fic: colorblind - three
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.
Prologue; One; Two
3;
Maggie Stone rarely felt old.
Sure, she kept the more-than-just-hints of gray in her hair dyed because she had gotten a bit vainer after a life with Lena, but she was in good shape- she exercised regularly beyond running around the hospital all day long, and she ate well except for the cravings that had never left her. She knew she was well built, had gained weight in places that only accentuated the subtle curves she’d had when she was younger. She was still attractive (Lena had always insisted she actually looked better as she got older) and she had never lacked interest from either sex.
All that aside, she now felt old.
Only some of it came from her recent loss, she knew.
No, this latest tidal wave of emotion came from an all-too familiar source.
Twenty years vanished in two seconds following Greenlee’s rather frantic little text message.
It took a good hour of careful verbal dancing over lunch to convince Nate to allow her to “catch a nap” alone, as much good as it would do- he’d gone on leave just to come stalk her in Pine Valley, and she knew better than to think he’d willingly leave her side for anything more than a few hours. As long as she was here, he would find a way to stay at her side.
So she had him drop her off at the apartment complex she used whenever she was in town, reminded him of movie night when he offered to come in with her. The slight squint that met her words promised that he saw through her but he nodded and told her he’d be back later and that he’d bring everything she wanted, from action movies to candy reserves.
Maggie flung her bag to the couch as soon as she got in, was dialing Greenlee’s number a second later.
“She cannot be here.”
“Jesus, hi to you, too.”
“Greenlee.”
“I only found out after Kendall called me, okay? It’s not my fault.”
“She cannot be here,” Maggie repeated a bit desperately, stalking into the kitchen area and swinging open the refrigerator to peer in absently. The junk food was a packed knot in her stomach, and she knew if she didn’t calm down it was going to come back up. It was another thing notching up her blood pressure now. “When is the wedding happening?” she asked after a moment, seeing an out.
“We don’t even know anymore…” Hope was again gone, leaving Maggie to close her eyes and sigh. “I mean, if everything goes well it should only be a few weeks but everyone’s going crazy so we don’t know when anything’s going to happen.” There was a sigh, Greenlee’s annoyance unmistakable. “I think Erin’s developing a tic.”
“Well, Chris is pretty level-headed, so it shouldn’t take too long, right?”
“I don’t know,” Greenlee enunciated, sounding more than a little aggrieved, tone of voice suggesting she was tapping a toe against the floor and rolling her eyes. Trying to stop shaking, Maggie finally snagged a jug of juice, kicking the fridge closed and dropping it to the counter, searching for a glass.
Think.
She needed to think, to process, to stop panicking and actually figure this all out.
Maggie wasn’t ready to go home yet- Pine Valley was painful, sure, but she couldn’t leave yet, couldn’t disconnect, needed to be here with David and Greenlee, needed to find some kind of balance here before she tried to go back to the house.
“-wants you to be there.”
Wait.
“What?” she asked blankly, feeling more than a little confused at the few words that actually sank into her skull.
“You’re invited,” Greenlee stated. “Adam invited you along with David and me, and he knows you’re in town.”
“He wants me to go to the wedding?” she asked slowly, frozen holding a glass and no doubt looking like an idiot.
“Well, you’re as much his family as we are, so… yeah- Oh, and Nate, too, if he’s still in town when they finally get everything done.” A beat of silence, Greenlee considering. “And you know Mike and Tina and the girls are invited, of course, if they suddenly popped up or anything.”
“Right,” she replied. She imagined Mike and Tina showing up at the wedding with the twins on hand, and shivered helplessly at where that mental image went. The twins would escape and stage a coup under the wedding cake table, and Tina would be ready to pop but still run around preaching the values of meditation and Chakra work (whatever that was). “Right,” she repeated, nodding to herself and deciding that such a thing would not happen.
“Nate’s in town, right? If he isn’t gone when it happens, he can be your date.”
Maggie considered that next, her younger son escorting her to her cousin’s wedding.
“I’ll go if I can,” she promised, deciding that going with her son was a less intimidating possibility than the mental image of the twins unleashing world domination between the ceremony and the cake cutting. “You think Bianca will come?” she asked after a tense heartbeat, hoping for a firm negative on that appearance.
“If we’re lucky, she won’t,” Greenlee said slowly, distaste staining her voice.
