Chapter Forty Maddie
Chapter Forty
Maddie
My and Bram’s love is slow and then sudden like the changing seasons.
After my classroom lesson in December in the midst of finals, I spent the weekend at Bram’s and I never left.
After a week of leaving bits and pieces of my belongings in his room and in his bathroom, he asked me how I felt about laying down roots.
Here. In this house. And not in the guest room up on the second floor with the girls, but here with Bram in his bed.
He asked me early in the morning as the day spilled from the horizon, and I whispered a yes into his ear before he could finish the sentence.
Before I even got home from celebratory end-of-semester drinks with Junie that day, Bram and Joey had cleaned out my apartment and Bram had paid Sloane for the next three months of rent.
(A fact I only later found out, thanks to Leo’s loose lips, and a fact that became an argument that Bram refused to have.)
Today, Sara was on back-to-school duty, so it was an incredibly quiet return to real life after the holidays as Bram and I had lazy, sleepy morning sex before he showered and headed over to campus.
I, on the other hand, put on my best sweatshirt* and spend the day prepping for my first day at my new second job, which isn’t until next week.
I’ll be adjuncting through May, though I only have classes two days a week, and then I’ll also be working for Veronica Balentine.
I won’t actually be doing her job—at least, not at first—but watching her do her job and learning from her as her shadow will be the next best thing.
The house is quiet without Hester Prynne, and Bram is slowly giving in to my cat adoption campaign. After Bram gets home, we’re going to visit a middle-aged brother and sister duo whose bios read that they are only motivated by shredded cheese.
Most of the morning is spent building a dossier on potential candidates for the next election cycle that I’ll be presenting to Veronica, who called me on Christmas Day.
“I don’t think I can ever forgive you for your bad taste in men,” she said in lieu of hello. “Though to be fair, most taste in men is bad taste in men, but over the last few weeks, I was dismayed to find that I missed the Madelyn Kowalczk interruptions in my life.”
I smiled as I stepped into the mudroom at the back of the house, while Bram, Sara, Asher, the girls, Hester Prynne, my mom, Bee, and Nolan all snoozed in and out of a Hope Channel movie called The Last Letter, written by Bee’s friend Sunny Palmer.
“Oh, Veronica,” I said in a whisper as I closed the door behind me. “If you’re trying to woo me back into a campaign, I’m sorry to say I’m not your girl.”
“I know, I know,” she said. “Though I’ve been thinking about it and I think with the right donors, maybe we could actually capitalize on the good professor’s bad boy past if—”
“No. No, thank you,” I told her. “Now, I’m assuming you’re not calling to wish me a Merry Christmas.”
She huffed. “No, I’m calling because my wife says she won’t talk to me until next year unless I just pull the trigger and offer you a job. Next year is only a week away, I know, but the woman is the only person I enjoy talking to, so that would present a problem.”
My jaw dropped as I paced back and forth, tiptoeing over discarded shoes and jackets.
She took my stunned silence to mean something else entirely. “All right, I can see this is going to take some negotiations.”
My heart immediately skipped a beat at the scent of blood in the air.
Ultimately, we agreed that I would spend a few months shadowing Veronica before I would be allowed to take on my own clients. I told her that I wouldn’t work with just anyone, and she coolly replied that as long as my moral compass didn’t put her in the red, that was fine.
Which is why I am currently running all over the house with my laptop open and balancing it in one hand as I hunt for my charger.
Bram’s theory is that if I just leave it in the same place every day, I’ll be able to find it, but that doesn’t account for my changing mood and the fact that some days I want to work in the greenhouse or in bed or in the window bench of his—
Bram’s office! Yes, of course.
Quickly, I slide down the hall in my fuzzy socks, the red battery angrily blinking at me in the corner of the screen.
I swing the office door open and right there sitting on Bram’s desk with a small note attached is my charger.
Right where you left it. Funny how that works. —B
I stick out my tongue, knowing that I’ll always choose to be his brat when it comes to this silly little charger that always seems to be missing.
Just as I plug the laptop in, the screen goes black, so I plop down into Bram’s chair as I wait for it to charge enough so that it will power back up.
While I wait, I use Bram’s desktop to browse the county courthouse page and brush up on the campaign filing rules and deadlines.
The cursor hovers over a menu option that reads How Do I . . . There are several options. Pay a traffic fine, receive an exemption from jury duty, receive housing assistance. And then at the very bottom of the list is file for a marriage license.
I nearly exit out of the page before it can even load.
But then I remember my mom whispering in my ear about what a good man Bram is as he and Nolan lay on the ground the day after Christmas, fake snoring and pretending to be asleep as the twins attempted to wake them while Fern downloaded Bee on her crush on a girl named Adelaide.
I let myself look over the page and I can’t get over how easy it is to just go to the courthouse with the person you love and make things quietly official. How you can go to the historic two-story building in the heart of Mount Astra and walk in as two and out as one.
For just a moment, I let myself imagine a short little white dress and a nonsensical veil because why the hell not. And red lipstick. Always red lipstick.
It’s just the two of us in my imagination. Our lives are full of people we love and treasure, but I like the idea of this moment taking place discreetly in a building where lives change in big and small ways every day. That our union is a contract, a promise, and not at all a performance.
I leave the browser open on purpose right there next to Bram’s inbox, because almost everything I do is for a reason.
Sitting in the windowsill is my prickly pear because Bram said that the lighting in his office was ideal at this time of year and that this office is ours now, and he likes that it shows evidence of me.
The soil appears to be a little dry, so I take out the mister and shower her with a little bit of water.
It feels silly to hope, but every time I check on the spiky little thing in her shiny red pot, I get a little giddy as I catalog every minute change and development.
It all feels very subtle, but Bram has promised me that one day this spring, we will wake up to find that she is flowering all at once.
And because we will have witnessed her every day until that moment, Bram and I will know that even though her blooms will appear to be sudden, the truth is that they have been finding their light little by little every day for months.
I leave the cactus in the window and go back to the desk to retrieve my laptop and charger, taking one last look at the open web page on Bram’s browser, and I know that for anyone else who might see it, the silent and completely informal proposal might feel abrupt, but for Bram and me, there’s never been any sort of casual space between meeting as strangers and a deep, life-altering connection.
So this—the idea of us committing ourselves to each other in a legal and binding way—was a seed planted early on before either of us even knew what we might become, which was in no way sudden and yet, like spring, abruptly lush and alive all at once.