Chapter 10 Dominic
Dominic
Cecily pulls up to Klein and Paisley's house Monday morning in a late-model, black Jeep.
I catch sight of her from the front living room window, and not two seconds after she's shifted into Park does she lay on the horn.
It's not a nice beep beep. It's long and mean, indignant.
If a car horn could sound like a put-down, this one would take the cake.
I blow out a breath and step outside. Cecily's death glare reaches across the front yard, searing me.
I give her a one moment finger, then lock up the house behind me.
Paisley is at work, and Klein is teaching a creative writing class at the local YMCA.
It's only his third week, and the class consists of senior citizens.
Tucking their house key in my pocket, I make my way down the driveway to Cecily's waiting vehicle. Slowly. To annoy her. Apparently, this infuriating woman has turned me into a spiteful teenager.
She has her phone out, tapping away, refusing to look at me as I approach. From here I spy her light-wash denim jeans, her white top with the V-neck.
Her outfit is visible to me because her Jeep doesn't have doors.
What's it like to drive this thing when it's pushing one hundred?
Degrees, that is. How does she survive Arizona summers in this contraption?
It's spring now, that magical period in central Arizona where the inhabitants forget there is a scorching summer on the horizon.
"Would you like a rag?" Cecily asks when I hurl myself into the passenger seat. Because, again, there aren't doors.
"For what?" I ask, buckling myself in.
"To wipe that look of disdain off your face."
Plenty of my time is spent around sharp women, but Cecily is different.
Cecily has teeth. Claws. She punches straight.
And though I'm not much of an antagonizer, there's something about her that makes me want to punch back.
Press her buttons. Light that fire in her eyes. It's a pyre burning men. Burning me.
I deliver a light slap to the glove compartment. "Could you have chosen a more impractical vehicle for the climate?"
She stabs the air between us with a red-painted nail. "There it is. I knew you had something to complain about."
"I'm not complaining."
"You are. And just to let you know, I won't tolerate shit-talking about this car.
I worked hard and saved up and bought her outright.
She's mine and I love her." Cecily shifts into Drive and pulls away from the curb.
"Let me know if you'd like me to stop at a surgeon along the way?
Get that stick surgically removed from your ass?
It's quite large, but I'm sure we can find someone who can operate on you, Dominic. "
My full name. She's doing it on purpose. "I'll be fine," I grumble. It's becoming more and more obvious that when it comes to verbal sparring, Cecily is superior to me.
"Let's just get on with this," I say, watching Cecily pull out into traffic.
She has a lazy hold on the wheel, gripping at seven and five instead of ten and two.
Hell, even nine and three would be better than where her hands are placed now.
How is she going to keep control of the vehicle in the event of an accident?
She'll be ejected because it doesn't have doors.
"You know," I shout above the atrocious road noise, "if you were really my wife, I'd buy you a safer car."
"Good thing I'm not really your wife," she whips back, hair blowing around her face as she picks up speed.
We're quiet after that, not that we could really talk with the noise smashing around us. I want to ask her what happened nine months ago. I'm dying to know why she left me on that date, slinking away while I was on the phone with a client.
She slows the Jeep at a red light, and just as I open my mouth to ask her about that afternoon, she says, "We'll be there soon, and it might be a good idea for me to tell you what to expect from today.
Or, what I expect to happen. Who really knows, though, because I've never brought a surprise husband home. "
"No? Weird." A car pulls up beside us at the light. I can't get over how close the vehicle feels, how exposed we are.
"They all know about you thanks to my drunken over-sharing text." She taps her finger on the steering wheel. "I still don't know why I did that."
The answer seems clear to me. "Because they are your family, and you wanted them to know you got married."
Cecily shakes her head slowly back-and-forth, as if to say, absolutely not. "You see, that's a normal answer for a normal family. The Hamptons are not normal."
"What are they?"
"Abnormal."
I snort. "Such a generic term. And highly subjective."
"Ok, Word Police. Between you and your wordy cousin, I swear..." she trails off, muttering under her breath.
