Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
Lemon
“What the fuck gives, Nash?” I throw open his bedroom door, taking up the space he felt he needed.
Screw that.
You don’t get space when your child is grieving.
“I get that you might be mad at me for having actual feelings. You know, those things you’re terrified of showing?
But pull your head out of your planner for once and open your eyes to what your family feels.
Bryar, Poppy, now Cami. They are grappling with something big, Oliver.
And I have to wonder how long they’ve been struggling. How long it went unnoticed.”
“So, it’s Oliver again, not Nash?”
“Are you kidding me? I have been wracking my brain trying to figure out why you suddenly loathe me again, and it’s about nicknames?”
“Well, you might not want me to call you Lem, but I like Oliver. Nash was just a friend.”
“You were never just a friend.”
He swallows, and I want to kiss those pouting lips. To smooth the furrowed edges of his heart. But none of that changes what’s happening here.
“Look, neither of us know what we want, and it’s incredibly hard most days, pun intended, but you can’t sulk about labels and nicknames. We are what we are. Besides, none of those things are as important as your other name.”
He pushes off the dresser and stalks to the closet as his fingers tug at his silver hair, but I follow him there.
He doesn’t get to walk away from this. Nobody stuck up for me when I needed someone to explain loss, and my father stuffed it so deep inside I believed it was wrong to feel anything at all.
I won’t let that happen to these girls.
I study the beautiful fool who’s lived a whole lifetime and died before his death, but it’s far from over.
Lauren is gone, like my mother, like Randall Holiday.
But O.L. Nashville lives on, and so does she, through the four beautiful brats that are starting to feel like mine.
“Dad,” I tell him. “The only name you should worry about. Because you know what sucks for them, more than you? You chose that love before you lost it. They had no option but to love her, no say about their family. And the cold, hard truth is only one of their parents is dead, but the other, Oliver? He just refuses to live.”
He stiffens, hand on the closet door, hinged on the choice to walk into the storm or out of it.
Walk the fuck in, I plead with my eyes.
One step. Then two.
And when he’s facing me again, his forehead creasing in the center, tugged as tightly as my heart, I reach out and press my thumbs to it, smoothing it back down. “You have it inside of you; can’t you feel it? Something like…starlight. Brightness worth chasing.”
I slide my hand to his chest, where the beat of his heart meshes with my pulse. I could kiss him now, but I fear our games are becoming more than that.“Your girls shine for you, Oliver. Don’t let them burn out because you refuse to look at the sky.”