In another life

one

On the last day of life as I know it, I’m sitting in my law firm office, watching the digital clock in the bottom corner of my computer screen tick over to eleven p.m.

Only an hour until I’ll be working on Christmas Day. A new low, even for me.

The kids are already asleep, the little voice in my head needles. At this point, what does it matter? They won’t know when you got home.

I scroll through the eight pages of the document I’ve been working on, barely seeing the words.

Go home, I beg myself. Instead, I remained glued to my chair.

My favorite family picture sits in a frame on my desk. It was taken two years ago, when Chelsea and Molly were just five and seven, and Nina, my wife of ten years, was looking at them, not at the camera. Her beautiful, tired face was transformed by joy when she smiled at our daughters, and the photographer had captured that, just before reminding all of us to smile at the camera.

This was the only photograph from the whole shoot that I liked. In all the other photos, my wife and I had fixed, unconvincing smiles, and Nina’s shoulders were stiff under the arm I’d obediently wrapped around her at the photographer’s direction.

My eyes drift closed for a moment before I’m struck with the dull panic of vertigo and nod back to full consciousness, bracing one hand against the edge of my desk.

Decision time: be a coward and sleep at the office on Christmas Eve, or get my ass home.

The beautiful leather settee in the corner of my spacious office isn’t inviting. I know from experience that the supple white leather may as well be covering blocks of stone instead of cushions.

Through the smoky glass wall the settee sat against there’s a fuzzy circle of light. I’d assumed everyone else had already gone home, but apparently I’m not the only one still at his desk.

Aleks is here.

I shouldn’t be surprised. The firm’s managing partner, Perry Midney, always makes approving comments about Aleks’s dedication, demonstrated in part by his habit of “burning the midnight oil” or “being the one to lock up the place.”

The thought of Aleks makes me grit my teeth. Throughout my decade and a half of practice Aleks and I have shared an employer, but the firm is so big and the Pittsburgh office was so distant, I’d comforted myself with the assurance that we’d never really work together. Then, four years ago, he transferred to the Denver office.

Sometimes, I blame Aleks for how the universe had started yanking pieces out of the Jenga tower of my life right around the time he’d set foot in the mile-high city. Maybe Nina can hardly contain her exasperation when I talk about work because I launch into rants about how much Midney adores Aleks. Maybe I’m spending more and more time at the office to compete with someone who wants me to fail. Maybe I wake up with a headache three days a week because every time I hear Aleks laugh during my work day, I grind my teeth.

I have to go home.

I reach for my messenger bag, a step toward actually leaving the building. Then my office door opens.

Aleksander Petersen stands in the doorway and stops cold at the sight of me.

He isn’t wearing a tie, the top button of his shirt collar is undone, and his thick, shoulder-length, white-blond hair is pulled into a messy bun on the top of his head. Somehow, how he looks is more distracting than what the fuck he’s doing barging into my office.

Neither of us says anything. Aleks opens his mouth, then closes it again. With his hair tied up, his face has a diamond’s angles and his eyes seem bluer than usual.

“Can I help you with something?” I ask, my voice even gruffer than usual after not being used for hours.

Aleks’s mouth opens, then snaps closed. He goes from perfect stillness into sudden motion, taking down his hair so it spills over his neck and hastily re-buttoning his collar, like he’s a schoolboy caught breaking a dress code.

He’s flustered. I’m not used to seeing him this way. His eyes slide away from mine, which is odd too. Usually he meets my gaze relentlessly, like a dare.

“You’re actually here,” Aleks says. “I assumed you’d left the light on. You never work past six.”

Aleks’s shirt sleeves were rolled up his slender forearms to his elbows, and now he’s tugging them back down. One of his scars snakes around his right arm and forms a shiny pink knot right above his wrist. My eyes trace the line of it before he covers back up.

“I just came in to turn off the light before I left,” Aleks goes on on, restlessly filling the silence. “I didn’t mean to bother you. I—sorry, but what are you doing here?”

The question shocks me once again. Aleks doesn’t ask me questions, and I return the favor. The first time I’d had an unavoidable reason to communicate with Aleks, I’d devised a strategy of speaking around him. I catch him in a group and tell everyone what only Aleks really needs to know. Aleks has followed my lead, making random announcements at the end of team meetings without meeting my eyes or, if direct communication is unavoidable, sending an email.

We haven’t been in a room alone together in seventeen years. Not since—

“It’s Christmas Eve,” Aleks emphasizes. He glances at his white-gold Rolex, frowns at the time, and corrects himself. “Nearly Christmas Day.”

“So?” I shoot back, apparently reverting to the mental state of my early twenties instantly during a one-on-one conversation with Aleks, despite being forty—okay, forty-two. “You’re here,” I point out.

“Yes, but you have a family, Casella,” Aleks says. “Christmas is a family holiday. You have children.”

“Do I?” I mutter. “I’d forgotten about them. Thanks for reminding me.” The words alone probably wouldn’t have shut Aleks up, but the deliberate sneer in my voice does. Aleks is staring at me again. I stare back, filled with more restless anger the longer our eyes hold. I need to end this conversation before I boil over. “What, do you want me to get out of here so that you can poke around my office? Or do you really expect me to believe you’re here to turn off a light?”

Aleks’s brows rise. “What exactly do you think I’d be looking for? This is a paperless office, Cassella. If there was something I wanted to know about your work, I’d look in our digital files, not your desk drawers.” His brow knitted and his voice lowers like he’s speaking more to himself than to me. “Honestly, the most oblivious person in the universe.”

Anger flares in my chest, a hungry flame seeking tinder, and Aleks happens to be the closest source of fuel. “And you’re the most opportunistic.”

