Chapter 19
Chris
The sheets slipped down her body, exposing one nipple as she stretched her arms up. Her body was all smears of color and soft edges without my glasses, but my already hard dick jerked with arousal. There was no better way to greet the morning than waking up with a naked woman in my bed.
Unless it was the woman I’d lost my fucking mind with last night, and now I had to tell her, yet again, that we couldn’t be together.
Daphne rolled to her side and I fixed my gaze on the cracks in the ceiling plaster.
“Merry Christmas, Chris.”
“Merry Christmas, Daphne.” It came out hollow and thin.
“I’m going to shower, if that’s okay. I’m sticky. Do you want—”
“I’ll go after you,” I said without looking at her.
After what I did to her last night, I couldn’t stand myself. Couldn’t stand to face her disappointment and there was no getting away from it in this tiny room. How often was I going to keep giving in and lying to myself about it? Denying her needs and wants only to succumb to my own when they grew overwhelming? I hadn’t been fair.
I’d proven to myself that I couldn’t handle seeing her, knowing her. I’d have to block her out completely and that felt like torture. And at this point, it felt like the wrong decision. I just didn’t know how to make it right.
I started folding up our things. Laying out what we’d need to get home. Home, to an empty apartment. No historical facts blurted out whenever they popped into her head or silly destinations to divert my attention.
“Where are you, Chris?” she asked from the bathroom door.
“Nowhere good.”
“Obviously. Do you regret last night?”
I laughed. “No. I should. But I don’t. Unless..." I looked up at her. Her arms were folded protectively across her chest. “Did I hurt you?”
“No. You’re hurting me now. And you’re hurting.”
“I know. I know I’m shutting you out, and I hate that I don't have the answers. All I want to do is protect you and I’m doing the opposite. I’m causing your pain.”
“You want to protect me?”
“Darling,” I wrapped her in my arms and folded my body around her. “Yes. I want to do everything in my power to shield you from every unhappiness, every pain, every hint of discomfort.”
“Nobody has ever done that for me.”
“I know.”
“I don’t need anyone to do that for me.”
“We all need that. All your life, people should have been protecting you, loving you, and they failed.” I held her out. “But you can’t let me do it either. You can’t give me that. I haven’t earned it yet. You have to get through a little more by yourself, sweetheart. Because I can’t protect you if we’re together. If we’re caught—and we will be caught—it’s not a matter of me losing my job. As unfair as it is, it’ll discredit your career before you’ve even established it.”
“I can’t allow myself to think love can possibly be that cruel.” She searched my eyes. “Unless... it’s not love.”
“I don’t know.” I shook my head. More willful ignorance. I fucking knew what it was. “Anthropologically, I think... men need to take care of someone. To protect them. We use it to trick women into making it feel like love, but it’s just oxytocin and dopamine. It’s selfish, egotistical. We do it to make ourselves heroes or knights. Just like Valentine said.”
“I know you’re wrong, Chris. But I can’t be the one to convince you you’re wrong. You have to do it on your own.”
“Can you believe we’ve been on the road for a full day, and we haven’t stopped for gas once?” she asked.
Once we’d gotten on the road, Daphne had easily slipped back into her holly jolly persona, but I knew it was a lie. A coping mechanism.
All I could do was let her maintain that shield. Pretend I didn’t notice what she was doing. How hurt she was.
I’d pretend, too. “At this point, I’ll only be shocked if we make it to Knoxville today. I’m grateful for every time I don’t have to get out of the car and look at the damage done to Brigitte. I’m full up on heartbreak at the moment.”
She grinned. A real grin. “You called her Brigitte.” Maybe we’d be okay.
“After two accidents in one night, I figure she’s earned her name.”
“I know. She was so pretty. I’m sure someone can fix her. Or you can send her back to Germany.”
“No. This was proof that I shouldn’t have spent money I should have donated.”
“Are you going straight to the lab? Can I come?”
“Yes. And No.”
“Come on, please? No one will be there. It’s Christmas. I just want to see the facility. Bask in its hallowed halls.”
“It’s just a normal bio lab.”
“I’m coming.”
“I’m dropping you off at your father’s first.”
“Hasn’t this trip taught you that you can’t control anything? We’re just going to get thrown together again and again until you stop fighting it.”
