Holding Hands Won't Be Enough

Seth liked Ville, he had always admired him. It was the single greatest honor in his life being asked to produce his favourite band’s new album; that they had sourced him based on his work and their admiration of it. When Seth first met Mal he remembers them talking about their favourite music; HIM of course cropping up in conversation, it’s only recently that he had gone over that memory and realised how cagey she had seemed as he spoke about them, her only comment being, ”they’re okay”.

Since he had found out over dinner a few weeks back that Ville and Mal were once involved he had done nothing but observe her behavior; her body language; her eyes. The same with Ville. He had seen the lingering looks they gave each other without realising; the way Mal rubbed her right foot on the back of her left ankle nervously when Ville spoke to her; the way Ville tried to mask his smile constantly when they were in the same room; how Mal would do anything to encourage him out of the room if Ville was in it; they were all starting to add up in his mind.

He knew Mal wasn’t happy being rooted in California, but she knew what she was getting herself into from the get go – he told himself. He told her of his fear of flying, his love of his home state and his want to be an hour or so’s drive away from family at the absolute maximum.

He loved Oscar, he really did, he was a great little dude, but Mal’s non-disclosure about the paternity of Oscar had always irked him. He had seen her passport, she hadn’t been in France as long as she said she had been, he knew that the story she told him of the one night stand was bullshit, but, he came to except that it was none of his business, what was his business is that she was allowing him to be the male role model in Oscar’s life – and that had been enough, until he sat in the studio looking through the glass at Ville laughing and joking about in the sound booth, then it suddenly came to him why Mal was so visibly torn between being on edge and being happy around him; why she had made so many play dates for Oscar when usually he had very few; why she had been buying him more and more hats. The hair, the curly, dark chocolate mop of thick hair; the way it tumbled over the ears and flicked up up the back of the neck – it was the same, exactly the same. Then he saw the eyes, the big round dishes of green, it didn’t take an idiot to put two and two together once you noticed it. Ville was Oscar’s father and Mal hadn’t told him, hadn’t told anyone – it was plain as day to him now.

As they now lay in bed, he looked at her body asleep with her back turned to him, her long burnt sunset hair sprawled her pillow; he wondered what she had been doing pottering around in the kitchen for so long before coming to bed; he wondered if Ville had come back and they were talking more. He hated that they were seemingly reconnecting, he hated that he could see how much Ville wanted to on his face. He wanted to wake her up and scream and shout his suspicions in her face until he lost his voice, but he knew that it wasn’t smart for his career or for keeping their relationship -he had his own secrets to keep, he couldn’t do anything too brash, he had to ride it out – they would be going back to Finland soon enough and everything would go back to normal.

Making sure she was sound asleep he slipped out the bed and carefully padded across the room, as he had done every night for a long time and headed for his home studio in the garage. Glad that no one was occupying his space doing some late night tinkering on any instrument, he closed and locked the door before pulling out his phone and dialing the number he could recount with more ease than Mal’s.

”Hey baby girl..” he smiled.