Page 67 of After-Hours Heir

WHENCHRISTOSWOKEUPin the morning, he was holding Sylvie. And then the previous day came flooding back to him. The panic attack. The sex. His text confessional, and then their conversation in his study.

But she was still there. Lying next to him.

She wasn’t gone. She had come after him.

Her eyes fluttered open, and she looked at him. “Don’t get out of bed,” she said.

“Maybe I want coffee.”

“You look like you’re ready to run away,” she said, far too cheerfully.

He scowled. “I’m not.”

“I think we should watch Christmas movies.”

He deepened the scowl. “It isn’t Christmas.”

“You said you’ve never seen them.”

His chest ached. “I lied. Let’s get coffee.”

“Wait a second,” she said, grabbing hold of his arm. He let her hold onto him, lifted her up out of the bed as he stood. She squealed and ended up clinging to him, her arms around his bicep, her legs curling up around his calf.

He gazed down at her, a strange sort of wonder filling his chest. Was this…intimacy? This sort of playful activity when two people were naked. Her looking up at him like there wassomething special about him. Like there was something good in him.

“You have to explain your life,” she said, still hanging onto him as he began to walk out of the room.

“No, I don’t.”

“You do.”

“It’s not interesting.”

“I think you’re fascinating.”

He looked down at her, pushed her hair out of her face and bent down, kissing her lightly on the mouth. “You are a fool.”

She wrinkled her nose. “I already know that.”

He bent down and plucked her up from where she clung to him, held her to his chest, carrying her down the stairs and into the kitchen, where he set her down on a barstool as he went to make coffee. She squeaked. “That’s cold.”

“You should have thought of that before you picked a fight while you were naked.”

She didn’t seem at all embarrassed to be naked in front of him. That felt like progress of a kind. He just wasn’t sure exactly what the progress was.

He didn’t have a name for it.

“Why did you lie about Christmas movies?” She tented her fingers in front of her face.

“Because it’s sad. Like everything else. I watched a few. I told you… When I got away, I became quite obsessed with media. The Internet. Smartphones. Movies. TV. And Christmas movies… They’re such an interesting lie, I find. This massive cultural delusion that everyone engages in once a year. The people around you are stressed and angry about the additional work, and there’s this propaganda machine saying that Christmas is happy. But it’s about family.”

She propped her chin up on her elbows and stared at him while he touched the button on his automatic espresso machine to make a double shot for an Americano.

“I don’t know. I always find that the best Christmas movies have a little bit of darkness to them. I thinkIt’s a Wonderful Life, for example, is really all about how difficult that time of year can be. But it’s family that kind of pulls you back from the brink.”

“Maybe I never understood because my family was never that for me.” He swallowed hard. “Watching families…”

She nodded. “I get that. So many sweet, nurturing mother characters. And plenty of workaholic father characters which, frankly, did resemble my father a little bit, though he was always much nicer when he was around than those men were ever portrayed as. But I didn’t have that nurturing other parent as a counterbalance. I loved my father, don’t get me wrong. But you know, since I’m about to have a child of my own I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to do differently.”