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My mother nodded as if she could read my mind. “I doubt any of those people would choose to have a person they considered to be an embarrassment into their homes, would trust them with their children.”
She let that land, dusting imaginary crumbs off her slacks. “That’s all I’m going to say on that. Except I love you. I’m immensely proud of the person you are. You are exactly who you are supposed to be. Trust that.” She glanced at her phone. “Oh, I’ve got to go pick up your niece. We’re going to collect seashells.” That time, she smiled a smile free from pain. A simple smile at the prospect of collecting seashells with Ava. My insides contracted, knowing that my time to give her simple smiles had come and gone.
My mother rinsed her plate before placing it in the dishwasher, wiping down the counters, then leaving me stewing, sensing I couldn’t handle any more perceptive pep talks.
She turned to leave but paused, glancing at me over her shoulder.
“Oh, and I know a little about Elliot Shaw. I like him. Kip mentioned that he saw him leaving here early in the morning a few weeks ago.” She flashed me a wry grin, communicating that my mother was no slouch when it came to well-placed emotional landmines.
My emotions surged, ricocheting from complicated thorny feelings at my mother’s words to a more familiar and welcome emotion: anger. “That traitorous little shit.”
I hadn’t exactly thought that Kip would keep my secret, but I expected that his big mouth would be reserved for his wife, which I couldn’t be angry about since I had no business telling him to keep secrets from her.
But my mother?
That was an act of war.
My mother reached out to squeeze my arm. “Don’t be too hard on Kip for letting that information slip. He’s a father and married to one of your best friends. I think they like him breathing with all four limbs.”
“There are plenty of things I can do that will keep him whole and breathing,” I ground my molars, although for once, my threat was empty. As pissed as I was with Kip, my taste for ruining and punishing men had changed. Needlessly doing it to good and decent—and yes, fucking interfering ones—made my usually iron heart twist just a bit.
“You’re allowed, you know?”
I looked at my mother whose face was turned down, sad, gripping her sensible purse tightly.
“To be happy,” she continued. “To have a normal relationship. Even though you pride yourself on eschewing everything that’s traditional in this world, don’t deny yourself something as simple as happiness. Maybe even love.”
She blew me a kiss then was out the door.
As if happiness or love were simple.
As if I deserved either of those things.
Was capable of them.
I didn’t know why I turned up at Shaw Shack on Friday night. I should’ve had better things to do, a more pressing social calendar. If I was in New York, I would have. Gallery openings, dinner meetings, dates, late night workout classes. There was never a moment when I was idle, never had I sat on the $6,000 sofa in my apartment and watched TV, read a book, ate cookie dough… Whatever it was people did when they relaxed.
The problem was that in Jupiter, I had none of those things to keep me busy, to keep me away from being alone with my thoughts. Here, both my gym and Pilates studio closed at 8:00, the bars were only used as a last resort, and I didn’t have my conventional job anymore, therefore, no meetings. I’d been glued to my laptop since 6:00 in the morning, working, intent on quieting my mind, but there eventually came the moment when even I had to call it quits.
I didn’t date. My social calendar relied solely on my brother, my sister-in-law, their family, Fiona, Avery or any one of the other Jupiter Tides crew who had accepted me into their fold even though I wasn’t anything like them.
There were plenty of dinner parties, babysitting duties, girls’ nights that I could attend. But there were also plenty of nights when I sat alone in my brother’s old house, wearing ratty sweats, staring at my computer, trying to find my way out of the mess I’d gotten myself into while dreading the eventual disaster that would erupt when my failures caught up to me.
I also binge-watched the showSupernaturalfor a nice change of pace. If only my demons could be banished with some salt, words in Latin or silver bullets.
Then came the night Elliot knocked at my door, and my world transformed in a way I hadn’t been expecting.
I’d tried to shove that night away into one of the many mental drawers I kept firmly closed in my mind, full of traumas and regrets and bad decisions. Sometimes they rattled, especially the one I’d shovedthe eventinto, but my memories with Elliot wouldn’t settle. They kept flying through my mind, untamed.
Maybe because it wasn’t a trauma nor a regret nor a bad decision. Maybe because Elliot felt like the first good thing I had that was mine that wasn’t related to my family.
The problem was, I wasn’t good for him.
His deceased former sister-in-law proved that.
My night with Jasper proved that. Rubbing shoulders with environmental terrorists, billionaires, all sorts of bad people I’d rubbed shoulders with regularly in my previous life without batting an eyelash.
Not that that life was in the past in any way. I was just hiding from it.