fic: colorblind - two (miranda montgomery)
Title: Colorblind
Rating: NC-17 (language, sexuality, drug use)
Characters: Miranda Montgomery; ensemble cast; assorted pairings
Disclaimer: Not mine; they’re property of ABC, and I’m just playing with them
Teaser: Marriage is a time for family- and for avoiding those devastating childhood issues.
2;
Between his pediatric surgeon brother and his obstetrician mother, not to mention the world-famous heart surgeon who went by the title of ‘uncle,’ Nathan Stone was more comfortable in hospitals than an average person would be.
So he didn’t have a problem prowling his uncle’s hospital for his mother.
No, his problem was that, so far, he could not find his mother.
Maggie Stone, the amazing vanishing mother.
And with how tiny she was, there was no limit to hiding places for her.
After a good half-hour of stalking around like an idiot on the instructions of whatever nurse he could grab, he finally gave up and rapped hard on the desk of yet another nurse, smiling jerkily when he snapped his eyes up, startled.
“I need some help.”
“I told you-”
“She’s decided to try avoiding me,” Nate interrupted. “Could you page her for me?”
The poor nurse hesitated, glancing past Nate in the vague direction of his uncle’s office before sighing and nodding.
Stepping back, he glanced around restlessly.
Nate knew everybody at the hospital back home and everybody knew him as the other Stone kid.
He was practically a stranger here.
“Hey.” He looked up to find his mother approaching in her dusty blue scrubs, eyebrows lifted in greeting as she slid her arms around him and squeezed before stepping back to peer up at him. “You’re here early.”
“You said you were free for lunch.”
“I repeat,” she chuckled, “You’re here early.”
That was a lie, he wasn’t early; in fact, he was now late because she’d been dodging him.
They both knew it.
And, thankfully on not thankfully depending on the viewpoint, Mom wasn’t even trying to sell it, her face still lacking the intensity he had come to associate only with her. That inner blankness dampened the annoyance he would have felt from anybody else’s attempts to disengage from him, allowed him to shake off his frustration and focus on getting her out of the damn hospital that she was using as a shield.
So he reminded her “military time,” in the lightest tone he could manage and heard the eye roll in her snort.
“I was about to go change,” she told him after another moment, reaching up to brush loose strands of hair from her face and jerking a thumb over one shoulder. “Think you can give me a few minutes before running off to get food?”
“Maybe a few,” he shrugged and, flashing him one last grin, she turned and strode away to change out of her scrubs.
Nate blew out a noisy breath and gave himself a hard shake, wishing he had an instruction manual.
Chris Hart-Lavery was unflappable despite the fact that he had born and raised in Pine Valley, Pennsylvania.
Or maybe he was unflappable because he had been born and raised in Pine Valley, Pennsylvania.
Tornados and blizzards, serial killers … the fire that had left them sure that mom was dead for a good six months.
No, only the people he cared about most could get a rise out of him, and the rest of the world could go fuck itself.
He did most of his work at home loyally, never missing a deadline, and he kept his cubicle at the Bulletin neat and tidy even when he wasn’t in the actual office; he shared a house and a dog with his partner of several years. Granted, he also kept a little bit of weed stashed in the back of his freezer in the aforementioned house but he was a good guy with a good head on his shoulders and in Pine Valley, he functioned better than most of the people around him.
When someone in his life needed a quick therapy session, they usually gravitated to him.
Except for Miranda, who never said anything really important to anyone.
Which was sort of the problem at hand.
Because Miranda didn’t talk to anyone, she just said whatever she needed to say to keep people from realizing it. None of them had ever really fallen for it but her skill was always improving, and people who didn’t know her as well as they did fell for it all the time. He was firmly convinced that the weird obsession she had with not talking to anyone was what kept sending her back to Paris; as long as she was in Pine Valley, they could corner her and maybe find a way to get her opened up.
That far away, however, made it difficult to find any way to focus on her enough to do that.
Miranda Montgomery never did anything without a reason, a fact they’d all come to both appreciate and despise.
“Or maybe you’re paranoid.”
“Shut up,” he said without thinking, accepting the crate that Adam unceremoniously dropped into his arms and turning away, staggering up the driveway as he heard a trunk slam shut behind him. There was the jingle of keys and then an annoyed sigh as Adam fell into step behind him.
“Is this what my life’s going to be? I’ll say something and you’ll just tell me to shut up?”
Chris shrugged in response, attention unfocused. “Shut up, honey?”
“Cute.” Adam stepped past him, kicking the front door open and then quickly closing it as Chris moved past, dropping the crate carelessly onto the couch when he reached it. He heard a whistle, the sound of a body crashing through the room and he looked up in time to see Molly sliding across the floors into Adam’s outstretched arms, big shaggy body twisting to keep from taking the man down when she collided into him. “Good girl, good girl- good girl wanna go see crazy Emma?”
Floppy ears jerked up in immediate appreciation as the mutt shifted excitedly, nearly tripping Adam as she followed him urgently to the wall where the leash was hanging. Grunting as he caught himself on the wall, he started trying to get the leash clipped onto the collar, finally forced to throw a leg over the wildly bouncing dog to keep her still enough to succeed.
