I narrow my eyes at him as Lumen chuckles and unashamedly continues to drink Maxine’s iced chai. She deserves that and a whole lot more, I have to admit.
“Your three suitors, all together at one table,” she says, which makes my face flush red. “Lucky you. You could have your own harem.”
“Speak for yourself,” Parrish snaps, giving Lumen a dark look that she returns. I still have no idea what their deal is. When I first met them, I assumed they were a couple. That, or exes at the very least. Now I’m wondering if there’s a part of the story that I’m missing. My stepbrother turns that punishing gaze of his back to me. “You’re her only girlfriend.”
“Lucky me then,” Lumen challenges back, turning her brown gaze back to Tess. She’s on her way out the door now with a coffee in hand, giving a loose wave to our table before she disappears into the crowd passing by through the front window. “That was a close one, Dakota. You should be more careful.”
And she’s right. If Tess had caught me with Maxine, what then? Would she pursue a case against Saffron? Threaten my grandparents? Hell, Maxine is an adult: Tess could make my sister’s life a living hell.
Speaking of …
“Thank you,” I say finally, even though the look on Parrish’s face makes me want to grit my teeth. “All of you. Excuse me a minute.” I push up from the table and head into the bathroom to find Maxie in a texting frenzy with Maxx.
“X says hi,” she tells me, offering up a watery smile. “Is she gone?”
“She’s gone,” I reply, hefting a tired a sigh. “Did I tell you that she’s forcing me on a family trip this weekend?” My sister’s brows go up as I glance her way.
“Where to?” she asks, sliding her phone back into her pocket. She’s wearing denim overalls today with a t-shirt underneath, a pair of hiking boots on her feet. I suspect she’s going to sneak a hike in before she drives home.
“Bend,” I reply, shrugging loosely. “It’s a town in Southern Oregon. We’ll be so close to you but so far away. I highly doubt it’d be safe for us to see each other while I’m there.”
Maxine watches me carefully for a moment before taking out her phone again and holding it out for me.
“Call grandma and grandpa.” She gestures with the phone for emphasis. “I know you’re mad, but you can’t avoid talking to them. Remember: we don’t have to agree but we always talk problems out.”
It takes me a second to accept the phone from her, but I do, excusing myself from the bathroom and slipping outside the café’s patio. It’s raining—it’s fucking always raining here—but I’m used to it now. Leaning against the side of the building, I make the call and my grandmother answers on the first ring.
“Dakota,” she says, blinking surprised eyes at me. “Oh, Dakota.” Interestingly enough, I can see Saffron sitting at a lounge chair behind my grandmother. Saffron and I haven’t spoken since I saw the documentary four months ago. Seeing her there, the woman I used to call mom, the woman who turned the lives of so many people upside down, I’m not sure what to think.
She smiles at me, but it’s the smile of a broken woman.
“Honey, your grandfather and I have been wanting so badly to talk with you.” Grandma Carmen waves her husband over as I swallow a lump of nervousness and try to still the shaking of my hand. I can see from the tiny thumbnail of myself in the corner of the screen that I don’t look so good.
“Kota!” my grandfather calls out, like we’ve been separated for eons. The sound is enough to choke me. He slides into the chair beside my grandmother, blocking Saffron from my view. “Are you alright? I’m so sorry about the talk show. We wouldn’t have agreed to go on if we’d known what was going to happen.”
“I don’t blame you for that,” I say, trying to get used to this strange discomfort. Saffron. I guess I hadn’t realized how fucking mad I was at Saffron. There’s empathy in me for her, but there’s also this deep-seated rage I hadn’t realized I was holding onto. “But I do blame you for calling that hotline. I hate that I do, but I do.” The words come out in a breathy rush, and I close my eyes tight, thinking about how they might’ve known for two years that I wasn’t their bio grandkid. Two freaking years. What changed? “I’m not even angry that you might’ve known I wasn’t really Saffron’s kid. I don’t care about that. I care that you didn’t love me enough to be selfish.”
