Chapter 10: Dream Resumed

It took a while to get back to sleep after my conversation with Amy. When I finally drifted off, I found myself in the front hall of Adrian's apartment. I was about to call for him when I noticed what I was wearing: a little pleated khaki dress that looked like a parody of a mechanic's outfit, complete with a tool belt and a name tag that read "Sydney." I was reminded of countless Halloween costumes I'd seen girls wearing over the years – "Sexy Firefighter," "Flirty Cop," and "Naughty Nurse." This must be the "Hot Mechanic" costume, because the skirt barely covered my behind and the top was so tight I was practically falling out of it. I was also wearing some high-heeled "work boots," as if that made any sense. Who fixes cars in thigh-high stilettos? To complete the look, I was covered here and there with black smudges of grease, including one in the center of my cleavage. How on earth would I have gotten a smudge there?

"Adrian?" I called. "What is going on–"

"Oh, you're home early," he called, and came down the hall. He was shirtless and barefoot, and his dark jeans rode low on his hips. His bare chest was covered in artistically placed paint splotches. He picked me up in a hug and spun me around. "Did you have a hard day at work, sweetheart?" he asked. "I've got a casserole baking in the oven for us, for later."

"Um, what is going on here?" I asked, as he let me down.

He looked from left to right quickly, as if making sure no one was listening, then said, very quietly near my ear, "I thought we could play mechanic and artist. You're the hard-working mechanic, home from a long day at work. You're tired and sore and so, so, dirty." He leaned forward and kissed my neck once, lingeringly, then leaned away and went on, in the same conspiratorial voice. "I'm the brilliant artist who's been locked up in my room painting all day. I'm tired and dirty, too. We both need a really long, really hot, shower." He gave me a meaningful look and wiggled his eyebrows.

"Adrian," I said, trying to keep a straight face. There was a certain charm to his scenario, I had to admit, but I had something serious on my mind. Also, the stilettos were already starting to hurt my feet.

"We only have an hour or so before our daughters come home from their piano lesson," he said, taking my hand and pulling me gently towards the hallway that led to his bathroom. "Let's get those dirty clothes off of you."

"Ok, I admit it, this sounds fun," I said. "But we can't –"

"Oh, I know we can't have sex," Adrian said, making a face briefly. "You and your vows. But there's all sorts of fun things we can do in a hot shower." He grinned and scooped me up into his arms and began walking down the hall. "There's something kind of hot about doing those things with you while your jerkface of a husband is lying next to you in the bed..."

It was difficult not to smile, and even more difficult to turn down Adrian's offer, but I really did have to talk to him. "Let's play artist and mechanic next time," I said. "Right now we have to talk about our daughter and her little night time phone call."

"Right now?"

"Right now," I confirmed.

"Fine," he said, pouting a little, and let me back down. We went back to his living room and sat down on his couch, and he watched me with obvious delight as I took off the boots. When I was done, he handed me a pair of slippers, which I put on. Then we sat on the couch facing each other, and I summoned up a bathrobe to put on over my absurd outfit since it was impossible to sit down in a skirt that short. I tried to clear my mind so that we could talk about Amy, but when I looked at him, I was distracted by the paint splatters on his chest. And, well, his chest in general.

"Don't worry," he said, following my gaze. "The paint's dry." He ran a finger over it to prove it.

"I wasn't worried about that," I said, and lightly touched a splatter of purple paint. "I was just thinking – that's more or less how you looked the night we... you know."

"The night we made Amy," Adrian said, his hand running along my cheek softly. I nodded. "I was painting when you knocked on the door," he said. We both looked at each other for a moment, remembering. Then Adrian said, "You know, I never finished that painting. It's in storage. After you left, I just couldn't..."

"I'm sorry," I said, for what felt like the millionth time.

Adrian shrugged. "Water under the bridge, I guess," he said, then his expression brightened. "You know, when you finally leave Rick, one of the first things I'll do is get that painting out of storage and finish it."

"You sound confident that I'll leave him," I said.

"I am," he said. "After all, I have a little secret agent on my side. Pretty sure she's rooting for a change in the status quo, at least."

"Amy," I said.

"That's the one," Adrian said. "So, how did you catch her?"

"I went downstairs to make some tea," I said. "She was hiding under the table. She tried to hide the phone, but of course I saw it."

Adrian was obviously trying to suppress a smile and doing an awful job of it. "She said you'd hidden it, but she found it..."

"It was in an inside compartment of my purse!" I said, indignantly. "She used your tricorder to help find it!"

Adrian burst out laughing. "Oh my god, I love that kid," he said. "She's a rebel, like her mother."

"Like her father," I corrected.

"Like both of us," he said. "You know what she said, when I answered the phone?"

"What?" I asked, warily.

"She said, 'Sorry to wake you up, Mr. Steel, it's me, Amy Reznick.' She must have seen what the number was listed as, in the phone."

"Oh God..."

"And I said, 'You can call me Adrian if you want. Jet Steel is just a made-up name.' And she laughed and said I was cool for a grown-up. She's got a great laugh, even when she's trying to be quiet so she doesn't wake up her mom."

"What else did you two talk about?"

"Hmm. Well, she said she thought I'd be awake because at the mall I told her that I stay up late most night. I told her that I did usually stay up late, and that it was ok that she called. Then she asked if I got the video you guys made today, and I said yes, and that I was glad that she liked the presents. Then we made fun of you a little for drinking coffee in the shower – "

"Hey!"

" – and then we talked about some weird species of bug she found with her tricorder. And then she asked if I had ever gotten all the other videos that you guys made over the years, and I said yes, that I only got them recently, but that I had gotten them. And then she asked if I was going to come visit sometime, like for Violet's birthday."

"What did you tell her?"