“We’ll put the stuff up when we get back,” Chris sighed, stepping around the dog and man half-tangled in the leash for his jacket and then grabbing Adam when he noticed him about to tip over. “If we don’t leave now, they’re going to send crazy Emma to retrieve us- Hey, where’s my keys?”
“We’re taking my car.”
“Mom hates your car.”
“That’s why we’re taking it,” Adam grinned, balance back as he made for the front door, keeping a careful grip on the leash as Chris trailed after, locking the door behind them. As soon as the car door was open, the dog was climbing into the backseat, pawing at the window until Adam got the car started and opened the window. “Maybe you’re worried over nothing.”
Used to Adam’s bad habit of jumping between one subject and the next, Chris snorted as he scrolled through his phone messages, shook his head in a refusal to accept that. “Her hair got a shade darker since the last time I saw her, and she’s even skinnier than she was when he popped up last Christmas.” He glanced up into the side mirror and smirked helplessly at the sight of Molly with her head out the window, ears fanned open in the breeze and eyes closed in bliss.
When the phone went off in his hand, he answered with a flat, “We’re coming, Emma.”
“Miranda’s not answering our calls,” his sister replied.
“What do you mean?”
“Miranda, our cousin, real pretty but kind of scrawny, likes wearing business suits-”
“Yeah, I know who Miranda is,” he snapped and heard Adam’s snort of amusement, felt shoulders jerk with laughter. “Have you talked to her at all since last night?” he prodded, and heard a long sigh, knowing his sister was tossing blonde hair over one shoulder and rolling her eyes.
“Mom said Miranda sent a text this morning but she isn’t answering our calls.”
Chris closed his eyes for a moment, took a deep breath. “What did the text say?”
“That Miranda is going shopping.”
“Then she’s just going shopping.”
“But mom said that Miranda said that she’d be here by now.”
“Maybe she’s late.”
“Mom thinks she drove into a ditch, and dad had to take the phone before she could call out the National Guard.”
Which explained why Emma was the one bugging him to track down Miranda.
“I’ll call Miranda,” he promised and hung up, pressing three and waiting as it rang, pressing fingers against his forehead. He hung up and tried again, noticing the look he was getting from the driver’s seat. “Miranda’s late getting to the house because she’s buying clothes and Mom’s getting crazier.”
“Ah,” was all Adam said just as Miranda abruptly answered, tone annoyed.
“Tell Emma to stop calling me,” she ordered, as if he had any power over Emma.
“Call Mom and assure her you’re fine.”
“I’ll be there soon.”
“Just do it.”
“I’m an adult. Don’t tell me what to do-”
“Mimo-”
“Don’t call me that!” and the anger in her voice wasn’t amused in the slightest, it was hard, overly defensive.
After years of them all calling her that, her hate for the nickname was something he was still struggling to handle. Sure, he got cranky when people called him Spike just to tease him but he didn’t really mind the name too much- using Chris had only really become common for him when he’d started working since people didn’t take a reporter named Spike Hart-Lavery as seriously as he’d wanted.
But Miranda hated it, showed more emotion in reacting to it than she did to anything else.
“I’m sorry,” he offered after a moment but only heard silence. “Miranda?”
“I need to finish what I’m working on,” Miranda replied emotionlessly after a tense moment. “Just go ahead to your mom’s and I’ll be there later, okay?” She apparently didn’t mean it as a question because she proceeded to hang up the next second.
Swearing, he rubbed his forehead and closed the phone, trying to breathe through his annoyance.
“What did she say?”
“She’s getting worse.” It was the truth, painful as it was, and he couldn’t hold the words in. “She walks around like a mannequin ninety-nine percent of the time and only actually reacts when somebody pisses her off. Then she’ll go off on you until she just gets over it and goes back to ignoring everything. Like this switch, there’s no middle ground anymore.” He threw the phone down to his lap, pressed his knuckles harder into his forehead. “I’d try an intervention but I think she’d jump out a window to escape.”
“Which would defeat the purpose,” Adam deadpanned after a long beat of silence.
Chris just grunted, staring out the window and feeling useless.
It was the wedding thing, he knew- he always got too upset over Miranda, worried too much just like the rest of the family, but now said family was going insane and people kept shoving cake at his face. “We should have fucking eloped.”
A hand touched his, pulled at his fingers until they opened and Adam was able to tangle them together.
Dragging in a long breath, absurdly grateful for the basic touch, he allowed Adam to get a better grip on him, set their locked hands on the armrest as the tension slowly eased in his back, left his shoulders. Focusing on that, reminding himself that he could handle this as well as he handled everything else that Pine Valley threw at him, he closed his eyes and dropped his head back, twitched when Molly sniffed into his neck curiously.
“I invited Bianca,” he offered after a moment, feeling eyes immediately lock onto him. “I had to.”
“I didn’t know we wanted her at our wedding.”
“We don’t.” His thumb found the old scar on Adam’s index finger, the one he’d gotten two years before roughhousing with Molly when they’d first brought the puppy home. “But I had to so I did. I talked to one of her assistants just to tell her that there was going to be a ceremony and then I dropped it. Then she called back in the middle of the night sounding trashed.”
