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Melissa McCall had done the fall-in-love-in-high-school, marry-right-after-graduation thing. It hadn’t been all bad, but she wouldn’t particularly recommend it to anyone.
She’d done the whole date-a-secret-murderous-werewolf thing, too. Briefly. That one—that was all bad, actually, and had put her off of dating for longer than she’d really like to think about.
So when, during the junior year parent-teacher conference, her son’s economics teacher told her, “He might not be college-track-material, but, man, has his lacrosse game picked up! I see great things for that kid,” she was offended, indignant, and ready to file a complaint on her son’s behalf, but she was also wondering how that interestingly-spiky hair would feel beneath her fingers.
But she ignored the hair (strangely tempting though it was) and invoked her most serious parental voice and told him, “My son will do whatever the hell he wants to with his life.”
He blinked at her, squinted, and said, “Oh, right. Your son. Sorry, did I say all that out loud?”
She was oddly charmed. She was glad that she herself had a better filter, because otherwise she might be asking this strange, strange man if he’d like to take her home and ravish her. And she didn’t think she even wanted that—she was beyond the point in her life where she wanted romance-novel-romance, and would just like the calm, quiet kind of love her parents had had—but there was a full moon, and maybe spending so much time with werewolves was making her overly sensitive to it, too. Or something, but the thought was—quite alarmingly—there.
Instead she said, “You did, actually. I’ll let it go this time, but let’s be clear—if you make any comments to my son that imply he should focus on athletics over academics, that will not be OK.”
At home that night, in her bed, looking woefully at her vibrator and wondering how desperate she’d have to get to risk it with two sets of werewolf ears under her roof, she strongly considered the prospect of online dating.
When she got a call from “BHHS Coach’s Office” the next morning as she was about to head out the door to work, she picked it up thinking Scott hurt others hurt God why does everyone end up hurt, and so when the first thing the voice on the other end said was, “Hey, do you want to get dinner sometime?” it took longer than it should have to reroute her train of thought. And even then, she spoke before the train got fully on the tracks.
“No.”
“Uh….do you mean, ‘No, I don’t want to get dinner, I’d rather get coffee’? ‘No, not sometime, we should go now’?—“
“Oh, no, I just meant no. But sorry, I did mean for it to come out a little better. ‘No, I’m very flattered, but I’d feel uncomfortable dating one of my son’s teachers.’ That sort of no.”
“But functionally, still a no?”
“Still a no.”
“Huh. Well, that’s better than the last time I tried asking someone out, at least.”
“What do—“ But Melissa was speaking to a dial tone, and even though she didn’t regret saying no, she really wished she could’ve heard an explanation for that.
The next time she sees Bobby Finstock, he’s being rolled into the ER on a gurney and there’s an arrow sticking out of his gut.
“Shot by Cupid’s arrow,” he says. “And even though, strictly speaking, I’m pretty sure your son was the first person I saw, he’s sort of part of you, and so it’s definitely a sign.”
“That you’ve transferred your affections to my underage son?”
“That we’re meant to be together. If I don’t die. Oh my god, I’m dying.”
The paramedic at the head of the gurney looks pleadingly at Melissa. “Talking to you is basically the first time he’s stopped hyperventilating since we got him. He’s not dying, but there’s trauma from a puncture wound to the abdominal region, exacerbated by the fact that the patient won’t keep still, and he’s all yours.”
“That’s not a professional case history,” Bobby yells, and he’s right, but Melissa’s not going to tell him that. “I am all yours, though,” he says, going from demanding-patient defcon loud to 70s-porn cheesy in an alarmingly short period. “If you want me.”
“I want you to lie still and let the doctors fix you up,” she says firmly. “Can you do that for me?”
“For you, anything.”
The attending walking up shoots Melissa an amused look she doesn’t want to deal with. It’s hard enough getting respect from the doctors on staff without patients throwing themselves at her (which has thus far only happened sixty-two times, but most of those patients were drunk or drugged enough that it was less embarrassing).
