“You look beautiful.”
“You look tired.”
“Same thing, right?”
“Absolutely not. You look handsome and tired. There’s a difference.”
He huffs a laugh, his breath warm against my cheek. “Noted.”
I pull back to look at him properly. He’s wearing the navy sweater I like, the one that brings out his eyes, and he’s clearly made an effort to tame his hair, which is already starting to escape in the direction of his forehead. His hands are warm where they rest on my hips.
He’s the best person I’ve ever met. Not because he’s perfect—he’s not, he leaves his socks everywhere and he’s never once managed to load a dishwasher correctly and he still can’t remember the difference between spanakopita and tiropita, which after six years is frankly inexcusable.
But he shows up, every day, without being asked.
He remembers that I don’t like cantaloupe. He knows which takeout places deliver to our apartment without checking. He wakes up before me on weekends, makes coffee, brings it to bed. He listens when I talk, really listens, and he never tries to fix things that don’t need fixing.
He’s going to be an amazing father.
“You two hiding out over here?”
Dad appears beside us, a fresh glass of wine in his hand.
Brandon extends his hand. “Good to see you, Dr. Roussos. Sorry I’m late.”
Dad looks at Brandon’s outstretched hand, then at Brandon, and then he bypasses the hand entirely, pulling Brandon into a hug.
“You need to drag this one out to the house more often,” Dad says into Brandon’s shoulder. “I keep telling her. Sunday dinners. We have a whole table.”
“She’s very stubborn,” Brandon says, muffled.
“I know. I raised her.”
“You did a good job.”
“I know that, too.”
They pull apart and Dad’s eyes are bright. I lean into his side, just slightly. His arm comes up around my shoulders, automatic, like muscle memory.
“You know,” he says, not looking at me, “sometimes I miss it.”
“Miss what?”
“The old days.” He pauses. “Just you and me.”
I don’t say anything. I wait.
“I know that sounds—I don’t mean it the way it sounds.” His thumb keeps moving. “I wouldn’t trade any of this. Not Annie, not Mik, not Allie, not the messiness of it all. I love our life. I love all of them.”
“I know, Dad.”
“But sometimes I think about that little apartment.” He almost smiles. “You had that tiny bed with the rainbow sheets and you’d crawl into mine at three in the morning because you had a nightmare and I’d pretend to be asleep so you could feel like you snuck in without waking me up.”
“I knew you were pretending.”
“Of course you did. You were always too smart for your own good.”
I lean into him a little more.
