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"I hate this kitchen."
Chad trailed a hand over the smooth surface of the island. His touch was casually possessive, the caress of a lover almost. It made Vivian strangely uncomfortable to witness it even though she'd certainly seen more than that out of Hayden since joining the house's eternal occupancy. She sat up straight to avoid leaning on the glossy granite. There wasn't much that Chad could do to hurt her now, but that didn't mean she wanted to provoke him. Her own hand moved instinctively to clutch at the edge of the bassinet her infant son was sleeping in; Chad's attention appeared wholly focused on the kitchen though, his eyes never strayed to her baby.
They hadn't spent much time talking. The two of them weren't exactly on familiar terms at this stage. Some of that was because Vivian had been made aware that he had legitimately wanted to steal her children for himself and some was simply because Chad rarely let himself be seen by any of them.
Vivian hesitated before she responded, "Why is that? Don't tell me you hate the pasta arm, too."
She smiled slightly as Chad finally looked at her as if he could really see her. There was an edge, a sharpness to the smile that he returned to her; Vivian wondered if Moira counted Chad among those spirits who wanted to inflict their pain on the others who wandered into the house. Whatever he had been in life, Chad Warwick certainly seemed dangerous enough now after it.
"The pasta arm? Oh, please. I love that thing. It was one of the only things that Patrick offered to buy for this kitchen. Hell, I think it's actually the only thing that he suggested."
That was interesting. She knew that they had been the last owners. Marcy had told her that it was their efforts that had restored the house to its full glory. Vivian had wondered how much of the house was thanks to them and how much truly was original.
"How much of the house did you have to work with? I know you were the ones who remodeled it, right? Marcy said that when we were doing our first tour."
Chad paused on his side of the bar and seemed to consider that for a moment. It hadn't been that long since they had---come over. Vivian imagined that it might have been different for him because he had died violently. Her own passing hadn't been gentle, but it hadn't exactly been murder either. She suppressed a shudder in reaction.
"We moved in thinking we had quite a bit. We were going to flip it, you know? At the time, everyone was doing it. Buy a good prospect at a good price, improve the major fixtures and bam! Sell it for a huge profit, invest in a place of our own, and put in a bid for a surrogate."
He shrugged before settling in with a hip on the counter. Chad cut quite a figure even in death. There was something stylish about him that lent itself to an air of casual elegance that was often imitated but never replicated. He would have been someone that Vivian would have wanted to talk with in life, but likely wouldn't have had the nerve to start the conversation.
Vivian forced her smile to stay in place as she tried to follow the flow of his thinking, "You were going to get a surrogate? Or was he? How was that going to work? If you don't mind me asking, I mean."
"I wouldn't have cared," Chad murmured, crossing his arms over his chest as his attention wandered to the breakfast nook, "I wanted to use Patrick's sperm. I tried to pitch it to him as a way to carry on his family name. He didn't have any brothers. Me? I come from a big family and besides, who wouldn't have wanted a tall, blond son? Or a daughter. I told him it would even be great to have a girl since we could keep her fashionable. She'd have been the girl to know in her school."
"That's always a good thing. Violet never got along well with kids her own age. Even when we were living on the East coast, she wasn't what you'd call popular. Were you---"
"No, clearly your Violet isn't the best judge of character. I suppose we were all young once though and it is so hard to see clearly when you're blinded by love, isn't it?"
"I---" Vivian cleared her throat, "Yes. Yes it is."
She'd followed blindly along with every lie her husband had fed her while he was fucking his student behind her back. They were supposed to be mourning their son and Ben had been deep-dicking a co-ed while Vivian had been feeling guilty for discouraging his advances. She'd loved him. She'd loved him more than anything, but the thought of possibly getting pregnant, of having to incubate another corpse, had made her ill enough to keep any kind of passion she might have had for him at bay.
Chad's partner, Patrick, was a bastard, too, from what she'd heard. He could get it up for anything with a dick as far as Moira could tell. Vivian still got embarrassed talking to Moira about sexual things even though she now knew all the circumstances of Moira's own transition to this world. It was a little like talking about sex with someone's mother---or someone's grandmother considering Moira's age.
"Have you come to forgive yours? Now, I mean? With the evidence of his treachery scheming and plotting forever right here under your nose? I don't know that I could, if I were you."
Hayden was definitely a challenge. She listened to Vivian's order to go away though. It worked better than any charm she could have ever devised though Vivian didn't know precisely why it worked. Tate hadn't shared that information with Violet and Vivian wasn't curious enough to try to track him down to ask for herself. Truthfully, it had been long enough since Vivian had seen the girl that she had almost allowed herself to become convinced that Hayden's presence was merely a part of some bad dream rather than an actual reality.