When she’s making her rounds she checks in on Bobby for a post-op interview, and he’s high on pain meds this time, so she’s resigning herself to even more cheesy come-ons, but all he says this time is, “You’re an angel, aren’t you?”
Which is pretty cheesy, as lines go, and one guys seem to like to use on their nurses, especially when they’ve got the excuse of painkillers in their system. But he seems completely sincere, and she’s not completely heartless, so it’s with utter gentleness that she says, “No, not really. Now, how would you rate your pain on a—“
“Zero,” he sighs blissfully. “This is good stuff. You’re even better, though. You’re—“
Melissa hurries through the rest faster than she ought to—not skipping anything, not shirking patient care, but absolutely not lingering. Even though maybe it’s nice to be looked at like that, sometimes—like she’s someone absolutely perfect and wonderful, and even though maybe her inner teenager is cringingly susceptible to cheesy pick-up lines.
He asks again, as she’s on her way out. Of course he does. “Dinner date?”
And she still wasn’t sure about the guy, but he made some really pathetic puppy eyes, and he had just been shot.
"You’re a patient. And drugged. It’s inappropriate,” she sighs.
“I’ll ask you again when I’m not,” he promises fuzzily, and she can tell he’s already falling back asleep, so she doesn’t expect any follow-though.
“So,” she says when she gets home that night, flopping onto the sofa, exhausted, hand over eyes. “In addition to all of the other things that have gone terribly wrong today, I’ve possibly agreed to agree in the future to go on a date with your lacrosse coach.”
When she moves her hand from her eyes, she sees that Scott actually looks like death and that maybe she should have waited to have this conversation. “But pause that—what happened to you after the track practice? I heard you were there when Bobby got shot—“
“Then we went to Deaton’s,” Scott says, and his eyes and voice are so blank it hurts. “So Stiles could be safe from the Oni. Because it was getting dark, and there’s the mountain ash there, and—“ When he breaks off, he looks even closer to death, and tears.
“And? Scott, honey, what happened? Where’s Stiles?”
“Sleeping off wolf lichen in the cage Deaton keeps for unruly animals.” He laughs a little, but it’s not a happy sound. “All those dog jokes, and Stiles is the one that ends up in the kennel.”
“What the—what is Alan thinking? What were you—“
“He basically tried to kill me. I think. Or—something.”
“Deaton?”
“Stiles.”
Melissa sucks in a breath, except it’s not there to breathe in. There’s just—
“Stiles? Your best friend, sheriff’s kid, nervous talker, scary-smart Stiles?”
“No. More like the demon possessing Stiles. But.”
“The—“
“Oh, yeah, guess that memo hadn’t gotten passed on yet. Surprise.”
So the I’m-dating-your-coach-is-that-cool conversation got delayed, as did the date itself. Because her future-date was still in the hospital, strapped down so he wouldn’t tear his stitches with his truly embarrassing thrashing around, and because her son needed her, and Stiles needed her, even though there was absolutely nothing she knew how to do for either of them.
When she’d learned she was pregnant with Scott, she’d called her mom in tears, told her that she wasn’t ready, didn’t know how to be a mom.
“No one does, cariña,” her mom had said. “But you’ll learn. Sometimes you’ll mess up, and sometimes you’ll have to ask for help, but through it all you’ll love them—because that’s the kind of person you are—and that’ll mean that they turn out just fine, even when you don’t know what you’re doing. After all, you turned out just fine!”
“Did I?” Melissa had asked hysterically.
“Mostly fine,” her mom had conceded, her smile almost audible, before turning serious again. “You’re going to be a great mom, Melissa. When it matters, you’ll know what to do.”
As a teenager, Melissa had always delighted in being able to tell her mom when she was wrong and how she was wrong. Apparently she’d grown out of that, though, because there was no satisfaction in it now.
Maturity: Knowing that it’s not your mom’s fault your life sucks right now. It’s a Japanese fox demon’s fault.
The day after Bobby’s discharge, she gets a call from an unknown number while she’s on her lunch break. “I’m misusing school records to call you on a personal matter,” the voice on the other end says, “Again, I mean. So I hope you appreciate that and agree to go out with me. Also, this is my cell phone number. Oh, and this is Bobby.”
