22. Stephanie
— ? —
Stephanie
“We’ve got a problem.”
Miranda from the fundraising committee was standing in my office doorway, her clipboard clutched to her chest, all the color drained out of her face.
“What kind of problem?”
“The sperm costume.”
I blinked. “I’m sorry, the what?”
“The giant sperm costume. For the charity race. The volunteer who was supposed to wear it just called in sick, and the race is in two hours.”
I stared at her. The Nantucket Summer Charity Race was the clinic’s biggest fundraising event of the season.
We’d been planning it for months, permits filed and a whole stretch of Main Street cordoned off.
There were sponsors and reporters coming.
A giant finish line shaped like an egg waited at the end of the course for teams to race toward, which had seemed reasonable enough back in the spring when I’d approved it in a meeting.
And apparently, someone was supposed to dress as a sperm.
“Who approved a sperm costume?” I asked.
“The committee. It’s for the reproductive health theme. The mascot races toward the egg while the teams compete.”
“That’s… creative.”
“It’s a disaster. We don’t have a backup. The event will be ruined without a mascot.”
I rubbed my temples, where a headache was already setting up shop behind my eyes. “Can we just skip the mascot?”
“The costume was sponsored. If we don’t use it, we lose the sponsorship.”
“How much?”
“Fifty thousand dollars.” Miranda said it the way other people said terminal.
“For a sperm costume.”
“It’s a very expensive sperm costume.”
I started running through the volunteer roster in my head, looking for anyone I could bribe, threaten, or beg into a full-body foam suit in the next hundred and twenty minutes.
“I’ll do it.”
The voice came from behind Miranda. She turned, and Kevin stepped into view, leaning in the doorway in a linen shirt with his sleeves rolled to the elbow.
“You’ll what?” I asked.
“I’ll wear the costume.” He said it the way another man might offer to carry groceries, calm and faintly puzzled that it was even a question. “What size is it?”
“It’s one-size-fits-all,” Miranda stammered. “It’s a giant sperm. They’re not really known for their varied body types.”
“Then I’ll make it work.”
“Dr. Coleman, you can’t.” Miranda looked horrified, the clipboard sliding in her grip. “You’re the foundation’s lead donor. You’re on the board. You can’t run around in a sperm costume.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s undignified!”
“Dignity is overrated.” He looked past her to me, and I felt it land. “I’ll meet you at the starting line.”
He walked away before anyone could argue, whistling under his breath.
I spent the next two hours convinced this was some kind of fever dream, a stress hallucination brought on by too much coffee and a spreadsheet that wouldn’t balance.
I kept waiting for the catch, for the moment he’d remember who he was and send an assistant in his place with an apologetic email about an unavoidable conflict.
Because that was the Kevin I knew. The old Kevin, the one I’d been married to, had missed the hospital gala three years running.
He’d sent flowers to the auction and a check large enough that no one dared complain, and I’d spent those evenings in a rented gown making excuses for an empty chair beside me.
I’d learned the shape of the pity people wore when they asked where my husband was.
So I didn’t believe he’d actually show. Not until I arrived at Main Street, cobblestones baking under the noon sun and the harbor glittering at the bottom of the hill, and there he was.
Kevin Coleman, billionaire physician and feared negotiator and owner of several tailored tuxedos.
Wearing a giant white sperm costume.
The head was a massive oval that bobbed when he moved, wobbling on its own momentum.
The tail trailed a good eight feet behind him, so long he had to keep glancing back to steer it around pedestrians.
His face was visible through an opening in the front, currently painted white to match the costume, which somehow made the whole thing worse.
He was doing jumping jacks.
“What are you doing?” I called across the staging area.
“Warming up.” He jogged in place, the tail flopping wildly, slapping a traffic cone. “This race requires peak physical performance.”
“It’s three hundred yards toward a giant egg.”
“Three hundred yards of competitive sprinting in a costume that weighs approximately thirty pounds. I need to be prepared.”
I was trying so hard not to laugh that my face hurt, the muscles in my cheeks aching with the effort of holding it in.
The decorating station was set up nearby, a folding table crowded with markers and glitter, where volunteers could dress up the sperm before the race.
Kevin took his place obediently, standing still while a line of women approached with markers and supplies.
He held his arms out from his sides so they could reach.
