The Bride (The Boss)

by Barnette, Abigail

  I frowned. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I’d had plenty of happy hours pretending to be Belle rescuing the Beast from wolves, or chasing imaginary white rabbits into imaginary holes. “Yeah. It was, actually.”

  “I used to love our family vacations to Austria. The forests were spectacular for pretending to be soldiers or hunters. Or bears.” He smiled at the memory, and I had to admit, the idea was cute. I’d seen photos of him as a child, and he’d been absolutely adorable. He and his sister would have looked like Hansel and Gretel playing in the woods.

  Mom wasn’t back yet, so I retrieved the house key from the mouth of the frog fountain in the unused birdbath and let us in. I flicked on the light.

  It’s amazing how home always smells like home, no matter how long you’ve been away.

  Mom had made everything as neat as a pin. A stack of blankets, sheets, and pillows were on the sleeper sofa, waiting for us to make up our bed. Well, waiting for Sophie and the young, twenty-something Neil mom had pictured. I had no illusions about how the night would go when she got back.

  “This is pretty much it,” I said as Neil stepped in behind me, carrying our bag. I took it from him and put it down in the space between the end of the couch and the entertainment center. Then I shrugged off my coat and gestured around. “Through there is the kitchen, beyond that is the dining room. Over that way is the bathroom, and my old bedroom. But that’s my mom’s now.”

  “You and your mother shared a bedroom when you were growing up?” He sounded shocked at the idea.

  “Nope.” I shrugged. “Mom slept on the couch out here, and I got the bedroom. She’s probably still got my posters up, if you want to see how embarrassing my life truly was.”

  He took off his coat and laid it over the arm of my mom’s Lay-Z-Boy. “I don’t think it looks embarrassing at all. You were clearly raised by a very loving—if loud—protective family. You had a comfortable home, a caring parent, and you grew up to be a woman I love very much.”

  “Awww!” I stepped into his arms and hugged him hard. His chest was so firm and warm under my wind-burned cheek. I tilted my head up to kiss him, but first I said, “My family is loud?”

  “I could barely understand anything they were saying, with all the background noise.” He made a disgusted sound, but not at my family. I’d heard that huffy exhalation before. “I feel ancient.”

  “You’re not ancient. Chemotherapy can damage your hearing. You know that,” I said, reaching up to touch his face. I cupped his jaw with my hand, and he leaned his cheek against my palm. “Besides I kind of like being able to mutter under my breath without you hearing.”

  “What was that?” he asked, widening his eyes and leaning slightly forward so that I would take the bait. And, because I’m too nice and trustworthy a person, I began repeating what I’d said before. He grinned, I realized the joke, and I smacked his chest.

  “How do you manage to fall for that every single time?” he laughed.

  “I was trying to console you!” I rose on my tiptoes, and he bent his head to kiss me. I’d meant to give him a brief peck, but what I ended up getting was a thorough tongue-fucking that made me lose my balance and lean against him. His hands slipped down my back, over my ass, and he lifted his head and cursed softly.

  I opened my eyes to see the illumination of approaching headlights skating over the faux-wood paneling. “Mom’s home,” I said with a resigned sigh.

  “The point of coming here was for you to see your mother, and now you’re trying to avoid her?” He stepped back and ran a hand through his hair. “Do I look like I was just ravishing you?”

  “No, you’re fine. Except…wipe my lipstick off your mouth.” I brushed my thumb over the smudge of MAC Pre-Raphaelite that stained his lower lip.

  The door opened and Mom stepped in, faked normal at the sight of our close proximity, and held out a huge Tupperware bowl. Neil stepped over quickly to take it from her.

  “Potato salad,” she said as she handed it to him. “I think that’s the wrong color on you, Neil.”

  His blush was kind of cute.

  “Do you need us to bring anything in from the car?” I asked as she slipped off her coat and hung it on the pegged shelf beside the door.

  “Nothing that can’t keep until morning.” Mom pushed her sleeves back. “I want to get some quality time in with my daughter, if that’s okay.”

  This time, when she hugged me, it wasn’t a stiff armed, suspicious hug. She was also faintly alcohol scented, so I was so glad she’d been driving.

