Epilogue #3
The pair went back up the stairs they’d just come down from, and I watched them go with an ache hollowing out my chest. That didn’t go as well as I had hoped. Ethan and my mother left off to the kitchen soon thereafter, and I was left to wander the hallway leading down to my father’s study.
The door was closed instead of cracked open like usual.
I rasped my knuckles against the door but didn’t bother waiting for him to tell me to go away before turning the handle and ducking inside.
The room was a mess of loose papers, tossed about journals, charging cords, and strictly hardback books all walled around my father who sat at the center of it all.
He didn’t turn in his chair as I entered.
His fingers didn’t even stop clacking against the keys of his laptop.
“Hi, Daddy,” I tried, edging into the study.
The lenses of his glasses glowed blue from the open screen in front of him, black words scribbling in digital text at an outrageous pace.
Without moving a muscle but his mouth, he replied. “Hi, Sweetheart.”
“Whatcha working on?”
A beat.
“A very important chapter like I told your mother just a couple of minutes ago.”
My fingers felt the hollow of my neck cave in as I tried not to gasp at the clipped tone of his voice. It hurt. His customary welcome of a hug and a kiss had been shaved down to a barely there glance reflecting in his computer screen.
A year ago, when everything that happened between Ethan and I was discovered, my dad wasn’t pleased with me, obviously.
Though nothing like this. When I’d told my parents over the phone that I’d be bringing Ethan to Thanksgiving this year as my date, they’d both gone silent.
In a rush, I explained how it had all happened and how we’d found each other again and that Monica knew and had basically given me her blessing.
After a while, Mom started asking questions and talking again.
Dad never did.
“Are you going to join us out there soon?”
Another strangled beat.
“Not until I finish this chapter, no.”
I nodded, digesting his words as if they were a brick sitting in my stomach, lodged in uncomfortably and grating against my insides with every twist and turn I made.
He didn’t want to be around me, much less Ethan, much less us together.
That much was obvious. I just wished he’d come right out and say it so I could plead my case.
Carefully, and with my heart in my throat, I asked, “Are you mad at me, Daddy?”
His fingers stopped typing for only a second. Then he resumed the mind-numbing clicking.
“No, Alice. I’m not mad at you.”
“Then what are you?” I pushed.
His clacking of the keys slowed to a halt, and my father exhaled, slim shoulders sinking down as his head drooped to lie in his hand. He scratched the top of his head where thin, ashen-colored hair still grew, and finally rotated in his chair to confront me.
The face of my father was grim-set, long and sliced with deep upset. Eyes the same brilliant blue as mine raised to me, framed with an unusual intensity by the thick rims of his glasses. “Do you want the honest answer?”
The honesty might hurt, but if there was anything this past year had taught me, it’s that the honesty of the truth was less painful than the betrayal of a lie.
“Always.”
My father crossed his arms over his chest and sank back in his office chair. He bobbed back and forth in the chair more than a few times, stringing out my worries to suffocate on his silence.
“I’m not thrilled with your choices as of late, Alice, and I know I don’t have to specify what it is I’m referring to.”
Guilt sunk my head low. “No, you don’t.”
“Your mother might be okay with this, but I’m having much more trouble getting on board with you two.”
“Even if he makes me happier than I’ve ever been? Ever ?”
“And since when is it fair to put your happiness over your sister’s?”
“Never, but she is happy. She’s got Steven and he’s great to her.”
I held back the tid-bit Monica told me the other day over the phone where she’d glimpsed Steven flipping through an engagement ring catalogue on his phone.
He hadn’t popped the question, and we didn’t know when he would, so she made me promise not to say anything to anyone, and I was not about to blow her second engagement in any way, shape, or form.
“I know that, and Steven is a good man.” His salt and pepper eyebrows pulled narrow, and he shook his head. “I can’t say the same about the man you’ve chosen.”
“Because you don’t know him like I know him,” I passionately defended.
“And I don’t really care to. At least not any time soon.”
I threw my hands up in front of me, blue-tipped fingernails flashing in front of my vision. “Well, you have to!”
“And why do I have to?”
“Because I love him, and there will never be anybody else. It’s him and it’s me, and that’s all it will ever be.”
