“A lot of people are going to see it that way. It’s not fair, but people assume the worst wherever sex is involved. Remember when Carla’s nephew came out as gay, and they fired him from his youth pastor position?” Mom reminded me. That had been a massive scandal in our small town when I was in high school. We’d heard about it even though we didn’t go to that church.
And she wasn’t wrong. People assumed a lot when sex was involved, and the idea of three consenting adults living together in a romantic relationship was scandalous as hell. “I was hoping Valerie, at least, would understand.”
“Why would she make anything easy for you?” huffed the other woman who made absolutely nothing easy for me. “Olivia and the girls won’t be there for this, will they?”
“No, of course not. We’re trying to keep them as far from any of this as possible. They’re going through an adjustment period, too.” At least Amal and Rashida came from a very open-minded background.
“Well, of course. Their parents got divorced, now their father is getting...serious with other people…” She paused. “You can’t all get married, can you?”
“Um, no? Since when have three people ever been able to get married?” I snorted a laugh, but deep down, it wasn’t all that funny. El-Mudad was permanent whether we could be married or not, but Neil and I had done a big celebration to declare our permanence to our family and friends. Missing out on that part with El-Mudad made my heart ache. “But yeah, they understand that this is a marriage-like arrangement. We’ve taken this slow. Literally years.”
“Maybe you should point that out to Laurence and Valerie,” Mom suggested. “This isn’t a freaky sex thing. It’s a marriage.”
“In my experience, the two aren’t mutually exclusive.” I couldn’t resist embarrassing her just a little bit.
“Sophie Anne.”
“Oh, chill out. You’re right, though. I’m just hoping we can get that through to them.” Maybe it wouldn’t hurt for them to at least see the way the girls interacted. The way El-Mudad interacted with Olivia. If they could see we were a family, even just for a few minutes. “I’m going to go talk to the guys about this. Thanks.”
We said goodbye and hung up with a promise that I would let her know how it went in my own time, without her pestering me about it.
Neil was in his study, frowning at his computer screen. He looked up and took off his glasses. “Are they here?”
“Not yet.” I shook my phone; I would receive a notification from the front gate when they arrived. “But I was just…” I stopped before I could say, “talking with my mother.” Though Neil and Mom got along more or less, there would always be a little friction, and I wanted him to be open to my proposal. I continued, “I know we have alternate plans for the girls tonight. Maybe if Laurence and Valerie saw how the three of them interacted, that we’re a normal family, they would back off.”
Neil mulled it over for a moment, tapping his bottom lip with one open arm of his glasses. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for them to have dinner with us.”
“Oh, no, me neither. But if they were there to greet Olivia when she arrived, and if Valerie and Laurence could see how happy Olivia is with them, how much she loves El-Mudad…”
“They should be here any minute,” Neil said cautiously. He took out his phone. “I’ll text him. I have no clue where he is.”
“He said he was going to take a nap. I assume he’s in the den.”
It was a safe assumption. El-Mudad’s favorite napping spot was the butter-soft leather couch there.
Sure enough, that’s where I found him lying on his back with one foot on the floor, one arm flung above his head. He snored softly as I approached.
The sofa was wide enough I could lie down with him. Without opening his eyes, he rolled onto his side to spoon me.
“Are they here?” he mumbled into my hair.
“Not yet. Any minute, according to Neil.” I covered his hand where it lay on my hip. “I thought maybe instead of hiding the girls away, they could visit with Laurence and Valerie for a few minutes? So that they can see how well they get along with Olivia?”
He tensed behind me. “Oh...Sophie. I don’t want to use my children as props.”
I wriggled to my other side to face him. “I would never. That is not what I intended at all.”
“Tempers will be high. And if we can’t speak freely—”
“Only just to say hi,” I promised. “I don’t want to pressure you. You’re their father, you know what’s best for them, and I would never, ever interfere.”
“You let Amal get her ears pierced a second time,” he said dryly.
“I meant about something important. You were a needlessly controlling a-hole.” I cuddled my face against his neck. “It’s okay. It was just a thought.”
