“Hmm, for now.” She wiggles her eyebrows. She holds up a piece of apple dipped in honey like it’s a religious offering. I open my mouth and accept it, chewing it as she does the same.
“I like these,” she says, touching along the base of my neck and down between my shoulder blades. “I thought this was beautiful when I saw the reflection of it in the bathroom.” She bites her lip, I imagine, recalling those moments in that bathroom in Montana.
“I would sit in my dad’s design studio and watch him draft out designs from stones he wanted to repurpose. I was maybe seven or eight, and I didn’t know it then, but that was how he and my grandfather were paid for their cleaningexpertise—with jewelry.”
“So then your origin story wasn’t jewelry, it was the cleaning business?” she asks.
“Their origin story. Mine started with jewelry,” I say, watching her closely as she continues drawing her fingers over the dark triangular shapes.
“Turn, let me see the rest of these,” she says as her fingertips glide across my skin. I can’t remember a time in my entire life when I’ve been touched like this, studied, and appreciated. It feels fucking good.
As I turn my back to her and lean my ass against the counter, she traces along the pattern of paper airplane shapes between my shoulder blades.
“Keep talking,” she says softly, and I don’t know if I’ll ever understand what it is about her that makes it easy, but I want to tell her all of it.
My eyes close as she keeps moving her fingers, tracing each paper plane. “Jewelry made for less curious transactions. It was easy to transfer, pawn, and resell. I didn’t know any of that growing up, but the cleaning business was the first business. Making jewelry was the cover, and for my dad, the hobby.” Looking down, I drag my finger across my palm the same way she’s moving hers across my back. “He would draft out tons of rings and pendant designs on tracing paper. I remember thinking it was really basic stuff, but my dad liked to think through things before just starting. He always had a plan. The Pacific Northwest during the summers, in a beach town, turned busy quickly, but he wanted me to enjoy time off and not be in camps. I think he just liked spending time with me when he could, so I hung out around his workspace. Spending time with him was never a bad thing to me.” I pause, thinking about him like that, so young and alone raising a kid on his own. “I started making airplanes with his discarded designs. And he’d take breaks and make them with me. We got pretty good at all the different folds there were.” I laugh to myself, before adding, “Of all the things we’d done together over the years, something as small and basic as making airplanes on the floor with him ended up being a core memory for me.”
She leans forward and presses her lips along my upper back, likely kissing one of the paper airplanes. “It’s always those moments that stick with you for the long haul,” she says quietly, almost as if she’s lost in her thoughts. As she wraps her arms around me, legs too, I cover her hands with mine while she holdsme from behind. “For me, it’s cakes with my mom. My sisters and I would sit in the kitchen and watch her stress-bake. She’s not the stand-still-and-reflect-on-her-feelings kind of woman.” She smiles against me; I can feel her lips pull as she keeps a hold on me.
“I can relate a bit to that,” I say, turning slowly to face her.
She looks at me, weighing what else she might want to say.
“My mom is,” —she breathes out—“complicated, a bit selfish, maybe even an asshole at the core of it.” She threads her fingers into the hair at my nape as she says, “She would repeat shit that famous people said, or quote songs like they were snippets of wisdom that she’d come up with on her own. Out of all the ones she’s droned on about over the years, it’s the one that Dolly Parton said that lingered loudest for me.”
“Which one is that?” I ask.
“Find out who you are. And then do it on purpose,”she says with more of a twangy accent than what she typically has.“She would say prolific things like that and then look disappointed when I was twenty-three and starting a thesis on the chemical composition and complexity of whiskey. We didn’t have the kind of relationship that you and your dad had.” She lets out an exhale. “I don’t think she knew how to connect with me.”
I turn around as she drapes her arms around me. I run my hands along her bare thighs. The Whispering Fool T-shirt she’s wearing has the arms cut off and barely reaches past her ass, and it’s the sexiest thing I’ve seen her in. Freshly fucked and not giving a shit looks good on her.
“I didn’t want the things she was always stressed out about. When I was young, the goal was never to snag a husband and kids. Or run a loud-ass bar. I wanted the things that made me feel good—a really incredible garden like Birdie’s.” She looks up like she’s thinking through a list. She smiles when she adds, “Maybe a dog, and to try making something I could be proud of,something as complicated as whiskey, like my dad’s side of the family.”
“Is it any better now?” I ask, cuffing a piece of hair away from her face. “Now that you know a little more about her and your grandmother?”
She swallows, her demeanor changing to something more rooted and darker.
“I was...” she pauses, “embarrassed by all the rumors that circulated about Lu Crowne. Embarrassed of her, for her. And I was her daughter.” She puffs out her cheeks and blows out a breath. “God, I spent almost my entire graduate program with the single motivation to show everyone how much Iwasn’tlike her and the rest of my family.”
“And now?” I ask as she plays with the ends of my hair.
“I thought I might never see them again,heragain, and all I could think was that she never knew how wrong I was. That when it mattered, how much I wish I was more like her. How she would have never allowed—” She cuts herself off and smiles, like she just realized something. “All of the rumors that swirled about her, turned out to be more true than not, and I don’t know what to do with that.”
A heavy breath leaves her as I trace along her cheek. When her eyes finally shift to look at mine she says, “My dad wasn’t a good man. A part of me is too nervous to know if that’s where it all started. If he was the reason—” She stares at the center of my chest. “If he hurt her enough to make it okay and ignore her moral code.”
I tip her chin up to look at me. “How can I help?” I ask, leaning forward and kissing across the base of her neck. The truth is, there’s no sage advice or role that I need to have in how she comes to terms with what her mother and grandmother have done. If she wants me to leave, knowing what I’ve done and howI’ve helped them, I would hate every day hereafter, but I would go. I think I’d do anything she asked of me.
“You already are,” she whispers.
“Moral codes are subjective,” I tell her softly, running my fingers along the edges of her shoulders and then down her arms. “Right and wrong depends on the side of the situation.”
“Is that why you said this was your last job?” she asks, taking my fingers that hovered over her side and pressing them there. She holds my palm against a place that I know hurt her, and it makes it impossible to be anything but honest now.
“I lost sight of the reason why we did it. And then without him, I didn’t have an anchor.”
She hums in understanding, without asking what I mean. She understands what it’s like suddenly finding yourself alone. “Tell me more about him,” she prompts. “About your dad.”
“My dad was...” I shake my head and smile, even as my chest tightens with emotion. “He was funny. Stoic around the people he didn’t know—a little like me in that way, but he made me laugh. And he was smart. He turned the jewelry business into something. My grandfather had gotten the nickname of ‘The Jeweler.’” I let out a grounding breath. Fuck, it feels good to have someone who wants to listen to this—someone I don’t have to hide from. “But really, that was my dad. He was a goldsmith—so damn talented too. He learned and then made the most intricate details with the most basic handcrafting tools. He wasn’t designing pieces; he would just make what he wanted and sell them.” My fingers roam around her waist, making me want to hold on for as long as I can. “I didn’t think twice about the fact that my dad was my best friend. Not even when I was a kid. When my friends were embarrassed of their parents, I thought they just weren’t lucky enough to have one as great as mine.”
