25. Cali
CALI
But not today.
Today, I float up out of sleep like I'm gently rising from the bottom of a pool. Even when I surface into consciousness, I'm not quite sure where or who I am, what day it is, what planet.
Then, one piece at a time, reality clicks back into place.
I know who I am: Calista Meadows.
I know where I am: my bedroom.
I know when I am: the morning after the gala, the sun already risen and bright through the gap in my curtains.
Weirdly, I'm still in my dress. The green silk is bunched up around my thighs and twisted at the waist. My mother's earrings are still in my ears.
I can feel one of them digging into the side of my head where I slept on it.
My mouth tastes like sour whiskey and my head is doing a slow, dull throb behind my eyes.
I lie there and try to put the night back together.
The gala. The dress. Ronan at the bottom of the steps.
Dancing under the big chandelier. Todd, frail and sweating.
Paula crying black tears onto her cheap gold dress.
The car across the bridge. The stoop. The whiskey.
Ronan's father and the shattered glass and his mother getting smaller and smaller until there was nothing left.
Then the kiss.
I remember climbing into his lap on the warm stone. And afterward…
My face goes hot even alone in my own bed. I remember asking him to come upstairs.
But then…?
Nothing.
I sit up too fast, and my head lurches. I press a hand to it and wait for the room to stop whirling.
"Good morning."
I nearly jump out of my skin.
Ronan is sitting in the chair across the room. Nobody ever sits in that little armchair in the corner; its purpose is to hold clothes I don't want to fold right now.
But the laundry is in a neat, crisply folded stack on top of the dresser and Ronan is there instead.
He's still in his tuxedo from last night, though he's draped the jacket over the back of the chair and the bow tie is undone, hanging loose around his open collar.
His sleeves are rolled up. He's got one ankle crossed over the opposite knee, and he's just sitting there, calm as anything, watching me.
"How long have you been sitting there?" I croak.
"A while."
"That's not creepy at all."
"You slept better when I was in the room," he explains. "You'd start to stir, and I'd say something, and you'd settle again." He shrugs one shoulder. "So I stayed."
I look down at myself. At the dress, still on.
I look back at him. At the suit, still on.
I… don't understand.
I really, truly do remember asking him upstairs. He carried me! Picked me up like a newlywed bride in his arms and carried me over the front door. I was thinking, in some far-off part of my brain, that this was it, we were hurtling toward the finish line that had always been our destiny.
But after that, it's just a blank space. Black-out nothingness, until I woke up still zipped into my dress with my earrings digging into my scalp.
"Wha… what happened?" I mumble.
"Nothing," Ronan says. "Nothing happened."
That can't be right. "Nothing?" I repeat.
He sighs and looks at me. "You were drunk," he says. "And crying, at the end there, though I'm sure you'll deny it to your grave. You cried the whole way up the stairs." He uncrosses his ankle and leans forward, elbows on his knees. "I don't take what isn't given sober, Calista."
I'm dumbfounded. "So we didn't… we didn't…?
Ronan points at the end of the bed. "I took your shoes off. That's the extent of what I took."
I look down at my feet. They're bare. My heels are lined up neat by the door to the walk-in closet.
I feel like I'm going crazy. I don't know what to do with any of this. Old Cali would be embarrassed right now. Mortified. Old Cali would want to crawl under the covers and never come out.
But that's not exactly how I feel.
I mean, yes, I do, in part, because what woman wouldn't be ashamed by making a fool out of herself in that kind of situation? But it's not the whole story.
Because the rest of me feels unbelievably touched.
I mean, what man wouldn't take advantage of a woman making a fool out of herself in that situation? Ronan had a desperate, drunk woman in his literal arms, begging him to come upstairs in her child-free house and ravish her—and he chose to spend the night in a chair instead?
He had my yes. Consent was given. Consent was pretty much slapping him in the face, let's be honest.
But he didn't.
He didn't take.
All he did was stay.
"That's a really horrible place to sleep," I say, too stunned to communicate even half of what's on my mind right now.
He shrugs and pats the arm. "It's a good chair."
"It is definitionally not a good chair. Nobody has ever sat in that chair on purpose."
