“Yes, we certainly will.” Neil’s past experience haunted him, still, despite the enormous strides he’d made in the past years. His fear of becoming like the man who’d raped him was something he still couldn’t shake.
I hopped up on my toes to kiss his cheek. “Come on.”
Neil raced me to the patio doors, and we emerged from them fully naked, our clothes like a trail behind us. I delicately dipped my toes in on the first step, but Neil ran straight to the deep end and jumped. He pulled up his legs to do a cannonball that broke the surface with a tremendous splash.
Though not a drop could have possibly reached me, I recoiled when he came up and admonished, “You’re so childish.”
“And you’re a scaredy cat. It’s eighty-five degrees out here. Get into the damn pool,” he ordered.
I rolled my eyes and walked down the steps. After the initial sting from the saltwater against my wounded back faded, the pool was perfectly lovely without us having to turn on the heaters. I swam over to him and wrapped my arms around his shoulders.
“So,” I began, locking my legs around his waist beneath the water. “What do you think about all of this?”
I didn’t have to specify the “this”. He responded, “I’m a bit thrown. On the one hand, I’ve never been in love with two people at the same time on purpose.”
“But you’ve been in love with two people at the same time before?” I leaned back to float, still using him as my anchor.
“I have. It never worked out well.” He reached under my back and pulled me upright, again. “I’m worried that I will love him a much as I love you. And I’m worried that if I don’t, this won’t work.”
“But I want you to love him as much as you love me,” I said, before I realized that I’d also implied the inverse. “I don’t think you’ll love him in exactly the same way you love me. But I want you to feel about him the way I feel about you.”
“And how is that?” Neil teased. I wasn’t the kind of person who kept my affection under wraps.
But if he was giving me an invitation to share my feelings, I wouldn’t let it pass me by. “Like you’re a part of my soul. That you make me something more than whole.”
He looked taken aback.
“Do you think you could ever feel that way about El-Mudad?” I asked, tilting my head to study Neil.
His stunned expression didn’t change. “I…think I could. Yes. The way I feel, right now… Do you remember when you first came with me to England? And we had Christmas at Langhurst Court?”
“I’ll never forget it.” For good memories and bad; Michael had proposed to Emma, but we’d also been celebrating what could have been Neil’s last Christmas.
“That’s how I feel, now. Minus the cancer, of course,” he corrected himself. “But that feeling of promise, that you and I had cemented our relationship, somehow…that it was safe to let myself love you entirely… That’s what I feel, right now.”
“That sounds like a great feeling.” It had been so easy to have El-Mudad here with us, and so natural. “I’m a bit more…comfortable? Settled? I really want this. But I don’t want it if you don’t.”
“No, I do. I very much do,” Neil insisted. “Perhaps we should stop trying to convince ourselves otherwise.”
“Then, it’s going to happen? We’re going to move in together?” My heart did giddy flips. We would have to get a bigger bed. Oh, and figure out a way to explain why he was always around.
And explain things to Olivia.
No sooner than reality had crashed into my head, Neil echoed my concerns aloud. “I’m not sure we could ever be open about that arrangement. Imagine trying to explain to your mother, or to Valerie, or Olivia—”
“In other words, we’d have to keep this a secret forever.” Everything in me deflated. The week had been a beautiful fairytale. But my mom couldn’t be in Vegas forever. Olivia lived with us. And Valerie already criticized our parenting enough.
“And there’s no guarantee he’ll want to live here,” Neil reminded me.
My conversation with Deja swam into my brain. “I’ve actually thought of that. It might not be safe here in the future.”
“It’s not entirely safe, now,” Neil said grimly, his jaw tightening.
I didn’t want to let go of the fantasy, though. Not when it was hard enough that he’d left. “Let’s not think about that, now.” The most brilliant idea struck my brain. “Oh, my gosh. You said you’re feeling like you felt at Langhurst Court?” When he nodded, I went on, “We should have Christmas there this year.”