The tears brim then, the ones that I promised I wouldn’t shed when I first got here but that keep coming and coming anyway.
“Dakota,” my grandfather starts, exhaling sharply and then glancing over at my grandmother. “I don’t know if this helps any, but I … I regret it, too. I regret it so much.” He drops his face into dirt-stained hands, and my heart clenches so tight that it feels like it might never beat again. He’s been working in the garden and I’m not there to help; he regrets it. He regrets. He regrets it.
“I’m so sorry, Kota,” Carmen chokes, just barely managing to keep herself together. “I didn’t think it would be like this. I thought … well, I thought we’d at least be able to visit each other. But I couldn’t do anything different than what I did. Tess might not be any of our favorite people, but she’s your mother. She’s a woman who lost her baby through no fault of her own.”
I blink through the tears, but it’s hard to tell how much of the wetness is from the rain, and how much is salty sadness.
“Let me talk to Saffron,” I say, my voice hardening slightly. “I want to hear the story from her lips.”
There’s a brief pause as my grandfather lifts his head up and turns to give my grandmother a look.
Before either of them get a chance to reply, there she is, snatching the phone away. Her face is so familiar, so maternal to me. Even though she was never really a mother, she was the only one I ever really had. Her eyes are dark; her hair is dark. We could very well be related. If it weren’t encoded in our DNA … But that’s one thing nobody can hide from, is it? It can’t be wished away or erased; I am Tess’ daughter and that’s a fact.
“Has she told you about your father yet?” Saffron asks, her voice on the edge of hysteria. She doesn’t look well. Actually, she’s never looked well, not once in my whole life. She’s always been sick and sad and broken. Always.
I just blink at her, because what could she possibly know about my bio dad? What does she even care?
“Why did you pick me?” I ask, because that matters. It matters because there’s no way she just happened to stumble upon a child with such similar looks to her own. Clearly, she’d been watching Tess and me for some time before she pounced. “Did you know my sperm donor or something?”
She owes me answers to such simple questions, surely. Instead of offering them up, Saffron snaps at me.
“Has she told you? If she hasn’t, she should—before he finds you.” Her eyes dart to the side, as if she’s looking for someone.
“Saffron!” Carmen reprimands, but her daughter ignores her, moving into the house and locking the door before either of my grandparents can stop her. I’m torn between putting her words down as a psychotic rant … and being deathly curious about them.
“Well?” she repeats as I stand there reeling in the rain, my tears replaced with water as confusion swaps places with sadness. “Tess Vanguard doesn’t care about you, Dakota. Only I do. I’m your real mother.” Saffron points at herself, dark circles under her eyes and wrinkles in her forehead that Tess doesn’t have. They’re nearly the same age, but they look so different; they’ve lived such different lives.
“Is that so?” a cold voice asks from my left.
An icy terror filters through me as I turn to the side to see Tess, poised on the other side of the metal railing that separates the patio from the sidewalk. She holds out her hand, the other wrapped so tightly around her coffee cup that her fingers are leaving indents.
Her expression is one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen in my life.
No. No, no, no. What the fuck have I done?! I wasn’t careful enough.
I’m left with little choice but to comply. The situation is already bad enough.
I had my sister’s phone over to Tess and watch as the women in my life who could claim the title of mother—for very different reasons—stare at each other.
“Haven’t you done enough?” Tess breathes, her shoulders stiff, and her expression murderous. “I took pity on you because you’re obviously a very sick woman, but if I find out you’ve contacted my daughter again, I will destroy you. Don’t believe me? I have the resources to bury you.”
Bury you. I see where Parrish gets his attitude from. Nurture won out over nature in that case.
“Dakota deserves the truth,” Saffron replies, her voice like a whisper in comparison to Tess’ steely tones. “She has a right to know. I protected her. Me, and only me. I was the only one that cared.”
“Contact my daughter again, and you’ll be spending the next two decades in federal prison.”
Tess hangs up the phone and then studies it in her palm.
