She managed to doze a little bit again before dawn began to fill the place with grey, but it wasn't a good night. She was already working again by the time she heard Ethan, then Shaun, make their way downstairs. Ethan hollered at her for breakfast, and she agreed with Shaun that waffles were pretty much awesome, glad they'd bought all the fruit the day before. Afterward, with father and son bickering over the homework problem, Shaun beginning to sulk, she retreated to the study for a few hours more. It wasn't working, all of the information about the Origami Killer. It was only limping along, being supremely uncooperative. It was such a great story, and there was no reason it should read like it was boring, but it was reading that way. She glared at her screen, trying to force the text into shape, until there was a knock on the cracked-open study door.
"Madison, I'm sorry, I hate to ask you," Ethan started, leaning on the door frame.
"Oh, just ask. I hate my job more than life right now. I am too stupid to use language." She shifted her glare from the screen to him; he looked uncomfortable. Actually, she realized, he looked kind of bad.
"I don't think I got enough sleep. I'm feeling a little shaky. Could you –"
"Yeah, sure," she replied, before he could finish. "I am more than ready for a break. Did I see a basketball hoop out back?"
"You did," he responded, surprised. "The ball should be out there, too. I think it's gotten kind of cold, though."
"Well, we can try it, anyway." Ethan forced a coat and a thin pair of gloves onto a protesting Shaun before disappearing into his bedroom. Both woman and boy jammed hands in their pockets and made their way outside, and began fumbling through the world's worst game of H-O-R-S-E, on the world's worst overgrown court. Madison struggled to remember the rules. It hardly mattered; after they'd both worked their way up to H-O-, they'd started laughing at how mutually terrible they were. Neither one won before Madison realized the weather had gotten colder, cold enough that the only jacket she'd brought was no longer enough.
"Shaun, I think we have to go in. I am freezing." She stuck her hands in her armpits.
"Okay." He looked a little disappointed, but the tip of his nose was pink, and she thought he'd probably better get inside, too.
He shed his cold-weather gear in the laundry room like a particularly untidy reptile losing its skin, while she jumped up and down in the kitchen, warming her hands under the sink's hot water so she could use them properly again.
"Take a seat, kiddo," she said. "Tell me everything you know."
"About what?" he said, climbing on to a chair.
"I don't know," she replied, drying her hands, unzipping her jacket. "Pick something. You can ask me something, if you want."
"Can you take me for a ride on your motorcycle?"
"No way," she said immediately, refilling the teakettle. "I only brought one helmet. Anyway, your mom would flip her shit." When she turned back from the sink with the full kettle, Shaun was staring at her with unbelieving horror. She realized what she'd just said, and went into panic mode. "Oh, shit. I mean, oh, hell. I mean, oh, oh, oh, Shaun, I'm sorry. Bad word. Two of them. Three of them. I'm sorry, I swear too much. Bad habit. Don't tell on me. No, wait, you should tell on me. No secrets. Oh, man, I screwed up."
He giggled, his face breaking into the wide-eyed grin of the guiltily fascinated.
"Is that another bad word?" she kept worrying at it while she got the kettle on the stove. "Can I say screwed? Or should I say I messed up?"
"You effed up," Shaun said, looking self-consciously wicked.
"Yes, sir, I did. I do that, sometimes." She sat down herself, showing all her teeth in her widest grin, and both shot their gazes to the ceiling as they heard movement overhead. "Sounds like your dad's up."
"Is he all right?" Shaun asked, serious again.
"No," she said with mock gravity. "I'm pretty sure he's a werewolf. We are going to have to tie him to a chair for the full moon."
He squinted. "Why for the full moon?" The joke had gone over his head. Madison rolled her eyes, was still explaining the concept of werewolves – in what she hoped were relatively innocuous terms – when Ethan appeared, rumpled, in the kitchen doorway. They paused to look up at him.
"Hey, guys," he said. "Did you have a good time? Want some lunch?"
"Madison is really bad at basketball," Shaun announced cheerfully, nodding. "And she swears too much." Ethan's eyes flickered towards her questioningly.
"I said I was sorry!" She gave an apologetic grimace, and Ethan shook his head at her, smiling.
"You're forgiven. Go wash up, Shaun. Peanut butter sandwich?"
"And honey and raisins," his son replied, thumping towards the bathroom. Madison shuddered and stuck out her tongue at the ingredients.
"Thanks for that," Ethan said, and began to pull out plates. "The basketball. I don't really feel up to stuff like that just yet."
"He's right, you know, I am terrible at basketball. I could probably kick his butt at soccer, though. Your butt, too. And field hockey." She dropped her voice. "And I accidentally said 'shit,' twice."
