“You could have called,” she said.
“I did. Twice.”
She looked at me then, head to toe, and something moved through her face that she tucked away before it could become a full expression. She stepped back and let me in.
“These are for you,” I said, offering the flowers, then shoving my hands in my pockets.
“Hey Houston,” Missy said from the couch, shoes off, wine glass going. She looked at me and then at Teaghan with an expression that said she already knew what brought me here, even if Teaghan wasn’’t going to say it.
“I was just leaving,” Missy said, which was a lie, but I appreciated it.She gathered herself, kissed Teaghan on the cheek, and gave me a look on the way out that meanthandle this.
The door closed behind her. The apartment got quiet. Teaghan stood in the middle of the room with her arms folded and I sat down on her couch and waited. She could run the clock if she needed to. I wasn't going anywhere.
She lasted about ninety seconds.
“My mother auctioned me off Sunday.” She said it flat, no setup, the way you said something you’d been carrying so long it had lost most of its weight. “At a brunch. Stood up in front of a room full of people and put a date with me on the table like I was cattle.” She laughed once. Not because it was funny. “I guess I should be grateful right. Miss can’t keep a man finally has some worth. Somebody put a number on it.”
I watched her face. The way she was holding it still.
“And then to top it off, the man who paid is somebody my parents have already mapped out for my future. That’s what the whole brunch was. A presentation. An ambush. And I stood up there and smiled because that's what you do when you are Franklin LeJune’s daughter and you don’t want to make a scene.” She shook her head slowly. “He wrote the check easily. Didn’t even blink. Because that’s how it works in their world. Money is what you throw at things. It does the work nobody wants to do.”
She looked at me when she said that last part.
“Roderick had nothing and I still made it easy for him. Got him the job, wrote the resume, called in the favor. He got on his feet and got options and I got left.” She set her jaw. “Not one person in my life has ever just shown up for me. Because I don’t need it that way. I show up for people. That’s my function. That’s what I’m for.” She paused. “And then there’s you Houston.”
The room was quiet. I let it stay that way for a minute.
Then I stood up. “Go get dressed.”
She blinked. “Houston, it's late.”
“No it’s not. Go put something you feel good in on.”
“I’m not really in the mood to go anywhere.”
“Tea, I didn’t ask what mood you were in. I gave you four days. I’m taking the night.”
She looked at me for a long moment, deciding if I meant it and what I meant by it. She must have found something because she turned and went to the back without another word.
I stood at her window and watched the street, and thought about what she said.
That’s my function. That’s what I’m for.
No. That was what people had decided she was for because she was good at it, and she let them. But that wasn’t the same thing and anybody that spent five minutes actually paying attention to Teaghan LeJune could see the difference. She wasn’t a resource. She was a whole woman with a whole life that she had been quietly starving while she fed everybody else and calling it purpose.
She came back twenty minutes later and I had to work to keep my face neutral.
Black dress, cinched at the waist, stopping above the knee. Her jet black hair was out and styled, a few soft curls falling at her temples, the rest full around her face. Gold earrings, a thin gold chain, and that honey and peppermint scent that I had stopped pretending wasn't one of my favorite things about walking into a room she was already in. She put her hands out at her sides. This work?
Every head in whatever room we walked into tonight was going to turn. She had to know that. She always knew that.
“You look beautiful, Tea.”
She pressed her lips together. “You clean up decent yourself McGraw.”
“Thank you. It’s for you, on the cool.”
She laughed and grabbed her purse and I held the door.