Page 20

Lovie

“ I don’t know, Lov,” Chrys says, her voice staticky over the phone. “He’s just been…different, since that last hospital trip. Like that light he had before is gone. And I’ve been trying to cheer him up, but it’s like it doesn’t even get through to him.”

I switch the phone to my other ear, glance through the fogged up windows of the grocery store, and try to focus on my sister and shopping at the same time.

“Did you tell him about Shannon’s?” I ask, giving another shopper an apologetic smile as I step around them to grab a bottle of nonalcoholic wine, and two more bottles of the fertility wine Harrison suggested.

Shannon’s is a little diner in Portland that cooks up a whole Thanksgiving feast and delivers it to your door. When we were kids, my mom would call ordering Shannon’s “naughty” cooking.

“I told him,” Chrys says, sounding apologetic. I grab a package of crackers and a block of Havarti, then throw them into my basket. “Maybe he’ll feel differently when it’s here.”

“Maybe,” I agree, swallowing down the lump in my throat at the thought of Shannon’s not even cheering him up. “Hey, sorry Chrys, but I’m about to go through the checkout.”

We say our goodbyes, and I try to put the thoughts of my dad out of my head as I walk a block back home.

Snow is already coming down, floating gently through the yellow street lights, and I’m not the only person hurrying home, head down against the wind, clearly buying last-minute Thanksgiving supplies.

Because the weather is supposed to be bad, Harrison thought we should have our Thanksgiving tonight, just in case the power goes out tomorrow. I agreed, and now I walk through the lobby and into the fancy elevator, punching the button for his floor.

Maybe I should stop by my apartment first, freshen up, run a brush through my hair, but I’m to the point where Harrison knows what he’s getting from me.

After a week of lying on my back, knees to my chest, eyes on the ceiling while he made me laugh, I hardly need to worry about my bangs being frizzy.

Still, even with that familiarity, I knock when I get to his door.

“Lovie,” he says, something warm and buttery in his voice when he says my name. Then, his eyes dart down to the items in my reusable shopping bag. “I told you not to bring anything.”

He looks flushed, his cheeks tinged the lightest pink, which somehow only makes his blue eyes bluer.

I have the strangest urge to rush forward, throw my arms around him, pull him close to me and breathe in his scent.

To feel his hands on my back, to let him hold me.

I ignore it and pull the bottle up, shooting him a smile I hope doesn’t give away the feelings lingering from my conversation with Chrys.

“I brought nonalcoholic wine,” I say, turning the label toward him. “So we can get not-sloshed.”

“Sloshed?” he says, raising an eyebrow. “Is that what the kids are saying these days?”

“I’m thirty-three,” I counter, stepping in when he backs up and lets me inside. I kick my shoes up, hand him the bag, and meet his eyes. “So I have no idea what the kids are doing.”

“Until you have your own.”

I know he means it as a joke, but it hangs in the air between us, a reminder of what this is. A deal for sperm. A contract we both signed to spend time together.

Forcing a laugh, I brush past him and toward the kitchen, knowing he’ll want to follow me so I don’t touch anything. He got a firsthand taste of just how bad my cooking skills are last week when I almost set his apartment on fire.

“Hold on a second,” he says, skirting around me, one hand on my hip gently guiding me to the breakfast bar, and I laugh at the obvious redirection, my shoulders relaxing at the relief of the brief awkward moment passing.

More than anything, I want to take a pregnancy test and find two little lines instead of one. But I’d be lying if I said the thought of that—of being done with this thing with Harrison—didn’t also make me a little sad.

“There you go,” Harrison says, opening one of my teas and depositing it next to me on the breakfast bar.

Like every other time I’ve come to his apartment, I sit and sip my drink, swinging my feet and watching him cook, but this time it’s the world’s cutest—and totally not sad—Thanksgiving meal for two.

He rubs Cornish game hens with butter and herbs, boils and peels red potatoes, washes asparagus and tosses it in a mix of oils and seasonings.

Harrison chats with me as he cooks. We talk about the season, the drama with Greenhill, whether or not we really think he’s left the mother of his children high and dry.

There’s no doubt in my mind—Harrison is still holding out hope that Greenhill turns out to be a decent guy.

As he moves, I stare at his forearms, the way his baby blue shirt bunches around his elbows, folded neatly out of his way.

