Chapter One Bram
Chapter One
Bram
He’s awake,” a little voice whispers. “You ask him.”
“No, you ask him.”
“Let’s get Fern to ask him.”
Two pairs of tiny feet pound away, and I roll onto my back—into a wall of cardboard. A sheet falls onto my face, and I don’t even bother pulling it off because at least it’s stopping the sun from stabbing into my brain.
It is . . . so bright.
I breathe in through my nose and try to absorb as much information as possible without opening my eyes. I’m on a creaky wooden floor—my creaky wooden floor. I’m still wearing my belt and shoes. My head hurts, my mouth is dry, and my dick is sore. Sore like it hasn’t been since I was eighteen.
A flash of last night comes to me—stripping off a condom and having to use a spare tucked inside the brat’s purse. And then having to use another.
Three times. Jesus. I haven’t gone three times in one night in . . . years.
“Dad,” comes the unhappy voice of a teenager. The sheet is ripped off my face and I force myself to blink my eyes open. My eyelids scrape over my corneas like fine-grain sandpaper.
“Yes?” I croak, and then try to sit up (a mistake). I knock over another wall of the cardboard fort that the twins have been building around me, pain lances through both the frontal and occipital bones of my skull, and then I have to confront the quiet judgment of my oldest daughter.
It occurs to me that I am too young to have a seventeen-year-old evaluating my fully legal bad decisions. (Thank you, Kansas sex education in the 2000s.)
“What time is it?” I rasp.
Fern stares down at me with her mother’s dark, dark eyes. Her expression doesn’t change, but it’s very clear that she has thoughts about her dad having slept fully clothed on the floor. “Nine in the morning. The twins have been up for hours.”
“And have you been awake for hours?” I ask as I glance around the living room and attached parlor.
Old textbooks and battered dictionaries pin sheets to tables—sheets that are definitely supposed to be on beds upstairs—and the crushed exoskeletons of juice boxes litter random counters and chairs.
The tinny noises of a YouTuber’s video game commentary emit from a place in the fort both mysterious and abandoned, and when I look over at the antique aquarium where the pet frog lives, I see the glass lid hinged open. No frog inside.
“Well, I just got up,” Fern concedes. “But they woke me up to wake you up to tell you that they want pancakes.”
I catch movement just beyond the parlor, where the staircase is. Two heads of dark curls, bent together in either espionage or suspended conference.
“Is that true?” I ask the twins. “You two want pancakes?”
The twins step out of the shadows. They’re wearing a motley sampling of the makeup that Sara’s mother bought them for Christmas paired with superhero costumes, and they clunk over to me in some high heels they stole from Fern’s room.
Letty—the spokeswoman of the pair—clears her throat as Berry, my shy one, crawls into my lap.
She smells like apple juice and sunshine.
I kiss her soft glossy hair as Letty itemizes, in order of priority, the toppings they would like, starting with whipped cream, all the way down to sliced bananas.
AN HOUR LATER, and I’m Advil’ed, showered, and gathering syrupy plates from the kitchen island as the twins dash out to the backyard to enjoy their last day of non-school sunshine.
I put the plates in the dishwasher, look around the ground floor of the rambling old house that Sara and I bought as a foreclosure, and allow myself a tired sigh.
We picked the Queen Anne because 1) we had no money and it was cheap and 2) it looked like the kind of house that would forgive a mess or two.
Sara and I have always been the kind of people to favor homey clutter over sterile minimalism, and the Queen Anne, with its fussy fireplaces and stained-glass windows and ornate metal doorknobs, practically came pre-cluttered.
But it’s too cluttered even for this old place, and I resign myself to spending the afternoon cleaning (and gently herding the twins into cleaning with me).
We can leave part of the fort up in the parlor, maybe, because I do like to encourage their imagination and ability to problem-solve structural engineering dilemmas, but we’ll never find the frog if the whole floor is covered in sheets and couch cushions, and we need to find the frog before I collect Hester Prynne from the vet—
“DAD!” Fern rushes into the kitchen. Her bronze cheeks are flushed with panic and the August sun. “My car won’t start!”
“Okay,” I say, setting the dishwasher and closing the door. “I’ll come take a look.”
“I’m supposed to meet Sophia at the library to make back-to-school posters,” adds Fern. “It’s really important, because Olivia has already flaked and Emily can’t help because she broke her pinkie finger playing lacrosse.”
“Well, when are you supposed to meet Sophia? I can get the twins gathered up and then drop you off—”
“I was supposed to meet her fifteen minutes ago,” Fern mourns, already going to the back door. “I’ll just walk.”
“Fern,” I call calmly, “it’s no problem for me to drive you. I just need to round up the twins—”
“No time!”
