Dirty Rowdy Thing (Wild Seasons, #2)(74)

He looks out at the water and seems to consider this for a long, quiet beat. “Yeah, I get that.”

There’s nothing else for me to say. “Let’s go get a f*cking beer. I can fill you in on the details of the show.”

He nods, standing beside me and following me as I walk down the dock toward my truck. “Are you happy up here without her?” he asks. “You feel pretty good going home alone every night?”

Laughing humorlessly, I tell him, “Not so much.”

“You think she must be a real *, I guess, to try to ruin your business. What a twat.”

“Jesus, Olls, she wasn’t trying to ruin it,” I say, instinctively protective. “She was probably just trying to find a way for us—”

I stop, turning to look at Oliver’s giant shit-eating grin.

Groaning, I say, “Go f*ck yourself, Aussie.”





Chapter FIFTEEN


Harlow


I WAKE UP TUESDAY and immediately know I’ve gotten my period, which of course brings a huge wave of relief . . . which of course makes me pissed-off all over again that Finn just hopped in his truck and drove north, leaving the mess between us behind.

One of the things I appreciated most about Finn was the plain assumption he seemed to always have that he sees things through with work, friends, and family. Apparently, that didn’t apply to the fight he had with the girl he’d married for twelve hours, loved for a day, and potentially knocked up.

But remembering that makes it clear why I appreciated that about him: because it’s the way I was raised, too. Take care of your own. Don’t leave loose strings. Clean up your messes. And, as my father has told me countless times, “Worrying is not preparation.”

So I drive to my parents’ house at the break of dawn to check in, reconnect, or, as Dad would probably say, be a meddling worrywart.

Dad is already up, eating cereal and staring out the window in his typical pre-coffee zombie zone, so I jog upstairs and crawl into bed with Mom. I don’t want to get so wrapped up in my own internal drama that I forget what she’s going through and that, at the end of the day every day, she’s still a mom who needs cuddles.

She hasn’t lost her hair yet, but I already mourn it. I inherited my father’s olive skin, but my mother’s auburn hair, and hers spills out over her pillowcase, just as long and full as it was when I was little. Mom’s trademark during the peak of her career was her hair. Once she even did a shampoo commercial, which Bellamy and I love to give her endless shit about because there was a lot of shine and hair flipping.

“Morning, Tulip,” she sleepy-mumbles.

“Morning, Pantene.”

She giggles, rolling to press her face into her pillow. “You’re never going to let me live that down.”

“Nope.”

“That commercial paid for the—”

“The camera that Dad used to film Caged,” I finish for her. “Which got him lined up at Universal for Willow Rush, for which he won his first Oscar. I know. I’m just being a menace.”

But there’s the rub. Mom’s work paid for Dad’s work, which moved our family forward, and nowhere in there did pride come into play, even though Dad is one of the most prideful men I’ve ever known. Mom came from a rich family in Pasadena. Dad came from a poor single-mother household in Spain. He never cared that his career took off because of the money and connections Madeline Vega made first. Once he’d convinced the love of his life to marry him, only three things mattered to my dad: that my mother took his name, that he could make her happy, and that they both got to do what they loved for a living.

“Why are boys so stupid?” I ask.

She laughs. “I’ve literally never heard you sound upset over a guy. I was worried.”

“Worried I was into girls?”

“No,” she says, laughing harder now. “That would have been fine. I was worried you were a cold-blooded man-eater.”

“Dad’s a tough act to follow,” I explain, pressing my face into her hair. Beneath the scent of her shampoo and face cream, she smells the slightest bit different—not bad, but . . . different—a result of the chemo and all the other things they’re currently doing to her body. It’s not like I go even an hour without thinking about it, but it hits me in this moment like a physical blow, this reminder that my mom is sick and my world is different than it was just two months ago. It makes me miss Finn and the strength he provided so acutely, that for a flash, I can’t breathe. “It was hard to take anyone seriously before now.”

“Before Finn, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

She rolls to face me. “What happened?”

I tell her—vaguely—about the hooking up, about my need for distraction, about how he was too distracting. I tell her about the real feelings, the I love you’s. She already knows about the potential deal with Salvatore, but apparently she doesn’t know how it unfolded.

“Sweetie,” she says, putting her warm hand on my cheek. “Your heart is always in the right place.

But a partnership always starts at the beginning. I did the commercial to help Dad, but we decided that I would do that together.”

“I understand that Finn was upset that I didn’t loop him in,” I say, “but I still don’t understand why he couldn’t have stepped back and realized it was a good thing, or at least had a discussion with me about it. It isn’t like there’s a contract with Sal that has been drafted. He’s just interested. Finn flew off the handle.”