Chapter 12 #2
“Ah.” Demi looks like she wants to say more on that subject, but instead she looks down at the table as she tears her bread in half.
I’m about to ask Noel what exactly med-legal entails—we’ve never gotten into the nitty-gritty of his job aspirations beyond the apparently broad field of medical illustration—when Demi speaks up again.
“So what sort of role do you expect to play in our baby’s life? ” she asks him, quite bluntly.
The question catches him off guard. His eyes dart over to me, briefly, before he looks back at my wife. “What do you mean?”
She gazes back at him with her elbow on the table and her chin in hand, something my father always used to snap at her about.
I try to picture him here with us at this odd meeting, my pregnant wife meeting my boyfriend, and it’s so ridiculous that I have to dispel the mental image immediately. Too weird.
“Well, do you envision yourself a sort of...” Demi’s gesturing now, her bracelets jingling on her arm. “A mother figure?”
Noel’s face is as blank as I’ve ever seen it. He blinks at her exactly once. “What?”
“Because you’re—” She’s not quite spluttering, but close, and I sit up straighter as I finally determine what strange course she’s taking with this line of questioning. “Don’t take this the wrong way. I just wasn’t sure if your, ah, presentation plays any role—”
Oh, no. “Demi,” I say in a low voice, and when she glances at me I shake my head.
Noel’s taking it in stride, though. He raises one dark eyebrow. “I’m still a man. I don’t pretend to be anything else.”
“Alright,” she says, and she has the grace to look somewhat embarrassed. “I wasn’t trying to offend.”
“It’s fine. Like, I get it. I’m gender nonconforming in how I present, but for me personally, that has no bearing on my actual identity right now.
” He tugs at his shirt where it’s slipped off one bony shoulder.
“But to answer your question, I’d like to be involved, as much as you guys are comfortable with. If that’s okay.”
Demi nods thoughtfully. I watch Noel for a moment.
He’s gone back to dipping his bread in his soup, eating it with a gusto that’s rare for him.
I casually slice him off another piece off the loaf and toss it onto his plate, and he shoots me a half-smile.
“Don’t they teach you not to assume one’s gender in those inclusivity modules at your work, Demi? ” I remark to her.
“Sorry.” She is genuinely apologetic. “I was curious.”
“I don’t mind talking about it,” Noel says. “It only sucks when people are rude or mean about it. Questions and conversation are fine.”
“But you shouldn’t have to field questions about it constantly,” I say. “It’s no one’s business, anyway.”
He shrugs. “As long as no one is calling me it, I’m good.”
Another ten minutes goes by of companionable conversation that Demi largely abstains from aside from the odd comment, content to listen and eat her food, and I start thinking that this isn’t so bad.
Demi’s a little awkward, sure, but it’s an awkward as hell situation, and Noel’s handling it like a champ.
If roles were reversed, I’m not sure I could say I’d behave the same.
He has gotten so much better. Without me.
Done it himself, like he’s always done everything, while the world spat on him and his brain terrorized him.
Picked himself up and dusted himself off and just went on with it like he didn’t have scrapes on his knees and palms, or scars from all the repeated beatings the universe has dealt him.
I admire him so much for it. And I love him all the more for it, too.
I ask him about the med-legal stuff and he explains it to me: illustrations for court cases, oftentimes gruesome. “Not glamorous work, by any means,” he says in a way that seems to relish this fact. “But it’s in high demand and always needs custom work. Busy. Short, punishing deadlines.”
“Stuff you’re all good at.” I grin at him.
Which is when Demi can’t seem to contain herself anymore. She clears her throat. “I wanted to ask you about something, Noel.”
We both swivel our heads towards her. “What’s that?” he says.
“Well, I was sort of looking you up…”
“Looking me up?” Noel echoes, confused. “Looking me up how?”
She pauses. “I ran a background check on you.”
There is a sudden hush in the dining room.
A soft thunk as Noel sets his spoon on the placemat carefully and deliberately.
He raises his gaze to Demi again. His chin juts out in a defiant way, his hair sliding around his face, and I can see a muscle in his jaw work.
Angry cat, all flattened ears and raised fur, holding the hissing and spitting in desperate check.
I break the brief, yet terribly heavy silence. “Why did you do that?”