They were giggling. Actually giggling, giddy and star-struck. They covered him in pink and silver glitter, dumping it by the handful. Drew hearts and stars on his tail. Added googly eyes to the costume’s head that jiggled every time it bobbed.
“Having fun?” I called over.
He winked at me. “Living my best life.”
I couldn’t hide my smile. And he was watching me the whole time, ignoring the women decorating him completely, his eyes fixed on my face while a stranger drew a heart on his shoulder.
He looked at me the way he used to across a crowded room, the way that used to make me forget anyone else was there.
“Is that Kevin Coleman?”
Hugo appeared at my side, sunglasses pushed up on his head, wearing an expression caught halfway between amusement and horror.
“What are you doing here?” I turned to face him. “You don’t live in Nantucket.”
“Found out through social media. Thought I’d pass by.” He shrugged, already grinning. “I mean, what are you still doing here? You don’t live here either.”
“I’m working.”
“For three months?”
“It’s a complex project.”
“Mmhmm.” He raised an eyebrow at me, my brother’s face doing the thing it had done since we were kids, when he knew he’d caught me. “And Kevin being here has nothing to do with it?”
“Shut up.”
“That’s not a no.”
“That’s a shut up.”
He grinned and walked toward the decorating station. I watched him grab a makeup palette off the table, lean in close to Kevin’s white-painted face, and draw two enormous rosy circles on his cheeks with the flat of his thumb.
Kevin sighed and let him.
Hugo wasn’t done. He grabbed a marker and climbed onto a step stool the volunteers had been using, writing across the top of the costume’s head in big block capitals.
NANTUCKET’S DUMBEST SPERM.
Kevin just sighed again, and let him do that too. He caught my eye over the top of Hugo’s head, mouthed words I couldn’t read, and I had to turn away before the laugh got out of me.
It was such a small thing, him standing there taking it.
The man I’d married would have found a way to be busy.
He’d have taken a call or wandered off to shake a hand that mattered more than whatever foolishness the rest of us were up to.
He’d never once let himself be the joke.
Being the smartest man in every room had been his whole religion, and now he was standing in the sun with two rosy circles on his cheeks and his own brother-in-law’s insult on his head, and he wasn’t checking his phone.
He was watching me. I didn’t know what to do with that.
Three years of certainty about who Kevin Coleman was, and he kept picking it apart one ridiculous afternoon at a time.
The race started at noon.
Ten competitors lined up at the start, toes on the chalk line. Nine of them were wearing normal athletic gear, running shorts and racing bibs. One of them was a billionaire in a sperm suit with his brother-in-law’s handwriting on his head.
The whistle blew.
Kevin sprinted down Main Street, his tail flying behind him, his rosy cheeks bouncing with each step, the googly eyes rattling. People lined the route three deep, cheering and howling with laughter. Someone had a homemade sign that said GO SPERM GO.
I was laughing so hard I could barely stand, one hand gripping the barricade to stay upright. Tears were streaming down my face. Hugo was bent double next to me, wheezing, one hand on my shoulder for balance.
Kevin was actually fast. Despite the costume, despite the tail, despite the thirty-pound weight and the limited visibility through his little face window, he was keeping pace with the front runners, arms pumping, foam flanks shedding glitter with every stride.
Then the wind came up off the water and caught one of my project display boards.
The model of the finished clinic, the one I’d had mounted and set up at the finish line for sponsors to admire, lifted clean off its easel and started cartwheeling down the street, corner over corner.
“No!” I shouted.
Kevin saw it. Without hesitation, without so much as a glance at the finish line he’d been about to cross, he veered off course and chased the board.
His tail tangled in his legs. He tripped over his own costume.
He rolled down the grassy slope at the edge of the park, momentum carrying him straight toward the decorative fountain, and I watched it happen with both hands pressed over my mouth.
He landed in the water with a spectacular splash that soaked the front row of spectators.
And held the display board over his head, completely dry and undamaged.
For one beat, nobody made a sound. Then a little kid on someone’s shoulders yelled “THE SPERM WON!” at the top of his lungs, and Main Street lost it, air horns and whooping and a woman near me laughing so hard she had to grab her friend’s arm to stay upright.
