by London James
I hope it pays off for both of us because I sure as shit hate being with Dad most of the time. Maybe the silver lining will appear later.
“Ashton?” Dad croaks, his eyes opening slowly.
“Hey.” I try to sound a little upbeat. “How are you feeling?”
“Mm,” he grunts. “Hand me that water, would you?”
I hand him a plastic cup with water in it, making sure the straw is facing him. He takes a long sip and looks at the TV again. We watch the beginning of a basketball game for a solid fifteen minutes without saying a word to each other. I’m glad he’s not feeling chatty today. The last time I visited, I left feeling like a teenager again, locked in my bedroom with my music turned up loud, his hoarse yelling about how worthless I was still audible over it. He yelled at me about my company, yet again, and called me a fucking idiot for being resistant to the idea of taking it public immediately.
‘Fucking idiot’ was one of the tamer insults he’s thrown at me, actually. It was the same old thing—see, this company went public relatively early and look how big their customer base is! Or he’ll list a long list of people who’ve gotten millions and millions by being the CEOs of public companies.
I bite the inside of my cheek and focus on the game. Sometimes I wonder what he would be like if my mom hadn’t died. He’s never said it outright, but I feel like he blames me for her death. She had terrible post-partum depression after having me, which might have led to her overdose. Dad denies it, though, and says the doctors gave her the wrong medicines. He rarely has a reason to lie about anything, and doesn’t give a shit about my feelings, but still. What if she committed suicide and he was hiding it for some reason?
“How’s the company doing?” Dad asks during yet another Sprite commercial a few moments later. I jinxed myself, didn’t I?
“Fine.”
“IPO?” he asks, coughing.
“Thinking about it,” is all I say in response.
“Mm. I’m telling you, take it public while it’s hot,” he continues. He finally looks me in the eye. His body might be withered and frail, but that gaze is still cutting. Before he fucked everything over with his businesses when I was in the Navy, falling victim to his own greed, I knew he could use that look to change someone’s mind during a deal without a word.
A strange mix of guilt and anger strikes me at the same time. I know part of the reason that he is all about me taking my company public is because he missed the opportunity to do it for his own company. But does that mean he has to pressure me into it? I want to keep it private to keep it under my control, and to keep it close to the original mission of improving lives. Tech companies these days often spiral away from that the moment someone dangles enough money in front of their faces. Dad wanted to take his company public for the money. It didn’t matter that his role would change.
It really feels like Dad knows the cheat codes to my weak spots and uses them, frequently. With that one look, he makes me feel like I slapped him in the face for not doing what he said. I’ve been through some of the most brutal training and combat in the world, but I still can hardly stand up to my seventy-year-old father.
Ben and Briony’s mom, Brenda, always says that they are still her babies despite being adults — usually to chastise Ben after he swears up a storm. I feel the same way with my dad, but for all the worst reasons. I’m still the kid whose stomach turns over when he hears his dad come home from work.
“I’ll think about it,” I repeat, as firmly as I can. Thankfully, he leaves it alone.
We sit in silence watching the game again. I’ve only been there thirty minutes, but I’m already itching to go home. If I pull out my phone, he’ll go on a ‘kids these days’ rant.
“Nora said the blood transfusion went ok. What’d the doctor say?” I ask.
Dad sighs, like the weight of the world is on his shoulders. “Still not sure what the problem is, but the blood transfusion should help with the anemia that just won’t get better. Kidneys are pieces of shit. Might try dialysis next. Trying some new pain medications that kind of help. Still not sleeping too well.”
I nod. I know next to nothing about medical things, but I hooked him up with some good doctors that Ben knows from his work at a medical biotech company. Dad hasn’t thanked me.
“Speaking of medicines, Mr. King,” Nora says, appearing at his side with a little cup of pills. “Here’s your midday round of pills.”
Dad throws the pills down with surprising ease, burping like he just downed a beer. He snuggles under the covers again, and Nora tucks him in like he’s a child. She is truly a saint. A paid saint, but still. She doesn’t have to be so nice.