The back door slams just as I shout, “I love you!” There’s, of course, no I love you back, or goodbye. Teens.
In the silence that follows Fern’s exit, I reorder the day’s tasks in my mind. I need to clean, find the frog, and look at Fern’s old Honda . . . and get Hester Prynne . . . and finish my proposal.
First, though, I go upstairs to start a load of laundry, finding my button-down shirt from last night and getting ready to sort it into the cold-wash pile. There’s a smear of pink lipstick on the collar.
The brat’s mouth on my throat, nipping at my earlobe.
Her jaw in my hand and those green eyes on mine. Her mouth was wet and open, shining in the shadows of the empty apartment above the bar.
“Someone needs to teach you some manners.” I barely recognized my own voice. Low and heavy and stern.
She shivered and shivered, a brat in a blizzard of her own making. “If you say so,” she whispered, and then opened her mouth like she wanted my fingers in it.
I press the heel of my palm to the fresh hard-on swelling behind my zipper, irritated. I’m thirty-five—inconvenient boners are supposed to be a thing of the past! Especially since I need to map sea tides and chart lunar cycles just to find a few minutes of time alone as a single parent.
But god, her. Her too-full mouth, her too-large eyes. Her cunt like liquid silk when I’d finally gotten inside; so hot that I thought my skin might catch on fire as I moved between her legs.
My phone rings in my pocket, and I wince as I dig it free and the fabric pulls against the raw but endearingly hopeful erection I’m sporting.
“Loe,” I answer as pleasantly as I can while 90 percent of my brain is still fucking a parking-space thief above The Dry Bean.
“Bram, it’s Ali,” says Dr. Ali Darwish, my department chair—and then, not waiting for a response—“the butterfly perverts from Oregon are saying they still don’t have the website copy you sent over for the pollinator seminar series, and I told them I knew that you’d sent it over because you’d cc’ed me, but they’re probably too busy drinking microbrews to check their spam or whatever, so do you mind sending that again, because you know they’ll want to Track Changes the entire thing before we can put it on the website, and I want to go live before we meet with the dean next week. ”
I take in a belated breath and mentally revise today’s to-do list to include dealing with the visiting lecturers from Oregon.
“Of course,” I say. “That’s no problem at all.”
“Great! Then I’m going to archive that email and forget it exists. Hey, congrats on Sara’s grant, by the way, that’s amazing.”
A side effect of being married to a fellow academic and having worked at the same institution for more than a decade is that people still think of us as a unit, even though we’ve been divorced for five years and Sara’s been engaged to someone else for two of them.
Our accomplishments are still funneled into the joint bucket of Sara and Bram, and I’m not generally bothered by it, except when people offer me praise that rightfully belongs to her.
“Ali, I had nothing to do with it, it was all her. But I’ll pass on your kind words.”
“Behind every great glacier scientist is an ex-husband with an air fryer and crumb-covered booster seats,” Ali says distractedly. “Okay, the rest of the inbox awaits. Talk soon, Bram.”
I hang up, but before I put my phone away, I see a text from Sara.
Arrived safely in Fairbanks! Do you think I can FaceTime the kids later?
I arrange a time that I think will work—with as much as Sara’s research takes her away from Mount Astra, we try to prioritize her connecting with the kids at least every other day—and then I put my phone away and take a deep breath.
On the bright side, my erection has settled down.
I put a load in the washer, change into a worn Astra University Copperheads T-shirt in anticipation of getting under the hood of Fern’s car, and then take the lovingly restored stairs two at a time.
Clean, frog, car, dog, Oregon, phone call. Proposal.
I can do all of that, right? And make sure the twins and Fern eat something resembling real food? And not think about the fact that I fucked a stranger in a bar last night and wish I could do it again?
Clean, frog, car, dog, Oregon, phone call—
The doorbell rings.
I pause at the foot of the stairs, consider the warren of cardboard and fabric between me and the door, and admit defeat. I drop to all fours and crawl through a cardboard tunnel, my shoulders knocking against everything. The doorbell is ringing again by the time I reach the door and swing it open.
And then I feel like I’ve been lit on fire.
The brat from last night stands on my front porch, wearing a floral sundress and pearls like she just came from Sunday brunch at the Congressional Country Club, her sinful mouth painted in a demure shade of pink.
“I’m Madelyn Kowalczk,” she says. “The agency said you needed a—”
She finally realizes who she’s talking to, and she stops. We stare at each other.
Which is the moment the missing frog chooses to emerge from the fort. The frog gives us both a salutatory ribbit and then flings herself out the front door and toward the road.
“Well, fuck,” the brat says.