“What about Christmas with Valerie and Laurence, for Olivia?” Neil disentangled my legs from his waist and swam to a shallower spot.
“Let’s bring them!” I suggested, getting more excited the more I thought of the possibilities. “Let’s invite everyone. Your siblings, my family. And El-Mudad.”
“Sophie…”
“No, hear me out. Let’s introduce him as our friend. And just see how everyone likes him. We don’t have to make any big announcements.”
“I don’t know,” Neil tried, but the idea was too good, damn it. He relented with a sigh. “All right. I’ll ring in the morning and have the house closed for the week after Christmas.”
“Closed? Don’t we need it—” Then, I remembered that he meant closed to paying visitors. “Jesus, our life is so weird.”
Neil grinned. “Darling, you were never going to be conventional.”
Chapter Twelve
“And this is the fountain on Thursday night…”
I nodded and tried to look genuinely interested in the photo on Mom’s phone, but she’d taken a picture of the fountain outside the Bellagio every night they’d been there.
“It sounds like you both had a wonderful time,” Neil observed from the stove. Though it had been a busy week for Mom and Tony, they insisted Sunday dinner go on as usual.
If Neil thought he would deter her from a chance to describe every one of her four hundred pictures in detail and tell us the same stories a hundred and twelve times, he would be sorely disappointed.
“It was fantastic,” Tony enthused. “Thanks, again, guys.”
“It was the least we could do,” I replied, mentally adding, to keep you out of our business for a week.
“Hey, so, what did you guys get up to while we were gone?” he asked. He’d perched his big frame atop one of the stools at the island and hunched over the countertop as though he were in a bar, even though the bottle in his hand was a sparkling water.
Neil cast me a sideways glance as he scraped radicchio off the cutting board and into a sauté pan. We’d decided to tell Mom about the kidney transplant, and that sooner would be better to do so, but this was our best opening, and neither of us were quite ready.
“Well, our friend, El-Mudad, visited, and…” I looked between the two of them. “I also saw my half-sister, Susan.”
Mom put down her phone, Vegas pictures forgotten. That made me feel bad. I would be sure to look at them properly after dinner. She looked shocked and surprisingly sad. “When did this happen?”
“She contacted Sophie while her husband was in town on business,” Neil explained for me. “We invited them to dinner.”
“How do you feel about that, Sophie?” Mom asked, reaching out to run her hand up and down my arm supportively.
I shrugged off her touch, trying too hard to seem totally okay. “Fine, really. We just had dinner and got to know each other. And we discussed my other sister. One of them.”
“Oh?” Mom’s expressions might as well have come with a vocal translation, because I could almost hear her lifted eyebrows asking, so you’re calling them that, now?
I pleaded with my eyes for Neil to take over.
“She’s… Was it sixteen, Sophie?” he asked then went on, “She has some kidney disease or other, and Sophie plans to see if she’s a suitable donor.”
There. He’d said it just as simply as it needed to be stated. No reason for hysterics. Just
soap opera level drama at the Elwood house, like always. Nothing to see here.
“Your kidney?” Mom asked, and I braced myself for an explosion of outrage with anxiety shrapnel. I was sure she would tell me that I couldn’t put my life at risk for a stranger, or start detailing all kinds of issues donors had later in life. To my surprise, tears welled in her eyes, and she hugged me, almost violently. “I am so proud of you.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know how to proceed. I’d mentally rehearsed an entire speech about how it was my body and my choice, and how my conscience demanded I do it. I’d put in a lot of work on it just to see it go to waste. “I thought you were going to be mad at me.”
“Mad at you?” She thrust me out to arms’ length. “Why would I be mad?”
“Because kidney transplants are, like, big deal surgery. With risks and stuff?” Now, it was beginning to feel a little insulting that she wasn’t at least slightly worried.
She waved her hand like she was swatting a fly. “No, they do those all the time, now. It’s nothing. Especially for you. You’re young, you’re healthy, you’ll bounce right back.”
