by Noir, Roxie
“Anything,” I say. “Distract me.”
“The sound llamas and alpacas make when they mate is called orgling and it sounds like a jalopy trying to turn the engine over,” she says.
My eyes are still closed, and I take a deep breath.
“Orgling?” I say.
“Sounds exactly like you think it does, kind of a… bludabludabludabluda,” she says, then clears her throat, lowers her voice. “I’m not doing a very good job. Turtles squeak when they fu— uh, mate, like this high-pitched ennnhhhh. Though in most of the videos I’ve seen they were actually doing it to shoes, which I guess look like female turtles.”
“Were there feet in the shoes?” I ask.
Kidnap Rusty and get fake names, maybe Charlie will come…
“Some of them,” she says. “Apparently Crocs really look like hot lady turtles, which is kind of ironic given the name.”
“I knew there was a reason my mom hates them,” I say, and Charlie smiles.
We keep talking about nothing, or rather, Charlie keeps talking: about the weird noises animals make when they mate, about how speed walking is an Olympic event, about how President Andrew Jackson was once gifted a 1,400 pound block of cheese and threw a party at the White House so people would come eat it.
Then the door at the back of the courtroom opens again. Charlie stops cold. Our palms are sweaty against each other’s, but I couldn’t care less.
“It’s fine,” she whispers. “It’s fine.”
Despite myself, I glance over at Crystal.
She looks bored. Court resumes. Formalities are said, and finally, Judge Hughes takes his glasses off and leans forward.
I swallow, waiting, Charlie’s ring digging into me.
“After serious consideration, I’ve decided to amend the custody agreement between Mr. Loveless and Mrs. Thornhill,” he states, and I hear Charlie gasp. She squeezes harder.
His words push the breath from my body, like I’m in a vise.
I lost. The last six years don’t matter, because I lost my daughter to a woman I can’t stand, to a woman who doesn’t love her—
“In light of Mrs. Thornhill’s new life circumstances, I’m awarding you partial custody,” he goes on.
I might throw up. Charlie might break my hand. I think, desperately, of everything I might be about to miss: watching her run through the sprinkler and reading her bedtime stories and teaching her to make scrambled eggs, all the simple, day-to-day things that seems like nothing until they’re gone.
Please, don’t let them be gone.
“That custody will consist of four weeks per year at your new home in Colorado, to be divided as you see fit,” he says.
I was so set for bad news that it takes me a moment.
The information reaches my brain like snow melting through cracks in the asphalt, and I don’t understand it right away because I’m still thinking of singalongs in the car and games of Candyland.
“Mr. Loveless will retain custody for the other forty-eight weeks…” he goes on.
I finally get it.
She’s staying with me, and she’ll be gone once in a while, but day to day, morning and night, it’ll still be me.
Just as I realize it, Charlie gasps. I look over, and she’s crying, tears streaming down her face, and she grins at me, and the next thing I know our arms are around each other and her face is in my neck and she’s sniffling and I’m burying my face in her hair.
A month is nothing. It’s nothing. That’s fall break, spring break, and two weeks over the summer. It’s less than she theoretically has in visitation right now.
“I’m sorry,” Charlie says into my neck, whisper-laughing as she sniffles. “I’m sorry. Shit.”
I just laugh, my face still buried in her hair. For the first time in years and years, my own eyes are wet, and I blink against tears because Rusty is staying with me and I’m so happy and grateful that I don’t know what to do.
There’s more court. Lucinda handles it, I assume, because I sure don’t. I don’t hear anything that anyone else says, I just know that Rusty’s staying with me and Charlie showed up and while life is never perfect, it feels damn close right now.
Court adjourns. We all stand, and after the judge leaves, I finally give Charlie a proper hug, holding her against me, her breathing ragged and deep to match mine. Crystal, her husband, and her lawyer leave, dry-eyed, looking annoyed.
Charlie pulls back, wiping her cheeks, her face bright red and her eyes highlighter pink.
