CHAPTER NINE
Sharing two bathrooms with a house full of people was an exercise in extreme patience. It was well past eleven o’clock by the time I finally got my turn, and hot water was but a distant memory. Still, I wasn’t the last in line, which was worthy of celebration. I showered in peace, but dried and dressed to the tune of Lane and Art banging on the door. Ah, just like old times.
On the way out, I snapped them both with my towel, whipcord fast. There were several yelps, and a loud yell of “Avery!” that was like music to my ears. I took off down the hall like a pajama-clad Usain Bolt before they could reciprocate. Like I said. Just like old times.
When I finally got back to my room, Jackson was already in bed, looking incredibly comfortable. He was lounging on top of the covers in drawstring sleep pants and a faded t-shirt, busily typing something on his laptop. I had to grin a little at his absent-minded professor look—he had taken out his contacts and had his glasses on, and his hair was mussed as if he’d been running his hands through it.
“Should I even ask how you got in the bathroom first?” I asked, rubbing my hair vigorously with my towel. “Again?”
“I know a little something about bathroom wars,” he said without looking up. “You can’t be afraid to use elbows, AJ.”
“You’re a trust fund baby who grew up in a mansion on Hillside.” I tossed the towel on the ottoman at the end of the bed. “Who exactly did you fight for bathroom space?”
“I went to boarding school most of that time. So to answer your question, everyone else who had been shipped off to Siberia because their parents couldn’t be bothered.” He finally looked up, sending me a flippant grin. “Rich kids filled with ennui can be a little aggressive.”
He may’ve been flippant about his parents sending him off to boarding school for most of his life, but it made me a little sad. And angry. Kids weren’t hobbies to pick up and put down as you saw fit. I’d spent the majority of my life in this very room, and long after I’d left, I carried the memories with me.
I had to admit, being back in my old room was strange. It made me feel like I was a kid again, even though the décor was completely different, and all my junk was gone. The room was no longer an obnoxious teal that I had strangely found attractive in my youth, but a soothing mélange of neutrals, all cream and brown and beige. No more boy band posters, but a mirror in the shape of a starburst. The neon space decals I’d had on the ceiling had been peeled off, and only smooth cream surface remained.
Actually, now that I looked, the popcorn ceiling was gone, too. Now it was resurfaced and smooth, with recessed lighting. The full-size bed was different, too—I’d had a twin for most of my life. Lane and I had shared the room until our parents had built an addition on the house. She’d moved her twin bed out, and I was so used to it by then, I hadn’t wanted to bother with anything different. A full-size bed had seemed too big back then.
It seemed kind of small now, and not because I had a queen-sized bed at home. Mostly it was because I was going to have to share it with Jackson. I certainly couldn’t ask him to sleep on the floor. How would that look if anyone came in? Besides, two people could certainly share a bed without getting physical. We’d all had sleepovers in our youth. I’d done it even in college, when I’d crashed with a fellow inebriated buddy on whatever surface was available. It wasn’t sexual, it was merely sleep.
At this point, I wasn’t sure who I was trying to convince. All day, I’d been telling myself it was only the ruse messing with my head. Playing girlfriend and boyfriend was a lot harder than I’d thought it would be. After being without someone for so long, my skin had yearned for touch like the desert missed rain. Now my poor skin was on sensation overload—all day, his casual touches had driven me crazy. The brush of his shoulder against mine. An arm around my waist. A hand on the nape of my neck after dinner as he stood behind my chair.
But now we weren’t pretending to be a couple. We were behind closed doors, and I could relax. He hadn’t touched me since dinner. I huffed out a frustrated breath. I shouldn’t know, without even thinking about it, the last time that he’d touched me.
Hmph. Well, there was one thing I had going in my favor. I glanced down at my apparel with a satisfied grin. If ever there was anything made to cool someone’s ardor, it was my pajamas. My nighttime attire certainly wasn’t going to drive Jackson Sparks—or anyone with working eyeballs and taste—to the brink of lust.
With that thought in mind, I clambered in bed. Dates with potential might get the Avery special—hair brushed to a glossy shine and cute lingerie that only looked good on Victoria Secret mannequins. Fake dates got the real AJ. Tonight, “the real AJ” featured SpongeBob Squarepants sleep shorts and a faded tee that at one point might have been royal blue but was now a little closer to periwinkle. Black framed glasses and my hair up in a messy topknot completed the look.
I watched him typing on his computer for a little while, his long, elegant fingers moving across the keyboard with ease. I smiled a little as he paused to push his glasses back up on his nose. “Breaking up another marriage, Sparks?”
“Don’t you mean saving someone’s sanity, Winters?” The side of his mouth curved. “My clients come to me for a reason.”
“Yeah, because they’re as disillusioned with love as you are.”