  When she stepped back, she called to Neil, who was trying in vain to find room for the giant Tupperware bowl in the tiny galley kitchen, to ask, “Are you hungry, Neil? Do you need something to eat?”

  “No, thank you, no. Still quite stuffed from this afternoon.”

  Mom smirked at me and mouthed, “Quite.”

  I mouthed back, “Stop.”

  I wasn’t sure what I wanted her to stop doing, but I had this horrible feeling that what I’d meant was, “Stop finding my boyfriend cute.”

  “How about drinks, then?” Mom suggested. “Neil, put that down, I’ll find a place for it in the fridge. What are you having?”

  “Oh, um…” He stepped into the living room and let Mom past; the kitchen of a single-wide trailer was really a one-person show. “What do you have in the way of scotch?”

  “I don’t know about scotch, but I have a fifth of Wild Turkey,” Mom offered. The bottles in the refrigerator door tinkled, and I heard stuff moving on the shelves. “And I’ve got some Jack.”

  Neil looked like my mother had just asked him if he wanted to drink gasoline, but he managed to choke out, “I-I think Jack Daniels would be fine.”

  “Rocks?”

  He nodded, then, remembering she couldn’t see him, said, “Yes, if it isn’t too much trouble.”

  “Have a seat before you fall down,” I murmured, steering him toward the couch. His sudden case of nerves was a combination, I thought, of his claustrophobia in the small trailer and the realization that we were all alone with my mother. It was only five o’clock, and she had plenty of time to ask us whatever she wanted.

  When I’d first met Neil’s daughter, Emma, it had not been under the best of circumstances. She’d come home unexpectedly and overheard her father and I having headboard-slamming, obscenity-shouting sex. I’d felt so super awkward around her for longest time after that, so I couldn’t help but feel that Neil’s discomfort around my mother was a little bit of life balancing the scales.

  “Thank you for letting me stay in your home,” he said, trying again to break the ice.

  “It’s no trouble at all,” Mom replied, coming into the room with a glass of Jack over ice for Neil. “You let my daughter stay with you for, what, has it been a year already?”

  “It’s less ‘staying with’ and more ‘I live there now,’“ I corrected her.

  “Do you want anything, Soph?” she asked, smoothly ignoring me. “I have Snow Creek Berry.”

  “Ooh, I haven’t had that in so long!” I even clapped my hands a little at the thought of some good, old-fashioned, cheap as hell Boone’s Farm. “It’s going to give me a wicked headache.”

  When Mom came back, she had two plastic tumblers of the gas station wine and handed one to me. “Okay. So. Neil. You’re dating my daughter, and I know practically nothing about you.”

  “Yes, Sophie informed me on the drive here from Marquette that you had no idea the boyfriend you were going to meet was twenty-four years older than you were expecting. I wasn’t quite thrilled at that surprise, myself.” He looked to me with a lifted eyebrow, and I pointedly canted my eyes away as I sipped my drink.

  “Well, tell me about yourself. I know you’re British, and I know you have family in Iceland. And you have a daughter I just found out about today, so you’re… I take it you’re divorced?” Mom sipped from her cup.

  “Yes, but not from Emma’s mother. Emma was a happy accident with my girlfriend from
university. We never married.” He grimaced at the taste of the whisky and was totally unsuccessful at hiding it. “I had just gotten divorced when Sophie and I reconnected.”

  Oh, fuck you, Neil. He knew that casual “reconnected” was going to open a can of worms I wasn’t interested in digging into.

  “You two have known each other for a while then?” Mom looked to me, and so did Neil.

  “Okay. I get it. This is my punishment for secret keeping.” I took a gulp of my Snow Creek Berry. “I met Neil seven years ago, at the Los Angeles International Airport.”

  Mom blinked. “Seven years ago you were here. And then you were in New York when you left for college.”

  “She made slight detour,” Neil said quietly.

  “I was heading to Japan.” When Mom still didn’t look like she was getting it, I added, “I was running away.”

  “You were going to run away to Japan and you never told me?” Mom shrieked, leaning forward so fast the Lay-Z-Boy creaked.