“I think that went quite well,” Lucinda says, snapping the latches on her briefcase shut, the hint of a smile on her face. “A month a year isn’t too bad.”
I just laugh.
“A month a year is fine,” I say. “I never wanted her not to get to see Rusty, I just… didn’t want her to take her away.”
Lucinda reaches out, takes my arm.
“I know, Daniel,” she says. “Pleasure working with you. Call me next time she gets up to her tricks again.”
She offers her hand. We shake. She leaves, and I pack up all my papers that are scattered over the table, shove them back into a folder, put them back into my bag. Pete Bresley watches the whole thing, and though part of me wonders whether he’s taking notes so he can tell his mother Mavis the most accurate version of what happened, I don’t care.
Let him tell everyone that Charlie sprinted in and that we held hands the whole time and that I cried tears of relief when I found out I got to keep Rusty. Fuck it, I don’t care.
We walk out of the courtroom holding hands.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Charlie
I let Daniel lead me, since he knows where we’re going and I don’t. We head down the hall, around a corner, through a passageway and at the end, there’s a staircase. This building was built at least a hundred years ago so the staircases are beautiful, made of stone and brick, wrought iron balustrades, big windows on every landing.
I wobble, wearing the only pair of heels I own. I’m out of practice, and that makes me slow, uncertain, and I’m hanging onto Daniel for dear life.
At the first landing, we stop. We’re next to a window that looks out over a green field and the Burnley County detention center, and he turns, faces me.
“I’m sorry,” I say instantly.
“Charlie, that’s not—”
“I fucked up and I’m so, so sorry, and I wasn’t even sure if you wanted me to still come today so if you didn’t, I’m sorry for that, but I think it worked out ommph.”
He covers my mouth with one hand, still slightly sweaty. I look up into the alpine lakes of his eyes, and they’re smiling.
“You didn’t get my voicemails?” he says.
I clear my throat, and he takes his hand off my mouth.
“No,” I say, offering no further explanation.
“I left at least five,” he says. “And I texted?”
“Uh, I guess they didn’t come through,” I say, and he raises one eyebrow.
“You didn’t come because I apologized?” he says.
“For what?”
“For being an asshole to you,” he says, like it’s obvious. “For acting like you’re the only person who’s ever made a mistake with a child.”
I swallow hard and look away, out the window, because I still don’t feel like he was wrong. Everything he said was true. I fucked up. I keep fucking up.
“For forgetting that we’re all human, and we all fuck up, but it’s the wanting to be better that matters,” he goes on.
“Is it?” I ask, still looking away.
He pulls me close, his fingers on my chin, makes me look at him.
“You’re the sun and I’m the moon,” he says slowly, carefully. “You shine and I reflect, and that’s how we always were. Without you I’m a dark, cold, dusty rock hurtling through space.”
“You’re not dusty,” I whisper, eyes already leaking.
“I love that you’re the sun,” he goes on. “I’ve been in love with
you for years and I didn’t know it because you were always there, always letting me bask in your light and your warmth even if sometimes I didn’t deserve it.”
“What?” I say, my voice barely above a whisper. “You always deserved it. You were always, I don’t know, my anchor in a storm. My safe harbor. I always had you.”
“You still have me.”
“I don’t ever want to not have you,” I say, the words spilling out of me. “But I’m gonna fuck more things up, Daniel.”
Now he smiles, leans in, kisses me on the forehead. I’m still doing my best not to cry in the staircase of a courthouse, but it’s a losing battle.
“You’re gonna fuck things up and I’m gonna fuck things up and all I want is to be together when we do,” he says. “We’re people. We’re human. We’re imperfect, and giving in to love is the best we’ve got, so say you forgive me and let me fall with you.”
I take a deep breath. I still feel awful, like my insides are circling a drain. I still feel guilty about Rusty, about all the damage I’ve done or almost did, about the things I know I’ll fuck up in the future.
“Of course I do, Daniel,” I say. “Yes. You knew I’d say yes.”
