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It's Brittany, Bitch | Ερις (eristic) wrote in paxletalelogs, @ 2011-12-20 10:26:00

It Was A Cold Night
Who: Rylee, Charlie, & Mrs. Ekholm
What: Rylee’s mother comes to visit her only child and her “adopted” daughter for the holidays.
Where: Rylee’s apartment
When: Right after Rylee picked up his mother from the airport; December 20th

Rylee was exhausted. The few days that Rylee and Charlie were off before his mother’s arrival were spent tumbling over one another in his bed. They only resurfaced to feed and bathe; and even that was all done together. Sunday morning had been spent cleaning the apartment and trying to rid it of the scent of two very active sexual people before Christina Ekholm arrived. When Rylee left to pick up his mother, Charlie was busy trying to put the finishing touches to the apartment, and she seemed to do a perfect job as Rylee opened the apartment door and held it for his mother before walking in with her suitcase.

The Christmas tree was lit with the sparkling lights and tinsel, Jack was passed out on his doggy bed, and it smelt like Febreeze rather than sweaty bodies. Christina stepped in and gently placed the roses Rylee bought her on the dining room table as she looked around. “Oh, Rylee, it’s so nice.”

Placing the suitcase down by the door, Rylee stepped beside his mother and wrapped an arm around her shoulder. She embraced him with one arm and patted his back; she looked up at her son (he had surpassed her in height just before his senior year in High School) and grinned. It was clear that Rylee and Christina had the same smile; something Christina had passed down to her child who otherwise looked like his father.

“Charlie is here somewhere. That’s her dog Jack, he’s really sweet. ” Rylee explained, pointing to Jack who had woken and seemed interested enough in Rylee’s mother to be sitting up in his bed. “Charlie?! Where are ya? We’re here!”

Once everything was in place, Charlie figured the best thing for her to do was to stay away from all of it, for fear of besmirching one small thing and then making a bigger mess in her attempt to correct it. Without Rylee around, her standards of cleanliness fell very short, and once he had left for the airport, Charlie had plopped down on the bed with a book. The closing of the apartment door signaled Rylee and his mother’s arrival, and now she was hurriedly trying to smooth out the bedspread from the indentation her small form had left behind. It wasn’t going too well, and finally she left her side of the bed a wrinkled mess that would surely put a frown on Rylee’s face.

Putting the book on the nightstand, she stopped by the bedroom door and took a deep breath, almost for a moment worried about how she looked. Mrs. Ekholm had seen her worse, but Lee was all too worried about how much the woman’s opinion of her might have dropped over the last few years. Even with constant reassurance from both Rylee and his mother, in the few short phone calls they’d had, Charlie couldn’t really believe that they’d forgive and forget what she’d done so easily. But she pushed herself out the bedroom door, always willing to throw herself into nearly any situation, with or without preparation (often the latter).

“I’m here, I’m here,” she called out in reply, appearing before them in jeans and a tee, her long brown hair tied up in a neat pony tail that was a little frazzled from movement against the pillow. She smiled widely, the edges of fear showing up around the corners of her eyes as she did her best to prove that she was, truly and really, happy to see her boyfriend’s and best friend’s mother. “Hiya, Mrs. Ekholm. Was the flight OK?”

Christina’s face brightened considerably at the sight of Charlie. She took graceful steps forward and opened her arms for the smaller woman. “Charlotte, you look wonderful.” Without waiting to see if the embrace was all right, Christina hugged Charlie tightly and patted at her long hair; the younger woman did her best to not stiffen, instead wrapping her arms around the blonde. “I’m so happy to see you and get to spend time with you as well. It will nearly be like old times, won’t it?”

She stepped away and held Charlie at arms length as Rylee moved closer to the pair. “Momma, let me bring your bag to the spare room. You’re sure you don’t want to sleep in my bed?”

“Rylee, I’m sure,” Christina replied with a loving pat on Rylee’s shoulder. “Let me put these flowers into something and then you can show me around your apartment.” She reached for Rylee’s head and rubbed her hand over his high and tight, creating a frown on her lips.

Rylee grabbed the suitcase and carried it down the short hallway, not without grasping Charlie’s hand temporarily as he passed, then disappeared into the spare room. Christina looked at Charlie with a certain sparkle in her blue eyes. “I like when his hair is longer, don’t you?

“And now, Charlotte, if you could help me I would like to put the flowers in some water. Does Rylee have a glass and scissors that you could get for me, please?”

“Yes ma’am,” she replied, falling into a familiar role that she used to play with her father. Though Christina was no where near as demanding or overbearing as her father had been, it was simply the way Charlie was used to acting around such authority figures - unfortunately the same could not be said of her military superiors, but there were precious few that garnered Charlie’s respect. The brunette moved into the kitchen, going to a drawer near the fridge to procure the requested scissors; Rylee didn’t own any vases, but there was a set of tall glasses that would suffice and Charlie quickly procured one from the cup cabinet. Both items were presented on the kitchen bar for Christina’s use. Charlie leaned on the counter, then moved out of the way to lean with her back to the kitchen sink.

