Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
Lemon
Oliver’s finger jams down the coffee bean grinder, the clanking and tumbling abrasive to my ears. My head pulses, but I did this to myself.
A gnarly hangover.
Normally, when this happens, I roll my merry ass over to my bedside table, pop a pain killer, and chug some electrolytes before drifting back to an additional five hours of sleep. Only after this intense period of metamorphosis would I emerge, a renewed woman.
But this?
“Lemon, why did your parents name you Lemon?” Cami smacks her Corn Pops in my ear. The kind with red dye that makes kids hyper. The milk turns a swirling shade of pink as it gets soggy.
I eye my keeper suspiciously, rubbing my forehead as sounds seep into the crevices of my brain and dance around, banging and clanging like the damn chimney sweeps in Mary Poppins.
All the while, the apple charm burns against my wrist, the past pulling me backward.
But it isn’t lost on me how she, too, was an eccentric nanny with a bag of secrets.
Miss Poppins and Miss Perkins.
Hm.
I drop my arm to my side, the bangles clanking just as the metal chair scrapes across the floor, pulled by a scowling Oliver to the breakfast nook behind us.
I turn and raise a brow, but he dismisses me, eyes darting down as his newspaper unfolds.
Is he doing this on purpose? Red dye…loud ass coffee and scraping chairs.
Dismissive looks.
If I didn’t know any better, I’d say he was trying to piss me off.
But it’s Oliver. I shake the thought away. He can barely laugh, let alone meddle. Although now that I’m meandering on that thought, a vivid image of that same grumpy man sitting beside me in a car doing just that pops into my head.
Oliver Nashville was laughing.
It hits me then, all that happened last night, a visual rollercoaster shoots zero to sixty as the images flash across my mind.
Would you kiss me right now, if I weren’t drunk?
And yet my answer’s still yes.
I widen my eyes at Oliver, but he’s not paying any attention to me or Cami. He’s intentionally paying no attention, to be precise. But what happened last night to shift us from laughter and love declarations to this?
There was the call with Papa…
Oh fuck.
I hang my head. “I made a bet last night, didn’t I?” I peer at Oliver, but all he offers is grumbly condescension.
“Nash,” I groan, ignoring Cami’s question. But kids don’t let you forget.
Or have a moment of silence, it seems.
“What bet? Who’s Nash? Why is your name Lemon?” Cami smacks into my ear.
He lowers his paper long enough to twist his lips at me, his darkened scowl far sexier than I think he intends. “Yeah, Lem, is it Nash or Oliver?”
I ignore his blatant use of my nickname, the one I told him not to call me before I professed my dumbass love for the geriatric jerk, and I focus on the present issue here. The big, billion-dollar one.
“I can’t believe you let me bet my shares while I was drunk.”
“Me?” He slams his paper down. “I tried to stop you.”
“Well Superman, if I had been at the bar where I skated myself instead of on the way home, I wouldn’t have been privy to your little chum sesh in the first place. And what gives with that, anyway? Are you like besties now?”
I don’t acknowledge that I just called it my home.
Neither does he, and I’m not sure why that stings.
“Yeah, Dad, how could you?” Cami pipes in, spoon held proudly in the air. She’s a girl’s girl.
But I scold myself in the moment that follows, because that’s not right.
As their nanny, and for no other maternal reasons whatsoever, I want them to see the importance in accepting your faults.
And more than anything, I want to prove to the stick way up Nash’s grumpy ass that a good role model isn’t always the same thing as a boring, sad, Stepford one.
“Thanks, Cam. You’re my ride or die,” Nash rolls his eyes when Cami lights up, “but a big girl accepts her consequences with grace. I made the bet, now I must lie in it…or something like that.”
Nash snorts from across the room, but he doesn’t show his face, and unless I forgot some major part of last night, I’m still not sure why he’s so irritable with me.
I raise a brow his way, an olive branch of sorts. “Your dad’s a good man. It’s not his fault I’m better at winning arguments. Sorry, Oliver.” I flick my eyes to him. He keeps them there, but only for a second before I’m both discarded and deflated.
“Ride or…what?” Cami scrunches her face. I boop her stupid-cute nose, and she giggles before I turn back to face my captor.