Two pink spots appear high on Aleks’s sharp cheekbones, and he tilts his head so his hair slides into his face, completely covering the narrow, livid scar that runs up his neck and curls just past the hinge of his jaw. “I don’t understand what your fucking problem is,” he hisses, his blue eyes seeming to flash as they narrow. “I’ve stayed out of your way for years because it’s obvious you take issue with me. But—why? You do realize we’re not students vying for the top rank anymore?”

“Vying?” I echo, with a rusty, incredulous laugh.

His chin juts up. “It was always the two of us. Neck and neck. What do you want me to call it?”

“The two of us,” I repeat coldly. “Neck and neck.”

“Yes! Only one of us could be first, and in the end it happened to be me.” He throws up his hands. “Can’t you get over it? What does it matter now?”

My heartbeat is surging, flooding my ears with the thud of my pulse and flushing my whole body with heat. I can’t believe he has the gall to say these things to me. To rewrite history. “You’re so full of shit. Are you really going to pretend that I don’t like you because of some petty jealousy over getting outranked in law school?”

He hesitates. The sign of weakness is too much for me to resist in the moment. I feel like a dog at the end of a chain, straining toward a rabbit. My chain snaps.

I say, “We both know the real reason that I can barely look at you.”

“C-cassella,” Aleks managed, a tremor in his voice creating a catch in my name. “Please—”

But it’s too late. My anger has momentum, like a tide. I can’t reel it in. Honestly, I don’t even try. “We both know you earned the top grade in Abernathy’s class on your knees.”

Silence echoes my words. The poisonous drug of angry satisfaction pumps through my veins, and I feel triumph instead of shame when Aleks, face pale, takes a heavy backward step, like he’s been shoved—or punched.

A second ebbs past and my conscience begins to override my temper. But before it can, the shock clears from Aleks’s face and he smirks, seeming to get a few inches taller as he glances at his fingernails. “Tell yourself whatever you want.” His words drip with disdain. “Whatever makes you feel better, considering you got your job because you’re daddy’s little boy, the same reason everyone here scrambles to cover your ass when you fuck up.” He puts his back to me in dismissal, like I’m a sack of trash he’d just set on the curb, and walks off without bothering to close my office door behind him, moving with the silent grace of an angry cat. 

I launch myself after him without thinking—out of my chair and around my desk before I stop myself. I back up until the edge of my desk hits the back of my thighs and lean heavily against it.

What was I going to do, get into a fistfight in my workplace lobby?

I corral my breathing. Suck air deliberately in, and force it deliberately back out.

No. I won’t give him the fucking satisfaction. I push the embers of twisted feelings his words fanned to a blaze back into the corroded pit in my stomach.

Then I pick up my messenger bag and my coat and head for the elevators. The light is still on in Aleks’s office, across the lobby and down the hall, but his door is firmly closed.

In the elevator, I watch the grid of illuminated buttons, sensitive to the lurch of acceleration, and another when it slows at the first level of the parking garage.

I step out into cold, snow-flavored air. Past the dull yellow security light, I can see a slow-falling sprinkle of tiny flakes. Imagining my little girls waking up to the sight of white-dusted evergreens outside their window makes it easier to walk toward my car. A true white Christmas. Even my tired heart lifts at the thought.

I deliberately left my cell phone in my coat pocket, unchecked. Now with my coat over my arm, I can’t ignore it so easily when it vibrates. Grimacing, I take it from my pocket, stomach sinking when I see that Nina is calling. She has to be epically pissed off, and I deserve it.

Trying to decide whether I prefer to be shouted at now, over the phone, or later, when I get home, I don’t see the headlights until the car turns at the bend in the ramp. Then, the light is blinding.

All I hear is the squeal of brakes. I am so fucking surprised, I make no effort to save myself. I look into the white-hot light and let myself be struck.

Pain doesn’t register immediately—all I’m aware of is that there was no air in my chest, and I am flying through the air. And then I hit the pavement and everything goes dark.

Quiet.

A thought pierces the emptiness—Am I dead?

I gasp and my eyes fly open.

I expect to be lying on a cold concrete floor, racked with pain, my body broken.

But I’m lying in bed, and nothing hurts. I frantically run my hands down my body, checking for wounds. I kick off the blankets so I can assess every inch of myself, down to my toes.

“I’m alive,” I whisper. That means—what? The collision with the car was… a dream? A hallucination?

The blankets shift across my lap as Nina rolls over beside me. I can’t believe I didn’t wake her with my panicked thrashing. She’s an incredibly light sleeper.

I slowly turn my body to swing my feet off the edge of the mattress. A piece of art on the wall looks vaguely familiar, but wasn’t hanging in my house this morning when I left for work. The unframed canvas is painted with an abstract tangle of two bodies in shades of gray.

I look down at my body, plucking at the buttery-soft material of my sweatpants. I don’t recognize them. I tug reflexively on the drawstring waist with my left hand and freeze.

My fingertips just grazed a ridge of muscle on my abdomen that I definitely didn’t have when I woke up this morning. For the past ten years, my midsection has been distinctly soft. And now that I’m staring down at my lap, I see that my thighs are too lean inside the unfamiliar sweats.

And the wedding band that glints faintly on my left ring finger isn’t the traditional, rounded, yellow-gold one I’ve been wearing for fifteen years. It’s square and silver.

“The hell—?” a voice that is not my wife’s rumbles from behind me, and the hair stands up on the back of my neck. “Has your wolf been out for his nightly howl? Honestly, we could gotten had a sensible pet, you know. Like a fish. Or even a shih tzu.” The more the voice says, the more horribly familiar it becomes.

I slowly turn my head to look over my shoulder. Sprawled out beside me on his stomach is Aleksander Petersen, with a horrifying look of sleepy affection on his face as he rakes his hair away from his face. On his hand is a ring that matches the one I just found on my own finger.