“An’ yeah, the buzz cut doesn’t do him any favors,” she added, a wisp of a smile floating over her features as she could slowly feel the sensation of being trapped welling up in her gut.

“Thank you, Charlotte,” Christina replied as she grasped the roses and brought them to the kitchen bar where she began to snip at the plastic wrapped around the roses. “When he was little I tried to keep it a decent length, nothing as long as he’s been wearing it in recent years, but it was always so messy. When he went into the Marines I realized I’d rather he kept it longer.” Wrinkling her nose, she looked up at Charlie with a sparkle in her eye. Her smile turned gentle though, her voice soft and inviting as she began to speak to Charlie. It was the voice you used for a frightened animal, one that Rylee had used for Charlie time and time again.

“It really is nice to see you, honey. You look...happy. You’ve always seemed pretty happy when you’ve hung around our home but now you seem to... I don’t know it’s like you really are happy.” She winked at Charlie as she began to place one rose at a time into the glass. “I’m glad you two finally got together. He’s loved you for a very long time and you have made him so happy. He seems less anxious now and I think it’s because of you.”

A loud bump from the spare room caught Christina’s attention. She called out to Rylee, asking what was wrong, and his muffle reply came back to the pair in the kitchen, “Setting up the futon and making your bed.” Christina let out a little sigh; Rylee didn’t have to make her bed but it was pointless to argue with him.

Charlie shook her head with a bemused smile on her face, staring at the floor as she tried to think of a way to respond to Christina’s observations. She hadn’t seen Rylee in a long time, and she had some idea of what might have occurred between her boyfriend and his mother. Stubbing the toe of her sneaker on the floor, she tucked a strand of hair behind one ear as she glanced back up to watch Christina’s motions with the flowers.

“Yeah, things are good. At least, that’s what I hope he’s been tellin’ yah.” Her arms settled against her chest, her eyes lingering on the scissors moving around the stems.

“Don’t worry, sweetie, it’s all been good things. I promise,” Christina replied. She slipped the last of the roses into the glass and looked over her handiwork. Picking it up, she moved past Charlie to the sink and filled the glass. Glancing once, then twice at Charlie, Christina’s smile remained. “You know, when you and Rylee were babies, I knew your mother.”

Christina sat the glass on the counter and turned fully to Charlie, crossing her arms over her chest and leaning against the counter, she kept eye contact with the younger woman. “We weren’t close or anything. But I knew her name and when we would pass one another we’d say hello and ask how our children were doing. You know, you look like her. Your smile...it’s like hers.”

The happy look on Charlie’s face faded, turning into something apathetic. So much was wrapped up in that small mention of her mother - all of her hopes and fears and pleadings that she wasn’t like the woman. Especially after what she had learned from her half-brother’s arrival and subsequent departure. It was probably better that neither her mother nor her brother were still around; Charlie knew herself to be unstable as it was, and such catalysts would certainly only prove to cause further harm. Though at the same time, she couldn’t deny that she still longed to know more about the parent she’d never known.

“O...oh? I...no one ever said.” The words were shaky, a waver in her voice betraying her even more than her sudden silence after Christina’s description. Charlie wanted her to say more, wanted to wring every last memory out of the woman’s mind, but didn’t know how to ask. Part of her wanted to say, why did you wait until now to tell me this? But even someone as slow in the head as Charlie knew that, in the past, she’d always run from such things. Now she settled against the counter, eagerly waiting for Christina to say more.

“I didn’t want to bring it up while you were younger. You were...skittish to the subject,” Christina said carefully, eyeing Charlie to make sure she was all right before she threw herself fully into the story. “But you didn’t look like her as much as you do now. The way you smile, it’s just like hers. I passed her by once in the grocery store. To think, you and Rylee were so close as babies and no one could have guessed you both would be where you are now.” Christina softly smiled, a smile that seemed to only grace the lips of mother’s who remembered fondly the earlier days of their child’s existence.

Tucking back a stray blond hair, Christina glanced at the floor before continuing, her eyes back on Charlie. “Your mother was picking out some canned vegetables and I paused to ask how she was doing. You and Rylee were both...almost a year old. I think it was during the summer. Rylee didn’t have much hair yet and was sitting in his seat with his large blue eyes watching you. He was so quiet as a baby unless something scared him.

“But you! You were moving all over the place. Your little legs were kicking and you were trying to grab whatever you could. You were so active. I remember Rylee looking at me and then back at you, as if to ask ‘why is she moving around so much?’. You ended up knocking a jar of black olives out of your mother’s hand. It went rolling down the aisle.” Christina made a small laugh, still clearly picturing her son and his girlfriend as babies. That was probably the singular time Charlie had extra weight on her, from what Christina could remember, with rounded cheeks and little baby rolls on her arms and legs. Rylee, on the other hand, had been a large baby and rather long. But he still had the fat cheeks until he was in Kindergarten.