He played idly with a lock of my hair for a long, silent pause. “It wouldn’t hurt for them to say hello. That’s not what’s bothering me. It’s all of this campaigning we have to do to prove that we’re trustworthy.”
“I know. And it’s none of their business.” This all would have been so much simpler if Emma hadn’t—
A hiccup of pain caught me by surprise.
El-Mudad pressed his lips to my forehead. “Everything will be fine. Emma and Michael chose you and Neil to be Olivia’s guardian for a reason. They trusted you. Valerie should, as well.”
That was another good point, and one we could no longer tip-toe around.
“This is going to be hard, isn’t it?” I whispered.
He stroked the backs of his fingers down my cheek. “Yes. But it isn’t harder than anything you’ve handled already.”
My phone vibrated in my pocket, and dread forced my stomach into my throat. The feeling of just wanting to get the meeting over with vanished. I longed for it to come back. I checked the notification, and sure enough, “It’s them.”
“I’ll call Amal and Rashida down. Olivia will be thrilled for them to greet her,” he said gently. “Go on.”
I stopped by the hallway mirror and fluffed my hair, which I wore loose around my shoulders. I’d dressed extra-Puritanical, in a Victorian-inspired high-neck white blouse and flowy gray palazzo pants. I took a deep breath, looked myself in the uncharacteristically understated eye, and prepared for battle.
Neil was already nearly to the foyer when I caught up with him. “El-Mudad?”
“He’s getting the girls.” I reached up and adjusted Neil’s collar. “Shall we have some kind of signal? Something to let you know when you’re creating more problems than we’re fixing?”
“We can establish one, but I’ll likely ignore it.” He rolled back the sleeves of his untucked, gray button-down—we often accidentally dressed alike—and nodded toward the door. “Perhaps it would be better if I could signal when you should stop me from committing violence.”
“I know that you’re kidding because you’re trying to get all this anger out of your system before they get to the door.” At least, I hoped that was the case. “Just don’t make yourself angrier than you already are.”
“No, I’ll let them do that for me.” He closed his eyes. “I can’t think that way. I have to approach this as if they’re acting in good faith.”
“They are. It’s just that their idea of how to raise Olivia and our idea of how to raise her are clashing. That’s what we’re going to resolve,” I reminded him.
“Resolution involves compromise. And there aren’t any I’m willing to make,” he huffed definitively.
Oh, Neil.
The leaded glass’s texture in the windows flanking the door reduced Valerie’s car to an indistinct dark cloud gliding around the circular drive. We stood in the foyer and waited, my face a frozen, aching mask of the least sincere friendliness I’d ever worn.
And we waited.
And waited.
“This is a power move,” Neil seethed beside me.
A car door closed. I held my tongue and tried for preschool teacher levels of patience.
They rang the doorbell, and Neil didn’t bother to counter their move with one of his own; he wanted to see Olivia too badly to delay any further.
“Afi!” she shouted as she launched herself over the threshold into his arms. “I came back!”
“Of course, you did! You live here,” he laughed, leaning down to hug her.
We moved aside as Valerie and Laurence came in. I shut the door behind Laurence, extra careful not to even brush against his aura for fear he would take it as an unbridled sexual advance born of my loose morals and looser vag.
“Where’s El-Mudad?” Olivia demanded.
I pretend to be offended. “What about ‘where’s Sophie?’”
Olivia walked over to me and patted my hand. “I know where Sophie is.”
“Neil.” Laurence put out his hand to shake. I hoped it didn’t devolve into a squeezing contest.
“Laurence. Valerie.” Neil nodded to both of them. “How was the drive?”
“Long,” Laurence said, the corner of his mouth twitching. “As always.”
“Sometimes, I think we could walk here faster from the city than drive.” I forced myself to sound sympathetic. We’d offered them the use of our helicopter more than once. They just didn’t want to take it.
“You could certainly take better shortcuts,” Valerie said, shockingly amiable. So, she was making an effort, too.
