Fuel the Fire

by Krista Ritchie

  Connor kisses my hand. “On a gagné.” We’ve won.

  I hear the slam of the police car door. And I expel the last wounded breath that Scott imprisoned inside of me.

  “On a gagné,” I repeat with a rising smile.

  We’ve won.

  [ 61 ]

  ROSE COBALT

  I thumb through the rack of baby clothes in one of the largest children’s department stores. A-line pleated dresses, tulle skirts, peter pan collars—all in an array of pastel spring and summer colors. The boy’s fashion line is nautical-inspired with striped shirts, khakis and jean material.

  My lips lift at the sight of a teal floral dress with a white collar. No zebra-prints, no frogs licking flies or monkeys with bananas. The simplicity, the femininity, is all my style. I pluck the dress off the rack and inspect the tag.

  There it is: CCB with a small inset HC.

  Loren sidles next to me and hands me a lemonade. “Ew,” Lo mock cringes and puts his hand up to his eyes. “The smile is back.”

  This particular department store is closed for a party, everyone from Hale Co. in attendance, and instead of schmoozing with men who’d rather do the opposite of everything I tell them, I just join the company of my ultimate reward.

  These clothes. This fashion line. In a department store.

  “Get used to it, Loren,” I retort.

  He tilts his head at me. “I already am.” It’s a small, actually nice moment between us, and I’ve realized that working with him isn’t so bad after all. I mean—it’s not ideal but it’s not horrible either. God, complimenting Lo will always be a feat.

  He nods towards Mark and Theo and all the other employees who gather around the boy’s clothes. “If you keep it up though, they’re going to think you got what you wanted.”

  “I did get what I wanted,” I say. “This is my victory lap.” I set the hanger back. “Maybe in time I won’t have to pretend to despise all the things I like in order to be heard.”

  “I want that for you too, you know.”

  “Is this your way of saying that you’re always on my side?”

  He lets out a short laugh. “Let’s not push it, Angelica.”

  I narrow my eyes. “That comment alone makes you more Angelica than me,” I always note. He flashes a dry smile, not denying the truth. We both turn into bratty, hostile kids from time to time. I sip my glass of lemonade, avoiding work talk amongst my lovely coworkers.

  “Have you checked Twitter recently?” Lo asks me.

  “No. I’ve logged off since the press conference.” I didn’t want anyone to ruin Connor’s speech for me. He was brave, and having people say he doesn’t love that bitch! They’re using each other! This is all so fake! would’ve tarnished something beautiful.

  Lo suddenly reaches into my black handbag, and I whip away from him with wide, wild eyes.

  “Excuse me?” I snap.

  He gives me a sour look. “I’m trying to get your phone.”

  “You can’t just go through a woman’s purse.” I press my lips together. He hasn’t learned since Lily hates carrying purses.

  He reaches for my handbag again, and I slap his fingers away. He leans closer and says beneath his breath, “You just hit your boss, Rose.”

  I poke his chest with my finger. “Oh look, I accidentally poked my boss with my manicured nail.”

  “Your talon.” He swats my hand away and then ends up taking his own phone and spinning it towards me.

  I don’t understand. “What’s this?”

  “What I’ve been trying to show you—holster the glare, ‘gelica. Just read.”

  “Fine,” I grumble and collect his phone. It’s a tweet from Lily.

  #RCC This is love.

  RCC is my initials and Connor’s. Lily attached a photograph to the tweet, one of Connor and me from Mexico last year. I’m pregnant, our yacht lounge chairs tucked close together. My yellow-green eyes are pierced on Connor, and his grin towards me is equally as prominent. Fire to water.

  There are 4.8k retweets and 12k favorites. I scroll through Lily’s feed and it’s filled with similar pictures of my dynamics with Connor. Some candid that she snapped without us noticing. Like at the lake house slumber party, where Connor and I were staring at each other for a long, long moment to see who’d concede first.

  She wrote: #RCC This is love. #nerdstars

  My heart swells.

  “She’s been doing this for weeks,” Loren explains. “Look at what’s trending.”

