My smile deepens as I continue. “He’s married to Bethanny, and they have eleven-year-old twins, Sarah and Hayden.”
Light starts to dawn, and Holley nods in actual understanding.
“Anyway, Bethanny is…” I pause, trying to come up with an appropriate word, and Chloe fills in the gap.
“Satan’s mistress.”
“Chlo.” I try not to laugh as I shake my daughter’s shoulder in warning.
“What?” she questions. “She is. She’s really rotten to Sarah mostly, but she’s not exactly great to Hayden and Uncle Garrett either. Still, she’s an adult, so I won’t say anything else.”
Chloe flashes a knowing look in my direction, and I relent a little, elucidating, “Bethanny is, well, very…self-centered. Garrett and the kids are not.” I shrug. “But he’s tried really hard to make it work for a whole number of reasons.”
“He’s tried to make it work because no doubt her tantrums will be worse if he divorces her,” Chloe expands.
I shake my head, but not in denial. She’s right. I imagine that’s exactly why Garrett has put up with Bethanny for so long. Hell, it’s bad now—nearly intolerable, to be honest—and if he would divorce her, he’d still have to deal with all of her ungrateful bullshit, but undoubtedly worse.
For me, though, I wouldn’t even be able to stand putting my dick inside her at this point. I don’t know how he does it.
“Anyway, enough about her,” Chloe says, punctuating the last word with certified teenage attitude, and I shake her shoulder again. She ignores me. “I went shopping with them today for back-to-school stuff. Sarah has the best style. Seriously, she is chic in girl form. I can’t even explain how snatched she is.”
“How what?” I ask, just as Holley bursts into a half laugh, half cough, spewing some of her water onto the table.
“Snatched,” Chloe repeats, and full-blown hilarity fills my lungs and blocks any ability to form words.
Thankfully, Holley gathers herself enough and asks for the both of us. “Snatched? What does that mean exactly?”
“Like, fashionable,” Chloe responds, glancing between Holley and me like we’ve grown three heads. “Stylish? On-trend?”
“Ohh,” Holley hums, widening her eyes at me comically, and I return the gesture.
“In my day, that is not what the word snatch meant,” I mutter.
Chloe shakes her head, correcting, “It’s snatched…with the e-d. It’s not snatch, Dad. Geez.”
“Dance Hall Days” by Wang Chung starts to play, and I don’t hesitate.
I reach over and grab Chloe’s hand to slide her out of the booth. She comes willingly, laughing and already bobbing her head back and forth to the music. We’ve danced to this song since she was a little girl, and I imagine, one day, we’ll dance to it at her wedding.
She swings wide to the side, shaking her head at Holley, and then crooking a finger at her.
Holley refuses—a routine occurrence, I’m starting to notice—but just like me, Chloe isn’t good at taking no for an answer. She grabs Holley by the hand and pulls her out of the booth and shoves her toward me. I catch her on a spin, swinging her around the floor and then tucking her in as we shuffle from one side to another.
The song fades out pretty quickly, and “Faithfully” by Journey fades in. I expect Holley to pull away, but when she doesn’t, I tuck her into my arms and sway us around the floor. Her head rests on my shoulder, and for a brief second, I almost can’t even form a thought.
Damn, she feels good in my arms.
I glance over to Chloe, who looks on from our booth with a smile on her face. It’s such a foreign feeling. In fact, I haven’t felt like this in so long, I’m not sure I even recognize what this is.
Holley’s hair smells like lavender as we spin and step to the beat, and a weird memory of Chloe as a toddler flashes in my mind. It was always part of her bedtime routine to put on lavender-scented lotion to soothe her into sleep. As a result, it was always a calming smell to me too. Probably because it signified that I’d survived another day as a dad—that I’d managed to keep my kid happy and healthy and alive.
As a result, smelling it now, in Holley’s hair…it feels overwhelming. Calming. Like having her here in my arms at the end of the long day is the peaceful transition I didn’t even know I needed.
The thoughts are insane—a seriously big jump to make without any