Page 36 of Something About September

They lay side by side, shoulders just brushing, both staring up at the sky. Pip’s breathing was steady nearby, the fire crackling low.

After a moment, Rebecca said, “Your place is beautiful.”

He turned his head slightly. “The house?”

“All of it,” she said. “The house, yes. The garden.” She hesitated, then added, “You’ve built something really good here.”

He was quiet for a beat. When he spoke, his voice was thoughtful. “It’s nice to hear that. When Melanie and I split up, I honestly didn’t know what single-dad life was going to look like for me.”

Rebecca turned her head toward him and could smell the sharp mint of his breath.

“My parents’ divorce knocked my dad completely off-balance,” Cort went on. “He loved us, but he never quite found his footing again. And when it happened to me, all of a sudden, I understood him. How hard it is to hold things together when what you pictured just…well, it’s not what you pictured anymore.”

The fire popped softly. Pip shifted in his sleep.

“But I also knew I didn’t want Pip growing up feeling like he was living out of a suitcase,” Cort said. “Like he had two houses but no real home. I wanted him to feel settled. Like wherever he was, he belonged.”

Rebecca’s throat tightened. “I get that,” she said. “Lenore gave that to me—a sense of belonging, even if I didn’t have parents. I know it was so important to her.”

He exhaled, slow and thoughtful. “It isn’t easy being a kid. It’s good to have adults in your life who get that, who care, right? Who don’t put their own happiness in front of yours—because really, in the end, with a family that works, it’s all the same happiness.”

Rebecca found herself smiling into the darkness. “It’s all the same happiness,” she repeated. Then: “You’re a good dad, Cort,” she added.

“That means a lot, Rebecca. It’s my most important job. Thank you.” They lay there in silence after that, but it felt like companionship, not awkward or empty. The night pressed in around them, and for the first time in a long while, Rebecca felt the urge to stop bracing herself for what might come next. Instead, she let herself go a little, and as she relaxed, their shoulders touched. Neither of them moved away.

“I don’t really know what that’s like,” Rebecca said after a moment. “Having a dad. So maybe I’m not an expert. But I do think I understand what it means to be a good parent. I always had an anchor, and that’s what it is, right? Being steady and constant.”

She felt him nod beside her. Now his arm was against hers. She wasn’t sure who had moved closer but allowed herself to relish the warmth, the contact. She wanted to tell him things, she realized. Because with Cort, there always seemed to be understanding between them. It was possible, she realized as she lay there beside him, the warmth from his body and the warmth from hers indistinguishable, that aside from Sabrina, she had never felt so comfortable, so herself, with anyone else.

She stared up at the sky and spoke again.

“I think I spent most of my life striving for what I thought I wanted because although Lenore was my anchor, I always knew it wasn’t permanent—that she wasn’t the age of a parent, that she’d be gone one day. I wanted my life to be so steady and sure that I could survive losing my bedrock. But…” She shook her head. “It turns out steady and sure lacks something.”

He turned his head toward her again, and she turned, too. His eyes shone silver in the flickering firelight. “You have choices, you know.”

“But what if I choose the wrong thing? What if I don’t actually know what right even feels like?”

He looked away then, turned his face toward the night sky. When he spoke, it was a low rumble through her body. “What if it feels like this?”

“Is that a rhetorical question?” she found herself whispering back, and his soft chuckle echoed through her body the way his voice had.

“I think it might be the very definition of one,” he said. Then he shifted beside her, and now their pinkies were touching. And then their pinkies were linked. They both squeezed at the same time, and the feelings this elicited were too big for Rebecca to ignore. But just because she wasn’t ignoring them, she told herself as calmly as she could, did not mean she had to analyze them. So she just gazed up at the sky and let the happy, cozy feeling stay where it was, in her heart, in her mind.

“Good night, Becca,” he whispered eventually.

“Night, Cort,” she whispered back.

Just then, a star streaked across the sky, leaving a shining tail as it fell through the atmosphere. She had seen shooting stars before—but this one felt like magic, especially when Cort squeezed her pinkie again. “Did you see that?”

She smiled at the wonder in his voice—felt it, too. “I did.”

They were both silent again, their hands still connected, and Rebecca’s heart, for once, was calm and settled even if she was firmly under the influence of the Cort Adams Effect. She sighed softly, happily, and heard Cort do the same just before she closed her eyes and drifted off.

Chapter 23

It was still dark, the only light from the heat lamp and the moon, when Rebecca woke up, suddenly cold again, to see Cort carrying a sleeping Pip inside to his bed. She sat up, pulled her knees toward her, and wrapped the sleeping bags tight. He returned moments later holding two bottles of beer.

“Hey,” he said. “Didn’t know if you’d wake up but I brought you one anyway, just in case. Pip hates missing school, so I wanted to make sure he got at least a few hours of sleep in a proper bed.”