17. Chapter 17

Chapter seventeen

Caleb

Time is a funny, unreliable thing. Living in Erin's house, alone for two weeks, afforded me lots and lots of time.

I needed it. Vikki sent me my clothes in a box wrapped with cellophane and full to the brim with rainbow glitter. I canceled the credit card I'd given her after that, seeing as my ass was itching and shimmery from nearly five hundred dollars spent at the craft store.

"You should be more subtle with your early morning strip club addiction," said Juliette, bemusedly, the second day she flicked glitter from my sweatshirt.

"The early bird special is too good to pass up," I deadpanned. My legs itched like a million ants were crawling all over me. The washing machines at Erin's were crap. Apparently, to my greatest horror, glitter sticks to the drum. So now even the clothes I came to New York in were covered in miniscule shards of microplastics. "Bonus points, I can blame the stickiness on this maple syrup and not—"

"Settle down, Caleb." She rolled her eyes and handed me a mug of coffee adorned with hand-painted flowers and fairies with gauzy painstakingly detailed wings. She poured from her favorite teapot that was shaped like a hallucinogenic mushroom fairy house. She argued once that it was actually a coffeepot simply because that's what she used it for.

"At least I don't have to wear a reflective vest to run," I grumbled, biting into the pancakes.

Juliette chortled with her mouth full of toast. "That glitter is a part of your life now. Bound together forever."

"The hell it is. I haven't bought a new wardrobe yet, that's all. "

Juliette's brows raised so high they threatened to recede into her hairline. "Look around, Caleb. Once you invite glitter into the home it never leaves."

"I refuse to believe that." I checked my watch and worried Kelsey would be late for school. "Want to know the worst part? Vikki sent me a dissertation last night about how she was sorry about the glitter, and she wished me well, and she didn't really love me, but she missed how easy it was to have me around," I added a look to that one, "And how we were never meant to be because she knew I wanted to settle down and she isn't the settling down type."

"Did you respond?"

"She told me she was mad that I had domesticated her."

"Like a kept woman?" Juliette grinned mischievously.

She liked to do that, reference previous conversations that I had made uncomfortable because of my big mouth. I rubbed my temples just thinking about that whole debacle. "Anyway, she blocked me after that."

Her face pinched. "Why? She seemed like she was coming to peace with the break-up."

"Well, I asked her to rescind her false claims that I was kicking her out of the apartment. She made me out to be a real villain. My best friend accused me of lying about Kelsey because she told everyone I had a second life with another woman. I had to send a screen shot of the paternity test to him."

Juliette took a sip of her coffee, momentarily pausing the conversation. Her little hum of pleasure on that first sip left me spellbound. Tongue-tied.

Juliette's skin was freckled everywhere it was exposed. Wrists, hands, cheeks, neck.

Thighs.

I'd never seen skin like hers. Painted by an artist trying to capture the whimsical prettiness of sunlight on a forest floor. The way it peeks chaotically through the canopy to create shadows that shift with the breeze. I didn't like silence for a multitude of reasons, one of which being that I plummeted into moments like this.

She scoffed, "Who would you even know in New York?" Her tongue darted out and licked the coffee from her pronounced cupid's bow. I ripped my wandering gaze from hers.

Should have kept my mouth shut. I regretted sharing as the realization hit Juliette.

"Me? I was the other woman?" She pointed at her chest.

I could feel my skin turning scarlet. Juliette snorted into her coffee. "Are they talking to you now?"

"Who cares? I can't believe they thought I was capable of that in the first place."

Juliette allowed me some space to hurt over that statement. She shook her head silently and took a deep breath. When Juliette had been wary of me, I understood. When friends I've had for a decade jumped on Vikki's side of the story and hadn't bothered to reach out to me at all… not so much.

Time really had a terrible way of creating distance.

Or revealing distance I had miscalculated.

"I'm sorry." Juliette's crystalline gaze was warm and pitying.

"I'm not." I shrugged. "Fewer reasons for me to miss California."

