“Somebody’s cheerful,” Eddie laughed. “Looking forward to your trip to lover’s lane tomorrow? Are you two going to frolic in the sand, take a moonlit walk along the Seawall, share a plate of fresh oysters? Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.”
“I’ve mentioned my deep appreciation for your clever wit, right?”
“No need, my friend, no need. It goes without saying.”
Dillon tried to hide his impatience. Whatever peace the baby song had brought had fled as soon as Eddie had barked out in his ‘most jovial guy in the room’ laugh. Jokes in the office were no way to soothe Serena into accepting his love. As neutrally as he could, he said, “I’ve got a few things to wrap up before I can go anywhere. You want anything?”
“No, man, just passing through. Pay me no heed. Hey, I’m meeting with Serena and Anica in a minute. Want me to give her your love?”
“Oh, I think Anica knows how I feel about her.”
“Man, you slay me. Catch you later.” And with that, Eddie was gone, but Dillon wasn’t able to shake off the disquiet he’d left behind him.
“Oysters,” he muttered, and turned back to the edits with a sigh.
Chapter Forty-Four
As she put everything together for the overnight, Serena noticed the smudge stick tucked in her jewelry drawer, and rolled her eyes. But she would almost definitely have Becky and Zane over someday, and it would be best if the thing showed some evidence of use by then. So, and not without putting on a meditative playlist first, she smudged.
The annoying thing was, as she walked through the living room carrying the smoking herbs in an abalone shell that normally nestled in her bookcase, she looked around her house through fresh, slightly stinging eyes and had an idea. She had to call on Natalie's know-how. And it would never come together if Gillian couldn’t help out. But by the time she was done purifying every corner of the house, her idea had become a full-fledged Plan.
Dillon dug through his closet, searching for an overnight bag. He’d left his usual one at Serena’s, which wouldn’t have been a problem if she’d invited him over; the one he unearthed with the wonky zipper would just have to do. He’d kicked everything else back into place and was shutting the closet door on the mess when his cell rang.
“Yeah?”
Justin was clearly in his car. Probably driving to keep Toby from a colic fit. “Hey, can I come by?”
“Oh, is asking first the thing you guys do now? I thought you were a big proponent of the ambush.”
“Dillon. Can I?”
As if he had to ask. “Of course. What’s up?”
“Nothing.”
“Everyone’s okay? Toby?”
“Fine, he’s fine. I’ll be there in five.”
Which meant Justin had been driving for a good quarter-hour already. Hopefully Toby wouldn’t be too cranky about the ride stopping too soon, but hey, he had his Uncle Dillon to sing ridiculous songs if necessary. The packing could always be done later.
Except it was only Justin at the door.
Justin, and an overnight bag with a zipper that strained against its contents, but held together. Dillon just stood there, frozen, thinking inane thoughts about the relative merits of overnight bags, because taking in the ash under Justin’s skin and his brother-in-law’s inability to meet his eyes wasn’t going so well for him.
“What are you doing?”
“Can I come in?”
Dillon looked at the bag again. “I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me what you’re doing first?”
“Dillon. Let me in.”
It took him another moment, but he stood back and waited for Justin to sit on the sofa before closing the door and joining him. But Justin still wasn’t looking at him, or at anything, really—it was clear that the poster of the Millennium Falcon was nothing more than a blur in front of his face.
Dillon cleared his throat. “I think you’d better explain, Justin,” he said, carefully, and far more calmly than he felt. In truth, there was a red blur thing happening with his own vision that was a little freaky.
When Justin turned towards him, it took a moment for his eyes to find and focus on Dillon’s face. “Can I stay here?”
But Dillon was halfway to his kitchen before the question was out. Not that he wanted anything in there. He just needed to not be in the other room for a minute. Justin didn’t wait for him to return, but his tone made it clear he knew it didn’t make it much better when he followed and added, “Just for a couple of nights. I’ll go home after work on Friday.”
