“Make sure you lick my balls, too, while you’re down there sucking my cock, Cap.” I popped open the fridge and took out a tray of leftovers.
“I’m serious!” he rattled on. “I have the business mindset, we know this. But I don’t deal well with fucking morons, so you’re the negotiator. You look like a puppy, and people love puppies.”
Ophelia hopped off her barstool and preheated the oven, stealing the Pyrex of ham out of my hands and taking over.
“Hi,” I mumbled through a smile.
“Hi,” she answered back bashfully.
We’d been playing house for three days. We woke up, had coffee, ate all our meals together, showered together, played every single board game Ophelia scraped out of the hall closet, scrolled through Netflix for long enough to get bored and let our hands wander—and then we had our merry way with one another until the sun came back up.
I was a spoiled fucking brat by all shreds of the cloth. Generally I’d never let a woman lift a finger for me, that’s not the way I was raised. But watching Ophelia prance around the house like she was a permanent staple—leaving her contact case on my nightstand, sifting through my drawers, wearing old T-shirts that ran down her tan thighs all the way to her knees—I’d let her do just about anything she wanted.
If that meant running my laundry through the wash with hers, saving me the largest piece of leftover lasagna, and finding a place for all our clean plates out of the dishwasher in foreign cabinets—who was I to complain?
She was an organized, calculated woman. At any given moment I could tell there was a trapdoor of endless lists and theoretical questions just behind her eyes. As if she didn’t keep busy, the perpetual background noise in her ears would come to a complete stop altogether and there would be nothing but a black hole of silence.
The only time that jittery energy evened out was when it was just the two of us. Time stopped in the little space between our bodies, reducing everything to slow motion. Like we were stuck inside a snow globe that someone had just given a shake.
Tally put her hand of cards down on the table and revealed a royal flush.
“Goddamnit!” Cap threw his cards down in frustration, his chair scraping across the kitchen floor as he stood and did a tantrum lap behind it.
“He’s right, Frankie.” Tally snorted. “Your patience is crucial to the entire operation. Clients will be leaving in droves when they get a hold of this sore loser.”
“Bratty isn’t on the content schedule today, sweetheart. But if you want to push it…” Cap pressed against his future wife’s chair and put his palms on the table on either side of her, showing a very uncomfortable amount of dominance. It quickly felt like Ophelia and I were props on a plaster movie set.
“You’re getting ahead of yourselves,” I said, squashing the moment. “This is all assuming I’d even be leaving in the first place, and I don’t see any job offers on the table. I had one interview.” I leaned back against the counter and crossed my arms. “I’ve learned my lesson about getting my hopes up. I’m not going to extend that to this.”
Only now the “this” I was referring to felt shamefully double-sided. “This” wasn’t just the chance to fly again, or teach, or simply feel like I was fulfilling a purpose beyond existing aimlessly. I was a damn good fucking pilot and that wasn’t something I stopped believing in—it was my ability to take care of the people I loved. The “this” that was up in the air at the moment was a coin flip between a new job and an entirely new life.
What if I did go to Colorado? Would Ophelia still want me out there? Would she want me to reach out to her for a real date or bring her coffee or be with me like I’d known for weeks I’d want to be with her?
Or were we still just playing a big old game with one another like we said we would? Practicing how to be better for other people, when other people wouldn’t hold a fucking candle in a hydrogen room.
“You are daringly pessimistic this morning, brother.” Mateo inched over and patted me on the back. “I like to think all the stars in our lives are aligning and everything you’ve ever dreamed of is about to bite you in your grumpy fucking ass.”
I rolled my eyes and watched Ophelia dip down to pull my plate out of the oven. The gentle curve of her hips made me want to sling her over my shoulder and take her down the hallway without another word.
“He’s hungry,” Ophelia defended me. “And he barely got any sleep last night,” she added.
A bee sting of pride stabbed into me and Cap’s lips pinched shut like the teeth of a zipper. I followed O to the table like a chaser follows whiskey: good-intentioned and sweet on her heels, pulling out one chair for the two of us and sitting her right on my lap.
“Yeah, these walls ain’t as thick as you think,” Cap complained, curling his lip in disgust. “Hey, I have an idea. How about you two put some of that, frankly concerning, amount of stamina to work and help take down these Christmas decorations?”
“No!” Ophelia and I protested in unison.
Tally’s attention lifted from her sparkly outstretched finger to us.
“You can’t take the decorations down until after New Year’s.” O tapped her finger impatiently on the table. “Everyone knows that.”
I didn’t know that.
In fact, the only reason I didn’t want to take down the decorations was because it felt too much like pressing go on a countdown. In the same way I liked to keep her on me physically, the thought of removing all those material reminders of the last few weeks with Ophelia was like running my fingers through still-wet paint. It wasn’t time yet. Give it a chance to dry on its own.
“So let me get this straight…” Mateo squinted, doing a dramatic look around the house. “You show up and convince this man to let you make the place look like the inside of Santa’s fucking workshop.” I grimaced as a finger was pointed in my direction. “Pick a tree that sheds like a goddamn Labrador—I’ll be finding pine needles in my asshole until I’m ninety.” Ophelia tugged her bottom lip into her mouth to conceal a laugh. “Staple a pineapple to my garage with industrial grade hardware…and now you expect me to be the sorry son of a bitch who cleans it all up?”
“You’re talking with your hands like your mother,” I pointed out.
“Don’t you dare bring my mother into this.”
“Phee is right,” Tally spoke up, reading something off the screen of her phone. “There’s some Pagan, Christian, folklore tradition that says you gotta keep the decorations up until the sixth because that’s when the Three Kings arrived at the manger.”
“Do I look like a fucking apostle to you, Natalia?” Cap replied humorously, setting his sights on O sitting in my lap again. “This one sure as hell ain’t the Virgin Mary.”
It took but one completely unexpected jibe to have me choking on a piece of ham. Worried eyes pinned me to the back of my chair as I beat my chest with a fist to dislodge it. So violently, actually, that my eyes started to water until I was crying, not only from the lack of oxygen, but from laughter, sucking in heaping gasps of air between fits.