CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

 

The hotel room suite echoed in silence as Seven lay in the middle of the freshly made bed and tried to contemplate trivial life decisions. Should she change hair colors? Maybe another piercing was a safer adrenaline rush than falling for Jax Michaelson. But no, that was not where her mind wandered. "I'm married."

And now that she'd finished freaking out, the idea that he was hers… Seven smiled. But that freaked her out. How could this have happened? She grabbed her phone off the charger and called Victoria.

"Hey," her best friend answered more gruffly than expected. "Glad you called. I need somebody to talk to who's not going to drive me crazy."

"Are the kids acting up?"

"Oh no. Ryder is acting up. Sort of. I may've been in the wrong, but he's overreacting."

"How are my kiddos?"

"Perfect. They're running around outside with him who shall not be named—"

"Your new husband?"

"Yes. Him. And they're angels, like always."

Seven snickered. "I can't believe that sweet, Aussie hottie could possibly be the cause of any headaches."

"That hot Australian is driving me nuts. Bat shit. Absolutely bonkers."

"Really?" Seven crawled up to the top of the bed and shoved the pillows behind her, propping herself up in anticipation of listening to the tales of a honeymoon-gone-wrong story. "You have to be very convincing for me not to take Ryder's side," Seven teased, knowing full well she would never do that. "What gives in the land of lovers? Last time I saw you two, it was all googly love faces and smoochy kisses. I wanted to puke."

"We were newlyweds. I'm pretty sure life has returned to normal. No more nausea for you."

"I was just kidding, and you two were always and will always be cute." She wondered if anyone would ever call her and Jax cute.

"Hope so." She sighed into the phone. "I looked over the first morning of our honeymoon and wondered how did I get so lucky."

Well, hell. Seven laughed at the memory of her morning after. She'd shrieked, nearly fallen out of bed tearing the veil from her hair, and had kicked Jax awake. "That's a dead giveaway that I'm right. It'd be a whole new conversation if you woke up, looked over, and wondered, 'what the heck did we do?'"

Victoria scoffed in her ear. "Yeah, how bad would that suck? I bet that happens to people all the time in Vegas."

Seven laughed so hard, she choked. "Yep. Bet so."

"Ryder's mad because I let the pizza delivery guy in."

Her brows pinched, and Seven smoothed her hand over the pillow next to her, trying to remove every last wrinkle and crinkle before asking the most obvious question that came to mind. "You ordered pizza?"

"Exactly!" Victoria grumbled.

At that point, Seven knew Victoria was on the verge of admitting that Ryder was right and she was wrong and at least they would have makeup sex. "You let a delivery guy in who wasn't your delivery guy. I think you both have done more questionable things. Not that I'm one to cast judgment," she added as she stared at her wedding band.

"No, he's right," Victoria lamented. "It was probably harmless. But I let somebody into our house when he had no reason to be there. Both of our careers make that a very bad idea, and it could've gone in another direction faster than I was prepared for."

"I get it. But everything was fine."

"The kids were running around earlier, and I was frazzled, and he showed up with his pizzas, insisting that he had the right address. I was insisting that he didn't. I'd been bribing Nolan to eat, and then he started, and I didn't want to leave him alone with food in his mouth. It was storming outside, and so I told the guy to come in while he made his phone call to figure out where the pizza was going to go—"

"Victoria, take a breath. It's okay." Her exasperation sounded as though she had been self-flogging to excess, whether she'd been called out by Ryder or not.

"You just never know what people's intentions are. It was okay this time, but for all I know, that guy was scoping my house out. He could've been some freak that liked kids. It might not have had anything to do with Ryder and me."

"Now you're just getting paranoid, Victoria. It's not like you've had kids for some freak-show pervert to stalk and obsess over. You know?"

Victoria hummed as though she didn't agree but had no defense left to put up. "How about you talk to your super-cute rug rats? They just walked in. I'll put you on speakerphone."

"Seven! Seven! It's Bianca. It's Nolan. Can you hear me? Us? Can you hear us? Me?"

"Hi, guys. I can hear you. What are you doing? Are you having fun?"

They started to talk over each other again with a list of activities that sounded as though Victoria had been offering a day at camp. Arts and crafts. Hide-and-seek. Duck, duck, goose. Something that had to do with glitter.

Seven shuddered.

As much as she loved all things glittery and sparkly, glitter was one of those things that could also be used as a torture device. One sneeze gone wrong, and it was hours of cleaning. She once made the mistake of asking for help with glitter cleanup, and it took about two minutes to realize that all the little hands were making it ten times worse despite their best efforts.

Nolan and Bianca ended their call with a series of competitive I love you's, each determined to say it louder and prouder and mean it more than the other before, apparently, they ended in a hug-and-tickle war that required Victoria to put down the phone, pick them up, count to one, and send everybody to coloring books.

