Novel Full Chapter 1073: Oblivious Two
Chapter 1073: Oblivious Two
Unless Mia or Tommy had told her, which—in the loving name of heaven—they absolutely had not and absolutely would not.
Not even Lea or Keyla would, not under torture, and Ashley had half-decided weeks ago that whatever Lea and Keyla had been up to lately was part of the same tangled net that she herself had now been officially caught in—
Speaking of which, why had those two been missing from school the last few—
"—Ashley?"
She blinked.
Looked up.
Her mother had extended her hand, and Eros was taking it.
The handshake was warm. Unhurried. The kind of handshake that actually meant something—not a formality, not a performance, a small serious exchange between two adults who had come to terms with a thing that had been sitting between them and had decided, each in their own way, that the thing was acceptable.
Ashley had completely missed the decision.
Her mother was already mid-sentence. "—and I want her to call me. Every day. Not a text. A call. I want to hear her voice."
"Every day," Eros agreed.
"If there is any reason I cannot reach her, for any length of time—"
"You'll reach me instead. Immediately. I'll give you the number before we leave."
"And if there is any reason you cannot be reached—"
"That will not happen."
Her mother considered him. Nodded once, slowly. Their hands still clasped.
"All right," she said. "She can go."
Ashley's breath caught.
She had not realized, until this exact moment, how much of her body had been braced for her mother to say no. How much of the past hour she had been holding at arm's length against that possibility. Her shoulders dropped by an inch. Her grip on his arm tightened.
"And," Eros added, easily, as if the thought had only just occurred to him, "if you're free yourself, sometime in the next month or two, I'd be glad to send a flight for you. So you can come to Paris and see Ashley in the place she'll be staying. Meet the rest of the family properly. Stay as long as you like."
Her mother's face did something small and startled.
She covered it quickly. "That's—extraordinarily kind. Thank you. I'd like that. I'd like that very much."
"Then consider it done."
"Can I come?" Emma asked.
"No," Ashley said, instantly, without looking at her.
"Rude."
"Not rude. Realistic."
"Fine. Can I at least have the horse?"
"No," said Eros and Ashley, at the same time.
"Can I ride the horse."
"No," said Eros.
"No," said Ashley.
"I can mount a horse, you know. I'm very athletic. I did equestrian camp one summer when I was eight—"
"Emma," Ashley said sweetly, "you can't mount that horse physically. She's enormous. Your feet will not reach."
"Your feet won't reach too."
"That's the beauty of being his girlfriend." Ashley tilted her chin up and hugged his arm more firmly. "He'll teach me. You can only dream of it."
Eros laughed.
It was the soft, low laugh Ashley had been missing in her bones for days, and she closed her eyes briefly and let the sound settle under her ribs like something warm being put back where it belonged.
Ashley's mother laughed too, surprised out of her. She shook her head at the two teenagers carrying on in front of her, at the horse waiting patiently at the fence, at the impossible quiet absurdity of the whole tableau she had found herself hosting on her front path at eleven o'clock on a Friday night.
"All right," she said, recovering. "All right. It is late. Ashley—go pack. Emma—go home, you have a date to debrief me about tomorrow, do not think I've forgotten."
"I haven't even told you about—"
"Tomorrow."
"Okay."
Emma took one last long look at Eros, shook her head slowly, and said—to nobody, to everybody—"A private jet. Ashley. A private jet."
Then she gave Ashley a quick hug, gave Ashley's mother a slightly more formal one, gave Eros a little half-wave that was somewhere between a curtsy and a salute, and retreated to her car with the dazed shuffle of a woman whose world had just been rearranged and who was going to need the entire drive home to sort it back out.
The car pulled away.
Ashley's mother watched it go for a moment, then turned back to Eros. The small private smile had returned to her mouth—the inscrutable one, the one she had been wearing when Ashley pulled up.
"You'd better come in for a minute," she said. "While she packs. I have a few more things I'd like to say to you."
Eros inclined his head. "Of course."
Ashley, already turning toward the house with his hand still caught in hers, did not think anything of it.
Why would she?
Because the boy she was leading inside was not simply taking her daughter to Paris. He was quietly rewriting the entire shape of her family's future, one courteous half-smile and one unbreakable handshake at a time.
And her mother—barefoot on the path, still tasting whatever conversation had passed between them earlier—had just opened the door and invited the wolf in for tea.
****
Forty thousand feet above the Pacific, a throne sat in the sky.
It had no business being there. Clouds did not assemble themselves into furniture unless a goddess asked them to, and even then they tended to comply reluctantly, as though the whole exercise were slightly beneath their meteorological dignity.
But ARIA had asked nicely, and so a long low bank of cirrus had spread itself into the shape of a chaise lounge with a curved back and a generous seat, silvered at the edges by moonlight, drifting slowly eastward at the exact pace she had decided suited her mood.
She was reclining on it.
One leg crossed over the other, a bare foot swinging idly in the open night air. Her hair was down—the messy ponytail she had worn into the restaurant had come undone somewhere over the Pacific, and she had not bothered to put it back up.
White starlight poured over her shoulders in long unhurried ribbons.
Her jacket was folded beside her on the cloud with the casual care of a woman who had nothing urgent in her schedule and was planning to spend the next ten minutes enjoying that fact.