She finds herself smiling, has been since the third word when she placed the voice and guessed the intent. “Fine, sure. But no sporting events, batting cages, or other sports-related activities.”
“You don’t like sports?” He sounds like he might be reconsidering.
“Not as first date activities.”
“Disappointing, but fair enough. Dinner? At a non-sports bar?”
“Sure,” she says, because life is made for making mistakes.
“It’s a date!” he says delightedly.
“Well, it could be,” she says, “once you pick an actual date.”
“Oh, right. Tonight?”
She lets the silence speak for itself, but when he counter-offers with Wednesday, she takes it. After she’s hung up, she wonders if this counts as a reason to buy new shoes. She can’t remember the last time she went shopping for herself, so—probably.
The I’m-dating-your-teacher-and-coach conversation with Scott gets revived then, since it’s an actuality, and since some of the bigger issues have been dealt with in the interim (small details like a thoroughly disturbing quasi-exorcism for Stiles, so that now he’s free of supernatural conditions and only stuck with his medical condition, and Melissa hates that they’re living in a world where that’s not a worst-case scenario, where something that horrible can still feel like a reprieve.) (She’s also pretty sure her son is going to bite Stiles any day now, but she won’t ask if they’re sure, because she knows that they would be.)
So things are at a plateau, a spot of calm, and there’s time to tackle the mundane things like her potential love life.
The first order of business being to make sure that it is, in fact, a mundane thing, especially since Scott seems to disapprove in a way that’s almost as insistent as his opposition to her dating Peter Hale. Which she really wishes she’d paid more attention to then, so.
“Is he a werewolf?” she asks Scott.
“No, but—“
“Kanima?”
“No, he—“
“Kitsune?”
"Mom, he’s not anything supernatural, OK? He’s my economics teacher! He’s my coach! He’s—Finstock.” Scott says the last with an expression that said he thought that was an argument clincher, for sure.
But Scott isn’t operating under a three-year sex drought, and Scott isn’t really the type to appreciate the way Bobby’s ass fills out a pair of khakis.
“Is he evil?”
“Probably not? Although Stiles says he’s kind of a sadist—“
“Oh my god,” Melissa sighs. “I’m not asking him to be my personal fitness trainer. Nor am I asking if you’re ready for him to be your new dad.”
Scott turns a little green.
“I’m asking if I can go on a date with him without him trying to murder me or anyone else.” That’s all she wants, really. A date, no murder or mayhem.
“Probably,” Scott says reluctantly.
“But—“ Isaac says, peeking his head into the room. “There was that time when he blew wolfsbane all over the place and tried to get us all to kill ourselves.”
Melissa buries her head in her hands.
When Raf finds out she’s going on a date with the lacrosse coach, he doesn’t make any snide remarks or try to convince her to change her mind. She’s impressed. Maturely offering her his best wishes is in fact the one thing he could do that would make think, even for a moment, of ditching Bobby and trying to get Raf back.
She’s pretty sure Raf knows that.
There are times when she thinks she and Raf have moved past all the residual animosity and become friends. The kind of friends who can see each other after a long time of not caring that they hadn’t seen each other in a while, and be pleasantly reminded of why they were once friends, without feeling any need to renew the friendship.
Sometimes she even thinks she’s still in love with him, like when he’s bleeding all over her hands and there are vengeful demons between them and the hospital.
It’s probably better not to tell a new potential love interest any of that on a first date, so when Bobby asks her, over spaghetti at Beacon Hills’ least-classy Italian restaurant, “So, that ex of yours who’s back in town—is he back in the picture?” she just says, “No, not at all.”
“Good,” Bobby says, slurping up spaghetti. “The last time I was in a love triangle, I was in seventh grade and Elizabeth Mecklenberg told me that the taller guy always wins by default.”
“Oh, wow, that’s, umm—“
“Tragic, I know. Sometimes I still wonder what might have happened if I’d hit my growth spurt before college.”
“Before—“
“I was a late bloomer, OK?”
