Pay up

What happens next baffles you both so completely that your mouths fall open and stay that way.

Sandra’s mother does a little victory dance in the doorway. Not a big one. A contained, sock-footed wriggle, and then she holds her hand out toward her husband, palm up, eyes shining.

“Pay up.”

Silence.

Sandra finds her voice first, and it comes out in disbelief, cracked from sleep and humiliation.

“Did you—did you two seriously place bets on whether we’d get together or not.”

She wants to be offended. She can barely manage it. The offence has nowhere to land.
These are the people who have been feeding you both since you were small.
The dance is too sincere.

Her mother stops bouncing long enough to explain, as if it is the most obvious household policy in the world.

“For what other reason do you think we disappear so often and leave you alone for weeks at a time. We have been waiting. We have been patient. I was already losing hope about getting grandkids.”

The word grandkids falls into the room like a brick through glass.

Sandra cannot hide the blush. It detonates across her face and she looks away—at the wall, at anything that is not her mother’s eyes.
She does not say we burned the pills.
She does not say we hope it already took. She does not have to. The look does enough.

Now it is her mother’s turn to be baffled.

The woman can be very observant. At times like this she has the intuition of someone who has watched this particular girl since she had scraped knees.
She is not offended. She is not angry. She goes silently amazed, the victory dance dying mid-step as her brain catches up to her daughter’s face.

Then, slowly, she turns and gives her husband his money back.

Another bet.

You see the exchange. You understand it a half-second after Sandra does.
Not just will they date. How fast will they get beyond that. Her father takes the notes without smugness.
He looks at you, then at the futon, then at his wife, and he does the kindest thing available to a man in a doorway.

He forces the door closed on her.

A hand on her shoulder, a murmur you only half catch—give them a minute, love—and the excited, amazed mother is on the other side of the wood.
Privacy. Thin, sudden, desperately needed.

The room is just the two of you again, plus shame so thick it has a temperature.

You should not need to die of it. You are adults.
You are in love. You have been in love. They wanted this.
They funded the empty house like a conspiracy.
And still you and Sandra sit on the futon in last night’s clothes, hands still vaguely linked, looking like two people who have been caught doing something far larger than sleeping.

Sandra puts her face in her hands.

“They bet on us.”

“They bet on grandkids.”

“John. She knows. She doesn’t know, but she knows.”

You thank her father in the quiet, toward the closed door.
Then you look at the girl who kicked this futon last night for existing.

“We handle your parents,”
you say, echoing the four a.m. plan.
“Together. After we put on real clothes. After we remember how faces work.”

Sandra makes a wounded little laugh into her palms.

“I wanted to tell them. I did not want to tell them with drool on my cheek and your arm dead under my neck.”

“I know.”

“She did a dance.”

“I know.”

They give you time to shower and dress. Not much more.

The living room is already a courtroom.
Holiday cookies sit on the low table between you like bait—the good ones, the ones she always brings back, arranged too neatly to be casual. Sandra had to dress decently. So did you.
Tight collar on her, high enough to try. It fails. The plethora of hickeys and bite marks still peeks above the fabric, a dark necklace she designed at dinner and you never told her to stop.
Yesterday you could not move her to erase the vulgar markings either.
They are under the clothes. You both know it. Her mother will not see DADDY’S SLUT, but she will see enough.

Claudia sits across from you. Thomas towers behind her chair, arms folded, not angry, just present.
Sandra is draped against your side, half using you as a shield, trying to make herself small in a way that only makes the marks on her throat more obvious.
Funnily enough it makes you feel bigger than you are.
Shielding your girl from shame puts a spine in you that the futon did not.
Confidence you should not have, sitting in the house you set on fire.

They are harmless. That is the strange part. Claudia is more or less fangirling.

“Finally,”
she says, and the word has two weeks of empty-house conspiracy in it.
“I told your father. I said if we left again it would either happen or I would start charging you rent for the emotional labour of watching you two orbit.”

You give them the practiced story. The same one you gave the perverted sisters on the path: you became a thing this week. You talked. You figured it out. You are together now. Clean. Almost sweet ... again useless.

Claudia calls the bullshit before the second sentence is finished.

“Don’t.”
She points, not unkindly, at Sandra’s collar.
“We were young too. We can imagine how it really went. That is not a ‘we had a conversation on Tuesday’ neck. And you—”
her eyes flick to you, to your own marked throat, the hickey necklace Sandra built while you ate ramen
“—look like you lost a fight with a very affectionate vacuum.”

Thomas makes a sound that might be a laugh and might be a cough.

Then the real question cuts like a knife.

“Protection,” Claudia says. “Are you using it.”

The room goes very still. Sandra’s fingers dig into your sleeve.
You do not look at each other for a script. You already had this talk at four in the morning.

You do not lie.

“No,” you say.

Sandra’s voice is smaller, but it does not hide.
“We’re not. And we’re okay with that. We want the consequences. If they happen.”

She is braced for scolding. For disappointment.
For the uni speech, the future speech, the you have no idea what you are doing speech.

What comes from Claudia is a sigh and a smirk.

Thomas, behind her, comments without looking away from you.

“She really is our daughter.”

Sandra stares.

“Why aren’t you angry?”
The question bursts out of her, raw.
“I thought—Mum—”

Claudia leans back, cookie uneaten, and looks at her girl like she is doing arithmetic out loud.

“I’m 38, you are 21...” she says. “You can do the math”