Charlie’s mouth smiled, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes. Mrs. Ekholm was one of the sweetest people she knew, so of course she’d paint Charlie’s home life with a generous brush, one that made the stresses and fights more benign. If anything, the story only seemed to serve the made-up story in her mind, the one planted there by her father, the one that said it was her fault for Madeleine’s departure. That she was a horrible child, a handful that no one could tame, and her mother had obviously been content to start a family elsewhere.

“I bet Ryry was a good baby, though. All those pictures yah got up at home, he was real cute. Cuter than he is now. Didja bring any with yah?” The clear steering of the conversation hopefully hinted to Christina that Charlie was done with that topic of conversation. Anything else would be better than lingering on her estranged and long dead parents.

“You know I wouldn’t pass an opportunity to embarrass him a little,” Mrs. Ekholm replied with a wink. “I have a stack in my purse. Come and see!” She lifted the glass filled with roses and left the kitchen. Placing the glass on Rylee’s table she retrieved her purse and dug through it until she withdrew a paper envelope and handed it to Charlie.

“I also found the first photo the two of you took,” Christina continued as she slipped onto one of the kitchen stools. A near devilish glint lit up her eyes as she looked at Charlie. She knew Charlie well enough to know how to make her squirm...just a little. And strictly for fun...although maybe there was a tiny bit of underlying truth in her statement. “You both were such scrawny children. When you and Rylee have a little one I bet they’ll be as thin as a rail until they’re twenty. Although, you’re still as thin as a rail.” She watched Charlie, waiting for her reaction with sparkling eyes. Mrs. Ekholm was sure Charlie had no intention of becoming a mother any time soon but she was sure if Charlie were to ever have children it would be with her son. And Mrs. Ekholm would be lying if she were to say she wasn’t excited at the idea of grandchildren.

She was perfectly content to accept the envelope, but didn’t even have the photos out before Christina dropped the little mention of grandchildren. Charlie went pale, her eyes growing wider. She had never imagined that she’d be in a relationship (much less with Rylee of all people), let alone having kids. Swallowing hard, Charlie reached into the envelope and withdrew the photos, intent on ignoring what Christina had said because she quite honestly didn’t know what to say.

“Hah, lookit that,” she laughed, pulling out the first. She knew she wasn’t the only one who would get a kick out of these - Sam would undoubtedly find plenty of material to tease Rylee about. “Hey Ryry, yah better get in here, yer mom brought baby pictures!” Her voice didn’t quite yell, but was certainly loud enough to be heard by the blond in the other room.

Christina grinned, successfully having startled Charlie but also with amused pride for her only child. In the other room, Rylee’s muffled voice replied that he was coming and shortly after his footfalls could be heard. He came into the kitchen and froze upon seeing the stack of pictures, his cheeks already beginning to color.

“You didn’t bring baby pictures, did ya?” Rylee said with a near whining sigh.

“Of course I did,” Mrs. Ekholm replied. “How else can I properly embarrass my baby boy if I haven’t any pictures? Although I’m sure I can tell a lot of stories too.”

Rylee frowned at his mother before cautiously approaching the counter and slipping his hand to the small of Charlie’s back before resting his head on top of hers and looking at the photos. “Wow, these things are really old.” Gently poking Charlie in her side he moved his head so that he could meet her eyes. He grinned foolishly but still had blushing cheeks. “Wasn’t I cute?”

“A lot cuter than yah are now,” Charlie teased back, a hand rising to pinch his cheek adoringly. Then it settled on his shoulder as she leaned into his body, moving through the photos. Several of them were of a chubby baby sporting crazy blond locks, but after three images the time period fast forwarded to a knobby-kneed young boy.

“Aw, lookit that beanpole,” she cooed, holding the photo out for all to see.

“And I continued to look like that for years; just at varying heights,” Rylee replied, his cheeks a flaming red. He distracted himself by running his hand slowly up and down Charlie’s back. Mrs. Ekholm kept a steady eye on the couple, her smile genuine as she witnessed the subtle display of affection between her son and his oldest friend.

“That twig isn’t much better,” Rylee teased as Charlie flipped to a picture of the pair standing together outside of the Ekholm house. The leaves were colored on the trees and they were wearing horribly awkwardly looking sweaters from the 90’s. Their younger selves were the same height at that point and equally thin.

Mrs. Ekholm took a step closer and touched Rylee’s arm gently, “I think I’m going to get settled. I’ll be in my room.”

Charlie looked at the photo with a fond smile, but then pulled away to glance at Christina. “Let us know when yer ready for dinner, we’re goin’ out tonight. I tried to convince Ryry to go to a bar, but I think we’re gonna settle for Marie Calendar’s instead. They got good pie,” she commented to the blonde, who smiled and then moved off to unpack, perhaps lie down for an hour or two after her long flight. Charlie watched the older woman go, then slid her arms around Rylee’s waist more firmly.

“Yah were right, this ain’t so bad,” she commented, lighting on her worries about having Rylee’s mother down for Christmas. With the exception of Rylee’s father, it was almost like when they were kids. Except she didn’t have to climb through any windows this time around.