This would not have been written without Sun’s help. Paris’s mom clearly belongs to her and was borrowed with her permission and extensive input. Also, thanks for helping me edit, Sun.
Word Count: 4703
The door opened the third time Chris raised his hand to knock.
He took a step back, cleared his throat nervously, shuffled his feet and stuck his hands into his pockets, carefully eyeing the woman who’d come to answer. She looked at him in surprise, glanced behind him as if she expected to see someone else with him. When she didn’t, she returned her gaze to him in confusion, one hand keeping the door half open.
“Chris…” she said, then, “What are you doing here?”
He opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out other than an uneasy “uhh,” which had him shutting his mouth and clearing his throat again just as quickly. He looked at her face, at her hair, down the length of her body, and then he felt awkward because this was Paris’s mother, and he didn’t usually make it a point to see Paris’s mother without Paris around.
Marissa had a different sort of presence than his own mother. Claire was sweet and girlish, sometimes oblivious, and other times too observant for her own good. A lot of it he suspected was half an act, a scheme his mother enacted to manipulate people—not for any nefarious purpose, but because she was lonely, looking for someone she could shower with her ceaseless affections, the company she craved in the absence of her husband and the gradual emptying of her nest.
Paris’s mother wasn’t like that. There was something guarded about her, something distant and restrained. She stood there casually enough, with an easy sort of grace that was unintentionally seductive where Chris’s mother’s would have been ethereal and sophisticated. Yet she kept herself somehow removed from people even when standing directly in front of them—kind and welcoming enough, but always vigilant, too, like she was ready to pull back at any moment. It was in her eyes, a certain level of caution she put in place with every encounter, not only with him, but with almost everyone.
All except her son.
It was remarkably like Paris. He sometimes wondered if Paris even realized how very much like his mother he was. Chris didn’t see them together often, only a few times so far, over lunches and dinners and a weekend at the beach, but it was enough to notice the stunning similarities in their behavior—the way they moved their hands to emphasize a point when they spoke; the way they examined a crowd, looking for the bad eggs first before easing up when a threat failed to present itself; the different ways they laughed, open and free with the people who’d proven themselves, but reserved and controlled with the people who hadn’t; the way they walked with a defensive pride, the result of so much hard work without the appropriate support system to back it up.
In Paris it was sad, that someone so young and so vibrant should be so guarded.
In Marissa it was intimidating.
With the sort of upbringing he’d had, living in the shadow of his father’s career and bearing the responsibility that came with a prominent family, one would expect Chris to be able to handle confrontations with aplomb. He could for the most part, when he knew what he was doing and the situation was one he’d become familiar with. Chris wasn’t usually so easily intimidated by people. He couldn’t afford to be.
But he was intimidated by Marissa
Her demeanor wasn’t the only reason for it. There was also the conflict of emotion. He wanted to like her. He wanted to be at ease around her, try for the sort of comfortable relationship Paris had with Claire, but there was always something holding him back. He thought it was because most of what he knew about her he’d heard from Paris, accompanied with Paris’s bitterness and disappointment and the hurt feelings of an abandoned child only now beginning to find closure and acceptance. Chris looked at Marissa and saw her as the woman who’d turned her back on her husband and son.
He couldn’t see her as the woman who’d come back.
Not yet.
He was too busy trying to understand a situation he’d come into too late.
“Is Paris here?” he asked when he was finally able to speak. He looked down when he found himself unable to stare into her eyes, but that put her legs in full view, and that was a completely different sort of awkward altogether. He settled for glancing off to the side, shifting in place again and forcing his hands deeper into his pockets.
“No,” she said, still watching him with a level of confusion as she explained, “He’s with your mother.”
“Right.” Chris nodded, moved his weight from foot to foot, spared another quick glance at Marissa before examining the wrought-iron railing that lined the stairs and the front stoop of the townhouse.
“Is something wrong?” Marissa asked, cautious as she opened the door a bit more.
Chris tried for confidence, but his voice came out a bit weak as he said, “I wanted to talk to you.”
“You wanted to talk to me,” Marissa repeated slowly. She had clearly not been expecting it. Then again, it wasn’t every day she and Chris spoke with one another without Paris somewhere close by.
