Page 107 of Courtroom Drama
NO
?
STILL PASSED OUT IN A CLOSET
I look up at him again, and he is smiling, just barely, holding a pen out toward me.
Epilogue
Three Months Later
We sit around the six-seater rectangular dining table with a familiar walnut finish, and I can’t ignore the warmth at my center.
I don’t want to.
Across the table, my mom and Caleb hold matching positions—right elbows perched atop the wood, chins cupped with open palms and loose fingers. Both wear doting smiles, their eyes positioned on the seat beside me, where Damon has Gen in his hands. He holds her just below the armpits, his hands providing more comfort than rails. She is seated on the table, facing her parents, her floral jumper puckering at her midsection where she bends. Though her body faces forward, her head is straining backward to look at Damon. She won’t stop looking at Damon. Or cooing at him. Or smiling at him. He grins at her—the type of movement his typically unyielding face only rarely offers—and she comes undone, a hiccupy laugh infecting us all with giggles of our own. It has taken her decidedly less time to determine him worthy of full, heaping adoration than it did me.
It’s only the second time we’ve all gotten together. Still, Damon fits into my family in a way that, up until the end of the trial nearly four months ago,Ididn’t even fit. My mom dotes on him like she owes him some retribution, though of course she doesn’t. But I think she feels guilty that we lost each other back then.
My mom and Mallory Bradburn, while certainly not what I would deem friends, have spoken, thanks to my mom reaching out to give her condolences about Kara, which led to an apology from Mallory. She had apologized back then, but it was all still too raw for my mom to accept. She has accepted it now.
The holidays came and went, and we spent them with our separate families. And now, we have nearly a full year to decide how to handle them the next time around.
Damon jabs a thumb into Gen’s side over and over again in quick succession, and she laughs, this high-pitched, breathless belly laugh that sounds like a car starter ticking. Like Kara’s. My mom laughs so hard in response she has to wipe a tear from the corner of her eye.
Gen catches her breath and looks over her shoulder, anticipating when Damon might get her again. He threatens a few times, moving his hands close and then whipping them away. This gesture alone makes her body shake with giggles. Here, with Gen, is the softest I ever see him, outside of the intimate moments we share in the bedroom where his eyes are fixed on mine, his vulnerability pulsing through his touch. I watch the two of them, the warmth at my center spreading to my limbs, my face, like warm tea in my veins.
She’s a powerful gift I didn’t know I could give him but am so grateful I can.
We stay far too late into the evening, long after Gen is asleep, having moved to the living room with glasses of Caleb’s favorite cab franc in hand. It feels more like a double date than a visit to my mother and her husband, something that would have filled me with anxiety just months ago.
Three months of dating Damon has taught me a lot, too. I have learned that I don’t like other people preparing my array of breakfastbeverages, even if it is a thoughtful, shirtless man. I’ve learned that sharing a bed with Damon means his foot will always find mine. I’ve learned I, too, enjoy unwinding at the end of the day to cute animal videos narrated by Morgan Freeman. And I’ve learned that two things can indeed be true at once. You can be broken but also come together with someone else to make something whole. It’s not that he’s a missing part of me, rather, he helps me see the parts of myself previously drowned in unmet expectations.
He’s always on my left when we sit on the couch, just as he was in the jury box. When he knocks at my door, I still get the same rush as when we were sneaking around the Singer Suites.
He still doesn’t speak a lot of words. But he says a fucking lot with his mouth. And, because he’s still better on paper, I have a new shoebox full of notes from him that sits in my closet just beside the one from when we were kids, everything from a full page of words on our one-month anniversary to sticky notes that simply say hi, scrawled and left stuck to my kitchen counter.
It was only six years, I used to tell myself. We spent more time apart than actually together. But they werethesix years. The years when we transitioned from children to young adults. The years we were carefree. The years we stretched and grew and had to duck our heads under the ceilings we no longer fit below. The years when the world first disappointed us, and we clung to anyone who made us feel less alone, less incongruent with the world. The years we learned that life can take as much as it gives. And the people beside you in those years are the ones imprinted in a way others can’t be. They are the first. The deepest. Everyone after is stacked on top but with less hold.
Damon was the first.
He is, still, the deepest.
Now, a week after that last visit to my mom’s, we sit with Mel at the bar around the corner from his place, sharing a basket of fries and another of lemon pepper wings. Damon has unbuttoned his dress shirt down to the white tee below. On Thursday nights, he volunteers as a guest teacher at a local after-school nonprofit giving lessons onkey points in history. He loves it, and it has served us many a hot-for-teacher fantasy in the bedroom.
“Do you think Gen liked the blue owl?” he asks as he pops a fry into his mouth.
I picture how she clung to the plush bird as my mom carried her upstairs to bed last week. “You know she did,” I tell him. “But you don’t need to bring her a gift every time we see her.”