“Ah, here’s El-Mudad,” Neil said, gesturing toward the hallway. El-Mudad came into the foyer with Amal and Rashida; Olivia ran past the latter sister to get to the former.
“Olivia, what would you say to having a pizza party in the movie room with the girls?” El-Mudad asked, bending down to make eye contact with her.
“We’re going to watch Captain Marvel!” Rashida announced, clapping her hands in excitement.
“Are you going to watch it, too, Amal?” Olivia asked hopefully.
She nodded. “And we’ll play Candy Land if you want.”
Olivia took Amal’s hand and pulled her toward the hall. “Let’s go. Let’s get pizza.”
“We’ll send it to you,” El-Mudad said with a fond smile.
Valerie spoke up, “We’ll say goodbye before we leave, darling.”
“Okay!” But Olivia didn’t look all that concerned about seeing them off, once faced with the prospect of a girl’s night with actual big girls.
As they headed off, Laurence said, “Isn’t that a pretty violent movie?”
“Oh, it’s all fantastical violence,” Valerie said with a wave of her hand.
I nodded my agreement. “And it’s nice for girls to see a woman being the hero, for a change.”
“Exactly,” Valerie replied.
And the conversation tanked out.
“Well, shall we go to the dining room?” Neil suggested.
“I hope you didn’t go to dining-room-level trouble just for the two of us,” Valerie said, placing her purse on the table in the middle of the foyer. “May I leave this here?”
“Of course,” Neil said, motioning that she should walk ahead of him, with me. Laurence followed behind us, with Neil and El-Mudad.
“Our chef has made the most fantastic adobo eggplant,” I said, maybe too enthusiastically.
“The way Olivia talks, we thought Neil did most of the cooking,” Valerie said.
“I often do,” he answered. “But I didn’t want to be fretting in the kitchen, wasting your time.”
The dining room, like so many of the formal entertaining spaces in the house, overlooked our vast lawn and the beach beyond. The Atlantic was a gray line on the horizon today, uncharacteristically calm. The needlessly enormous table had been set two across, with Neil’s place at the head. I took a chair beside El-Mudad; Valerie, I couldn’t help but pettily note, sat at Neil’s left, leaving Laurence directly across from me.
I couldn’t look at him. Just being in the same room with the man made my skin crawl. Not only because he disapproved of our “lifestyle,” but because of the way he’d expressed that displeasure in the past. There was real Puritan-colony-judge energy around him. If he’d brandished a bible at me and called me a harlot, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
One of our part-time staff members entered from the kitchen with a pitcher of mint ice water.
“Does anyone want anything else? We don’t have any wine, I’m afraid,” Neil pseudo-apologized. He would have been okay with serving wine, as long as it didn’t stay in the house after dinner. He’d made the conscious choice not to have any to reinforce how pure and harmless our home was.
“No, thank you,” Valerie answered for both herself and Laurence. “This is fine.”
As the young man with the pitcher moved around and filled our glasses, Laurence said, “It must be nice to have so much help around the house."
And so, it begins.
I opened my mouth to say something pointed but not openly hostile when El-Mudad spoke first. "The staff are here because of me. I'm afraid I'm a bit spoiled. Sophie and Neil aren't fond of having too many people in the house, so we've compromised."
"We hired everyone through the service you recommended, Valerie," Neil said easily. Precisely the kind of shade I wished I could master. I sat in awe of a bitchy legend.
"Your last name is Ati, isn't it?" Valerie asked El-Mudad, changing the subject quickly. "I think I knew your father. He lives in Paris, doesn't he?"
"He did. He recently moved to the Emirates." El-Mudad never talked about his family much. "Or so I've heard. We're not close."
"Oh? I'm so sorry, I shouldn't have brought it up," Valerie apologized, truly mortified.
El-Mudad lifted a hand to indicate there were no hard feelings. "My father is a powerful and well-connected man. It is only natural that he would know a powerful and well-connected woman."
A flicker of annoyance crossed Neil's face; he was either jealous of Valerie for capturing El-Mudad's playful attention or pissed off that El-Mudad was flirting with her in the first place.