Maggie winced helplessly, hand holding the jug wavering for a second as she swallowed down the familiar bitterness.
Bianca had made it perfectly clear what place she had in Miranda’s life- none.
After the first few years spent firing off e-mails and sending gifts, she had accepted it.
What Maggie knew of that period, disconnected from her family in Pine Valley, were only the basics, the architect wife and the existence of the “twister Kane baby” (as the press had called her) but nothing beyond that. Then there’d been the nasty divorce and, in the years since then, Bianca had become a favorite of the gossip rags- the two DUIs had been big messes, Maggie remembered, along with the stories told of her less public embarrassments behind office doors.
Then Erica Kane had died barely three months after Jack, and Bianca had married again a month after her mother’s death, some twenty-five year old little fashion designer. She had later divorced said little fashion designer six months after the nuptials, rumors persisting that she’d cheated on her newest wife, rumors that were helped by the knowledge that the now loaded designer had put careful wording into the pre-nup in regards to infidelity.
Since then, it had been a string of cringe-worthy public appearances.
“I doubt she’ll show up,” Maggie sighed, nodding.
Hoping that she was right and Bianca wouldn’t show up.
“Well, Kendall’s cringing over her coming, is biting everybody’s heads off over it.” There was a sigh, Greenlee clearly sure that she was the one enduring the most of Kendall’s abuse. It wasn’t true, and they both knew it, but Kendall and Greenlee had been too close too long to be shaken out of their system. Hell, it had worked for years, so maybe they had found the secret. “Not that I blame her, I mean, we can never forget the bathroom showdown, right?”
Maggie thought of the sisters she had known years before, the secret pregnancy and the endless days of courtroom drama, and winced again, forced to grip her glass more tightly to keep from dropping it.
“Nope, can’t forget that,” she agreed dryly, and swallowed down the bitter taste in her mouth with a swig of juice.
It didn’t work.
“Mom’s developing a tic,” Adam intoned to his partner, knowing without looking that Chris was grinning childishly.
JR had quickly settled beside Ryan when they arrived, the two men keeping themselves on the sidelines as redhead and brunette exchanged biting remarks in overly friendly tones over the spread of papers across the coffee table. Longtime friends or not, Kendall was driving the usually diplomatic Mrs. Chandler to the brink of her self-control.
And, as Adam had mentioned, a muscle was beginning to twitch very slightly by Erin’s eye, a warning that only a wedding-crazed mother or a complete idiot would dare ignore.
Never an idiot, Kendall was currently wedding-crazed.
“-doves will complete the ceremony.”
“But the boys-” (Adam and Chris both snorted, never tiring of being referred to as the ‘boys’ despite their age) “-don’t want any doves, as they’ve said repeatedly.” Kendall smiled back brilliantly and Erin smiled even more broadly, looking more than a little as if she was hurting her jaw. “This is the boys’ wedding.”
“It’s a family gathering.”
“Yes, a family gathering celebrating the boys.”
Emma, perched between mother and aunt, only moved enough to snap her eyes from one to the other.
“Yes,” Kendall chirped happily, hint of something deranged in her tone. “And the family votes for doves.”
“I don’t want doves for my wedding,” Chris offered uselessly, and found himself utterly ignored. Sighing, he looked at his father and Uncle JR, found both of them shaking their heads. He glanced towards Adam. “Do we want doves?”
“No,” Adam said for what had to be the millionth time.
“We don’t want doves,” Chris told his mother.
Kendall just waved his words away, intent on breaking down Erin’s arguments. Holding up a few colored squares, she waved them in her sister-in-law’s face. “See, they’ll compliment the red shades-”
“We want tan,” Adam told Kendall. “Tan and black, remember?”
“-and they’ll work with the zinnias!”
“Zinnias- Wait, zinnias?” Adam repeated, feeling his eyes open wide. “I don’t want zinnias,” he sputtered to Chris. “We decided no zinnias because we wanted the orchids. Tan orchids,” he insisted, swinging his gaze rather desperately to his stepmother and getting a sympathetic twitch in response.
“Our decisions were ignored,” Chris informed him. “We are voiceless, and our choices mean nothing.”
“Zinnias work with the theme-”
Chris snorted, bending forward to scratch behind Molly’s ears where she stretched out between his legs, eyes intent on the door that led to the kitchen and the dining room table full of rapidly cooling food they had been promised long hours before. “Maybe we could sneak in orchids,” he muttered under his breath.
