Chapter 6 #3
Kelly settled into the rhythm of the table.
Asked my father a question about one of the Persepolis reproductions on the walls that made him look pleased.
Let Avril pull her into a side conversation about a fundraiser without treating it like a spotlight.
Told a quick story about one of her students that made my mother laugh and my father’s entire expression soften.
And every time she relaxed, the danger increased.
She was more alive in the face.
By the time dessert appeared, I was in a very specific kind of trouble.
The kind where every small thing starts feeling charged because your attention has narrowed too far and you have no interest in widening it again.
Kelly wasn’t someone I could erase in my mind for even a second.
When dinner finally broke apart, my mother herded people toward the salon and terrace for more drinks, more tea, more conversation because no one in this family had ever once believed in ending an evening before it became an event.
Kelly rose from her chair and I joined.
This time when I touched her back, she didn’t tense first. She just moved.
That one tiny difference hit me harder than it should have.
People spread out in the usual pockets. Charlie and Hope by the bar.
Michael and Britney near one of the stone columns, speaking low to be private and clearly having no intention of joining anyone else until forced.
Jeff and Miley near the garden edge, talking with their heads bent close.
Roman and Isabel in the sort of still, expensive-looking intimacy that made every other couple in the vicinity look under-designed.
Kelly stood at the terrace rail with her drink and looked out at the water like she needed the horizon to keep from drowning in the room behind her.
I gave her thirty seconds before joining her.
“You survived,” I said.
“Did I? Because my nervous system disagrees.”
“You handled Charlie.”
“Charlie is the easy one. Your mother is the one who terrifies me.”
“She likes you.”
“That is exactly the problem.”
I came closer and asked, “Why?”
“Because when your mother likes someone, she starts planning their future before dessert.”
“You noticed that.”
She shook her head. “Everyone noticed that. Including you. She was practically measuring me for a wedding dress with her eyes.”
She took a breath and let it out slowly. “Did I?”
“More or less.”
She looked at me then, moonlight and terrace lamps catching in her eyes. “Your family is a lot.”
“They are all there when you need them.”
“That sounds amazing and its nice to see and wish-”
Her mouth soften around the edge of a smile.
She took another sip of her drink and looked back out at the black line of the Atlantic. “Your mother is very hard not to like.”
I stayed still beside her. “Yes.”
“Your dad is quiet and thoughtful. In some small ways he reminds me of my dad especially when he talks about books.”
“Pedar expects a lot from his sons. It’s different when you know you’re expected to be the best because he’s the best.”
“I don’t get that vibe. He’s just kind to me.”
“It’s because he told me to treat you like a queen in my life.”
Kelly laughed under her breath, and the sound did something low and physical to me that I disliked on principle.
“Queen sounds rather lofty and that’s more your mom. But she’s kind. Earlier she told me to saffron in warm milk when I can’t sleep,” Kelly said.
I looked at her.
“When?”
“At lunch.” She glanced over at me. “She’s the only mother figure around me so it was a little nice to be singled out.”
“Not remotely.” I should have said something light. Instead I heard myself say, “You should be frightened.”
She turned fully then, the terrace rail at her back, drink in one hand, hair moving in the wind.
“Because she’s planning some wedding of ours where I’m dressed in white?”
“It’s more. When my mother likes someone, she treats them like they’re already hers.”
The words landed between us with a weight I had not intended. Kelly’s expression changed, little by little.
And because I was apparently incapable of learning, I added, “She won’t be casual with you now.”
Kelly looked back toward the room through the open doors where my mother stood laughing with Avril and Hope and my father as if she had not rearranged three people’s emotional equilibrium before dessert.
Then she watched me again. “Why does that sound like a warning and not a brag?”
Because if Kelly let herself soften toward that kind of welcome before this arrangement had even fully started, the ending was going to be uglier than the beginning.
“I’m being helpful,” I said.
She snorted softly. “That is not your best look.”
“No?”
“No.” Her eyes stayed on mine one beat too long. “I prefer you insufferable.”
“Why?”
“Because insufferable I can resist.”
“And this?”
She sighed. “This I’m still deciding about.”
My voice lowered. “That sounds dangerous.”
“For which one of us?”
“Both.”
The wind moved between us. I turned to her mouth because I had made that mistake enough times now that it no longer felt accidental.
Her lips parted slightly. Awareness between us moved from managed to volatile in the space of one shared breath. I stepped closer before I could decide whether that was wise.
“Xerses.”
The warning in my name interested me.