“I hoped,” he teases, resting his forehead against mine. “I thought I was done for when you didn’t text me back or answer your phone. Not just because of the hearing. Because of me. I thought I was going to have to live out my life as a dried husk of a man, Charlie, if I couldn’t have you back.”
“Stop it,” I whisper, eyes closed, smiling.
“Stop what?”
“You’re not a husk,” I say.
“Well, not now.”
“Not ever.”
“You promise?” he asks, his voice low, quiet. He slides one hand down my arm, intertwines our fingers.
“I promise,” I say. “When we fuck up, we fuck up together.”
He leans in and kisses me, his lips hot against mine. I’m three inches taller than usual and the angle is different, more direct, and I grab his tie and pull him in, his other hand going around my back, under the suit jacket. His fingers press into my spine, and I arch against him.
It’s the heels. I swear. If I weren’t wearing heels I’d never be wondering where the nearest janitor closet was and whether I could talk Daniel into pulling out again, after the first time was a close call.
We pull back. I flatten my hand against his chest, feel his heartbeat, his warmth.
“I love you,” he says, quietly, seriously. He pushes a curl out of my face, and it sproings right back. “Even when I didn’t know I loved you, I loved you.”
“I love you back,” I say.
“I have a proposition for you,” he murmurs.
“I like it when you proposition me,” I say.
“Come to dinner,” he says. “And if traffic isn’t too bad on the way back, maybe we’ll get there in enough time for a quickie before my mom gets home.”
I just laugh. I push my fingers into my eyes, wiping away the last tears, and I laugh.
“A quickie before your mom gets home,” I say. “How’d we go from you are the sun to that?”
“Maybe a quickie,” he corrects me, his smile lighting up his eyes. “Depending on traffic.”
“How could I forget the most erotic part?”
“Beats me,” he says, shrugging. “But we should hurry up if we want to make it.”
He kisses me again: brief, thorough, hungry. He takes my hand and we descend the rest of the stairs.
“What happened to your phone?” he asks as we walk slowly through the courthouse, since I’m a little iffy in these heels.
“Why do you ask it like that?” I say, my voice totally neutral.
“Did you lose it?” he asks. “Or drop it in the toilet? Or did you saw it in half or something?”
I give him a quick sideways glance. He’s laughing.
“It got stolen,” I say.
“From where?” he asks.
“You’re supposed to say that’s terrible, what a pain in the ass, I’m so sorry,” I correct him.
“Charlie, where’d your phone get stolen from?” he asks again.
There are times I wish he didn’t know me so well.
“The cereal aisle at the grocery store because I left it on the shelf for six hours,” I admit.
Daniel just starts laughing.
We get back to his house with twenty minutes to spare.
They’re twenty minutes well-spent.
Chapter Forty
Charlie
Daniel turns his Subaru onto a gravel road, though road is a generous term. It’s more like two gravel ruts pointing into the forest and then disappearing behind trees.
“Now you’re definitely not trying to find a McDonald’s,” I say.
He just grins, not taking his eyes off the road.
It’s Friday, two and a half weeks after his court hearing, and this afternoon he told me to pack whatever I needed for a weekend away and be ready by six, because Eli and Violet volunteered to take Rusty all weekend.
I didn’t need to be told twice, though I’d imagined more of a… location. You know, a nice little bed and breakfast, a hotel, even a motel.
Frankly, I don’t care as long as it’s got a bed and the sheets are clean.
You know what? I don’t even need a bed. I’ll take any flat surface where pine needles aren’t jabbing me in the ass.
“You’ll see,” he says, carefully rounding a bend in the road, the car jostling.
“Glamping?” I guess, peering between the trees. Since it’s summer, the sun still isn’t down, but the light is slowly fading. Regardless, I can’t see anything besides brown trunks and the bright, nearly day-glo green of summertime Virginia woodland.
“What’s glamping?” he asks.
“Glamor camping,” I say.
