3 - Advent Adversity

As the hands on the bedside clock crept to closer to midnight, Charlie’s temper crept right along with them. 

Tuesday's news already had her on edge, and this afternoon’s visit added a heap of guilt that she didn’t like carrying around.  Lilah now knew, and Charlie was both relieved and sick over it.  

She’d wanted Jon to be the first one.  She’d wanted him to be the one to say everything would work out for the best.  That they'd get through this together.. 

She had.  Truly.

The problem she foresaw was that Jon wouldn’t give a damn about her intentions.  It was bad enough that someone else knew before he did, but it happened to be Lilah, whose perceptive nature irritated the hell out of him.  She’d promised not to breathe a word to anyone, but guilt still ate at Charlie’s gut.  

If she didn’t get this news, that guilt and some of this anxiety out of her system, she was going to throw up.  Again. 

Unfortunately, she couldn’t expel any of it until her goddamn husband decided to come home from Los Angeles.

He was already four hours late - without a word, as usual.

Charlie didn’t ordinarily care.  He was free to go and do whatever needed his attention without being chained to her or his phone.  That was part of their deal.  They were independently interdependent – content to let each other go, but overjoyed to reunite.  It was the perfect relationship from both their perspectives.

Tonight, though, it was pissing her off in a major way.

Seven text messages and three phone calls all unanswered. 

He, who normally couldn't wander as much as five feet away from his damn phone, had not responded to a single inquiry regarding his whereabouts.  He was probably busy bullshitting with David, Obie, Shanks or any of a dozen others that he talked to semi-religiously. 

While midnight found his wife propped up in bed with an unread book in her lap and turmoil in her belly. 

Asshole.

She was on the verge of pulling on some yoga pants and… doing something other than sitting passively when she heard the brownstone’s alarm system chirp.  Her asshole was home, and angry as she was, Charlie’s lip quivered with a completely different emotion. 

He was home.  Finally. 

Asshole or not, he was a rock when she needed him most, and this sat high on the list of her needy moments. 

“Where the hell have you been?” she barked the minute he stepped into the bedroom with a smile.  The man didn’t even get a chance to drop his bag before Charlie was ripping him a new one.  “I have called you and texted you all evening.  You said you’d be home around six, Jon.  This is not six, it’s six fucking hours past six!”

“I missed you too, sweetheart.”  His drawled sarcasm went unappreciated, but Jon got major kudos for approaching the bedside and leaning in to kiss her forehead.  Her husband had balls.  Big ones.  It was part of what she loved best about him.  “Wanna tell me what the hell that’s all about?  Or do you need to draw blood first?”

“You said you’d be here six hours ago.” 

It was a sign of trying times when a lawyer was reduced to repetitive monotony, but he didn’t remark on it.  That earned him more begrudging kudos as he nudged her toward the center of the mattress to sit on its edge, hip to hip with her. 

They were close enough for her to see a coffee splotch on his jeans and know it was the same pair he’d left home in earlier this week.  Close enough to smell he hadn’t showered since morning and see he’d been out in the sun while he was gone. 

His nose was pink, making blue eyes even bluer when calmly refuting, “I got held up.  They needed to do some mechanical maintenance on the plane.”

“You can’t call and let me know you’re going to be late?”

“I can, but you’ve said over and over that there’s no point as long as I’m going to be home the same day.  I’m home the same day.”

“You are not.”  An accusatory finger stabbed toward the clock that read seven after midnight.

“Chiara.”  The even tone he’d been using adopted a thread of steel as Jon reached the end of his limited patience.  “Cut the bullshit and tell me what you’re really bitching about.”

Lifting the book and slamming it down next to her left thigh, she glared and shouted, “I’m bitching because I’m going to be a goddamn grandmother!”

Jon both sighed and swore to himself.

Dammit all to hell!  The kid was supposed to wait until this weekend.

It wasn’t like Jon had coerced her younger son into sharing the life-changing news.  He and Caleb were taking one of their routine runs on Thanksgiving morning when the kid had to stop and tie his shoe.  Naturally, Jon stopped too, but when the lace was again secure, his running partner didn’t move.  Instead, he looked scared as hell. 

