Afterwards, the mirror felt like a silent co-conspirator. Jason tilted Christina’s head and examined his—her—face for a tremor of regret, but the surface only shimmered with sweat and something like pride. There was a flush along the collarbone, a strand of hair clinging to damp skin, and a softness around the mouth that hadn’t been there before. He reached for a hand towel and ran it under cold water, pressing it to his face with deliberate slowness. The coolness leeched a bit of the wildness from his chest, but not much. He dabbed the sides of his neck, then pulled open the medicine cabinet, searching for the boring, practical deodorant Christina favored—something clinical and vaguely cucumber-scented. He applied it to the underarms with a brisk efficiency, pleased at how easy it was to pretend he’d done this forever.
He buckled Christina’s jeans back around her waist—the zipper catching for a moment on the button above the fly—and shrugged the shirt onto her bare arms. He left it unbuttoned down to the sternum. He liked how it looked, a little bit careless and a little bit provocative. He padded into the hallway barefoot, toes going numb against the cold wood.
He could hear his dad in the master bedroom through the master-bedroom door, the low drone of voices—Dad’s and his –Jason’s.
He opened the door.
Dad was standing over Christina-as-Jason, who sat on the edge of the bed, shoulders hunched. They both stared at Jason—as-Christina—when he entered, arms loose at his side, shirt still open to the chest, hair wild.
“Jason,” Jason looked at Christina, “Can your father and I have a moment …alone?”
Jason watched his own—well, Jason’s—face scowl and nod without a word. He could see the tension in the jawline, the vein pulsing along the forehead, the way the fists gripped the edge of the mattress and turned the knuckles pale.
She retreated out of the room in silence.
Jason stood in the doorway, his hips canted just-so, hair a lustrous, wild tumble over the collar of the shirt he wore half-open against Christina’s bare chest. He pitched the smile upward, wide and effortless, as if inviting his father to recall some easy moment before the world had upended itself—the grin Christina used at dinner parties, at parent-teacher nights, at cashiers and telemarketers and, in the old days, at Jason, when he still answered to the name.
“Hi honey,” he said, drawing out the words with a deliberate, honeyed lilt.
Jason-as-Christina traced a finger down the placket of the shirt, pausing at the lowest button, then let his hand fall to the hip, a pantomime of breezy confidence he’d observed a hundred times from Christina. She knew how to own a room—now he did, too.
“You said you wanted to talk?” Dad stammered.
Jason grinned, the borrowed lips parting in a flash of toothpaste-ad brightness, and leaned against the doorframe with a practiced flick of the hip. He let Christina’s hand dangle, wrist loose, and rotated the wedding band so the diamond caught the overhead light and threw a polychrome fleck onto the carpet.
“Well,” he said, voice crisp, “seeing as I’m your wife—” and here he held up the hand, waggling the ring at Dad, “—I’d like to focus on rebuilding our relationship…”
“So, …’Christina’,” Dad said—he actually said Christina—“we’re just supposed to roll with this, act like nothing happened? You’re my wife now? For how long?”
“For as long as it takes,” Jason said, “We talked about this downstairs. It’s not a game, Alan. If you want your son to be happy.”
“I think we both know it’s been a little tense lately. Maybe this is our chance for a reset. A fresh start,” Jason leaned over just enough for the shirt to gap, amplifying the suggestion, “It’s still me, honey. Just… new and improved.”
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