This beautiful man who is suddenly mad at me.
And I suddenly care?
My phone, left dead on the counter, buzzes with notifications the minute I plug it into the charging station. I scan through them, finding little of importance, but there is a text from Onyx.
I hover over it, but my stomach pinches when I think about texting him back. Messaging Onyx feels wrong after everything with Oliver.
I peek over my chair and admire the furrow of his brow as he reads the paper, the crinkle of his eyes when he squints, and the way each of his girls wear that same intimidating scowl when they concentrate. I imagine the portrait above his mantel and ache for the possibility of another beside it.
Before my next heartbeat, I hold my thumb over Onyx’s name and hit delete.
“I want to keep you, Lem.”
Warmth spreads inside me, whether I want the shit to do that or not, taking up the spaces that pinched within my gut and replacing the pain with something stronger when I think of what we could be.
Together? Maybe.
But forever?
How easily could it come unraveled? Like my mom…Randall Holiday…Lauren.
“My mother chose Lemon,” I tell Cami, forcing the pain back to the holes it seeped from. “You’d have to ask her.”
I slide my phone back on the counter and pour myself a bowl of the toxic red puffs, shoving a hasty spoonful into my mouth.
Cami snickers. “Kimmie does that when she doesn’t want to talk, too.”
I roll my eyes. “Smartass. Kimmie doesn’t talk.” I mouth around the cereal.
“She does with her eyes. And you said a bad word!” Her giggle is infectious, and I realize in our heart-to-heart over breakfast cereal, that this Nashville child is the most empathetic of them all. She feels what others need and sacrifices her emotions to lift them.
Admiring Poppy’s drawings, speaking up for Kimmie, reminiscing about Lauren with Bryar…even joining her father in the breakfast nook…none of that was for her own benefit.
I hope her selflessness never gets swept away.
As much as Oliver wants to think he’s a shit father, Cami was a baby when Lauren passed away.
The intuitive, thoughtful soul she has become is a direct reflection of his parenting, and I will not for a continued second think about the pulsing of my ovaries with that realization.
“Dad’s like that, too,” Cami tells me as her voice drops to a serious whisper. “That line between his forehead gets all crinkly, but he doesn’t cry. Why do grownups do that?”
“Do what?”
“Pretend,” she says thoughtfully. “They tell us not to lie, but they do it all the time. You do it, too.”
“I do not. I’m as open as they come.”
“I’ll say,” Nash mumbles across his newspaper.
I ignore the comment that doesn’t even sting and give Cami my full attention. “Explain it to me, then. What do I do that you see as a lie?”
“Kind of the same as Dad, just upside down.” She slurps the pink milk from across the table and wipes her face on her sleeve just as her father’s eyes meet mine. “He pretends not to be sad, but you pretend to be happy.”
Wow.
“Where is your mom? The lady who named you Lemon?”
I break away from Oliver’s gaze and pinch my apple charm. I think back to what Papa said in the car. I think about Cami and her empathy. Mostly, for the first time in forever, I think about the example I set with my convictions. With the lies I tell myself.
“Probably with yours.”
“Dead, then.”
She says it with such finality, I almost break. For her and me, two daughters left too young.
Oliver’s hands tighten around his paper, his face still hidden from our view. The tips of his fingers grow white from his grip but hiding it won’t stop him from feeling. And he isn’t the only one who feels it, not by a long shot.
His daughter feels it enough to bring it up right now.
We all feel grief at some point.
For Randall Holiday, the old man who used to be my everyday job. Reading him stories, checking his meds…he was there, then he was gone. One last beep to follow his last whispering breath.
And even if we don’t know her fate, even if we never will, even if I hate her just as much as I miss her…I feel it for my mother.
Truth is, I grieved for her a long time ago.
“Dead,” I agree.
When Cami squeezes my hand, my heart jumps to my throat. I don’t know when I pull her into my body, at what point I wrap my arms around her in a restorative embrace, I just know we both need it.
A rustling sounds behind us, and when Cami slips from her stool and skips up the stairs, I spin to find the newspaper facedown at the breakfast nook and Oliver Nashville nowhere to be found.