I said nothing. We managed to make it through a whole verse of Dean Martin singing “White Christmas” in silence. It had to be a record. Not that I enjoyed her silence. I just enjoyed that she wasn’t saying or doing anything that was making me fall even harder for her.
“Oh!” She screamed. “Pull over.”
My heart seized. I jerked the wheel to the right, careening off the road onto the shoulder before throwing the brake. “Fuck. What’s wrong? Daph—”
Adrenaline coursed through my body as I whipped off my seatbelt and scrambled over her, two fingers at her pulse, looking at her pupils for signs of unequal dilation and reactivity. All I could think about was the black widow bite from yesterday. We were a lot farther from a hospital now. If there was another in the car, maybe from the wreaths, she wouldn’t stand a chance.
She stared at me with wide eyes. Blinking once. Twice. “I saw a sign for a cemetery.”
My head dropped as I let out a long-held breath. I rested my forehead on her chest as I gripped her arms. “Jesus, Daphne, I almost had a heart attack. I thought...” I slunk back into my seat. It was amazing how quickly I’d stopped the car and scrambled over the console–as if I could have done anything, anyway. But now, it felt like I was moving, thinking, feeling in slow motion. “You’re... okay though?”
“I’m fine.” She nodded. “But... can we visit? Please?” Her voice was so tiny.
“The cemetery?” My brain was still interpreting slowly as it settled itself into its pre-panic state.
She scrunched her eyebrows together like I was the crazy one. “You don’t like cemeteries?”
“They’re fine. I just don’t like almost crashing the car after hearing you shout like you’re dying, only for it to end up being nothing.”
“Not nothing. I love cemeteries. The historic ones. If I don’t have a direct cremation, I hope my family lays me to rest in a beautiful old cemetery. I want strangers to see my headstone–the flowers or the hourglass or whatever image is carved into the stone. They’ll see my name, and maybe it hasn’t been spoken for a hundred years, but they’ll see Daphne McKinnon and wonder what kind of woman she was.”
I grunted and restarted the car, my heart still racing.
“You don’t like thinking about your final resting place?”
“Not mine, sweetheart. I don’t like thinking about yours.” Her only physical existence reduced to a few dusty bones like the ones in the back of the car. It was impossible. She was too vibrant for death. And yesterday, she’d come entirely too close.
“I don’t particularly care.”
“If I had your money, I’d want a whole mausoleum. Fluted columns, brass plaques on the crypts. I’d want my great-grandchildren to be able to walk inside that iron gate to put flowers in my little flower urn thing and know that one day, that’s where their bones will rest, too.”
“Crypt vase.”
“Huh?”
“The little flower urn thing that sticks to the wall. It’s called a crypt vase.” I checked the rearview mirror. No one was on the road. No one had been on the road most of the morning. It was Christmas. They were home with their families and gifts and cookies.
Moments like this reminded me why it felt like it was Daphne and me against the world. The joke was, we weren’t allowed to fight on the same side.
“Your family has a mausoleum, don’t they? Exactly the kind I want?”
I was quiet for a beat before answering. “Yes.”
“Figures. I’ll just have to marry you for your mausoleum, then.”
My brain spasmed at the word. I stopped breathing. But it wasn’t altogether unpleasant. Instead of feeling like an anchor had dropped, jerking me into the dark depths of a tormenting sea, I felt... lighter. Buoyant.
I’ll just have to marry you.
Whatever her reason, those words sounded good. It sounded exactly right.
“Chris? Did you hear me?”
Wait. She’d kept talking. She’d been saying things. Other things. My mind had stopped on what it wanted to hear. I shook myself out of my reverie and put on my blinker. What was one more stop?
“Um... no, I didn’t, but let’s take a walk. Burn off this adrenaline rush.”
“We’re really stopping? Chris, I... You really are the best, you know that?”
I shook my head. “You can say it. Doesn’t make it true.”
“You don’t want to hear what I really want to say. But it doesn’t make it untrue. ”
I drove through the gates and followed the winding drive around the graveyard, looking for a place to pull over. Not that it mattered. There was only one other car here.
“Go up there, where those trees are.” Daphne pointed. “It looks like the oldest part.”
I parked on the road and we got out. We hadn’t been driving long this morning but it felt good to stretch and move.