Melissa hums sympathetically, because if she opens her mouth to say anything she’s going to start laughing.
“If it helps,” she says, when she can, “height isn’t always a benefit. Sometimes it makes the kissing more complicated.”
Bobby’s sets down his fork with perhaps unnecessary gusto. “You’re right! I am perfect kissing height for you. Do you want to get the rest of this to go so we can go try it out now?”
Melissa has been finished for the past fifteen minutes, but she’d begun to suspect that the restaurant’s Wednesday night special of bottomless breadsticks might keep them here all night. She’s not sure when she’ll get another escape opportunity, so she says, “Yes?”
She only feels slightly like a terrible person when, as he drops her off at her door, she tilts her head so his lips brush her cheek instead.
“I could’ve sworn we were perfect kissing height,” Bobby says with a frown. “But maybe not the right kissing angle. But don’t worry, I’ve had this problem before, and I’ve found it helps if I just hold your face in place.”
“Oh,” she says. “How romantic.”
“You think?” he asks, wrinkling his nose. “People—women—don’t tend to think so.”
She doesn’t, but she’s not really opposed to a kiss, just not looking forward to one, so she lets him grasp her cheeks in his hands (with surprising gentleness), and she lets this kiss land on her lips. After a moment of appreciation for the surprising lack of slobber or even tongue, she lets herself return it. And that goes well enough that she figures, hey, why not go for the tongue. Once he’s proven to be a bad kisser, she’ll finally be able to just say, “The chemistry’s not quite right,” and that will be that, and she’ll have given it her best shot.
Except Bobby actually knows what to do with his tongue, for once, and that excuse probably isn’t going to work now that he’s had her wrap her hands in his hair and moan embarrassingly loudly into his mouth.
The front door swings open, and Isaac stares at them forbiddingly.
Melissa breaks off the kiss with a laugh, but it’s not the kind she’s been keeping in all night. It’s the nervous laughter she thought she’d outgrown; it’s the laugh that’s not covering up how shaken she is at all.
“On that note,” Bobby says, “I guess I’ll get going. Melissa—I’ve had a lovely evening, and I hope you’ll allow me the pleasure of your company again soon. I’ll call you?”
“Yeah,” Melissa says, wondering if incoherence is catching, or if they’ve suddenly switched roles.
And he walks back to his car, whistling cheerfully and dreadfully off-key.
Only the fact that Isaac’s still there staring at her keeps her from leaning back against the door like a kissed-out-of-breath lead in a romcom. Instead she settles for saying, “You know, I’m the adult here.”
Isaac scowls. “And I’m the werewolf.”
As he stomps off to bed, Melissa wonders if that was supposed to make sense.
But considering how things have been going tonight—probably not.
Their second date is interrupted before it even starts, before she can get out the door. It’s John, with an update on Stiles, and an update on the Katashi case, and an update on the FBI investigation, and by the time it’s over, she’s uncomfortably aware that she’s left Bobby standing awkwardly in her kitchen for almost half an hour.
She turns to him with an apology on her lips and finds him looking at her speculatively.
“I’m not, like, getting in the way of you and Stilinski’s grand romance, am I?” Bobby asks her.
“No,” she laughs. “God, no. Although you’re not the first to wonder.”
“Good, good,” he says, nodding. “Not that it would have been a deal-breaker, necessarily, if you were both tragically pining for each other, but—he’s got a gun and all. So maybe it would’ve been a deal-breaker.”
“I’m not worth fighting for?” she asks lightly.
“Oh, absolutely,” he says. “But after you saw me fight, you probably wouldn’t want me anymore.”
Two days later, she watches Bobby wrestle Scott for the remote, and even considering the fact that Scott is a werewolf (though clearly holding back)…well, she can see where he’s coming from. But she just throws popcorn at them both, grabs the remote for herself, and keeps right on dating him.