“Doesn’t she usually?”
“Yeah, but it took me fifteen minutes to get off the damn phone. She just kept repeating the same thing over and over again like a broken record. I couldn’t actually understand half of what she was saying, she was just randomly babbling.” Fingers tightened through his a little more. “I think she’s somewhere in Tokyo.”
“Maybe she’ll miss it.”
“I can’t deal with her.”
He couldn’t, he didn’t have the patience.
Chris had come to that decision years before and he meant it even more now as his life was changing. The last time she’d come to Pine Valley, she’d come with Miranda to handle a basic ceremony for the Center- before the ordeal was over, there’d been a screaming match in the bathroom with his mother and then silent crowds watching his aunt embarrass herself stumbling over her prepared speech.
Bianca had left before the night was over and Miranda had proceeded to disappear completely for six months. When she’d finally contacted them again, she had refused to broach the topic at all and they’d dropped it.
“I can’t deal with her,” he repeated heatedly, and fingers tangled even more tightly with his.
Personally, Nate was craving something from Ronny’s back home- the chili dog with onions, the bacon and cheese fries, one of the onion blossoms… oh hell, he’d jump off a bridge to get one of those heavy cheese and onion omelets that could be ordered for a few hours every morning that he had never been able to perfect making for himself.
But Ronny’s was thousands of miles away and they were heading to the next best place.
“You and your nachos.”
His mother just smiled serenely as she dug through her purse, eyes hidden behind her sunglasses.
Nate had been to Pine Valley a few times in the years since Maggie and Lena had first appeared in his life as foster parents, small visits to see his aunt and uncle, but Mike knew his way around a lot better. He’d been the one come by regularely to do the surgeon bonding with David over and over again through the years.
Mike didn’t need any directions to get around.
Poor Nate wasn’t so lucky.
“This turn?”
“Next one,” she corrected, checking something on her phone and then tucking it away again, frowning slightly.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.” She somehow felt his stare and looked over to smile brightly. “It’s nothing.”
“Uh huh- Uh-”
“The street sign’s lying, it’s the next turn.”
Reminding himself that his mother had a better grasp of the Pine Valley geography that he did, he obeyed and took the next turn, not relaxing until he spotted the stretch of businesses that opened up before him. “Jesus.”
“Nothing like the PV business district,” his mother sighed theatrically.
“Yeah,” he agreed through the daze he found himself caught up in, not remembering ever seeing this on the rare visits. But then, he’d usually spent those entire visits at his uncle’s cabin or in that small area around the cabin. “Are you sure this is Pine Valley?”
His mother simply grimaced and he gave her a moment, knowing that expression.
Nate wasn’t completely sure how someone could love and hate a place as much as Mom seemed to love and hate this place- she always got homesick if she didn’t go visit at least once a year but she always left depressed, sometimes downright miserable. She’d bloom here for the first few days and then she’d hit a weird emotional wall and just crash.
Trying to give her a moment, he went back to absorbing the place that his mother insisted was the ‘triangle of crazy.’
There were tons of shops, everything from pawnshops to bookstores, one after another, some of their placements looking a bit odd, as though people had just thrown whatever they could together to get whatever space they could. Groups of office buildings scattered throughout shadowed and sheltered the shops at the same time, a few he couldn’t see the tops of even when he leaned to peer up through the windshield.
And there were restaurants, lots and lots of restaurants.
It matched what his mother had told him, though, that people had just kept filling the area up with more things.
The area wasn’t ugly, not at all, but it was certainly a bit… dizzying.
“There,” his mother chirped and he obeyed if only to get his balance back, slowing as he threaded between two cars and parallel parked as well as he could as his mother gathered up her things. “You’ll like it here,” she told him yet again, tugging his arm when he answered with a wary look. “Lots of chili and cheese,” she tempted.
“Do they use enough onions?”
“You can get extra onions and throw as much as you want on your food,” she huffed as she threw open the door and stepped out, checking her phone again even as he circled around the car. “Nothing,” she repeated as she put the phone away again, grabbing his jacket and half-dragging him up the sidewalk to the place called BJ’s.
“Who was that?”
“It wasn’t the hospital,” she replied vaguely. “I’ll call Greenlee back later.”
“What did she want?”
“Later,” she repeated, and he gave up, only vaguely aware of how their positions had reversed and she was now dragging him off to get actual human nourishment. They made it through the double doors and then his mother stopped abruptly, gnawing her bottom lip and fiddling with her purse, looking over the crowd and then back at him.
“What?”
“I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Mom-”
“Sit on the bench,” his itty-itty hard-as-nails mother ordered, pushing his shoulder back towards the bench behind him. “If you have to go get a seat, pick by the wall,” she explained needlessly, turning and disappearing a second later.
Staring after her uneasily, not liking the panicked look at the back of her eyes, he forced himself to drop onto the bench, feeling like a nervous kid instead of the grown man he actually was. He checked his watch, heaved a sigh, glad his feet were on the ground so he wouldn’t start swinging them the way he almost wanted to.