They’d definitely never spoken to one another alone.
“Alright. Come in,” she said, and she stepped aside to allow him room into the entryway.
Chris crossed through and waited as she shut the door.
The house was in disarray. He could see a few pieces of furniture here and there—couches in the living room and a narrow letter writing desk along the wall in the small foyer—with everything else still packed away in boxes stacked on the floor and lined up against the walls. It wasn’t surprising considering she was in the process of moving from New York to Destiny City, but it gave the place a slightly cold, impersonal feel, like it wasn’t hers yet, like Chris didn’t have any place being there.
He tried to ignore the sense of discomfort as she turned to lead him down the hall toward the kitchen.
“Did you want coffee?” she asked.
“Should you even be drinking coffee?” he wondered, and then immediately thought about how stupid it was for him to be questioning the habits of a grown woman who’d already had one kid and probably knew well what the risks were.
She turned again so she was walking backwards, and gave him a look that said “no s**t, I wasn’t talking about me” that was so much like Paris Chris had to shift his eyes away and look elsewhere.
“I don’t drink coffee anyway,” she said. One more thing to remind him of her son. “But Cal does.”
Oh, right. The guy she was supposed to be living with, the one Paris referred to as his mother’s “baby daddy.” Chris hadn’t met him yet.
“Is he not here?” he asked, glancing into the foyer, and then around the kitchen and into the dining-room and living-room beyond as if he expected to see the man standing somewhere among all the boxes.
“He’s meeting with a client in New York,” Marissa explained.
Chris nodded but didn’t say anything else. Now that he was here, standing around her all tongue-tied and nervous as hell, he didn’t know what he’d been thinking when he’d decided talking to her would be a good idea.
“Go ahead and take a seat,” she offered.
The kitchen seemed to be the only room on the lower floor that had been completely unpacked. Chris found a row of chairs at the counter bar and circled around to hop up onto one, trying to make himself comfortable while Marissa went about making one cup of coffee and one cup of tea. He took his time looking around to acquaint himself with Marissa’s house, so that he might be a little more relaxed the next time he came around—whenever that would be.
The most notable thing about the kitchen was that the walls were painted a muted purple. This struck Chris as somewhat odd, but the longer he looked at it the more he liked it. The white cabinets and stainless steel appliances stood out well against it, and it paired nicely with the black granite counter tops and the dark-grayish brown hardwood floors he expected went throughout the entire house. It was a homey place, though clean and well-organized, the sort of kitchen he could imagine Paris feeling right at home in.
Marissa moved around it with confidence, reaching for a couple of mugs as the coffee maker bubbled and the kettle on the stove began to heat up. Chris was finally able to make himself look at her now that she wasn’t staring straight back, carefully studying her as he made the effort to keep himself in place instead of nervously shuffling around again.
If it weren’t for a few subtle differences in the face, she could have looked like an older version of Paris. Well, with boobs and wider hips, of course. But the hair was the same—the same color and thickness, just a little longer, and she piled it up in the same hasty style as Paris when he rushed out to dance or stood in the bathroom washing his face. She had the same perfect nose, turned up just slightly at the end, and the same small ears. The line of her jaw, too, and her chin; the length of her neck and the paleness of her skin. The only things notably different aside from the color of her eyes were that her cheekbones weren’t quite as high and her lips were somewhat thinner.
She must have just come in from the gym a little while ago, because she wasn’t in her usual suit and heels. Instead she had on a pair of knee-length yoga pants and a bright blue tank top that stretched to cover the slowly growing expanse of her pregnant tummy—and that got Chris staring, because even though he’d known about it, it seemed a lot more real when it was shown off so blatantly. On anyone else with her body and face the clothing would have made an attractive picture, but Chris found it mildly discomforting considering she was thirty-seven and Paris’s mom.
There was an acronym for mothers like Paris’s mother. Chris did his very best not to think about it, though Michael had been more than happy to make a covert comment about it over Easter—which had not only been inappropriate because she was Paris’s mom, but also because her ex-husband had died only days before. The fact that Chris’s eyes actually lingered long enough to conclude that her legs rated a nine disturbed him, as did the fact that his brain decided to note the absence of any panty lines beneath her formfitting pants.
