The Land of Make Believe

( Caught in the Rain ) It wasn’t that Dot didn’t like Kendall, or didn’t like riding with her. She liked both very much. It was just that sometimes, she wished the younger girl were a bit more… mature. Responsible. Respectful.

Listening

“I saw a miracle today.”

There’s a kind of giddiness in Rachel’s voice when he says it, tumble of auburn curls framing his face, cheeks a matching color of rose, owing to his excitement over whatever revelation it was that he was about to divulge to young Aiko. The contrary young adult looks up from dutifully brushing her pony, cocking her head to show that she’s listening, and expectant, though she already has a guess at what’s got the man so worked up. She’s been living with the signs of the coming change for months, while Rachel was only a passing visitor, ignorant to the subtler cues that her taciturn stepfather gave away in the private moments of their everyday. She doubted whether or not Dimitri himself had noticed them. He’d always been a bit clueless when it came to anything involving introspection.

Still, she couldn’t blame Rachel for his excitement, or for the way he was pacing back and forth with his those expressive, feminine hands of his flailing in the air as he told a tale that ought to have been mundane. A few short months ago, she’d felt the same lurch of hope in the depths of her guts that was now adding so much color and drama to Rachel’s retelling of an innocuous moment that held so much weight.

She couldn’t blame him: it’d been almost six years since Rachel had last seen his life-long friend’s smile.

It sounded like it should have been pure hyperbole. Six years, without cracking so much as a smirk? Without even a breath of laughter? An amused exhale through the nose? Six years. Yet, that had been their reality, starting from the black day they’d been given the news. For the first few months, the new widow may as well have been a mute. The funeral came and went. The months stretched to a year, then two, then three, but for Dimitri, it hardly seemed as if a day had passed. It was commonly whispered in the aisles that a part of him had been lowered into the ground along with his husband’s coffin, cliché as it was. Aiko wondered if that was what her stepfather, thought, too, recognizing the parallels that could be drawn between laying awake in the deepest part of a pitch-black night and being buried six feet under, the crushing weight of grief a thousand times heavier than earth.

Somehow, between the Prozac and the obligation to his horses, Dimitri kept muddling along, living on auto-pilot while his staff looked on, their hope for change dwindling year after half-hearted year. But, as it tends to, change did come, even if it’d taken its sweet time, in the form of a golden boy in a tailored, navy suit.

That’s what Rachel had nicknamed the man who had arrived at the property one day in search board for his nephew’s pony: the golden boy. Fitting enough for his sandy hair and bright complexion, Aiko supposed, if a bit on the nose. If she were honest, she’d have much more quickly labelled him as ‘rich prick,’ after initial impressions of his over-confidence left a sour taste in her mouth. Dimitri’s too, judging by the observations Aiko made while watching their first encounter. It wasn’t unusual for her father to be chilly with strangers, even those intending to be prospective clients, but it was another for him to be downright frigid. Ashton–the golden boy–was either oblivious, or didn’t care(Aiko later learned it was the former), and had been bold–or stupid–enough to ask him out for coffee the next time he’d been out. A polite enough invitation, anyone else might have even been flattered, but the only thing it’d earned Ashton was a vicious snarl and a mean right hook that’d put a sizeable bruise on his too-perfect jaw.

A sane person would have assumed that would’ve been the end of it, but Aiko’s interest was piqued. It was, after all, the most emotion her father had shown to anybody in over half a decade, if… of the wrong sort. Still, she decided that anything was better than the lukewarm indifference that had become the widow’s norm. Enmity was better than apathy; she could work with enmity, though it took a bit of encouragement to rally the dejected Ashton enough to give it another go, and only with a good bit of coaching:

“Just go really slow. Ask to take riding lessons or something. Make him put up with you for a while until he gets over himself. He’s actually really sweet–uh, do you need ice for the swelling? Sorry.”

“Take him out to a symphony. He loves those.”

Happily, Ashton was of like mind for his appreciation of music, and Aiko could hardly contain her excitement at the revelation. She could have screamed the day she’d arrived home and had been greeted by the sound of piano music, after the majestic grand on which both of her fathers had once played together had been left covered and silent for so long.

“His favorite flowers are white lilies and gardenias.” It might have been cheating to be giving away all the answers that Dimitri’s late husband had spent years teasing out of the soft-spoken man, but Aiko didn’t much care. It was worth it to witness those blue eyes widen and shine with surprise when Dimitri had been presented with a swan-colored bouquet of sweet-smelling gardenias come Valentines day.

It was all kept very hush-hush, of course; Aiko could only imagine the damage that might have been done had Rachel or–god forbid, Caelin, Dimitri’s cherub-like half-brother of such sun-shining disposition that it was vomit-inducing–found out about it, before the time was right. Before Dimitri was ready, being the privacy-obsessed man he was, hardly able to admit anything to himself, much less to anyone else.

So, it was with polite interest that she listened to Rachel’s re-telling of the momentous event he’d witnessed, of Dimitri, smiling, while looking at another human being.

“–at the golden boy! Can you believe it? I thought he hated the guy, I mean–he punched him in the fucking face the second day he met him, like–what! Right?” The babble went on, and Aiko couldn’t help a smile, herself.