Glancing out at the street through the double doors, he watched the people absently.
There was a young woman pushing a stroller into a bookstore even as a young couple left the same building, bag hanging from the woman’s wrist as they hooked their arms around each other and headed down the sidewalk. There was an elderly couple sitting on a bench, the man looking pained and the woman gesturing rapidly around them, and another woman leaving a clothing store with definite annoyance in her stride-
Nate sat up straight without thinking, interest sparking as he leaned forward to get a better angle as he watched the woman he’d crashed into in the lobby from the night before reach a small sedan and fling open the door, long hair lifting in a breeze before she twisted into the driver’s seat and slammed the door violently.
Pretty, he thought stupidly, trying to make out her profile through the open car window, throwing long hair off a shoulder. He cringed helplessly when he saw her stuff a cigarette into her mouth with a quick glance around but she was still enough to keep him fascinated, sitting and staring like an idiot even after she drove away and vanished again.
Flustered, completely thrown by it, he looked around nervously, scratched the back of his neck.
Jumped like a kid with his hand in the cookie jar when someone touched his shoulder.
“What’s the matter?”
“What?”
His mother stared at him, something tight on her face shifting into protective sharpness as she pushed him back and peered hard out the doors as if a five-foot woman could protect better than a six-foot man with actual training could. Trying to force down the familiar warmth it caused in him, how willing she’d always been to throw herself into a fight to protect, he got to his feet and gave her the most comforting grin he could manage. “I just zoned out for a moment.”
“Zoned out,” she repeated slowly, looking between him and the street through the doors. “What was that look for?”
“Look?” he repeated innocently, and found dark eyes narrowing suspiciously.
Annoyingly aware of how impossible it was to lie to his mother, he ducked past her into the restaurant, moving faster past the startled employee when he heard her fuzzy sound of exasperation at his blatant attempt to flee. “Nathan?”
“It was nothing.”
But his mother reached his side and nudged him with her elbow as they moved together to a table against the wall. “The last time you looked like this, you came home bragging about kissing Lyla Davis behind the school.”
God, how did she remember these things?
Trying to ignore the flush that he could feel rising up his neck, he grabbed up the menu and flipped through it even though he already knew his order. When he glanced over it once, his mother was smirking back at him and he knew it was useless. Sighing, he dropped the menu and waited as she did the same, tiny form shockingly intimidating.
“Well?”
“I bumped into someone cute last night when I was getting back to my room.”
“And?”
“I just spotted her outside- no, Mom, she drove off.” His mother, already twisting around in an attempt to see the street through the window, stopped and glanced back at him. “What?”
“Did you get a name?”
“No.” He rolled his eyes at her hopeful look. “She’s just my type, I’m allowed to look.”
“Just look?”
“She’s a smoker,” he retorted in dislike. “Besides, I like being a bachelor.”
“And that’s why you blow through girlfriends the way you do?”
“I thought that was the definition of bachelor,” Nate chuckled awkwardly, looking around for the waitress a bit desperately. When he spotted her and waved, she smiled brightly and nodded to show she understood-and went back to taking the order of a little old lady on the other side of the restaurant. “Oh, for fuck’s sake-”
“Language.”
“Sorry,” he apologized immediately, rubbing the back of his neck uneasily and pushing the menu across the table to keep him from looking at his mother. Then she sighed and he looked up helplessly, finding her staring back at him with a mortified smile that caused an instant wrench inside him. “Mom, it’s okay.”
“I’m nagging.”
“You’re not nagging.”
“I’m nagging,” she whispered raggedly, rubbing fingers compulsively across her forehead, shoulders squared and face flushing with emotion. “You’re twenty-eight years old. I shouldn’t be telling you what to do-”
“Mom-”
She fell silent, closed her eyes.
Knowing what she was struggling with, he reached across the table to gather up the hand he found there, squeeze until she looked up at him again. “I know,” he assured her, squeezing more tightly. “It’s okay, it’ll get better.”
“I’m trying too hard.”
“You’re just trying to get your feet under you,” he insisted, and got a snort of laughter in response, her free hand darting up to push loose strands of hair from her face, swipe at a cheek. “It’s a lot for anybody to handle, okay?”
“Eighteen years,” she muttered, almost to herself, eyes staring down at her hand under his.
He followed her line of sight on impulse, shifting his fingers and staring down at the plain gold band that she’d been wearing for eighteen years. Looking up again, finding his mother still staring down with a vague lost expression that broke his heart, his own eyes found the sturdy gold chain around her neck disappearing into her shirt. Ma’s ring was there, he knew.
Eighteen damn years, almost nineteen if she would have been able to hold on just a while longer.
Hell, a few more months and it would have been nineteen years and a new grandkid to boot.
Grief rising up before he could stop it, he dropped his gaze when she started to pull her hand away and then looked up defensively when he sensed motion. But it was just the waitress, glancing between them cautiously as she stepped closer, smiling encouragingly. “You two know what you want?”
His mother met his eyes across the table, something frail in the smile she had forced onto her face.
“Yeah,” he finally managed, passing over the useless menu and ordering their meals.
