Petty?

Yes.

Children: I adamantly proclaimed were not part of my equation.

True at the time.

Was I an ass?

Sure.

Am I OK with this?

I pause to try to decipher what precisely I am feeling. Oh fuck, I’m blown away in an unexpectedly pleasant way.

Well, there she is, and since Chrissie is into her forties she is just under the wire. Khloe. I wish I could skip over all the other parts left to work through with Chrissie and just fast-forward to where I can let myself be happy about this. But that’s not how life works with Chrissie. No shortcuts. There never is.

I lift my gaze to find her watching me. It’s an emotional land mine question. I shouldn’t ask it.

“Why did you put Jesse’s name on the birth certificate, Chrissie? What was that about?”

Her lovely eyes grow intense. “Privacy. That’s all it was. I didn’t want you to get hit in the face with it before we talked. It bought me time. It’s as temporary as you want it to be.”

I sidestep the last part of her comment. “You could have called me, Chrissie.”

“Like hell I could. The last time we were together you ran from my house as if you couldn’t get away from me quickly enough. It was humiliating, Alan. And since then, you’ve been deliberately unreachable and the things I’ve been reading in the press were pretty clear confirmation that—”

She breaks off, unable to finish.

I take a moment to collect myself, because while everything she said is factual, none of it is right. I didn’t run from her. I ran from—I stop myself before I start to explain it to her.

I stare into her eyes, willing her to see how much I love her. “The last thing you needed at that time was me.”

Her face scrunches up. Her eyes flash. “How would you know? You never asked. You used to care about me enough at least to ask.”

“I love you enough to stay away, Chrissie.”

We stare at each other, held in a tense standoff of silence. She breaks eye contact first, scoops up the baby and leaves the kitchen quickly.

I relax back against the counter and watch her go. A tactical retreat. A temporary cease-fire for both sides. Chrissie’s way of cooling the situation. Not bad. Not good. Intermission. This is far from over.

The music shuts off, and I hear her footsteps in the hallway again. She drops the baby monitor onto the kitchen island and then adjusts it. A beep. She lifts her cell phone to read a text.

“You have to leave soon. Kaley is on her way home. She needs to pick up something.”

“So?”

“I don’t want fighting in the house when my kids are here.”

I can’t believe she said that to me.

“You don’t think much of me these days, do you?”

“Should I?” she challenges.

I relent. “Probably not.”

I watch her move farther away from me into the family room to sit and curl in an oversized chair. She’s different today, less generous, less accessible and less giving. Harder to read. In many ways completely unlike herself.

The only familiar gesture is the repeated anxious fiddling with her hair. I note the gesture. She’s waiting for something.

Something from me?

A peace offering?

It’s hard to tell what she wants by how she’s sitting there. Alert. Remote. Unrevealing.

I decide to go with peace offering.

“I want to correct the birth certificate,” I announce into her silence.

Her lips pucker. “Fine. I’ll have my lawyers contact yours.”

I tense in a knee-jerk immediacy. “Christ, we’re going to communicate through lawyers now? Is that how you want things?”

She looks up, startled, and anxiously searches my face. “How else do we correct all this?”

I hold her gaze. “You could love me and be good to me.”

Chrissie drops her eyes quickly. “I am, Alan. You just don’t know it.”

I look around the room, not sure how to move forward from here.

“So where do we go from here, Chrissie?”

Chrissie looks upset, almost tearful. “You go home. I wait for my children.”

“That’s not what I mean,” I reply, frustrated.

“I know, Alan. But that’s where we are today.”

Her gaze fixes on me, unblinking, intense, and there is something very far back, nearly hidden, that draws me in effortlessly. In that moment, it flashes like a movie in my head: every moment we’ve shared; everything we’ve ever said or done; the moments we’ve loved; the moments we’ve fought; the moments she ended us and the moments I hated her.

Staring at her has the strange power to make the weight of the bad times shrink to something I can’t feel. The weight is gone, but not the pressing urgency to understand some of them finally.

“Why did you marry Jesse so quickly after walking out on me?”

Her eyes flash. She pauses, rapidly scanning my face. “If I hadn’t, I would have gone back to you. And I couldn’t do that.”

Emotion tightens my throat, and I feel the wrench of those words in my gut. That comment says it all. The answer isn’t in the words; it’s in how she says them.

“Loving you is like being strapped on a runaway train,” she whispers so softly I can barely hear her. “The highs are so high, but the lows are too low. It’s exhausting trying to keep up with you, Alan. I couldn’t do it anymore. I needed to slow down. It was better for us both that I walked away.”

My eyes burn, meeting hers directly. “Maybe better for you. It wasn’t better for me.”

She doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t look away. She lifts her chin.

“You are and always will be the love of my life, Alan. Even with all the things that have happened, that hasn’t changed. I’d like to think that’s better for us both.”

Chrissie’s gaze glistens and fills with brilliant shimmers. Christ, I was an ass to her last night. I was an ass this morning. How can she look at me that way? It is humbling.

“Better for us both,” I concede, holding her gaze unwaveringly.

She looks away. “I still want you to go.”

I laugh. “I know, Chrissie.”

The laughter feels good. The touch of her eyes feels good. Yes, it is a good time to leave. No more questions. Better to let it all rest for a while.

I cross the room to her, for the first time realizing that I stayed in the kitchen and talked to her from the there. I stop at her chair and ease down until we are at eye level. I kiss her, just a brief, light contact. Nothing more. But the feel of her lips, the gentleness of her response, and the sweetness of her flesh is everything I remember.

The touch of her feels good. We are in a surprisingly good place considering how this started. A better exit point than last night.

I go for the door.

 

 

Chapter 10

By the time I reach Malibu, I’ve pretty much lost interest in all my favorite pastimes: music, drinking, parties, being purposely obnoxious to people, and sex. It doesn’t surprise me. It always happens when I am in this phase with Chrissie.

I’m in the in-between state. We’re not over and we’re not together. I’ve been here before: not good, not bad, just in between. Now comes the part where I figure out how not to fuck it up before she decides what we’re doing.

I contemplate firing the Indian girl when I get home, but that would be just some moronic, pointless gesture that’s only going to leave the girl unemployed without reason. I wasn’t even remotely interested yesterday—that was before I got to even see Chrissie again—I sure as hell don’t want Aarsi today.

I am now in the hold of Chrissie. All women lose their appeal. I can’t see, I can’t feel, and I can’t smell another woman, not when I’m with her. Not even when I only have the possibility of her. The possibility of her combined with that unrelenting want of her is like a testosterone inhibitor with all women except her the second I become aware I can have her again.