Chapter Fifteen Bram
Chapter Fifteen
Bram
After dinner, bath, and twin bedtime, I check in on Fern, who’s moved the anti-Simon conclave to some sort of group call on her phone, and get an impatient I’ll be fine, Dad and a reluctant hug.
I close her door, and more shrieking and giggling come through the wood as the conclave makes some biting observations about Simon’s poor performance in Forensics this year.
I pause with a small smile to savor the giggles.
I can’t deny that I miss being able to scoop my baby up and hug away all her problems, but Maddie was right in the kitchen.
I’m not the first person Fern needs to talk to anymore, and I don’t think she would be cackling and scheming and ready to take on the Ex of It All without her friends.
It just doesn’t feel fair that it’s so hard to learn to be a parent in the first place, to give all of yourself, to be everything for this tiny, gassy, emotionally unregulated person, and then once you think you’ve got a handle on how to do it, you are abruptly required to unlearn it all.
To become the backstory so they can start their first act without you.
To step back and let them make mistakes and hope they don’t fuck up too badly.
The hallway is mostly dark, save for the light coming from underneath Fern’s door and the light from around Maddie’s partly closed door. I see her sitting on her bed with her laptop balanced on her knees, her face adorably scrunched at her screen.
Another round of shrieks from down the hall makes her face scrunch harder.
“Why don’t you come grade with me in my office?” I suggest.
She twists, startled by my voice, and then squints at me. “Are you sure? I won’t bother you?”
I know what she means, but for a moment, I want to tell her the truth.
That she absolutely will bother me. In those sleep shorts that barely cover her ass, in the soft Copperheads T-shirt I lent her that she still hasn’t given back.
Her cute little feet in socks, her blond waves in a messy bun, wide mouth naked of lipstick.
She looks like a girlfriend right now, and I haven’t had one of those since I was eighteen, and I suddenly want her so badly that my stomach cramps. Cramps with hunger pains for Maddie wearing my T-shirts, for messy buns, for the dark pressing outside the windows and us together inside.
“I’m used to grading with the twins narrating a Let’s Play video for a game they’re pretending to play and Fern counting her stitches out loud when she’s knitting. Having a grown-up doing the same kind of work in my office will feel like noise-canceling headphones in comparison.”
A jolt of Olivia Rodrigo comes from Fern’s room, along with a polyphony of FaceTimed karaoke from her friends, and Maddie gives a decisive nod as she closes her laptop. “Office it is.”
As Maddie goes downstairs, I check on the twins—both fast asleep on the floor with Hester Prynne between them.
(They have beds, of course, but one of the joys of having one dog come stay with two girls is that the dog can’t be in both beds at once.
So Letty presented a solution to me: the twins would sleep in their sleeping bags on the floor so they could share Hester cuddles every night.
I congratulated them on their problem-solving and helped them find old quilts and comforters to make an approximation of mattresses.
I didn’t tell them that Hester is a faithless creature who leaves the twins in the middle of the night to come snuffle my face and then curl up in a dog-croissant by my feet.)
Downstairs, I take the liberty of making Maddie some coffee (she’s one of those people who can drink espresso like it’s warm milk and then tuck herself right into bed after) and carry it into my office.
I shut the door behind me—I doubt Fern will leave her room unless it’s to forage for food, but I want Maddie to work without any other interruptions.
And maybe . . . maybe I don’t hate the idea of a little privacy.
For the sake of my own focus, of course.
Maddie has claimed the chair behind my desk—a chair that is indisputably my chair—and is perched there with her laptop open as I bring her the espresso with a little square of chocolate on the saucer.
“Oh,” she says, looking at the espresso and then up at me. Her eyebrows have pulled up and created a kissable knot right above her nose. She looks stupefied. “This is for me?”
“You like late-night espresso, yes? Garishly en-sugared drinks in the morning, then grim brain fuel at night?”
“I do, I just—” Her exhale is a laugh. “Yes. Yes, I don’t know why I’m surprised by what you notice anymore. And the little chocolate square . . . I feel like I’m in a hotel.”
“A nice one, I hope,” I say as I settle heavily into the armchair near the bookshelves. It’s a good armchair, but unlike the one in my room or the one in the living room, it wasn’t made with my proportions in mind. I always feel like I’m sitting in a dollhouse when I use it.