"Just that I wanted to visit, but that it was up to her mother."

"Anything else?"

Adrian looked a little uncomfortable. "Well, she did ask who I really was. She asked if I was her uncle or something. And I said, no, I wasn't her uncle. And then she must have heard you coming down the stairs or something, because she said, 'Gotta go, bye!' and hung up. So I was sort of saved by the bell there."

I let that all sink in. I should have known that Amy wasn't going to let the mystery of Adrian just slip by. All her life, she'd known that there was someone special our there, someone named Adrian – of course meeting him was going to pique her interest. But what on earth could I do? I leaned against Adrian's paint-splattered chest and sighed.

"What's going on in that massive brain of yours, sweetheart?" Adrian asked.

"I'm just thinking... I don't know what to do," I said.

"You mean with Amy? I hope you won't punish her..."

"No, I didn't have the heart. I just meant, I don't know what to do about... this. This situation. I mean, she obviously wants a relationship with you. She has no idea what you are to her, but she still wants you around, for whatever reason. She wants you in her life badly enough to sneak out of bed and call you in the middle of the night. And I know that you want a relationship with her. And the truth is, I'd love it if she had someone like you in her life. She doesn't need expensive presents. She just needs..."

"An actual father," Adrian said.

"Yes," I said, and unaccountably, my eyes were full of tears.

"Well, she has me," Adrian says. "And for what it's worth, so does Violet, if she wants me. I have no idea what I'm doing, but I'll try my best. At the very least I won't try to kill their turtles. So don't cry, Sydney. Ok? Don't cry."

"I've just gotten us into such a jam," I said, and dabbed at the edges of my eyes. "I don't know how to get out of it now. A lot of family court judges in the district know Rick and respect him. He's not above bribery to get what he wants. He'd bribe the judge if he has to. He'd find people who'd say that I was a drug user, a child abuser, whatever he wanted them to say, all so he could keep the kids. If I left him, I'd never see Amy or Violet again."

"I've got some tricks up my sleeve, too," Adrian said. "And if he's cheating on you, then he won't have a leg to stand on."

"I don't know if I can risk it," I said. "If they got taken away from me, I wouldn't be able to protect them from him at all. He'd break them into pieces."

"If he got custody, we'd take them away and hide somewhere. I hear Costa Rica is pretty. You speak Spanish, don't you?"

"Of course I do, but that's not the point. We couldn't hide in Costa Rica. We couldn't even hide at the North Pole. You can't hide from the alchemists, and believe me, Rick would get the alchemists on the case."

"We'd go live at court then," he said. "The queen would protect us."

I shook my head. "I'm not going to start a war between the Moroi and the alchemists all just because I want to leave my husband."

"So you're saying it's hopeless?" Adrian said. "You brought this whole thing up to say it's hopeless?"

"It's not completely hopeless," I said. "I mean, there has to be hope."

"Well, it's not as if Rick is entirely blameless," Adrian said. "All you have to do is get proof of the affair. That could really help your case."

"True," I said. "If he actually is having an affair."

"Why don't you think he is?"

"Because he just doesn't seem into that sort of thing," I said. "I can't explain it. He's not into romance or even sex, really. He's just into... power."

"Then maybe he's into the power of having an affair," Adrian said. "In any case, all signs point to yes on this matter."

"I guess," I said. "And if he leaves me for her, that would probably make a lot of people in the church pretty angry. Even if I took the kids at that point, I don't know if my dad would sign off on hunting me down."

"Well, isn't that a ray of light," Adrian said.

"Yeah, I know," I said. "In any case, whatever chance we have, nothing's going to change very soon."

"So what happens in the meantime?"

"I was thinking maybe... visits," I said, slowly.

Adrian's face lit up. "Really? Visits?"

"Really, really careful ones," I said. "Maybe every two months or something. Like, maybe in February sometime, when Rick goes out of town, we could meet in DC again."

"I'd love that," Adrian said.

"And... maybe on nights that Rick works late, we can do a video chat," I said. "There's some alchemist technology that can hide internet activity, so that Rick can't find the records."

"That would be great," Adrian said. "Really. I'm not going to give up on the idea of you leaving him, but this is a great start."

"Ok," I said, and leaned forward to hug him. We held each other for a while, and the longer that I had my arms around him, the more I became aware of the spicy smell of his cologne, the warmth of his skin, the buzzing in my ears growing louder... Just a few minutes ago, we'd been discussing the impossibility of the divorce, the gloom and doom predictions of losing custody of my children, and now all I wanted to do was find out how his neck tasted.

"Is that all we needed to talk about?" Adrian asked, near my ear.

"More or less," I said.

"Well, ok then," Adrian said, and kissed me, first on the cheek, then on the neck, then on the lips. I started to feel a little dizzy. "Hey, mechanic girl," he growled. "Aren't you really tired and sore after a long day at work?"

"You forgot dirty," I said, taking off the bathrobe. Suddenly, this silly game didn't seem silly at all. "I'm just covered in grease and stuff."

"That's awful," Adrian said, his finger running along the smudge of grease between my breasts. "Just awful. Maybe you need a hot shower."

"We better hurry," I said. "I think we only have an hour or so before the girls get home from their piano lessons."

"The instructor called," Adrian said. "They're staying late today. We've got at least two hours. We can take our time." But we almost ran down the hall towards the bathroom.

A/N: Ok, hands up if you want to play "Artist and Mechanic" with Adrian...

Seriously, this was only going to be like a paragraph in a longer chapter about stuff that happens between now and sort of the last bit of the story but then I pictured Adrian wanting to sort of play at being married, in his own Adrian-ish way. And this chapter came out.

There's maybe four or five more chapters to go, and most of them will be a lot longer than this one.