Total pages in book: 38
Estimated words: 35304 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 177(@200wpm)___ 141(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 35304 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 177(@200wpm)___ 141(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
Mara is three and has decided that whatever Daddy is doing is the most important thing happening in any given room at any given moment. I don't disagree with her.
My mother is down there too. In my kitchen. Teaching Rye the pierogi recipe that's survived three generations of her family, which would have been unimaginable four years ago when she spent six months not speaking to either of us.
The world is genuinely full of surprises.
Jeremy ended up moving to Vancouver with the Saran Wrap guy from the first night at Club Echo. Derek. They grow organic marijuana and have three dachshunds. I fly out to see them about twice a year with Rye and now with Mara because my husband refuses to let either of his girls travel more than two miles to the grocery store without him.
Anna still lives close. She’s gone solo poly. The club actually changed all our lives for the better. She has four current partners at varying levels of involvement but she lives in her own space. Runs her own show and engages with whomever she wants, however she wants as long as everyone is aware of her relationship anarchy style. It suits her perfectly.
Go Anna.
My father is likely napping on the sofa after spending the morning with Mara talking about her stuffed rabbit. He’s sober five years. Happy most days, sad some. Like most of us. He’s stable and he and mom…happier than I’ve ever seen them.
Rye still runs the clubs. I know more about that world now than I ever expected to, and I've enjoyed a new expression of our love and dynamic we keep just for us.
Or, whoever is at the club that night.
He has rules and he enforces them with the kind of quiet authority that I watched clear a room the night I stumbled into Club Echo in a red dress that Anna picked out.
My own career looks nothing like what I trained for and exactly like what I didn't know I wanted.
I stop on a photo from last year. Him at the barre in the studio we had built off the back of the house, spotting Mara through something loosely resembling a plié. Both of them in profile, her tiny hand in his enormous one. I wasn't trying to take it. I was walking past with coffee and just stopped.
It's framed in the hallway now. He pretended to be annoyed about it for approximately four minutes.
Alexander disappeared after that day at his house. I had to come clean with Rye that I’d had my doubts about his intentions all along and there were mumblings among the other dancers that he was a bit of a opportunist and predator.
Daddy was not happy I’d hidden that information from him. I got a hot red bottom that night and some new rules about being one hundred percent honest with him from that moment forward.
There was some scuttlebutt in the dance community about where Alexander went, but the one time I brought it up to Rye, he made it clear that some questions are better left unanswered.
His footsteps on the stairs come alone, which means Mara has been successfully handed off to my mother and the pierogi dough. Or sitting on my father while he sleeps. I don't look up from my phone. I hear him stop in the doorway.
"How many."
"How many what."
"Photos, Elodie."
I look up. He's leaning in the frame with his arms crossed, still in the dark shirt from earlier, and he's looking at me the way he always looks at me. Like he's deciding something. Except I know by now he decided a long time ago and this is just his face.
"A lot," I say.
He makes a low sound and crosses to the bed. Takes the phone without asking and scrolls back. Stops on the maternity ward photo.
“It’s my favorite.”
He hands the phone back.
Five years and the warmth of him still unravels something in my chest.
"Daddy's got you," he growls against my skin.
Those three words. They still do what they've always done.
I turn in his arms until I'm facing him and his eyes move over my face the way they did that first night in the club like he's reading things about me I don’t even know. The difference now is I don't have a posture collar on and the door is open and Mara is thirty feet away being fed pierogi by my mother, and none of that changes the way the room tilts when he looks at me like this.
"Hi," I say.
"Hi, baby." His hand comes up to my jaw, thumb tracing the line of it. "You've been up here a while."
"I was looking at pictures."
"I know." His eyes move over my face. "You get that look."
"What look."
"Like you're trying to figure out how we got here."
I consider denying it. "Maybe."