by Shen, L. J.
“You can still have Clemmy. All she knows is you as her dad. As for Amber, I can sincerely say shoving your dick into a paper straw will give you more satisfaction than being with a woman who only wants you for your wallet and status. Even you can do better than that.” I wasn’t prepared to console my brousin after eating shit from him for three consecutive years, but kicking someone while they were down wasn’t my style.
“Anyway.” I arched an eyebrow when it became clear Julian wasn’t going to move an inch until I kicked him out. “I have work to do. Text me where to pick Booger Face up.”
He got up, looking around him like he was forgetting something. Maybe his manners. He should’ve knocked. He also should have apologized for the past three years. Being remorseful meant jack shit without an official admission.
“You know, Chase, you’re not so bad.” He stopped at my door.
I stared at him blankly. “Thanks for the lukewarm endorsement. Isn’t not so bad synonymous with I’ve met bigger shitheads?”
He snorted out a laugh. “See? That’s what I mean. I always thought you had no heart, which made villainizing you easier. You seem so detached from everything around you. You walk around with this broody dark halo around you. Almost like the devil.” He frowned. A shiver ran down my spine. That was how Madison referred to me. I’d thought she was joking. I didn’t think so now. “But I realized it was just you being you. And that you are capable of caring for people. You care about Lori and Ronan, Katie and Clemmy.”
And Madison. I cared about Madison too.
In fact, a part of me wasn’t so sure I was vastly different from my ex-girlfriend. In some ways, I, too, went out of my way to please the people I cared about. That was why I put so much on the line for Dad. But unlike Madison, my people-pleasing tendency had made my mouth write a check my ass couldn’t cash. I’d promised Amber marriage. And gotten slapped in the face with her betrayal.
But I was still a sucker for those I loved.
I would always have my family’s back.
Julian sent me a hopeful glance. Oh, for fuck’s sake. Just when I thought we were treading carefully out of Jerry Springer territory, he went and got all Brady Bunch on my ass. I couldn’t catch a break. I took a deep breath.
Say it.
It’s going to taste like turd, but you need to say it.
He is family.
“I care about you too.” I tried not to grit my teeth too much around the sentence. Julian’s eyes lit up. I got it. In his mind, we’d been fucking him over, giving him the Black name without the perks, so he’d rebelled. It wasn’t an excuse for his shitty behavior, but it was the incentive.
“That so?” he asked.
“Seems that way.”
“Does that mean I get to keep my CIO role?”
Or maybe he just wants to cover his ass and secure his job.
“Too soon,” I warned.
“Thanks, bro.” He gave me a wink.
I waited until he got out of my office, then gagged.
I made a stop at Croquis to pick Mad up. Sven was by the elevator bank, rubbing an employee’s pregnant belly like it was a crystal ball and gushing about babies. I gave him a nod, passing by him. A semifamiliar girl with Khaleesi-blonde hair cornered me, chasing me the length of the studio.
“Mr. Black, wait! I just wanted to thank you again for convincing Sven to give me another chance. I don’t know if you saw my two emails . . . or flowers. I want you to know I don’t take it lightly at all, and I’m not going to blow my second chance.”
I hmm-hmmed. I had no idea who she was or what she wanted from me. My eyes were laser focused on my target—Madison Goldbloom, sitting at her station in a powder-blue dress with white swans printed on it.
“Maddie and I are totally bonding. We went to lunch the other day. I don’t know if she told you. We’re cool with each other.”
Now she was physically standing in my way, so I guessed I had to address her.
“Nadia, right?” I asked.
“Nina.” She smiled brightly. “Maddie said you guys are no longer together. I’m so sorry.” She put her hand to her heart. Yeah. She seemed about as sorry as Daisy after trying to impregnate poor Frank. “If you ever need anyone to talk to . . .”
I’ll seek professional help from someone who doesn’t want my cock in her mouth, I was tempted to finish for her, but I knew Mad would call me a jerk, and I really, really didn’t want her to see me as the devil incarnate anymore.