"He goes to public school. He'll get over it. Do you want a sandwich, or leftovers?"
The rest of lunch was slow, pleasurable. Werewolves were discussed, then vampires. Ethan very seriously explained that The Count from Sesame Street feasted on the stuffing of other Muppets, and Madison, startled into laughter, dropped leftover spaghetti in her lap. Zombies were on the horizon by the time Madison excused herself back to the study. She managed to rearrange a few choice chunks of text as the afternoon grew fat.
Madison was on another downstairs tea run when she saw the car pull into the driveway. Feeling guilty about stranding Grace on the porch last time, she made it to the front door and opened it when the other woman was still on the steps.
"Where's Shaun?" Grace asked, immediately. "And Ethan?"
"Upstairs, messing around in Shaun's room," she replied. "I think they're drawing."
Grace looked at her, steadily. "Let's talk," she said, abruptly.
". . . okay."
Grace determinedly clutched her purse and moved in to the kitchen, sitting down at the table. Madison followed, slightly confused, hoping she wasn't about to get called out on sleeping with another woman's ex-husband. She hardly even deserved it, at this point.
"How's he been?" Grace asked. "Ethan."
"Okay, I guess," she replied. The question was confusing, unexpected. "He's pretty tired. Hasn't he been staying with you? I mean, you'd know better than me."
"Tell me everything that's happened since I dropped Shaun off. Everything."
Madison hesitated, but Grace's steely gaze was compelling. So she thought back, and slowly covered it all: homework, dinner, father and son falling asleep on the sofa, breakfast, basketball, lunch.
At the end, Grace's eyes were slightly narrowed. "He slept all morning? Ethan?"
"Well, not all morning." Madison felt as though she were failing a test, but wasn't sure what the rules were that would let her pass. "He made breakfast, and I think they did some more homework together while I got some of my writing done. Then he said he felt tired and was it okay if I kept an eye on Shaun, and so the two of us shot hoops until I realized I was freezing my ass off. Just me, by the way, he had a way better coat on than I did. Ethan was back up again for lunch." Grace quirked an eyebrow at the "ass," but didn't comment.
"Did he take all of his medication?" she asked, instead.
"God, I don't know. He talked about taking some pills, I guess."
Grace nodded, slowly. "All right."
"I, uh." Madison paused, awkwardly. "I slept on the couch. Last night."
Grace scratched thoughtfully at a spot on the table. "I don't think I really care," she said, finally, "Where you slept. As long as it doesn't mean that Shaun was having to fend for himself, or in danger, or scared."
There didn't seem to be a response to that. Madison was slightly resentful that Grace seemed to think she had the authority to grant permission for their sleeping arrangements – and, simultaneously, was grateful that the permission had been granted, anyway.
Grace filled the silence: "Do you work with kids a lot?"
Madison squirmed; it was beginning to feel like a job interview. "Not really. But I had about ten thousand brothers, growing up. I'm going to go tell Shaun you're here." She fled upstairs; Grace let her go.
Madison cracked the door to Shaun's bedroom, stuck her head in. "Shaun, your mom's here to pick you up." He grabbed some paper and rocketed out of the room past her legs. Ethan was sitting on the floor next to his son's desk, looking up, slightly slow on the uptake. Madison gave him the look of death before she turned to follow the boy down the stairs. She entered the kitchen just before Ethan did, both hovering on the periphery of Grace's tickle torture of her son.
Shaun, giggling, danced behind a chair for cover. "Dad made me an awesome Batman." He thrust it at her, and Grace smiled. She knew figure drawing had never been Ethan's strong suit – his old sketches of her that she still had squirreled away proved that – but it was good enough, she had to agree, to draw a pretty awesome Batman.
"Did you make any pictures?" she asked. "Stick them in your bag, and you can show them to me when we get home." He pounded back up the stairs, and she stood, smiling.
When she spoke again, it was clearly directed at her ex-husband. "Here's the plan. I'm going to see how much more work Shaun can get through over the weekend, and then I'll take him back to school on Monday. I'll pick him up, too, and bring him back here, just to make sure . . . everything's okay. I'm going to try to go back to work Tuesday, but we can talk about that in a couple of days."
"All right," Ethan said. "Thanks, Grace." Madison felt like the elephant in the room. A stupid, alien, excluded elephant. Shaun pounded back down the stairs, backpack loaded. Shaun, Ethan, and Grace moved to the front door, while Madison hung back, seating herself at the kitchen table while the former Mars family worked through its parting ritual. Finally, the front door shut. She kept silent until Ethan had come back to her, sat down at the table. He was already hanging his head.