The satisfaction I got from seeing Neil dry swallow a big pill of his own medicine was so thrilling I almost needed a cigarette.
When I accidentally glanced at Laurence and saw the total lack of humor in his expression, the thrill of triumph quickly turned to something darker, a suspicious kind of emotion that I couldn’t name. The idea of putting eggplant adobo in my stomach didn’t seem very smart, all of a sudden. I just couldn’t put my finger on why, exactly.
No one else seemed to feel that weird energy. But I knew I hadn’t imagined it.
"And I'm not ashamed of the state of my family,” El-Mudad went on. “It's helped me realize what kind of relationship I want to have with my children. What kind of family I want to have." He reached over and took Neil's hand.
Bravo.
"That's a good excuse to segue into the real topic of conversation, isn't it?" Laurence asked with a smirk I wanted to slap off his face. "Let's drop the pretense of this friendly little get-together and talk about why we're here."
"I think that's a fine idea," Neil said tersely. "Because I have some thoughts on the subject as well."
"I'm sure you do. But we need to keep this civil," Valerie reminded not just Neil, but Laurence.
"I agree." There. I had contributed to the conversation. I not only felt as though I was in way over my head but that I didn't have the right to enter the dialogue at all. Which was ridiculous; Emma had named me Olivia's guardian, as well. I might not have been a mother, but I certainly had a stake in the kid’s upbringing. But Neil, El-Mudad, and Valerie had all gone through the fires of custody-related battles. I felt like I didn’t have the range to voice an opinion.
"Why don't you start," El-Mudad suggested. "Since you have concerns."
Valerie looked at Laurence, then back to us. "I know that you're all very...nontraditional when it comes to matters of the heart. And Neil, you know that I would never judge your choices—"
I snorted loudly. I couldn't help it. "I'm sorry," I apologized quickly. "But can we jus
t all be honest? Valerie, you and I have a lot of history. Most of that has been about judging Neil's choice to be with me."
"That's fair," she said patiently. "You're right. I do judge the choices he makes, and now, I'm judgmental about the choices the three of you are making together. I don't have a problem with open relationships—"
"Please, let me correct you," El-Mudad interrupted gracefully. "They are not in an open relationship. I am not their lover. Neil, Sophie, and I are in a relationship together. If we weren't, I wouldn't have moved my daughters here, enrolled them in school, and involved them in the lives of people they would grow accustomed to. I am highly protective of my family. Deciding to blend it with Sophie, Neil, and Olivia's was not a frivolous undertaking."
"How long did you rehearse that speech?" Laurence cracked.
Valerie ignored him. "That does address one of our issues with this arrangement. We were afraid that you were putting Olivia in a position to lose people she'd grown close to."
"That is something we can never guarantee for her," Neil reminded her. "None of us know what will happen tomorrow. Any one of us could be taken in an instant. We know that too well."
"Please understand, we dated El-Mudad for years before we even met his kids," I added. "And we never sought this relationship out. It happened because of who El-Mudad is and the love we have for him."
"Look, whatever you're doing in your bedroom is your business. We just don't want Olivia exposed to it," Laurence snapped, getting straight to the heart of the matter.
"What we do in our bedroom?" I asked, my hands clenched under the table. "Like sleep? Get dressed? Watch TV? Say what you mean. You think we're exposing Olivia to sexual deviance, and you wouldn't have thought that if it were just Neil and me in this relationship."
"We never said—" Valerie began.
Neil cut her off. "You never said those words. But it's clear that when you look at the three of us, you see a fetish. Not a family."
"We see you the way the court will see you,” Laurence said, far too pleased with himself.
The words hung in the air over the table like a cloud of toxic gas.
I had never seen Neil look so cold and terrifying as he did when his eyes met Laurence's. "According to my attorney, a Suffolk County Supreme Court judge disagrees with you. And as this is Olivia's county of residence, any court action would take place here."
Sophie (The Boss Book 8) Page 4
