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“Don’t tell him I told you,” she said, “but Ryan loves bubble baths. He says they’re just so relaxing when you’ve had a long day or things aren’t going well. You look like you could use some of that.”
Without waiting for me to respond, she dumped some purple liquid right under the spout and bubbles began to form. A mental image of Ryan—all six feet four inches of him—in the same tub covered in fluffy bubbles made me snicker a little.
“Don’t knock it until you try it,” Chelsea said with a smile.
She fussed around with the tub a bit more—smoothing out the bubbles so they weren’t all at one end and adjusting the water’s temperature. She pulled large, fluffy white towels out of the linen closet and placed them on the counter.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked. “I mean, I fucked up your son’s wedding, and I don’t think we’ve said ten words to each other in ten years.”
Chelsea’s brow furrowed.
“You’re Michael’s nephew,” she explained simply. “I’ve been waiting to do this for you since you went away all those years ago. We’ve even talked about it.”
“Talked about it?” It was my turn to be confused. “What do you mean? Who’s talked about it?”
“Michael and I have,” she told me. “When he would worry about you, we’d talk about how someday you would come back to the family. Michael thought you might come back here first, and we knew you had been in such a bad way…well, we figured you would need a little TLC when you decided to ask for it. It was so hard for him to stop asking you to come home, but it made you so angry when he brought it up. Michael was afraid you would get really hurt out there, and it made him feel better when we’d talk and plan for this day.”
Chelsea’s eyes glistened as she looked at me.
“He loves you so much, Liam.”
I stared at her blankly. I remembered how often Michael used to come around and try to get me to talk to him—open up, come back home, take a job offer—but I had always told him to fuck off and leave me alone. Eventually he didn’t come around as much, but when he did, he used a more subtle approach, and I ended up with visits only once or twice a year.
I had always been a total dick toward him when he came around.
“No one ever gave up on you, dear,” she said as if she were reading my mind. “When you pushed everyone away, we knew it was just a matter of time. You can’t drag someone back from darkness until they’re ready to go with you.”
She shut off the water, stood up, and came over to me. She reached out and wrapped her arms around my shoulders, hugging me against her. Reflexively, I placed my arms around her middle.
“Your own mother should be doing this,” Chelsea said softly as she shook her head, “but somehow I don’t think you want me to call her.”
I licked my lips and leaned my forehead against Chelsea’s shoulder. She smelled like fruit salad.
“Not right now,” I replied quietly.
She leaned back and placed her hands on my cheeks.
“She misses you so much,” she said. “They both do.”
I stiffened at her words, and my shoulders crushed inward against my body. When I glanced at her, there were tears in her eyes even though she smiled through them.
“I’ll leave you to it.” She waved a hand at the tub. “There are some of Ryan’s pajamas on the counter for you. Michael’s having the cook make up a decent dinner—it doesn’t look like you’ve been eating well.”
I decided not to give her the details of just how accurate that statement was.
Chelsea closed the door behind her, and I dropped my wet clothes on the floor before sinking into the tub. It was warm, and the bubbles smelled nice. Feminine, to be sure, but it didn’t smell like Tria. The scent is what I imagined grandmothers smelled like, though I couldn’t remember my own. My father’s mother died when I was a baby, and my other grandmother had passed before I was born.
The bath felt good enough that I didn’t even care that I was going to end up smelling like an elderly woman. I leaned back against the end of the tub and sank down to my chin with my eyes closed.
The hot water warmed me, and the food Michael’s cook made nourished my body. After I couldn’t eat any more, Michael took me up to one of the guest rooms and helped me crawl into the bed. He probably wanted to talk to me some more, but I was out as soon as my head made contact with the pillow.
*****
Waking up in Michael’s house was surreal.
There was a desperate, childish part of me that wanted to believe everything I had gone through was just a dream, and I was currently back in high school after having spent too many hours playing video games in the basement rec room with Ryan and Mandi, and it had been too late to drive back home. As tempting as it was to pursue the fantasy, the pounding in my head, the itching on the inside of my arm, and the knowledge that there was a woman out there who needed my help when I was too big of a mess to give it to her brought me back to reality quickly.
I rolled over on the soft Egyptian cotton sheets and rubbed my face on the pillowcase of the same material. After all these years, it still seemed familiar. Strangely enough, I didn’t find the comfort comforting. I would have preferred to wake up on my one hundred and fifty thread count sheets from Big Lots with my arms wrapped around Tria. That was my definition of comfort.
