8. Ashton
Ashton
My son reaches past me for her, and it takes the legs out from under me in my own hallway.
I get to his door first. I always get there first, it’s the one promise I’ve managed to keep whole since the marriage came apart.
But Luke’s bolt upright in the tangle of his sheets, face streaked, dragging air like the room’s run out of it, and when his eyes find me in the dark they don’t stop on me.
They go past, over my shoulder, to the woman standing a half step behind.
“Imogen.” Not Dad. Her name, and only her name.
“Right here.” She’s already moving, around me like I’m a piece of the furniture between her and where she needs to be.
I step aside and let her, because the other option is putting myself between my kid and the one person bringing him down off the ceiling.
I won’t do that to him to save my own face.
It carves something out of me anyway. Eighteen months of being the only lock he’ll turn, the only hand he’ll take in the dark, and I arranged my entire existence around being that for him.
A handful of days with her in the house and he calls a stranger’s name first, and the unbearable part isn’t that he did it, it’s that I understand why down to the bone.
I trained him to expect a man with a plan.
She walks in with nothing in her hands and somehow that’s the thing he wanted.
She sits on the edge of his bed without waiting to be asked, folds an arm around his shaking shoulders, and starts to talk.
“It’s okay, Luke. What was it? Tell me.”
“A wave.” He chokes it out around the hiccups. “A huge one. And Dad was on the beach but he couldn’t find me in it. He kept looking and looking and he couldn’t see me.”
I stand in the doorway with that going through me like a blade, because of course it’s that.
Of course the thing my son screams himself awake over is me losing him in deep water.
I would burn the ocean down. I would drain it with my bare hands.
I say none of this, because none of it is useful to a six-year-old at three in the morning.
“Here’s the thing about that wave,” Imogen tells him, not arguing it away, not telling him it wasn’t real.
“Right now, the whole ocean’s asleep. You told me yourself the octopus sleeps.
Well, so do the waves. Every single one out there is lying flat for the night, resting up.
They don’t stand up tall again until morning, and by then you’ll be awake and watching them come, and your dad will see you the whole time. ”
“That’s not how the tide works.”
“It’s three in the morning. The tide does what I tell it after midnight. Everybody knows that.”
He almost laughs, this wet wrecked little sound, and it loosens the fist his lungs have been making. One breath, then a slower one, then one that goes all the way down, his shoulders coming away from his ears under her hand.
“Is Dad still there?” Luke asks, not turning around.
“Right in the doorway,” she says. “He’s not going anywhere.”
Luke doesn’t look back at me, but some of the tension goes out of his spine. That’s enough. That’s the whole thing.
I watch her undo in four minutes what I’ve never once managed in an hour, and the want that goes through me has no decency to it at all. Not for her, I tell myself, lying. For that. For whatever she carries that reaches him, the thing I would write any check in the world to own and can’t.
She stays until he’s gone under for real, heavy and slack against her side. Then she lowers him down, pulls the blanket to the exact height he tolerates, and follows me out into the hall, easing his door to the gap he needs to sleep.
And then it’s just the two of us in a dark corridor, and the quiet comes down over everything. I become aware, all at once and far too late, of how little stands between me and being naked in front of her.
Boxers. That’s the full accounting. I came up out of sleep at a sprint when he screamed and didn’t waste a breath on decency, and now I’m a stride away from her with the cold off the black windows on every inch of bare skin and no good move left.
Cover up and I’ve admitted it, put a hand somewhere and steered her straight to where I don’t want her looking.
So I do nothing. I keep still, let the cold have me, and hold my face shut, give her the blank I give everyone, the one that admits to nothing.
She’s no better off. The sleep shirt, the long bare legs, her arms folded over her chest now in a way they weren’t when she had a child to hold.
“You’re allowed to put a shirt on,” she says. “Genuinely. For me. Whenever you’d like.”
“After you.”
“I didn’t have time to dress for company. The rulebook didn’t specify a nightmare wardrobe.”
“Page two would have covered it.”
“Page two covered the weather and the snack rotation. Funny how the one thing it skipped was what to wear when your kid wakes up screaming.” Her eyes drop, take the fast trip down and back up, she catches herself in the act, and the color goes higher in her face. “I’m not looking at anything.”
“I haven’t said one word.”
“You’re thinking it at a volume I can hear.”
I let that go, because she’s not wrong, and steer us somewhere I can survive. “He’s never done that before. Asked for someone who wasn’t me.”
“He’s not swapping you out. Kids collect people once they finally believe they’re safe. He’s got room for two now where he only had room for one. That isn’t you losing ground. That’s the exact opposite of it.”
“You got that from a book somewhere?”
“I got it from watching him look for you in the doorway while he was crying for me.” She holds my eyes. “He needed both of us tonight. That’s not a problem. That’s progress.”
I’ve got nothing to put against that. It’s the kindest reading of my own son anybody’s handed me in a year.
Then she does the thing that ruins me.
She catches her bottom lip under her teeth, holds it, lets it go, and I track the whole small motion like a man on a dark street watching the one window with a light still on.
My body decides something well before the rest of me gets a vote.
I lean in. Half an inch. Less. Just enough that the air between us closes up and goes warm.
She doesn’t step back.
That’s the thing that nearly takes me apart, that she doesn’t move, that her breath goes shallow and her gaze drops to my mouth and climbs back up, that I know past any doubt I could close the last of this distance and she would let me, that she’s been holding her ground as long as I’ve been crossing the space, that whatever’s broken in me is broken in her too and has been since a stolen slice of cake in a dark kitchen.
“Ashton,” she breathes.
First time she’s reached for the name instead of the title, and it runs through me like current down a wire, and that, that of all things, is what shocks me back to my senses.
Because the rest of it arrives all at once.
Harrison, who handed me everything I have.
The board counting the days. Sophia in that doorway with a blade behind her smile.
My son one ugly story away from being taken out of a house I built to keep him safe.
The contract I wrote in my own hand for the express purpose of holding her back far enough that this exact moment could never happen, and here it is happening anyway.
So I reach for the one tool I’ve never failed to find when I’m cornered.
“Go to bed, Ms. Spencer,” I say, meaning the words to sting. “I don’t pay you to stand around in my hallway.”
It works. It always works, that’s the whole rotten miracle of it.
She rocks back like I slapped her, the warmth going out of her face all at once.
She turns and walks to her room without giving me one more word.
The door closes behind her, and I’m left alone in the cold with the taste of my own cruelty in my mouth and a kiss I didn’t take going exactly nowhere.
I stand there until I’m sure she’s not coming back out, then I go back to my room and sit on the edge of the bed in the dark. The house is quiet again. Luke’s breathing. She’s behind her door. Everything is exactly where I put it.
It feels like shit.