What followed was a rushed confession that Caleb’s girlfriend was pregnant – very pregnant – and the kid had been afraid to tell his mom.   He wanted Jon to do it. 

Sympathetic to the boy’s situation, Jon still had no choice but to be the hard ass and refuse.  If Caleb was going to be a father, he had to learn to be a man first.  

There were few things more character building than a man looking his mother in the eye and confessing his mistakes.  Even at his age, Jon hated like hell to tell his mother he’d screwed up something, but the feeling afterward was always that he’d done the right thing – and he’d always  appreciated that feeling later.

Caleb might not be quite so lucky, but Jon thought he could keep Chiara from killing him.  She was a lawyer, after all.  She knew the consequences of murder. 

“How did you find that out?”

“Caleb texted me a fucking ultrasound picture two days ago with the caption ‘here's a little gift from Becca and me for Christmas, but delivery is delayed until March first’.  The next text said he’d be in Jersey this weekend to do a better job of explaining.  And he’s blocking my calls!”

Holy mother of Christ. 

Talk about screwing up.  Had this kid never met his own mother?  Letting her stew over something like this for four days was equivalent to lighting the four-day fuse on a massive pile of dynamite. 

There were also some explosives on the path to that dynamite, and one was detonating in Jon’s face now.  His wife’s Italian temper was flaring with the volatility of a two-ton Roman candle.

“I mean, what the hell is he going to do?  Marry her?  Quit school?  Give the baby up for adoption, since they’re well beyond the point of any other alternative – thank God.  You realize that March first means they probably spent our honeymoon getting pregnant?  Six months ago. Do you realize that??”

Not only did he realize, Jon knew it for a fact – along with a lot of other truths that would make this irate mama bear quite proud of her son.  Unfortunately, his refusal to be the bearer of this news meant that he had to let Caleb handle it.  All of it, both good and bad, in whatever fucked up way his teenage mind chose.

If he missed any important points this weekend, though, Jon wasn’t above prompting the kid. 

For now….

His options were limited.  There were only two, as he saw it.  The first was to lie to his wife and act as though he was surprised by this revelation, supporting her outrage and agreeing that kids didn’t know dick. 

The other was to fight with her.  His hotheaded Chiara would undoubtedly be pissed at discovering he was already privy to what she’d obviously been waiting up to tell him.  He would catch almost as much wrath as Caleb was going to, but to hell with it.

Jon was half-horny anyway.  Nine times out of ten, their fights ended with a good fuck, so taking her on tonight wasn’t a problem.

“Yeah.  I realize.”

The narrowing of her eyes told him that was it.  That calm acceptance was his perceptive spouse’s clue that she wasn’t delivering unknown information, and he braced himself for the blast.

“Why don’t you look the least bit surprised, Jon?”

Leaning across her lap, he scooped up the book and moved it to the nightstand while casually admitting, “He already told me.”

“He what?”  That was her lethal lawyer voice.  The one that only came into play when she was about to take out somebody’s – his – jugular.  “Did you get the same text I did?”

Now came the tricky part.  Did he do the full confession and take his lumps, or downplay it and hope to fuck she didn’t smell something fishy and start digging for more? 

Might as well get it over with.  The harder she fights the harder she fucks.

“No.  He told me Thanksgiving day while we were out running.”

Three… two… one….

“You son of a bitch!”  Her fist slammed into his shoulder with a snarl, and the counselor he’d battled since day one made her fiery grand entrance.  “You’ve known for an entire week and didn’t tell me?  You’d better start spitting out what stellar reason you have for that!”

“Calm the fuck down,” he ordered blandly, grabbing the fist that was about to pummel him again – and then the mate that tried to pick up the slack.  “You’re mad at him, not me.”

“Oh, no.  I’m very much mad at you.  You didn’t tell me, Jon!  What you did was went on one of your damn road trips and let me get blindsided.”

She ripped her hands from his grip, and shoved until Jon was forced to his feet, allowing her to slither from bed.  That’s when she went after him full force, pushing at his chest and propelling him backward one step at a time while reading him the riot act. 