The rumble in the room quieted on the phone line, and Victoria came back. "The coast is now clear again."

"You, Madame Deputy Mayor, sounded very motherly a moment ago. All 'don't make me count' and 'one…'" Seven laughed. "I'm very impressed with that."

"I learned from the best."

"Ahh, I'd say thanks, but sometimes, I don't know if you should say that about me. Speaking of which, how's my mom?"

Victoria grumbled. "First, don't say that about yourself ever again. I've never met anybody more selfless and giving, in general and to these kids, than you. And second, your mom… I don't know anymore, Seven. I think moving your mom to assisted living was the right thing to do, but she seems so much worse than even three or four months ago. I know that's not a conversation you want to have right now." Victoria sighed sadly, and Seven felt the same way on the inside as her best friend continued. "A couple weeks ago wasn't that long ago. It's just like something has changed."

Seven hung on to the phone in silence, and Victoria didn't add much. There wasn't much to say. The doctors insisted her mom wasn't suffering, but her quality of life seemed miserable, even if she didn't complain… maybe because she couldn't complain.

"And I got a phone call… from my dad."

Maybe that was one of the reasons why Victoria was in the mood to bicker with Ryder, because her dad could spoil any mood depending on what he had to say and how he said it. There were times when he seemed like a normal, nice person. Those times weren't often.

When Victoria didn't expand on the conversation, Seven's stomach tied in knots. It was a doubly dreadful feeling, given that she was hours over her hangover, and raw nausea wasn't a great feeling. "What's the matter?"

"Your dad is… Somehow, Cullen got word sent to my dad while they were in prison. You know how that goes… Your dad's powerful. He can make things happen, and I didn't expect to hear from mine when I answered the phone."

Seven's nausea morphed into anger. The dread that swirled in her stomach snapped into tension, and she closed her fists. "I don't care. I don't want to hear what they talked about. I don't want to know anything." Seven shook her head and could feel blood pounding at her temples. "Tell him to keep my dad far away from my life."

"I'm sorry I said anything."

She let her fingers flare out then relax, trying to shake away the stress of Cullen Blackburn, when Seven caught sight of her left hand. That was a whole new barrel of stress. Why she hadn't taken off the wedding band yet? Jax had when he left to meet his boss.

"Don't worry about it," she grumbled, unsure if she was more aggravated that she wouldn't take off her ring or that her dad had reached out. "Have you ever picked up any legal know-how when helping out on your divorce cases?"

Victoria hummed. "Maybe a little. I'm not sure."

"A little, like about annulments or divorces? Papers involved with that stuff?" Seven held the wedding band in front of her, moving her hand up and down, unable to look away like a cat drawn to a laser beam.

"Well, actually, I think it's all—wait, why?"

She dropped her hand quickly, tucking it under her back as though nothing had happened if she couldn't see it. "No reason."

Victoria sucked a deep breath into the phone. "Holy shit."

Seven rolled her eyes because that was what she would've said. "Heard that before. Don't—"

"Did you get married?" Victoria asked in her most curious, most accusatory voice. "To who? Johnny again?"

"Oh my God, no. Are you insane?"

Victoria gasped. "Holy shit. You married Jax."

Seven groaned and slapped the hand that she had hidden over her face. "I blame the rope. This is all your fault."

"Oh my God. I can't—I can't even—oh my God!"

"He really knew what he was doing, and it built so much trust. I trusted him before that anyway, and he's really sweet and romantic to start—" Wait. Was she defending her marriage?

"Dying. Seven, I'm dying. Right now. I wasn't one hundred percent sure that you two were hooking up. But now you're married? Ryder's going to die too."

Ugh! "Don't you dare tell him."

"I'm texting him now," Victoria said from the far away sound of speakerphone.

"Dammit, Victoria, stop! We're going to fix it! Soon as we can figure out how to get divorced."

There was a long pause, and Victoria's lack of response made Seven sit up. "Why would you do that?" her friend finally asked.

Her face skewed in confusion. "Why wouldn't we? I don't know his middle name. We can't even have a solid foot-stomping, middle-name-calling argument."

"This is the first thing I can think of that you've done because you've wanted to do, not because you've had to do. You married Johnny because you were told to. Cleaned up all the messes your father made because he said so. You fix everything Mayhem asks you to because you feel responsibility for them. You love your kids to death, but you never saw them coming. You didn't plan on taking care of your mother before she had a stroke, and you had no intention to run a coffee shop before then, either. You have major responsibility in your life, and none of it was your decision. I don't know if you realize this, Seven, but you did something pretty huge on your own. Before you try to erase it, I'd try to figure out why. Even if there's alcohol involved." Victoria laughed quietly. "I'm just saying, don't rush, or at the very least, enjoy your honeymoon."