“Who says?”
“Fucking fate!” I exclaimed, falling into laughter almost immediately. The curse and confession poured out of me freely, and it felt good .
My father’s eyes kicked wide open, and my free-falling laughter pulled its parachute and stalled out. “Sorry…”
And then, like he was standing in the corner of the room, an admonishing Ethan blipped through my mind, and yet another smile blew wide on my face.
“No. I’m not sorry, actually.” My dad was clearly having trouble keeping up with my uncharacteristic tenacity by the way his eyebrows squished and eyes bounced back and forth between mine.
“Ethan’s been helping me learn to not apologize for things I don’t need to be sorry for like cursing and to not blame myself for things that aren’t my fault. ”
I stepped closer to my dad, hoping he could see the veracity of my words breathing in my stare.
“I have a lot to be sorry for, and how everything happened last year is on that long list. I will always be sorry for how it happened, but you will never make me apologize for falling in love with him. I’ll never be sorry for that.”
Inside my chest, my heart was cuddling up with the butterflies and sparklers that turned mine and Ethan’s love into something palpable. They buzzed and twirled, feeling fantastic to not only be out in the open, but guarded so proudly.
I waited for my dad to respond, to say anything, but he remained tight-lipped.
That infinite, delectable, limb-tingling feeling simmered as I kept my eyes locked to his, and he refused to comment past the shell-shocked judgement screaming from his eyes.
Just more and more of his silence that wound its fingers around the butterflies in my chest and tried its best to smother their joy.
It was working, too. Every second without a response, I felt another one thump to the bottom of my chest, its wings crinkled and body withered.
I left his study moments later, the dying buzz inside of me trying to shock itself back to life as I made it back down the hallway, and beelined it for the kitchen. I needed to see him. I needed to hold him and have him coax the butterflies back out of hiding.
Really, I just needed him to tell me everything was going to be okay.
In the kitchen, I found him and only him over the sink washing vegetables, my mother absent and thankfully so. Ethan turned over his shoulder as I entered, every single one of his handsome features drawing serious as he saw me. “What happened?”
“I tried to talk to my dad. Didn’t go well.”
Ethan’s face creased in open sadness, and he snatched the hand towel hanging over the edge of the sink and quickly dried off his hands.
“Slim…”
Arms and the allaying, crisp smell of him swept me up, cradling me into a chest of muscle and comfort.
The weight of Ethan’s hand cradled the back of my head, petting smooth strokes down my neck and back up again.
I pressed my forehead to his sternum, squeezing my eyes shut and straining to hear the honeyed melody beating from his heart.
“He just… said things that were—” I paused, chewing over the right word. “Upsetting.”
His hand that ran along the back of my hair split beneath my loose locks, fingers grazing the nape of my neck, his thumb trailing affection up and down. Skin to skin. I sighed, relaxing deeper into his body.
“We’ve been here less than 20 minutes and, between Monica needing to get ‘loose’ and my dad basically shunning us, it’s just not going how I hoped it would.”
Ethan rested his cheek on my head, holding me closer. “Your sister is trying, and I think she’s doing really well, all things considered. As for your dad, he’ll have no choice but to come around because I’m not going anywhere.”
“Good. I don’t want you to go anywhere,” I mumbled into his shirt.
I felt his cheeks pull into a smile against my head. “You’re not sick of me yet?”
I shook my head against him, rolling a smirk between my teeth. “Not yet. Give it a couple more weeks and we’ll see.”
“Ah, see?” The weight of his head lifted, and I leaned back to peer up at him, his stare a stunning combination of levity and adoration. “Told you my girl had jokes.”
His girl.
Veiled and wounded butterflies alike shimmied back to life, the buzz of their flapping wings creating a gentle hum in my chest. I loved being his girl as much as I loved hearing him say it out loud and without fear of being overheard.
Our love was as free as the butterflies, flying into the glint of sun and eclipsing into forever.
“I just want them to see what I feel between us,” I whispered, lost in the slow dance his thumb was doing along the back of my neck. Then, the same languid dance was in his eyes as they drew in thoughtful lines all across my face, a small smile gracing his mouth.
“Do you remember our night in Central Park?”
How could I forget?