Remember, Jack: A choice made for the first time is only made once. After that, the return to it is everything a return is. You and the beginning may seem as if strangers to each other, but you've been here before.
Chris and Dan fell into a wobbling tidal lock. It was the sharpness of her edges, and how they scraped against him, her abrasiveness never sanded down because she was the sandpaper responsible. A grittiness unbecoming of an office lady, some might find, and even that alone was enough to pique his interest. Not to pursue, but to observe, at least at first. She seemed to be a foot shorter than him, her eyes if staring straight ahead met his collar. Which made him tug at it when she turned her head away finally to critique his formulas, his lesson plans, things he's learning on the fly. She could tell. Only Dan noticed the small differences in her approach— like there was a stifled frustration pinching her cheeks when she ran out of impressions and directives. When she spoke again it was compliments. Really good work, Dan. A sigh. She meant it, too, despite herself.
It was the baggy clothes she wore, nothing too tight, long coats, things she could recede into when the lines of code blurred her vision, and she shut her eyes and huddled in her turtleneck, hiding her mouth in it (smearing her lipstick) slouched to the side in her chair, legs stretched out. The politics of the office hardly moved her. Dan sat against the lip of her desk saying nothing, arms crossed, eyeing her and her full ashtrays, and two coffee mugs, one old, one new, neither empty. They designed the protocol together. The way a child should be raised to achieve their full potential and the role of the parent, and community, within that process. Each interested in the chemistry of the self, the construction and manipulation of an environment upon the self, and epigenetics— neither will divulge why yet beyond an interest in the emergent field. They tease secrets from each other but are hesitant to play their hand.
It’s the way she finds a concrete corner of the building to become frustrated against, not leaning into it but letting it shield her, and it’s how she never cried and still sounded half-pleading when she said she doesn’t care if people think she’s sweet or pretty, she knows she isn’t, and he knows she tries anyway— she wants them to know she’s smart, she cares, and she’s not ashamed of being smart, or caring too much, she’s ashamed that this isn’t expected or wanted from her, and she can’t turn it off.
“I know I’m not sweet and I know I’m not pretty. Do they think that makes me bad at my job? Do they think that makes me an unfit mother? Why do I have to coddle another adult to prove I can do the same for a baby? I can’t stand this.”
Dan expected, wanted it. He wants to know her at her least constrained. He keeps his head down among his coworkers, but he’s been in the world and knows that everyone, to some degree, pretends; and maybe it’s this sixth sense that hints to him Chris is trying at something in a way somehow different than other people, and he wants to be there when she stops, to witness what’s there when the act ends. He’s wondered many times what she’ll do when he drops his own defenses.
“Christine, you make me laugh more than anyone here. And working with you… well, I want to do right by you. I wouldn’t change you for anything.” He stopped short of saying he wanted to impress her. Too much to give up all at once. He never lets her touch him. But she gets tired of lying on her back facing the concrete ceiling of her apartment. She wants to know what’s wrong with him. What is wrong with him? He never thought he’d get this far with her. And now he loves her. Listen: you have to give up slowly so you don’t realise you’re doing it. You let her take what you can give. When you’ve given her the last of it, what remains at the bottom is hope.
“I changed my name,” Chris announces. Her approach is sudden, with a casual tone, revealing and not, like it means nothing and comes from nowhere. Chris isn’t one to give up personal information easily, and even less when trying with purpose to tease it out of her. So Dan of course seeks the meaning and location instantly.
“I was tired of being Crístíona,” she explains, putting on an enunciated yet drawn-out accent for emphasis, evoking a disappointed mother.
“I can be that if I need to be, in a dreary lightless cottage somewhere in the country… but that’s no one to be in America. That’s some... dirty little beggar girl. So I changed it. To be someone here. Well, there.”
“You could be her here,” suggests Dan, invitingly. “You know I won’t tell. Besides, I’d like to meet her.”
“Ha ha.”
She’s quiet again.
“Christine is a line in the sand,” asserts Dan, but it’s a question.
“Yes,” she says. “It’s a statement: Christine. Simple.”
Chris folds her fingers against the knit of her skirt, grazing her knuckles up and down the weave. Dan sees her bite her lip before she snaps her head up again.
“So, what about you?”
“Ohh… I don’t think so,” he says from under his thick eyelashes.
“Come on. I told you my thing!”