“I,” Dillon stopped and tried again. “I need to know what’s going on, man.” He looked directly at him then, narrow eyed but as in control as he could get. “And I sure as fuck hope you can explain.”
Justin nodded, and leaned against the counter, rubbing at his face. “I can. It’s—look, Dillon, do you think I’d be coming here, to you, if it was something bad? Shannon said it was the best, the....” But Justin’s voice cracked a little and trailed off.
“She knows you’re here, then?”
Justin nodded.
“Did she? I mean, she’s okay? Toby’s okay?”
Justin nodded again, and hooked his hands behind his neck. “She suggested it.”
It took Dillon a minute to think about that. She hadn’t said anything weird when she’d dropped in the night before. He tried again, carefully. “Did she throw you out?”
Justin shook his head, though, so Dillon looked around the room like it might just tell him what’s going on instead of him having to pry it out of Justin. His kitchen, though, kept secrets, so he eventually got a couple of beers and pointed Justin back towards the sofa.
“Just two nights?” he asked, after handing a longneck to Justin.
It was another few minutes before Justin started responding with words again. “Tonight and tomorrow. Then I’ll go home for the weekend. Not just for the weekend, I mean. I’ll go home, period. Forever.”
“And she’s okay with that?”
“With me being gone two nights, or coming back?” Justin asked, more than a little irony in his otherwise bleak voice.
“Both. I guess.”
“Yeah. She’s okay. She said.” He sipped his beer and dropped his head back against the sofa. “It’s not that bad, Dillon. Stop looking so frantic at me, will you?”
Ha. Like he was the freaked out one. Justin was the one whose knees were vibrating. Dillon could handle it, he was just worried about Shannon, like any brother would be. ‘Not that bad,’ his left nut. He’d packed a fucking bag and left. “So things were fine yesterday, right? Shannon didn’t say anything, just that work was busy? You went back on Monday?”
He waited, but Justin was non-verbal again, barely nodding.
“And twenty-four hours later you’re at my door.” Now he was getting pissed at not being answered. “Justin, the fuck? Could you tell me what’s up, or not?”
He was on his second beer before Justin started talking, still with his head back and eyes closed. “Ten weeks I was off, Dillon. I was due it. They know that. But whatever you’ve heard about first-quarter profits lately, it’s not all that easy to step away from the bank for ten weeks at the moment. Or to step back in, with everyone covering their asses and looking for scapegoats at every turn. So it really isn’t the time for me to be fucking up a corporate loan renewal for one of my biggest clients, you know? But I did.” He opened one eye and closed it again wearily. “I sure as shit did.”
Dillon reached out a hand to Justin’s shoulder, rested it there a moment. “Sorry, man. Sorry it’s been rough going back.”
Justin stood then, more explosively than Dillon could have ever expected, practically vaulting over his coffee table. “You don’t get it. God. Shan says the same thing—you Hamiltons are so alike sometimes. ‘Sorry, hon,’ she says, ‘you’ll get back into the swing,’ she says, as if that’s all it is, just a blip and everyone will shake their heads then shake hands and get on with it. But I can’t. Fucking. Think right now. I’m on n
o sleep—none!—and she said ear plugs but ear plugs don’t work, and every time he’s down he’s up again within minutes, and the colic was fine when I was at home. You know I do my share; we both walk that baby for hours and hours and hours and get him out of the house so the other can nap and I make all her meals and clean the kitchen and the cat box. I can do all of that. I want to do all of that. But I can’t fucking do all of that and my job, too.”
Dillon sat still as Justin paced. He wasn’t sure what to say. Certainly nothing that Shannon hadn’t probably already said.
Justin turned back then, arms akimbo and head down. “If I lose the job, Dillon, that’s it. No one is hiring. No one. They can’t fire me for paternity leave in the middle of a downturn, but they sure as shit can fire me if I lose a client like that. We don’t have the savings to go more than a few months, maybe a year, without me working, not without breaking into our retirement, and forget about Toby’s college fund. And what the fuck would we do then? Does it look like there’s going to be some magical cure to everything and I can just go anywhere and get paid what we need? We barely finished with student loans, and now we have Toby, and I. Need. My. Job.”
