Chapter 22. Alex
ALEX
[DRAFT]
From: Alex Corbeau-Green
Subject: Dribble (noun) You drool on your pillow, just to let you know. And you sleep talk.
To: Ophelia Winters
If the rest of my birthdays begin like this one, then I’d like to live forever.
IT’S MY BIRTHDAY. Twenty-four.
I don’t know why, but it feels significant.
Over the years, I’ve prayed not to reach twenty-four, and here I am. Alive and breathing and feeling and aging, just like everyone else.
Oddly enough, I’m someone who enjoys my birthday.
I’m not one for presents or parties, but I’m one for time spent with family.
I’m one for the look of pride and relief in my mom’s eyes at the knowledge that I’ve made it another year.
My depression does feel like an illness, and every birthday feels like an achievement as much as it feels like an exhausting feat of endurance.
This birthday in particular, I feel blessed.
Ophelia’s presence in New York has flipped my week on its head.
When I’m not pulling my hair out from stress and trying to juggle four hundred things at once, I’ll sit down and fully appreciate what she did for me by getting on that plane.
It’s too much for me to think about right now, a kindness too great for my brain to accept.
I vowed as soon as my eyelids swung open this morning that I wouldn’t think about my father today. He doesn’t deserve it. It’s not like I have any real birthday memories beyond the age of ten that I associate him with, anyway. Green Aviation, his favorite child, took up too much of his time.
And after a mind-alteringly hot shower with my girl to start my twenty-fifth year, I spent the second half of my morning in a cramped hospital room with the eight women who put meaning behind my every action, purpose behind my every breath.
My mom’s recovery is slow, but she’s coming home. Ophelia seems in no rush to go back to Scotland. Fleur is speaking to me.
Today I feel surrounded by reasons to keep going.
Now I’m going through my emails in my office at home while Ophelia cooks me “the meal of a lifetime” for lunch, which may well be code for something that’ll make me shit myself, if history is anything to go by.
I love Ophelia, and I think she’s wonderful, but she’s the worst cook on the planet.
In the future I’m building for us in my head, I cook. She sits at the kitchen island and moans about the state of the world and how everything is becoming a QR code nowadays.
Maybe it’s my good mood, but I burn through my inbox in record time.
The weekly update from the sales team doesn’t feel as dry as it usually does.
The marketing strategy I’ve been forwarded seems to make sense.
The negotiations with the French airports are progressing.
The overambitious LinkedIn warriors in my inbox don’t make me want to put my head through the desk.
The folder of Deleted Items glares at me; one email in there teases me, taunts me all through my work days.
Carmichael wasn’t lying when he wrote to me. Sorrowsong’s architecture program is gaining more and more credibility.
Ophelia appears in the doorway, wearing a white apron over the green dress she bought in London.
I love that dress. I love the girl in it. I love what they do together.
She places an orange liquid in front of me with a small curtsy, dropping a cocktail umbrella in it. “Your drink, mademoiselle.”
I smother my laugh in my hand. She’s really going all out. “Do you know what mademoiselle means?”
“No.”
I take a sip, trying to keep both eyes open. One gently sneaks shut while my esophagus melts away. I’m not entirely convinced that isn’t a glass of battery acid.
Her eyes are bright, excited. “Do you love it?”
“Love it.”
“Then why are you wincing?” She snatches it from me, takes a sip, then immediately coughs it all over my desk. “That’s fucking horrendous.”
“It’s lovely,” I say, struggling to keep a hold on my laughter. She furiously brings up the recipe on her phone. Her face falls. “Ah. A tablespoon of lemon juice. Not a cup. I’ll remake it.”
“Pass that on to Rocco, though. He’s always looking for new ways to melt padlocks from doors.”
“Wanker,” she breathes, on her way out the door.
Ten minutes pass, and then twenty. No drink reappears. On top of my work for once, I follow the vague smell of fire into the kitchen and find Ophelia’s MacBook open on the island with how to unburn steak typed into the search bar.
I find her in the back kitchen, taking something out of the microwave. Her hair is in a messy bun, though more red tendrils have escaped than remain. She’s looks like she’s in the worst mood ever, which amuses me greatly.
“Fuck you for having a birthday. Fuck steak. Fuck lunch as a concept. Fuck frying pans. Fuck recipe websites. Why do I have to read about your uncle’s fucking gallstones to read how long to cook a steak for? And fuck the stove, too. It’s lying about being on medium. It’s on high.”
I lean against the doorway, a fond warmth spreading its way through my blood. This is what I want. This is what I want forever. “Going well, then.”
She spoons green beans onto a plate with far more force than necessary. “A cow died for this, Alex!”
“I’m sure it’s not that bad.”
She leads me into the main kitchen, where two steaks masquerading as lumps of charcoal sit in the cast-iron skillet on the stove. When she drops one onto each plate, they clank like charcoal, too.
“It—”
“Shut up.” She’s pouting, hard, as she tosses a few potatoes on each plate and puts salt and pepper on them, like that’ll save this car crash.
I sit down at the kitchen island, dragging the plate toward myself and biting the inside of my cheek.
“Happy fucking birthday,” she mutters, sitting down beside me. I can see she’s desperately trying not to laugh, too.
The potatoes aren’t even bad. The green beans are definitely almost edible.
“You’re not even going to try the steak?” she asks, looking down at the blackened mass on the plate, expression dejected.
“I’m all right, thanks. I’d quite like to finish the day with my molars intact.”
That earns me a whack with a dishcloth. “Alex!”
I hook my finger under the strap of her green dress, dragging her closer to me. She swats my hand like it’s a fly. “Is this how you usually treat the staff in restaurants?”