Rating: NC-17 (language, sexuality, drug use)
Characters: Miranda Montgomery; ensemble cast; assorted pairings
Disclaimer: Not mine; they’re property of ABC, and I’m just playing with them
Teaser: Marriage is a time for family- and for avoiding those devastating childhood issues.
2;
Between his pediatric surgeon brother and his obstetrician mother, not to mention the world-famous heart surgeon who went by the title of ‘uncle,’ Nathan Stone was more comfortable in hospitals than an average person would be.
So he didn’t have a problem prowling his uncle’s hospital for his mother.
No, his problem was that, so far, he could not find his mother.
Maggie Stone, the amazing vanishing mother.
And with how tiny she was, there was no limit to hiding places for her.
After a good half-hour of stalking around like an idiot on the instructions of whatever nurse he could grab, he finally gave up and rapped hard on the desk of yet another nurse, smiling jerkily when he snapped his eyes up, startled.
“I need some help.”
“I told you-”
“She’s decided to try avoiding me,” Nate interrupted. “Could you page her for me?”
The poor nurse hesitated, glancing past Nate in the vague direction of his uncle’s office before sighing and nodding.
Stepping back, he glanced around restlessly.
Nate knew everybody at the hospital back home and everybody knew him as the other Stone kid.
He was practically a stranger here.
“Hey.” He looked up to find his mother approaching in her dusty blue scrubs, eyebrows lifted in greeting as she slid her arms around him and squeezed before stepping back to peer up at him. “You’re here early.”
“You said you were free for lunch.”
“I repeat,” she chuckled, “You’re here early.”
That was a lie, he wasn’t early; in fact, he was now late because she’d been dodging him.
They both knew it.
And, thankfully on not thankfully depending on the viewpoint, Mom wasn’t even trying to sell it, her face still lacking the intensity he had come to associate only with her. That inner blankness dampened the annoyance he would have felt from anybody else’s attempts to disengage from him, allowed him to shake off his frustration and focus on getting her out of the damn hospital that she was using as a shield.
So he reminded her “military time,” in the lightest tone he could manage and heard the eye roll in her snort.
“I was about to go change,” she told him after another moment, reaching up to brush loose strands of hair from her face and jerking a thumb over one shoulder. “Think you can give me a few minutes before running off to get food?”
“Maybe a few,” he shrugged and, flashing him one last grin, she turned and strode away to change out of her scrubs.
Nate blew out a noisy breath and gave himself a hard shake, wishing he had an instruction manual.
Chris Hart-Lavery was unflappable despite the fact that he had born and raised in Pine Valley, Pennsylvania.
Or maybe he was unflappable because he had been born and raised in Pine Valley, Pennsylvania.
Tornados and blizzards, serial killers … the fire that had left them sure that mom was dead for a good six months.
No, only the people he cared about most could get a rise out of him, and the rest of the world could go fuck itself.
He did most of his work at home loyally, never missing a deadline, and he kept his cubicle at the Bulletin neat and tidy even when he wasn’t in the actual office; he shared a house and a dog with his partner of several years. Granted, he also kept a little bit of weed stashed in the back of his freezer in the aforementioned house but he was a good guy with a good head on his shoulders and in Pine Valley, he functioned better than most of the people around him.
When someone in his life needed a quick therapy session, they usually gravitated to him.
Except for Miranda, who never said anything really important to anyone.
Which was sort of the problem at hand.
Because Miranda didn’t talk to anyone, she just said whatever she needed to say to keep people from realizing it. None of them had ever really fallen for it but her skill was always improving, and people who didn’t know her as well as they did fell for it all the time. He was firmly convinced that the weird obsession she had with not talking to anyone was what kept sending her back to Paris; as long as she was in Pine Valley, they could corner her and maybe find a way to get her opened up.
That far away, however, made it difficult to find any way to focus on her enough to do that.
Miranda Montgomery never did anything without a reason, a fact they’d all come to both appreciate and despise.
“Or maybe you’re paranoid.”
“Shut up,” he said without thinking, accepting the crate that Adam unceremoniously dropped into his arms and turning away, staggering up the driveway as he heard a trunk slam shut behind him. There was the jingle of keys and then an annoyed sigh as Adam fell into step behind him.
“Is this what my life’s going to be? I’ll say something and you’ll just tell me to shut up?”
Chris shrugged in response, attention unfocused. “Shut up, honey?”
“Cute.” Adam stepped past him, kicking the front door open and then quickly closing it as Chris moved past, dropping the crate carelessly onto the couch when he reached it. He heard a whistle, the sound of a body crashing through the room and he looked up in time to see Molly sliding across the floors into Adam’s outstretched arms, big shaggy body twisting to keep from taking the man down when she collided into him. “Good girl, good girl- good girl wanna go see crazy Emma?”
Floppy ears jerked up in immediate appreciation as the mutt shifted excitedly, nearly tripping Adam as she followed him urgently to the wall where the leash was hanging. Grunting as he caught himself on the wall, he started trying to get the leash clipped onto the collar, finally forced to throw a leg over the wildly bouncing dog to keep her still enough to succeed.