“The pills will probably knock him out soon,” Nora murmurs to me.
I nearly blurt ‘good’, but I manage to stop myself. We watch the game for a while longer, until Dad finally passes out. Once he’s out for ten minutes straight, I get up. I planned on staying longer, but we’ve already run out of things to talk about that don’t send either of us into a blind rage. My duty is done. At least I stayed as long as it took for me to get there this time.
I call a cab and get back on the train, tension melting from my shoulders so quickly that I find myself nodding off.
I wake with a start when we reach Brooklyn. I have some time to kill before dinner with Daisy and Briony, so I walk to the restaurant. Yesterday’s rain cleared a lot of the oppressive humidity, and it’s a bit overcast, so it’s tolerable. I briefly wonder if I’ll run into Briony on the streets someday. As if Brooklyn doesn’t have millions of people living here. According to Ben, she’s been living here for years. So have I, and yet I still have never run into her.
I smile to myself, remembering how hellbent she was on moving out of Long Island and into the city after college. Hopefully Brooklyn is everything she wanted it to be.
I take the scenic route, walking along Ft. Greene Park before finally heading to the restaurant. Am I nervous? Nervous isn’t the right word, but excited isn’t either. I want to see Briony again, but I’m not sure how to feel or act. Ben won’t be there since he had to pop into the office, so we can get away with a little more flirting than we could with him around. Or we can continue to play it cool like nothing happened. That’s probably the wisest decision, since banging my best friend’s sister, even after more than ten years since our ill-fated ‘relationship’, would only complicate things.
Except when I turn the corner, the first thing I see is her. The sight sets my heart racing.
She looks hot as fuck sitting in the open window of the restaurant, reading a book. Her black curls are up in a loose bun, and she’s wearing her glasses, which give her a hot-librarian vibe. Her delicate neck looks ready to be kissed and sucked on, and I know she probably has a cute sprinkle of freckles across her shoulders from the sun. She’s wearing a dress again—pink this time, but short, giving me a nice view of her smooth legs. She has on flat sandals, so she’d probably be nice and small tucked against me.
My restraint goes flying into space faster than a rocket.
“Hey, you,” I say, sliding up next to her and putting my hand on her lower back, just like I did at the party.
She jumps and slams her book shut, looking up at me. “What the hell are you doing here?”
My mouth drops open, and I pull my hand off of her like her dress is on fire. “Well, hi.”
“Uh, hi.” She stuffs her book into her bag and slides away from me like I smell bad. “More politely—may I ask why you’re here?”
I’m so thrown off that I blink for a few moments before responding. “Dinner with Daisy? To go over some pre-wedding event planning?”
This time she’s the one to blink rapidly, clearly horrified, which only pisses me off. Did we not clear the air a bit at the party? Sure, we hooked up, but I couldn’t exactly walk her home after that and make a big deal of it. She asked me to act like it hadn’t happened, so I did exactly as she’d asked.
“But… why? What?” She would suck
at poker because I can read the full emotional journey she’s going through right now—annoyance, confusion, resistance. Her large eyes are so expressive.
“Did Ben not tell you that I’m his best man? And did Daisy not mention that she wanted me to make some cocktails for the pre-wedding parties?” A sinking feeling comes over me. Of course, neither of them would have mentioned that. They’re both smart people, but sometimes they assume that everyone can read their minds.
“Nope, they both left that little detail out.” Briony catches a waiter’s eye. “Can I get a carafe of white wine? Whatever’s the house wine is fine.”
“And I’ll have a whiskey sour,” I add.
“A little early to be hitting the hard liquor, no?” she asks, her eyes narrowing.
“Apparently I’ll need it to get through this dinner with you,” I snap. “What the hell, Briony?”
“What do you mean, ‘what the hell’?”