I'm sure she had some kind of creative insult in those quiet words, but I'm curious about her family. "What about your grandma?"
A light smile tugs on Cecily's lips, brightening her face. "My grandma is a character. Her name is Ophelia, but we call her Savage Grandma, and—"
I cough. "What? You call your grandma savage?"
Cecily waves off my question. "You'll understand when you meet her."
This family is already shaping up to be infinitely more interesting than my own.
The light turns green. Cecily shouts above the air rushing around us. "My little sister Kerrigan is a character. She'll say the most unhinged, inappropriate stuff."
"Do you call her Unhinged Sister?"
"No, but we should." Cecily signals for a move into the right lane, glancing over her shoulder before completing it. The sun bounces off her dark hair, making it shine. Her sunglasses hide her eyes.
"My older brother, Duke, is"—Cecily pinches her lower lip between two fingers as she thinks—"aloof. He works closely with my dad, and I think he's created a shell around himself to survive."
"Your dad is someone to be survived?" My family might be vanilla, but I know a thing or two about surviving my parents' behavior.
"Yes, just ask my mom." Cecily takes a turn off the busy road, immediately delivering us onto a quieter street.
Quainter. Ranch style homes bracket the roads, set back a good distance.
A few are outdated, relics of the eighties before the city built up around them.
Most have been remodeled, or torn down and rebuilt.
The updated homes have brick-lined semicircular driveways, front yards with citrus trees, mature bushes, and flowering vines.
"What's your mom like?" I ask, inspecting the homes as we pass. The further we drive, the more the homes increase in size.
Cecily twirls a lock of hair around her finger, the other hand holding the steering wheel. "She's sort of this blank space of a human. She's the only person I've ever met who manages to be absent while present. If that makes sense."
My mother couldn't be more different, but I'm not going to tell her that right now.
"And what about your dad?" I'm expecting her dad to be nothing short of irate with me.
After all, I just married his daughter without asking him.
Without knowing her. Genuine marriage or not, I'm expecting to do a little apologizing.
"My dad is cold. Unyielding." Cecily turns on her blinker.
Hmm. That's interesting. On our disaster of a date, she described her parents as a lot. Not very descriptive, but hearing she thinks of her dad as cold and unyielding? I can't help but cling to that little nugget. It explains more about Cecily's sharp tongue, her willingness to fight.
We turn left, onto what looks like a driveway.
It slopes up, and we climb the gentle rise of the mountain.
The higher we go, the more confused I become.
I know this neighborhood, but only from afar.
As a kid, it amazed me that mountains could sit in the center of a city.
When we'd drive on the roads that parallel the mountains, I'd point up from our hot, frequently broken-down car that lacked working air conditioning, and say Richie Rich lives up there.
I never expected Cecily's grandmother to be Richie Rich.
Without tearing my gaze from the stunning homes we're passing on our crawl up the mountain, I say, "I'm prepared for your dad to read me the riot act for marrying you."
Can a person hear an eye roll? No, they cannot. But with Cecily, I swear I can. She injects the sentiment into her tone of voice. "Cool your jets, Rambo. You aren't walking into the lion's den. My dad isn't the protective type."
That's…sad. I have a protective streak a mile wide.
I plan to be a terror if I'm lucky enough to have a daughter.
Klein's dad left the family when he and his sister were in elementary school, and I watched the way Eden floundered when she was a teenager.
I didn't know it at the time because I was a kid myself, but looking back, I see how Eden would've benefited from an involved, loving dad.
Which is how I know that Cecily, despite sounding nonplussed about her dad's lack of interest in taking up a sword for his daughter, wouldn't mind having someone go to war for her.
I won't be telling her though. She's likely to rip off my arm and beat me with it. "Noted," is all I say.
There's only one house in front of us now, and it looms large.
The exterior is tan to match its surroundings, as if the mountain yawned and the home sprang forth, settling on a divot of space.
A waist-high glass wall porch stretches the length of the home, supported by metal beams that plunge into the packed earth below.
The Jeep clears the last stretch of road, and Cecily pulls up to a brown metal gate.
She reaches out, punching in a code on the box.
