by Caro Carson
“I have to leave,” she said. “You know I do.”
He stilled. “Next week.”
She swallowed hard. “No. I have to leave now. It’s Christmas, and you have your children. I’m just in the way.”
“You’re not in the way. You’re part of it all.” He stepped closer and raised his hand to her cheek to smooth a piece of her hair back.
She flinched.
He stopped. “Couldn’t you feel how you were part of it all?”
“It was nice of you to include me. You are such a good father. It was nice for me to see you with them.”
“Nice.” He hissed the word, a little burst of impatience.
She dropped her gaze. “Not nice. It was humbling. Humbling to see what a good father you are. What a full life you have.”
“It’s not full enough.”
She breathed, just breathed, just keep breathing.
“I need you, India. Nice has nothing to do with it. Being a good father has nothing to do with it.”
“I know it doesn’t. That’s the problem. You are a father.”
The way his eyes narrowed as he looked at her broke her heart. “And you don’t date fathers.”
“No, I don’t. Don’t look at me like that.”
“I was about to say the same thing to you. Don’t look at me like I’m only a father.” He reached to cup her cheek in his hand again, but this time, he wrapped his other arm around her and pulled her close, as well. “Remember me, India?”
He kissed her, softly, his lips gentle on hers, lingering until she relaxed, until she responded. When she swayed toward him, pressing a little closer, he stopped kissing her to whisper quiet words over her lips. “Remember me, baby, please. I’m the man you said you loved. I’m the man who fell in love with you this week.”
“I know. I came back to steal another week of your time, but—”
“So steal it.” It was an order. It was a plea.
It would be so selfish of her, to take his attention away from the children who needed him. Why was he asking her to be so selfish?
“I can’t. This vacation is going to end, Aiden. This romance is going to end with it. I should leave now, while we’re still at least a little in love.”
“At least a little? Yesterday you showed up on my doorstep and told me, so bravely, that you loved me. Full stop. Not a little.”
“But then, last night...” She gestured toward his bedroom door.
“I’m not going to pressure you into sex. Is that what you think? I know it must be a lot, to find out about Melissa and Poppy and Olympia, but if you give us a chance, if you give us this week—”
She backed away from him, sad that he was tempting her to do something that would ultimately split his time and attention until he came to resent her for competing with his daughters. His first instinct, to keep his real life a secret from her, had been the right course to take.
“I have to go back to Belgium sooner or later. If I go sooner, I can tell myself we never fell out of love. I can tell myself it’s just geography that kept me from you, not anything else. Let me have that. Let us both have that much.”
“I’m supposed to live like that? When I’m raw inside because I miss you, I’m supposed to imagine you in Belgium and be content with the knowledge that we never fell out of love?”
“Yes.” She had backed up against the wall, she realized, gasping for air like a fish out of water. “I need that. I know we’ll really be missing only sex, but it would be nice to think it would have ended differently if we hadn’t lived so far apart.”
“Only sex.” He sounded angry.
Then she was angry, too. “You let me go to San Antonio with only the memory of a vacation romance. If I don’t leave soon, then even the memory of that week is going to go bad. Please, let me leave.”
He was looking at her less and less like a lover with every beat of her heart. “When?”
“Now.”
“While the girls are sleeping? They’re just supposed to wake up and find that you’ve left without saying goodbye to them?”
He was angry that she might do something that would make his girls sad. She only loved him more for that anger. It proved that he was a better father than hers had been. Aiden’s priorities were straight. His daughters mattered more than a girlfriend. That was good, even when she was the girlfriend.
Do you see? Being a father has everything to do with it.
“I don’t know how this works with children. Am I supposed to stay for turkey?” She was going to cry. Don’t cry, India.
“The girls only eat chicken drumsticks, so that’s what I’m making. Dinner will be around six. It’s up to you if you leave before or after that.”
He left her standing in the hallway, panting against the wall, staring at the door that led into the bedroom he’d shared with the woman he should have gotten to keep.
* * *
It was nearly six. Dinnertime.
She was still here.
Aiden and the girls were still in their pajamas. Aiden had been cooking. The girls had been playing with the new dollhouse. Only India had gotten dressed, but she was still here.
She used the bathroom to wash her hands before dinner. There were some suspicious shuffling noises on the other side of the door, but no knocking.
Such good girls. They were obeying their father, learning their manners.
Then Olympia belted out at the top of her lungs, “Miss Major, we’re not knocking.”
India laughed, actually laughed when she’d been trying not to cry, but she laughed silently, with her hand over her mouth. Jeez, she loved those girls.
Her laughter died. They weren’t hers to love.
“Come in.”
They burst through the door.
India held up her empty hands. “Sorry, no lip gloss here.”
“Santa Claus can bring you some,” Poppy said.
“He only brings toys,” Olympia said. “Why are your earrings big today?”
