Restored (The Walsh Series Book 5) (2 page)

N
ovember

T
iel leaned into me
, nodding toward the kitchen, and whispered, "You ready?"

I blew out a long breath and frowned. Riley was seated at the table, the sports section of the newspaper spread out before him. He was eating cereal out of a two-quart mixing bowl, and he was naked save for his Batman boxers.

"Can we wait until he's clothed?" I asked. His dress shirt, tie, and khakis were hanging off the back of the chair to his right. "I mean, I know we see his dick a lot—"

"
A lot
," Tiel murmured, her lips pursing.

"Yeah, I don't enjoy knowing that you can draw it from memory, sweetheart," I said, exasperated. My brother preferred loincloth living, and my patience for that was waning.

"Come on," she said, tangling her fingers with mine.

My thumb traced the hard lines of her ring. Her
engagement
ring. It had only been seated at that spot for twenty-four hours, and I was still high on the primal thrill of conquest.

She chose
me
, she wanted
me
, she was keeping
me
.

"The deal was we tell Riley before we tell the rest of your family, and then we tell
my
family, although I still contend they'll say something offensive about the Irish but otherwise not be able to find a single shit to give. Actually," she said with a heavy sigh, "I don't think we should bother telling my parents anything. Send them an invite, and be shocked if they show up."

"That's not one of the options," I said.

Riley growled at the newspaper and muttered, "Those motherfuckers need to get their offensive line together," before refilling his bowl.

"He's like our first baby," she said, dropping her head to my chest. "We're getting real parenting experience. From a twenty-eight year old."

"Well…" I was about to protest that Riley often appointed himself as den mother and had done a decent job of looking after me when I'd refused to look after myself, but then he spilled milk all over his bare chest and mopped it up with his tie.

I rubbed my knuckles down her belly. "I've got time if you want to work on our
next
baby."

She dipped her chin, smiling. "We worked pretty hard yesterday," she said. "I'd be surprised if you didn't get the job done."

This.

I wanted this. I wanted to stop talking about starting a family
someday
and make it a reality
today
.

It was one of the most ridiculous thoughts living in my head—and I had a lot of fucking odd thoughts up there—because I'd never imagined this for myself. Under no construct had my future ever included a wife, children, or anything beyond functional alcoholism and a thinly leashed contempt for the universe as I knew it.

But I had a recurring vision of Tiel teaching our babies music. Us going camping and fishing with our kids. Our little family eating dinner and celebrating holidays around the table I built. And I wanted those visions to be real.

We'd stopped using condoms after a long weekend away when we each thought the other packed them, and Tiel went on a rant about hating how they made her hands smell like old tires. There was also a talk about how we were a little obsessed with each other, and wanted to be together for always, and we wanted some tiny humans in our lives. Maybe a lot of tiny humans.

"I'm very goal-oriented. You give me a target and I'll hit it," I said.

"Oh, you
hit it
all right," she said with a snort.

"When will we, uh…" I cleared my throat. She didn't love it when I asked about these things. "When will we know?"

Tiel studied my tie, her bottom lip wiggling between her teeth. "Two weeks, or so." She looked up at me. "After yesterday, I'm thinking it's a sure thing."

I didn't ask why yesterday was any different from the past two months, instead bending to kiss my fiancée's forehead. "Just wait until tonight. Maybe you should clear your schedule for the week. Rest up. Let me hit the target some more."

"Let's not forget about all the meetings I have, or all the journal articles I have to finish, or the classes I have to teach."

The excitement in her eyes dimmed, but she quickly blinked it away as if she could hide her frustration from me. She didn't love her new job as an associate professor of music therapy, and though she hadn't come out and said it yet, it was the worst-kept secret in the home we shared with Riley.

There were times when I'd find her sitting in the firehouse's old communal showers-turned-studio, staring at her instruments or sheet music with none of the hunger and passion I'd once seen from her. It started shortly after she moved in here, and there was a period of time when I attributed her unease to me, and our new living arrangement. But I learned that my free-spirited girl liked this taste of the settled life, and it didn't take long to map the crests and crashes of her moods to her gig in academia.