Wow, he was so not going there. What the ******** hell on Earth was he thinking?
Either he was spending too much time with his older brother, or he had just reached a new level of awkward previously uncharted by man.
Christopher Gallo, inadvertently checking out his boyfriend’s mom since 2012.
He gave a start when she set a cup of coffee in front of him, and he realized he’d just spent the last little while sitting in her kitchen and not saying a word. He blushed furiously and felt like an idiot, then blushed even more for suddenly being so socially inept.
“Do you want sugar or cream?” she asked him.
Chris forced his tongue to unglue itself from the roof of his mouth and said, “Uhh, just sugar is fine.”
She moved to another section of the counter and grabbed the sugar bowl, set it by his coffee and opened a nearby drawer to hand him a spoon. Chris took it and measured two spoons of sugar into his coffee, then swirled the utensil around to mix it in and keep himself busy.
“So you wanted to talk,” she observed as she went about preparing her tea, pouring the hot water into another mug and leaving it there to steep.
“Y-yeah,” Chris stuttered. He cleared his throat again.
“Is everything alright?”
“Yeah,” he repeated, thought better of it and said, “Actually, no.”
“No?” she wondered, raising a brow and leaning against the counter.
He felt better about the fact that she chose to stand instead of joining him at the bar, even if he thought it was a little impolite for him to sit when she wasn’t. He wasn’t too sure he’d feel all that comfortable while sitting directly beside her, in any case. It was bad enough that he couldn’t seem to get himself together long enough to bring up what he’d actually come to talk to her about. He’d only feel more intimidated by closer proximity; having the bar between them was therefore a reassuring boundary.
It was because he could never tell what she was thinking, he decided. There was the emotional conflict, too, and the fact that she was actually pretty hot that made things more awkward than they would have been if she’d looked more like his mental image of a mom, but even when he found a scrap of courage and took the chance to look into her eyes, she was a difficult person to read. He wondered how Paris did it, unless he and Marissa were just so similar they knew what the other was thinking on instinct.
Of course, Marissa was different with Paris than she was with everyone else. She was tender with him. She touched him and held him and let herself be close to him. She spoke to him with love in her voice, watched him with fondness in her eyes, and she called him “Baby.”
It was like no one else deserved that sort of attention from her, that sort of warmth and trust. Chris supposed it meant she was an okay mother, even if she’d left. He should try to give her the benefit of the doubt more. Maybe then he wouldn’t be quite as tense.
“No,” he said, looking down into his cup of coffee as he admitted, “I think I made a mistake.”
She was silent for a moment, like she expected him to explain, and when he didn’t she prodded him along, “A mistake?”
“With Paris,” he elaborated.
“How do you mean?”
He took a breath, let it out through his nose, idly stirred the spoon through his coffee. “Did he tell you what happened?” he wondered.
Somehow he didn’t find it hard to believe that Paris might have kept some of the finer details to himself. He seemed to do that a lot—not lie outright, but hide how he thought, how he felt, at least until he couldn’t hold it back anymore. He bottled himself up tight and didn’t let very many people in, not truly.
“Between you guys?” Marissa asked. When he nodded she copied the gesture. “He said the both of you decided things were moving too fast, that you thought it would be good if you took a break for a while.”
“That…” Chris began. Unsurprisingly, he found he was unable to look up at her as he made the correction. “That’s not… well… what he said… it’s not entirely true.”
“What isn’t?”
“I’m the one who wanted to take a break,” he clarified. “He didn’t want to at all. I mean, he pretended like it was okay, but I know it wasn’t. This isn’t what he wanted.”
He saw Marissa’s hand take the sugar bowl, heard her open the drawer again, then the tinkling of another spoon against the inside of her mug as she stirred sugar into her tea.
“I don’t understand how what happened has anything to do with me,” she said, making her way to the refrigerator to retrieve a gallon of milk to tip over her drink. She returned it to its proper place when she was done with it and took her spoon to stir it through again.
“Because the night Paris’s dad died…” Chris tried to explain. He had to swallow through a sudden tightness in his throat before he could continue. “The night Henri died… Paris was…”
He didn’t want to say that Paris had been drinking. He had a pretty good feeling Marissa was well aware of the things Paris used to get up to, but he also didn’t think something like that was important to mention or discuss right now. What did it matter? He’d already decided the presence of alcohol didn’t make what Paris had said any less true.