“Appreciate it.” I bypassed her, going straight to Madison, who was frowning at her phone. She looked up when she noticed me, grabbed her jacket, and gave me a distracted kiss on the cheek that almost made my fucking heart explode.
“Thank you. Anyway”—she smiled up at me—“I was hoping we could say hi to Ronan on our way back from the movie. I made him nondistressed banana bread.”
“Nondistressed?” I ducked my head to catch her eyes. She dodged the eye contact. Everything about the platonic shit was watered down, impersonal.
“Meaning I didn’t batter it. The outside looks subpar, but the inside tastes really good.”
“The outside looks better than you think,” I murmured, knowing it was sink-or-swim time and finally—finally—deciding to get my head out of the water.
It ended up being a pleasant evening, everything considered (things I considered: I had to see Julian’s sour-ass face again, and Madison remained fully clothed for the entire duration).
After the movie, we took Booger Face to see Dad and stayed for tea. When it was time to go, Madison stopped me at the door and put her hand on my chest. My muscles jerked under her fingertips like she was fire.
“He doesn’t look very good,” she whispered, rubbing my chest in circles. “Stay with him. I’ll take the train back home.”
Normally, I’d try to buy more time with her. Today, I knew she had a point. I kissed her cheek. “Thanks for killing my libido and possibly my retinas with that movie. I will never look at ball gowns and tiaras the same again.”
“Thanks for being a good sport about it.”
She lingered. Mom and Clemmy were in the living room, doing a puzzle together. Dad was in the master bedroom. I could lean in and kiss her, and she’d let me. Her eyes were burning with that something I’d learned to recognize. A carnal hunger.
But now wasn’t the time.
And definitely not the place.
I leaned back, flicking her nose with a smile. “Bye.”
“Bye,” she said, the word thick in her voice.
As soon as she was in the elevator, I took out my phone and messaged her, knowing the reception was crappy there.
Chase: I fucking love you, Madison Petal Goldbloom. So much it sometimes hurts to look at your face.
A minute later, she replied.
Maddie: What did you send and delete? I’m going to kill you for this one day, Chase.
Chase: Dad says the banana bread was just okay. Didn’t want you to get offended.
Maddie: You’re a jerk.
Chase: Someone has to be.
“Come in.”
Dad’s voice was hoarse from his lungs working at only 10 percent capacity. I pushed the double doors to his room open.
I pressed my back against the doors, hooking my thumbs into my front pockets. He lay in the shadows. Grant had explained to me that he was on a lot of painkillers but was still majorly uncomfortable. His breathing was so labored he sounded like an old car trying to spurt its last few miles before running out of gas. It had been both slow and fast coming.
“Don’t just stand there, boy. Come in. I don’t bite.” He coughed. I took a few steps in, feeling overwhelmingly inadequate for the first time in my life. He had days, maybe. Hours, more like. And still, the world turned. We took Booger Face to the movies. We went to work. We lived. Every moment I lived away from him felt like betrayal.
He propped himself on the headboard, reaching for his nig
htstand and picking up a rolled cigarette. I arched an eyebrow as he grabbed the lighter next to it.
“Getting high?” I asked sarcastically.
“As much as I can with the state of my lungs. Medicinal cannabis. Does wonders for the pain.” He lit up, inhaling deeply until it hit the spot. He coughed the smoke out. I sat beside him. “Maddie seems in good spirits,” he remarked.
“Are we really going to talk about Maddie?” I picked up the jar of marijuana next to his nightstand, examining it.
“No, sorry. Let’s talk about my favorite subject—my dying.”
“Touché.” I scratched my stubble. “Yeah, she is doing fine. She’s worried about you, though.”
“Are you romancing the poor girl?” He cocked his head sideways, taking another hit. It was surreal to sit here with him smoking pot. All he needed now was a backward ball cap on his head and a Pornhub Premium subscription, and he’d be every guy I’d known in college.
