Page 51 of Binding Their Hearts

They settled on The Cap & Feather, with enough time for him to run over to Alice’s office first and ride back downtown. A late lunch, but a lucky one. This wedding-claiming-collaring-commitment ceremony would have to come together in a hurry.

Jay locked his bike to the fence outside The Cap & Feather alongside some knucklehead’s brakeless fixie and hustled down the steps to the basement bar. He’d made it on time, but not early, after leaving Alice’s lunch at the front desk with a note and a plea for the receptionist to send it up while it was still hot. Sweat glued some hair to his face despite the crisp late-October air—high of forty-five today, but the sun blazed without a single cloud for cover.

He strolled inside, and the gal behind the bar pointed him down the long L of booths. So yeah, Emma had arrived before him and described him enough to make him unmissable. A discreet jaunt to the bathroom to clean up would be impossible.

She’d left the far side of the booth for him. Henry’s side. He slung his bag in the corner. “Sorry, I’m—”

“As sweaty as might be expected from riding so far so fast. You did say you were out in Newton?” She shook her head and waved a hand, impatient with herself more than him, it seemed. “Don’t mind me. Go on and wash up for lunch. We’ve plenty of time.”

He took a few minutes to soak his head and blow his hair dry under the hand dryer, using paper towels for the sweat on his back that his undershirt hadn’t wicked away. The ride from Alice’s office to Back Bay was about thirty minutes with hills and traffic. Usually he’d be flying high on the rush of seeing her in the middle of the day and her till-later kiss. Today he’d been pumping away the frustration of other stuff outranking him for her attention. But he’d talk with Emma instead, make sure their ceremony would be amazing. After that, they’d be golden. House-hunting would stop taking up so much of Henry’s time, and learning the job would stop stealing Alice’s, and they’d be the poster family for domestic bliss.

“Hey.” He slid into the booth across from Emma and pressed his back into the cushion as if he could pull Henry’s memories inside him just from sitting where he’d sat. “Sorry for the short notice. Thanks for meeting me today.”

“Nonsense. You called to discuss a time; I’m the one who selected immediately. Your notice was more than adequate, Jay.” She reached for him across the table and clasped his hands, folding hers over the top. “And I am so, so delighted to help you with any preparations you need for the ceremony. Do you have a specific date in mind?”

“Sort of. It’s more like a—” His phone chimed insistently. “Sorry, one sec.” He fished the device from his pocket. “Could be Alice. I dropped off—”

Peggy’s name stared at him. The second ring started cycling through. If he swiped Decline, she’d know. She’d know that he’d seen her call and decided not to take it. He gently set the phone facedown on the table and slid it toward the wall, beside the fancy ketchup holder. The third ring vibrated against the wood.

“Sorry. It’ll stop after four.” He watched, just to make sure it would.

“Jay?” Emma wore a frown, the tiny lines around her mouth forming a web of fractures. “Is something wrong with you and Alice?”

“No?” Shit, maybe he looked poutier than he felt about missing lunch. “She’s busy learning new stuff lately, but it’s okay. I understand.”

The divot between Emma’s neat-as-a-pin eyebrows deepened. “Is it the flogging training? You know she’s practicing so she’ll be confident of your safety—”

“No, no, no.” He shook his whole body, vigorous as a dog coming in from the rain. Watching Alice flog Leah was one of his weekly highlights. The way she stalked the room. The tilt of her head. How she twirled the deerskin with a swivel of her wrist. His knees drifted apart. She and Henry had exchanged a nod Saturday, and then he’d gotten to sit closer, in his waiting pose, just outside the range of her swings. “At work. She got promoted. We’re good. Solid. That’s”—he gestured at the phone, not ready to pick it up and see the voicemail notification waiting—“my sister Peggy. We’re, umm… She’s…”

He took a deep belly breath, Danny’s version of the slow breathing exercises Henry had been using with him for years. He was about to ask Emma to plan his wedding with him. She was coming to Thanksgiving dinner. He could be honest with her. She didn’t judge. Danny would call her a safe friend. The flicker in his stomach still shriveled his insides like shame, though.

“My therapist says I have to set boundaries with Peggy. Because she has lots of ways to take power before I know it’s gone.” Inroads, Danny called them. A whole network of trails mapped into Jay’s brain when he was a kid, before he could develop his own. “Letting her is the path of least resistance.”

“Setting boundaries is good and right with everyone in our lives.” Emma’s frown lines disappeared, but shadowy edges clouded the blue of her eyes. “It’s hard to know where to draw those lines, isn’t it? And some people need firmer lines until they prove they can respect them.”

His phone sat silent, but sometimes Peggy called twice real fast. Trying to get around a do-not-disturb that he didn’t even have turned on by faking an emergency. But that was a breakthrough, too. Two months ago, he would’ve found a way to tell himself she had a top-notch reason instead of seeing the manipulation. “Some people do, yeah. You don’t, uh, you don’t really know someone until you see how they react to no.”

Lightning flashed in his head, an enormous thought-storm crackling with energy. Henry had started teaching him to say no their very first night together. Henry had denied him rewards until he learned to say no and mean it. The cutting words and lashing out never happened with Henry, and not with Alice, either. They respected his no.

“You could set it to silent.” Emma tapped the table in front of his phone. “For your persistent sister? If you’re comfortable with that.”

“But what if it’s an emergency?” Backsliding. Dammit. His brain traveled the old trails out of habit, Danny said. Remapping would take time, and patience, and compassion for himself when he messed up.

“Are you the nearest relative to her? The one who could get there the most expeditiously?”

An expedited Jay-package would still take hours to reach the farm. Hell, everyone was closer than him. “No, that’s my sister Beth.”

“So would—Peggy, is it?—would Peggy be calling in an emergency because she indeed could use your assistance, or would she be calling to take out her frustration on you because you aren’t there?”

He swallowed, then took a swig of water to clear his dry mouth. Their server hadn’t come by yet, not once, which meant Emma had made some discreet request before he’d sat down. He did have friends, real friends, who looked out for him in small ways he’d only barely started to notice. “She’d be calling to blame me for something going wrong in her day.”

He snatched up the phone and stabbed through the menus, switching Peggy’s ringtone to silent before his head slid onto the old trails. The phone went back in his pocket. “Thanks. Sometimes a nudge makes the difference, you know? Therapy can be tough. Patching brains is harder than patching tires.”

“I’ve often found outside perspectives can clarify one’s vision. Not that they have more truth—such a subjective undertaking—but their distance reveals things we cannot see ourselves.” Emma ran her finger around the rim of her water glass. A lemon slice blocked her, and she dug two nails into the flesh, sinking pulp and seeds through the tower of ice cubes. “I congratulate you on entering therapy, Jay. It’s a brave choice to make ourselves so vulnerable, to confront the places we fear to tread in our own minds.”

He snapped his teeth on the thousand questions pushing and shoving to the front of his tongue. She’d definitely said we. “I haven’t told—I mean, Henry and Alice know, of course—but I haven’t said anything to anyone else.”

“And I won’t say a word, darling boy. In fact”—she lifted her chin, and the overhead lamp showered her in a soft glow—“I shall trade you a confidence. William and Henry were the ones who convinced me of the necessity for therapy. I still meet with my therapist. Less frequently than before, but those unhealthy patterns can be quite stubborn, as you are undoubtedly discovering.”

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