“Really?” She was only confirming what I’d read online already, but it was nice to have it confirmed by my mom. No matter how old I got, I trusted her word more than anyone else’s.
“Oh, yeah. Remember when I worked at the hospital?” she asked.
“Did they do kidney transplants in Calumet?” Neil asked, truly perplexed.
“No, but we raised money to send two nurses down to Ann Arbor to be part of a donation chain,” she explained. “Are you a match?”
“We don’t know, yet,” I admitted. “I haven’t had the test. And I haven’t told them I said yes.”
Mom frowned. “Why didn’t you tell them?”
“I needed time to think.” I still felt like I should apologize for that. “Because of all the stuff that goes along with this. It would almost be easier to donate to a total stranger. I’m not sure there’s ever going to be any family relationship between me and them.”
“That’s just stupid,” Mom pronounced. “If you’re related enough to have matching organs, you’re related enough to be a family. That’s how you were raised.”
“It’s not me that’s the problem.” Then, I felt the need to defend Susan a little. “My sisters”—still weird—“didn’t even know I existed until recently. And they never planned to meet me.”
“But they’re fine taking your kidney?” Mom’s support for the transplant vanished in a puff of maternal defensiveness. “You’re just not good enough to be part of the family?”
“I don’t think it’s that,” I said. Not rolling my eyes was a Herculean effort. “It’s complicated.”
“And probably not something any of us could understand,” Neil put in. He pulled the kitchen towel from his shoulder and wrapped it around his hand to take the handle of one of the pans and shift it from the heat. “Not without going through it ourselves.”
“So, from what I’m hearing, this transplant thing isn’t set in stone?” Tony asked, clearly laying the groundwork to calming my mother down when she went nuclear in private later.
“Right. It’s not official. I’ve just made my decision. At this point, we don’t even know for sure that I’m a match.” There. I hoped that would help him when he had to run interference for me.
“But Sophie did offer to pay for whatever their insurance won’t cover,” Neil told them.
“See,” Tony said, rising to come to Mom’s side and place a hand on her shoulder. “Your kid is doing the right thing.”
The doorbell rang. It would be Valerie and Laurence, with Olivia; only a few other people had gate privileges. Neil gestured frantically to the stove. “Rebecca, could you?”
“Sure thing. Go get that baby,” she ordered, and Neil smiled gratefully as he hurried off.
“I’m going with him,” I said, jerking my thumb toward the swinging door. It gave me an excuse to get away from any further discussion of my family and what I was apparently doing wrong about them. Besides, I’d really missed Olivia.
I caught up with Neil in the long windowed hallway to the foyer, but I had to jog a little, he was walking so fast.
“Hey, slow your roll. You’re going to be out of breath when you get there.” I beamed over at him. “She’s home!”
“And Mariposa doesn’t come back until Monday,” he reminded me. “So, be prepared.”
Oh, god. Bedtime. Bedtime was so much easier when it was the nanny’s doing.
We heard Olivia’s cranky whining before we even opened the door. Valerie stood outside, juggling a twisting, tantruming toddler on her hip while her driver stood behind her, laden down with baby luggage.
Valerie blew hair out of her face. “You need a butler, Neil.”
“We need as few people in our house and our business as possible,” I corrected her, reaching for Olivia. I hefted her into my arms and admonished, “Stop that.”
She lifted her tear-rimmed eyes and the heavy baggage beneath them to meet mine. Her white-blonde curls stuck flat to the back of her head with sweat. She tried valiantly to keep her fit going, but she was too happy to see me. A big smile displayed her tiny, unevenly spaced teeth, and she nuzzled her face against my neck.
“Too much Grandma, apparently,” Valerie said, and she sounded a bit sad.
“I’m sure that’s not it at all,” Neil said, sympathetic but probably a little triumphant, deep down. He wanted to be Olivia’s favorite.
“She hasn’t slept a full night…oh, since I picked her up on Saturday.” Valerie usually looked put-together and dressed-to-kill, but her hair was limp and unstyled, and she was actually wearing jeans. I think I’d only seen that once or twice the entire time I’d known her. Things had gone rough.
