Page 100 of Over & Out
Aweek passes, then another. Filming goes on. And on and on. Aziz makes me train on set and Cindi makes sure I’m well fed, and somehow, I keep making a movie. But all of it is a blur until we wrap each day. Usually when I wrap shooting, I’m exhausted and just want to sleep. Now? My day starts when filming ends. It doesn’t matter that I’m bone-achingly tired at the end of each day. And my aches ache on top of that. Because each night, no matter what time it is, I get to go home to Chris. Opening that door—with the alarm system and second deadbolt I insisted on putting in with permission of the slightly bewildered old man in the care home—I feel everything unwind. As I step over the threshold each night and smell the lingering scent of whatever Chris made for dinner, the wood stove, and, sometimes, that bubble bath, all of it goes away.
I don’t ever come to bed expecting we’re going to have sex. I just come to her.
Sometimes we do have sex, and that lazy, dreamlikeversion of it is incredible; I can’t lie. But mostly I just swallow hard when I see Chris, hands tucked under her head or splayed beside her on the pillow, hardly able to believe I’m so lucky. I crawl in next to her. And then—then—she gives me my favorite thing. This contented little sigh that sends me over the moon. It makes me feel like she’s crawled right up into me and I’ve got her contained and safe forever in my heart. Ever since she showed me her scar, something’s shifted in her. She’s become a lighter, truer version of herself. She laughs more easily. Dances around when her favorite songs come on. She kisses me out of the blue. It’s the real her, I realize. The beautiful soul under those emotional scars.
Christmas comes, and I have a whole glorious week off. We spend the day holed up at the beach house, since everyone else is gone. It’s got a hot tub and movie theater in the basement, and we christen both. Along with all seven bedrooms over the next couple of days. It’s amazing. Chris insisted on no presents, but I still give her something. A bouquet of daffodils, the obtaining of which, in the dead of winter, I won’t explain, along with a fully acted-out scene from her favorite Duke book. I promise to try to get it into the movie.
Chris gives me the greatest gift of all. Late on Christmas Day, back at her place, after I show her a video of Mom and me tobogganing when I was a kid, she tells me she loves me. It’s kind of an accident—likeaw, I love you!
But she said it. When I ask her to say it again for real, she refuses. Then, the next morning, she writes it on a card and leaves it on her pillow when she gets up to make coffee.
Chris manages to get a present to Shay: Betty, officially.
We cooked up the plan together. Because everything would go sideways if the guy recognizes me, I have Aziz show up on Shay’s doorstep in a suit, pretending to be a used motorcycle dealer who just happened to see the bike poking out from behind the barn. “I’ve been looking for a crap bike like that for a while,” he tells him. “For parts. Would you part with it for five hundred dollars?”
The guy, who Aziz tells us later was three sheets to the wind, takes it, no questions asked. “He was cackling as he closed the door, like he got away with something,” Aziz says.
“Are you sure you don’t want to keep it?” I asked Chris once it was safely parked at her house. “I could get Shay a new one.”
But Chris shook her head. “She’s Shay’s now.”
She’d managed to get Shay’s number and texted her right after Aziz left, telling her that she had a surprise for her. Down at the track, Shay hugged her for a whole five minutes, sobbing.
She brought a friend to the track that day, and Chris was able to give both girls some pointers. “And Shay did her first jump!” Chris exclaims when she tells me about it that night. “She didn’t actually get any air, but it’s not time to do that yet.”
Watching Chris light up when she talks about beingback on the track is like watching a celestial event. I can’t stop staring. Or joining in on her enthusiasm.
Finally, it’s New Year’s Eve. Chris insists on doing a little work during the day, so I run some errands. When I get to her place, Chris isn’t there, but I was expecting that.
I drop the groceries I picked up on the table, putting away the things that need to go into the fridge. A beautiful piece of halibut for dinner. Champagne. Chris’s favorite chocolate.
I pull the shower curtain down from its knot and have a quick shower, restraining myself from using the bubble bath as soap. No need to get worked up before dinner.
I scrub my hair, thinking of Chris. I soap up my body, thinking of Chris. And when I see headlights pulling into the driveway in the low light of late afternoon in the Pacific Northwest, I smile like I conjured her. After quickly toweling off, I pull on a pair of sweats and pad across the living room to the front door, pleased I can be in time to greet her with a bear hug. Or a full back-from-the-war dip. We’ve been a bit lax here in terms of discretion, but she doesn’t have any neighbors within viewing distance. Going out in town together and having to pretend we just work together fucking sucks. The disguise doesn’t really matter anymore, since everyone knows everyone in a town this small.
But all I want to do is pull her into my arms. Show her off. Tell the world she’s mine.
So I get a lot of joy out of getting to do that at her place.
I fling open the front door, a smileon my face. “Hey, baby,” I say, leaning forward with my hands on the doorframe.
But the words die on my lips, and my hands fall, because there is someone there, coming slowly—stiltedly—up the path.
But it’s not Chris.
It’s my fucking father.
Chapter 34
Hopper
I’ve never really understood the saying “my blood ran cold.” But I get it now, as ice traverses its way through my veins.
My dad stops on the path. “Hopper.”
It’s not a greeting. Just my name. Stated. Like he’s been practicing.
Mostly, I’m stunned that he’s here. But I’m also shocked at how old he looks since I saw him last, at Mom’s funeral four years ago. His hair has grown more silver, and deep-set wrinkles cut along the sides of his mouth and nose. He had the cane last time I saw him, but now he looks like he really needs it.