“This woman’s husband cheated on her with her sister. You don’t think she deserves a beach house and all their argyle sweater-wearing corgis?”
“You talk about it like it’s a game.”
“Isn’t it?” His eyes glittered with something hard. Something indefinable. Something I wagered was about more than the thousands of cases of love lost that came across his desk. Something personal that he wasn’t about to let me get near.
I didn’t bother to respond. Mostly because after tonight’s pre-dinner announcement, our attitudes on love were a better match than ever before.
I sighed. “I can’t believe I had to call Julian and rearrange our schedule yet again. Another three days off. That’s a total of six days, Sparks.” I pointed at him. “I don’t give six days to just anybody.”
“You’re a giver,” he agreed.
“Which reminds me, you can take the car back. All the rental information is in the visor. I’ll probably catch a flight.”
“We’ll go back together like we planned,” he said, not looking up from his keyboard.
“I don’t want you to miss any more time,” I said, frowning. “It was already an imposition.”
“I rearranged some things, too.” He gave me a look that I couldn’t quite read. “I’m not letting you face the wedding alone.”
I bit my lip. I wished I had the strength to do the right thing and tell him to leave. But I really, really wanted him here. I needed his calm, steady support right beside me. And I wasn’t selfless enough to give that up, even when I knew I probably should.
“I assume they weren’t happy with you requesting another few days.”
“Burning effigies in my name,” he said with a crooked grin. “But they’ll have to get over it.”
Jackson taking a long pull from an Evian water bottle next to his side of the bed snapped me out of my funk pretty quickly.
I scowled. “Where’d you get that?”
“Irene,” he said smugly. “You missed her turndown service. I ate your mint, by the way.”
I swatted his arm. “I’ll remember this.”
“Hey, I was doing you a favor. I got her out of here before you came back.” He raised an eyebrow. “Seeing as how you don’t seem to like her all that much.”
If there was a competition for picking things I’d like to least talk about, Jackson would have won, hands down. “I like Irene just fine,” I said shortly.
He snorted and shook his head.
Yeah, well. Maybe I wasn’t happy with her, but I still liked her. Dinner had been a stilted affair. Despite the best of my intentions, after their little announcement, I had been quiet. Too quiet. My good mood had evaporated like cotton in a rainstorm—the pieces were still there, but every time I gathered them and tried again, there was less to put back together.
Lane and Art hadn’t been much better. My dad had been his normal non-talkative self, and Irene, Rick, and Jackson had tried to pick up the slack for us all. They had talked and I had tuned them out, wondering why their upcoming nuptials bothered me so damned much.
I sighed and pulled my purse on the bed with me. I began digging through the oversized Burberry bag for my moisturizer. I might have been down, but that was no reason for dry, cracked skin, dammit.
“You want to talk about it?” Jackson was clearly not familiar with the phrase or concept of “leaving well enough alone.”
“Not really.”
“Let me guess. You’re the type to hold everything inside until you finally go crazy and explode?”
“Something like that.”
He rolled his eyes. “That’s not healthy, you know.”
“Neither are ninety percent of the things that make my life worth living.” I ticked off some prime examples. “Chocolate. Butter. Bacon.”
“I don’t know. Your father and Irene seem like they’re in love.”
The divorce lawyer? Defending love? I glanced over at him to find him frowning down at his computer screen like he wasn’t even seeing it. It was like he wanted me to believe in love even though he was through with it.
“Love is a fallacy,” I finally said. Unable to find the tiny bottle of moisturizer, I began pulling items out. Wallet, ChapStick, aspirin, first-aid kit, two Nutrigrain bars…if I ever got lost in the wilderness with nothing but my purse, I had a pretty good chance of making it out alive.
“Your parents weren’t in love?”
“Yes,” I said slowly. “And now he’s in love with someone else. That’s the way it goes.” I found a handful of mints and popped one in my mouth, forgetting that I’d brushed my teeth.
“That’s a bit fatalistic.”
“Negative? Perhaps. But no less true. Besides, I don’t see you offering up any examples to the contrary.”
He chuckled. “I would if I could. Trust me, I would love to belay your smug little argument. But you know how I feel about it. And my parents weren’t exactly pillars of commitment.”
“What do you mean by that? Jules told me they were married for twenty-three years.”
“Married yes. Faithful?” His mouth twisted. “Not exactly.”
“Jules never said anything,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry.”
“He never said because he didn’t know. What’s the point in telling him something that doesn’t matter anymore? I didn’t find out until after they died. I was going through my father’s office and I found…things.” He huffed out a breath. “Letters. Pictures. Gifts. Pictures.”
The fact that he’d said it twice let me know exactly what kind of pictures they’d been. I winced. “Why didn’t you tell him?”
“I wanted our father to still be the man that Jules thought he was.” He paused. “The man I thought he was.”