“Is she due for more teeth?” I asked Neil. He kept track of those things.
“I think perhaps so. Molars?” He took Olivia from me and lifted her up to kiss her red tear-stained cheek. “She does feel a bit hot.” Then, to Olivia, he cooed, “Did you miss Afi? Afi missed you.”
“I gave her the teething gel—” Valerie began.
I cut her off. “No. The teething gel doesn’t work. Nothing works. It’s just hell until the little sucker cuts through. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Thank you, Sophie, but I have done this before,” Valerie snapped.
We’d run into little bumps here and there over the fact that I had never raised a child and she had. This one, though, was just pure exhaustion, judging from the tired lines on her face.
“Valerie, you look awful,” I said, realizing too late that it wasn’t a great opener. I hurried to add, “I know how you feel. Why don’t you stay for dinner with us? And if you’re too tired to go back to the city, you can crash here.”
Because I’m sure she’d just love to stay overnight at the house of the ex-lover it had taken her twenty-plus years to get over.
Maybe I wasn’t as full of good ideas as I thought I was.
At the mention of dinner, Neil blanched. “God, I left your mother in charge of the kitchen.”
“Go on,” I told him, but stopped him before he ran off with the baby in his arms. She watched him go with trepidation but didn’t let out the howl I’d expected.
“I would be happier just going home and sleeping for fourteen hours,” Valerie said, rubbing her eyes. “Tell Neil goodbye for me.”
“Of course.” I repositioned Olivia on my hip and leaned her forward. “Say bye-bye to Grandma,” I told her.
Valerie took Olivia’s face between her hands and kissed her forehead, nose, and each cheek. “I’ll see you soon, my love.”
The thing about kids was that if you loved them, you were still happy to get rid of them, sometimes. But it was hard to be happy walking away. Valerie lingered with a hand on Olivia’s hair and longing look. I knew it killed her that she lived so far away; even her Manhattan residence was too far for her liking.
“You should come for a cookout, s
oon,” I offered. “You and Laurence.”
“We’ll have to schedule something,” she said noncommittally. They never really came out, unless it was Olivia related.
It wasn’t that I was trying to make Valerie my best friend or something. She didn’t like me for a variety of reasons, but perhaps the most obvious was that she’d been in love with Neil for decades and somehow viewed me as having swooped in to steal her man. Or something.
That wasn’t fair. She had a long-term boyfriend, now, and she’d never outright accused me of stealing Neil. There was just a lot of friction between us, and probably would be, again, in the future. But there had been nice things, too.
“Well, schedule Christmas at Langhurst Court,” I said. “Because Neil and I want to have everyone there. His family, my family. Our family.” I gestured between her and me. “We want you to be there.”
“I’m not sure if I can,” she said bluntly. I knew right away that it wasn’t because of any petty drama between the two of us. They had celebrated Christmas there a lot when Emma was a little girl. It might have been too painful for her to go back.
Then, she added, “I may be getting married.”
“Getting married?” I whooped with joy, and she motioned for me to keep my voice down.
“Sophie, we haven’t announced it. Don’t run off and tell everyone. But Laurence and I are trying to decide between a Christmas wedding or a Christmas elopement.”
“Can you elope on Christmas?” I wondered aloud. “Isn’t City Hall closed?”
“There are wedding chapels in Las Vegas,” she reminded me. “We might just go to one of those.”
“Well, according to my mom, the Bellagio is the best hotel on the Strip. And the fountain is the eighth wonder of the world.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Valerie said dryly. “Must run. But I’ll talk to Laurence about Christmas. I’m not blowing you off completely.”
“Please don’t,” I said, then nudged Olivia’s arm. “Wave bye-bye.”
Olivia mustered up enough tired enthusiasm for a quiet, “Bye-bye” and a perfunctory open-and-close of her hand.
The Sister (The Boss Book 6) Page 21