“Hm… You don’t think that’s a little different?”
“Well is it?”
Dan cracks a bigger smile, it’s earnest as much as it guards him. Taking the edge off, letting this roll off of him until he’s endeared by her again. Panic runs a quick lap in his chest.
“If I told you,” he begins, twisting his body clockwise in his chair to lean forward on the table, “that’s how you’d see me. Somebody long gone, and shouldn’t’ve existed anyway. I don’t want that at all.”
He turns his head away slow, then quickly back again with a blissful smile. It’s clear he knows he’s being annoying.
“Like Pandora’s box.”
Chris frowns to his smile, how he says these things while looking at her like he’s reminding her of some bigger truth— and frustratingly, he is, it’s just that this is the most paternal he’s seemed so far.
“Besides, you wouldn’t be able to pronounce it. Crístíona,” he says, pulling the same mean Irish accent as her, “is pretty easy. No offense.”
“Ooh, okay,” Chris shoots back, “well go raibh maith agat, Dónaill.”
Dónaill? Dan mouths, pointing at himself.
Chris laughs a little, but of course every time she speaks any bit of Irish, or reveals any bit of the shame that is Irishness at all, she becomes viciously embarrassed, which she has to do her best to stifle. And she is not good at it.
She reaches for her coffee, black, sketo, and minding the unfiltered sludge at the bottom, she sips it and swallows hard before speaking again. Dan gives her room for that now. But he hadn’t realised this was going to be their evening.
“You sure you want to be drinking that? It’s late…”
“It doesn’t bother me,” she says. She holds the cup in her palms and moves on.
“If someone else had your old name, would you still hate it?
“Some people do have it. It’s got a tinge to it I guess… tainted a little, but I don’t hate it. It’s not mine to hate, it’s theirs.”
“Oh my god. Why are you talking like a poet?”
“Well forgive me for not giving a canned answer,” Dan rolls his eyes. “Maybe I’ve thought a lot about this before I ever met you.” He gestures with one hand open, instructional. Otherwise he’s returned to sitting slouched in his seat as usual, leaning back, arms held close to his body. He says it with more intensity than he meant.
Chris taps her clear-painted fingernails against the ceramic mug, and, like that reminds her it’s still in her possession, drinks the last of it— save for the grounds of course, a quirk of Dan’s preparation and seemingly common up here in the territory, but not common on base. The cafeteria still offers the type of biting American swill with which they’re both a bit more familiar. Chris stands to bring her mug to the small and open kitchen, darker hair and clothes briefly contrasting the harvest gold cabinets above her head and then comes back quickly, nervous Dan will let the conversation die if she’s not there to resuscitate it.
And he surely tries to kill it, picking himself up from the chair, its metal legs grinding against chequered linoleum. Chris isn’t close enough to warrant it but she steps back as if to give him room, as if she takes up enough of it to stop him. She acknowledges his cue, and sighs inaudibly.
In the bedroom though, he stands at the foot of their now-shared bed with his hand in his pocket. She isn’t looking at him now, already in her pajamas or what passes for them, a long shirt with pockets, not covering much of her legs when she sits with them crossed, setting the alarm clock on the bedside table. She tends to recoil visibly when he tells her he likes how soft her thighs are, but still, he likes to tell her, an honesty she inspires him to practise. And anyway, she likes it well enough when he’s giving them his undivided attention. She’s built to be much stronger than she is, but even as a weird little waif, if he saw her outside a shack in the west of the country he’d marry that girl too.
Dan slips his fingers into his wallet, fishing for a second between his various IDs, and pulls them out again.
“Hey,” he says from his throat.
He holds the thinned and dirtied little photo in between his fingers, not looking at it. Chris raises her head, barely curious. Dan leans over and places the paper on the bed, then slides it, face down, over to Chris. She gives it a sideways glance, and snatches it up when she realises what it might be.
Dan’s hands are both in his pockets now. ⠀
“Who is this,” Chris exclaims rhetorically. Dan hums.
“God…” says Chris, exhaling and then silent, turning it over in her hand.
“You look like such a…” but her voice cuts out.
“Go on,” lilts Dan, floating in it.
“Dyke. It’s insane, Daniel.”
“Yeah, well…”
“I’d’ve been scared of you!”
“I know,” Dan says wistfully. “Scared to fall in love with me.”