Sleepless Nights Read Online Free Page A

as he stood in the kitchen with a dishcloth in his hand and a painfully aggrieved expression in his sea-green eyes. “‘What will happen when the baby comes?’ you said. “You need to be a better father,’ you said. ‘You need to watch your son grow up,’ you said. Now the baby’s here, I’ve cut back my night hours at Crimpson in spite of the recession, I’m nervous every time there’s a knock at my office door, and this is the moment you choose to fly out the door with Samuel and leave me behind…”
    I protested, sweeping the innards of the newspaper into a box (Peter’s strategy is to disembowel the Times, section by section, throwing everything he doesn’t want on the floor). “It’s not that, darling. Hear me out. It’s just that after all the hospitals, the worry of pregnancy, it seems a shame to pass up the opportunity of a littlebit of time—”
    “You seem confident that it is an opportunity,” Tom cut in acerbically, dark curly hair standing nearly on end as he rubbed furiously, exhaustedly, at his head, “but I should perhaps point out that Paul hasn’t offered us his house in a year.”
    This, I admitted, as I attacked Lucille’s lipstick-stained teacups, was indeed a small problem. Last summer Paul was warmly insistent that we should go and stay in his summer place, but at the time we were both working too hard; since my pregnancy, we’d hardly seen him at all (Tom was in his office almost around the clock in order to try to make partner at his firm, while I was confined to my bed).
    “Perhaps you could ask him—” I tried not to wheedle.
    “Q,” Tom snapped, staring at me, green eyes narrowed, “really, I don’t understand you!”
    There was a muffled yelp from our son, who was sleeping on the sofa, and we both turned hastily to look at him. His mouth was agape, drool spilling gently onto the cushions; he was a little red around the eyes still, from a bout of furious crying that afternoon. He was beautiful; and he was (everyone agreed, from bejeweled old ladies in the street to the plump cashier at the bank) the spitting image of his father. He had a shock of fine dark hair, black eyes that were turning to green, and hamster cheeks. He was warm and floppy in my arms, a little frog with bandy legs and spread-out toes, and somehow the look of too many fingers on his tiny crumpled hands. Sensing his own wrist near his face, he opened his mouth, cracked his eyes ajar, and began furiously sucking. Slowly, his eyelids turned heavy, then drooped, as his body relaxed again in sleep.
    My husband and I caught each other’s gaze.
    “Listen Tom,” I went on, walking over and putting my arms around him, his big comfortable chest, his wide warm shoulders, “the truth is, I was thinking. What if you came too ? What if you saidto yourself, forget it, they’re not going to partner me-Crimpson made that perfectly clear before Samuel was born—so I’m going to use up all my long-overdue holiday entitlement and go away for a few weeks with my wife?”
    My chest thumping now, I stared at the bit of my husband’s shoulder in front of my face. It was a very nice bit of shoulder, as it happened, muscly, firm, and covered in starched white cotton. I pleated a bit of it in between my fingers, and waited, hoping.
    Tom craned down to look into my face, his warm breath fanning my eyelashes. “You want me to commit suicide at Crimpson?” He sounded incredulous. “In this economy? Q, do you know what’s happening out there?”
    “I know how it sounds,” I admitted. “I know what the partners will say. I know what they’ll think. But Tom, your position is tenuous no matter what we do. If Luis didn’t think you’re the world’s best lawyer at handling bankruptcies, you’d already be out on your ass. I think you should take control now—ask for a few weeks off, which you’re entitled to, after all. Luis is bound to support you; he’s desperate to keep you around. And then we can use the