“We’ll put the stuff up when we get back,” Chris sighed, stepping around the dog and man half-tangled in the leash for his jacket and then grabbing Adam when he noticed him about to tip over. “If we don’t leave now, they’re going to send crazy Emma to retrieve us- Hey, where’s my keys?”
“We’re taking my car.”
“Mom hates your car.”
“That’s why we’re taking it,” Adam grinned, balance back as he made for the front door, keeping a careful grip on the leash as Chris trailed after, locking the door behind them. As soon as the car door was open, the dog was climbing into the backseat, pawing at the window until Adam got the car started and opened the window. “Maybe you’re worried over nothing.”
Used to Adam’s bad habit of jumping between one subject and the next, Chris snorted as he scrolled through his phone messages, shook his head in a refusal to accept that. “Her hair got a shade darker since the last time I saw her, and she’s even skinnier than she was when he popped up last Christmas.” He glanced up into the side mirror and smirked helplessly at the sight of Molly with her head out the window, ears fanned open in the breeze and eyes closed in bliss.
When the phone went off in his hand, he answered with a flat, “We’re coming, Emma.”
“Miranda’s not answering our calls,” his sister replied.
“What do you mean?”
“Miranda, our cousin, real pretty but kind of scrawny, likes wearing business suits-”
“Yeah, I know who Miranda is,” he snapped and heard Adam’s snort of amusement, felt shoulders jerk with laughter. “Have you talked to her at all since last night?” he prodded, and heard a long sigh, knowing his sister was tossing blonde hair over one shoulder and rolling her eyes.
“Mom said Miranda sent a text this morning but she isn’t answering our calls.”
Chris closed his eyes for a moment, took a deep breath. “What did the text say?”
“That Miranda is going shopping.”
“Then she’s just going shopping.”
“But mom said that Miranda said that she’d be here by now.”
“Maybe she’s late.”
“Mom thinks she drove into a ditch, and dad had to take the phone before she could call out the National Guard.”
Which explained why Emma was the one bugging him to track down Miranda.
“I’ll call Miranda,” he promised and hung up, pressing three and waiting as it rang, pressing fingers against his forehead. He hung up and tried again, noticing the look he was getting from the driver’s seat. “Miranda’s late getting to the house because she’s buying clothes and Mom’s getting crazier.”
“Ah,” was all Adam said just as Miranda abruptly answered, tone annoyed.
“Tell Emma to stop calling me,” she ordered, as if he had any power over Emma.
“Call Mom and assure her you’re fine.”
“I’ll be there soon.”
“Just do it.”
“I’m an adult. Don’t tell me what to do-”
“Mimo-”
“Don’t call me that!” and the anger in her voice wasn’t amused in the slightest, it was hard, overly defensive.
After years of them all calling her that, her hate for the nickname was something he was still struggling to handle. Sure, he got cranky when people called him Spike just to tease him but he didn’t really mind the name too much- using Chris had only really become common for him when he’d started working since people didn’t take a reporter named Spike Hart-Lavery as seriously as he’d wanted.
But Miranda hated it, showed more emotion in reacting to it than she did to anything else.
“I’m sorry,” he offered after a moment but only heard silence. “Miranda?”
“I need to finish what I’m working on,” Miranda replied emotionlessly after a tense moment. “Just go ahead to your mom’s and I’ll be there later, okay?” She apparently didn’t mean it as a question because she proceeded to hang up the next second.
Swearing, he rubbed his forehead and closed the phone, trying to breathe through his annoyance.
“What did she say?”
“She’s getting worse.” It was the truth, painful as it was, and he couldn’t hold the words in. “She walks around like a mannequin ninety-nine percent of the time and only actually reacts when somebody pisses her off. Then she’ll go off on you until she just gets over it and goes back to ignoring everything. Like this switch, there’s no middle ground anymore.” He threw the phone down to his lap, pressed his knuckles harder into his forehead. “I’d try an intervention but I think she’d jump out a window to escape.”
“Which would defeat the purpose,” Adam deadpanned after a long beat of silence.
Chris just grunted, staring out the window and feeling useless.
It was the wedding thing, he knew- he always got too upset over Miranda, worried too much just like the rest of the family, but now said family was going insane and people kept shoving cake at his face. “We should have fucking eloped.”
A hand touched his, pulled at his fingers until they opened and Adam was able to tangle them together.
Dragging in a long breath, absurdly grateful for the basic touch, he allowed Adam to get a better grip on him, set their locked hands on the armrest as the tension slowly eased in his back, left his shoulders. Focusing on that, reminding himself that he could handle this as well as he handled everything else that Pine Valley threw at him, he closed his eyes and dropped his head back, twitched when Molly sniffed into his neck curiously.
“I invited Bianca,” he offered after a moment, feeling eyes immediately lock onto him. “I had to.”
“I didn’t know we wanted her at our wedding.”
“We don’t.” His thumb found the old scar on Adam’s index finger, the one he’d gotten two years before roughhousing with Molly when they’d first brought the puppy home. “But I had to so I did. I talked to one of her assistants just to tell her that there was going to be a ceremony and then I dropped it. Then she called back in the middle of the night sounding trashed.”