  I click out of Lily’s profile, and I see more tweets with a similar hashtag.

  @morningside32: #RCCthisislove when intelligence is sexier than abs.

  @heatherveronica: #RCCthisislove when you play chess with me, and we refuse to let each other win

  @fashionpleeeaze: #RCCthisislove when you look at me like you love me, no matter what mood I’m in :)

  @neverneverland: #RCCthisislove when we share secrets behind a newspaper <3

  @hearmeroar29: #RCCthisislove when I’d rip my hair out to protect my daughter & you’d shame the media for shaming us.

  My fingers are frozen to my lips, overwhelmed. I’d question how all these people know some finer details of my relationship with Connor, if Lily hadn’t taken so many photos of us. She posted so many honest moments with Connor and me—things I’d never think to capture, things I’d never think to share.

  It makes me realize how much love my little sister sees between us, and now how much other people are beginning to see too.

  The worldwide trending hashtag: #RCCthisislove

  “She’s crazy,” I say dazedly. “She’s crazy and I love her.”

  Loren laughs. “I’ll tell her you said so.”

  “I’ll tell her,” I say adamantly. I’d tell my sister that I love her a thousand times over. Before she made my love known to the world. And definitely after.

  [ 62 ]

  ROSE COBALT

  My mother air-kisses both of my cheeks the minute I step into the sunroom, something I’ve never seen her do. If this is her turning over a new leaf, I’ll accept it.

  “Hello, birthday girl,” my mother says in a high-pitched voice, patting my daughter’s head. I have a hard time picturing my mother acting this way with her own infant children, but maybe her grandkids are different. She feels more obligated to be overly sweet and less disciplinary. Then again, she wasn’t this way with Poppy’s daughter, so time could’ve been a factor too.

  I adjust Jane in my arms, and she babbles back to her grandmother, the only recognizable word is hi! and blue.

  I don’t know how “blue” ended up in her tiny vocabulary, but I don’t question it that often. “Is that your favorite color now, Jane?” I ask her in my usual voice.

  Jane just smiles as though the world has turned blue for her.

  It’s not blue. In fact, it’s pink.

  Pink pastries, pink roses, a pastel pink tablecloth. I set Jane on her feet and hold her hand while she curiously inspects the tablecloth, her stuffed lion in her clutch.

  “This is pretty,” I tell my mother, gesturing to the table setup. Morning sunlight streams through the windowpanes, and the fans spin languidly overhead. It’s not too much at all. I thought she would’ve hired a string quartet and constructed a tea party outside.

  I told my mother that one-year-olds won’t remember their birthday and to save extravagant parties for when they know the difference between a backyard carnival and a ten-dollar bag of streamers from Party City.

  “I went simple like you said,” she tells me, and I watch her silently count the chairs at the long table.

  “Everyone is coming,” I assure her. Jane tugs on my dress, and I lift her back into my arms. She rests her cheek on my shoulder.

  My mother lets out a soft breath. “You know, there was a minute where I thought you might not let me throw Jane a birthday party.”

  “Can you blame me?” I wonder. She no longer sat on my side during one of the most harrowing moments of my life. I
needed her to support Connor and my love for him, even if she didn’t fully understand it.

  “No, I don’t blame you.” She touches her necklace, not her usual strand of pearls. This time, it’s a silver locket. “I rushed to judgment…me and your father did.” Before she can say anything more, the sunroom door opens and Connor and my father slip inside.

  They both seem at ease, and Connor wears his usual complacent expression, not divulging much. He nears, tickling Jane’s arm, and she giggles and squirms against my hip.

  “Your father apologized,” he explains, eyes flitting back to my dad.

  My father nods repeatedly and clears his throat. “It’s easy for me to go on the offense when I feel like my daughters and my company are being threatened at the same time. It wasn’t right, but…I was just seeing red. I’m sorry.”

  It’s nice to be back on these terms, and I sincerely hope it’ll last. “I appreciate the apology,” I say.

  “Did you hear that Scott wasn’t granted bond?” he asks both of us.