  “I didn’t make it to Tokyo. My flight was delayed, we spent the night together, and Neil stole my boarding pass. I had no other choice but to go to New York.” I shrugged off Mom’s look of horror at my open admission of teenage sex-having.

  “She told me she was twenty-five,” he said uncomfortably. “And I didn’t strand her when I took her boarding pass. I left her four thousand dollars.”

  “Ah. So you had sex with my eighteen-year-old daughter and left her four thousand dollars on the nightstand?”

  The question hung in the air like the worst balloon since the Hindenburg, and I held my breath.

  Neil didn’t apologize. Not for sleeping with me, not for stealing my ticket, not for any of it. “It was the only way I could think of to prevent her from going to Tokyo and throwing away her chance at college. Or, her chance at an advanced degree, since she’d told me she was going for her Masters.”

  There was no ammo there for my mom to strike back with. If he hadn’t intercepted me at LAX, I would have run away to Tokyo. She was backed into a corner.

  She chose to go for the aerial attack, dive bombing him with, “So…this was while you were married?”

  I lunged into the fray again. “Neil wasn’t married when we first met. After our one-night stand, he went on and met someone else, then six years later he got divorced and—”

  “I was her boss.” He wasn’t going to let me tiptoe around that, either. “I took over for Gabriella Winters briefly when my company bought Porteras and the magazine needed restructuring.”

  “But Sophie was fired from Porteras.” I saw the pieces click together in Mom’s mind, in the completely wrong way. “Did you fire Sophie so you could date her?”

  “No, we were a bit unprofessional, I’m afraid. We had something of a secret office romance for a few months, and then a situation arose in which I had no choice but to terminate her,” he said, taking another sip from his glass.

  “He really did have to do it,” I assured her. “I was in the wrong, and it would have been impossible for me to continue working at Porteras after what I did.”

  “Do I even want—” Mom stopped herself. “No, never mind. I don’t need to know.”

  “It all worked out,” I reminded her. “Hello? Soon-to-be-published author? At twenty-five?”

  “That reminds me, how did the interview go?” Mom’s mode shifted from interrogation to genuine caring and curiosity. I know a part of her excitement about my audition for Wake Up! America was the fun she would have going back to work and telling everyone about her daughter on TV.

  “It went really well.” I was pretty sure it had. Everyone in the room had seemed enthusiastic about my ideas for possible segments, and my on-camera audition had been amazing. “I guess I look great on TV, so if it doesn’t work out, I could always be an anchor or something.”

  “You do have a degree in journalism,” Mom said in her always-look-on-the-bright-side voice.

  “So, Rebecca,” Neil began, reaching over to take my hand and squeeze it. He knew how nervous I still was about the audition, and the brief touch was welcome, as was his proposed change of subject. “Tell me about yourself. Sophie told me you work at the hospital?”

  “I’m a monitor tech. I’ve been there since Sophie was knee high to a grasshopper,” she said with a fond smile at me. “Sophie is the first person in our family to go to college.”

  “I must congratulate you on raising such a wonderful woman.” Neil sipped his whiskey. “And thank you, as well. It must not have been easy, doing it on your own.”

  “Neil’s a single parent, too.” I was pleased to land on a subject where they had something in common.

  “A single father who had nannies and only part-time custody,” he reminded me. “I know Sophie’s father wasn’t in the picture. It must have been very difficult.”

  “It was. But it was worth it,” Mom said. “I kind of like this kid.”

  Calling me a kid in front of Neil was going to bring up all sorts of pseudo-incest, creep-out issues he still wasn’t quite over. But he didn’t voice those now. “Sophie has told me about her father, and that he left. Has he ever tried to contact you or…”

  “No. No, he saw her a few times, but I think the last time was her first birthday. He was a kid name a Joey Tangen, off the res down in Baraga. We met at a party and fooled around. That’s about all there is to that story.” Mom shrugged and took another sip of her Boone’s Farm.

  “Have you seen him since?” Neil asked me.