“How could you not know I’d be upset?  Are you that much of a moron?  This is my baby we’re talking about, Jon!”

By the time he’d let the counselor back him against the dresser, he was done.  Jon swept her hands away with a grunt that heralded the final snap of his patience.  “Goddammit, that wasn’t how it was supposed to happen!”

“How was it supposed to happen, then?  Huh?”  She took another pot-shot shove that pissed him off to the point of mentally vowing to spank her ass when this blew over.  “There’s no scenario here that doesn’t make you an asshole!”

“Asshole or not, you’ll fucking listen to what I have to say, Counselor.”  Jon cuffed both her wrists and hauled her into his chest while she gasped with indignation.  “Caleb told me because he was afraid to tell you.  He wanted me to do it.”

“Yeah.  Still an asshole.”

“And still talking here.  Shut the hell up until I finish.”

His wife was a good-looking woman all day every day, no matter what her mood.  When she was livid, though….  There was something about her that set his blood on fire.  His dick was a steel rod in his pants even as she killed him with a glare and muttered a few choice words that he took as belligerent agreement. 

“I refused to do it.”

“Because you’re afraid of me, too.”

Clenching his fingers more tightly around the wrists trapped in their confines, he proved just how much of an asshole he could be.  “You have a fucking law degree and don’t understand a simple phrase like, ‘Shut the hell up’?”

Chiara’s lips clamped so harshly together that they all but disappeared.  Her eyes, though….  They were talking a mile a minute, and he deliberately ignored all the four-letter words flashing in their depths. 

“Let’s get one thing straight, Chiara,” he told her with deadly softness.  “There is no world where I’m afraid of you.  Respect, yes, but never fear.  Understood?”

Flattened lips puckered but still didn’t open.  She gave a single sharp nod, which was the best he could hope for in her current mood. 

“You didn’t marry a goddamn pussy, and I won’t allow Caleb to become one, either.  Playtime’s over.  He crossed the line from boy to man whether he wanted to or not, and I’m making him own it.  If he’s gonna break his mama’s heart, he needs to look in you the eye when he does.”

Balled fists and stony features relaxed slightly, but Jon still didn’t risk letting her go.  

“He talked me into saving the peace at Thanksgiving by promising to do it this weekend – in person, not through some goddamn text message.  I was going to be right there for you.  That was the plan.”

“Well, the plan sucks,” she grumbled belligerently.

“Only when you don’t stick to it.”  A gentle tug on her wrists brought Chiara’s gaze to his.  She was still hot, but he thought all his body parts were safe and unclamped one hand so that it could tuck under her chin.  “I’m sorry it worked out this way, but I’m not sorry for what I did.  If you have to see me as an asshole so Caleb can learn a lesson in character… that’s just the way it’s gonna have to be.”

“I hate you.”

Jon’s mouth tipped up at both corners at her surliness.  This, he could work with.

“You know how we deal with that in this house, don’t you?”

Continuing with that surly theme, she recited, “We fuck until we like each other again.” 

It was a standing rule since their wedding.  Anger was fine.  Yelling was a given.  Anything was fair game when their tempers blew up, but they never went to sleep mad – and it was awfully hard to be pissed after an orgasm or two.    

So, even when they didn’t particularly feel like having sex, they did.  

Why?  Because sex first revealed this inexplicable bond of theirs.  Whenever it needed reinforcement, it only made sense to return to the source.  Sometimes they had to go back a couple of times before things felt right again, but they had a hundred percent success rate so far. 

As he just told her, a plan only sucks when you don’t stick to it.  Jon was sticking with this plan, and so would she.

“Damn right, Counselor.  This gonna be a quickie or an all-nighter?”

When she blinked up at him, the familiar spark in her eyes stoked his blazing blood.  This was the woman who’d knocked him for a loop over and over again.  Unapologetic, defiant and full of passion, she touched him in ways no one else ever had, and his heart warmed when she delivered her matter-of-fact decree.

“I guess that depends on how good you are the first time."