  Before we can say yes, my mother chimes in, “He should get a maximum sentencing after what he’s done.” I spot the rage in her stiff posture. She can be a protective mother hen, I suppose. It just takes the right kind of bullet to head towards us before she grows horns and breathes fire like me.

  “Connor doesn’t think he’ll go to trial,” I tell them.

  Scott is stuck in jail since the judge denied him bond, so he has to sit there and wait for what could potentially be months. He’s being tried in federal court, so it’s likely he’ll try to worm his way out by a plea deal.

  My mother looks horrified at the notion. “A jury needs to convict him.”

  “If he pleads guilty,” Connor says, “and takes the deal, it probably won’t be much better than a trial.” Scott Van Wright is looking at five to ten years in prison.

  And his name will not cloud the jubilant atmosphere of Jane’s first birthday, so I decide to change the subject. “Mother says you’re dieting,” I tell my father, a clear digression but I’ve never been subtle.

  He laughs once into a smile. “My cholesterol is high.”

  “Where’s the birthday bunny?! We come with presents!” Daisy exclaims before the door even opens. My parents turn to greet the large group of people, all squeezing into the sunroom, and I go near the other end of the table with Connor, settling in the head wicker chair with Jane on my lap. He sits adjacent to me.

  I won the right to sit here after a thirty-minute game of Scrabble this morning. I only beat him by two points.

  “Winners sit at the head of the table, Jane,” I tell her.

  She waves around her stuffed lion and looks up at me with big blue eyes. “Mommy…” I can’t really understand anything else. Sometimes I think I can, but then I realize I just want to hear actual sentences, and it’s my mind pretending her noises are intelligible words.

  “You’re glowing,” Connor says. He has his finger to his jaw, his grin widening as I meet his eyes.

  “I’m not pregnant, if that’s what your oversized brain is thinking.” The mention of pregnancy downturns my lips. Jane is supposed to be an only child, Rose. Whatever other babies I birth will belong to Daisy.

  “I wasn’t, but clearly you were,” he says easily, as though the topic hardly plagues him. I don’t see how it doesn’t.

  I think about our lost dream almost daily, and never once do I begin to smile.

  Happy thoughts, Rose. It’s Jane’s first birthday, a momentous, joyful occasion on June 10th. Being sad about not having more of my own children on my actual baby’s birthday is downright mean and almost sacrilegious.

  I try to be better. Maybe this is what life is always like.

  Connor scoots his chair closer to me.

  “Are you cheating, Richard?” He’s trying to sit at the head of the table with me.

  “Would you love me if I was a cheater?” he asks. In my peripheral, I notice our friends and family beginning to take their seats.

  “Why do you ask me questions that you know the answer to?”

  He steps over my comment. “You love me so I couldn’t possibly be a cheater.”

  Mind games. Riddles. Paradoxes. My head beats with them all. And I’m transported to us at sixteen and seventeen, when we were locked in a janitorial closet at Model UN together. I never knew he had the means to let us out, not until he admitted it at the press conference.

  “You told everyone a memory of ours,” I say, jumping to a new page of our book, and he follows me.

  “I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  “I don’t,” I say softly. “But you forgot to tell them the part where you leaned in to kiss me, and I face-palmed you.”

  He gives me a look and shakes his head. “That’s not how it went.”

  I glare. “Yes it is. I have a perfect memory, Richard.”

  He scoots even closer. Until his shoulder bumps into mine. “Moi aussi.” So do I. He lifts my chin with two fingers. “That day, you stared at me like you’re staring at me now.”

  “And how’s that?”

  “With passion,” he says it with his own bout of passion. “You looked at my lips and I looked at yours.”

  He’s already roped me in, and I draw nearer, our knees knocking.

  “We never touched, but I made love to your mind. When you had enough, that’s when you face-palmed me.”

  I made love to your mind. He’s never uttered those words before, but I think I’m in love with them. “Hmmm,” I say.

  His brows rise. “Hmm?”

  “Your memory isn’t terrible.”

  He laughs into another grin. “You do love me.”