Maddie pretends not to watch me fold in my arms and knees, but she’s biting her lower lip so she doesn’t betray her smile.
So she stole my chair to get a rise out of me. Interesting.
“The nicest hotel I’ve ever stayed at,” she confirms. “Even if I’m hoping for some more guest perks.”
“Is that so?” I ask. A little gravely.
Maddie has this way of looking out from beneath her lowered lashes.
It’s a way that could be flirty, but it’s more like she’s about to take you apart bit by bit and she hopes you’ll beg her not to when she does.
It gets my dick so hard, and I breathe through my nose as I reach for my laptop and crack it open.
I made it a week. I made it an entire week.
I can make it through the next hour or so of grading.
And I almost do, truly. Despite Maddie’s bare legs and the way the cozy lamplight accents the upturned lift of her nose and the lush curve of her mouth—a mouth that’s all plump, creased fullness in the middle of her lips and then sharp, sharp corners, ready to tip down into a devastating pout at a moment’s notice.
Despite the way her expression flickers as she’s focusing on her work—her eyes almost narrowing in disapproval, her cheeks almost lifting in a smile, her jaw almost tightening in irritation, like her mind is moving too quickly and intricately for her face to keep up with.
Like every feeling, even the simple ones like disappointment or amusement, comes with an array of possibilities, scenarios, and outcomes, and she’ll take a look at all of them before she gives you the pleasure of a reaction, thank you very much.
It’s because I’m watching her so closely that I see it, the confusion in the high arches of her eyebrows, the suspicious uncertainty. It’s one thing I’ve noticed Maddie never fails to express: her disbelief when she encounters something deeply, deeply stupid.
“What is it?” I ask. It’s the first we’ve spoken since we started working, although my painful awareness of her every shift and sigh has meant I’ve barely been able to concentrate anyway. Alas.
She’s sitting with one knee drawn up to her chest, the chair scooted close enough to the desk to keep her wedged there, and she brings her fingers up to pinch worriedly at her lower lip. “It’s nothing,” she says. “Just . . . nothing. I’ll figure it out.”
“I want to hear about the nothing.” I close my laptop so that she has my full attention. Which she would anyway, but watching her play with the pink curve of her lip has me additionally riveted.
She doesn’t speak right away, looking over at me with peevish stubbornness, which I return with a mild look of my own.
She might be an unstoppable force, but I am an immovable object.
My life’s work is charting the generational growth of mosses—I am primed for an entirely different scale of time than someone who’s spent the last three years playing politics.
As I suspect, I win, and she relents with a huff.
“Two of my students turned in bullshit for their Supreme Court assignments.” She turns her laptop toward me, and I get out of my chair to look more closely, setting my own laptop on my desk so I can have both hands free to brace myself on the back of Maddie’s chair as I lean over the top of her.
I can smell jasmine. Fuck.
“They’re supposed to give me four paragraphs summarizing a seminal Supreme Court case of their choosing. And pretty much everyone did fine—or at least ChatGPT did fine—but these two . . .”
The first short essay is, in fact, very short. It’s three sentences about Sandra Day O’Connor. And not even a case she ruled on, just her life.
The second assignment, when Maddie clicks over to it, is a PNG of disembodied testicles wearing a Ruth Bader Ginsburg–style collar. Both the collar and the testicles are drawn with an impressive amount of detail. Underneath the testicles, it just says SCROTUS.
“The lace work on the collar is . . .”
“I know,” Maddie agrees. “I think it’s hand-drawn too.”
“Ah, throw them a bone and give them a point for it,” I say, straightening up. “Maybe two, depending on how many points the assignment was worth.”
Maddie’s mouth twists to the side. I study her.
“What is it?”
She hesitates, like she knows what I’m going to say. “Well, it’s just—if two people did this, maybe that means I wasn’t clear about the assignment. Or the due date. Or something.”
I brace a hand on the edge of the desk so I’m leaning forward. I want to see her face. “Madelyn,” I say. “They didn’t do the assignment. By any metric. You have to mark their work appropriately.”
I watch as her teeth dig briefly into her lower lip, her sharp brain trying to find a way to justify this. “But—I don’t know. They turned in something, you know? And maybe they had good reasons for not—”