“Oh, no. I think she needs help.” Daphne took off through the gravestones before I had a chance to turn around.
The car had its hood up. That hadn’t been the case when we’d pulled in. It could be a ploy. They could have seen us coming in the fancy car and decided to tug on our hearts. Or Daphne’s heart that was way too big for her own good.
“Daph, wait.”
“Excuse me!” She was hollering to the person under the hood. “Do you need help?”
An older white woman with frizzy brown hair looked around the hood with surprise. “Nothing you can do.”
She went back to the engine.
Daphne walked closer, saying, “I can take a look. I don’t mind. I know engines.”
The woman glanced at Brigitte and raised her eyebrows at Daphne. With Daphne’s lustrous blonde hair pulled back in a low ponytail, and wearing my coat, she looked posh and expensive. Not that Daphne wasn’t expensive—two car crashes, an ER visit, and a two-thousand-dollar lap dance burger, this road trip was costing me a fortune—but she was so much more than that. This stranger had no idea.
I was the useless one.
“No offense, but you don’t look like you know a thing about cars, except for calling a service, which might not be a bad thing, except they’ll tow it to a mechanic I can’t afford.”
“What happened to it?” Daphne casually ignored the woman’s lack of confidence in her ability, and glanced at the filthy engine.
The woman sighed. “I turned it on, went to leave. By the time I got around the loop, it was running so hot, I turned it back off. Scared to drive it any further. I know Rob used to do something to it to keep it from getting too hot, but I don’t know what.”
Daphne nodded.
“Never thought I needed to know what to do. I’m not as willful as I look, I just never thought there’d be a time so soon when Rob weren’t here. It was always his job, worrying about the cars and fixing up the house.”
The woman bent into the driver’s seat and pulled out a pack of long, slim cigarettes. She lit one up, holding the pack to Daphne, who shook her head.
“Won’t hurt nothing to look, I guess. Don’t know how you can do much of anything out here. Rob kept some tools in the back.”
Daphne walked to the front of the car, slid her arms out of my coat, and handed it to me. “I’m Daphne, by the way.”
“Carol.”
“Like a yuletide Carol!” Daphne’s eyes lit up. Carol’s did not. “Anyway..."
She ducked behind the piece of lumber holding up the hood of the old Plymouth, where the sun had scorched the burgundy paint into a splotchy raspberry shade.
Daphne pulled out the dipstick and the woman craned her neck over her shoulder.
“Rag?”
The woman nodded and rummaged through the truck before giving an old flannel shirt to Daphne. “It’s okay to mess this up?”
“I’d rather have a car that runs than another one of Rob’s old shirts.”
Daphne wiped the stick and dipped it back in again. When she pulled it out, she frowned. “Oil’s low. You change it?”
“Last month. I know I have to do that much. Think they messed something up?”
“Probably not.” Daphne said. She touched the blackened engine cover with the back of her hand before laying the shirt down and leaning across it. “Chris, can you turn on your flashlight?”
I handed her my phone, and she shone it into the engine. I had no idea what she was doing, or what she was looking for, but she was on the hunt for something.
“It’s my first holiday alone,” Carol said. “Rob’s been gone since August. Feels like we just buried him.”
“No leaking under the oil cap. Seal still looks okay.” Daphne replaced the thing she’d unscrewed and looked at Carol. “I’m sorry for your loss. You have any kids?”
“Rob did. But they were partly mine, too. And three grandkids. But they’re spending the holidays with their mom’s side. Rob and I weren’t married. Never got around to it.”
“You’ve got a lot of caked-on gunk around the valve cover, but I don’t see any pooling or wetness. Could be you just need a new gasket, but that doesn’t usually cause a thermal event like what happened today. And I can’t tell you where it’s coming from without removing the cover.” She shifted her weight, practically hopping onto her belly. Legs dangling, over-the-knee socks slipping down her thighs.
Was it rude to get an erection while she was lending a helping hand? Yes, of course. But trying to avoid being turned on by anything she did was useless. Her kindness and competence was my kink. Watching her diagnose this faulty engine while her ass was in the air with her corduroy skirt hiked up around the tops of her thighs was damn near pornographic.
Carol narrowed her eyes at me like she knew what was going on inside my head. And in my pants.
Daphne was now wedging herself under the car.
“Parking brake on?” I asked.
Carol nodded.