"Then I'm the first," he says. "Someone should. It told me it's very lonely over here."
My head hurts too much to properly laugh, but the intention is there.
He stands up and rolls his shoulders once. I hear something in his back pop, and I think, Good, serves you right for sleeping in that chair instead of putting me through the mattress. Then I immediately feel guilty and flushed and confused all over.
He moves slowly across the room, not talking. When he's at the side of the bed, he kneels down so his face is level with mine.
He takes my hand. His is warm. Mine is cold. Then he lifts two fingers and puts them under my chin, tipping my face up so I have to look at him.
I can't look away. He won't let me.
"When I have you, kotyonok," he intones, "you'll remember every second of it. I'm not interested in a version of you that can't recall my name in the morning."
I don't say anything. I don't think I could if I tried.
His eyes are on mine. The blue and the gray.
He means it. Every word. I can tell.
Even on our best days, Todd never once looked at me like this. I don't think he was capable of it.
Ronan looks at me like everything else in the world has ceased to exist.
"Okay," I whisper. It's all I've got.
He nods. He lets his fingers fall from my chin. Then he brings my hand up and presses his mouth to my knuckles, soft, and lets go.
Then he starts to rise.
"You're leaving?" I protest. "You don't want coffee, or—"
"I want a great many things," he interrupts. "But you have children coming home in a few hours, and you need to shower off that whiskey, and I need to not be here when your mother's car pulls up." He bends down. "May I?"
I nod.
He kisses me. It's not the kiss from last night, the deep one that made me climb into his lap, though I really wouldn't mind if that's how he did kiss me, morning breath and all.
But this is a fluttering, barely-there kiss. It leaves me wanting so much more.
I watch as he retreats to the chair, grabs his jacket, and slings it over his shoulder with one finger. He walks to the door.
I can't let him go quite yet, though.
"Ronan."
He stops. Turns.
I don't know what I'm going to say until I say it.
"Thank you," I tell him.
He looks at me for a second. "You never have to thank me for that, Calista," he whispers. "Not for that. Never."
And then he's gone. I hear his feet on the stairs, and then the front door whooshing open and closed, and then nothing.
I lie there for a while refusing to let myself think about anything in particular.
Sleep creeps up on me again for a few hours.
When I wake back up, the sun is at its mid-morning point in the sky and my phone is vibrating with texts from my mother informing me that she's bringing the kids back at noon.
Time to reassemble all the broken pieces of myself and be SuperMom again.
I sit up and realize with a jolt that there's a glass of water and two ibuprofen on my bedside table. I can only laugh and shake my head—Ronan must have set them there. I down both gratefully, then rise to do everything that must be done.
The week that follows is a good one.
I keep waiting for it to turn on me. For the last year or year and a half of my life, I got so used to the floor dropping out that a part of me can't stop bracing for it. I'm too wary—I can't quite trust a good day to just be a good day.
But it doesn't turn. The days line up one after another, ordinary and warm, and slowly, the bracing starts to loosen.
The kids come home Sunday afternoon, dropped off by my mom, who gives me a look on the porch that says she has questions aplenty, but also the good grace to save them.
Isabella barrels into the house shouting about a caterpillar she found at Grandma's that she has named Doctor Fuzz.
Hayden trails behind with a library book about hydrothermal vents that he clearly intends to recite to me word for word.
"There's a whole world down there," he tells me at dinner, waving a chicken nugget for emphasis, "where there's no sun at all, and the animals don't need it. They eat chemicals from the vents. Isn't that insane, Mom? A whole world with no sun!"
"That's insane," I agree.
"There are worms," he says, delighted, "as long as your arm."
Isabella makes a face. "Doctor Fuzz would not like those worms."
"Doctor Fuzz is a caterpillar," Hayden says.
"Yes, and he is a good one," Isabella says, with the withering dignity of a six-year-old defending the honor of her comrade. I have to put my napkin over my mouth so they don't see me laughing.
This is what I fought for. I forget that sometimes, in the swirl of everything else, in the divorce and the company and the man in the tuxedo who takes my mirrors and answers questions I didn't know I was asking.
