Page 56 of After-Hours Heir

Baby: It changed my father. It turned him into something that I didn’t recognize.

Kid: And you were lonely.

Baby: Yes. I learned that I could be entirely free of that feeling, of that suffering, if I simply expected to be alone.

Kid: That’s awful.

Baby: It worked very well. For a while. What made you text me that first time?

She frowned.

Kid: I guess I’m like you. I spent a lot of time feeling apart. School was strange for me. I got sent to a boarding school because it was what my mother wanted. Something prestigious. But everybody there was raised in that life, and I wasn’t. I was an odd one out. Then my father decided hewanted me to come home, so I changed schools and I had trouble making friends there too. It isn’t that I have none, it’s just that I’ve always felt like I was sitting somewhere in between two worlds.

Baby: That isn’t really the same.

Kid: It’s not, I guess. But I understand what you mean. That feeling that you could die of loneliness. I made the publishing company into something that I could love. But still, that night, when I decided to text to make sure the person whose phone it was could contact me… I guess I just wanted to reach out.

She paused for a moment.

Kid: Why did you respond?

His answer was slow to come.

Baby: I have spent a great many years coming to terms with my life. With who I am in this life. But there are nights, I believe they are called the dark nights of the soul? There are nights like that. Still very dark. And it seems like it won’t end. It was one of those nights. I just wanted to reach out to somebody. But there was no one. I was lonely most of my life through no fault of my own. And now, I have fashioned for myself an entire life where I am lonely by design. And that is fine. Mostly. But then, there is a wave of despair and you want to reach out for a hand and you realize there is no hand.

Her throat went tight, tears pushed at the backs of her eyes.

This was the same man. The one that she had talked to. The one that she had connected with.

He was there. It had all made perfect sense before she had known that he was Christos.

And then, because of the way Christos presented himself to the world, because of what she assumed about Christos, she had thought that it would be impossible to love him.

She had thought that it would be impossible for this to be real because she assumed that the man she saw in all those meetings,the one she had seen at publishing parties over the years, he was what was real.

No. It was the man who wrote to her. That was the most real, deep part of him. But for some reason he felt desperate to hide it when he was with her.

Kid: Why did you leave after we slept together?

Baby: I had planned to leave.

Kid: That’s a lie. I know it is.

Baby: I don’t know what you make me feel. The words started to come in fast. I don’t understand it. You ignited part of me before I had ever seen you. I cannot for the life of me understand what it is.

Kid: Human connection?

Baby: I never asked for it.

Kid: You did. When you texted me that first time, that’s what you were asking for.

He hadn’t known that it would become sexual. She had a feeling that he was even now trying to distance himself from it by telling himself that it had been. But she knew that it wasn’t. She knew that what he’d said first, what he had said just now about loneliness. Isolation. Darkness, that was the truth. He had reached out for a hand, and she had taken it.

Baby: Well, I don’t like it. I want to go back to before. I want to go back to who I was before.

Kid: Before you felt something?

Baby: I don’t even know what to call it.