Kevin stood in the fountain, water streaming off his sperm costume, glitter running down his face in pink and silver rivers, the display board held triumphantly overhead with both foam-gloved hands.
He spotted me in the crowd. And bowed, water sheeting off the tail.
He’d thrown a race and taken a swim in a fountain in front of half the island, and every bit of it had cost him the dignity he claimed not to care about, and he’d done it grinning, because the only thing he’d been chasing was the look on my face.
I was crying. Actually crying from laughing so hard, my stomach cramping with it. Hugo had given up entirely and was lying flat on the grass, clutching his ribs and gasping.
The video was viral before Kevin even got out of the costume.
Three different strangers near me were already replaying it on their phones, the little tinny splash sound going off again and again.
By the time I got home that night it’d have a caption about the billionaire who fell in a fountain for charity, and none of the comments would guess the truth, which was that he hadn’t fallen for charity at all.
He’d fallen for me. He’d have chased that board into the harbor if that’s where the wind had taken it.
I wiped my eyes with the heel of my hand and tried to remember the last time I’d laughed until my stomach hurt.
It had been years. It had been, if I was honest with myself, the last summer before everything went wrong, and I hadn’t laughed like that since because the person who’d always been able to pull it out of me had been the same person who broke me.
Both of those things were true at once, and standing on Main Street in the sun, I didn’t know how to hold them together.
Later, after he’d changed and toweled off and accepted congratulations from approximately everyone in Nantucket, Miranda pulled me aside near the main tent, breathless and pink.
“We met our fundraising goal,” she said. “Someone anonymously matched every donation made during the race.”
I looked across the staging area. Kevin was talking to a knot of sponsors, still picking flecks of silver glitter out of his damp hair, laughing at one of their jokes.
“Anonymously,” I repeated.
“Yes! Can you believe it?”
I could absolutely believe it. I could’ve named the bank it came from.
I marched over to where he was standing. He saw me coming and excused himself from the conversation, stepping away from the sponsors to meet me.
“You matched the donations,” I said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Kevin.”
“Anonymity means you can’t yell at me.” He didn’t even look up. “That’s the whole point of anonymity.”
“Your inability to disguise a seven-figure transfer is deeply embarrassing for a supposed genius.”
“I’ve got no idea what you mean.”
“The donation came from ‘K. Coleman Foundation for Reproductive Health.’” I folded my arms. “That’s literally your name.”
“Coincidence.”
“Kevin.”
“Fine.” He smiled, not one bit sorry. “I wanted to help. Sue me.”
“I might.”
“You won’t.”
“I might just to prove a point,” I said, fighting the corner of my mouth.
“What point?”
“That you can’t buy your way back into my good graces.”
“I’m not trying to buy anything.” He stepped closer, dropping his voice below the noise of the tent. “I’m trying to support a cause I believe in. The fact that it makes you look at me with that expression is just a bonus.”
“What expression?”
“The one you’re making right now. Like you’re annoyed and charmed in equal measure.”
“I’m not charmed.”
“You’re a little charmed.” His mouth twitched.
“I’m not.”
“You’re smiling.”
“I’m grimacing.”
“That’s the same muscle group,” he said, entirely too pleased with himself.
“It absolutely isn’t.”
We were standing too close, the way we always ended up standing too close.
Bantering the way we used to, the years falling away between one line and the next.
For a minute the last three years hadn’t happened and we were still the people who finished each other’s sentences and argued about everything and couldn’t keep our hands off each other in other people’s kitchens.
“Thank you,” I said quietly, the teasing draining out of my voice. “For today. For all of it.”
“You’re welcome.” His voice dropped to match mine. “I’d do a lot more than wear a sperm costume to make you smile, Steph.”
“Like what?”
“Like whatever you need. Whatever it takes. However long it takes.”
His eyes held mine, and the noise of the crowd faded down to nothing, the whole loud bright afternoon narrowing to the six inches of air between us.
It was tempting. So tempting to close the distance. To stop fighting what I so obviously wanted, right here in the middle of my own fundraiser.
“I should get back to work,” I said.
“Yeah.” He took a step back, and the space rushed in cold between us. “Me too.”
But neither of us moved. And over his shoulder, near the edge of the tent, I saw a woman in a sharp gray dress step out of a car and start toward us, and every warm thing in my chest turned to ice.