by Q. B. Tyler
“Dominic, you can talk to me, you know. I am an adult.”
“That’s right,” he chuckles. “Eighteen. God, where does the time go?”
“No clue. It feels like just yesterday I was ten years old and I had the biggest crush on you.” My eyes, which were previously closed, fly open. Shit. “I mean before you met my mom.”
“Wait what?” He’s still on his back, but he moves to face me.
“Okay, don’t get all weird, but I had a crush on you when you moved here and started teaching at my elementary school, okay? Let’s not make it a thing. I was ten.”
He looks at me and then back at the ceiling. “I see.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to say that. I rarely think about that. Obviously.” Sell it better than that, Stassia. He still doesn’t say anything and I turn over on my back and let out an indignant huff. “Stop being so weird,” I grumble.
“I’m just…high as hell, Stass.” I see the glazed look in his eyes; he’s fading fast underneath the strong weed. “Not being weird.”
“That doesn’t explain why you’re acting like this over me having a crush on you when I was far from legal. It’s not like…” I swallow, my tongue suddenly very dry and feeling super heavy in my mouth as I prepare to speak these particular words. “Like I have a crush on you now or something.” I roll my eyes like it’s the most absurd thing in the world. I say it as if even at this very moment, I don’t feel something slowly shifting inside of me. Something I thought I’d lain to rest the second my mother said ‘I do.’
I’d told myself I couldn’t have a crush on my mother’s husband.
And he was still my mother’s husband.
Right?
* * *
The feeling of someone pressed right up against me is the first thing I feel as I make my way out of unconsciousness. I’m vaguely aware of the sound of birds chirping outside of the window and the smell of coconut and lime that is oddly familiar. Still somewhat out of it, I reach for the smell, expecting to be hit with a wave of nostalgia as I submerge my face in my late wife’s pillow. It’s the conditioner she used and there were many mornings I submerged my face in her hair and took deep breaths. However, instead of a soft satin pillow, I find a warm body instead.
My eyes fly open as my mind catches up with my body and I realize that Stassia is pressed up against me sleeping soundly. I’ve been lying on my back and her back is pressed directly against my side, so it isn’t super sexual but uncomfortable enough that she’s here given that she’d never shared a bed with me before. Ever. She’s still wearing her sweatpants and sweatshirt and I’m grateful she didn’t shed any clothes during the night.
I sit up slightly, trying my best not to wake her and slip out of bed unnoticed. Thank God, Stassi sleeps like the dead. After I relieve myself and brush my teeth, I head down the stairs to make us some breakfast, disallowing my brain to unpack the fact that my dick was semi-hard when I woke up. I know that it’s a completely normal thing for men and it probably has nothing to do with the fact that Stassi was in bed with me.
Probably.
The thought I’ve been ignoring makes me groan as I pull the bacon out of the fridge. I turn on the Keurig and start preparing the cup when my phone rings. It’s only eight a.m., so I can already guess who it is, probably coming in from his morning swim.
“Why do you insist on calling me at eight in the morning? You’re lucky I was already up.” I roll my eyes at my younger brother Seth. He’s eight years younger than me but acts more like he’s twenty years younger than me. He’s still single, no kids, and if I can recall, he’s never had a serious relationship. A slew of one night stands, yes, but I can’t remember the last time he entertained a woman for longer than a few weeks. Swimming has been his life from a young age and he even almost made it to the Olympics, but another guy from Maryland kind of had the lock on that the year he was close. He never let it sway his passion though, and I commend him for not being bitter about it. He still swims every day, sometimes more than once depending on his schedule.
Stanford University is the best division one swimming college in the country, and they essentially broke down our door his junior year to get to him. He went and received an Ivy League education for free. Once swimming on the professional level didn’t pan out, he’d gotten a job at a recruiting firm and has been there since, climbing his way up the ranks to senior vice president. He now lives in Florida because “fuck that Maryland weather.”