I would have expected a hockey guy like him to be messy, leave the kitchen covered in spatters and sticky puddles, but he moves methodically, cleaning up each mess as he goes, throwing away scraps and wrappers the moment they accumulate.

Without meaning to, I imagine Harrison on Christmas morning. He would be the kind of dad that might gather up each little scrap of wrapping paper the moment it hits the floor. For some reason, the thought of that—the image of it in my head—makes my throat get a little thick.

And then, like it always does, the grief hits me out of nowhere.

The fact that my dad will never be a dad like that on Christmas morning again. That this will be our first Christmas without my mom. How Chrys and my dad are all alone today, trying to navigate what this holiday means with just the two of them.

“Lovie, are you okay?”

When I look up and see Harrison watching me with a concerned expression, it’s over.

A sob fights its way up my throat and I start to cry—not the dainty, pretty crying you can dab away with a tissue—but the wretched, jerking kind of crying that’s so embarrassing and you can’t stop it from happening no matter what you do.

“Hey, hey,” Harrison says, coming around, wrapping his arms around my shoulders, pulling me close to him. On my next inhale of breath, I get nothing but his scent, and it actually manages to soothe me, to make something in my chest feel a little quieter.

His hand goes to my back, and he whispers, “Hey, what’s going on, honey?”

Honey. I should stop this right now—tell him not to comfort me. Not to use a pet name with me. But I feel horrible, and his touch is making it better.

“Sorry,” I gasp, pulling back, wiping at my face and trying to get control of my breathing. “I just—I was thinking about my mom, and I?—”

The sobs cut me off again, and Harrison wordlessly pulls me into his chest, hand running soothingly up and down my back until I go still, feeling impossibly sleepy.

Without a word, Harrison seems to understand, and takes my elbow, leading me to his bed.

He brings me my drink, a box of tissues, drops a blanket around my shoulders, then sits in the bed with me and continues to rub my back in comforting circles.

“It’s okay,” he murmurs, and when my eyes meet his, I almost laugh at the fact that I was worried about frizzy bangs earlier. Here he is, looking like a model, and I’m a snot monster. “Do you want to talk about it?”

I open my mouth to say no, but instead I say, “I’ll never have another Christmas with her again.”

Harrison pauses, his eyes going vague for a moment before he presses his lips together, nods, and says, “The grief comes out of nowhere, sometimes.”

Then I remember that he lost his mom, too, and that thing in my chest grows even quieter. It’s nice to sit here with someone who knows what it’s like, who understands the particular black hole that opens up inside me any time I think about her, about my dad, about what happened.

When I start talking, Harrison listens. When the oven goes off, he disappears for a moment, then returns, settling back into the bed without a word.

An hour later, I get hungry, and he reheats the food, bringing in plates for us to eat on his bed.

“I just feel bad,” I mumble around a bite of food. “These must be nice sheets. And you worked so hard on this meal just for it to go in the microwave.”

“It doesn’t matter, Lovie,” he says, and it really sounds like he means it. When we’re finished eating, and he takes the plates away, I try to find the will inside my body to stand, get out of his bed, force myself back to his apartment.

“What are you doing?” he asks, when he comes back in and I’m sitting on the edge of the bed, preparing to stand up.

“Since we’re not going to…” I trail off, not wanting to say fulfill our contractual agreement. “I should probably head back to my place.”

“No way.” He shakes his head, and pulls from behind his back the chilled bottle of nonalcoholic wine. I’d give anything for it to be the real thing right now, to numb some of the pain from the grief rolling through me like crushing tidal waves. “We have to drink this first.”

That makes me laugh, and I accept a glass from him, sitting carefully and making sure not to spill, even as I wipe the crumbs away from supper. Tears continue to trail down my cheeks, though the sobbing has stopped.

Just barely, I stop myself from adding something about how I’m not usually like this. I don’t usually cry this much. It must be the hormones. The grief. The experience of being here with him and loving it, and feeling guilty for leaving my family back home.

The lingering, looming knowledge that when I get the thing I’ve always wanted, I’m going to lose Harrison. That is just a fact. It’s in the contract.

“Lovie,” he says. His voice is deadly calm, filled with a level of seriousness I’ve never heard from him before. And when he raises his eyes to mine, holding them in the intimacy of his bedroom, he says, “This is the best Thanksgiving I have ever had.”

And I realize I might be falling in love with him.