It’s never been like that before. I’ve never been that insatiable. I’ve always enjoyed sex, but this was more. Being inside Clover felt right in a way I’ve never known, in a way I wouldn’t have known how to describe before last night gave me the reference point.
Once upon a time, I rushed into things with a woman.
The truth is I never loved Kiki. I know for a fact she never loved me.
We hooked up, she got pregnant, and I married her because that was what you did and because I was twenty-six and stupid and I thought obligation was close enough to love if you squinted at it right.
It didn’t take her long to realize she had no desire to be a wife or a mother. She’d been after my money all along. The divorce was tidy and swift since I gave in to all of her monetary demands without argument because what I wanted was for it to be over.
But I walked away the richer one. I got our son, and raising Leo has been my greatest honor. Hands down, the best decision I ever made.
As unexpected as meeting Clover was, I feel a bone-deep certainty that she’s my other half. The kind of certainty I’ve never felt about anything that wasn’t work or Leo. It should probably alarm me. It doesn’t.
The morning should feel significant for other reasons.
My son is getting married today, and I am standing on the balcony of my suite with a cup of coffee.
The sun is doing something genuinely unreasonable over the water.
Pinks and golds are stacking up on the horizon like the island is showing off.
It probably is. I’ve owned this place for eleven years and the sunrises still stop me cold.
I should be thinking about Leo. About my best man duties. About the speech I finished yesterday and have already read back to myself twice this morning. About the fact that my ex-wife is somewhere in this building right now, a reality I have been successfully compartmentalizing thus far.
Instead, I am thinking about Clover.
Clover with her wild red curls and her brown eyes shot through with amber.
Clover who talked to herself out loud and didn’t seem particularly embarrassed about it.
Who lost a cake decorating job and called 9-1-1 on a class full of sick toddlers and had theories about sobbing widows and their boy toys.
Who sat on my lap in the dark and came apart so sweetly it made something in my chest crack open like a window that had been painted shut for years.
Knowing all of that is the only thing that staved off the panic when I woke this morning and found her gone.
Last night before I showered I’d sent a message to the weekend manager making sure her room was upgraded and ready.
It had only taken a quick text to confirm she’d checked in. I knew where to find her.
I need to find her today. After the ceremony, after I’ve stood next to my son while he marries the woman he loves and given the speech and done what fathers and best men do.
Then I’m going to find her and finish the conversation we started last night before Leo and Juniper arrived and the evening became a different kind of thing entirely.
I make a mental note to figure out how to say what I want to say in a way that sounds like a man who has his thoughts organized. Chances are telling a woman she’s not nothing isn’t nearly as romantic as it sounds in my head at six-thirty in the morning.
My coffee has gone lukewarm. I finish it anyway and go inside to get dressed.
I am apparently whistling when I find them at breakfast.
I don’t notice I’m doing it until Graham looks up from his coffee with an expression that contains multitudes.
“What the fuck are you whistling about?” he asks.
“Am I not allowed to be happy?”
Graham and Bram exchange the glance of two men who have known each other long enough to have developed a private language of meaningful looks. James, my brother-in-law, sits quietly with his coffee watching the water, which is his standard operating mode and one I have always respected.
“Morning,” I say.
“Morning,” James says.
Graham and Bram continue to say nothing, which is somehow more commentary than words would be.
I pick up the menu even though I know it by heart and study it with great attention.
“Perhaps next time don’t advertise it with a love bite on your neck,” Bram says.
The other two men stare at my neck with the synchronized attention of a jury.
Must have missed that when I was getting dressed. I try to muster up some embarrassment and genuinely cannot locate any. The fact that Clover left her mark on me makes me feel something closer to proud, which I am self-aware enough to know says a great deal about where my head is this morning.
“For fuck’s sake, Heath, you seriously going to rock a hickey at your son’s wedding?” Graham says.
And there it is. Big brothers, I have found, do not improve with age in this regard. They just accumulate more material.
“You’re one to talk,” Bram says, pivoting immediately to my defense in the way that means he’s already planning to use this against me later. “Taylor told everyone at family dinner the other night that you and Lizzie had matching hickeys at the office the other day.”
“Your granddaughter doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about,” Graham grumbles.
“Sure,” James says. “Though if you’re going to give a love bite, you really ought to do it somewhere generally covered by clothing.”
“Dude, that’s our sister you’re talking about,” Graham says.
James just chuckles, which is his primary mode of conflict resolution.
I order coffee and eggs and let the noise of my family wash over me.
This is the thing about the people I love most. They are incapable of letting anything pass unremarked.
It is exhausting, and it is, if I’m being honest, exactly what I need this morning.
Because if Graham and Bram are giving me grief about a love bite then I am not thinking about Kiki.
And any potential drama she might create.
About the twenty years of complicated history that exists between us that Leo has spent his entire childhood navigating.
Leo isn’t a huge fan of his mother. Not in an angry way, just in the way of someone who made peace a long time ago with exactly who she is and decided to love her from a comfortable and sustainable distance.
She prefers he call her Kiki rather than mom, a preference he accommodates without comment.
He is, in this as in most things, a better person than the situation required him to be.
“There he is,” Bram says.
Leo drops into the chair across from me and immediately zeroes in on my neck. “Whoa, dad, is that a hickey?”
“Good morning to you too, son.”
“So are you going to tell us who she is?” Graham asks.
“Not right now. Today is Leo’s day.” I look at my son. “When do we get to meet your bride?”
“You’ll see her at the ceremony. You’re going to love her,” Leo says.
The smile on his face hits me somewhere behind the sternum.
I have watched my son’s face his entire life, every version of every smile he’s ever produced.
This one is new. This is the one I have been hoping to see since he was small enough to carry on my shoulders, back when I was making silent promises to a kid who couldn’t hear them about the kind of life I was going to try to build for him.
He truly loves this girl.
Maybe I’ve been hasty. Thinking I needed to talk him into slowing things down.
Maybe the ghost of my own disastrous early decisions has been following me around so long that I’ve been seeing it in places it doesn’t live.
Leo is not me at his age. Leo is careful and kind and he chose a woman for the right reasons, not because she told him what he wanted to hear when he was too young and too stupid to know the difference.
Kiki came with warning signs I ignored. My sister and Graham never liked her and told me so, and I didn’t listen.
Leo is an amazing man. I’m biased, but I worked hard to raise him to be kind and levelheaded, and here is the evidence of that work sitting across from me grinning about pina colada pancakes.
I decide, here and now, that I am done reserving judgment. Leo’s smile is enough.
“Ready to see Mom?” he asks.
“I am never ready to see your mother,” I say honestly.
“I totally forgot Kiki would be here,” Graham says.
Leo laughs. “I would never have heard the end of it if I hadn’t invited her.” He shrugs with the ease of a man who has accepted certain fixed features of his landscape. “She’ll behave. She almost always behaves in public.”
“Seriously, though, what is with all the smiling?” Graham asks, studying me with the look he reserves for things he hasn’t figured out yet. Which isn’t many things.
Bram leans back in his chair and nods in my direction with the satisfied expression of a man arriving at a conclusion. “I know that face. Fucker is in love.”
I pick up my coffee.
I don’t argue.