I gulped. This should be interesting. “Oh—”
“I get why she calls youDaddy Dannyand why she calls your dogPuppy Bucky. It’s kind of self-explanatory.”
I nodded and braced myself for the obvious next question.
“So why did she call mePatriarchal Marshall?” He frowned. “Why does she rhyme in the first place?”
Choosing to ignore his first question, I chewed my bottom lip as I thought abouthowto respond to his second. It’d been a while since I’d had to explain her quirk to someone. Actually, I was kind of surprised that he hadn’t raised the question before now. “It was something she began when she was having speech therapy. The rhyming forced her to slow her thinking and her speech down enough that she wasn’t tripping herself up. It seemed to help her, so we kept it going enough that some of her rhymes stuck long after she didn’t need to do it anymore.”
“Huh.” He cast a calculated look over my face. “Makes sense. It’s unusual, but I can see how it could work. Does everyone she interacts with have rhyming names?”
Feeling my cheeks begin to heat, I rolled onto my back so I didn’t have to look at him when I answered. “Only those she likes.” Scratching my chin, I wondered if it would be wise if I explained further.
Fuck it.
“She calls JacksonPappy Jacky, so obviously she still likes him even after everything that happened, though she hasn’t given Brett a rhyming name.” I frowned in thought. That probably should’ve registered that something was wrong well before things became obvious at the restaurant the other night.
“Oh….”
“Yeah.” A sense of pride welled up in me that she’d so quickly accepted Marshall. It had surprised the hell out of me the first time she’d done it, but some part of me had thought she might have only meant it in passing. To hear her keep calling him pet names made my stomach burble nervously. “Even Gabe at the gas station gets calledGabe Babe.” I tilted my head to the side as I thought back over Sunday’s events. “Well, when he doesn’t piss her off. Then she drops theBabeportion.” I chuckled at the memory of Gabe getting all pouty when she told him off and dropped his nickname. “He doesn’t like it when she does that.”
“And the woman at the gas station?”
“Scarlett? Hers is generallyStarlet Scarlett.”
He let out a low laugh. “I guess it’s better thanHarlot Scarlett.”
I laughed along with him. “Give it a few more years. I’m sure Rose will introduce that into her repertoire eventually. There’s a reason why she keeps beating me at Scrabble, no matter how much I brush up on words I think she’ll use.”
A warm silence filled the bedroom as I let Marshall take all that in, wondering if he was going to call me out on not answering him entirely.
Sure enough, he eventually stretched his hand on my bare chest, toying with the unruly thatch of hair that insisted on spreading there no matter how much I tried to tame it, before asking, “So… um… why did she label me withPatriarchal, then?” His fingers flinched a little like he was nervous about asking. “I mean, there are tons of other things she could’ve used instead.Marvel Marshall. She usedSparkle Marshallyesterday. Hell, she could even useImpartial Marshall. Why’d she go withPatriarchalthis time?”
Resigned to my fate, I closed my eyes and sighed, laid my hand over his, and interlocked our fingers so I could squeeze them, prepared that he’d probably freak out. “She actually used it that first night when we were playing Twister down in the storm shelter.”
When the memory registered, I heard him say a soft, drawn-out, “Oh….”
“I think she sees potential for you and me to be more than just a hookup.” I felt him go still next to me, but surprisingly he didn’t try to pull away. “It’s obvious that she likes you, otherwise you wouldn’t have been given a rhyming name at all. And it’s possible that she’s trying to will you into staying in Rockdale through positive thinking, and her choosingPatriarchalis one way of trying to bond with you, in addition to the games we played yesterday.”
I turned my head just enough to open an eye and peek at him. Remarkably, he wasn’t freaking out. Or if he was, he was doing an incredible job at internalizing it.
“Or I could be entirely wrong,” I said as I shrugged. “She’s twelve. The older she gets, the harder it is for me to figure out what goes on in her extraordinary mind. I’m sure there’s a reason to it, but it might only make sense to her. You could ask her if you’re really curious, but there’s no guarantee that she’ll give you any answer outside of just laughing at you.”
A clatter of dishes interrupted us before I heard Rose call out, “It’s okay! Nothing broke! Everything’s under control! It’s just a little fire!”
Both of our eyes widened, and we cursed loudly and immediately jumped out of bed to scramble for our boxers and then the door.
On the other side, Rose was standing in front of the sink, busy examining the pan that she’d been using, which was now covered with the fire blanket we’d bought for these types of emergencies. She eyed us both for half a second before she returned her focus to what was in front of her. “Told you I had it.” She bobbed her head toward the stovetop proudly. “And look, no smoke damage this time!”
“This time?” Marshall muttered from behind me, sounding morbidly curious.
“It’s why there’s a fire blanket,” I replied quietly before looking Rose up and down to make sure she wasn’t hiding any injury. “There’s an extinguisher in the corner.”
“Huh.”
“Safety first.”
“Clearly, yet you still let her cook unsupervised.”
