“Oh, fuck,” I snarl. I hoist her hips up and slam home. Can’t stop myself. Not after she said that. I whip my body into hers, wet smacks echoing in the air until I lose control again, shooting hot cum into her body. Something hard in me crumbles as I lie on her back, flattening her against the bed as I kiss all over. “You don’t know what you do to me, Lena.”
Her whisper is barely words. “I have an idea.”
I roll her onto her back and kiss her mouth, and I don’t ever want to stop.
I’m not sure if I can.
SEVENTEEN
LENA
Opal’s presentationis on the water cycle. I don’t remember doing projects this complex when I was five, but times change, I guess.
This is the topic she has been assigned by Ms. Callahan, and it is, according to Opal, an excellent topic, because she already knows a lot about weather, and this will only make her know more. She has been saying this for three days, along with spouting off random weather facts she’s been learning for the presentation.
We are now in the living room with poster board, colored markers, and a printed diagram of the hydrological cycle that Opal can’t pronounce but has annotated in red pen with her own observations.
Dario sits on the floor to help, but he’s lousy with tape. Dario Spinelli, the doctor whom I have watched receive grown men with knife wounds with the bedside manner of someone doing paperwork, is sitting cross-legged on the living room floor next to my daughter while holding her note cards. He’s been relegated to card duty since the tape nearly ended up in Opal’shair. He’s reading them back to her in a voice of such profound academic gravity that Opal is already starting to lose it.
“The water cycle,” he intones, in the voice of a man delivering a papal address, “also known as the hydrological cycle, is the continuous movement of water—” He pauses for effect. “Within Earth and its atmosphere.” He lowers the card and regards her over an invisible pair of spectacles. “Miss Swan. Please define precipitation.”
Opal, who has been holding it together admirably for about eight seconds, collapses into laughter so complete that she has to put her head on her knees. She laughs the way she does everything—with her whole body, full volume.
He waits. He maintains the professor expression with perfect seriousness, which only makes her laugh harder, which I can tell he knows. It’s why he’s doing it.
I’m on the couch, reading through the logistics of my new job’s onboarding materials in theory. I’m not reading them. I’m watching my daughter and this man on my living room floor, and I’m feeling something so large and so warm and so complicated that I don’t have a proper container for it. I just feel it.
What catches me off guard is not the silliness itself—I’ve seen him be gentle with her before. Also patient and kind and attentive in the way that matters.
What catches me off guard is how genuine it is. There’s no fakery in it. He’s not doing it because it’s what you do with children, not executing a protocol for appropriate adult-to-child interaction. He has dozens of protocols, ways he fakes humanity to the rest of the world. This isn’t that.
He thinks Opal is funny. He’s delighting in her. It comes off him the way warmth comes off sunlight, just there, available to whoever is standing in it.
He loves her. I don’t know when that happened. I don’t know exactly when I knew it. But sitting here watching him hold her note cards and wait for her to collect herself, I know it with complete certainty.
Opal finally gets herself together enough to attempt precipitation. “Rain!”
“Aye, that’s one kind of precipitation. Name another.”
“Snow!”
“Very good. Now, Miss Swan, name one more, and you might attain the cookie of infinite wisdom.”
She giggles. “Hail!” Then she turns to me. “I didn’t say the bad word, Mama.”
“I know, baby.”
He shifts out of the professor voice and into something more genuine and direct. “Excellent work. Now for the evaporation round…” He knows what parts she has down cold and what parts are shakier, and he steers her toward the shakier parts without making her feel tested. He’s a good coach.
He’s better at this than he would ever admit to being.
They go through the whole cycle twice. The second time, she does it in a normal voice with only minimal prompting. When she gets through condensation without needing help, he gives a single, approving nod and says, “You have this,” in the flat, certain tone he uses for facts.
Opal sits up straighter. “One more time?”
“You don’t need it. You know it. Go to sleep so you’re sharp tomorrow.”
Opal regards him for a moment—the weighing look she does, the one that takes a full three seconds—and then, “You’re right. I have it.” She gathers her note cards. She lines up her colored markers in color-spectrum order, her nightly ritual, orange to violet, very serious.