“I would do it for anyone new who expects to be around the baby. You understand, right?” We’re both just looking at her.
My shock is subsiding, the anger only just beginning to mount, while Noel stares on in cold fury.
She fumbles to steer this somewhere better and it’s only derailing further.
It’s speeding headlong toward a cliff. I’m shaking my head at her and telling her stop but she’s talking again, too late.
“I promise it’s not personal. It’s just that you’ll be around the baby, so I needed to know—”
“Shoplifting when I was fourteen and vandalism when I was seventeen. Trust me, I’m aware of my own juvenile criminal record.”
I don’t look at Noel; I’m watching Demi, who’s staring back at him with a crinkled brow.
No, I don’t know anything about Noel getting arrested as a kid—I didn’t even think that showed up on a criminal background check.
I am mad that she’s bringing it up here, now, like she’s going out of her way to humiliate him, instead of talking to me about it first. He doesn’t deserve this.
“Demi,” I say, and I sound just as mad as I feel. “What are you doing and why?”
“It’s not like that.” Her words trip over themselves in their effort to escape her tongue. Her expression is a mix of frantic and embarrassed, her cheeks dark. “Look, it’s not about what I found there.”
I remember what she said in the kitchen earlier, though. He’s out there by himself. “Then what is it about?”
“Is that it, then? You don’t trust me around your kid?
” Noel interjects. “Because I stole food for me and my mom one time? Actually, it was more than that—I just got caught once. Or how about when I slashed a cop’s tire because he called my mother a crack whore, so they threw the whole book at me?
Gonna hold that against me too?” There are furious tears in his eyes, trembling on his long, dark lashes. “Did I fail your little test?”
“No,” I say at once. “No, of course not.”
“Just let me talk.” Demi turns back to Noel.
“I didn’t even know about the shoplifting.
Only the felony vandalism showed up. And—um, you know, since that was six years ago, you’re eligible to seal it.
That way it doesn’t show up on any searches.
” He doesn’t say anything. He’s still glaring at her.
“That’s, um, all I was trying to say. I phrased it poorly. I’m sorry.”
Noel clearly doesn’t believe her and I’m not sure I do, either. I’ve never been more horrified of Demi than I am in this moment. In fact, this is the very first time.
He abruptly stands, almost knocking over his chair in the process.
He grabs it, rights it and turns to me but doesn’t say anything.
His face contorted with the sheer effort of holding back the meltdown he wants to have and he’s physically shaking.
He can’t make himself ask without dissolving and I don’t make him, either.
“My keys are on the front table,” I tell him softly.
“Go sit in the truck. I’ll be there in a minute. ”
He’s off like a shot, darting into the hallway, and I hear the click of Amelia’s toenails as she bolts after him.
I hear the rattle of keys, the slam of the front door.
The dog whines once before it’s back to the awful silence.
I turn my head back in the direction of my wife, who rubbing an absent hand along her stomach.
“Why?” I say. “Why on earth did you that? Here? Now?”
“I don’t know,” she murmurs, tracing the seam of her sleeveless shirt with her fingertips. “It was bothering me.”
So it was bullshit, the excuse about sealing his record. “Why do it at all?” I ask, incredulous. “Without even telling me? What does it have to do with anything?”
Her long hair curtains her face, shielding her from me. “You never include me in your decisions,” she says. “Why should I include you in mine?”
Were we really doing this eye for an eye crap? “You could’ve at least told me the results in private first.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything in the first place,” she snaps, jerking her head up.
“I wanted to let it go, but it was bothering me. I had to know what happened with that charge, what was so bad they slapped him with a felony at seventeen. He’s going to be around our child, Luca. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
“Are you satisfied with the answer?” I shoot back. “You should have told me. Not keep it to yourself just to blurt it out at the table.”
“I messed up, alright?” she says. “I get it. I know I wasn’t tactful.”
“If you’d asked, I would’ve told you he had an awful childhood. His mother’s an addict. He’s been neglected his entire life.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset him. I just needed to know.”
“I’m not the one you need to apologize to.” I stand up. “I’ll be back in an hour. I’ll clean all of this up when I get home.”
Demi doesn’t look at me. She’s still rubbing the bump on her belly as I walk away.
It’s always something.