I get the door. “Threaten me one more time, Mother, and see what happens. Attempt to use this child as a pawn one more time. Please. I dare you.”
She turns to respond, red lips twisted, but I slam the door in her face.
And then I make a phone call.
Thirty-One
Astaire
* * *
I break off a square of dark chocolate Saturday night and hand it over. Casablanca streams on the TV above his fireplace, which I’d always thought was a framed painting up until today. A shared blanket covers our laps and a bowl of half-eaten popcorn rests on the coffee table.
He’s glued to the movie—a good thing because most people either love or hate this one, and it happens to be one of my personal favorites. Linda and I used to watch Casablanca on snow days, sharing microwave popcorn and Twizzlers, quoting every line by heart.
I hold my breath when Bogie gives his famous line, “Of all the gin joints in all the towns, in all the world, she walked into mine …”
Strangely serendipitous, but I keep that to myself. Bennett is much too pragmatic to assign deeper meanings to anything. He’d look at me like I had two heads. Plus, I don’t want to get ahead of myself. Things between us have shifted, leveled-up in a way, but it’s all so new, so fragile.
I’m taking it one day at a time.
So is he … in his own way.
The doctor has ordered him to take it easy the next few weeks. No work. No stress. It’s practically torture for him, but I’m doing my part to make sure he sticks with it and to make sure his time recuperating is as relaxing as possible.
“Astaire, I need to ask you something.” He leans forward, grabbing the remote and pausing the movie. “I have a favor of you. Well, not so much as a favor as it is a commitment. And I want you to know I don’t ask this lightly.”
Random.
“Okay...”
His mouth presses flat and his dark brows meet. “If anything happens to me, I need to make sure Honor has someone. Someone to take care of her. Someone worthy of taking care of her.”
“Of course. I told you I’ll help any way I can. You know that.”
“I mean legally,” he says. “She cannot—under any circumstances—go to my mother or brother.”
I swallow the melted chocolate on my tongue and nod. “Are you sure about this?”
I don’t point out the fact that we only just met last month, that he hardly knows me. What if he gets sick of me? What if he meets someone else and falls in love? Wants to start a family with them? What then?
“She’s going to need a mother figure in her life,” he says. “There are things I won’t be able to give to her.”
“There are plenty of single dads out there who do just fine.”
“I’m sure there are. But I know my limits, Astaire. I know my strengths. Nurturing and tenderness and all of that—it’s a foreign language to me. You … you have all of those things. You are all of those things.”
“You’ll learn as you go along,” I say, leaning in to kiss him. I love him like this—vulnerable and admitting for the first time that he’s scared of one thing in his life.
“I’m serious, Astaire. You’re the only person I trust, the only one who feels right for her.” He lifts a hand to my cheek, exhales, his forehead pressed against mine.
“You sure?”
“More than anything.”
I swallow the lump in my throat, force down any worries of this exploding in our faces. “If that’s what you want, Bennett … then I’d be honored.”
He exhales, like he was worried I wouldn’t agree. And then he kisses me. Hard. Grateful.
“I know we both got screwed in the family department.” I sweep a dark hair from his brow. “But in a way, this is our chance to have our own makeshift little family. We can have our own rules. We’ll be good to each other. We can even have traditions if you want. No matter what happens between us, I’ll always be there for the two of you. I promise you.”
Bennett lifts my hand to his mouth, depositing a light kiss. “Thank you.”
“Of course.”
“I’ll call my attorney first thing Monday and have him draft the paperwork immediately.”
His urgency catches me off guard, but I don’t question it. He strikes me as a man who likes to be prepared. I’m sure it’s nothing more than that.
“Linda and I didn’t have a lot of Christmases together, but we had this one tradition … on Christmas Eve, we’d get peppermint hot cocoas and drive around for hours looking at all the Christmas lights, singing Christmas songs at the top of our lungs.” I smile. “And on Valentine’s Day, she always got me a mother-daughter card. I thought it was strange at first, but she told me Valentine’s Day is about love, and love comes in all varieties. Every summer, we’d spend three weeks in Marco Island, Florida, visiting her sister and staying in a condo right on the beach. I always asked her why three weeks. She was off the whole summer, being a teacher and all, and she told me she loved her sister but that was about as much time the two of them could spend together without ripping each other’s hair out.”
Bennett laughs through his nose.
“Did you have any traditions in your family?” I ask.
“None.”
“Nothing? Really?”
“Nothing like that,” he says. His voice is colored in melancholy and his eyes are glassy, though I don’t think he realizes it.
Peeling the blanket from our laps, I climb onto his lap and cup his face in my hands. “We’ll have to start some of our own then.”
I kiss him, inhaling his woodsy scent.
“I’m afraid I wouldn’t know where to begin,” he says.
I kiss him again. “That’s where I come in …”
His hands hook my hips, pulling me against him as his hardness grows. There’s hunger, greed in the way his mouth crushes mine, and my fingers tangle through his thick hair.
“I don’t know what I’d do without you,” he whispers, lips grazing mine. Hands sliding beneath my ass, he lifts me from the sofa and carries me to his room where we make love like we’ve got all the time in the world—each of us silently aware that tomorrow is never a promise.
Thirty-Two
Bennett
* * *
“What are you doing here?” Astaire’s face is lit as I walk into her darkened classroom Monday afternoon. She’d mentioned before that the kids go to lunch from 11 AM to 11:25 AM with a twenty-minute recess afterward, and I was in the area, so the timing worked.
“I was at the bookstore down the road.” I place a giftwrapped book on her desk—an old favorite filled with Marcus Aurelius’ philosophy. “Thought I’d try to catch you for a few minutes.”
“Thank you.” She places her hand on the book but leaves it wrapped. “You keeping busy today?”
“Trying.”
“You haven’t been to the office, have you?” she asks.
I sniff. “Of course not.”