Vivian had forgiven Ben.
She couldn't imagine how she would have been expected to hold a grudge against him for all eternity. Then again. There were spirits in this house whose anger was great enough to pass along for centuries. It might not have been such a bizarre question in consideration.
"I've found that the forgiveness was a lot easier to come by once life was put into perspective for me. Death did a lot to cool my temper. Where's yours? Patrick, I mean. Are you two fighting?"
Chad rolled his eyes at her, "Aren't we always fighting? That's what I'm resigned to here, didn't you know? An eternity spent fighting with the man I love about how much he doesn't love me in the house that was meant to be our salvation. How much of this house is original? Well, we tore out the rotting floorboards, the worn tiles, refinished everything, repainted, reupholstered, repaved, repaned, on and on and on forever and there were still improvements to be made when we were pushed into an early retirement."
Vivian didn't quite know how to go from there. She knew more than she cared to about the violence that had been done to Chad and his partner. The thing that struck her the most was how very much they had both lost from the house while still loving it as much as their cheating husbands.
"When he goes away, do you know where he is? Can you see him? I'm still trying to figure all this out."
Enough time passed that she honestly didn't expect an answer from him. Chad surprised her by actually responding.
"I always feel him. If you spend enough time thinking on yours? You'll notice it. There's this feeling inside like an invisible string that if you focus enough attention on it, you can trace it back to the source. Right now he's most likely chasing down that little monster who did this to us. He does that when the itch gets to him and he doesn't want to try to fuck his anger out on me so beating on him seems to be the next best solution. I'm still waiting for the day to come when he decides that he'd like to try fucking him instead of hitting him. I'm betting on this length of time once over and by then it will look like a good idea."
"Fucking him? He's only a boy!"
Chad turned incredulous eyes on her and gave her a look that clearly illustrated what he thought of that protest. Her face flushed as his eyes traveled meaningfully to the sleeping baby at her side that had as yet gone unmentioned. Vivian couldn't let herself think on that too much either. It was beyond her comprehension that she'd genuinely thought that he was her husband that night. The whole event seemed far, far away from her now; the details were lost to her.
Vivian's voice was weak as she tried to counter, "It's this house. It makes everyone in it sick, evil even. I look back at all the things that Ben did, the things that I did, and I know that this place is what's to blame for it."
He moved then, surprisingly, tracing his hand over the bar and then raising his other to run along the other cabinet as he moved to lean on the table in the breakfast nook. The only sound in the room was that of the baby's quiet breathing. Vivian sipped her tea which she'd honestly forgotten about. It had gone cold, but she found it didn't bother her at all. The flavor was still there and she didn't really need the sustenance.
She had forgotten how good it felt to simply be with someone else. Not talking, just sharing a moment.
"We picked this table out together from a catalog. Our initials are carved under the top. The day they delivered it? We didn't even bother taking the packing tape off before making love right here, right on top of it. Patrick held my hand and told me he loved me and that being with me was the best thing that had ever happened to him in his life. I honestly thought that when we sold this place? I would have to take this table with us because I wouldn't be willing to leave it behind. It was too much a part of our love."
Vivian stared at it, seeing it for the first time almost. She couldn't help but remember her own first years of marriage when she was genuinely in love with Ben and they had wanted to make love on everything because the bed wasn't ever close enough. That passion still sometimes flared up for them. She couldn't imagine what it would be like to have it be lost to her forever while she was haunting the house their love had built.
Chad's voice was decisive as he stated, "You can't blame my house for him. You can lay a lot of blame for a lot of things at the door of my house, but you do not get to blame my house for Tate Langdon."
Looking away from Vivian, his eyes went vague again. She could tell he was drifting away into his own thoughts once more.
"I hate this kitchen. It was supposed to be everything we wanted. I picked everything in here. This room? It's all mine. Pristine ruins built from broken dreams. I hate this room the most out of all of them."
He disappeared as quickly as he'd appeared and Vivian exhaled a breath she hadn't even known she was holding. She picked her son up from his bassinet and focused hard on Ben to see if she could feel him somehow, could find him the way that Chad had said she could. Feeling that tiny tingle of her husband in the distance, Vivian closed her eyes to take the two of them to him because suddenly, she too, hated this kitchen.
Being in it felt too much like sitting inside the wreckage of someone else's life; Vivian wanted to get back to her husband to spend a few moments in his arms to appreciate how lucky she was that their dreams had come back together and they, at least, had found a way to make a Heaven out of this shared Hell.