India turned to look at herself in the mirror. She’d put on the copper hoops, the ones she’d worn when she’d invited Aiden in for a Bloody Mary. Why had she worn sexy earrings when she was only going to drive away? Sex wasn’t the same thing as love. She’d learned that much. Hadn’t she?
If she would never be more than his sexy vacation romance, then she supposed she had worn the earrings to remind herself of her proper place in his life.
“They’re shiny,” Poppy said.
Ah, shiny again. No higher compliment.
“I love them,” Olympia said.
“Thank you.” India had loved the way Aiden had toyed with them. She’d loved the way he’d placed them on the nightstand...
They were all three looking into the mirror together, looking at the earrings from two totally different angles. The children loved something shiny, she loved something sexy—but they loved the same pair of earrings.
“Oh, my God,” India whispered to her reflection.
“Oh, my God,” whispered Poppy.
“Don’t say that. I shouldn’t have said that.”
India stood in front of a bathroom mirror with two four-year-olds and felt like she was on the verge of understanding something important. She’d been dividing love into types and then assigning each thing—no, each person—the one kind of love she thought they should have. Her father had loved his harem of available women, so he hadn’t loved India. Her mother had loved her, so she hadn’t been able to have the traveling lifestyle she also loved, not until India had joined the army and moved away. Aiden should have the love of his daughters, therefore, he could not love India.
It could only be one or the other—but that was wrong.
Earrings could be shiny and sexy.
What if she hadn’t confused a week of great sex with a we
ek of falling in love? What if they had both happened?
That was why she’d turned around her pickup in San Antonio and come back. She couldn’t have a weeklong sexual fling and just leave, because the sex hadn’t been separate from the love—not the way Aiden did it.
He made love.
India looked at the two little faces that were looking at her. Aiden had made love long before he’d met India. He had known love with Melissa, and these little girls now existed, like some kind of miracle. Was it any wonder India could not take Melissa’s place in her bed?
“Would you like to see our mommy?”
India’s heart stopped, just for a moment, because the question had been asked as if the woman was waiting in another room, ready to meet her.
“Here, come here.” Little hands tugged on her fingers. She followed where they wanted to lead her.
She saw the picture frame on Poppy’s dresser. No, stop, I don’t want to know, I don’t want to see.
But the little girls were pointing, happy and proud. “That’s Mommy.”
India looked at the photo, a casual snapshot that had been enlarged. The double stroller in the center of the photo was dark green. The two chubby babies, strapped into their seats, wore pink. On the left, crouched down by the stroller, was a younger Aiden, more than four years younger, surely, with that carefree smile—or maybe he’d just aged more than four years since the photo was taken.
India picked up the frame to get a closer look. To the right of the stroller, crouching down by her babies, was Melissa.
“Isn’t she lovely?” Poppy said.
The word struck India as unusual for a child. Aiden must use it to describe their mother to them.
“She’s very lovely,” India said.
She was. But as India held the frame and willed her lips to curve pleasantly for the sake of Melissa’s daughters, India felt some fear slip away. Melissa was lovely, but she looked like a real person. She was certainly attractive, but she wasn’t a flawless woman. Her hair was windblown. Her clothes were unremarkable: denim shorts, a blue top, white Keds on her feet. Melissa looked like someone’s very pretty wife, someone too busy with little babies to have the need—or the time—to pose for a photographer in full makeup and elegant clothes.
In India’s imagination, Aiden’s wife, the mother of Poppy and Olympia, had been an angel, a vision in white, perfection India could never attain, all porcelain wedding bells and gold letters.
I’ve been scared of her.
But here the real Melissa was, captured in the middle of a day that had probably been just another day. Melissa was just a woman, a real person whom India might have known as a neighbor or a coworker’s wife. Her smile was as open as Aiden’s. They’d been a couple. Happy in a normal, human way. Happy in all the ways that mattered in life.
They’d been happy in a way India had never known.
“Look what else I have,” Poppy said.
India braced herself, wishing she could say No, not another photo, not another snapshot of a life that is gone.
Poppy plopped a green plastic alligator’s head on the dresser. The cartoonish gator head was almost as big as hers. Its mouth was wide open, its white teeth standing neatly around a pink plastic tongue. It wasn’t new. They had a whole batch of new toys under the Christmas tree, but they were showing her this...thing.
“Oh, that’s—that’s an alligator,” India said.
“You do this.” Poppy, whose eyes were barely level with the top of her dresser, stood on her toes and reached for one of the white teeth and pressed it down. It clicked into place.
“Okay.” India set down the picture frame with one hand as she pressed a tooth down with her other. The girls found this incredibly entertaining. It was a baffling toy. “Why do its teeth go down?”
Olympia crowded against her legs. “It’s going to chomp you.”
Poppy pushed down another tooth, and both girls squealed. Touching a tooth was apparently hysterical.
India felt old and out of touch. The toys she’d played with had been board games like Candy Land or pretty things like a ballerina Barbie. She put her finger on a white plastic tooth and pushed. Toys today—
The jaws snapped shut.
