✅ My Cousin's Keeper [NaNoWriMo 2021]

19. My Art of Persuasion

This chapter is dedicated to Eladon, with thanks for all your support. Thank you!

For everyone who supports me on there, I will post one extra chapter at the start of every month, as well as giving $5+ patrons access to unpublished chapters of all my current books.

After a late-night marathon of Captain Kairo, it was a long time before we stayed up so late again, or drank so much. I don't know what had possessed us to be so careless. Perhaps it had been a reminder of when I was young and stupid; when I hadn't felt the pressure of responsibility weighing me down. But I wasn't going to get into that state in a hurry. Our lives settled into a more regular routine. Ffrances stayed over more often, visiting for a day or two in between returning to her own apartment. Now that we knew Tess wouldn't be intimidated by the presence of another adult in the house, and that she wouldn't have any problems with the wilder side of my lifestyle, we could go back to doing whatever seemed like a good idea at the time.

I did find more time to help Tess with her schoolwork. She tried teaching me what they'd been learning in history, which included a whole slew of names and dates I'd never even heard before, and which I would surely have forgotten if they'd been important while I was in school. But quite often, when I asked for clarification, she seemed to be actually thinking about what she was teaching. It was true what they said about teaching someone else; it needs you to understand the subject rather than just memorising it. And I hoped that perhaps it would help Tess with her upcoming exam.

I was working late more often as well, over the next week or two. We had a new contract with Claughton Innovative, and that required a lot of extra hours in the office. But I felt safe now, knowing that Tess was quite capable of looking after herself if I called to say I was going to be back late. I didn't like letting a little kid sort out her own dinner, and would often try to make sure Ffrances would be there if I wasn't. Once or twice they even had dinner waiting for me as soon as I came through the door.

Having a child in the house was a big shake up in all of our lives, even more so than I had expected. But within a week or three, our lives were starting to settle down into a new kind of couple. A couple of wild former party-animals, or at least former students (which I assumed was roughly the same thing) were becoming a family.

I didn't talk to Tess again about her little problem. I hoped that she would turn to me again when she felt more comfortable, or when she realised that the situation wasn't going to change. But she didn't seem to be quite so frustrated when she came down to wash her sheets after an occasional night of deep sleep. She knew that I knew now, and as long as I didn't push the baby thing too hard she wasn't going to waste time trying to deny something that we already knew.

But one evening after work, I decided it might be the right time to broach the subject with my girlfriend. For all the promises I'd made to Tess, I was still less than a hundred percent certain about my ability to convince her. And after a long wait, I thought tonight would be the perfect opportunity to talk.

Tess wasn't here tonight. She'd told her parents that she would show them around the area on a video call, so now she was taking a moonlight walk in the park just to make sure that she could find her way around. To Ffrances that still sounded strange, but I'd been using video conferencing to meet with clients for so long that it was almost as natural. I guess in that way I was already a little closer to the mindset of the next generation. There was a park opposite my house, a long narrow one that followed where land had once been set aside for a railway line that never happened. The park was long and thin, but spread out where the odd shape of plots had meant it was never worth anyone's money to develop it properly. Tess would be getting off the school bus a few stops early today, and walking back along the park while showing her parents the places where she was now living. They had said they would also be treating her to a virtual stroll around a sculpture trail near their new home, and they expected it to take several hours.