“Okay,” he says after a moment, clearly waiting for more explanation. Guess I was wrong about glamping.
“You’re technically in a tent, I think, but it’s a permanent tent, with a floor and a bed and stuff. And heating. And air conditioning?” I say, trying to remember the details of something I read once.
“So glamping is just a flimsy cabin with no windows,” Daniel says. “Unless the tent has windows.”
“Some probably do,” I say as he goes around another bend in the road. “I don’t know, I’m not a glamping expert. I think there’s usually also kombucha. It’s that kind of thing.”
“I tried kombucha once,” he says, reflectively. “Some lady kept calling the brewery and insisting that we should start making it to sell, but honestly, it just tasted like I ruined some perfectly good iced tea. Maybe I was doing it wrong.”
“No, kombucha’s kind of gross,” I agree. “And it’s got that big weird fungus — is that where we’re going?”
Daniel doesn’t answer, just grins as he pulls his car into a clearing next to a cabin and parks.
“Hopefully it’s better than glamping,” he says.
It’s a log cabin perched above a creek in the middle of a small clearing. I hadn’t realized we were going uphill, but clearly we were, because even the parking spot has an incredible view of the unspoiled valley below, the mountains beyond, blue and purple and green. I feel like I can see straight to West Virginia, or Tennessee, or Kentucky or whichever state I’m facing right now since the geography way down here gets a little confusing.
“How’d you find this place?” I ask as we get out of the car, still staring around.
“I know a guy who knows a guy who rents it out,” Daniel says, pulling out his phone. “Okay, he says the key is under the ceramic frog with the bowtie…”
I peek through the window in the front door while he finds the key. There’s a curtain in front of it, so it’s hard to see, but I’m fairly sure there’s a big stone fireplace, a high vaulted ceiling, and a light fixture that’s not even made from deer antlers.
“Did you want to actually go inside, or just peek through the window all night?”
Daniel teases from behind me, and I move. He unlocks the door, then pushes it open so I can go in first.
The opposite wall is nothing but windows, overlooking the creek below and then the mountain vista beyond, the sun just dipping below the horizon, painting the sky pink and orange and purple.
It’s gorgeous, and I walk over to the wall, just looking out at the view.
“Holy shit,” I breathe, and Daniel comes over. He drapes his arms over my shoulders and rests his chin on top of my head, his beard tickling my scalp through my hair.
“Jim Bob wasn’t lying,” he says.
“Someone named Jim Bob owns this place?” I ask. Based on my personal experiences, I’d expect a Jim Bob to be more of a trailer guy, but what do I know?”
“Jim Bob is very enterprising,” Daniel says.
We stand there for a long moment, and I lean back into his solid form, reveling in the moment. Aside from the crickets and the grasshoppers and the birds, it’s quiet. The view is beautiful. There’s no piles of probably-clean-I’m-pretty-sure laundry, there’s no seven-year-old in the next room. We’ve got all weekend, not thirty minutes.
I might be in heaven.
“I’m gonna go get our stuff,” Daniel says, and drops a kiss on top of my head.
“You want help?” I ask.
“I got it,” he says, and disappears outside.
I wander back into the cabin and look around. It’s only got one bedroom, but the bedroom is glorious — a view, a sitting area, a jacuzzi bathtub in the bathroom, and a bed that I’m pretty sure is the next size up from a king bed. The rest of the cabin is open plan, the kitchen separated from the living area by nothing but the island in the center, rustic wooden stools gathered around it.
There’s a stone fireplace. There’s a light fixture — maybe it’s a chandelier; what makes something a chandelier? — that’s not made of antlers.
A minute later Daniel is back, a duffel bag over each shoulder and a giant cooler held in both hands, his biceps and shoulders bunched under his t-shirt.
I don’t even offer to help again. I just watch as he walks to the kitchen island and sets the cooler on top of it, because I’m never going to get tired of watching him lift heavy things. He walks the duffel bags to the bedroom, comes back out.