“No orchids,” Kendall barked, slapping a palm against the color squares. “And it’s white and red.”
“Tan and black,” Adam insisted stubbornly, not caring that he sounded childish. “We decided our wedding colors-”
Something stopped him, a knee knocking against his hard.
Frowning, he glanced over at Chris only to find the younger man focused on their dog, making little kissing noises and rubbing her skull playfully until she climbed to her feet and dropped her head into his lap, peering up at him with an unmistakably wounded air. He opened his mouth but a knee hit his again and he clicked his teeth together, baffled.
A glance to the other side showed his father and future father-in-law talking in quiet tones about what seemed to be a mission to sneak into the kitchen while their wives were busy with WWIII.
When he looked back at Chris, he found himself met with a long stare.
Lost, he opened his mouth a third time- and got yet another bruising smack of a knee against his.
Chris had narrowed his eyes, was shaking his head a fraction of an inch to the side.
Oh.
Okay.
Mollified, remembering that Chris had always been better with the scheming than he was, Adam gave up on convincing Kendall to retract her claws from the wedding. Ignoring the two of them, their mothers were now gesturing at each other heatedly with color squares, looking a little unhinged and like they were ready to start swinging any second.
“Here,” Chris said suddenly, getting to his feet and leading Molly to Adam. “Go take her out for a few minutes.” Adam hooked his fingers in the dog’s collar, lifted an eyebrow, but Chris just grinned back, shaking his head, looking somehow just as crazy as his mother. “I have to go make a call,” he explained brightly, and walked right past the two bickering women and out the front door, hand digging in his pocket as he went.
“Right,” Adam said, “right.” He stood up, flashing his dad and Ryan a smile. “I’m just going to take her out.”
That said, he guided her through the kitchen door and then past the food (she only whined once, knowing the utter uselessness of such an endeavor) and then wrestled with the back door, releasing the dog as soon as it was open. She bounced down the steps and took off into the yard, and he peered at the tree curiously, trying to figure out why it had an arm.
Then he realized it was Miranda and set off across the yard, circling the tree to find her behind it.
“I’m not doing anything,” she said around the cigarette, set of her jaw suggesting she wasn’t in the mood.
“You know,” he answered slowly, “when Chris finds out you’re smoking, his head’s just gonna…” He gestured over his head a little with his fingers spread out, adding a quick puff of breath. “You’ll have to help me glue all the pieces together.”
“He’s not going to know,” Miranda shrugged, only the shift of her stare offering her unease.
“I’m going to start off my marriage on lies?”
“It’s only two or three a day,” she retorted, flicking off a bit of ash and taking a long drag. “I’m still quitting.”
“I don’t think you know what that word means.”
“It used to be a pack a day, now it’s only two or three.”
“Quitting,” he continued easily, “that’s when you stop doing something.”
She just grunted at him, scuffing the toe of her pump into the grass and pointedly ignoring his gaze.
“Miranda-”
“Cold turkey after the wedding,” she snapped abruptly, dropping the last inch to the ground and grinding her shoe down onto it with more force than was needed. “Besides, I won’t need the stress relief when I get back to Paris.”
Now it was his turn to grunt, scowling at the thought.
“Not you, too-”
“I don’t need to give you the speech about lung cancer again, do I?”
Miranda just made a muted noise in her throat, letting darkened hair fall around her face and hide her from view.
On impulse, he reached out to tuck loose strands behind her ear, see her face- but she only turned her head away more, refusing the touch with enough anger in her shoulders to make him grimace, drop his hand in defeat.
They shared the same birthday, had played together when they had been younger; his father loved her every bit as much as he did him or Charlie, tried to protect her the way he protected his two biological children. Hell, Adam had come out to her first, a drunken phone call in the middle of the night where she’d assured him that she'd figured it out a good year before and didn’t mind one way or another.
(His parents had also already figured it out, he had later found to his relief and embarrassment.)
If she had grown up in Pine Valley, they’d have gone to high school together.
Now she only talked to him when he cornered her.
