Chapter Thirteen
W HEN C HRISTOS WOKE UP in the morning, he was holding Sylvie. And then the previous day came flooding back to him. The panic attack. The sex. His text confessional, and then their conversation in his study.
But she was still there. Lying next to him.
She wasn’t gone. She had come after him.
Her eyes fluttered open, and she looked at him. “Don’t get out of bed,” she said.
“Maybe I want coffee.”
“You look like you’re ready to run away,” she said, far too cheerfully.
He scowled. “I’m not.”
“I think we should watch Christmas movies.”
He deepened the scowl. “It isn’t Christmas.”
“You said you’ve never seen them.”
His chest ached. “I lied. Let’s get coffee.”
“Wait a second,” she said, grabbing hold of his arm. He let her hold onto him, lifted her up out of the bed as he stood. She squealed and ended up clinging to him, her arms around his bicep, her legs curling up around his calf.
He gazed down at her, a strange sort of wonder filling his chest. Was this…intimacy? This sort of playful activity when two people were naked. Her looking up at him like there was something special about him. Like there was something good in him.
“You have to explain your life,” she said, still hanging onto him as he began to walk out of the room.
“No, I don’t.”
“You do.”
“It’s not interesting.”
“I think you’re fascinating.”
He looked down at her, pushed her hair out of her face and bent down, kissing her lightly on the mouth. “You are a fool.”
She wrinkled her nose. “I already know that.”
He bent down and plucked her up from where she clung to him, held her to his chest, carrying her down the stairs and into the kitchen, where he set her down on a barstool as he went to make coffee. She squeaked. “That’s cold.”
“You should have thought of that before you picked a fight while you were naked.”
She didn’t seem at all embarrassed to be naked in front of him. That felt like progress of a kind. He just wasn’t sure exactly what the progress was.
He didn’t have a name for it.
“Why did you lie about Christmas movies?” She tented her fingers in front of her face.
“Because it’s sad. Like everything else.
I watched a few. I told you… When I got away, I became quite obsessed with media.
The Internet. Smartphones. Movies. TV. And Christmas movies…
They’re such an interesting lie, I find.
This massive cultural delusion that everyone engages in once a year.
The people around you are stressed and angry about the additional work, and there’s this propaganda machine saying that Christmas is happy. But it’s about family.”
She propped her chin up on her elbows and stared at him while he touched the button on his automatic espresso machine to make a double shot for an Americano.
“I don’t know. I always find that the best Christmas movies have a little bit of darkness to them. I think It’s a Wonderful Life , for example, is really all about how difficult that time of year can be. But it’s family that kind of pulls you back from the brink.”
“Maybe I never understood because my family was never that for me.” He swallowed hard. “Watching families…”
She nodded. “I get that. So many sweet, nurturing mother characters. And plenty of workaholic father characters which, frankly, did resemble my father a little bit, though he was always much nicer when he was around than those men were ever portrayed as. But I didn’t have that nurturing other parent as a counterbalance.
I loved my father, don’t get me wrong. But you know, since I’m about to have a child of my own I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to do differently. ”
He poured his espresso shot into a mug, and then turned to his hot water and added some to the coffee. “The worst part is that I liked them. The worst part is that I knew they weren’t true. Not in any capacity. But still. When I watched them I would almost feel something.”
She was looking at him like he was sad again.
“Let’s watch Christmas movies,” she said. “Because we’re having a family. Because there is nothing stopping us from having beautiful Christmases, Christos. If we both want our family to look different than the ones that raised us, it can.”
“Can it? I’m… me . You love Jones & Abbott, which is fine, but…”
“I’ve already been thinking about that. I love my job.
I don’t think being a mother requires that I lose an integral part of myself.
I’ll always be a happier person if I’m able to spend time on the things that I’m passionate about.
But I don’t need to make the publisher my child’s life too.
And I don’t need for them to be a certain thing, or to be a certain way.
And I think the major thing is that over the last few months I’ve realized that when you have a family it brings balance to your life.
Because the publisher felt like my baby.
It felt like if something happened to it then my life would be over.
But now it feels like my life is bigger.
That’s only a good thing. I can care about more than one thing. I’ve been working on that, actually.”
“Tell me about that.”
He passed her the coffee he had made. And began to make another.
“Cream?” she asked.
He opened the fridge and took out a carton of half-and-half, then set it on the counter in front of her. She put in a generous amount and handed it back to him.
“I started trying to make more friends at work. I told them the real story of what happened between us.”
“You actually told them about our text relationship?”
“Yes. And the anonymous in-the-dark sex.”
“I’m not sure that I want friends if that’s what it entails.”
She waved a hand. “Don’t worry. I spoke of you in flattering terms.”
“Is it flattering if they’re true?” he asked.
He was not insecure when it came to sex. Especially not the sex between the two of them. It was the only place he was certain he did everything right.
She laughed, while he finished making himself an Americano.
“Let’s go back to bed,” she said.
“Go back to bed?”
“Yes. I think that we should lie in bed and watch Christmas movies today.”
“I don’t do leisure time.”
“I know. But I think you should. We’re having a baby together. We got married. And I don’t think it’s reasonable to think that the two of us aren’t going to have a relationship.”
He realized that what she was saying was true. He just wasn’t entirely certain about what to do with it.
“Agreed.”
“And that means we’re going to have to practice this. Being in a relationship. So that we can practice being a family.”
Family.
Again, it was something that threatened to overtake the frozen feeling in his chest.
“Okay. I will try leisure time.”
Which was exactly what they did. They went back to bed and played Christmas movies back to back. He watched her cry at each and every one.
He couldn’t remember ever being so close to human emotion.
To another person feeling things so deeply.
It did things to him. But then, everything about her did.
Everything about her ignited something inside of him.
He wasn’t used to burning. Not like this.
But if there was one thing he recognized about his response to finding out he was having a son it was that he needed to change.
And he had a feeling the only way he was going to accomplish that was silly.
For the first time in his life he was going to have to trust another person.
He couldn’t use his phone. He couldn’t distance himself in any way.
Sylvie was his wife.
And in order to create the right kind of life for his child, he was going to have to figure out what that meant.