I give her my most charming smile. “Only the sexy, grumpy redheads.”
“You better tip well.”
“Oh, I have a tip you can have,” I whisper, watching her bury her face in her hands.
She’s blushing when she emerges, the very corners of her mouth turned up. “You’re a terrible flirt.”
I stick out my bottom lip, hands landing on her ass. The soft lines of her body have me in a tailspin, my head so far in the clouds that I’ve forgotten all my issues. “Flirt back. Don’t leave me hanging—it’s my birthday.”
“Only if you leave me a good review on Tripadvisor.”
I grin against her neck. “Five stars. Chef was so hot that I can only assume that the steak must’ve burst into flames on contact.”
She leans into my touch, my hands threading through the bright copper strands that have buried themselves so deep into my chest that they’re holding my fragile heart together. “Seven letters,” she whispers, “First letter B. The chef might give you one, if you’re lucky.”
I shift on the stool. The thought of Ophelia on her knees, here, has my next sentence stuck in traffic. My brain has short-circuited.
But the patter of bare feet coming through the foyer reminds me why my errant thoughts must remain just thoughts. Josie skids around the doorway, face wrinkling. “Ew. Were you kissing?”
“We would never,” I say, scandalized. I pick her up with one arm and swing her into my arms. She has a piece of paper clutched in her clammy little hand. “What you got there?”
“It’s for Pheelz.”
“Woah, on my birthday?” I set her down. “Better give it to her, then.”
Josie drags Ophelia to the end of the kitchen island, sticking a homemade poster against the white marble. There’s a stick figure that’s obviously me, and another with an orange mass of hair.
Welcome to our family, Ophelia is scrawled across the top.
It may be a messy kid’s drawing, but I know as soon as I read it that it’ll feel like a swift punch of emotion straight to the gut for Ophelia. I place my palm on her lower back, just so she knows I’m here.
She stares at the poster, looking lost for words. “I … uhh …”
Josie’s greasy little finger lands on the orange chaos that juts out from one stick figure’s head. “That’s you.”
Ophelia’s pale brown lashes blink rapidly, lips pressed together in a tight line. “It’s …”
“You don’t like it?”
I scrunch my hand through Josie’s blond waves. “Give her a second, J. She’s got to take it in.”
“It’s …” Ophelia starts and stops again, but I know. It’s the reason she’s hung on all these years. “I love it, Josie. Please may I keep it?”
“Yeah!” Josie exclaims, hugging Ophelia and charging out of the kitchen like she hasn’t just thrown a stick of dynamite at the walls Ophelia has spent so many years building around her heart.
The silence is heavy. The mood is heavy.
Her breath is heavy, laden with unshed tears.
She clutches the poster so hard, like someone might snatch it from her at any moment.
For a girl so full of snarky remarks, her next sentence comes out so quiet.
So unsure. “Can I spend Christmas with you guys this year?”
I fold her into my arms, feeling the shudder of a sob ripple up her spine. “I’d be disappointed if you didn’t, Twist.”
“This year, though? Like … in eight months?” she reiterates into my chest, like she can’t believe I’ve said yes, that she’s made it through the loneliness and out the other side.
Something about the moment feels like daybreak. The first ray of sun after a long, dark night. The first shard of hope, illuminating two people who were on the edge of giving up.
“Please?” she adds, misinterpreting my silence for indecision. Something in my chest splinters. It makes me want to crawl beneath her skin and stitch all the little cracks up one by one.
I bury my face in her hair, inhaling that cinnamon coffee scent of hers. “This year and every year until midnight.”
A hundred years from now.
MY MOM IS home, propped up on a giant pile of pillows and pushing the small portion of food on her plate around without taking a bite.
I’ve left Ophelia in the comfortable surroundings of the living room, playing online Scrabble with some terrible TV show on in the background. Not MasterChef. Cooking has become a sore subject since Steakgate.
I didn’t know that Scrabble was the sort of game you could get all worked up over, but she manages. Every single night. If WordBuster89 could hear what she’s saying about them, they’d probably never look in the mirror again.
She’s a funny one, my Ophelia.
Putting a tomato onto a fork, Mom smiles at the sound of Mia and Evie screeching about something in the garden. I wish she’d eat. I don’t think she could get much thinner.
I’m about to coax her into eating a bite when she nods over to the framed sketch on her bedside table. I did it years ago, messily scribbled on the back of a napkin while we sat in a café in Paris. “You never talk about architecture anymore.”
I shrug. It’s been a long while since I’ve had time to think about my future. “It was a pipe dream.”
“Says who?”
“Me. I’ve got to keep my head in Green. I don’t know anything about architecture.”
“That’s the point, Alex. Your father made you forget it, but you’re not supposed to know everything. You show up to university to learn. You pick a topic that inspires you, and then you study it.”
Well, when she says it like that, it sounds obvious. A simple truth beaten out of me by my father. He didn’t take it well, that first time I told him I didn’t want Green.
From the minute you were born I knew you’d let me down.
“You always said you’d run an architecture firm. I know you haven’t ticked building a public library off your bucket list, unless you’re really good at keeping secrets.”
I fiddle with the ring on my pinky, wishing she wouldn’t inflate my hopes like this. “Maybe once the girls are in college.”
“You’ll leave Green soon. You could go back to university, finish the degree you started at Yale. You could even start a company while you’re there.”
She’s described the dream I fought so hard to forget. But it’s so complicated. With my mom how she is and the girls at home, adding something else into my schedule would likely finish me off.
But my mom has this hopeful expression on her face, and she’s reached into the darkest pit of my chest and stoked a fire I thought long extinguished.
“I’ll look into it.”