A Problem I Shouldn’t Have

Julian

I hadn't slept, not really, not since dinner ended and Asher and Della retreated upstairs and the house went quiet enough that I could hear the ocean through the open window in a way I usually found comforting and tonight found unbearable.

I told myself it was nothing. A long day, an unfamiliar house settling in around new voices, the ordinary static of having people under my roof for the first time all season. I gave that explanation a fair chance, lying there in the dark, and it didn't hold up past the first ten minutes, because the truth, when I finally let myself look at it directly, was considerably less comfortable than a restless first night.

I'd spent most of dinner watching my son's girlfriend. Not the ordinary vetting a parent does of the person their child brings home. I'd watched the way she laughed, delayed, like she was checking herself before she let it out fully. I'd watched the particular, deliberate way she held eye contact a half-second longer than any conversation strictly required, like it cost her something to do it and she was doing it anyway out of pure stubbornness. It was an absurd thing to notice about a twenty-two-year-old sitting at my table specifically because she was dating my son, and some reckless, undisciplined part of me had spent the better part of two hours cataloguing her like she was available to be looked at that way.

I gave up on sleep a little after one and went down to the kitchen for water I didn't need, mostly for something to do with my hands, and ended up standing at the counter in the dark, replaying a dinner conversation I had no business replaying this closely.

She'd argued with me for a full ten minutes about algorithmic news curation, unwilling to concede a single point even when I pushed back specifically to see if she would, and I had enjoyed it more than I was prepared to admit to myself. Not the argument itself. Her. The particular, stubborn way she'd held her ground, the quick laugh she kept trying to rein in and kept losing to anyway, the directness in her eyes when she disagreed with me instead of the polite deferral I usually got from people her age.

I was Asher's father. She was twenty-two, dating my son, sitting at my table because he'd invited her here for the summer, and somewhere over the course of one dinner I had apparently developed the emotional discipline of a teenager.

I poured a glass of water and didn't drink it. I set it down slowly on the counter, and I was still standing there, still turning the whole evening over in my head, when I heard footsteps stop somewhere out in the hallway.

I opened the kitchen door before I could decide whether that was a good idea.

She was standing three feet away, barefoot, one hand still braced against the wall like she'd been caught mid-decision about whether to keep walking or turn back. In the low light from the range hood, she looked younger than she had at dinner, more unguarded, and the sight of her did something immediate and unhelpful to whatever careful, reasonable framing I'd been trying to build for the last hour.

"Sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to wake anyone. I was just getting water."

"You didn't wake me. I wasn't asleep." I stepped back, holding the door, an invitation I probably shouldn't have extended. "There's a glass in the cabinet to your left, if you want one."

She hesitated, just a beat, then came in, moving past me with the careful, deliberate distance of someone conscious of every inch of space between us, which did nothing to help the situation, because I found myself just as conscious of it from my side, tracking the small sound of her bare feet against the tile, the way she kept the counter between us without seeming to decide to.

She filled her glass at the sink and stood there drinking it with her back half-turned, not quite looking at me. "Couldn't sleep either?"

"Old habit. First few nights of summer always throw off my schedule, even in my own house." That was mostly true. It was not the reason I was standing in my kitchen at two in the morning, but it was the version of the truth I was willing to say out loud.

"That surprises me. You seem like someone with a very fixed routine."

"I am. Which is probably why it takes so little to disrupt it." The sentence came out lighter than it felt, and I watched her catch something in it anyway, a small flicker of attention, like she'd heard the second meaning under the first without being able to name it.

"What disrupted yours tonight?"

I didn't have a good answer to that. I had a true one, and it wasn't one I could hand her.

"Honestly? Dinner." I watched her go very still at that, just slightly. "Something about the conversation stuck with me. I couldn't quite let it go."

"That happens sometimes. Conversations sticking."

"It does. Usually there's a reason for it." I leaned back against the counter, arms crossed, putting an actual, deliberate distance between us. "You held your own tonight. Most people don't push back on me that directly. I found I liked it more than I expected to."