I wanted to hug him in sympathy, but I didn’t know what my reception would be. Judging from the set of his jaw, I thought he might confuse my sympathy with pity. I floundered for something appropriate to say, and in the end, settled on the only thing I could say. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s the past.”
“What does that have to do with my sorry?”
“It means that I’m over it.” But his whitened knuckles gripping the edges of his laptop told me differently. I reached over and pried it from his hands gently, and he looked at me, startled. Then his eyes got soft and rueful. “I’m starting to get over it.”
“Sometimes that’s as good as it gets.” I closed the laptop to send it into hibernation and sat it on the nightstand. I also gave up on moisturized skin and began repacking my survival bag…er, purse.
“Family is…difficult,” Jackson agreed. “Rewarding. But difficult. Like everything that really matters, I suppose.”
“You miss them,” I said, hearing the sadness in his voice. It wasn’t a question. He disappointed you, he left you…maybe even broke you a little. And you still miss him like the dickens.
He just gave me a half smile and turned off the light on his side of the bed. He moved down further in the bed, shaking the thing like crazy until all empathy had dissipated and I was tempted to belt him one. He finally settled down on his pillow with a sigh.
“Let me guess,” I said dryly. “You’re a restless sleeper.”
“I sleep better with the light off,” he said pointedly. “What’re you looking for, anyway?”
“I was looking for moisturizer, if you must know. But don’t worry, I’ll have alligator skin so that you can have your precious beauty sleep. You look like you need it.”
He chuckled. “There’s lotion on the nightstand.”
I glanced over. “I have bottled water, several toothbrushes, and a spare tube of toothpaste.”
“This side.” Jackson pointed. “And shampoo, conditioner, and a bowl of green grapes. Part of Irene’s guest services program, I think.”
“She’s edging out the Marriot,” I had to admit. “I’ll make sure and review her on Yelp.”
“So?”
I finished repacking my purse and sat it on the floor. “So what?”
“Do you want the lotion or not?”
“Not.” I flipped off the light on my side and enveloped the room in darkness. I snuggled down in the covers and smelled Downy. Irene went up another star. “I don’t want lotion, I want my moisturizer.”
“What is the big whoop about this moisturizer?” Jackson’s voice was amused. “With all of this talk about it, it had better be made of diamonds and pearls.”
“I think there are diamonds in it. Smarty Pants. And it’s supposed to make your skin more beautiful in six weeks of regular use,” I informed him. “It’s been twelve, but I’m holding out hope.”
“Anything that could possibly make you more beautiful is clearly witchcraft, Avery.”
My eyes went big as saucers and suddenly I had nothing to say. Couldn’t manage a flipping word.
He continued after a moment of charged silence. “As would be anything that could make you more annoying.”
And the moment was gone. My eyes narrowed. Bastard.
He chuckled as if he knew exactly what he did to me, and pulled up the covers on his side. “Go to sleep, AJ.”
But I couldn’t. And as his breathing evened out and the household noises went quiet, I thought I might be the only one. The only one still wide awake, trying to make sense of something I should be perfectly okay with.
None of us really had the right to be upset at our father moving on. He obviously needed someone to fill that space, that void…that hole in his life where Mom used to be. And yet, some part of me couldn’t forget that it had only been five years. Only. I huffed out a breath. There was that word again. Part of me understood that there was nothing “only” about five years of coming home to nothing where there had once been everything. Five years of rolling over to the space where your wife slept for thirty years and finding nothing but cool sheets and space.
But then there was the other part of me…the part that wanted to throttle him good. The part that couldn’t believe he was replacing her, finding someone else to take her place. And he didn’t give a damn if we were okay with it or not.
Good for him, he got to start over. I didn’t. Lane didn’t. Art didn’t. Our hole was just a motherfucking hole and there was no amount of spackle that would ever cover it. Tears. Again. Jesus. I swiped at my face disgustedly. Quietly.
I barely flinched when his arms came around me. Guessed he wasn’t asleep after all. I wanted to resist. Wanted to tell him where to get off. Wanted to tell him I wasn’t crying and I didn’t need comforting.
I wanted to rail at him, and tell him that no matter what he thought he knew, he didn’t understand me. How could he, with his perfect life, understand how I felt? Only…Jackson’s life hadn’t been quite as perfect as I’d thought. They may have been rich and entitled, but his family was as screwed up as mine. He’d lost just as I had—his mother and his father. Even more than that, he’d lost his father twice. The man he’d known, and the man he’d thought he’d known. It was strange, but every chink in his armor made him seem stronger to me. Ugh. Like I needed another reason to like him.
Finally, my brain quieted down, seeking REM, far too exhausted to puzzle anything out anymore. And ushered by the strange dichotomy of comfort in a stranger’s arms, I slept.