She'd bring it up when she was ready, and I wasn't meant to rush her.

"But seriously, I'm a sure thing," she said. She held up her hand, inclining her head toward the pink diamond ring. "You can retire the pick-up lines now."

Her hand wrapped around my belt, she dragged me into the kitchen and pointed to a chair across from Riley. He looked up with a quick nod, and promptly returned to his sports page. He hated reading—always had—but he was devoted to his New England teams and didn't enjoy interruptions to his daily study of the stats.

Also, he wasn't a morning person. He didn't start speaking in complete sentences until shortly before lunch, and even then, it was limited to discussions of food.

Tiel set a spinach-papaya-cucumber smoothie beside me, and sat down with a bagel and jar of cream cheese in hand. Riley acknowledged her with a jut of his chin, and she said, "He put a ring on it."

"That's awesome," Riley said, the sleepy fog clearing from his eyes and his face breaking into a wide smile. "Awesome, just awesome. Everyone's getting married around here."

I was about to agree when Tiel said, "Wait. What? Did I miss something?"

Riley blinked to the side, his mouth open as if words were stuck on his tongue. "No. Right," he said. "Matt and Lauren, and now you guys. That's it. No one else. My bad."

Tiel and I glanced at each other, confused.

"Riley," she started, "is there something you're not telling us?" He shook his head vigorously. "Are
you
seeing someone?"

He shoved the spoon in his mouth and shook his head again. "No," he said around his cereal. "I'm not ready or looking for a commitment right now. I'm working on myself."

Tiel turned to face me. "Did he learn that line from you?"

"If he did, he didn't learn it recently," I scoffed.

"You didn't actually answer that question, Riley. So…you're not seeing anyone?" she asked. "Nothing casual? Not even a friend with benefits? None of that?"

"No," Riley said. "I was with one chick on and off through college, but she was fucking crazy. I mean,
fucking crazy
. Art chicks are freaky. Like outdoor cats. I've been a lone wolf since Dorrance."

"Outdoor cat?" Tiel said. "I don't understand that reference."

"Dorrance?" I repeated.

"Middle name," Riley said. "Her first name's Kacie, but she started going by her middle name when she got to art school. Like I said, outdoor cat."

"What's an outdoor cat?" Tiel said.

"What about the dominatrix?" I asked. "That lasted a while."

"The
dominatrix
?" Tiel repeated. "No, forget the cat, I want to hear about
that
."

Riley shrugged as he dug into his cereal. "Met a woman at a deli. Turned out she was a dominatrix. Who knew?" He pointed his spoon at Tiel. "I learned a lot, but it wasn't my scene."

Tiel laughed as she smeared cream cheese over a chunk of bagel. "All for the research?"

Riley stared at his bowl, thinking before he replied, "It was cool at first, but like I said…not my scene."

"You can't leave it at that," Tiel said. "Come on. This is a safe space. We're in the trust tree here."

I glanced to Tiel. "Is that what we're calling this place now?"

She jerked a shoulder, a smile lifting her eyes. "That's what I'm calling it, yeah."

Riley refilled his cereal, and waved his spoon at Tiel again. "Mila came at me with a big purple strap-on, told me to suck her dick, and the only thing I could think of was Shannon. So that was traumatic. I safe-worded my ass right out of there, and never went back." He frowned and glanced away. "Oh, shit, I'm not supposed to say her name."

He knocked his fist against his forehead several times while Tiel layered both hands over her mouth to keep from laughing.

"Trust tree," I said. "It stays in the trust tree."

Riley glanced up with a quick nod and returned to his breakfast. "Yeah, well, she…Ma'am…texts me every now and then. Invites me to play. But…she has too many rules and obviously, I never remembered them, and that experience reminded me that I don't enjoy having my ass whipped. I have enough problems without pretending to like ritualistic beatings."

"This has been really informative," Tiel murmured. "You think you know someone, and then… Are you okay? I feel like I should hug you now."