"Is that a compliment or a warning?"

"Both, probably." I meant it as something close to a joke, and heard it land as something closer to an admission, and from the way her expression shifted, so did she.

"You're doing the professor thing right now," she said, a flash of something sharper coming through, defensive in a way I found, against my better judgment, more interesting than the careful politeness she'd led with all evening. "Cross-examining me like I'm a student who turned in a suspicious citation."

"That's not what this is."

"Then what is it?"

It was a fair question, and a dangerous one, and I gave myself a full three seconds to consider answering it honestly before I decided against it.

"I don't fully know yet," I said instead, which was, unfortunately, the truest thing I'd said all night, and watched her hear the honesty in it even through the vagueness of the words.

"That's not much of an answer."

"It's the only honest one I have available at the moment." I held her gaze, longer than I probably should have, aware that I was standing in my own kitchen at two in the morning having a conversation with my son's girlfriend that had drifted somewhere I had absolutely no defensible reason to let it drift. "I could give you a more comfortable one, if you'd prefer."

"Would it be true?"

"No."

She almost smiled at that, something quick and involuntary crossing her face before she caught it and pulled it back. "At least you're honest about being dishonest."

"It's a specialty of mine."

"Somehow I believe that." She set her glass down, quieter this time, some of the earlier sharpness softening into something more careful. "I don't think I've ever had a conversation quite like this with someone I met six hours ago."

"Neither have I, if it helps."

"It doesn't, particularly. It's mostly just unsettling."

Neither of us said anything for a moment. The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere outside, the ocean kept up its steady, indifferent noise against the shore, entirely unconcerned with whatever was happening in this kitchen.

"I should go back to bed," she said finally. "Early start tomorrow. Asher mentioned the boat."

"Right. The boat." I straightened, putting my hands in my pockets, a deliberate, physical way of making sure they had nowhere else to go. "Sleep well, Della."

My name in her mouth landed strangely, a moment before, and I found I was still turning that over too. "You too, Julian."

She was almost to the hallway when she paused, glancing back, just briefly, something caught between curiosity and caution. "Goodnight."

"Goodnight," I said, and stood there long after she'd disappeared around the corner, alone in my own kitchen at two in the morning, furious with myself in a way I hadn't been in longer than I could remember.

This was not a complicated situation, I told myself, and told myself again, like repetition might eventually make it true. She was twenty-two. She was my son's girlfriend, sleeping under my roof for the entire summer, and whatever this feeling was, this low, persistent pull I had no reasonable explanation for, it needed to stay exactly where it was: unexamined, unacted on, and, God willing, gone by morning.

I thought about Asher, upstairs, asleep, entirely unaware that his father had just spent twenty minutes standing in a dark kitchen with his girlfriend, saying things that were technically about disrupted routines and functionally about something else altogether. He trusted me. He'd brought her here specifically because he trusted me, wanted the two most important people in his life to get along, and I had responded to that trust by standing in my own kitchen enjoying her company more than any reasonable host should, by admitting, however obliquely, that I didn't fully understand my own reaction to her and had no immediate intention of examining it further than I already had.

I ran the conversation back through my head while I stood there, every unwise line of it, the compliment I hadn't meant to give and hadn't taken back, the admission that I could have offered her something more comfortable and hadn't, the particular quiet in her voice when she'd said this was unsettling and not meant it as a complaint. None of it should have stayed with me the way it did. All of it did anyway.

I poured the water down the sink, untouched, and went upstairs eventually, past the closed door of the guest room, careful, deliberate, not stopping, telling myself the entire way that tomorrow would put all of this back into its proper, harmless proportion, that daylight and the ordinary business of a normal summer day would do the work my own discipline apparently couldn't manage alone. I lay awake a long while after, running the whole exchange back through my head, certain of exactly one uncomfortable thing by the time the sky outside finally started going pale: whatever this was, it was not going to be as easy to bury as I needed it to be.