He tugged his blond Randall head, thinking. “Are you trying to ruin us, Silas?”
“I’m not trying to ruin us, Aleksander.” Our voices were rising. Oliver muffled his ears with his hands.
“This is about him. You can’t even think straight when he’s involved. You are my husband, and I will come first. I’m calling the shots with him from now on. Go put Oliver in his room. He stays there for the night—without you,” he clarified.
“Don’t do this, Aleksander. Please.”
“Do it now or I will.”
I’d struck a nerve. The worst one. He wasn’t going to budge. I didn’t want Oliver to see any more violence—words or otherwise—than he already had. It was unfortunately the best of the worst possible options.
I told myself Aleksander would calm down by the morning and I could ream him out then. I brought Oliver to his room. He didn’t want to let go. “Come now, Oliver. Baba will be back. You know I always come back, Eaglet.”
“Noooo. I’m good. Good boy, Oli,” he said.
“You’re a very good boy.”
“Silas!” Aleksander screamed from downstairs. “Hurry up.”
My heart hammered. Oliver cried. Prying his tiny hands from my body tightened my stomach and made me wish I was dead. I left him screaming my name—Baba, Baba, Baba—on his bed, shutting the door and locking it so he couldn’t get out. Would he think I didn’t love him anymore? That I’d abandoned him for good this time? He was more upset than usual.
“I’ll be back, my babe. Soon.”
I wasn’t sure how to approach Aleksander. Fighting with him when he was like this would be fruitless, but I was in the mood for violence. I charged down the stairs. He knew me well and recognized what was brewing.
“You can’t keep doing this to him.”
“I can do whatever I want, Silas.” There was only coldness in his demeanor. We were back to how we began. He couldn’t get what he wanted by asking so he was pillaging.
He took a step toward me, and I ran to the kitchen. I yanked a butcher knife from the block on the counter and thrust it at him. “You need to calm the fuck down,” I said.
My hand was shaking too hard to do anything mortally damaging with that knife.
He approached me anyway and I folded, plastering myself against the counter, holding the knife toward him. He gripped my wrist and removed the stabby object, reaching over me to slide it back into the block. “Shhh. I’m not going to hurt you.”
“You have. Oliver is important to me. When you do things like this, I feel like you don’t care about me.”
“You’re young and have fanatical ideas of what it means to be a parent. You’re too young to be a parent, Silas.”
“Is this a fucking joke? You forced me into parenthood, and I stepped up to the plate. I’ve earned my place as Oliver’s parent. You said you understood why I couldn’t let go. You said that’s what we shared. That meant something to me, Aleksander.”
He held my hand against his chest, and it was a rare moment his terror showed. It’s something I recognized. It was something that flowed through me. It triggered my compassion.
At the same time, Oliver’s cries carried down the stairs and riled my nerves like nothing else. Like a drumbeat in my head, making it hard to think.
“That hasn’t changed. I apologize. I had this horrible feeling today that I’m about to lose you and I freaked out.”
“And you’re jealous of Oliver.”
His forehead fell to mine. “And I’m jealous of Oliver. I don’t want to be second.”
“What about therapy?” I said. “Not Dr. Allen,” I clarified. “Someone of my choosing. Perhaps Oliver and I do need to work through our attachment issues.”
It was clear early on that we had them. Maybe if Oliver and I had worked on it then, we wouldn’t be as entangled as we are now.
Aleksander smiled. “Yes. That works. See? We’ll make it work.”
“Now please, let me go to Oliver? It’s his bedtime anyway. I’ll get him settled. We’ll watch a movie, or whatever you want.”