I gestured for her to come closer and handed her my business card. “Have the car towed to a shop. Fix whatever needs to be fixed. I’ll take care of it.”
Carol took the card and nodded to Brigitte. “Looks like you got your own mess to take care of.”
“Yesterday was not her finest.”
“I appreciate this,” she said, with a weight in her voice that was too complicated to parse.
Daphne scooched herself out from under the car with her legs clamped shut, trying to keep her skirt down. “There’s a lot going on under here. You’ve got a leak for sure, but I can’t tell where it is without running diagnostics. You carry any oil with you? Maybe we can add enough to get it to a shop.”
“Rob used to take care of this,” Carol repeated.
Daphne and I locked eyes. “I know it must be tough. Especially today.”
Carol nodded and sniffed. “I’ll get you that oil.”
“What did you and Rob do on Christmas?”
“Do?”
“Any favorite movies? Family recipes? You know, holiday traditions.” Daphne smiled at me.
“He liked National Lampoon . I never did. I didn’t watch it this year, but now I kind of miss it. Rob had that kind of Christmas spirit. He was like a kid, he got so excited at the presents. Every year, he wanted a real tree. I told him the fake ones look good now and they’re cheap. But he’d rather have a real tree than fancy presents, so we always got a real tree. That’s what I was doing here today. I got one of them mini Christmas trees for him. Not real, though.”
Daphne slipped my coat back on as Carol talked and talked about Rob and his kids and how she’d see them sometime this week to give them their presents, and she didn’t know what she was going to do about this car the way it kept leaking oil. Daphne listened without judgment or impatience, knowing the woman needed a friend.
“I sold my car three days ago for the same reason. There was nothing I could do to keep it from leaking. It had grooves in the engine block. A new one would have cost more than the car was worth. I loved that car, though.”
I wished she’d told me that three days ago. I would have bought her a new engine if she wanted to keep the car.
“You live far from here?” Daphne asked.
“Ten minutes.”
“Start her up. Let’s see if the temperature’s gone down enough to get home. It won’t last. You’ll need more oil. You’ll need to take it in and find that leak, too. Or sell it for something more reliable. I’m sorry I couldn’t do more.”
“Dishwasher door’s busted, too. Feel like swinging by my house?” she laughed. “You’ve done enough. Thank you. Your husband’s coat’s got a grease stain now.”
Daphne smiled. “We have to be on our way, but good luck.”
“Well… guess I’ll go home and watch Christmas Vacation . Maybe even make the peanut butter cookies Rob loved. The ones with the forks pressed into them. Thank y’all. That was really sweet of you to stop and help the way you did. Most people would’a drove on by without looking.”
“Merry Christmas, Carol,” I said.
When she’d turned out of the cemetery, I grabbed Daphne’s hand.
“Take a walk with me.” The weather had broken and it was in the forties, but the sky was still painted like a film noir. Daphne was the only color in the cemetery.
I kissed her knuckles.
“Don’t. I’m greasy.”
“You’re perfect. I don’t know how you do it.”
“Do what? The car stuff? My dad taught me. And I went through a program in high school when my academic classes weren’t hands-on enough to keep my attention.”
“No. That was fun to watch. But I’m talking about your empathy. You’re so compassionate with everyone. You never leave a place without making a new friend.”
“You’re compassionate. I saw what you did for Yuletide Carol. I pretended not to notice to give you your privacy, but I noticed.”
“Throwing money at a problem is the least I can do. It doesn’t put me out. You put yourself out for people.”
“Sometimes too much.”
“Mm.” I tilted my head. “I saw that with some of the people who worked for my parents' charities, giving one hundred percent and burning out. You’re different, though; you light up when you give.”
We sat on a memorial bench at the top of the hill, under a stand of sentinel oaks, their final, clinging leaves shivered in the wind. It was still cold, but it felt tropical compared with the negative temps of last night.
I picked up a stick and twiddled it between my fingers while she basked in the silence of the historic cemetery.
“That’s an interesting one.” Daphne pointed to a headstone carved with a woman’s hand holding a rose. She was somber and quiet. She knew—we both knew. This was it. Our hours were counting down. Today wouldn’t be like yesterday, with a hundred detours and catastrophes that made the day feel like it was a year long.
“Very nice.” She could say anything, and I’d agree with her.