Adam worked hard to be passive-whenever he stood up for himself or people he loved, he had strangers jumping down his throat accusing him of “acting like a Chandler,” as if trying to protect people was a mortal sin. He got side looks and angry tirades when he acted overprotective or a little crazy. Charlie embraced it, used it to scare people when she had to, but then, she had Erin’s determination running through her veins.
And Chris… well, was a Kane; people liked it when he acted overprotective and a little crazy.
After a lifetime of watching his father struggle to protect his kids while people vilified him for it, Adam understood it now, why his father was only himself around his family, the people he trusted. The way his father’s jaw set, the way he threw out words, even the way he went quiet after it was over and withdrew to mend his own wounds, Adam recognized it.
So it stung, Miranda somehow so much worse than she’d been the last time he’d seen her.
“Did something happen?” he asked quietly after a few more moments of silence, “Since you left last time?” Miranda was silent, scuffing her shoe in the grass and refusing to look at him. Blowing out a breath, he touched her arm, only felt the muscle tighten so much he dropped his hand again, trying not to make things worse. “Are you forgetting to eat again?”
“I don’t understand what people don’t get about privacy,” she huffed nastily.
“We’re worried about-”
“I’m fine,” she whispered, gesturing at herself broadly, something brittle in her voice. “I just take my work seriously-”
“And forget eating,” he reminded her, “and sleeping, and now you’ve started smoking again. And your hair got darker, I notice,” he added, reaching out to flick a few strands before she slapped his hand away, harder than needed.
“I look better as a brunette-”
“Why are you doing this to yourself?”
Silence greeted the words he couldn’t hold in, dark eyes carefully blank when she finally looked at him.
When he didn’t look away, she opened her mouth but then hesitated, finally licked her bottom lip self-consciously. Her hands lifted to touch her hips, dropped for a moment, and then one lifted again to press a palm against her stomach.
Big brown eyes swung to the house and then back to Adam.
Weakened by the way her lower lip began to tremble, he reached out, touched her arm.
She jerked back as if someone had burned her, shook her head violently. “Not now,” she snapped, eyes shuttering and face closing, features going hard as she stepped away. “I don’t have time for this nonsense now while the crazy wedding is being planned, okay? Corner me another day, when I have time.”
Last words dying in a forced laugh, she stalked back to the house on stiff legs, shoulders set against the world.
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.
Prologue; One; Two
3;
Maggie Stone rarely felt old.
Sure, she kept the more-than-just-hints of gray in her hair dyed because she had gotten a bit vainer after a life with Lena, but she was in good shape- she exercised regularly beyond running around the hospital all day long, and she ate well except for the cravings that had never left her. She knew she was well built, had gained weight in places that only accentuated the subtle curves she’d had when she was younger. She was still attractive (Lena had always insisted she actually looked better as she got older) and she had never lacked interest from either sex.
All that aside, she now felt old.
Only some of it came from her recent loss, she knew.
No, this latest tidal wave of emotion came from an all-too familiar source.
Twenty years vanished in two seconds following Greenlee’s rather frantic little text message.
It took a good hour of careful verbal dancing over lunch to convince Nate to allow her to “catch a nap” alone, as much good as it would do- he’d gone on leave just to come stalk her in Pine Valley, and she knew better than to think he’d willingly leave her side for anything more than a few hours. As long as she was here, he would find a way to stay at her side.
So she had him drop her off at the apartment complex she used whenever she was in town, reminded him of movie night when he offered to come in with her. The slight squint that met her words promised that he saw through her but he nodded and told her he’d be back later and that he’d bring everything she wanted, from action movies to candy reserves.
Maggie flung her bag to the couch as soon as she got in, was dialing Greenlee’s number a second later.
“She cannot be here.”
“Jesus, hi to you, too.”
“Greenlee.”
“I only found out after Kendall called me, okay? It’s not my fault.”
“She cannot be here,” Maggie repeated a bit desperately, stalking into the kitchen area and swinging open the refrigerator to peer in absently. The junk food was a packed knot in her stomach, and she knew if she didn’t calm down it was going to come back up. It was another thing notching up her blood pressure now. “When is the wedding happening?” she asked after a moment, seeing an out.
“We don’t even know anymore…” Hope was again gone, leaving Maggie to close her eyes and sigh. “I mean, if everything goes well it should only be a few weeks but everyone’s going crazy so we don’t know when anything’s going to happen.” There was a sigh, Greenlee’s annoyance unmistakable. “I think Erin’s developing a tic.”