“Whose phone is this?” she asks me, just before Maxine pops out the back door of the café with an oblivious smile.
“Did you get a chance to talk—” Maxie starts, and then she goes completely still, the color draining from her face as Tess looks up and their eyes meet. Uh-oh.
“What the fuck are you two doing out here?” Parrish demands, slipping out the door behind my sister. It takes him about half a second to notice Tess standing on the other side of the railing. “Shit.”
“Shit is right,” Tess says, stepping a bit closer to the railing and holding Maxine’s phone out to her. “I want the two of you out front—now.”
My knuckles rap against the doorjamb outside of Parrish’s room. Neither of us has a door anymore: Tess and Paul removed them both and left the two of us without a shred of privacy.
“Hey.” The sound is soft, almost inaudible. “Can I come in for a second?”
Parrish ignores me, shoving clothes into a duffel bag to prepare for the trip tomorrow. We’re driving six hours south to stay at Paul’s mother’s vacation home. Should be a fun drive, considering Tess wants to murder us both. I could barely sleep last night. One, because not having a door is an oddly traumatizing experience. Two, because every time I closed my eyes, I could see Tess’ dark expression in my mind.
“Might as well. You’re my only companion for the next few weeks.” He yanks the zipper on his bag before turning a surprisingly mild expression my way. I’ve been avoiding him since yesterday’s incident. The risks were mine to take, but I feel bad for dragging Parrish into it. Even Chasm is banned from the house for two weeks.
Grounded. Again. I can barely go a day before receiving another sentence.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, choking back the pain. I have no idea what’s going to happen to Maxine or Saffron or my grandparents. Tess really does have the power to make all of their lives miserable. She’s taken all of Parrish’s electronics, too. The only thing she doesn’t know about is my second phone, but I haven’t even turned it on since yesterday; I’m afraid to see what might happen if she finds out that I have it. “For dragging you into this, I mean. You were trying to save my ass and instead, I insulted you at the café …”
Parrish pauses for a moment, hands on his duffel bag, and turns to look at me. He’s much less angry than I expected, and I’m not sure what to make of that. Also, his hair is delightfully mussy and falling across his forehead in a glorious fop. I want to tousle it, and then kiss him, and then … shit, I don’t know.
“Don’t apologize for other peoples’ decisions,” he snaps, and then closes his eyes in frustration. “I’m not here to tell you how to live, Dakota, but I will say this: it gets exhausting after a while.”
“Is that why you don’t apologize for anything?” I try to make it a joke, but when Parrish opens those honey-almond eyes of his to look at me, I get chills. He’s so beautiful, so fucking beautiful. And not just on the outside. There’s a thread of kindness in him that he tries to pretend isn’t there. By all appearances, he’s just a rich dickhead. Underneath it, he’s actually nice. Even though I just think the word, it chokes me a bit because I hate to admit it.
He helped me escape the TV studio; he held me when I cried; he tried to save my ass at the café.
“What do you think Tess is going to do?” I ask when it becomes clear he has no intention of answering me. I move into Parrish’s room, pausing beside his desk and picking up the fake hand he uses to practice his art on. It’s been inked with an incredibly complex design made up of stars and moons; every square inch is filled with color. It’s absolutely stunning, but I can’t seem to make myself say it aloud.
“Do?” he queries back, his shadow falling across the desk. He’s standing right behind me; I can feel his breath stirring my hair. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. I turn around suddenly, almost too quickly, and find myself face to face with him. Something is different between us, something that changed that day when he followed me upstairs and pulled me into his arms. “She’s already done it: do you not see the missing doors?”
Parrish plucks the hand from my grip and cradles it close to his chest, like I’ve somehow marred his precious artwork.
“Is this the tattoo you want to give me?” I ask him as he opens one of his nightstand drawers and I see a bunch of fake body parts—mostly hands and feet—stuffed into it. All of them are covered with ink. “Holy crap. When I snooped in your room before, I’ll admit: I avoided that drawer in case you had crispy socks or something in it.” A laugh escapes me as Parrish raises a single brow in surprise. “Honestly, I’m glad I didn’t look. I know those are just silicone, and that you need them for practice, but it sort of also makes you look like a serial killer.”