But this—two kids at my table arguing about the heroic qualifications of a caterpillar—this is the thing that matters most.
This was always the thing.
I clear the plates. I do bath time. I read the hydrothermal vent book out loud, doing voices for the worms and the volcanos and the many sightless fish that call the bottom of the ocean home, until Hayden falls asleep with his hand still on the page.
I tuck Isabella in with Doctor Fuzz's shoebox on the nightstand, where she can see him, because she made me promise I'd tuck him in, too.
Then I go downstairs and stand in my kitchen in my socks.
Only when the house is quiet do I let myself think about him.
It's been like that all day long. I'll be doing something completely mundane—wiping down the counter, pulling a load out of the dryer, standing at the sink—and my mind will just go there, all on its own.
Any time I'm in my bedroom, I keep sneaking glances at the chair in the corner of my room that I still haven't put the laundry back on, because it feels like his chair now.
The stoop whiskey.
Two white pills next to a glass of water.
You never have to thank me for that.
And also, most confusingly of all…
Nothing happened.
Todd would have taken it. Not because Todd was a monster in that specific way, but because Todd took whatever was in front of him and called it love and expected me to be grateful. He never once in ten years sat in a chair all night so I could sleep.
I don't know what to do with a man who does.
The mornings help.
Every morning, before ten, my phone lights up. You're beautiful, Calista Meadows. Same words, every day, relentless in their patience.
The first day, I sent back, Stop.
The second day, I sent back, You're going to give yourself carpal tunnel.
By Wednesday I stopped fighting it and just let the warm glow force a smile to my face for a few precious minutes before I put the phone down and got on with my day.
He sends other things, too. A picture of a sea creature he found online that he thinks Hayden would be interested in, some kind of translucent squid with a bioluminescent appendage on the end of it.
On Thursday, a delivery arrives. It's a stack of children's books about the deep sea, and a smaller box of the good bandages, the ones with the cartoon animals, because Isabella went through the last of hers performing an emergency appendectomy on the couch cushion.
Ronan Akov is always, always listening.
The company is doing good, too. The Jersey logistics firm signs the full contract on Tuesday, and the first payment hits the company accounts the following day. Shortly after, two more companies email asking for a demo.
Turns out humiliating your cheating husband in front of a bank full of financiers is excellent marketing. Who knew?
The filing against my company goes quiet.
Ronan told me not to worry about it, and I trust him enough to do exactly that.
I don't understand all of it, but I've stopped needing to, because for the first time in a very long time, there is someone else in my corner. Someone who has never once lied to me.
That's the part I keep circling back to, in the quiet in-between moments.
He's never lied to me.
There are things he won't tell me. I know that. I haven't forgotten it. I'm not stupid, and I'm not doing the thing I did with Todd, where I saw the ocean of red flags and told myself they were beige.
I see them. I'm keeping the receipts, same as always.
But there's an essential difference between a man who has secrets and a man who lies. Todd looked me in the eye and told me I was crazy while he stole my company out from under me.
Ronan looks me in the eye and tells me there are things he won't say, and then he doesn't say them; meanwhile, everything he does say turns out to be true.
I think I can live with that.
By Friday night, with the kids asleep and the house quiet and the whiteboard on the fridge blank and clean, I sit on my stoop and breathe in the evening air.
I feel like I'm standing at the edge of something.
It's finally, finally solid ground beneath my feet.
I built this ground myself, brick by brick, receipt by receipt, and there's a whole life on the other side of this that I can almost see, the way Hayden talks about that world at the bottom of the ocean.
A whole world down there with no sun, and the animals don't need it.
I built a life that doesn't need Todd. I did that.
I don't know exactly what the shape of the new life is yet. I know it has my kids in it, and my company, and this house with its stoop. I know it has mornings that start with four words on my phone that I've stopped pretending I don't wait for.
I look at my wrist. The little gold octopus charm catches the streetlight.
I laugh, quietly, to myself, in the dark.
Then I go inside, and I lock the door, and I go up to bed, past the chair in the corner I still haven't touched, and I sleep the way I slept the morning after the gala.
Slow.
Easy.
Like someone's watching over me.