“Well, Chris is pretty level-headed, so it shouldn’t take too long, right?”
“I don’t know,” Greenlee enunciated, sounding more than a little aggrieved, tone of voice suggesting she was tapping a toe against the floor and rolling her eyes. Trying to stop shaking, Maggie finally snagged a jug of juice, kicking the fridge closed and dropping it to the counter, searching for a glass.
Think.
She needed to think, to process, to stop panicking and actually figure this all out.
Maggie wasn’t ready to go home yet- Pine Valley was painful, sure, but she couldn’t leave yet, couldn’t disconnect, needed to be here with David and Greenlee, needed to find some kind of balance here before she tried to go back to the house.
“-wants you to be there.”
Wait.
“What?” she asked blankly, feeling more than a little confused at the few words that actually sank into her skull.
“You’re invited,” Greenlee stated. “Adam invited you along with David and me, and he knows you’re in town.”
“He wants me to go to the wedding?” she asked slowly, frozen holding a glass and no doubt looking like an idiot.
“Well, you’re as much his family as we are, so… yeah- Oh, and Nate, too, if he’s still in town when they finally get everything done.” A beat of silence, Greenlee considering. “And you know Mike and Tina and the girls are invited, of course, if they suddenly popped up or anything.”
“Right,” she replied. She imagined Mike and Tina showing up at the wedding with the twins on hand, and shivered helplessly at where that mental image went. The twins would escape and stage a coup under the wedding cake table, and Tina would be ready to pop but still run around preaching the values of meditation and Chakra work (whatever that was). “Right,” she repeated, nodding to herself and deciding that such a thing would not happen.
“Nate’s in town, right? If he isn’t gone when it happens, he can be your date.”
Maggie considered that next, her younger son escorting her to her cousin’s wedding.
“I’ll go if I can,” she promised, deciding that going with her son was a less intimidating possibility than the mental image of the twins unleashing world domination between the ceremony and the cake cutting. “You think Bianca will come?” she asked after a tense heartbeat, hoping for a firm negative on that appearance.
“If we’re lucky, she won’t,” Greenlee said slowly, distaste staining her voice.
Maggie winced helplessly, hand holding the jug wavering for a second as she swallowed down the familiar bitterness.
Bianca had made it perfectly clear what place she had in Miranda’s life- none.
After the first few years spent firing off e-mails and sending gifts, she had accepted it.
What Maggie knew of that period, disconnected from her family in Pine Valley, were only the basics, the architect wife and the existence of the “twister Kane baby” (as the press had called her) but nothing beyond that. Then there’d been the nasty divorce and, in the years since then, Bianca had become a favorite of the gossip rags- the two DUIs had been big messes, Maggie remembered, along with the stories told of her less public embarrassments behind office doors.
Then Erica Kane had died barely three months after Jack, and Bianca had married again a month after her mother’s death, some twenty-five year old little fashion designer. She had later divorced said little fashion designer six months after the nuptials, rumors persisting that she’d cheated on her newest wife, rumors that were helped by the knowledge that the now loaded designer had put careful wording into the pre-nup in regards to infidelity.
Since then, it had been a string of cringe-worthy public appearances.
“I doubt she’ll show up,” Maggie sighed, nodding.
Hoping that she was right and Bianca wouldn’t show up.
“Well, Kendall’s cringing over her coming, is biting everybody’s heads off over it.” There was a sigh, Greenlee clearly sure that she was the one enduring the most of Kendall’s abuse. It wasn’t true, and they both knew it, but Kendall and Greenlee had been too close too long to be shaken out of their system. Hell, it had worked for years, so maybe they had found the secret. “Not that I blame her, I mean, we can never forget the bathroom showdown, right?”
Maggie thought of the sisters she had known years before, the secret pregnancy and the endless days of courtroom drama, and winced again, forced to grip her glass more tightly to keep from dropping it.
“Nope, can’t forget that,” she agreed dryly, and swallowed down the bitter taste in her mouth with a swig of juice.
It didn’t work.
“Mom’s developing a tic,” Adam intoned to his partner, knowing without looking that Chris was grinning childishly.
JR had quickly settled beside Ryan when they arrived, the two men keeping themselves on the sidelines as redhead and brunette exchanged biting remarks in overly friendly tones over the spread of papers across the coffee table. Longtime friends or not, Kendall was driving the usually diplomatic Mrs. Chandler to the brink of her self-control.