Her love life hasn’t been her top concern since she had Scott; never will be again. It takes up more thought, now, but it’s still very much a secondary—tertiary—possibly quaternary priority. She worries, sometimes, that Bobby can tell, that he sees the phone calls she interrupts their dinner dates to take and wonders what’s so much more important, why her teenage son and his friends can’t be put on hold for even an hour at a time. But he never says anything, except, sometimes, to ask if she needs to leave early, if she needs him to do anything. Sometimes she says yes to the first, but never to the second. The things she needs someone to do probably can’t be done, and certainly not by someone whose belief in the supernatural, if one strange conversation can be believed, amounts to the notion that aliens live among us, not the dangerous kind, but the Superman kind, and help maintain the shield that prevents the dangerous kind of aliens from attacking Earth and depriving it of all its resources. There’s a 50/50 chance he was kidding when he shared these theories, she thinks.
She is worried about her son, about her son’s friends (Stiles. She is worried about Stiles, about a boy who presents with the same inexplicable symptoms that killed his mother. And when she thinks about it she can’t stop, she can’t sleep, and then she fears she’s caught it, too, whatever it is, until she shakes herself out of it and moves on.) So: She is worried about a lot of things, and a lot of people, and it doesn’t leave much room for anything else.
But when she’s with Bobby, the worries are different. She worries that she’s going to say something she means to be funny that he doesn’t get. She worries that he will get it, and he’ll start laughing, but that it’ll be his ridiculously loud, honking laugh, the one that goes on for minutes and causes everyone to stare, and that instead of appreciating it, she’ll be embarrassed.
She worries that he’s going to let their relationship affect the way he teaches and coaches Scott, and that maybe Scott will have to quit lacrosse or switch to some distance-education economics class, and Scott doesn’t deserve any more upheaval in his life.
She worries that the sex isn’t going to be any good at all, and then what’ll she do, because she’s taken enough of a risk on him, and besides, how many more safe, non-supernatural single men could be left in Beacon Hills?
She worries that it will all work out, and then someone or something will hold its claws at his throat, and he’ll die, or, worse: She’ll have to choose. Between him and someone else, or something else. And she knows she’ll always choose Scott first, but she doesn’t want to think about how she’d rank all the people in her life, all the people she’s become caught up with in this strange, horrible revolving door of Beacon Hills’ populace.
So maybe the worries are the same, in the end.
“If he makes you happy, Mom,” Scott says, “then I’m happy for you.”
She thinks that she’s happy, but it’s hard to tell, beneath the other emotions, the fear. She’s tempted to ask Scott to sniff her and tell her what she’s feeling, but
a) That would be weird
and
b) She’s not sure werewolf senses really work like that.
and maybe
c) If she’s happy now, that can disappear.
After she and Bobby have been dating a month, she thinks, It’s way too soon.
After they’ve been dating three months, she thinks, Now might be a good time.
After they’ve been dating six months, she thinks, Goddammit, Melissa McCall, your mother didn’t raise you to be a coward.
So after they’ve had their anniversary dinner, she sucks it up and she says, “There’s something I should probably tell you.”
“Oh, are we doing that now? I thought we’d at least wait until a year. Or we were engaged. Or married. Or retiring. Or—“
Melissa can feel amusement creeping in beside her fear, and that—that was why it felt right to tell him. Because he can make her smile even when there isn’t much to smile about; because even though he sometimes uses humor to deflect, he does it when he didn’t really think there was anything that needed deflected (truly panic-worthy situations he simply panics about).
He says, “If we’re doing cheat lists, mine is just Will Smith,” just as she says “My son is a werewolf.”
“A cheat list? Really? Are you in high school?” she asks him, but she can’t even bring herself to feel offended.
“At least 70% of the time,” he says, distractedly.
Melissa’s not sure how long one should give a significant other to process the information that his girlfriend’s son is a werewolf, so she waits as he stares at the far wall, soundlessly moving his mouth and angling his head in what she now knows is a silent conversation between “Sane Bobby,” “Crazy Bobby,” and “Mediator Bobby.” He once narrated a sample conversation for her, and she informed him that they were all manifestations of Crazy Bobby, and he just shrugged.
“That explains so much,” he says slowly. “God, so much. And—that means ghosts are real, too, right? I knew the locker room was haunted.”