“Some people have to work on Saturdays, dickhead, and I wanted to check on my big brother. Shit.”
I can’t ignore the smile that finds my face at my well-meaning little brother. I have one brother and one sister and I’m close with both, but only my brother dropped everything when Angela died. My sister, Elle, was in med school at Princeton and under a rigorous schedule, so she couldn’t make it. She swore she’d come visit this summer, but she’s as flakey as she is busy, so I’m not counting on it.
“I’m good,” I tell him.
“You sure?” I can hear the concern in his voice. “You don’t sound good.”
“I’ve been up twenty minutes. Sorry I haven’t already swum eight miles and had breakfast,” I joke.
“You can’t hoot with the owls and sing with the birds I guess,” he retorts and I give him the middle finger in my brain at his jab that I was always the night owl, while he was getting up at four in the morning to hit the pool by the time he was thirteen.
“You’re working today?” I change the subject.
“Yep, we’re rolling out this new software on Monday, so I have to make sure the education team is prepared. I’m hoping to be out in a few hours though. This girl I’m seeing is having some birthday shit tonight at this bar.”
“When you say ‘seeing’ you mean…?” I ask for clarification, hoping he means he’s trying to settle down.
“I mean she does this thing with her tongue where—”
“Enough, I don’t need to hear it.”
“You should be hearing it man, it’s been two months. How’s your dick holding up?”
“Fine, thank you,” I grumble as I take a sip of my coffee and walk towards the front door to step outside. The last thing I want is for Stassia to overhear any part of this conversation.
“Have you…”
“No! Seth, not every man thinks with his dick. My wife’s been dead two months; it took me a full year to sleep with someone after Tessa.”
“Times are different, man. When T died, you didn’t have the kind of access to women that you do now. Get with it, join an app and you can have a woman at your door in thirty minutes if you play your cards right.” He pauses. “Well, words. You know what I mean.”
“You’re almost thirty-five, aren’t you ready to grow up yet?”
“Excuse the fuck out of you, old man. I’m almost thirty-four, and don’t turn down your nose at me because you don’t know how to pick up women. Didn’t both Tessa and Angela have to make the first move, you pussy?”
“No,” I bark. Well…maybe Angela because, again, I was still mourning my first wife. Fucker.
“Uh, yes. Tessa was like your lab partner or you tutored her or some shit. Anyway, didn’t she plant a kiss on you out of nowhere?”
I smile at the memory. “Why do you remember that?”
“Because you talked about her that summer the whole. fucking. time.” I’m silent and he chuckles in response. “Exactly. Now listen, I am about to go into a meeting but I was thinking, I could come visit soon? I know I didn’t get to stick around much after the funeral and I feel like shit over it.”
“Don’t. I appreciate that you came at all,” I say, but I can hear the resentment in my voice implied toward my sister.
“Give Elle a break, Dom. She’s stressed the fuck out.”
“And I’m not? My wife died again. I have to deal with not only my feelings this time around but a very sensitive adolescent who just lost her mom.”
“How is Stassia anyway?”
<
br /> I take a seat on the top stairs. “I think she’s okay. One day at a time. She’s sleeping right now.”
“Wait, she’s staying…with you still?”
“Yes?” Where else would she be? “This is her home.”
“I just figured she’d go stay with Angela’s parents. She was practically attached to her grandmother after the funeral.”
“They live kind of far and she wanted to be close to her friends and school when she went back.”
“Interesting.”
I know my brother; for him to say something is ‘interesting’ means he has a whole bunch of thoughts on the subject. “What?”
“That you have an eighteen-year-old that’s basically a younger, hotter version of your late wife living with you.”
“Watch your fucking mouth,” I bite out, but I’m not sure if I’m defending Angela in that moment or irritated that he referred to my stepdaughter as ‘hot,’ but I feel my blood boiling.
“Oh, don’t even hand me that shit. Stassia is a smoke show and that is a fact.”