She knocked into my side. “You really don’t care what you want when you die? Even if you already know your final resting place, you still have options.”
I shook my head again, concentrating on de-barking the twig. Now that we were alone again, I kept thinking about that thing she’d said before. It meant nothing. It was just a thing you say, but I liked hearing it.
“You could be donated to science or something. My first guess for you would be The Body Farm, but obviously that might affect the students’ ability to remain objective—measuring and analyzing data about their former professor’s state of lividity.
“How would it work?” I said abruptly.
“Oh, I don’t know. You’d have to talk to the person who handles donations. I know there’s a long waitlist. Everyone wants to be a part of forensic history. Maybe since you’re affiliated—”
“Not body donation. What you said before, about the... mausoleum.”
“I just think they’re so stately and regal—”
“About marrying me.”
She froze. “Marrying you?”
“So that you can be buried in my family tomb.”
“Oh. That. I was just—”
“I know what you meant. Let’s pretend it’s not entirely out of the question. As a solution to our other problem.”
“Other problem?”
“Waiting.”
She swiveled to face me. “Are you considering—”
“Not considering. Curious. I doubt it’ll actually work, or if you’d want to, or… What…” I swallowed thickly, “would it look like, you think?”
She smiled that smile that showed all her perfectly imperfect teeth. “Probably the same as the day we spent in your parents’ mansion.”
“House. It’s a house.”
She grabbed a twig and followed my lead, picking the bark off, flake by flake. “My legs dangling off the counter, while I watch you cook.”
“My neighbor, Gita, would love you. She brings me so much food I can hardly finish it all.”
“I can’t wait to meet her.” She scooted closer to me. “Let’s see. It would look like me, sneaking scoops of cookie dough whenever your back is turned–”
“I knew there should have been more cookies.”
“...you, frowning at your computer and pinching the bridge of your nose under your glasses, until I forced you out of the house to go to some ridiculous performance art show.”
“Sounds awful.” I stroked her thigh, needing to touch her in the worst way.
She leaned in closer. “You’ll hate it. My taste in art is the worst.”
“It would be getting to feel your cock inside me every night when we go to bed together. Falling asleep with you slowly softening inside me. Waking up to your toothpasty fresh mouth on my clit. Getting fucked until I can’t move and then feeling your cum slip down my thighs.”
She straddled the bench. “You, lifting my skirt and fingering me in the diner after you found out I’d forgotten my panties.”
With her legs parted wide and short skirt stretched across her thighs, I could clearly see what was not underneath. Bare pussy. Just another pair of thigh high socks today.
I fisted my hands, though I didn’t remove them from that stripe of bare skin between her skirt and her socks. I rubbed, but as much as I wanted to shove my fingers inside her and finger fuck her until she was christening the cemetery ground with her gushing cum, I was going to be respectful of the dead.
I sighed and shook my head at her. “I meant academically.”
I reclined on the bench and laid my head in her lap. Immediately, her incredible fingers were in my hair, scratching and stroking, looking down on me like an angel. My Christmas angel with the golden hair.
“I don’t know. It might gain me enough respect going into the program as... your wife.” I knew it was hard for her to say the word. It was hard to hear it. It was too much of a fragile dream, the idea that she could be mine today, tomorrow. For the rest of our lives.
“I’d spend the day working at the lab, or in class. Studying in the evenings, or working on papers until you came home from your classes, or fieldwork, and decided to distract me.”
“I can’t wait to be your distraction.” I smiled. Truly smiled. It was the first time all day.
“What does this mean?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart. I don’t know what to do about any of this. It doesn’t make it any more right. I’m clearly still in the wrong, as far as the handbook goes.”
“Oh my God, Chris. Enough with the fucking handbook.”
“I don’t know if marrying you would be enough, or—or if you even want to..."
“I would want to marry you, Chris. For more than your family crypt. But it won't be enough, and you're not really asking. This is just another thing that’ll get my hopes up.”
We were quiet most of the ride home. The hope that had sprung up in the cemetery had dissipated more and more, the closer we got to Knoxville. It was as if our speaking the word marriage had been too loud to sustain the idea. Or maybe it was the UT Campus, that all-knowing being that could see into our souls and cast our actions in a shameful dirty shadow.
By the time we got to Daphne’s house on the outskirts of town, the only one talking was the GPS.