Dillon stepped towards him, just a half step. “Okay. I get it. Justin, fine, look, I get it. You need to sleep. Sit down. You can stay here, just sit down.” He guided his brother-in-law to the sofa and stood back a moment, regarding him. “Look, can I call Shannon?”
Justin shook his head, then shrugged. “Toby might be asleep now, I don’t know. I went home a little early from work and took him for a walk so she could nap for an hour, but he’s going to eat again before long, and that sets him off again.” He was rambling, clearly disassociated, so Dillon just pulled out his phone and texted his sister to call him when she was free, then went to rummage for some bedding he could put on the sofa. Fortunately he’d gotten the natural sheets for Serena, so it was easy to locate the non-organic set he’d taken off his bed. Which was a whole thing he didn’t need to add to the mess in his brain at the moment.
Dillon sat on his bed, thinking. Or not thinking. Just, not being in the same room as Justin for a moment. Because okay, he didn’t live with the colic. Or the job in the financial sector. But...Justin. He just up and left Shannon to deal with it. To deal with a fussy two-month-old baby overnight. Over two nights. So he could, what, catch forty winks and settle his boss’s ruffled feathers? And he thought that was worth it. After only three days back at the bank, he was abandoning Shannon and Toby in favor of work.
And there he was, circled back to anger and betrayal again. Which made him feel guilty. Which made him mad.
He grabbed up the sheets and a pillow and took them to the living room. Justin hadn’t moved, so, fine, he knew where the towels were and how to make up a sofa by himself. Dillon just dropped everything on the coffee table and went back to his bedroom.
It was a half-hour later, when Dillon had finished packing and was lying in bed rereading Hitchhiker’s Guide in an attempt to cheer up, or at least momentarily stop brooding on every damn facet of his miserable life, that Justin entered his room. He didn’t talk, though, and Dillon saw no reason to be the one asking questions all the time when Justin was the one who’d screwed up at life. Whatever his reasons were.
“You know I’m not doing this for the hell of it, right?”
Dillon lowered his book and shrugged.
“It’s not a spur of the moment thing. Well, it is, of course, but it’s not a light thing. I’m standing here aching to be with them. It kills me that I’m not there. I left Shannon’s meals for her, you know? And folded all Toby’s things. Made sure there were diapers and wipes. But I know none of that’s the same as being with them.”
Dillon propped himself higher against his headboard, nodded at the foot of the bed in case Justin wanted to sit.
He didn’t. “I’m not going to stop taking care of them. Jesus, Dill, I’ve been taking care of Shannon—and of you for that matter—my entire adult life. You know that? I mean, do you really know that? Do you think about it? What it means? I couldn’t even buy booze when we met. Think how long ago that was.”
Words without thought hissed from Dillon. “I know how long ago it was, Justin. My parents were hit by a truck, remember? You were at the funeral? First time I meet you, I’m standing at the crematorium, as if there was anything of them left to burn, and I want to hold my sister’s hand even though I’m too old for that shit, and I can’t, because you were doing it, instead.”
“Jesus.”
Dillon gulped. Gulped again, then muttered, “Sorry.”
“No. Jesus. No, it’s okay.” He started to back out of the room.
“Justin.” He tried to say it properly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say all that.”
“Yeah. I know. I’m...I’ll turn in now.”
“I don’t think that, it’s not—it just came out.”
Justin’s smile was brief. A split-second smile. “I know. We’re fine. I’m going to just get some sleep now.”
If Dillon could have come up with something else to say, of a better way to apologize, he would have followed. Instead he slumped back on the bed, unfocused gaze locked on his book, listening to Justin’s quiet settling down to sleep noises in the next room.
No amount of Marvin the Paranoid Android was diversion enough for him.
