I remember what he told me that night he came to the apartment and made pasta, and everything started to change.
I worried about you. I hated that to do your work you took risks and put yourself in danger.
Beneath the table, I reach out until my hand finds his clenched into a fist.
“Much as I loved what I was doing,” I tell Dad, “it’s burned me out. I’m ready for a change. I’ll still travel, sometimes, I hope. But I plan to spend a lot more time at home.”
Bea smiles at me from across the table. “So long as you don’t leave before December 25, for the sake of all those who’d have to deal with Maureen Wilmot losing her ever-loving shit if you were gone for Christmas.”
“Language,” Mom says, before turning toward me, poorly hiding her hopes as she looks at me. “Christmas is just so soon, and you hadn’t left; I assumed you were staying.”
“I’m staying,” I tell her while, still hidden under the table, I stretch my palm across Christopher’s knuckles and feel his grip start to relax, until our fingers tangle. Christopher’s gaze snaps up and our eyes meet. “And I’m not planning on leaving anytime soon.”
* * *
—
“Mom!” I call from the mudroom, where the washer and dryer are set up.
“Yes, Kate!” she calls back.
“Something’s wrong with the washer.”
Popping her head in, Mom wrinkles her brow in confusion. “Oh, dear. You don’t say.”
Dad pops up behind her, frowning. “It is? I just used it this morning—”
“Bill,” Mom says sweetly, turning and smiling up at him. “Would you be a dear and make sure the front door shut properly when Jamie and Bea left? Puck will pull it open if it’s not securely shut, and I’m not in the mood for another midnight frolic in the cold, looking for that tyrannical furball.”
Dad blinks down at Mom. “Maureen, the door’s—”
Mom yanks Dad down by the collar and kisses him so suddenly, he grunts in surprise. But then whatever hesitation he felt dissolves as his hands wrap around her waist, drawing her close.
“Ew. You two.” I shudder, shooing them with my hands. “Go do that somewhere else.”
Mom pulls away from their kiss and flashes me a smile that’s so like Jules’s, it’s startling. “I’d say the same for you and the laundry. Try Christopher’s.”
“Christopher’s? Mom, I can’t just—”
“Excuse me, Kate,” Mom says, eyes back on Dad as he leans in for another kiss. “Your father and I will be back in just a minute.”
“A minute?” Dad says, huskily. “That’s all I get?”
Mom laughs as she walks him back from the doorway until they’re out of sight.
I sigh, turning back to the washer. Puck slinks into the mudroom and meows, twining around my legs. I start to pull out my sopping-wet clothes from the washer and load them into the zip-up hamper that I brought them in. “I know, Puck. It’s gross. Parents aren’t supposed to act horny like that.”
Meow, he says.
“Well, fair point,” I tell him, reaching inside the washer for the wet clothes plastered to its sides. “I can appreciate that their horniness precipitated my existence, but as far as I’m concerned, that was twenty-eight years ago, and that should have been the end of it.”
A throat clear makes me jump and slam my head against the washer. Swearing under my breath, I stand and feel my heart flutter ridiculously in my chest.
Christopher stands, leaning against the threshold, hands in his pockets, watching me.
“It’s not polite to eavesdrop,” I tell him sourly, rubbing the back of my head.
He pushes off the threshold and closes the distance between us, gently brushing my hand aside, feeling the back of my head, satisfied when he doesn’t find any serious damage.
“Washer’s busted, Maureen said.”
I sigh, glancing over my shoulder at the traitorous washing machine. “Apparently.”
Christopher’s quiet, inspecting my sopping clothes sitting piled in the hamper. He seems to be deliberating something, his brow furrowed. Then he steps past me and picks up my laundry bag, using the shoulder strap to hike it onto his back. “I’ll do it for you.”
I give him a look. “You are not doing my laundry. However, if you wanted to invite me to your house for the rest of the evening so I could do my own laundry, that would be a different matter.”
Christopher’s jaw clenches. He stares down at me, clutching the hamper. “Kate—”
Taking a page out of my mother’s book, I press up on my toes and silence his mouth with a kiss. He’s breathless when I pull away.
“Let’s settle this like we do all serious matters, Petruchio.” I reach behind me for the doorknob, then turn it. “Race ya.”
Christopher swears viciously as I sprint down the stairs and across the yard. I glance over my shoulder just once, shocked to see how fast he’s moving for carrying a sopping wet, heavy bag of laundry on his shoulder.
I leap up the stairs to his back porch two at a time and come to a halt at his door. Above the handle, there’s a code-based lock, a half-moon of numbers.
“Kate!” Christopher yells, making it to the bottom of the steps, scrambling up them.
I don’t know why I do it, if I’m daring fate, if I’m wishing it into existence, but I enter my birthday.
The door unlocks.
I gape and glance over my shoulder.
“Dammit,” he rasps, pushing me inside, slamming the door behind him.
I laugh, equally shocked and thrilled. “Why is my birthday your lock code?”
He drops my laundry off his shoulder with a wet thud and rakes a hand through his hair. He doesn’t answer me.
“Christopher,” I press, my heart pounding with a dawning, earth-tipping hope that’s my most closely guarded, deepest-buried dream. “Why is my birthday your lock code?”
He stares at me, something so fierce and raw in his expression, my breath catches in my lungs.
My throat feels thick as I take a step toward him. “Tell me,” I whisper.
“Tell you what?” he snaps.
Closing the distance between us, he grabs me by the waist and hoists me onto the counter, which hasn’t changed in twenty years, in a kitchen frozen in time. Curious as I am about why his home seems unchanged since I was last here as a little girl, I don’t focus on my surroundings. I focus on Christopher, who’s breathing hard, staring me down.
“What should I tell you, Kate, hmm?” His voice is dark and sharp as he sinks his hands into my hips and pulls me close. “That your birthday is my lock code, that I keep your horribly sewn handkerchief in my journal at work, that I’ve archived every single photograph you’ve ever published, that I lure your cat to my house for cuddles, that I walk into bakeries in the fall just to see the foods you love, that I sit in your mother’s greenhouse and breathe in the scent of your favorite flowers, because anything you’ve touched, anything colored by the memory of you, are relics and I’m a supplicant?
“Should I tell you that since you came home and stayed, I’ve been losing my goddamn mind, because I couldn’t believe the lie I’d told myself for so long, and that’s why I wrote the note in those flowers? Should I tell you that was my confession—that my sad attempt to feel close to you was upheld by the delusion that it was better to have your hate than your apathy? That when I realized how badly I’d fucked up, I hoped it wasn’t too late to have you look at me with anything besides loathing burning in your eyes?
“Should I tell you that I have missed you and ached for you for so long, Katerina Elizabeth Wilmot, that you define those words, and I have done everything I could to break inside me what drew me to you, but I’m not strong enough?”
He steps between my thighs, his hands diving into my hair as he presses the gentlest kiss to my mouth and breathes slowly, shakily. “I can’t do it anymore. Denying myself you has been like battling the tide. If I fight it any longer, I’ll drown. I’m yours,” he says, reverent, quiet, like a prayer whispered in a church. “For as long as you’ll have me.”