“Is anyone home?”
There was a string of lights on the small blue house. Old bulbs. Big ones, half of them burnt out or missing.
“Dad’s home, he doesn’t go anywhere. Do you want to come in and meet him?”
I looked at the door and shook my head. I didn’t want to introduce myself as just a colleague or professor.
The thought of leaving her here turned my stomach, but I had too much to think through, and my prefrontal cortex stopped functioning whenever Daphne was near.
“If you think there’s no such thing as love,” she said, “that it’s all hormones, then what do you think disillusions anyone into imagining they love each other?
“Who said there’s no such thing as love?”
“You did. This morning at the hotel.”
Another carol started and she let me ignore the question through most of it.
“Are you going to answer?”
“I don’t know what I think. You make me realize a lot of what I don’t know. My whole foundation is crumbling. I'd always thought real love was a decision; borne from all the small things you do for each other. Eventually, lust mixes with care and a desire to see only good things happen for the other person. I’d thought I loved women in the past, but it didn’t feel like this. Like I can’t catch my breath when I look away from you. Because I only have seconds left to see your face, and smell your skin, and hear your laugh.”
I took off my glasses and scrubbed my hand down my face, as if it was a reset button. “This feels unbearable, parting from you. I don’t want to bear it. I’m trying—”
The world was quiet again. A mist had descended, shrouding the heavily forested road near her house in gloom.
“I don’t know how I was living before you.”
“It took you three days to realize that?” she asked.
“It took me twelve fucking minutes to realize that.”
I turned off the car. We sat in silence, neither one of us making the move to open our doors. In the rear view mirror, I saw a man walking a dog down the road. He passed the driveway, staring at my car, puffing on an electric box. I wondered if he was a neighbor. If he knew Daphne or her dad. It didn’t matter either way. I was just jealous that he lived close to her and I didn’t.
“Don’t make me into your manic pixie dream girl.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Like in movies, when the cool, free-spirited woman comes into the life of a solid, staid man, and shakes him up a bit before he drops her for being too crazy.”
“I don’t think that fits you at all.”
“No?”
I shook my head. “You have opinions on Ming Dynasty porcelain and early twentieth century telephone etiquette. I love that, but I don’t know that those characteristics would be considered cool by many people. You can fix cars without consulting Google. That takes a tremendous amount of self-discipline. Too much to be free-spirited. So what if you wanted to see some of the sights on a road trip? That doesn’t make you manic or elf or whatever you called it. You’re just you. And if it wouldn’t cause the ruination of both our careers, I’d keep you. But right now, you have to use that self-discipline to get through this grad program as fast as you can, so I can be yours.”
“So that’s it then.”
“I don’t know, Daphne. I need time.”
The sound of her door opening gutted me. It was really happening.
She gathered her things from the front seat. Her unopened Mountain Dew bottle, her backpack, her hot cocoa trash and our empty water bottles. Tidying up behind her as I stared, unseeing, out the windshield.
Then she took off my coat, folded it, and placed it in her seat. “Sorry about the grease.”
I carried her overnight bag and wreath to the back door, watching every microdroplet of mist glint in her hair.
Her key crunched in the lock. Just when I thought she wasn’t going to say goodbye—maybe that was for the better—she whipped back, grabbed me around the neck, and kissed me hard. My lips moved with hers, opening her mouth and tasting her for the last time, taking everything I could from these final seconds.
“Listen to me,” she said, after she pulled back. Her eyes were still wild and she hadn’t let go.
“I know you’re the one, Chris. I’ve never cried in your arms, but I don’t have to to know you’d hold me until my tears dried on your shirt. We haven’t seen each other through loss or hard times, but I know I’ll always hold space for you. I don’t know your greatest shame—besides me—or your greatest fears. I don’t know if you believe in a higher power, or how you vote, or what made you go into odontology, how many kids you want, or where you even buy eight-hundred-dollar pants, but I know you’re the one.”
“Daphne.” I lowered my forehead against hers.
“Somehow, I love you. And…” she took a deep breath. “This isn’t goodbye. It doesn’t matter how much you try to keep me away from you because I’ll keep coming back. I’m your home now. And you’re mine. Don’t ruin this because you think you have to get on some honorable high horse. Love is just as powerful as honor.”