Chapter Forty-Five
So it was the big day. Serena woke unreasonably early, even for her, and no amount of yoga got her centered. She was jiggling her leg every time she sat down, wandering aimlessly every time she stood up. Even while going to shower, she stripped off half her workout clothes, went back to the kitchen for a glass of water, started up the shower, went back to the utility room for her laundry basket, stopped half-way back to the bathroom to change the playlist on her iPod, and found the room full of steam by the time she was finally naked. And then she forgot to shave, and had to hop back in for round two after she’d toweled her hair dry.
She quadruple-checked her overnight bag (condoms: packed; lingerie: not packed. She wasn’t going to jinx it by being overconfident, but she was going to keep her fingers crossed.) She double-checked her portfolio, since that was easier to be sure about. They were going to rock Mrs. Kirby’s world, between her designs and Dillon's provisional copy. Because they were a good team. And only a fool would interfere with good teamwork. Serena was not, she reminded herself, a fool.
She was maybe an idiot. She was definitely scared. But she was not a fool.
She squared her shoulders and headed off to pick Dillon up. Well, she had to stop mid-way to her car and go back for her purse, but as soon as she had it—oh, and her to-go cup of tea—she was on the way.
Thanks to Serena’s training, Dillon was up in plenty of time to chat with Justin before he headed in to the bank. “You sleep okay there?”
“Yeah. It was fine, thanks.”
So they were both being polite. Great. He sighed. “Well, I’m out of town tonight, so you can use the bed. I changed the sheets a couple of days ago.”
“Thanks.”
After setting the coffeemaker going, he cleared his throat. “I, um, talked to Shannon last night.”
Justin perked up. “What time? Was Toby awake? Did he go down at all for her?”
“It was after eleven. You were out like a light. I guess you needed it,” he offered with a brief smile. “She said not to disturb you. Toby was fine. She was nursing him, but said they’d both slept a couple of hours already.”
“Good. Good.” Justin scraped back a chair and sat heavily. “What else did she say?”
“That I was an asshole. Basically.” Dillon laughed. “She’s right, as always.”
“You’re not an ass.”
“I’m a little bit of an ass, Justin.”
“Well, you’re a pain in the ass.”
“This is what you’re like when you get a good night’s sleep? Nice. See if I let you keep my key.”
“Dill. Look.” Justin held up a han
d to stop Dillon from interrupting. “No, seriously. I want you to hear me say this: I didn’t mention taking care of you guys because it’s a bad thing. I know I wasn’t making a lot of sense last night. I was fucking tired, and stressed out. And scared. But I don’t take care of Shannon and Toby, and sometimes you, if you’re not being a pain in the ass, because you’re some kind of albatross. You’re my family and I love you and I take care of you because I take care of what I love. It matters to me.”
“You think that’s news?”
“It’s not like I took pity on the orphans and feel like I can’t ever, I don’t know, go to the store again without checking to see if Shan needs something first.”
“Like you’ve ever gone to the store without asking what she needs first.”
“Well, I mean. I don’t want to do every diaper. I’m not a selfless fool.”
“You kind of are, though.”
“Shut up.” But Justin smiled a little.
“Why, so you can tell me that you only mentioned taking care of us to point out that it took an unusual combination of stressors to make you leave last night, and that you were actually taking care of Shan still by taking care of the big picture stuff like making sure you still have a job, and that she was the one who insisted you make it two nights instead of just one? Don’t bother. She read me the riot act. Thank God Toby needed changing, or she’d still be yelling at me.”
Justin didn’t even pretend he wasn’t crying. “I don’t deserve them.”
“Bullshit, man.” Dillon leaned closer, spoke intently to him. “You guys are sick, how perfect you are together. And by the way, I’m taking Toby out for two hours after dinner every Wednesday night from now until he’s over the colic, at least, to give you guys a break, and I’m an asshole for being so caught up in my sex life that I haven’t offered to do so before now.”
“Is that a direct quote?”
“More or less.”
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