“What’s your problem?” I can hardly focus on how pretty she looks when I’m moments from losing my shit. Though the fact that I can even have a lustful thought when I’m angry is a feat in itself.
Her mouth opens and closes like a fish trying to breathe on land. “I… what… ?”
I close my eyes and take a slow, deep breath through my nose. I’m good at holding it together from my experience in the Navy, and sometimes, I need to put myself back in that mindset. “I asked what your problem is. You look like I just came from using your cat for javelin practice or something.”
“How did you know I have a damn cat?” she asks, her voice rising. If the table wasn’t bolted to the floor, she probably would flip it onto the sidewalk.
“What about Chunk?” Daisy comes from around the corner, smiling as always. She pulls off her sunglasses and tucks them into the case.
Briony pastes a grin on her face, which miraculously looks natural. “We were just talking about pets. How I adopted Chunk and uh, stuff.”
“Oh, cool. Ben and I were thinking of getting a puppy after the wedding. Is that a cliché? A couple with no kids getting a dog to kind of do the parent thing?” She takes a seat next to Briony, right as the waiter drops off our drinks. “Wow, you guys are hitting the sauce already?”
I knock back half of the drink in one go. “It’s that kind of day.”
Daisy gives me a questioning look and pulls out a folder. “What happened?”
“Visited my dad,” I explain, thankful for the opportunity to change the subject, even if it’s to one of my least favorite ones.
“Oof, I’m sorry.” Daisy knows all about my past with my dad and his illness. “How is he?”
“Alive,” I shrug. Son-of-the-year winner, right here.
Thank god Daisy knows when to leave something alone. A waiter transfers us from the window bar to an actual table and hands us menus. It’s all tapas, which would be nice if we were in Spain where tapas actually feel like a real meal. Instead, this place is unnecessarily pricey and with, from what I’m seeing on the other tables, microscopic portions that aren’t even worth sharing. I’m a billionaire, sure, but no one likes being ripped off. The quality better be good.
“Are we down to share stuff?” Daisy asks. “I’m down for patatas bravas, of course… ”
Daisy and Briony go back and forth about what they want while I watch, waiting for them to make a decision. They order most of the menu; then I ask the waiter to double it. I know Daisy is cool with sharing food, but I know Briony isn’t like that. Whenever she was around watching me and Ben play video games in high school, we always fought relentlessly over whatever snack was being passed around. The memory almost makes me smile. Almost.
Briony reaches over the table for water right as I do, her gaze lasering right through me as our hands touch. She snatches it out of my hands and pours some for herself before slamming it back down on the table.
This is going to be a long dinner.
Chapter Three
Briony
I don’t consider myself an angry person, but this whole wedding situation is already testing my own self-knowledge.
I cannot believe that Ash is here and that he thought he could roll up to me with a sexy ‘hey, you’ as if he didn’t drop me like I was garbage after our hookup. But I can believe that Daisy arranged this dinner without realizing how awkward Ash and I are together. Ben has told her everything about our little debacle years ago, but he probably correctly assumed that we were both adults who were over it. But she doesn’t exactly know that we hooked up and are now right back in the awkward zone again.
God, that hook-up. Even though time has passed, I feel like it happened yesterday. I blurted out everything that happened to Zara the second she came home from her long-weekend trip. She’s hard to impress, but her inky black eyebrows shot up in surprise, and she slow clapped for me.
“Zara! This is not a slow clap moment! This is a roll around on the ground in shame moment!” I groaned, throwing myself on her bed.
“Um, first, there’s no shame in sex,” Zara said, in her not-quite-British-but-not-quite-American accent, leaning more toward the American side. She’d gone to visit her mom’s side of the family in Westchester over the weekend and picked up the accent more. “Second, the man made you come all over his hand at a damn party, girl. That’s hot. And he’s hot. I’m proud of you for embracing your saucy side.”
“Zara!” I rolled face-down, ignoring the warm throbbing between my legs. It really was hot. The hottest thing that I’d ever done. It was so hot that I still can’t stop thinking about it.