“Ouch!” She jerked her hand out of the plastic mouth, pure reflex. The girls squealed and jumped and laughed. The bite hadn’t actually hurt, but considering how surprised she’d been, India was relieved that she’d only said ouch.
“Where is everybody?” Aiden stopped in the door frame.
“She got chomped!”
India must have looked as indignant about that toy as she felt, because as angry as Aiden was with her, he still gave her a quick snort of amusement.
“They invented a toy that’s even worse than a jack-in-the-box,” she said under her breath.
Poppy dragged the plastic head off the dresser. She sat on the floor with it to reset the contraption, but Aiden was still looking at the dresser where the gator had been.
No—he was looking at India’s hand, which was still resting on top of the picture frame.
India let go. Their eyes met again, but she couldn’t decipher his feelings any more than she could neatly catalog her own. She was real, and you loved her. And I’m real.
Her heart was pounding. I’m real, too, and you...
“Dinnertime,” he said to everyone. Then, to her, he asked, “Coming, or going?”
“Coming,” she said. She sounded kind of breathy.
Aiden let the girls climb into their seats themselves today. He had their plates ready, their carrots cut up into safe bites, their chicken drumsticks wrapped with napkins so the bones wouldn’t be too hot for their little hands.
He had the parenting thing down. He didn’t need India as a coparent. He hadn’t needed Melissa as a coparent, either. When he’d lost her, he hadn’t lost a cook or a laundress or anything else that he was perfectly able to do himself.
Aiden had the parental love down, too. Those girls adored him. He adored them. But that was only part of the whole, wasn’t it? He should have another kind of love, too. An adult love. A woman, an ally, a friend. Sex.
Their week hadn’t been about rebound or revenge sex. They’d both been filling themselves up on a part of life that they’d been missing.
Finally, she had thought from the very first, finally she’d found a man she clicked with. And Aiden? He’d found in India a woman who’d loved him with an adult kind of love. Who’d fallen in love with him—not with his parenting skills.
India sat at the table, finishing her Christmas dinner, marveling at the miracle that was the Nord family. Aiden was the source of all the love in this house. It radiated from him, warmed the house, and came back to him tenfold in the love of these two little girls.
And me. I got love from him. I can give it back.
He wanted her to stay for one more week. After that...
There would be an ocean between them. They could text each other. They could do a video call. She needed to remember his words. How long will it be, before we realize that we’re pretending we’re still involved, when we aren’t?
Standing in her driveway, packed for San Antonio, she had only been offered one more week—with a warning. If they extended their vacation romance through this week, it would involve his family, he’d said. It would get messy.
She stood and smoothed her hand over Poppy’s hair. “Are you done eating? Let me take your plate.”
India stood at the sink and looked out the window. The land rolled away in gentle waves as far as the eye could see, so very different from her view in Belgium.
I finally know what I want.
She wanted Aiden and Olympia and Poppy in her life. It would get messy when she had to leave, because she would be leaving a whole family behind, not just a man with whom she’d had a vacation fling.
She’d handled that mess before. Adolphus, Bernardo. One family had welcomed her. One had not. Neither had really mattered. She had left their whole families behind, because she hadn’t loved the man who was at the center of it all.
She loved Aiden.
For the first time in her life, she wanted to be part of a family, because it was Aiden’s family. She was part of them today. Aiden had said so.
But she would not be part of them one week from now. She must return to Belgium. The US Army had a claim on her that could not be ignored.
Aiden would let her go. He’d already let her go once, hadn’t he, with no promises to ever see her again?
She had cried all the way to San Antonio when she’d left the only man she’d ever really wanted. If she accepted his offer of another week, her tears wouldn’t stop falling even once she reached Belgium.
“Here you go, Miss Major.” Olympia’s voice jolted India out of her reverie. That, and the way she pushed her cup and plate up and over the edge to clatter into the sink. Thank goodness they were made of plastic.
Aiden spoke quietly, intimately, into her ear. “Is everything okay?”
No. I’m going to miss you forever. “I’m going to go to Tom and Helen’s and close all the windows.”
“You don’t have to. I planned on doing it.”
“I know. You didn’t expect me to be here. But since I am, I need... I’ll just go do it. Alone.”
He was still for a moment, then he took a deep breath. “And then? Are you leaving?” He touched her earring, pulling a strand of hair free from the hoop. “Or have you decided to stay on board?”
“I don’t know. I just need to make sure everything is locked up neatly.”
* * *
Aiden knew India would be gone for at least thirty minutes. She would need ten minutes to walk there, ten to close and lock the windows, then ten to walk back. He shouldn’t look for her until more than thirty minutes had passed.
He only lasted twenty.
“Come and put your coats on, girls. We’re going to walk Fabio over to his house.”
Between sudden bathroom breaks and a hunt for a missing shoe, it took another ten minutes to get out of the house. The delay was fine. They’d probably just run into India as she was coming back over the bridge.