Instead, he got to the point of the matter and forced out, “He told me he loves me.”
The kitchen was quiet for a few moments. Chris noticed there was a clock on one of the walls when its soft ticking provided the only trace of noise. When it got to be too much, he finally made himself look up and meet Marissa’s eyes.
She was frowning sadly, and with some sympathy in the expression, clasping her hands around her mug as she leaned over with her elbows on the counter, looking up at him.
“So you were afraid,” she guessed.
Chris couldn’t speak, so he nodded in response instead.
“And you wanted to talk to me because…?”
“Because I ran away,” he said. He felt guilty, knowing he was implicating her of doing the same, but she was practical and level-headed, and he didn’t think she’d hold it against him.
And that was the real reason he’d come here, because who else could possibly understand? Michael gave good advice, but as far as Chris was aware Michael had never had a serious, long-term relationship before. He dated around and had a couple of flings and when he was done with them he hardly gave them a second thought.
Then there was his mother. Every time he tried talking to his mother she just looked sad and disappointed and like she thought he was making a terrible mistake, and maybe he was—of course he was—but he felt like enough s**t without struggling to explain it to her, and his father…
It was so hard talking to his father about Paris, not because Chris was worried about what he’d think, but because he and his dad were too similar and too private with their relationships to be able to discuss it so openly.
So who did that leave him with? Zia? What would she say? He hadn’t even introduced her to Paris yet. It felt selfish to flaunt his happiness when he knew she had so much going on, and even though he trusted her and cared about her and valued her opinion, having her get in the middle of one of his relationships hadn’t worked out all that well before (and, to be honest, what Zirconia had said to him at the meeting still stung even now, and even though he knew that wasn’t really Zia talking, he knew the cat had at least gotten the information from his best friend).
Daniel might have been a better choice, but then he’d never known Daniel to ever be in a position like this. What would he know? How could he empathize? How could anyone empathize? Chris was having enough trouble trying to empathize with himself when he knew he was an idiot and a moron and a selfish, spoiled little baby.
But Marissa knew. Maybe not exactly, but she could probably imagine. Her sympathetic look told him as much, and he knew he’d been right to try and talk to her.
“He told me he loved me, and I…” he struggled to speak, but once he’d swallowed again and gotten the first few words out, the rest came in a deluge.
“At first I didn’t really think about it because of the timing and everything else that was going on,” he said, “but then we moved in together and it started to get to me. I knew he’d been telling the truth even though he hasn’t said it since, and I got scared and I felt trapped because I didn’t think I could give him what he needed, because I’m just some stupid rich kid—”
Zirconia had been right about that.
“—and the only thing I’m good at is school and baseball, and I don’t know how to take care of him when he’s this upset, and half the time he doesn’t even tell me when something’s wrong, and I don’t want to fail at this because I can’t stand hurting him, but now I have anyway.”
It didn’t take a genius to see it. He’d tried to remain oblivious to it for as long as he could. He’d overlooked the signs, told himself Paris had stopped running after their conversation about it, but deep down he knew. There was something wrong. Paris was struggling. And even though Chris knew he hadn’t been the cause of it, that it had been happening since Henri died, he knew he could have helped, he could have tried harder, he could have made a difference if he’d only struck around instead of running when things got too complicated.
“I just… I panicked,” he explained, “and I feel like s**t for it, and I tried to see other people because I thought the perspective would help, but all it did was make me think of him more and I realized how much of an idiot I am because I…”
He stopped to breathe. He hadn’t taken his eyes away from hers yet, but it wasn’t discomforting anymore. He thought he could see understanding in her eyes, and that calmed him. She wasn’t upset with him or disappointed or even angry about the effect his actions had had on her son. She stood patiently and she listened, and even though she hadn’t said anything about it yet, he somehow knew she wasn’t judging him.
And she looked so much like Paris it physically hurt for him to sit there in the same room with her without Paris there, too.
“You what?” she prodded again when he ground to a halt.
For a moment he didn’t think he was going to be able to say it, but when he finally opened his mouth Chris was surprised by how easily it came.