“Doesn’t she usually?”
“Yeah, but it took me fifteen minutes to get off the damn phone. She just kept repeating the same thing over and over again like a broken record. I couldn’t actually understand half of what she was saying, she was just randomly babbling.” Fingers tightened through his a little more. “I think she’s somewhere in Tokyo.”
“Maybe she’ll miss it.”
“I can’t deal with her.”
He couldn’t, he didn’t have the patience.
Chris had come to that decision years before and he meant it even more now as his life was changing. The last time she’d come to Pine Valley, she’d come with Miranda to handle a basic ceremony for the Center- before the ordeal was over, there’d been a screaming match in the bathroom with his mother and then silent crowds watching his aunt embarrass herself stumbling over her prepared speech.
Bianca had left before the night was over and Miranda had proceeded to disappear completely for six months. When she’d finally contacted them again, she had refused to broach the topic at all and they’d dropped it.
“I can’t deal with her,” he repeated heatedly, and fingers tangled even more tightly with his.
Personally, Nate was craving something from Ronny’s back home- the chili dog with onions, the bacon and cheese fries, one of the onion blossoms… oh hell, he’d jump off a bridge to get one of those heavy cheese and onion omelets that could be ordered for a few hours every morning that he had never been able to perfect making for himself.
But Ronny’s was thousands of miles away and they were heading to the next best place.
“You and your nachos.”
His mother just smiled serenely as she dug through her purse, eyes hidden behind her sunglasses.
Nate had been to Pine Valley a few times in the years since Maggie and Lena had first appeared in his life as foster parents, small visits to see his aunt and uncle, but Mike knew his way around a lot better. He’d been the one come by regularely to do the surgeon bonding with David over and over again through the years.
Mike didn’t need any directions to get around.
Poor Nate wasn’t so lucky.
“This turn?”
“Next one,” she corrected, checking something on her phone and then tucking it away again, frowning slightly.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.” She somehow felt his stare and looked over to smile brightly. “It’s nothing.”
“Uh huh- Uh-”
“The street sign’s lying, it’s the next turn.”
Reminding himself that his mother had a better grasp of the Pine Valley geography that he did, he obeyed and took the next turn, not relaxing until he spotted the stretch of businesses that opened up before him. “Jesus.”
“Nothing like the PV business district,” his mother sighed theatrically.
“Yeah,” he agreed through the daze he found himself caught up in, not remembering ever seeing this on the rare visits. But then, he’d usually spent those entire visits at his uncle’s cabin or in that small area around the cabin. “Are you sure this is Pine Valley?”
His mother simply grimaced and he gave her a moment, knowing that expression.
Nate wasn’t completely sure how someone could love and hate a place as much as Mom seemed to love and hate this place- she always got homesick if she didn’t go visit at least once a year but she always left depressed, sometimes downright miserable. She’d bloom here for the first few days and then she’d hit a weird emotional wall and just crash.
Trying to give her a moment, he went back to absorbing the place that his mother insisted was the ‘triangle of crazy.’
There were tons of shops, everything from pawnshops to bookstores, one after another, some of their placements looking a bit odd, as though people had just thrown whatever they could together to get whatever space they could. Groups of office buildings scattered throughout shadowed and sheltered the shops at the same time, a few he couldn’t see the tops of even when he leaned to peer up through the windshield.
And there were restaurants, lots and lots of restaurants.
It matched what his mother had told him, though, that people had just kept filling the area up with more things.
The area wasn’t ugly, not at all, but it was certainly a bit… dizzying.
“There,” his mother chirped and he obeyed if only to get his balance back, slowing as he threaded between two cars and parallel parked as well as he could as his mother gathered up her things. “You’ll like it here,” she told him yet again, tugging his arm when he answered with a wary look. “Lots of chili and cheese,” she tempted.
“Do they use enough onions?”
“You can get extra onions and throw as much as you want on your food,” she huffed as she threw open the door and stepped out, checking her phone again even as he circled around the car. “Nothing,” she repeated as she put the phone away again, grabbing his jacket and half-dragging him up the sidewalk to the place called BJ’s.
“Who was that?”
“It wasn’t the hospital,” she replied vaguely. “I’ll call Greenlee back later.”
“What did she want?”
“Later,” she repeated, and he gave up, only vaguely aware of how their positions had reversed and she was now dragging him off to get actual human nourishment. They made it through the double doors and then his mother stopped abruptly, gnawing her bottom lip and fiddling with her purse, looking over the crowd and then back at him.
“What?”
“I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Mom-”
“Sit on the bench,” his itty-itty hard-as-nails mother ordered, pushing his shoulder back towards the bench behind him. “If you have to go get a seat, pick by the wall,” she explained needlessly, turning and disappearing a second later.
Staring after her uneasily, not liking the panicked look at the back of her eyes, he forced himself to drop onto the bench, feeling like a nervous kid instead of the grown man he actually was. He checked his watch, heaved a sigh, glad his feet were on the ground so he wouldn’t start swinging them the way he almost wanted to.