“Not that I know of,” she says. “Although, maybe. It was probably just werewolves, though. And a kanima. Maybe the odd nogitsune, kitsune, darach, oni, werecoyote, or banshee. Or just teenagers sneaking around. Possibly some combination thereof.”
Bobby sits down without really looking, and Melissa’s pretty impressed that he lands more on the couch than off of it.
“I don’t even know half of those words,” he says. “Why can’t it be ghosts?”
“I’m sure there are ghosts, too,” she says, although those are not words of comfort she ever thought she’d be offering, and she does not, herself, find the thought at all comforting. Bobby looks a little less lost at the prospect, though.
“And you are…”
“Not a werewolf,” she assures him. “Fully human.”
“Good,” he says, then winces. “I mean, I’d support you if you weren’t. Human, that is. Not that I’d prefer if you weren’t, like that I have a thing for that or something, because, no, no thing, but— Supportive? I’d be supportive.”
“Good to know,” she says solemnly. “Me, too.”
His eyes widen. “Oh, shit, am I going to become a werewolf? Is this, like, a zombie thing that only affects the male populace? Or—“
“Only affects those bitten by alpha werewolves, as far as I know,” she says. “And I think you’re safe from Scott.”
“Please, god, tell me Lahey’s not an alpha werewolf,” Finstock says. “Because I’m pretty sure he’d happily rip my throat out.”
“Werewolf, but not alpha.” Melissa considers the rest of the statement, and decides that even it might be true, she probably shouldn’t confirm that, so she changes the subject. Bobby is always happy to talk about next year’s track prospects.
“D’you know, Stiles once heard Finstock say he likes to be called Cupcake?” Isaac asks her idly one evening as she’s getting ready for a date. “I’m pretty sure it’s because he does unspeakable things with baked goods.”
“I somehow doubt that,” Melissa says. “But thank you, Isaac, for enlightening me. Anything else? Results of a background check to disclose? Embarrassing photos? Latent demonic possessions?”
Isaac says, “He’s not good enough for you, really,” and Melissa cherishes the words even as she tells him, “People shouldn’t have to be good enough for each other. They just have to be good, and that’s enough.”
“He’s kind of an asshole, though,” Isaac grumbles, because of course he can’t just let it go.
Melissa raises an eyebrow. “Yeah, well, maybe I have a soft spot for those.”
Isaac sputters a little, and she knows that’s not the last she’ll hear of it from her son and surrogate son, but she thinks it’s earned her a much-needed reprieve.
(“Does he make you call him Coach in bed?” Isaac asks the next week, and as Melissa launches into her “These are the boundaries normal people have” speech, she thinks it means he’s coming around.)
She’s always gone to the Beacon Hills lacrosse games, whenever she could manage to get off work, even when she knew Scott would ride the bench, even when Scott was just a scrawny middle schooler who dreamed of one day making the team. To show her support. And because, honestly, lacrosse was about the most interesting thing Beacon Hills had had to offer, before the invasion of all-too-interesting supernatural creatures and their associated catastrophic consequences.
So it’s not like it’s something new for her to be in the stands, cheering the team on, and occasionally getting a little too excited over a goal and possibly embarrassing her teenage son.
Ogling the coach’s ass—that’s new. (Or not. But admitting it to herself—definitely new.)
Congratulatory sex in the coach’s office after all the kids have cleared out and gone out for pizza—very, very new.
Also new, and rather less exciting, is the obligatory recap, review, and analysis of every single minute of play.
“That last penalty was such bullshit!” Bobby exclaims, gesturing wildly, and Melissa can tell it means a lot to him, so she tries to care. But—they won. Scott scored. That’s really all she cared about, and now that the game’s over and her orgasm’s been had, she’d really like to move somewhere more comfortable (and clean) than the floor of Bobby’s office. She’s a grown woman. She doesn’t feel like it’s too much to ask to be in a comfortable bed if she has to listen to this.
Sometimes she finds herself more engaged with the rambling than she’d expect to be, though. Sometimes, when she sees the moments of hesitation and the hints that Bobby’s own high school years were hell, she can appreciate that he has so much more control over this go-round, or at least some illusion thereof.