And, as Adam had mentioned, a muscle was beginning to twitch very slightly by Erin’s eye, a warning that only a wedding-crazed mother or a complete idiot would dare ignore.
Never an idiot, Kendall was currently wedding-crazed.
“-doves will complete the ceremony.”
“But the boys-” (Adam and Chris both snorted, never tiring of being referred to as the ‘boys’ despite their age) “-don’t want any doves, as they’ve said repeatedly.” Kendall smiled back brilliantly and Erin smiled even more broadly, looking more than a little as if she was hurting her jaw. “This is the boys’ wedding.”
“It’s a family gathering.”
“Yes, a family gathering celebrating the boys.”
Emma, perched between mother and aunt, only moved enough to snap her eyes from one to the other.
“Yes,” Kendall chirped happily, hint of something deranged in her tone. “And the family votes for doves.”
“I don’t want doves for my wedding,” Chris offered uselessly, and found himself utterly ignored. Sighing, he looked at his father and Uncle JR, found both of them shaking their heads. He glanced towards Adam. “Do we want doves?”
“No,” Adam said for what had to be the millionth time.
“We don’t want doves,” Chris told his mother.
Kendall just waved his words away, intent on breaking down Erin’s arguments. Holding up a few colored squares, she waved them in her sister-in-law’s face. “See, they’ll compliment the red shades-”
“We want tan,” Adam told Kendall. “Tan and black, remember?”
“-and they’ll work with the zinnias!”
“Zinnias- Wait, zinnias?” Adam repeated, feeling his eyes open wide. “I don’t want zinnias,” he sputtered to Chris. “We decided no zinnias because we wanted the orchids. Tan orchids,” he insisted, swinging his gaze rather desperately to his stepmother and getting a sympathetic twitch in response.
“Our decisions were ignored,” Chris informed him. “We are voiceless, and our choices mean nothing.”
“Zinnias work with the theme-”
Chris snorted, bending forward to scratch behind Molly’s ears where she stretched out between his legs, eyes intent on the door that led to the kitchen and the dining room table full of rapidly cooling food they had been promised long hours before. “Maybe we could sneak in orchids,” he muttered under his breath.
“No orchids,” Kendall barked, slapping a palm against the color squares. “And it’s white and red.”
“Tan and black,” Adam insisted stubbornly, not caring that he sounded childish. “We decided our wedding colors-”
Something stopped him, a knee knocking against his hard.
Frowning, he glanced over at Chris only to find the younger man focused on their dog, making little kissing noises and rubbing her skull playfully until she climbed to her feet and dropped her head into his lap, peering up at him with an unmistakably wounded air. He opened his mouth but a knee hit his again and he clicked his teeth together, baffled.
A glance to the other side showed his father and future father-in-law talking in quiet tones about what seemed to be a mission to sneak into the kitchen while their wives were busy with WWIII.
When he looked back at Chris, he found himself met with a long stare.
Lost, he opened his mouth a third time- and got yet another bruising smack of a knee against his.
Chris had narrowed his eyes, was shaking his head a fraction of an inch to the side.
Oh.
Okay.
Mollified, remembering that Chris had always been better with the scheming than he was, Adam gave up on convincing Kendall to retract her claws from the wedding. Ignoring the two of them, their mothers were now gesturing at each other heatedly with color squares, looking a little unhinged and like they were ready to start swinging any second.
“Here,” Chris said suddenly, getting to his feet and leading Molly to Adam. “Go take her out for a few minutes.” Adam hooked his fingers in the dog’s collar, lifted an eyebrow, but Chris just grinned back, shaking his head, looking somehow just as crazy as his mother. “I have to go make a call,” he explained brightly, and walked right past the two bickering women and out the front door, hand digging in his pocket as he went.
“Right,” Adam said, “right.” He stood up, flashing his dad and Ryan a smile. “I’m just going to take her out.”
That said, he guided her through the kitchen door and then past the food (she only whined once, knowing the utter uselessness of such an endeavor) and then wrestled with the back door, releasing the dog as soon as it was open. She bounced down the steps and took off into the yard, and he peered at the tree curiously, trying to figure out why it had an arm.
Then he realized it was Miranda and set off across the yard, circling the tree to find her behind it.