Glancing out at the street through the double doors, he watched the people absently.
There was a young woman pushing a stroller into a bookstore even as a young couple left the same building, bag hanging from the woman’s wrist as they hooked their arms around each other and headed down the sidewalk. There was an elderly couple sitting on a bench, the man looking pained and the woman gesturing rapidly around them, and another woman leaving a clothing store with definite annoyance in her stride-
Nate sat up straight without thinking, interest sparking as he leaned forward to get a better angle as he watched the woman he’d crashed into in the lobby from the night before reach a small sedan and fling open the door, long hair lifting in a breeze before she twisted into the driver’s seat and slammed the door violently.
Pretty, he thought stupidly, trying to make out her profile through the open car window, throwing long hair off a shoulder. He cringed helplessly when he saw her stuff a cigarette into her mouth with a quick glance around but she was still enough to keep him fascinated, sitting and staring like an idiot even after she drove away and vanished again.
Flustered, completely thrown by it, he looked around nervously, scratched the back of his neck.
Jumped like a kid with his hand in the cookie jar when someone touched his shoulder.
“What’s the matter?”
“What?”
His mother stared at him, something tight on her face shifting into protective sharpness as she pushed him back and peered hard out the doors as if a five-foot woman could protect better than a six-foot man with actual training could. Trying to force down the familiar warmth it caused in him, how willing she’d always been to throw herself into a fight to protect, he got to his feet and gave her the most comforting grin he could manage. “I just zoned out for a moment.”
“Zoned out,” she repeated slowly, looking between him and the street through the doors. “What was that look for?”
“Look?” he repeated innocently, and found dark eyes narrowing suspiciously.
Annoyingly aware of how impossible it was to lie to his mother, he ducked past her into the restaurant, moving faster past the startled employee when he heard her fuzzy sound of exasperation at his blatant attempt to flee. “Nathan?”
“It was nothing.”
But his mother reached his side and nudged him with her elbow as they moved together to a table against the wall. “The last time you looked like this, you came home bragging about kissing Lyla Davis behind the school.”
God, how did she remember these things?
Trying to ignore the flush that he could feel rising up his neck, he grabbed up the menu and flipped through it even though he already knew his order. When he glanced over it once, his mother was smirking back at him and he knew it was useless. Sighing, he dropped the menu and waited as she did the same, tiny form shockingly intimidating.
“Well?”
“I bumped into someone cute last night when I was getting back to my room.”
“And?”
“I just spotted her outside- no, Mom, she drove off.” His mother, already twisting around in an attempt to see the street through the window, stopped and glanced back at him. “What?”
“Did you get a name?”
“No.” He rolled his eyes at her hopeful look. “She’s just my type, I’m allowed to look.”
“Just look?”
“She’s a smoker,” he retorted in dislike. “Besides, I like being a bachelor.”
“And that’s why you blow through girlfriends the way you do?”
“I thought that was the definition of bachelor,” Nate chuckled awkwardly, looking around for the waitress a bit desperately. When he spotted her and waved, she smiled brightly and nodded to show she understood-and went back to taking the order of a little old lady on the other side of the restaurant. “Oh, for fuck’s sake-”
“Language.”
“Sorry,” he apologized immediately, rubbing the back of his neck uneasily and pushing the menu across the table to keep him from looking at his mother. Then she sighed and he looked up helplessly, finding her staring back at him with a mortified smile that caused an instant wrench inside him. “Mom, it’s okay.”
“I’m nagging.”
“You’re not nagging.”
“I’m nagging,” she whispered raggedly, rubbing fingers compulsively across her forehead, shoulders squared and face flushing with emotion. “You’re twenty-eight years old. I shouldn’t be telling you what to do-”
“Mom-”
She fell silent, closed her eyes.
Knowing what she was struggling with, he reached across the table to gather up the hand he found there, squeeze until she looked up at him again. “I know,” he assured her, squeezing more tightly. “It’s okay, it’ll get better.”
“I’m trying too hard.”
“You’re just trying to get your feet under you,” he insisted, and got a snort of laughter in response, her free hand darting up to push loose strands of hair from her face, swipe at a cheek. “It’s a lot for anybody to handle, okay?”
“Eighteen years,” she muttered, almost to herself, eyes staring down at her hand under his.
He followed her line of sight on impulse, shifting his fingers and staring down at the plain gold band that she’d been wearing for eighteen years. Looking up again, finding his mother still staring down with a vague lost expression that broke his heart, his own eyes found the sturdy gold chain around her neck disappearing into her shirt. Ma’s ring was there, he knew.
Eighteen damn years, almost nineteen if she would have been able to hold on just a while longer.
Hell, a few more months and it would have been nineteen years and a new grandkid to boot.
Grief rising up before he could stop it, he dropped his gaze when she started to pull her hand away and then looked up defensively when he sensed motion. But it was just the waitress, glancing between them cautiously as she stepped closer, smiling encouragingly. “You two know what you want?”
His mother met his eyes across the table, something frail in the smile she had forced onto her face.
“Yeah,” he finally managed, passing over the useless menu and ordering their meals.