Alternate Histories (1/1)
A Crossing Jordan Fanfiction
Written by Kate "SuperKate" Butler
Spring came early to Boston and its surrounding counties and Lily chuckled as he pointed it out, setting a heaping bowl of potato salad on the table. “I guess you’re right,” she remarked, and glanced up at the sky thoughtfully. “I never notice, anymore, until May. Because then, I’m busy trying to figure out what I’m going to do when the kids are out of school.”
She smiled and brushed a red strand of hair from her eyes, looking about ready to add to the discussion when a small form emerged from the house and grabbed her around the waist, nearly toppling her over. He caught her by the arm and steadied her, almost sending his fistful of napkins fluttering onto the brick patio. “Millie,” Lily scolded as the little girl – all dark, braided pigtails and big, frightened eyes – buried her face in her mother’s jeans. “We’ve talked about this kind of behavior. Especially when Uncle Mahesh is here.”
He gave a little smile and a wave at Millie as she pulled her face out of Lily’s leg and shot him a dour look. “Daddy’s being mean,” she harrumphed, her lower lip pouting out. “He and Mim found a spider and they’re chasing me around with it. It’s still alive, too!”
Rolling her eyes, Lily patted the girl on the head. “Let’s go have a talk with Daddy,” she sighed, and sent an apologetic look back at her visitor. “He should at least have your sister behave better when your uncle’s here to visit.”
Her “uncle” watched them both leave the patio, hand-in-hand, before resuming his task of setting the lunch table. It felt cooler in the suburbs than in the city, he realized, though it could very well have been the enormous shade trees that arched over the patio that brought the temperature of the air down. The breeze cut through his casual garb – a t-shirt and jeans, a far cry from work’s dress shirts and sports coats – and he shivered, his arms rising in goose flesh. Through the sliding door, he could see Lily – with Millie still clinging to her leg – frowning and wagging a finger, and the sight brought at least some hint of a smile to his face; she’d always amused him whenever she’d tried to be stern and serious.
He’d just finished setting the silverware and tucked the napkins into their wooden holder when the door slid open. “Sorry about that, mate,” Nigel smiled, and he glanced up from his task of organizing the relish tray to see a beer offered in his direction. “I always forget that six-year-olds don’t have the same kind of fun the older ones do.”
“Or the kind of fun you do,” he retorted, and Nigel sent him a hurt expression as he snatched the beer away. The liquid was cool against his mouth and down his throat, and he sipped it gingerly, looking out on the lawn. “I like your new house,” he said after a moment’s silence.
“It’s alright,” Nigel shrugged, and joined him on the edge of the patio. Their lazy yellow dog waddled along the fence line, sniffing at something or another, and a lawnmower buzzed somewhere in the distance. “I suppose I understand all Lil’s very good reasons for wanting to move out here, but I miss the city.” He snorted and took a swig of his own beer. “You’d be surprised how little work there is at a suburban morgue.”
“I doubt that.” He rubbed idly at the condensation on his bottle with a thumb, and for a moment, the backyard was blissfully quiet, a peace washing over the tried-and-true tradition of two men standing on a patio, drinking beers.
Then, Nigel nudged him in the side with an elbow. “We’re still holding out for you to arrange some sort of nuptials, Buggles,” he informed him with a grin, his eyebrows wiggling. “Jordan marrying before you was certainly a sign of the apocalypse. Tell me the truth: are you seeing anyone?”
He said nothing, and Nigel nudged him again.
“C’mon, Buggles. I swear on the one collection of porn I have left that Lily does not know about that I won’t tell her. Or anyone else.” His grin widened. “Mum’s the word, honest.”
“No one.” He took a long pull from his beer, ignoring the surprise in his friend’s expression and the sudden disappearance of his smile. Or at least, he tried to; he ended up shrugging away the sudden concern. “When do I have time? Since you moved, and Jordan’s on leave, I’m always working.”
“A man has to make time for something more than just his work,” his companion sighed, and he arched an eyebrow. “Sorry. I guess Lil’s rubbed off on me.”
“Obviously,” he smirked, and swallowed another mouthful of beer.
“Nigel!” They both turned around to see Lily standing in the doorway, hands on her hips. She was trying to look intimidating, he could tell, but there was just the smallest hint of a smile touching at her face, and there was a warmth captured within it that suggested some form of deep love beneath the feigned annoyance. “Mim is insisting we keep the spider. She even named it.”
“It’s a living being!” protested a girl’s voice, and Mim popped around the corner of the door, her long hair hanging in her face. “Thou shalt not kill, Daddy! Do you want to be a killer?”
Nigel rolled his eyes. “You need to figure out what to do with it with your mum,” he ruled, and she grinned toothily before ducking back into the house. Lily’s eyes narrowed. “What? I don’t care if she keeps the spider.”
“You will when Millie has more nightmares and starts sleeping with us, again,” Lily scolded, and Nigel’s face fell as she turned tail and walked back into the house.
He, however, chuckled. “She’s got your number,” he observed, and glanced up at Nigel.
“That she does, Buggles.” He shook his head and turned back to the big, green-grass lawn and the looming trees that had somehow survived the creation of suburbia. “Say, do you want to hear something ridiculous?”
“Do you ever say anything that isn’t?”
He smirked as Nigel frowned at him, but then the atmosphere turned serious and Nigel stole a sip from his beer bottle. “I think back on that year, sometimes, and everything that happened. The visa, and marrying Lily, and all that. And I sometimes wonder if it couldn’t have turned out differently.”
For a moment, he considered this, his stomach tightening as he took another swallow of his drink. “Well, you were the ass who let his visa expire.”
“As you refuse to let me forget,” he returned, a bony elbow meeting ribs in a teasing prod. “But I mean, what would have happened if things turned out a different way? Like what if I’d not been an ass – as you always put it – and had renewed my visa, or if Garret hadn’t been such a stubborn wanker and actually written me a decent review, or if Lil hadn’t been completely insane and agreed to marry me?”
“Or if I’d agreed to marry you,” he nodded, and glanced up at Nigel.
Nigel smiled at that and nodded back, his fingers running along the line of the label on his beer bottle, his brown eyes warm and inviting. There was a crash in the house and a high-pitched shriek, and he sighed and shook his head. “Or that,” he agreed, smirking. “I’d guarantee you, I wouldn’t be stuck on a Massachusetts mock-up of Wisteria Lane, had I married you.” He chuckled softly to himself, raising his bottle to his lips. “And sometimes, I think about what might have happened had you chosen me over your life of destitute singlehood.”
“Yeah.” He frowned as he said this, Nigel’s joke causing a lump to catch in his throat, and he tried to wash it away with a desperate gulp of beer. The sliding door opened behind them and he could hear Lily and at least one of the girls come out, talking together, and smelled roast chicken catching on the breeze and to his nostrils.
Nigel smiled, glancing down at him. “What about you, eh? Do you ever think about what would have happened, had we married?”
A breeze caught in the branches of a nearby tree and he pulled his eyes from the laugh lines and the bright smile, glancing up at the thick canopy of leaves above him. For a moment, through the boughs, he thought he caught a glimmer of something else, another time and place, a life where there were no unanswered questions and no stomach-churning “what ifs.”
He shrugged his shoulders as he brought his gaze and mind back to the present, to the laughing children, cool beer, early spring, and Nigel staring down at him.
“Yeah,” he admitted, and sipped his beer. “Every day.”