“I’m not doing anything,” she said around the cigarette, set of her jaw suggesting she wasn’t in the mood.
“You know,” he answered slowly, “when Chris finds out you’re smoking, his head’s just gonna…” He gestured over his head a little with his fingers spread out, adding a quick puff of breath. “You’ll have to help me glue all the pieces together.”
“He’s not going to know,” Miranda shrugged, only the shift of her stare offering her unease.
“I’m going to start off my marriage on lies?”
“It’s only two or three a day,” she retorted, flicking off a bit of ash and taking a long drag. “I’m still quitting.”
“I don’t think you know what that word means.”
“It used to be a pack a day, now it’s only two or three.”
“Quitting,” he continued easily, “that’s when you stop doing something.”
She just grunted at him, scuffing the toe of her pump into the grass and pointedly ignoring his gaze.
“Miranda-”
“Cold turkey after the wedding,” she snapped abruptly, dropping the last inch to the ground and grinding her shoe down onto it with more force than was needed. “Besides, I won’t need the stress relief when I get back to Paris.”
Now it was his turn to grunt, scowling at the thought.
“Not you, too-”
“I don’t need to give you the speech about lung cancer again, do I?”
Miranda just made a muted noise in her throat, letting darkened hair fall around her face and hide her from view.
On impulse, he reached out to tuck loose strands behind her ear, see her face- but she only turned her head away more, refusing the touch with enough anger in her shoulders to make him grimace, drop his hand in defeat.
They shared the same birthday, had played together when they had been younger; his father loved her every bit as much as he did him or Charlie, tried to protect her the way he protected his two biological children. Hell, Adam had come out to her first, a drunken phone call in the middle of the night where she’d assured him that she'd figured it out a good year before and didn’t mind one way or another.
(His parents had also already figured it out, he had later found to his relief and embarrassment.)
If she had grown up in Pine Valley, they’d have gone to high school together.
Now she only talked to him when he cornered her.
Adam worked hard to be passive-whenever he stood up for himself or people he loved, he had strangers jumping down his throat accusing him of “acting like a Chandler,” as if trying to protect people was a mortal sin. He got side looks and angry tirades when he acted overprotective or a little crazy. Charlie embraced it, used it to scare people when she had to, but then, she had Erin’s determination running through her veins.
And Chris… well, was a Kane; people liked it when he acted overprotective and a little crazy.
After a lifetime of watching his father struggle to protect his kids while people vilified him for it, Adam understood it now, why his father was only himself around his family, the people he trusted. The way his father’s jaw set, the way he threw out words, even the way he went quiet after it was over and withdrew to mend his own wounds, Adam recognized it.
So it stung, Miranda somehow so much worse than she’d been the last time he’d seen her.
“Did something happen?” he asked quietly after a few more moments of silence, “Since you left last time?” Miranda was silent, scuffing her shoe in the grass and refusing to look at him. Blowing out a breath, he touched her arm, only felt the muscle tighten so much he dropped his hand again, trying not to make things worse. “Are you forgetting to eat again?”
“I don’t understand what people don’t get about privacy,” she huffed nastily.
“We’re worried about-”
“I’m fine,” she whispered, gesturing at herself broadly, something brittle in her voice. “I just take my work seriously-”
“And forget eating,” he reminded her, “and sleeping, and now you’ve started smoking again. And your hair got darker, I notice,” he added, reaching out to flick a few strands before she slapped his hand away, harder than needed.
“I look better as a brunette-”
“Why are you doing this to yourself?”
Silence greeted the words he couldn’t hold in, dark eyes carefully blank when she finally looked at him.
When he didn’t look away, she opened her mouth but then hesitated, finally licked her bottom lip self-consciously. Her hands lifted to touch her hips, dropped for a moment, and then one lifted again to press a palm against her stomach.
Big brown eyes swung to the house and then back to Adam.
Weakened by the way her lower lip began to tremble, he reached out, touched her arm.
She jerked back as if someone had burned her, shook her head violently. “Not now,” she snapped, eyes shuttering and face closing, features going hard as she stepped away. “I don’t have time for this nonsense now while the crazy wedding is being planned, okay? Corner me another day, when I have time.”
Last words dying in a forced laugh, she stalked back to the house on stiff legs, shoulders set against the world.