VIOLET SKY, takigawa chris yuu

━ epilogue

act iii

life will go on;
together?
no.

epilogue

━━━━━━

Amara doesn't expect Jordan to get back to her so quickly.

Well-aware of his busy schedule with his job, at the start of her lunch break, she sent him a text, asking to call her to discuss some things and that, of course, he could take his time to call her; it wasn't anything particularly urgent.

But by the time she's leaving the café she spent her lunch break at, her phone buzzes with an incoming call from him. She hums, pleasantly surprised, and answers.

"Hello?"

"Hey, Amara," Jordan's soft tenor reaches her ears. "I saw your text. What's going on? Ricky alright?"

She stops at a crosswalk with a few other people; an older man and woman, tourists, if the way they're both hunched over a map gives any indication, a businessman dressed in a pressed suit, talking on his phone, familiar Quebecois French falling from his lips, a college student tugging their UT hoodie off their torso, no doubt feeling the unusual warmth today.

It may be late March, but they're finally easing into something like spring.

"He's okay," Amara replies. "It's not about him. Or, well, nothing serious. I was just calling you to let you know — well," she pauses, unsure how to breach this. The crosswalk indicator flickers to a pedestrian. She and the others cross the street.

She takes a deep breath. "I met someone. And with the way things are turning out, he wants to start contributing. So, I figured, I'll tell you to cut the payments for Ricky's daycare and my rent, so he'll pick up that."

"Oh," Jordan says, tone still light, but with a ripple of surprise lifting the intonations. "Well, sure. That's not a problem. I'm . . . glad to hear that. That you met someone, I mean, and it seems like it's going well."

She smiles faintly. Well might be an understatement. It's going more than well. After they'd returned to Toronto a few days after the start of the New Year, she and Chris, naturally, had to sit down and hash things out. Not the stuff about their feelings, that was made abundantly clear, but about the place Chris would be taking in Ricky's life — how they were going to slowly incorporate him into their schedule, how they were going to slowly incorporate him into Ricky's life as a father figure. They had to discuss discipline, what was okay and what wasn't (absolutely no corporeal punishment, no matter what, but Chris had been in vehement agreement about not using it, which wasn't surprising, but it was nice to hear), essentially all of the new responsibilities he was taking on as a result of him and Amara getting together.

For a moment, she feared it might turn him away, but in the three months that have passed, he's still there. Spending most of his time at her apartment, actually, taking care of Ricky during the day — not all the time, they still sent him off to daycare, just because Chris wasn't always free, particularly when the new season was looming and is now currently in session, and to keep him used to that setting. Doing grocery runs for her, cleaning occasionally, picking Ricky up from daycare, cooking dinner.

It is all very domestic.

The transition to his season had been rocky, too, as he started spending long hours training again and had to actually leave the city for spring training, but she acclimated. That was the good thing, she supposes; she's been alone so long, she knows how to handle it all. The difference now is that it's not all falling onto her shoulders and even when it does at times, she knows he'll come back. That when the season winds down, he'll be back in her apartment, getting up in the mornings, getting Ricky dressed, cooking breakfast, making them lunch and sending the both of them off with a kiss.