“I love him, too,” he replied.
She should have told him he didn’t have any right. She should have launched into a lecture about how he shouldn’t need some time to himself to figure something like that out, that he didn’t deserve her son after what he’d put Paris through.
But she did something much different. Of all the things she could have done in response, the thing he expected the least was for her to smile, but that’s exactly what she did. Her eyes twinkled just a little, the way Paris’s did when he was happy and content, and she released the hold she had on her mug to prop her chin on her hands.
“The difference between your situation and mine,” she began, “is that you and Paris both want the same thing.”
“What do you mean?” Chris asked, fiddling with his spoon again.
“Henry and I were at completely different stages in our lives when we had Paris,” Marissa explained. Chris noted that she used the English version of Paris’s dad’s name instead of the French one. “We wanted different things. He was finished growing up. I wasn’t. Getting married and having a kid weren’t anywhere close to the top of my list of priorities when I was eighteen, but those were the cards I got and those were the cards I chose to play. I don’t regret that at all, but to say that I was ready for it… that wouldn’t be true. Henry was more ready than I was.”
“So… you left,” Chris guessed.
“I didn’t leave because of that,” she said. “Not entirely. I left because I made the mistake of taking the easy way out instead of figuring out a way to keep the family I already had while trying to get the future I’d always wanted. In the end, I thought it would be better for all of us.”
“But it wasn’t…”
“No,” she agreed, slowly shaking her head. “There were parts of it I did right, I think. Dragging Paris along with me would have been an even bigger mistake, because even though it hurt him to have me leave, I wouldn’t have been able to take care of him on my own. His father could.”
There was a brief pause. Chris lowered his eyes back to his coffee for the time being. He felt bad for Paris, but he couldn’t say he blamed Marissa for what she’d done anymore. He couldn’t even imagine being in her shoes back then.
“It’s okay to be scared, Chris,” Marissa continued. “It’s okay to make mistakes and be overwhelmed and feel insecure and doubt yourself, but that’s where you’re lucky, because I promise you Paris feels the exact same way.”
Chris blinked in confusion, looked back up at her and cocked his head to the side. “How is that lucky?” he asked.
She smiled again, a sad and wistful thing, and said, “Because it’s much easier to work together when both of you are coming into it with the same perspective. It’s easier to understand where the other’s coming from, and sorting it out together will be better for you as a couple than if you’d been in my position. A good relationship is based on more than love. It’s based on two people working together as a team, not one leading the way and the other struggling along behind them.”
It didn’t seem like such a big thing when she said it, but the more Chris thought about it the more it felt like it made sense.
“Do you think he meant it,” he felt the need to ask, just to make sure, “when he said he loves me?”
Part of him wanted her to say “yes, absolutely,” but there was another part of him that couldn’t understand why that would be the case.
What had he ever done? What had he said to make Paris fall in love with him?
The answer came unbidden, but then he knew what he would have said if Paris had asked him the same thing.
‘I love you because you’re you.’
He loved Paris for all the things that made him Paris.
Why shouldn’t it be the same the other way around?
Thinking about it like that… it all seemed so simple.
Marissa was still smiling, leaning against the counter as she answered with another twinkle in her eye. “Yeah, I think he meant it.”
Chris let out a sigh of relief, caught her gaze again and smiled back.
Most of the weight he’d felt slowly piling up on his shoulders since the night of Henri’s death lifted and vanished in an instant. The tension he’d been carrying around began to seep away, the fear seemed somehow less pronounced, and he could breathe easier than he had in months.
Some of it remained. There was plenty of worry left over—worry and guilt and the feeling that he’d ******** up royally, but he knew he could fix it. Now that he could admit to himself what the problem was, now that he knew how he felt, the uncertainty seemed manageable.
“Thanks,” he said.
Coming here had been the one right decision among all the wrong ones he’d made in the last two months.
Marissa quirked an eyebrow at him and reached down for her mug of tea. “Are you going to make things right?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he told her, “I am.”
“Then you’re welcome,” she said, and clinked their mugs together in a toast.
Chris looked at her, saw Paris in her, but a different person, too, and when she smiled at him liked she smiled at Paris, he wondered why he’d ever been intimidated by her in the first place.
