Chapter 25 Cash
CASH
Remy agrees to having a bodyguard with her outside of college. She refuses to budge on being followed into lectures by a man who looks as if he catches aliens from outer space for a living.
“He can wear a hoodie and baggy-assed jeans if it will make you feel better,” I suggest to snickers from Bash.
“No.” Remy is wearing faded jeans and a patchwork waistcoat over a thrift store long-sleeved man’s shirt. She hoists her tote higher onto her shoulder. “Look at me. I can do without attracting more attention than I’m already getting.”
I look at her from the breakfast stool and smile, pulling her between my legs and cupping her face gently in both hands. “Tell the students that you’re off limits. They can’t have you because you’re mine.” I kiss her lips.
“Ahem,” Bash clears his throat. “Yours?”
I wink at Remy. “Okay, mine and occasionally his.”
Remy bats my arm playfully. “You know that isn’t what I mean, Cash.”
She’s right. The swelling on her lower face has gone down, but the bruises linger, fading too slowly to greenish gray. She has tried to cover them with concealer, but all that seems to do is throw a kind of eerie shadow across one side of her face.
“You’re still the most beautiful woman in the world to me.”
She smiles and chews the corner of her lip that didn’t get busted by her ex-boyfriend. “You’ve been practicing your cheesy chat-up lines again.”
“There is no bottom to the barrel he’s scraping,” Bash joins in.
I lock eyes with him. “Tell me you don’t agree.”
“Oh, I do agree. I would maybe just find a less corny way to say it.”
“Such as.” I prompt.
“Such as… Tá mé faoi gheasa do áilleacht.”
I feel Remy’s heart racing through her clothes. “Damn. This is because I was born five minutes before he was. He has to outshine me at every opportunity.”
Bash shrugs. He powered up his tablet when he sat down at the breakfast bar in my apartment earlier but barely glanced at the screen. “Youngest and coolest. What can I say?”
My cell jumps to life in my pocket and Remy reverses out from between my legs so that I can answer it. It’s the call I’ve been waiting for.
“Sorry, gotta take this. But don’t move.” I raise a warning finger to Remy and stand by the living room window to take the call.
I watch Remy take the stool I just vacated. She leans across the counter, takes a slice of toast from the rack, and spreads it thickly with butter and marmalade.
Turning away from the cozy scene, I murmur into the phone, “We’ll be there,” and end the call.
Bash nods once as I rejoin them and slip my arms around Remy’s waist from behind. Maybe someday I’ll be able to spend time in the same room without touching her, but it’s like she has a magnet in her core that I’m unable to resist.
“That was quick,” she says, her face immediately filling with heat. She stares at the half-eaten slice of toast in her hand. “Sorry. It’s none of my business.”
She keeps doing this, a lot, since she suggested that we consider working closely with Isabella Leone.
It’s as though she has been slowly shedding the armor she wore that night and slipping back into her comfort zone of remaining as silent and invisible as possible.
I wish she could see that there’s room for both versions of her.
“That’s where you’re wrong.” I nibble her ear. “It is your business, but you’ll have to wait a little longer to find out what it is.”
“No,” she groans out loud. “That is so unfair. You can’t do that to me, Cash. It’s like dangling a carrot in front of a donkey and then eating it yourself.”
I snatch the toast from her hand, stuff it into my mouth, and chew. “Like this, you mean?”
She blinks, wide-eyed with feigned indignation. “I can’t believe you just did that. I’m eating for three, remember.”
“Way to go, Cash.” My brother shakes his head. “You literally stole food from our babies’ mouths.”
“Wow.” I swallow the toast that now tastes like cardboard and wash it down with a mouthful of orange juice. “I feel bad now.”
“So you should.” Remy steps away from the counter and faces us, clinging to her bag strap with both hands like it’s the only thing tethering her to the real world. “I’d love to stay and wind you up some more, but I’ve missed too many lectures already.”
She doesn’t move.
She hasn’t been back to college since the incident with George and Isabella and has been staying in my apartment here in the Titan.
Bash hasn’t been back to his apartment either.
We haven’t figured out how this is going to work yet, but we all have an unspoken understanding that this is only a short-term plan.
“Skip college,” I say. “Spend the day with us.”
“You want me to work with you?”
“No, we’ll take the day off.”
“A perk of being the boss,” Bash adds. “We can take time off whenever we want.”
She smiles. “You never take time off.” Her eyes slide down our suits, and she arches an eyebrow. “You’re dressed for work.”
I shrug my jacket over my shoulders. “Now I’m not.”
