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“Don’t judge,” I warn. “This is what your kids are craving tonight.”
“I didn’t say a word,” he points out.
“Yeah, but I can hear you thinking.”
He shakes his head as he dips his spoon into his bowl of lobster bisque. I eye him as he brings the spoon to his mouth. “No. You can’t have this. There’s wine and brandy in the broth,” he cautions and swallows.
“Whatever.” I pick up a French fry and sink it into the generous cheese dip. I close my eyes with satisfaction as the combination of sweet and salty bursts on my tongue.
“You know, I’ve always been curious about one thing,” Ezra starts. He waits for me to open my eyes again before he continues, “Your hair. You change the color every month. Is there a pattern to it?”
“Ezra Beaufort, how do you know I dye my hair every month? Have you been stalking me?” I tease.
“I’m pleading the fifth.” He grins charmingly, tearing a bit of cornbread and tossing it into his mouth.
Huh. Has he really been stalking me? “Now, I’m curious. Did you do a cursory background check on me after we met up last year? Or after I showed up to tell you I’m pregnant.” That’s the only thing I can think of.
“I might consider answering your question if you answer mine first.” He shrugs carelessly.
“Deal. Thereisa pattern to it. But I’ll have to start from the very beginning. You see, growing up, the only distinct feature that could be used to identify Ella and I were my eyes, and back then I thought it made me a freak.”
“That’s insane. I love your eyes.”
I give him a warm smile as I twirl a piece of my chicken alfredo. “I’ve learned to love them too. I didn’t back then, so when we were in high school, Ella got eye contacts and started wearing them in her right eye too, so I wouldn’t feel alone. It was fun. We could finally really be identical twins, and even pretend to be one another. I’m getting off track. Anyway, in our senior year, Ella had to stop wearing the contact lens because it was starting to hurt her eye. I still hated my eyes so I thought, fuck it, I’m just going to shave my hair off or something equally dramatic to shift attention from my eyes.”
“You didn’t.” He sounds scandalized, so I grin.
“No, I didn’t. Ella convinced me that was much too drastic, so I settled for dying my hair. My senior year in high school featured my hair a fire engine red. Then just before Istarted college, Dad arranged the engagement between us and mandated I dye my hair back to my natural brown, which I did.”
“Ah, that explains why you were so pissed when we first met.”
“Yeah.” I was really angry. Not only was I suddenly engaged to a guy I’d never met, but I had to get rid of something I’d come to think of as a fundamental part of my personality. I was fully prepared to be uncooperative when we came to Brattleboro.
Then when I saw Ezra, I took a moment to rethink my decision, but I soon realized that he was drunk and I went back to my previous decision.
The engagement lasted only one month before Ezra came to our house and asked if I really wanted to be married to a recovering addict. I appreciated his honesty, but we both agreed we weren’t in the right place. We were so young. Ezra said he’d take the fall for calling things off, but he never knew that I had told Dad. Either he called off the engagement or forgot about me going to a higher institution.
Who would have thought that just five years later, we’d be here like this? Me pregnant with his kids.
“So, how did you go back to dying your hair?”
“Dad negotiated with me.” I smile at the memory. “In exchange for calling off our engagement, I’d go to college; if I felt like I must still dye my hair, I would only dye a small part. It seemed like a fair deal, so I agreed to dying just the tips. I ended up not liking how it looked, so I switched to the front strands.” I pinch a bright yellow streak between my left fingers, then drop it.
“And how do you decide on what color it will be in each month?”
“I drew inspiration from the painted night sky in my room.”
“The stars?” he asks and frowns.
“When you look at stars, you can see a variety of brilliance and color. But stars can only be five colors; orange, blue, yellow,white, red and orange. There are twelve months in a year andonlyfive star colors. So, I make up a variety of the colors from the hottest month to the coldest.”
“How?” He leans forward, placing his elbows on the table as if he’s genuinely interested in the stars and a silly chart I had come up with to dye my hair. My grin widens. I love talking about this, but I’ve learned not to speak about it unless asked because it bores most people.
“Basically, stars don’t have identical temperatures, so astronomers devised a method to characterize the color of a star and use thatcolorto determine the temperature of the star. For example, blue colors dominate the light output of very hot stars while cool stars have the light output of red wavelengths. Therefore, from hottest to the coldest, the lights the stars emit are; blue, white, yellow, orange, red.”
“And you just use a variant of the star colors depending on how hot or cold the month is?” He guesses correctly, and I snap my fingers in his direction.
“Correct.” For the warm months, I use variants of yellow, white, and blue. Yellow being the least hot, blue being the hottest. And for the cooler months, variants of orange and red, orange being the least cold.
