Needless to say, Matt had a conversation with our sister.
Also needless to say, she was taking his side.
Further something I personally thought was needless to say, I could opine about her doing this because, if someone took Matt to task for carrying his resentment about Dad on for far too long, they might also take her to task for being adrift.
Wisely, I decided not to bring up that last point when Sasha told me off.
I could try, but as I’d done it countless times before, I knew I’d fail in any effort to brush aside one of my siblings being mad at me. A sheer impossibility when both of them were.
We might bicker, even have words, but we didn’t fight much.
However, when we did, it upset me.
Greatly.
Therefore, definitely in a cold war with Matt, and tensions escalating with Sasha, I was standing, freezing my satin-covered ass off, facing a new year that was going to be upon me in under ten minutes, and thinking this was becoming typical.
Out with the shitty old.
And in with the shitty new.
On this thought, my eyes flew open, and I emitted a surprised peep when a weight landed on my shoulders.
I whirled, and when I did, the heavy camel hair overcoat I was suddenly wearing whirled with me.
And there stood Judge, and he did it close, with a thick burgundy scarf wrapped around his neck and his hands lifted.
To me.
He used them to pull the lapels so tightly closed at my chest, my upper body swayed at the same time it contracted with the snug fit.
He kept his hands there as he lifted his eyes from them to mine and said in his deep, and now seemingly irritated voice, “You’re a lunatic.”
“Well, hello,” I replied. “So very lovely to see you again.”
He scowled at me, and it was then I smelled his cologne.
He hadn’t worn cologne the other times I’d been in his presence.
For my peace of mind, I wished he hadn’t worn it now either.
My nose picked up the herby head note of basil, definite heart note of plum with the base note of cedar.
If I had built the scent myself, I would have picked the same things for him, though I probably would have gone for bergamot or mint as a head note.
“You’re barely clothed, are you trying to freeze yourself to death?” he demanded, breaking into my fervent mental scent concocting.
“Allow us both, upon our much-dreaded reunion, not to exaggerate,” I replied. “I’m hardly barely clothed.”
“Every guy in there has been staring at your tits, or your ass, all night long,” he shot back.
I stared up at him.
“If Sully, Gage, Duncan, Harv, your brother, Rix and me hadn’t been liberally disbursing death glares, I could have easily punched fifteen men in the throat tonight.”
My gaze skittered to the windows, vaguely wondering who Rix was, not so vaguely wondering if this was true.
“Chloe, look at me,” he growled.
Yes.
A growl.
I looked to him even as my entire body got warmer, and it wasn’t all due to the coat.
I also started to feel peeved.
These contradictory emotions weren’t alarming.
For me, this happened a lot.
He tightened his fists in what I hoped was his own coat (I hoped this not only because it would be bad that he stole someone else’s for this interlude, but also it was a fabulous coat and said many good things about his level of taste—good things, I hastened to remind myself, I did not care about).
“Now, see, I came tonight expecting you to be here,” he stated. “And I came tonight expecting to have a conversation with you. And so I came here ready to apologize. But now, after hours of your horseshit, I’m wondering what I should be apologizing for.”
My…
Horseshit?
“You came here to—?”
I didn’t finish that question.
“I came here for Duncan’s yearly gig, and yeah, I came here hoping to talk to you.”
“Well, I’ve been here all night,” I pointed out.
“I have too,” he returned.
Did he mean…?
“Are you saying you expected me to come to you?” I asked, my words dripping with my feelings on the absolute absurdity of that idea.
“Fuck yeah, I expected you to come to me. How else was it gonna go?”
Apparently, I was going to need to state the obvious.
This, I did.
“You could have come to me.”
“Really? Was it me who verbally handed you your ass months ago?”
Hmm.
“And let’s talk about that,” he continued, taking his hands out of his coat but doing it moving into me so I had no choice but to move back. As I didn’t have far to go, it didn’t take much before I hit railing, but he kept coming, so he was this close to his body touching mine. He then leaned into a hand on the railing so he was even closer, and mostly fencing me in. “That was uncool.”
His last three words were difficult for me to process, because I had a nose full of deliciously plummy cedar and an eye full of a very pissed-off Judge Oakley.
Since, due to his silence, it seemed something was required of me, I parroted, “Uncool?”
“You making those assumptions of me.”
My brain scrambled through a fog of cedarwood and glittering brown eyes in an effort to try to remember what assumptions I’d made of him.
I didn’t have enough time to succeed in this effort before Judge carried on speaking.
“For months, I felt like a dick. For months, I worried about you. For months, I kicked my own ass because you made me think I’d kicked you when you were down. Then, for the last four hours, watching the ice queen hold court nowhere near me, I wondered how I became guilty of being the player out for nothing but to tap your ass when all I did was be very obvious about the fact I’m interested in you.”
I was catching up, and as such, I reminded him, “You seem to forget our first encounter, you made assumptions about me.”
“Give it up, Chloe,” he returned instantly. “I apologized for that and you’re a big girl. I was pulling your pigtail and you know it. You also didn’t tell me to fuck off. You jumped right in. Both times. And now we’re playing,” he twisted at the waist (though did it and still managed not to move an inch out of my space) and flung an arm behind him to indicate the party inside, “these games?”
“I’m not playing any games,” I returned.
His eyes dropped to his coat then came back to mine.
“Your mom’s a movie star and still, I spent time getting to know her tonight, finding out she’s one of the most down-to-earth ladies I’ve ever met. Even in red satin. What’s your excuse?”
“I hardly wore this for you,” I scoffed.
“Who’d you wear it for? Shasta?” he retorted.
Shasta was Bowie’s husky dog, one of three dogs and two cats (and a rabbit) in his (and now Mom’s) menagerie.
But oh no.
He did not.
He did not get to think anything I did was for him.
I straightened, which meant his coat that I happened to be wearing brushed his chest.
“I don’t dress for men,” I hissed.
“Coulda fooled me,” he fired back.
“You have a high opinion of yourself.”