Remy giggles. “What about my lecture?”
“What about it?” Bash stands. “We’ll get you a video recording so that you can listen to it in your own time.”
She tugs the bag strap as if weighing the options stored inside. “Is there anything you can’t do at the drop of a hat?”
I tap my bottom lip. Pretend to give the question careful consideration. “No?”
I don’t know how or when we drifted into this routine of easy banter and mutual teasing. There isn’t a single moment I can pinpoint, we just seem to have ended up here organically, and I have no clue how it will continue to evolve. But going back to my life before Remy isn’t an option.
“Ohh…” She’s still here.
We all know she isn’t going to college today; we’re simply waiting for her to admit it.
“I have to go back at some point.”
I smile. “Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow.” Her shoulders relax. “But if we’re spending the day together, we’re doing it my way.”
I avoid Bash’s gaze. “Deal.”
We go to Artists and Fleas, a market in Brooklyn.
Remy has always wanted to visit a real flea market, and she wanders around the stalls, her mouth a round O of excitement, chatting to the vendors about their paintings, their tie-dyed T-shirts, handmade jewelry, musical boxes, crocheted blankets, gem-encrusted pens.
She soaks it all up, pointing objects out to me and Bash, and then blushing when we offer to buy them for her.
After, we take a horse and carriage ride around Central Park. We visit the Conservatory and the Alice in Wonderland sculpture. We grab hamburgers from a street vendor. We wander around the Museum of Modern Art.
And I watch Remy, viewing the city and its attractions through her eyes.
Late afternoon, we ride the ferry across the Hudson to Staten Island. That’s when she spots the bodyguards close by.
“Have they been following us around all day?” she asks.
“Yes. It’s for your protection, Remy. You and the babies.”
She focuses on the water and the land ahead. “Do you ever wish that you could just go outside and be normal for a day?”
“This is normal for us.” I rest my elbows on the railing and nudge her gently. “Eventually, you’ll forget they’re even there.”
Standing on her other side, Bash adds, “If we could do this any other way, we would. But you and the babies are too precious to us.”
She is quiet for the rest of the journey.
Our car is waiting for us when we disembark the ferry. Remy doesn’t ask where we’re going next, but her eyes light up when we pull up outside our family home.
“Wait.” She stops dead outside the porch. “Is your mom home?”
“Sure. She’s been waiting to meet you.”
“No.” Remy backs away, shaking her head, her face pale. “Why didn’t you tell me we were coming here? I need time. I would’ve worn something else.” She peers down at her faded jeans and untucked shirt. “Look at the state of me.”
I open my mouth to protest that she doesn’t need to dress up for our mom, when the door opens and she comes out onto the porch, barefoot and wearing similar faded jeans.
“Boys, finally.” She ignores us and strides straight over to Remy, denying her the opportunity to cut and run. “You must be Remy. I wondered when they were going to introduce you. Everyone is here.”
Mom slides an arm around Remy’s waist and guides her inside.
Remy glances at us from over her shoulder, wide-eyed, and mouths, “Help me.”
“Did we do the right thing by not pre-warning her?” Bash asks.
“There’s only one way to find out.”
We follow them inside and through to the small-arena-sized kitchen where our family naturally gravitates when we’re all together.
Victoria and Sienna hug Remy, breaking the ice and easing her in gently.
Terry pulls her into a hug next, careful not to crush her, and kisses her cheek sloppily.
Caleb and Kyle are preparing dinner; they turn around and greet her with warm smiles and a wave of a wooden spoon.
Holly stays close to her papa’s legs, peering at Remy from beneath a mop of dark curls, while Skye, Kyle and Sienna’s baby son, crawls around the floor with a carrot stick in his hand.
“Nothing like dropping her in at the deep end,” Bash murmurs.
“Look at it this way, while we’re all here, Mom can’t have the ‘break-my-sons’-hearts-and-you’ll-have-me-to-deal-with’ conversation with Remy.”
“So, we’ve basically done her a huge favor by bringing her here today.” Bash cricks his neck from side to side. “I can get on board with that.”
“She’ll thank us someday.”
Terry opens a bottle of wine and takes some beers from the fridge. He pours a soda over ice for Remy before she is forced to remind him that she isn’t drinking alcohol.
Mom supervises the meal because she doesn’t know how to relinquish control.
Remy sits on the floor with Holly and coos over the child’s doll that cries like a real baby.
She slides effortlessly in and out of the conversation, as if there was always a Remy-shaped slot in our family just waiting to be filled.