There was some scuttlebutt in the dance community about where Alexander went, but the one time I brought it up to Rye, he made it clear that some questions are better left unanswered.
His footsteps on the stairs come alone, which means Mara has been successfully handed off to my mother and the pierogi dough. Or sitting on my father while he sleeps. I don't look up from my phone. I hear him stop in the doorway.
"How many."
"How many what."
"Photos, Elodie."
I look up. He's leaning in the frame with his arms crossed, still in the dark shirt from earlier, and he's looking at me the way he always looks at me. Like he's deciding something. Except I know by now he decided a long time ago and this is just his face.
"A lot," I say.
He makes a low sound and crosses to the bed. Takes the phone without asking and scrolls back. Stops on the maternity ward photo.
“It’s my favorite.”
He hands the phone back.
Five years and the warmth of him still unravels something in my chest.
"Daddy's got you," he growls against my skin.
Those three words. They still do what they've always done.
I turn in his arms until I'm facing him and his eyes move over my face the way they did that first night in the club like he's reading things about me I don’t even know. The difference now is I don't have a posture collar on and the door is open and Mara is thirty feet away being fed pierogi by my mother, and none of that changes the way the room tilts when he looks at me like this.
"Hi," I say.
"Hi, baby." His hand comes up to my jaw, thumb tracing the line of it. "You've been up here a while."
"I was looking at pictures."
"I know." His eyes move over my face. "You get that look."
"What look."
"Like you're trying to figure out how we got here."
I consider denying it. "Maybe."
His hand slides into my hair and pulls at the roots, and the authority in it is so quiet now, so woven into the ordinary fabric of us that I barely register it as anything other than him. The man I know. The man I've always known, and then the man I discovered, and then the man who became this. All of it somehow the same person.
"We got here," he says, "because I wasn't going to let it go any other way."
“You’re insufferable.”
But, also completely accurate.
I press my mouth to his and melt like I always do. His arm bands around my back and pulls me in until there's no space leftbetween us and he kisses me the way he does everything. Like he has all the time in the world and intends to spend it with me.
Downstairs Mara shouts in the dialect of three-year-olds. The whole house smells like butter and garlic and the particular warmth of something that took a long time to build and is not going anywhere.
He pulls back just enough to look at me.
"You're done working," he says. Not a question.
"Yeah, Daddy." I settle into his chest and close my eyes. "I'm done."