“I’m fucking warning you. She’s my stepdaughter.” I feel the anger welling up inside of me. Anger that isn’t only directed at my brother, but also at myself. We’d smoked last night and I’m just now remembering a little piece of information I hadn’t been privy to.
She had a crush on me when she was younger?
I hadn’t been angry at that fact. She was ten and I was sweet to her while I courted her mother. I suppose there’s some understanding to that.
No, I’m angry at myself for the thought that flashed through my stoned mind no more than a moment later.
Does she still have a crush on me? Does she feel anything for me now that she’s older? Has that crush developed into something else over the years?
“Actually, ex-stepdaughter if you want to get technical?”
“I have to go,” I tell him. I don’t have time to get hung up on ‘technicalities.’ Stassia is off limits. Indefinitely. And I hate myself for even having to voice that unwritten rule. It should have been a given. A line in the sand I shouldn’t even be getting close to crossing. “Don’t come here because now I have to worry about you pushing up on the very vulnerable young woman that lives here, and I won’t have it.”
“Relax, D. I wouldn’t do anything to Stassi, mostly out of fear for my life.” He chuckles. “I’m more concerned with you, big bro. Men do interesting, and at times questionable, things in times of grief.”
“You forget I know how this works.”
“You forget you slept with Elle’s best friend in a coat closet at Elle’s birthday party and subsequently ended their friendship.”
My hand clenches around my phone as I recall the drunken blow up that happened that night. My sister definitely overreacted and she was angrier at her friend than she was at me, but I never fully understood why Elle cut her off after that.
“Come on, let me come up. Maybe next month?”
“No.”
“Okay, think about it and get back to me. I gotta run,” he says before he’s gone. I let out a sigh as I walk back into the quiet house trying to ignore my brother’s words, and yet I’m unable to escape them. I decide to make Stassi a cup of coffee and take it upstairs mostly so I can wake her up and force her out of my bed so I can stop thinking about the fact that she’s there in the first place. I hear Seth’s words in my head and as much as I want to say he has no idea what he’s talking about, I hate that maybe he’s not completely clueless.
The sound of sniffles breaks me out of my thoughts just as I pass Stassi’s door and a fleeting feeling of disappointment ripples through me as I realize she’s not in my room, contradictory to how I felt just moments before.
I am losing my fucking mind.
“Stassi?” I knock lightly on her door. “You want some coffee?” The sound that moves through the door vibrates through me. A sniffle.
I don’t think twice before I’m moving through the door into her bedroom. She’s sitting on her bed, her body facing away from me as her tiny shoulders shake up and down. Her head is lowered and I see her hands covering her face. I set the coffee on her nightstand and move quickly towards her, my long legs eating the distance between us until I’m lowering myself slowly onto her bed. “Stassi?”
She doesn’t say anything at first, but then I hear her voice, choppy and broken and full of emotion. I can see the tears cascading down her cheeks rapidly before she wipes her face once. “Go…away…” She’d shed the sweatshirt and sweatpants she’d worn last night, leaving her only in a tiny t-shirt and a pair of shorts. She shifts away from me and hides her face and I feel as if someone is standing on my chest as I watch my sweet girl break down. I can still see her eyelashes that are wet with her tears, and I watch as one lone tear drips down her chin and into her lap. “Stassi, look at me, sweetheart.”
She shifts again slowly towards me and what I see knocks the rest of the wind out of me. I let out a shaky breath as I see her brown eyes that are so bright that it stuns me. For a moment, I’m so captivated by the beautiful color of her eyes, I forget why they’re that color. “Your eyes…they’re so clear and bright. I’ve never seen them this color before.” I press a hand to her cheek and rub a thumb under her eyes. “They’re like honey.”
“Sometimes…” Her bottom lip trembles and she traps it between her teeth, “…when I cry, they get lighter.”
