Chapter 487 | What If I Want It Anyway?

Chapter 487: 487 | What If I Want It Anyway?

Alexis moved to the grey sectional like her knees had forgotten how to bend. She lowered herself onto Kumiko’s pink slipcover, and the cat slippers dangled off the edge because her legs were too long to fold under her the way Kumiko’s did. Her hands stayed flat on her thighs, fingers spread, confirming her body was still attached.

Jordan stayed at the dining table and watched Chloe settle into the armchair across from the couch, the yellow legal pad on her knee, pen uncapped. Kumiko crawled onto the couch beside Alexis and sat cross-legged against the arm. Close enough to touch. Not touching.

"Thursday," Chloe said. "Harrison’s dinner."

Alexis flinched. Her right hand went to her neck, to the spot from Heisler Park, rubbed once, and dropped back to her thigh.

"My mother expects me at the Balboa Bay Club at seven. Private room upstairs. His parents. Mine. The empty ring box will probably be in my mother’s clutch so she can show Mrs. Van Allen the size."

"And you don’t want to go."

"I don’t want to marry him."

"That’s not the same thing."

Alexis’s jaw tightened. Jordan knew that look from his own mirror in January: someone realizing they’d been talking in circles instead of straight lines.

"I don’t want to go," Alexis said. "I don’t want to sit in that room and eat foam that tastes like disappointment and watch my mother touch his mother’s arm and say ’our children’ like I’m livestock."

"Then don’t go."

"I can’t just not go. My father will call. My mother will show up at my door. Harrison will send flowers, and then more flowers, and then a car."

Chloe wrote three fast lines on the pad and stopped.

"What happens if you tell them no?"

"I’ve never told them no."

Kumiko made a small wounded noise. Her hand moved toward Alexis’s arm and hovered.

"In eighteen years," Alexis said, "I have never said no to a dinner, a trip, a dress, a boy, or a ring size. I have said ’I’d prefer not to’ and ’perhaps another time’ and ’that’s lovely but I’m not sure it suits me,’ and every single time my mother has nodded and smiled and done whatever she was going to do anyway."

"Say it now," Chloe said.

"Say what?"

"No. To me. One syllable. I’ll be your mother." Chloe crossed her ankles, straightened her spine, and lifted her chin a quarter inch, and somehow she was sitting in a private room at a yacht club. "Darling. Wear the Zimmermann."

Alexis opened her mouth. "I’d actually prefer—"

"That’s not the word."

"I know it’s not the word." Alexis pressed her palms harder into her thighs. "N." She stopped and swallowed. Tried again. "No."

It came out the size of a coin. Kumiko clapped anyway, three silent claps with only her fingertips.

"Again on Thursday," Chloe said. "Louder." She uncrossed her ankles and was herself again. She wrote one word on the pad and underlined it twice.

Jordan leaned against the kitchen island and folded his arms. The phone had stopped buzzing, but he could feel it warm against his thigh, waiting.

He did not check.

"So Thursday is when you say no for the first time," Chloe said.

"Thursday is when I’m supposed to say yes. The engagement party is March twenty-second. The announcement goes out the next morning. My mother has already written the Instagram caption."

"What do you want to happen instead?"

Alexis looked at the sticky note on the refrigerator, at the stick figure with the thunderbolt.

"I want to be somewhere else. I want to eat food that doesn’t have foam on it. I want to wear something I picked because I liked it, not because Harrison’s mother saw it in a photograph."

"You want to be here."

It landed in the middle of the loft and sat there. Kumiko’s fingertips finally touched Alexis’s arm, and Alexis did not pull away.

"I want to know if here is real," Alexis said. "The headpat, the galbi, the slippers, Kumiko crying because I said please. I want to know if this is something I can have, or just something I’m watching through a window."

Chloe set the pen down. She took off her glasses and cleaned them on the hem of Jordan’s henley, slow, buying time. When she put them back on, her eyes were clear and steady.

"Jordan."

He pushed off the island. Chloe pointed at the cushion on Alexis’s other side, and he sat, a full foot between his knee and her silk-covered thigh. Three in a row, Alexis in the middle.

"You’re sixty-four," Chloe said. "I told you what happens at sixty-five."

"I get a vote."

"You get a voice. The vote comes later, after you’ve used the voice enough that we know what you sound like when you’re telling the truth."

Alexis turned to Jordan. Her hair still hung over one eye and she hadn’t fixed it, which was worth more than anything she’d said at dinner. September Alexis would never have allowed a strand out of place.

"What do you want from me?" she asked him. "Not what Chloe wants. Not what Kumiko hopes. You."

Jordan considered it.

Two months ago the answer would have been everything. He’d have promised her the moon and his entire allowance, then sat by his phone for seventeen hours while she texted someone else.

He was not that person anymore.

That Jordan would have heard I want to be here and started planning the next three months of her life. This one mostly wanted to find out what she would do with a Thursday if nobody planned it for her.

"I want you to eat more than nine bites at dinner," he said. "I want you to stop rubbing your neck every time someone mentions your mother. I want you to sit in those slippers and look stupid and be okay with looking stupid."

Alexis’s mouth opened and nothing came out.

"That’s it?"

"That’s it for tonight. Tomorrow I’ll want something else. Chloe keeps a list."

"I keep one too," Kumiko said. "Mine’s longer."

"Hers has stickers," Chloe said.

"He’s lying," Chloe said. "He also wants to put his hands on your shoulders again. He’s been staring at your trapezius since you took off the trench coat."

Jordan did not deny it. His eyes had been tracking the line of tension from her collarbone to her ear, the new knot, the way her posture locked whenever the conversation touched her family.

Alexis looked at Chloe.

"Is that allowed?"

"Tonight? No. You’re at sixty-four."

Kumiko’s fingertips tightened on the silk sleeve, as if she could hold the number up from underneath.

Alexis didn’t look away.

"What if I want it anyway?"