For all the ways time created distance between me and my old life, it closed the distance between me and this new life. The expiration date of Kelsey's two-week trial period at Juliette's was today, and I knew she wasn't ready to move in with me. I could sense it in the way she joined us at the island, the way she hadn't said a word to me on our run this morning. The look of dread on her face was clear as day.

My daughter rounded the staircase and stopped short, a strange look on her face. "Ready?" I jingled my keys.

"I forgot my laptop." Kelsey, not usually a forgetful kid, dropped her things and ran back up the stairs.

A pointed look passed between me and Juliette .

Like two old ladies at a coffee shop, we came together and whispered. We did this a lot when Kelsey went upstairs, huddling together to discuss our next play, our personal space bubbles becoming one.

Juliette read my mind. "She can stay here for as long as she needs." Her voice was barely above a whisper. "If it comes up, in therapy."

"She's not ready to come home."

"I'm glad you agree. I thought you might push back."

"No. She's only just settled in, and things are a little less awkward, don't you think?" If I got paid for every time Juliette and I dissected the precise amount of awkward or tense a day had been, I'd have enough money to build Juliette a trust fund, too, when this was all over.

"Definitely, she talked a lot at dinner two nights ago."

"Then yesterday, nothing."

"Right?"

"Right. Not a coincidence," I whispered. I was cut off by Kelsey's footsteps down the stairs. "I'll send dinner with Kelsey later," I called out to Juliette, rushing to the door before Kelsey could catch us.

Juliette, a much better actress than I, smiled brightly and herded us out. "I could get used to this," she winked at Kelsey, "Thank you. Have a good day, Kelsey. Text if you need anything."

Juliette waved us away from the door, like she did every morning. Her legwarmers bunched at her ankles, leggings and an oversized tee-shirt dwarfing her frame. I checked for her in the rearview mirror, every morning, instinctively, until I saw her front door close.

Kelsey was silent on the short drive to the high school. Exposure therapy was working for both of us. For, after several weeks of this, I was no longer terrified of the hundreds of teen zombies mobbing the front of the school. They were even more frightening at pick-up, when they were fully awake and downright menacing. Once, I even saw a pair of them smooching and I swore I'd have nightmares for weeks. In reality, I just told Juliette about it and we both shared a long and therapeutic shudder.

That afternoon, Kelsey dropped into the front-seat, her silence even more tense than it had been this morning .

The moment Dr Liu welcomed us and we sat down, she broke it with a very quick, very precise, "I'm not ready to move in with Caleb."

"That's alright," I replied to her profile. "I'm not upset about it. I was expecting this." Dr. Liu looked like she was going to speak, but I shook my head with a look.

She didn't show an ounce of emotion as she said, "Shall we talk about why you feel that way?"

"No." Kelsey and I responded in unison.

"Things are going well the way they are, and Juliette likes having Kelsey around. We have a good routine, as we discussed last week. Why fix what isn't broken?"

I winced. Broken was a poor choice of words.

"Not broken, but rather, mending. Right, Kelsey? You hate me a little less." I really wished someone other than me would start talking. Since they didn't, I kept going. "Not only do we eat dinner together, but we actually talk to each other." With the help of all Dr. Liu's homework prompts, but still.

"That's good news. If everyone is okay with the arrangement, then let's begin, shall we?"

We spent the rest of therapy on an exercise where Dr. Liu said a word and Kelsey and I had to say the first word that popped into our head. Several times, she and I said the same word and I learned that Kelsey had a pet fish once. She had decided to stop eating fish altogether until Erin had cooked nothing but fish for a week, forcing Kelsey to end her strike. Kelsey learned that I hated fishing and felt claustrophobic on a boat because if I couldn't see land, I panicked I'd die at sea. Doing the most boring, least rewarding sport on earth, making that death worse.

There were no deep dark secrets shared. No grand declarations of my devotion to being her father. We got something better out of therapy that hour, we laughed together again. That's what mattered to me.

That, and getting a goddamned pair of underpants that didn't make my ass crack itch.