Chapter 13 #3
“The one where everyone’s naked? God, no. But I suppose the surviving part is similar.”
“This is it!” I skate to Nash’s side.
I tell myself I’m not upset when I see his erection has deflated since our awkward moment with Onyx’s text, but I so the fuck am.
None of my feelings change that he’s still my father’s employee, he’s still being paid to hang out with me, and I am not fit to be a wife and mother of four, most importantly.
This type of kismet means only one thing.
“You can help me prep for the competition!”
“What competition?”
“I’m sort of slated to star in this show. It films in the fall, and my father knows nothing about it, so please don’t breathe a word. I’ll know if you do and tell him about the fantastical girth of your cock.”
He bursts out laughing. “Okay, I promise I won’t tell him.” His eyes crinkle, and I believe him, my handsome silver asshole.
“It’s a survival show.”
“You’re naked, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.” I bite my teeth together and backward skate around the garage to distract myself from the weirdness. “So, anyway, I’m pretty good at the naked part.” I meet his eyes again and blush when his lip curves up just the tiniest bit. “I just don’t know much about the survival part.”
“Wait.” He drops the remaining cables. “You’re going on a survival show, and you don’t know the first thing about surviving?”
I blink.
“Well, when you put it like that, it sounds kind of stupid.”
“Kind of? I have heard a lot of crazy stuff in the music industry, but the television world must be batshit if they think they can drop off a trust fund debutante in the woods for the night and expect her to survive.”
“It’s a month. And I’m not a debutante, anyway. I never finished that stupid course. White gloves are patriarchal and so last century, don’t you think?”
“A month?” His face turns serious. “Lem.”
“I told you not to call me that.”
We tense, silence separating our unity.
“Sorry,” I finally say.
I truly don’t know why I snapped like that. Maybe because he’s acting like I couldn’t possibly survive or win a game show if it means I have to get down and dirty, like he thinks all I’m worth is the billions of dollars that have been written in my stars before I even knew you could wish on them.
What the fuck is there to wish for anyway, when you’re the girl who has it all?
And yet I did.
I wished for my mother to come back and be with us and kiss my father once more, to wipe his tears and pick up the shattered pieces of his heart that she trampled upon all those years ago.
To glue them back with love.
With home.
But people leave.
They grow and they change.
Or they die, like Randall Holiday.
And worst of all, I don’t want Nash to stop calling me by the name he’s used since I was nineteen.
Because that is change.
“You remind me of Bryar sometimes. Is that weird for me to say?” He winces, like he knows it is, and I’m not sugar coating that shit, either.
“Yeah, it’s fuckin’ weird.” But I skate to his side and give him a hip bump, so he knows I’m toying. He’s a sensitive soul, even if he acts hard and rough to his colleagues and children. I think deep down he’s just scared.
Of everything.
“You know what I mean.” He nudges my hip back.
“I don’t intend to upset you sometimes. I just don’t know what you want, or what I want, or where either of us stands.
Ever.” He lets out a breathy laugh and meets my gaze with sheepish eyes.
“At least with my own kids, I can ground them when it’s confusing. ”
“See, that right here is why you’re sucking at this whole parenting thing.”
His brows hit the ceiling. “I’m not sucking. Am I sucking?”
I scrunch my nose. “Sorry, but you have two choices, the way I see it. Get to know your girls on their own level, in their own ways, and appreciate them for who they are, or keep doing what you’re doing with this whole authoritarian, ‘what dad says goes’ bullshit and see how long it takes before your sweet little baby is sneaking from her window onto some senior’s Harley and getting a tattoo that says Bone Me, in Latin, above her ass. ”
“Lemon, what the hell?”
“Sorry, too personal?”
“Do you have a tattoo that says—”
“That is neither here nor there, Nash. Look, the point is, your children need you to stop and smell the roses, okay? Maybe on this camping trip you can, yeah?”
“I wasn’t going to take you with us.”
My heart sinks.
I don’t know why. I’m cool with that. I mean, I didn’t think I was going just because I’m the nanny and I sucked his big, fat cock or anything like that, but I mean…
“Why not?”
“Honestly?” His lips curve. “I think you’d break a nail, babe.”
“Oh, fuck you! I’m coming! I’ll make you a deal. You to teach me to forage, and I’ll teach you to do all sorts of things.”
He snorts. “You really think you have what it takes to survive off the wilderness for thirty-one days?”
