Page 266 of How to Kiss a Hawthorne Brother
“Don’t take Lennox,” Kate says a little too quickly. “I’ll come with you. I feel like getting out of the house anyway.”
They hurry off, pausing in the entryway long enough to put on coats and hats and boots. Kate shoots a furtive glance over her shoulder, and then they disappear out the door.
“Pretty sure this is her leaving us alone on purpose,” Tatum says, humor in her voice.
“I’d put money on it. I used to think having so many brothers was annoying, but it’s not near as bad as having so many meddlingsisters.”
She smiles. “They love you.”
“They irritate me.”
“They just want you to be happy. I’m getting the sense that’s the way the Hawthorne family works.”
There’s a wistfulness to her voice that immediately sobers me. Having so many meddling siblings and now siblings-in-lawcanbe irritating, but mostly, it’s pretty amazing. Sometimes I forget how lucky I am to be so close to my family.
I fold up the game board and drop it into the box. “Any siblings for you?”
“An older brother, Daniel, and an older sister, Bree. But they’re eight and ten years older than me, so we didn’t really grow up together. Not like you and your siblings did.”
“Do either of them work with your dad?”
“Not even a little bit. Daniel is a doctor in Chicago, and he doesn’t get along with Dad at all.” She hands me the lid to the game, and I place it on the box. “He and Bree do okay, but I think she keeps stuff surface level on purpose just to make it easier. She runs her own marketing firm in St. Louis.”
“What about your mom?”
Tatum is quiet for a long moment. “She died last year,” she finally says. “We weren’t really close. She and my dad split when I was twelve, and she moved home to France.”
I lean forward the slightest bit, one elbow propped on the card table Brody set up for the game, and brush my fingers across her knee. “I’m sorry. That must have been tough.”
She lifts her shoulders. “We weren’t close. Which makes it easier in some ways, but harder in others. It’s like this weird combination of loss and regret, all mixed in with questions I always thought I had time to ask. But now I don’t, so I just have to reconcilenothaving answers, and—” She breathes out a sigh. “Yeah. That part’s hard.”
I nod my understanding, wondering if it would be weird to offer her a hug. Tatum and I are doing this weird dance where we inch closer, leaning into opportunities to touch, then swing apart again. Ithinkshe’d want a hug, but all of this still feels so new, I can’t be sure.
I get up and add a couple of logs to the fire, then move to the couch and sit down, happy that Tatum quickly joins me. She sits sideways and pulls her feet up onto the couch, wrapping her arms around her knees and tucking her feet under my thigh like she’s trying to warm her toes. Even if that’s all she’s trying to do, I’m still happy to have her close enough to touch. The longer we’re together, the more I’m feeling the tug to be close to her.
“Did you ever go see your mom in France?”
She nods. “Every summer while I was in high school. She cooked, too. Not like my dad. Just for friends, mostly. But she did a little bit of catering every once in a while.”
She sinks back into the cushions, almost like she’s falling in on herself, and her eyes turn distant and sad.
I reach down and loosely wrap my hands around her ankles. “Hey. You okay? You want to talk about it?”
“I was just thinking about how Mom was always asking me to cook with her whenever I went to visit, and I never wanted to. I think a part of me was mad at Mom for leaving. Cooking was Dad’s thing—something he and I did together. I didn’t want it to be something she did, too.”
“That’s understandable,” I say. “Twelve is a hard age to have to go through a divorce. Especially when one of your parents winds up on the other side of the world.”
“Yeah, maybe so,” she says, her tone reflective. “But I wonder now what I was missing out on. What could I have learned from her, you know? I don’t remember much about why they got divorced, but if my father treated her anything close to how he’s been treating me lately, it isn’t hard to imagine what they could have been.”
“What does that mean? How is he treating you now?”
“Like I’m a business asset,” she answers quickly enough that I know she’s had this thought before. She frowns. “That sounds bad. Probably worse than it is. But I’ve only ever workedwithmy father, so he tends to see me for what I can offer as opposed towhoI am. He’s constantly pressuring me, wanting to pull me into branding deals and merchandising—into the fame side of it all.”
“And you don’t want that? The fame?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. I used to think so. But it’s been really nice to be away from it all.”
She nestles a little deeper into the couch, and I pick up her feet, dropping them into my lap. “Was it tough growing up with a famous father?”
