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He glanced out the bedroom door to where she sat on the couch in the living room. “Shit. I go into rehab for six weeks, and the next thing I know, the world’s upside down.”
“Not upside down,” I’d assured him. “Just a little crazy.”
“It’s always been crazy,” he said.
“It has,” I had agreed, and I’d pulled him into the living room to meet Juliet properly. And from that night forward, Thursdays had become game night. Mom even came over sometimes to join us, and it became my favorite night of the week.
Right around the time Jarred had begun working for an electrician Mom had met in Brentwood, Austin had called to tell me he thought he was ready to retire.
“Already?” I asked, surprised. I’d expected it to be at least a year.
“I’ve got a chance to take a round-the-world trip,” he said. “Can’t pass it up.”
“Okay,” I told him. I was ready. I’d talked to his attorney and financial manager, and brought in a couple of my own. The paperwork was done, and the transfer was going to be easy.
I told my mother and Jarred that day, but waited until that night to tell Juliet.
We’d decidedto have dinner brought in, something we did pretty often, since Juliet had only become more famous on the heels of the piece Hollywood Reporter had run on her, describing her realization that she didn’t want to define herself through her relationships, that she was a confident and secure single woman. The piece had delved into Hollywood’s tendency to focus on starlets as two-dimensional, as caricatures of human beings, uninteresting unless they were either linked to a man or in the midst of some dramatic crisis.
“I’m a fully-formed and intelligent human being on my own,” Juliet had been quoted as saying. “And I don’t really care if people acknowledge that—maybe it’s too much to expect in Hollywood. But what’s important is that I’ve realized it, and I’m not going to live my life for other people any more. I’m taking it back for myself, and for those I love.”
The piece had been cited widely as a mantra for women everywhere to define themselves not by other people, but by their own actions and intentions. “Taking it back” had even become a hashtagged meme online for a while, and Juliet’s picture was everywhere.
Juliet had been busy, studying a lot—not just scripts anymore, but she was working on her college degree, taking classes in literature and French. I was glad to have an evening where we were both away from the distractions, focused on one another.
An enormous Christmas tree stood in the corner, surrounded by a low fence to keep Elvis from investigating anything too closely, and the twinkling light gleamed in Juliet’s eyes as she smiled at me.
“This is nice,” Juliet said, reaching for the salad bowl as she sat across the blanket we’d spread on the floor in front of the glowing fireplace. Winter was setting in, and though Los Angeles really didn’t get cold, it was still cool enough in the evenings to warrant the fire.
“It is,” I agreed. “And I have some news.”
“What?” she cocked her head to the side, her fork paused partway to her pretty pink lips.
“I’m the owner of Austin Security now,” I said. “As of today.”
Juliet dropped her fork. “That’s amazing! Congratulations!” She rose to her knees and leaned over the spread of food to hug me. “I’m so proud of you.”
I was proud of me too. For a kid who never thought he’d go to college to have both a degree and a wildly successful business to call his own, I was doing pretty well. But there was one more thing. “Thanks,” I said. “But there’s one more thing I wanted to tell you.”
“Okay.” Juliet drew out the word, wary suddenly at my change of tone.
“My life has changed in so many ways since I met you, Juliet. Some of them hard to accept at first, but all of them good.”
She nodded, her hair slipping over her shoulder.
“And I’m hoping we might make one more change—not right away. But someday. Maybe in a year or two.”
I rose so that I could kneel properly, and when I did, Juliet’s entire expression shifted to an excited smile.
“I love you, Juliet. You’re the light in my world, the air I breathe. When I’m with you, the insanity around us all makes sense. Or maybe it just doesn’t matter to me anymore. You’ve made my life better in so many ways, I can’t even count them.”
“I’m your KY Jelly,” she said, interrupting my romantic proposal.
“Did you just make a lube joke in the middle of my proposal?”
“Are you proposing to me, Jace?” She grinned.
“I’m trying.”