I lowered my voice. “You told your friends not to discuss us in front of me.”
“Yes.” She said without anything else.
I brushed her hand. “Why.”
She stared. I held it. Finally she said, “Because I’m not going to stand there while everyone acts like I need to be talked into my own choices.”
Kelly didn’t want the weekend argued in front of me because she had committed to it and refused to look uncertain once she had. I respected it.
“You’re very good at that,” I said.
“At what.” Her face altered.
“At deciding your life.”
“Don’t make that sound like a compliment,” she said quietly.
“Why.”
“Because then I might accidentally enjoy your attention. It becomes a whole thing.”
I looked at her. The wind lifting her hair. The line of her throat. The bare flash of vulnerability she had not wrapped up in wit quickly enough. The drink still in her hand because maybe she needed something to hold or maybe she liked making me think about her mouth around the rim of the glass.
My body made a decision before the rest of me had fully signed off on it.
I reached up and took the glass from her hand and set it on the stone railing behind her.
Then I looked down at her and said, “I see you.”
She didn’t move. Neither did I.
The room behind us still existed. Laughter, voices, the low pulse of family life. But distance had opened around us anyway, the kind that happened when two people became too aware of the same thing at once and everything else lost clarity.
Kelly swallowed. My attention caught there.
Her hand came up, not to push me back, to rest lightly against the front of my shirt for one unstable second as if confirming I was there and this was happening and that was somehow the worst possible thing she could have done to my concentration.
“Xerses,” she said again.
I lowered my head the slightest fraction, enough to make the possibility obvious.
I closed my eyes, but then, because Charlie was a plague sent by God to stop me from kissing her, his voice cut through the terrace from behind us. “Okay. Nope. That’s too much eye contact for people allegedly dating only six weeks. Maman needs rings on fingers to tolerate public kissing.”
Kelly jerked back so fast her shoulder hit the railing. I turned.
Charlie stood in the doorway with Hope under one arm and a grin that deserved violence.
Kelly snatched her glass off the railing and shoved it back into my hand like it had become evidence.
“Your family,” she muttered, cheeks flushed, “is too nosy.”
I almost smiled but I searched Charlie and said, “You value your life very strangely.”
Charlie lifted both hands. “I’m helping. Believe me and you’re welcome.”
Hope elbowed him hard to make him wince. “Ignore him. We need Kelly inside. Maman wants to show us something in the vault.”
Kelly blinked. “The what.”
“My mother’s jewelry vault,” I said.
Her whole face did something caught between dread and fascination.
“Come on,” Hope said, grabbing her hand before either of us could do anything more reckless than stare.
Kelly let herself be pulled toward the doors, then half-turned once on the threshold and called back to me, “Try not to ruin anything while I’m gone.”
My gaze held hers. “That seems optimistic.”
She rolled her eyes and disappeared inside with Hope and the other women.
Charlie lingered.
He came to stand beside me at the rail and looked out over the water like we were two brothers enjoying the evening instead of one of us actively considering all the ways to bury the other in the dunes.
“You like her,” he said.
“No.”
He laughed. “You are so bad at denial. Must be hard for you to actually have to remember details about a woman.”
I looked at him. “Is there a reason you enjoy living dangerously.”
“It’s exercise.”
I should have left. Instead I stayed because he was family and because somewhere under all his chaos Charlie did occasionally stumble into truths no one else would say first.
“She’s not forgettable,” he went on.
The line I hadn’t meant to speak.
The one that landed in the air between us and stayed there.
Charlie heard me.
He looked at me then, not joking for once, not entirely. “don’t be stupid with her.”
I gave him a flat stare. “That from you.”
“Yes. Because I am stupid in obvious ways. You’re stupid in expensive, emotionally repressed ways. Don’t hurt that one.”
I wanted to tell him he was projecting. Instead I looked back out at the Atlantic and listened to the waves break below us in the dark.
Inside, my mother’s laughter rising over the women’s voices, bright and victorious.
Kelly’s came after it.
Warm. Real. Uneven, like she was trying not to give too much and forgetting not to for a second.
The sound went through me more cleanly than anything that had happened all evening.
Charlie clapped my shoulder once and went back inside.
I stayed where I was, staring out at the black water and trying, unsuccessfully, to recover some version of the useful distance I’d had at the start of the week.
But standing on my mother’s terrace with the sea below and Kelly’s laughter drifting out from inside the house, it was becoming very clear that whatever else this arrangement did, it was not going to stay simple.