“I know, I know.” She sat down next to me and rested her hand on the back of my head. “But more importantly, that’s a dick move he made. Let’s go talk to some wine about these feelings, yeah?”
And that’s why she’s my best friend—whenever shit really hits the fan, she drops everything to help, even with my most annoying problems.
What’s also annoying about this Ash problem? How he looks infuriatingly good. His outfit isn’t out of place in Brooklyn by any means—chinos, rolled up a little at the ankles, canvas sneakers without socks, a button-down linen shirt—but somehow, he makes it look especially delicious. I can’t help but imagine his body under the clothes, powerful and masculine, with a certain grace to his movements. Just catching the mix of the same cologne he wore at the party with a little sweat is killing me.
He watches Daisy and I silently as we pick out some tapas to share. After we order, he asks the waiter to double everything we got.
“So we won’t end up fighting over the last potato,” he explains to Daisy, glancing at me with a knowing look so briefly that I nearly miss it.
I think back to high school when we would fight over who would get the last chip or who was eating more of the snacks. I had such a big, dumb crush on him back then that any sort of interaction would fuel my daydreams for weeks.
“So…” Daisy pulls out her tablet from her bag and loads up a document, placing it on top of the folder she already pulled out. “Pre-wedding events! Thanks for coming to talk about them with me, by the way. I’m dead serious when I say that you guys can refuse to do certain things if they seem like they’ll suck away your time.”
I believe her—her chill reins in Ben’s tendency to be over the top, and she’s understanding to a fault. She’s a psychologist, after all.
“Ben and I were thinking of having a beach-themed engagement party, a joint bachelor/bachelorette party weekend at a ski resort, maybe, and a rehearsal dinner that we haven’t quite figured out yet,” Daisy continues. “The engagement party will be at the pool of that new hotel in Boerum Hill, which I’ve already reserved, and we were thinking Vermont for the ski weekend since it’s kind of close. We don’t want to fly out to Utah or anything. I’d love your ideas for the rehearsal dinner.”
I nod, pulling out my notebook for the ideas that are already flowing. My brain is itching for any good distraction from the heat coming off of Ash’s knee close to mine under the table. Beach theme sounds
fun for a pool party—hibiscuses come to mind immediately as the central flower. I’m not sure how flowers would fit in at a ski resort, or what event we’d even need them for. And a rehearsal dinner… Maybe she’ll be happy with actual daisies being incorporated into it.
“So you want signature cocktails for each of these?” Ash asks, also pulling out a tablet. His hands are so big that he can hold it across its center with his thumb and middle finger without a problem. “How about one that’s more your speed and one that’s more Ben’s?”
“Ooh, that would be nice.” Daisy nods, tapping away at her tablet.
“You can design cocktails?” I ask Ash, surprised. “Or make them, whatever.”
“Yep. Mixology.” He shrugs like it isn’t a huge deal. “I made the punch at the 4th of July party.”
So he’s the one responsible for that booze bomb. And by extension, he was responsible for both of us getting so tipsy that he fingered me on a rooftop.
I’m never going to drink again. After this carafe of wine, of course.
“How do you even have time for hobbies?” I ask in wonder. Between my day job and my business, I’m pretty tired. I can’t imagine being a CEO, working out regularly, being involved in veterans’ charities, and having a genuine hobby.
“I do have time to have a little bit of a life despite being the CEO of a company, Briony,” he says, a playful look in his eyes. I narrow mine in return, despite my fluttering heart. I am not going to fall under his spell again.
“And you’re fine with doing some flowers for all of these, right?” Daisy asks me. “The engagement party would have flowers as decorations, but the other events would have centerpieces and whatnot.”
“Of course.” It’ll be fun, and a good addition for my website’s portfolio. Plus, I’m happy to have any sort of distraction from Ash and my disaster of a dating life, especially if it makes Ben and Daisy happy.