Illusions, they’re important.
There’s a small decorative jar with Deaton’s wolfsbane antidote that sits on the mantle now, right by a photo of her with the boys, smiling, and one of Scott and Stiles in simpler times, and a needlepoint that Melissa’s mom had given her that says, “Blessed be all those within this house” that is so unbearably cliché and unattractive that Melissa could never take it down.
Bobby looks at the arrangement it for a long while, one night, and she thinks he’s going to tell her, again, to be careful. He does that a lot, has done so even before he knew about werewolves and witchery and the many weird ways one could die in this town. She appreciates it, even as she tells him she’s always careful; he should be careful.
But what he says is, “Why don’t you have a photo of me up there yet?” And he says it with an audible pout, and his eyes when they turn to her are the same ones he gave her when he asked if she could burn his hospital records so they’d stop sending him bills (“It was just one little arrow!” he’d said indignantly. “Not what you said at the time when you were begging for ‘more of the good drugs,” she’d replied. And really, the hospital needed all the funds it could get, considering the repair bills the past few years had racked up.).
“Maybe because we have yet to take a photo together in which you don’t end up looking like a crazed mass murderer,” Melissa replies drily.
Bobby looks like he’s about to protest, but she can see him reviewing their photo reel in his head, and she sees the moment where he realizes it’s true. She finds it kind of comforting, though—she’s so much more wary of perfection, now, because that’s what mass murderers can hide under. A crazy-eyed stare, maybe that’s the best sign of sanity.
“Well,” he says finally, “someday we’ve got to get a good one. And then I expect it up there, on the wall. At least an 8 ½ x11. Maybe even an 11x14, you know, so that you can really see the detail, the way my love for you shines through my eyes—“
“Oh, is that what that disturbing look is?”
“I’ll show you disturbing—“
It’s like she’s a teenager again, which isn’t as freeing a thought as it ought to be, because teenaged Melissa made a lot of mistakes, and believed a lot of lies. So it’s better, because she trusts herself now, and she trusts that the idiot she’s in love with is an idiot with good intentions and a good heart. He’s not a man her teenaged self would have ever looked twice at, because she was easily blinded by confidence and charm and terms of endearment that sounded sexy enough in Spanish that she didn’t think to listen for sincerity.
When Bobby whispers one night, “Tú eres muy sexy,” she laughs until she can barely breathe, and tells him, “Please, don’t.”
“I Googled the pronunciation and everything!” he protests indignantly, and she can’t help but laugh again even though she knows she shouldn’t.
When she introduces him to her mom, she’s a little nervous, because her mother loved Raf (everyone loves Raf, at least at first), and Bobby’s more of an acquired taste.
Her mother pulls her aside and says, “M’ija, that is the most awkward man I have ever met. And you know your Uncle Leo had some very strange friends.”
“I know, mamá,” Melissa says. “But he kind of grows on you.”
Her mother looks at her skeptically, but raises a shoulder in concession and says, “Well, then. Let’s get back to it, so I can catch up with my grandson.”
Scott corners Melissa later and asks, “Why does Grandma think Finstock is going to be my new stepfather?”
Melissa chokes a little on air. “I…really don’t know.”
Scott squints. “You’d tell me if you were engaged, right?”
"I’d tell you before I got engaged,” Melissa assures him. “Not that that’s happening right now.”
And it’s not. She’s still not ready for another marriage, still not ready to see what could go wrong again. The town’s had too many funerals, and a wedding would be a nice balance, but balance is a lost cause, probably.
What there is, is hope. That someday it might happen, and someday it might work, and someday Scott won’t look queasy at the prospect and she won’t wonder if there’s too much truth in Bobby’s jokes about how his students drive him to drink.
When Bobby comes in, he says, “You know, your mother’s not nearly as scary as you made me expect”—to the amusement of her mother, who's close behind him.
“Oh, she is,” Melissa assures him. “But you’ll get used to it.” She links their fingers together, and it’s a promise that they’ll deal with the scary things together. Because they have to, and because they can. And she thinks she can get used to that.