“Who knows?” Parrish replies, his voice surprisingly light considering the punishment Tess handed down to both of us. The scariest part of it all is that she hasn’t said a word to me about any of it. After she called us out at the café, we got in the car, came home, and handed over our electronics. She and Paul took our doors and then … that was it. Back to being WASP-y again. “Maybe I am?”
“Don’t forget: we share a hallway. I see your comings and goings.” I plop down on his bed, even though the very act of it makes him cringe. I pretend not to notice; if he asks me to leave then I’ll leave. Like I said, setting and respecting boundaries is important. “Anyway, you never answered the question: was that design for me?”
Parrish turns toward his desk—that is, away from me—and puts his hands atop it. He seems pained by something, but I’m afraid to ask. This sort of light, easy conversation is rare for us. We’re usually fighting or … making out, I guess.
“I haven’t been able to decide on a design for you.” His voice is low, thick with contemplation and maybe even a dose of surprise. When he glances over his shoulder to look at me, our gazes lock and I feel trapped in it, mired in this strange connection we’ve seemed to have since moment one. “Who the fuck are you. And what are you doing in my house?” Well, okay, maybe not since moment one … “Or maybe I’m not supposed to decide for you? Why don’t you pick something for yourself?”
“You’re the artist,” I say automatically, but then again, he has a point and I hate to admit that. “Guess it can’t hurt to give it some thought, am I right?”
“You’ll have my ink inside your skin forever.” That’s his reply. Like, really? Who says things like that? “I would say it’s definitely worth some thought.”
“There’s always laser removal.” Parrish turns the rest of the way around, perching that perfect ass of his on the edge of his desk. He folds his arms over his chest, and even though he’s wearing that stupid Whitehall hoodie of his—the gray one with the ironic best and brightest quote on it—I can see the muscular set of his shoulders. I know he works out: I’ve seen it. Did I ever mention that there’s a home gym downstairs? Did I need to? Nah, the Vanguards are that rich. The only thing we’re missing is
an indoor bowling alley. Cue the eyeroll. “Well, there is.”
There’s a long pause where neither of says a thing. After a while, the silence just gets too heavy for me to take.
“Thank you, by the way.” The words hurt a little bit coming out, but they need to be said. “I owe Chas and Lumen thanks, too, but … you got punished because of me.”
“I made my own choice.” He rises to his feet and flicks the light off. There aren’t any screens in here now, so the room is plunged into total darkness. My breath catches as Parrish moves over to the opposite side of the bed and lies down beside me. After a moment, I lie back, too, and end up staring at a ceiling covered in glow-in-the-dark stars.
“Tess put them up when we moved in; you’re not allowed to judge.”
I turn my head his direction, even though I can’t see him just yet. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, my mind wanders, and I end up trying to mentally calculate how far apart our mouths are. Or what the risks are of lying here beside him with no door. If Tess comes in and sees this, what will she do? What will she think? At this point, what else can she take away from me? No punishment is greater than being stripped of my ability to see and contact Maxine or talk to the Banks. Nothing. I decide to stay right where I am.
“I wasn’t judging. I like them, actually. I want to be the sort of person who can put glow-in-the-dark stars on their ceiling when they’re fifty years old and still smile about it.” I turn my attention back up to the ceiling, listening to the low, easy cadence of Parrish’s breathing.
I can smell him, too, which I know sounds creepy as fuck. He just … god, he smells good.
“Why do you always wear that perfume?” he asks, like he’s annoyed at me but also like he can read my mind. Did I make a loud sniffing sound or something? Dear god, please tell me I’m not embarrassing myself here.
“Me?” I ask, genuinely confused. “I’m not wearing any perfume. You’re the one that douses himself in freaking dewy clovers and citrus every day.”
Stolen Crush Page 37