I chuckled. “She’s not that unfortunate yet, but I’m working on it.”
“Slowly.” He tapped the ash into an ashtray.
“Let me worry about the pace. You worry about cramming as much fun as you can into the next few weeks. Look, I want to iron things out about the whole Julian crap at the office. We never really got to talk about it.”
Dad waved me off. “No need. I knew, subconsciously, that this was going to happen at some point. The two of you needed to figure it out, and you did. The balance of power. Julian tried his luck with the leader of the pack and did not succeed. He is now tending to his battle wounds, and you’d be wise not to poke them while they’re still fresh. As I mentioned before, I see him as a son. Clementine is my granddaughter. Nothing will ever change that. Biology could never rival familiarity. But I will tell you this, Chase. Out of all my children, I see the most of myself in you.”
When he finished talking, he took a greedy, hungry breath, like he couldn’t stand the strain on his lungs of uttering a few sentences together.
“Thank you.” I bowed my head.
“It is not a compliment,” he deadpanned, surprising me. I looked up, frowning. He sighed, took another hit, and talked with the joint clasped between his fingers.
“I’m stubborn and pigheaded and extremely unreasonable at times. I love your mother, but I am the first to recognize I’ve put her through hell with my radical moods. I have no manners to speak of, and I’m sarcastic even when the time doesn’t call for it—which is always. I want you to promise me something.”
I hoped to hell he didn’t mean to warn me against being sarcastic. I’d need to cut off half of my brain and my tongue to be on the path toward not making a dark joke out of everything.
“Hit me with it,” I said guardedly.
“Give love a chance. It is rare and raw and completely life changing. A girl like Madison doesn’t fall into your lap every other day. If you miss your chance with her, there’s no guarantee another girl who is tailor made for you will just walk into your life. I know Amber hurt you, bad. You didn’t love her, though. You wanted to get settled and get the romance thing out of the way. I saw the way she looked at you. I saw the way you looked at her.”
I knew what he meant. I’d looked at postcollege Amber like a new, shiny, limited-edition car. She’d raised my stock and seemed like a good addition to my life at the time. I looked at Madison like she was a piñata full of surprises and orgasms I wanted to burst. With my dick-shaped bat. She kept me on my toes and made me second-guess what she was going to do or say. And I had ended up watching Me before You. Guess what? Louisa Clark was hot as hell.
“Open up your heart. Life is shorter than you think. And when you’re in my position, bedridden, a breath away from death, you don’t think about all the money you made, all the lucrative deals you signed, about the revenues and people who screwed you over and people you screwed over in business. You think about how lucky you are to be eating homemade banana bread and listening to your grandchild laughing from the other room and the love of your life being the person who made her laugh.”
I closed my eyes, nodding. “I promise I . . .” I started talking, but when I opened my eyes, I saw Dad passed out. He was fast asleep, the last flame of the joint burning in his hand. I took the joint, put it out in an ashtray on his nightstand, kissed him good night, and left.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
MADDIE
“Are you okay?” Sven asked as he tugged and smoothed the dress on my body.
I wasn’t.
I was absolutely not okay.
The model for the Dream Wedding Dress was MIA, again, and I had to fill in for her. At this point, I was furious. It was one thing to give him my measurements. It was another completely to model the frigging thing, especially when she was at least eight inches taller than me. How unprofessional.
“I’m fine,” I clipped. “You should talk to this girl’s agency. She’s stood us up twice in a row now. Maybe you should just get a size zero replacement.”
Phew, now I really was a long cry from Martyr Maddie. The old me would never say anything remotely negative about someone. The new me, however, wanted to hold people accountable for their actions. Living with the new me, I realized, was much more convenient than sharing a body with my previous version.
“Nah, too late for that.” Sven crouched forward, pinning needles around the fabric bunched at my waist. He had another row of needles in his mouth as he spoke. “Besides, even if I could get another model, I want the one that looks like a real woman. She’s worth it. Trust me.”