  I’d told him only the very basic facts about my missing dad: that he’d been sixteen when I was born, like my mom, that I had three photographs of him, and that my lifelong issues with abandonment probably stemmed back to Joey Tangen, absentee father.

  I shrugged. “No. I don’t care to, either.”

  “Wherever he is, he’s ancient history,” Mom agreed.

  I hated talking about my bio-dad in front of Neil. There would always be some small, sad part of me that was truly embarrassed that my father had been able to walk away from me. So, when the subject switched again—Mom asked Neil about his job—I was relieved.

  We sat around, drinking and talking. I never really got a sense of what Mom thought of Neil. I knew she wasn’t happy that I was dating him—if her little freak out at the house hadn’t clued me in, her super polite and interested faces during our conversation would have—but she didn’t seem like she was ready to poison him, so I guess I could thank god for small miracles.

  I filled Mom in on what was happening in my best friend Holli’s life. Holli was currently dating Deja, assistant to Rudy Ainsworth, managing editor of Porteras and Neil’s best friend.

  “She actually worked for Neil,” I said, deferring to him.

  “Oh?” Mom loved Holli, and already I could see all the ways she was deciding that Deja wasn’t good enough for her. “What do you think of her? Is she a good girl? Is she going to treat Holli nice?”

  “Uh, I believe so?” After three rocks glasses of Jack Daniels, his cute little drunk frown was starting to show up more often. “She was a good assistant. And very discreet, when she found out what was happening between Sophie and myself, which I appreciated very much.”

  “She is just like a grown-up version of Holli. You’re going to love her,” I assured Mom.

  “Holli is twenty-five years old,” Neil said with a chuckle. “I think Holli is the grown-up version of Holli, at this point.”

  “Well, ladies and gents, I think it’s time for me to mosey off to bed.” Mom pulled the handle on the recliner to lower the footrest and got up, weaving just slightly. She stopped and pointed at both of us. “This is a trailer. The walls are thin. No hanky-panky.”

  “Yes, well, I’ll try to restrain myself amid the romance of sleeping on a sofa bed in the living room of my girlfriend’s mother’s home,” Neil said dryly.

  Mom just drunkenly pointed again and staggered off to her room.

  “I’ll show you where the bathroom is. You can take your conta
cts out while I make up the bed,” I said with a laugh, and I grabbed Neil’s hands to pull him off the couch.

  I’d just unfolded the bed and was tucking in the final corner of the fitted sheet when he came back in a t-shirt and plaid cotton sleep pants. He picked up a pillow and tossed it to the head of the bed. “You know, it occurs to me that I have never once in my life slept on a sofa bed.”

  “What?” That just seemed absurd.

  “In college, I slept on a lot of sofas, but not sofa beds. This is a new experience for me.” He looked pleased at that, so I had to laugh.

  “Well, you did take me to London and Paris and you flew me around in your fancy jet and bought me ridiculous amounts of jewelry, so I thought it was time to return the favor,” I said with a mock-sigh. “Nothing but the best for my boyfriend.”

  “Well, if we’re opening up to new experiences, I’ll get into bed and you can turn off the lights for a change,” he laughed.

  We were lying in the dark for all of two minutes before the shine of the new experience wore off.

  “There is a very sharp bar digging into my back,” Neil groaned.

  I lifted my head. “Why don’t you move then?”

  “Well, I can’t bloody well move, can I? One creak from this rusty deathtrap and your mother will think I’m out here mounting you.” But he flopped over onto his stomach anyway, while I muffled my giggles into my pillow.

  “This feels so weird,” I whispered, nudging his elbow. “I feel like I’m doing something bad, having a boyfriend over. I only ever did that once, when my mom was working a night shift. I was terrified she would come home and find me and the guy together. But that made it kind of hot.”

  “If you’re feeling nostalgic, I can clumsily finger you while talking about my band,” he mumbled into his pillow.

  “Who told you about A.J.?” I squeaked in amused outrage.

  “Your aunt Marie was more than willing to humiliate you behind your back while you were in the bathroom.” He hooked his ankle over mine. “Happy Christmas, Sophie.”

  I leaned over for a kiss. “Merry Christmas, Sir.”