“Thirty,” I correct. “It’s filming in November.” I shrug when he just gapes at me. “Might as well get the facts straight.”
“You are genuinely petulant, you know that?”
“Nice vocab, Professor Pedantic. Use those big fancy words on all your girls?” I cross my arms, skating figure eights between his two vehicles as he unnecessarily flexes his biceps with some under-the-hood wrench action. It’s not even notable how stupidly fucking ripped it is.
“Are you saying you’re my girl, Sour Patch?”
He licks his top teeth with the tongue I wish was inside me, and we share that same fucked up look again.
I won’t push if you don’t pull.
“No,” I say, deflating both of us. “More like your concubine. I get what we can’t do and why, okay?
I understand you need this thing you have going on with my father to work out.
” I wave my hand, dismissing the thought of being his girl from the conversation, entirely, and begin practicing smaller turns, but I stop when I hear that growl again.
Slow.
Organic.
So. Fucking. Hot.
“Concubine?”
I suck in a breath, the muscles in my pussy squeezed so tightly I fear I may fall over on my wheels at his gravelly vibrato.
I nod, casting my eyes down to my skates. If I avoid his gaze, maybe my clit will stop pulsing long enough for me to think.
His voice softens. “You think your father sent you here to be some…what, mail-order sex nanny?”
I blink through my squinted lashes, because…sorta, and when he scowls like this, he has no idea how much I wouldn’t mind if that were true.
“For Christ’s sake, I do not understand women. Not teenagers nor grown up…whatever you are.”
“Nice.”
“I’m sorry.” He sighs, grabbing my hand and guiding us to the plastic folding chairs by a large blue toolbox.
A crinkled crayon drawing taped to the side presents two stick figures on a boat with fishing poles.
My heart tugs when I see Bryar’s name scribbled in the bottom corner. She must have been very young.
“Your father didn’t send you here to do that, Lemon. You know that deep down.”
“Well, so far, nothing has been deep down in me since the tour bus, so—”
His lip twitches. “I’m serious. Take it from another struggling father. It stings the most when he thinks you hate him, and like my own daughter, you use that power like a sword. Don’t you see how deep it cuts him?”
“Well, like my own father, you seem to know it all. And I hardly think he notices the cuts beneath diamond set bandages.”
But Papa’s tearful eyes when I did not return his I love you take form in my head and cut just as deep.
The warmth from Oliver’s hand is almost too much to handle. It feels safe, and before I know it, the only man besides Jeremy who peers through my bullshit has me doing the near impossible and listening.
Can you believe that?
Me. Listening.
“If you were supposed to be my…plaything—” He pauses at his word choice and clears his throat when I twist my lips, repositioning his cock in that thinly woven penis-display he calls pants and rolling his eyes when I can’t stop my chortle.
“Well, anyway, a man would have had to pay for that type of…service, right?”
“Presumably.” I snort. “Let me call up my girl Jasmine and see what her take is. She has tons of experience, what with the whole Jafaar debacle and all.”
“You are one dramatic woman, you know that? Your father paid me. He just wants you safe. Out of trouble.”
“Like that’s his business.”
I stand, but Nash keeps hold of my wrist, his body hanging from my limb like a shiny, new charm.
My silver fox.
He lifts a brow. “Is his only daughter and legacy to all he is and has ever accomplished not his business?”
“Fuck. I know, okay? I know. But it doesn’t make it any easier that all he sees in me is a mess.
Not the girl who has four degrees he paid for and should be very well privy to.
Not the girl with all the crowns and plaques and ribbons.
Not the crazy girl who made silly little videos and grew the label’s social following by thousands in less than a year. Should those things not earn me worth?”
“He’s beyond proud of you, Lem. I can assure you of that. Have you seen how many awards and pictures of you are hung in his office? You’re his world.”
“Really?” I spit, unsure why I’m so worked up by this, but I am.
A scab has been ripped from my skin, fresh blood spilling free without recourse.
“Is that how you feel about Bryar? Because the last time I checked, you trust her so little you grounded her for organizing a cancer card for her coach, assumed she was off fornicating or whatnot, and then rejected her when she sought the comfort of her goddamned father. You said no to a memorial for your dead fucking wife! What the fuck, Oliver. I mean, I love you, but what the actual fuck?”
I stop.
The world stops.
“You love me?”
I leave without another word.
And I’ve never skated faster.