"Nah, it's all good. When's the wedding?" Riley asked around another mouthful of cereal. He shot a glance at Tiel. "You should know we all get into a lot of trouble at weddings. Epic trouble."

I pushed away from the table to rinse out the smoothie jar. "I think you're exaggerating," I groaned from the sink.

"And I think I'm holding the chips on more wedding night shenanigans than you can imagine," Riley said. "You're kidding yourself if you think shenanigans won't go down at your wedding. Fixing old houses and fucking up shit at weddings. It's what the Walsh kids do."

G
rowing up in a loud
, meddlesome family of six, and then choosing to work with that same family, I'd always leaned toward keeping what personal information I had left to myself. It was never about secrecy, rather the persistent need to designate something as my own. When so much existed under the umbrella of communal property, that which only I owned was treasured.

And for the past year, the treasure was Tiel.

Keeping her to myself was entirely for my benefit. She joined my brother Matt's wife, Lauren, and my brother Patrick's girlfriend, Andy, for brunch sometimes, and had drinks with my sister Shannon when their schedules aligned, and Riley begged for her homemade Greek meatballs weekly, but she was still
mine
. She didn't belong to all of us the way Lauren or Andy or Matt's marathon buddy, Nick, did, and I was selfish enough to prefer that.

But the status quo was going to change. Marriage meant change, and deep down I knew I wanted the family I made with Tiel to be part of this bigger, messier, noisier family, too. However, I still needed to protect her from the thundering herd of well-dressed beasts known as my siblings.

I girded myself for this change as we reached the tail end of our Monday morning status meeting. We did this every week: everyone around the table in our Beacon Hill office's attic conference room, all our sustainable preservation projects on the table for review, and without fail, at least ten minutes devolved into family talk.

It was go time.

"Tiel and I are getting married," I announced.

I smiled to myself while I fished my phone from my suit coat pocket. I tapped the screen, and an image of Tiel and me appeared. It still seemed unbelievable that I was going to marry this girl.

Everyone crowded around me, offering handshakes and hugs, congratulations and quips about Tiel making an honest man out of me. But Shannon was still seated, watching while Andy and my brothers offered their well wishes.

I looked up and met Shannon's eyes across the table, and I couldn't believe she was still angry at me for taking time away from the office, and that she still held Tiel responsible for that sabbatical. She couldn't accept that I'd needed the time to get my shit in order, that I'd needed to make sense of my life, that I'd needed to be really fucking alone for a little while. She couldn't comprehend that leaving was about
me
, not about Tiel, not about her.

"Shannon?"

Her expression shifted into a perfect mask of hollow happiness. It was almost humorous how hard she worked at pretending she wasn't completely fucked up. It was no secret that Something Happened—something more than being pissed at me for falling off the face of the earth for a couple of months—but every time someone asked, Shannon blinked, smiled, and rattled off assorted details about difficult negotiations or jogging some extra miles. She was laboring under the assumption that we hadn't noticed her clothes hanging off her small frame, or couldn't see deep bags under her eyes or the lonely cocktail of sadness, anger, and regret radiating from her.

"Congratulations!" she said eventually, rounding the table to wrap me in a bony hug. She felt like she was trying to disappear. "Have you set a date yet?"

I dropped my hand to her shoulder, swallowing my annoyance, and shook my head. I wanted her to freak out the way she did when Matt got engaged, and tackle Tiel and me in a screaming hug, and then yell at us for making her cry. I didn't want the boss lady right now.

"No, we didn't get that far yesterday," I said.

"Well, there's a ton to plan," she said. Her expression turned serious, and she collected her things before retreating to the staircase. I'd put money on her returning to her office and making some phone calls to get available dates for the event space at Sixty State Street.

It was like she'd forgotten how to feel anything.

Shannon gestured toward me, another stiff smile in place, and she said, "We should get dinner soon, the three of us, and start thinking about dates, venues, themes. So much to do. Colors. Flowers. Everything. Let me know what works for you two, and we'll get together."

Her heels clacking against the stone staircase echoed after her, and the conference room was silent for a long moment.