“Supermodels are real women too. In fact, women come in all shapes and sizes and colors and heights, and none of their physical characteristics make them any less of a woman.” Nina raised her arm in the air as if asking for permission as they both inspected me in my work of art.
“Amen.” I high-fived Nina before giving the customary bride-to-be twirl in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirror we kept in the studio mostly for Sven’s daily angle check. Designers and interns and administrative assistants gathered around me to look at the dress. Crimson marred my neck and cheeks, and my skin became blotchy with embarrassment. I wasn’t used to everyone’s eyes on me.
“Fine. I’ll amend. The model is worth it because she looks like she was born for that dress, and I don’t care that she is busy. Now, Maddie, would you do me a favor and straighten your back? You look like you’re about to hide inside this dress.”
I did as I was told, smoothing my hand across the lush fabric of the Moonflower. I’d named the dress design after the white flower, which looked like a long dress midtwirl when it opened. But there was a catch that made me insist on the name—the moonflower only opened at night. It blossomed in the dark. Sven had said to call it something that reminded me of myself.
Nothing reminded me of myself more than blossoming in the arms of darkness.
I’d lost my mother in the midst of my awkward swing into adulthood. Only guided by my widower father, who’d been busy saving my late mother’s other legacy—her flower shop.
I’d fallen in love with Chase Black when his father was dying.
And I’d fallen in love with myself, too, once I’d realized I was worthy of a man like Chase Black. Frankly, that I was worthy of anyone.
I bit my lower lip as I stared in the mirror, thinking about all the women who would hopefully walk down the aisle wearing the dress. Then about the lives they were going to have with their husbands (or wives) afterward. I thought about the children they would have. The positive pregnancy tests. The promotions. The Christmas mornings. The family vacations. Entire lives would be wrapped around the Moonflower. Thousands of women would look at this dress years from now, and it would symbolize something different to each of them. Love. Hope. Heartbreak. It filled my heart with excitement.
“Maddie.” Nina stepped forward, passing me my phone, which was dancing in her palm. “You have a phone call.”
I frowned at the caller ID. Katie. Did she want to cancel on our lunch p
lans? I pressed the phone to my ear. “Hey, K. What’s up?”
“Maddie,” she choked out. My heart immediately sank.
“Katie.” My voice quivered. “What happened?”
It was terrible. Asking a question you knew the answer to just so it could be out in the open. So we could deal with it. Layla’s word of the day today was disaster. I should have known.
“It’s Dad.” Her voice sounded soft and hoarse, like it was melting in her throat. “He died.”
The next hour was a blur. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t see clearly.
Maybe that was what made me burst in a blaze out of the building wearing a wedding dress that resembled a three-tier cake, before Sven and Nina pulled me back in, kicking and screaming I had to go see the Blacks. Nina shoved me in the bathroom and peeled the dress from my body before dressing me up in my normal clothes. I shook uncontrollably, trying to call Chase and getting hit with the cold, impersonal sound of his voice mail each time. Thank God Nina had been working hard on making amends and being the best version of herself at the office. She made sure I had a taxi waiting downstairs.
The journey to the hospital passed in a blink. I couldn’t decipher the faces or the words of the staff who directed me to Ronan Black’s room. He wasn’t there anymore when I got there. Chase was standing with his back to me, staring out the window, the empty, still-crumpled bed behind him. Lori was curled into herself on a clinically green love seat, her head tucked in Katie’s shoulder. Julian was sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at his hands in his lap. Amber and Clementine were nowhere to be seen. I rushed to Katie and Lori first, not quite ready to witness Chase’s pain up close.
“How’d it happen?” I asked, knowing dang well it wasn’t a question they wanted to answer. On the day I’d found out about Mom, Dad hadn’t wanted to talk about anything, much less the technicalities of how it had happened. And yet as friends and family had trickled in, we’d been swamped with questions. How had she died, who’d found her, and how had Dad broken the news to me?