“Stassi,” I whisper her name like it’s a plea as I prepare to beg her to open up to me and not to shut me out. She needs me and I refuse to let her down. “Why didn’t you come get me?”
“I…I didn’t need to. It just hit me all at once.” Her nose scrunches slightly highlighting the few freckles she has on the bridge. She purses her lips and the faint dimple she has on one side shows itself. I pull her into my arms on instinct. “I miss her,” she mumbles into my shirt. “Fuck, I miss her so much.” I rub her back in slow methodical circles, hugging her tighter each time she sniffles or hiccups. She continues to sob into my shirt and her tears feel like tiny knives stabbing my chest as I do my best to console her.
“I know, sweetheart. I know. So do I.” Her wild curls are pulled into a bun on top of her head, made messier after our night of sleep, but a few of the tendrils framing her face tickle my chin. I pull away and push them back slowly before I press a kiss to her forehead. A short intake of breath falls from her lips and for a second, I regret what I’ve done, but I push my thoughts to the side because I’m just consoling her. Nothing about that kiss felt intimate, I tell myself. Even as I think the words though, I don’t believe them.
“Why?” Her voice breaks again. “She was a good person. The best. Why her?”
Hearing this question destroys me because it’s one I’ve asked a million times over the past two months. Having gone through this once before, I came to the conclusion a little quicker this time, but it’s just as difficult nonetheless. The conclusion that life is hard and dark and sometimes it fucking sucks.
That sometimes living is harder than dying.
But Stassi is eighteen and I refuse to contribute to her having such a morose outlook on the world. She has so much life to live and I want her to thrive in spite of this tragedy. I want her to live for both herself and the woman that can’t any longer. So, I say the most positive thing I can think of in the moment.
“You know I’m not very religious, Stass, but your Mom would say because it was her time. Because God was ready for her.”
Her cheek is pressed against my chest as her sobs begin to quiet, but I don’t stop rubbing her back. “Do you really believe that? Or are you just bullshitting me?”
“Okay, here it is in my words. I don’t know why the universe decided it was her time, but from the beginning, we are taught that tomorrow isn’t promised, for any of us. You have to live, Stassi. Every day to the fullest. I want you to mourn, of course, because your heart will hurt for a while. You almost won’t feel like yourself. Death is hard. But…that’s life. And if there�
��s one thing I’ve learned is that it goes on. You will go on. And, sure, there will be fleeting moments where the feelings of missing her will overwhelm you, but those feelings will go just as quickly as they come. You’ll heal, Stassia. You’ll find strength in the people you love and the people that love you. You’ll find strength in your passions and your dreams. You can’t use this as an excuse to not be happy. To not, live.”
She pulls back slightly and looks up at me as fresh tears stream down her face. “Wow. That was really…powerful.”
“I know a thing or two about grief and I’ve got one hell of a therapist.” I give her a smile, that I know doesn’t reach my eyes and she returns it before moving back into my arms. “Thank you…for being here.” She wraps her arms around my back and squeezes me. “Don’t let go.” Her voice is quiet but it’s like she screamed the words with how much I feel them deep in my heart.
“Never,” I tell her. I continue to rub her back for a few minutes before she finally drops her arms, releasing me from her grip.
“Sorry,” she murmurs and I cock my head to the side as her face comes into view.
“For what exactly?”
“Getting all emotional.” I reach for her but she leans back slightly and wipes the tears that had fallen. I wish she’d let me do that. I don’t know why in this moment, the need to take care of her overwhelms me. Maybe because I’d never really seen her cry. She’s never been a crier, and the few times she had, she would retreat to her room and emerge later with a clear face like it had never happened.
“You don’t need to apologize for that.”
We’re both silent for a few minutes; when I look over at her I spot her staring off into space and I realize I would do anything to get that painful look off of her face.
“So, what do you want for breakfast?”
The following Saturday is her graduation day and I can safely say I have never been prouder, especially since, as the Principal of Lakewood High, I get to be the one to hand her the diploma.