  “And you love stating the obvious,” I point out. I don’t stare at him to see his full-blown grin that overtakes his face. I rarely agree that I love him to the extent that he claims, even if it’s always true. Someone clinks a wine glass, and I redirect my attention to the filled table, every family member and friend seated.

  We’re all here, including Willow, Sam, Poppy…and Jonathan. He’s positioned between my father and Sam, and his hair looks thinned on the sides, as though he’s been battling stress.

  I’m surprised that he stays quiet, and maybe he’s a little guilt-ridden like Connor has claimed.

  Loren rises with chilled water in his left hand, his right hand in a black cast. As the table hushes, I take in the moment, the smiling faces of my three sisters, my parents with their hands clasped together beside a coffee cup, the quiet morning in my childhood home, Connor so close that his arm fits across my chair, and my daughter here, on my lap, hugging her lion.

  “I know it’s Janie’s birthday, but after everything that has happened to you two”—he gestures with his water glass to Connor and me—“I have something to say.”

  This could go fairly bad or fairly well, but I have a lot more faith in Loren Hale to swing in a direction that won’t cause World War III, me leading a platoon against him.

  “I may always say that Rose is as cold as ice and Lily may always say that Connor must be a planetary alien,” Lo begins, Lily nodding beside him while bouncing Maximoff on her knees, “but you both have astronomical-sized hearts, you know that?”

  I look to Connor, and his fingers have returned to his jaw in contemplation. We have hearts. It’s not an earth-shattering realization. I know I have a heart. I know Connor has one too, but for other people to acknowledge this is rare. Our hearts are submerged beneath the thickest, densest armor that we only let a select few through.

  Loren continues, “You’ve both never judged me for being an addict, and even when tons of people judged you and questioned you—you forgave them.” He shakes his head in disbelief at the notion, that we’d all congregate together peacefully in the end. “This table is full because of your compassion, and I want you to know that I can see it.” He turns to my parents, his father, Sam and Poppy. “And everyone here sure as hell better see it too.”

  At this, my father rises with his mimosa, a
nd then my mother follows suit in solidarity. When Jonathan rises, water in hand, the tension strangely untangles. He has a ways to go to repair his relationships with his sons, but being here without being an ass is a start.

  I watch Poppy join them, then Sam and their daughter, Maria.

  When Lily stands beside Lo, she clears her throat, already turning red. I watch her raise her chin triumphantly and then pull back her shoulders. Go, Lily. And she says with confidence, “I think if we can come together after everything that’s happened, our kids are better for it.” She nods in resolution.

  I breathe through my nose, holding back emotion that swells my chest. I don’t like the feeling of people towering over me, so I rise next with Jane on my hip. Connor is quick to follow.

  Ryke and Daisy are the only two still seated, which isn’t entirely surprising. Out of everyone, they’ve faced the most dissention from inside the family.

  Ryke leans back and shakes his head. “Is this for real?” he has to ask. “Because I’m not standing up if in three months this side of the table”—he motions to our parents—“make our lives hell because you believed a fucking tabloid rumor over us.”

  My father clears his throat and pauses, trying to find the right way to share his emotions. “…I know I’ve doubted a few of the men here with my daughters.” His eyes ping from Sam to Ryke and lastly to Connor, a fresher doubt than the other two. “I can’t apologize for caring about my girls, but I can apologize for putting a strain on your relationships and feeling as though you had to choose between the people you loved and your family.” He pauses. “It’s time for that to change.”

  Ryke’s lips slowly part in disbelief. Over the course of a year, I knew my father has warmed to Ryke and Daisy’s relationship, but I don’t think he ever outwardly expressed this to Ryke.

  My mother straightens, knowing half of Ryke’s statement was directed at her. “You went through liver transplant surgery for your father, and you want to know what I told Jonathan—you’d never do it.” Her hand loosens on her mimosa glass. It’s a subtle acknowledgement that she’s misjudged Ryke too. “I don’t want to live like everyone is out to get my family, and it starts by trusting the people we should trust.” She says, “And I trust you.”