👿

Adrien’s father’s birthday always arrived in the dead center of summer, right in the thick of the heat. Adrien and Maman used to share giggles behind fingers about that, how Papa hardly even liked to wear short sleeves because they were too casual, and yet was supposedly a summer child. It was hard to imagine him as a child at all. That he might’ve ever woken up on a hot summer day, giddy to be one year older. 

To Adrien, he always seemed winter, through and through. Cool and quiet. His icy blue eyes sometimes sent a shiver down Adrien’s spine when he leveled them just so, all cool and narrowed and distant behind glass. Nothing like Maman’s warm green.

Anytime he brought that up to Maman, though, she got this distant, sad-happy look on her face. He used to be more summer, she told him sometimes. Back when she first met him. She always said that Papa still had that summer in him, and it was their job to coax it out.

Again, hard to imagine. Adrien always thought that Papa—and Nathalie—probably just weren’t birthday sorts of people, not like him and Maman were. Adrien and Maman loved birthdays.

“Everyone deserves to have their very own special day,” she used to tell him. Every birthday, like a mantra. “No one should have to share.”

And she always worked very hard to make birthdays special. Especially Papa’s. Once, Adrien remembered, she performed a surprise song and dance at his birthday gala, stunning the crowd of attendees into uproarious applause. She looked luminous, like an angel in her flowy white dress.

Papa had hugged and kissed her after that, smiling out at the crowd. They looked so perfectly happy. That night was the first time Adrien could remember being filled with the bone-deep longing to one day fall in love.

Late that night, after the guests had all gone and Adrien had been sent to bed, he found himself tiptoeing toward the loud voices that echoed through Maman and Papa’s door. He held his breath and pressed his ear against the wall.

“Well, I’m sorry if my birthday gift wasn’t lucrative enough for you!”

“Don’t be obtuse. Even you must be able to recognize how horrifying it was to watch the face of my company parade herself around in my competitor’s merchandise at our most populated networking event—”

“It was a birthday party! Your birthday party—!”

“Grow up, Emilie! Adults do not have birthday parties! This was an opportunity to secure multiple major international investors, deals you may well have completely derailed with your stunt.”

“Oh, that's rich. I am so sorry that your wife wearing the wrong dress to your birthday party is going to make your business implode—”

“It was Versace!”

“It was a surprise! God, Gabriel. It was custom. It was a surprise. If I went through your company, you would’ve known. You prick.”

“Can you see anything past your own—”

Adrien couldn’t stand it. He knocked on the door.