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Sex on legs, that doesn’t even come close to what she is.
“Fi?” Sadie says, walking up beside her.
“Goldilocks,” Fiona yells, throwing her arms around Sadie’s shoulders and almost flying off the stool in the process.
I pour the milk and add the powder, whisking it up, and exchange a look with Sadie.
Dilated into a sentence, perhaps meaning, Fuck, fuck, fuck.
“Hey,” Sadie smiles, propping Fiona up. “So I guess somebody had a little too much to drink, huh?”
“Don’t be jealous—” She trails off, covering her mouth. She swallows and then smiles away her discomfort. “Just because you’re not twenty-one for a few months. Don’t worry. I won’t tell. Shhhhhhhh.”
She puts her finger over her lips, reminding me of when she was a little girl and would play the shh game.
Sadie and I exchange another furtive glance, laden with meaning, with questions.
What have we done?
What are we going to do?
What happens when Fiona finds out?
“Here,” I say, sliding her milkshake across the bar.
“Thanks, Dad,” she murmurs.
“Now, what was this argument about?” I ask.
“Jess,” Fiona huffs. “Goldilocks, have I ever told you that you’re my best friend?”
Sadie and I exchange another glance, a secretive goddamn glance, which is probably the last thing we should be doing when my drunk daughter is clearly going through a hard time.
Best friend.
I wonder what Fiona would say if we told her what we’d done tonight, how she’d react, which object she’d break first.
“Yes, Fi-Fi, I know,” Sadie says, sitting down next to her.
“Well, good,” she huffs. “Because that bitch Jess is … I don’t know who she thinks she is. Basically, she threw Mom leaving in my face. We were playing a drinking game and somehow the topic of divorce came up—”
“Your mother and I were never married, Fiona,” I say, my heart thumping to think that this could trigger Sadie’s jealousy, where in reality Sadie is a hundred times more perfect than any woman I’ve ever laid my eyes on.
“Well, whatever,” Fiona goes on. “The point is, she was drunk and decided she was in the mood to be a bitch. She started going on and on about, all the damage having an absentee mother can do. She started Googling it, for fuck’s sake. Can you believe that?”
“She sounds like a real piece of work,” Sadie murmurs, not looking at me.
Why won’t she look at me?
“Yeah,” Fiona snorts. “That’s one way to put it. It’s just Marchway, I guess. They’ve got small-town syndrome to the max. Any time somebody goes to college or leaves for work, everything changes. It’s like they think that I think I’m better than them or something. But I don’t. I promise I don’t.”
“I believe you,” Sadie says, rubbing her shoulders. “Why don’t I take you to bed, hmm? Everything will seem better in the morning.”
Fiona nods, allowing Sadie to help her to her feet. Jasper trails behind the pair, keeping guard, probably sensing that Fiona isn’t at one hundred percent right now.
I watch them go, a pit opening in my stomach and swallowing all the magic of tonight.
For once my eyes don’t linger on Sadie’s legs … at least not for long.
Ignoring them completely is impossible.
Instead, I stare at the back of her head, wishing I could reach into her mind and read her thoughts. We haven’t spoken about Fiona’s mother and I have no idea how she feels about Fiona bringing her up this evening.
I walk to the fridge and grab myself a beer, cracking the lid cap on the edge of the counter and then catching it mid-drop so Jasper doesn’t accidentally eat it.
I sit at the window bar, taking small sips, looking at myself in the icy reflection of the window.
Is this where it ends? I muse silently to my reflection, the forty-one year old man who’s maybe starting a romance far too late in life … and with the most inappropriate woman ever.
Is it crash and burn time already?
I’m halfway through my beer when Sadie returns to the kitchen, her cheeks marked with redness and her mouth twisting in a hard to read way.
“How is she?” I ask.
“Fine,” Sadie murmurs. “She passed out pretty much straight away. She and Jasper are cuddling.”
“Good,” I say.
“Yeah,” she sighs. “Good.”
Silence hangs in the air, a silence I don’t like one fucking bit.
“Sadie, come and sit in the garden with me,” I say.
“In this weather?”
“I have a heated enclosed porch at the rear of the house.”
She shoots me a look, sassiness shining through.
A chance, her look reads, we have a chance.
“Okay, Saul,” she whispers. “But even with that heated porch, let me go and put a jacket on first.”
You’d look sexy wrapped in a thousand layers anyway, I want to snarl, but she’s already spun and headed for the door.Chapter ThirteenSadieThe heat comes up through my bare feet, infusing my shins and then my thighs, warming my whole body as we stare out into the garden. The glass of the enclosure is clear and shiny, the heat within causing beads of condensation to slide, but where the glass is so clear, it looks like they’re suspended in midair.