"Okay, it would have been really good to know that my real job was apparently spying on you, asshole," Madison started. "We just had a conversation in the kitchen where I thought she was going to start shining bright lights in my face and ask me if I knew what my thought crimes were."
He grimaced. "Did she give you the third degree? I'm sorry, I didn't know she was going to do that."
"What the hell is going on?"
"I told you I needed a little help looking after Shaun right now," he said. "That's true. It's also true that Grace knows I need it, and she's decided that I have to have it, or he's not coming here."
"You didn't tell her that we, uh." There didn't seem a good way to say had sex while your son was missing.
"No," he said. "It didn't seem . . ."
"Smart?"
"I was going to say, 'necessary.'"
"How long is this supposed to last?"
He shrugged, uncomfortably. "I'm not sure. I think she'll trust me sooner rather than later."
"Were you going to tell me this was an indefinite favor?"
"I thought maybe we could get through one night, first. I'm hoping this helped change her mind. There's a couple of days until Monday. I can find someone else to ask. You were great, perfect, really, but it's not fair to trap you here. And you don't owe me anything, I owe you about a thousand things. I just . . . the time with him."
He looked at her pleadingly, and she glared back at him. He was right, Madison thought, but he was also so sadly apologetic. "Well, one thing's for damn sure, I'm not covering for your ass. You screw up, I am going to snitch, and then I'm leaving, and you two can figure out a new passive-aggressive way to fight that doesn't involve me."
He nodded, looking relieved. "Do you want me to help you get your stuff back home?"
"No," she said, "I want to get some damn work done, and hauling everything back and forth is not going to help. You can make me some tea, and then you can leave me the hell alone for a while, and then," she was starting to smile, despite herself, "If you get all that right, you can make me dinner. Again. No ketchup."
He was smiling back at her. "Thank you, Madison."
Dinner was simple, sleepy, and while they ate, Ethan slowly, reluctantly, filled her in on all the details of how he'd earned his place in the doghouse.
"Wow," Madison said, chewing. "When we met during that whole thing, I sort of thought that you didn't want to go to the hospital because there was so much danger of getting arrested. I didn't realize that you're also a moron."
He flinched, but took it. "I'm working on it. Figuring out how to admit there's stuff I can't control. Figuring out when I have to slow down. It just doesn't seem important, most of the time, but I guess I'm hearing that it is, from a lot of people."
They did the dishes together, and then there was an awkward fumble of forward movement. "Do you want to go back to the study?" Ethan asked.
"No, I need another break." She meditated. "Entertain me."
"There's some movies. Most of them are Shaun's, but I've got a couple of grown-up things, too."
"Good enough." They flipped through the titles until they both found one they could tolerate, and settled down to watch North by Northwest. He told her, softly, about the architecture in the film. What it looked like, what it meant, where it came from, that amazing cliffside house of Frank Lloyd Wright fantasy. She leant against him, told him to stop talking when James Mason was, because that voice was too good to miss.
The movie ended; they were bathed in snow from the screen. She started talking, because she knew he wouldn't.
"Listen," she said. "You owe me. You owe me, big time. My price for performance is one warm bed."
He squeezed her arm, but answered reluctantly. "I don't feel –"
"Did I say I want to bang you? I said I want to be in your bed. There's a difference. I'm exhausted, and I want to sleep in your bed. With you in it. Say yes, or I'm gone."
"Yes." There weren't a lot of words after that, and they both made their way upstairs, into the world of old tee-shirts and boxer shorts, for sleep. They curled away from each other, falling into private comforts.
This time, someone broke through the apartment window to Madison's back, knife in hand. She knew he was there, could feel him, could even see him, in a bird's-eye view, stabbing down towards her reclining body, but everything was happening in slow-motion, her body felt like she was moving through mud, through quicksand, and she was never going to get away in time. Helpless, terrified, she braced her body against the pain that she knew was going to tear her apart.
"Madison." It wasn't a knife against her throat, but a warm hand, and she came awake with a shudder, no longer in her apartment. She blinked, still panicking, into Ethan's sleepy face. Her heart was beating like a hummingbird's.
"Hey," he mumbled. "Wake up. Bad dream." She pulled her arms protectively into her chest, and pressed herself against him, trembling. He clumsily wrapped one arm around her back, squeezing her for a second, tucked the top of her head under his chin – and went back to sleep. And just like that, the moment of terror was over for her. She wanted to laugh into his chest at how easy it'd been. No heroics. He'd barely even woken up, and somehow that made it better, his absolute assumption that everything was okay, because he'd woken her up and told her so. She didn't have to think about it long before she'd joined him again in sleep.
A/N: FUCK James Mason is awesome.