The gate clangs open slowly, revealing more of the house.
No, not a house. A mansion. A compound. A place where many people could live for a solid week and never see one another.
I hadn't thought about what Cecily's grandmother's house would be like, but if I'd used my imagination, I wouldn't have come up with this. Richie Rich.
"Um." It's all I can manage.
Cecily parks her Jeep beside a shiny luxury SUV. On the other side of it sits a blue-green Bentley convertible. I'm not a car person, but even I know that car is unique.
"I know," Cecily says, peering at the home through the windshield. "She won the lottery before I was born."
"Like, the actual lottery?" People don't really win the lottery, do they? I guess someone somewhere does, but it never feels like it, because I've never met someone who knows someone who won.
Cecily nods. "Savage Grandma is loaded."
'Loaded' is a relative term. When I was a kid, I thought it was fancy if someone had a box of tissues.
To this day, my parents blow their noses with a couple squares of toilet paper they've torn from the roll.
I mentioned it once to my dad, when I was fifteen, and he'd said It's the same thing, but I can put some toilet paper in a box if it'll make you feel like you're using tissues.
So, yeah. Savage Grandma is a whole lot more than loaded.
We climb from the Jeep, feet quickly hitting the pavement since there aren't any doors. Death trap. I follow Cecily toward the house, cutting behind the Bentley. That's when I notice the personalized license plate. SVGGRMA
"Your grandma likes the nickname," I point out.
"She does," Cecily agrees. She turns to face me when we arrive at the massive front door. "Here's the deal. We're married, but it was a drunken mistake. We're getting it annulled after we leave here. We're here together because my grandma asked us to be."
"Right." I nod slowly, waiting for her to say something I don't already know. "None of this is new information."
Cecily rolls her eyes.
"Careful," I warn, "those might get stuck looking at the back of your head."
She ignores me. "I'm rehashing the details so we're on the same page. Don't go in there and think we're in a Klein and Paisley situation. We are not in a fake marriage."
"Correct. This is a real marriage. And I'd like to point out that everything ended well for Paisley and Klein."
"One in a billion chance of it working out the way it did for them.
" Cecily adjusts her top. "Now, do not, I repeat, DO NOT"—her stiff finger hovers dangerously close to the tip of my nose—"get some wild hair and tell my family you love me and I'm your wife or some other utter baloney. Do you hear me?"
I bristle at her tone, grip her finger, and lower it. "No problem, wife. We'll make sure everyone knows it was a stupid Vegas mistake. I only chose you because I was drunk."
Hurt flares in her eyes for the shortest second, but she covers it nearly as quickly, and now I'm not sure I read the emotion correctly. She's good at regaining control, whereas I feel like a flailing man overboard in a stormy sea when I'm around her.
"Right." She nods decisively. "I need to be drunk to like you."
She's punching back. Hoping to hurt me, because I hurt her. And the only way I could hurt her is if she cares what I think.
Interesting.
She's looking up at me.
I'm looking down at her.
Her rosebud lips, pressed together, slowly peel apart. A flush spreads on her cheeks.
"Are you planning on ringing the doorbell, Cecily?"
Gaze locked on mine, she leans closer. Memories trickle into the moment.
Her draped over me, skin warm and eyes glassy, smile spreading lazy and slow as we danced.
I like that version of her. Carefree. Happy.
Now she draws near to me, chest lightly coasting over mine.
The slope of her curves brushes over me.
Every part of me is at attention, my fingers longing to reach for her hips.
I only chose you because I was drunk.
I need to be drunk to like you.
Lies, if this is any indication.
Cecily's arm stretches out, reaching past me. She presses her other palm to my shoulder, using me to steady herself. A loud bell sound rings out, playing a melody.
"Down boy," she whispers before pushing off me and bringing herself upright.
A retort springs forth, ready, but the front door opens. An old woman stands there, dramatically dressed in a flowing, brightly colored floral caftan and a large gold necklace.
This must be Savage Grandma.
"Well, well, well," she says, as if she finds everything about this very entertaining. "If it isn't the newlyweds."