Chapter 22: Thanklessgiving

Jul 28, 2026

Chapter 01
Chapter 02
Chapter 03
Chapter 04
Chapter 05
Chapter 06
Chapter 07
Chapter 08
Chapter 09
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21

Diana saw her family. Huddled together in black dresses covering them from neck to ankle over a mahogany coffin. She looked at her father from afar, sleeping like the dead with a cushion underneath his head, and thought, ‘Why does he need a pillow? He’s already dead.’

She wasn’t there; she seemed to stay in the back of her family’s whispering voices. She tried to get closer, but it seemed the closer she got, the farther she also got.

She started hyperventilating; she needed to see her father dead, to grieve with her sisters and mother, but she simply couldn’t get to them.

Then, suddenly, they turned to look at her, all pointing a finger, hissing like vampires in a bad teen movie, and screamed.

Diana screamed as she had never screamed before. It was guttural, more so than the scream she did when she found a massive cockroach on the shower wall while taking a shower, and she regained consciousness. A sanitized white crumpled space, a too-small seat, ears popping. A plane; she was on a plane.

She felt Spencer’s hand close around hers as she sat up in the dark, looking at the shadows of his face as he dreamt. She wondered what could ever be going on in that semi-perfect blonde head of his.

He dreamt of goats, in a small cottage near the hearth, knitting. A goat made noise with its hooves in the kitchen, and another one close to the entryway. This was the life he dreamt of.

Away from modern society, the stock market, product manufacture, and brand marketing. He dreamt of raising goats and making goat cheese, selling it at a random farmer’s market. No phone, no internet, nothing, just peace. Then he realized this was the same way he felt about Diana. No phone, no internet, no modern society, just her removed from time to tango in the universe with him.

Then the goat started speaking in Diana’s voice:

Are you ready for what’s to come? You haven’t even begun.

The funeral was a simple affair. Only the immediate family had made the trip to the small church in Diana’s hometown. It was quiet; no eulogies were made by Diana’s mother or sisters, and they all sat together in silence, not touching.

It felt weird for Spencer to see the way her family behaved. He remembers when he was sixteen, and his grandfather had passed; the whole family and congregation had made the trip, and eulogies seemed never-ending in their banalities of greatness. His mother was completely destroyed to see the man who raised her, who held her as she took her first breath, die.

His grandfather had been to war and raised his children to be strong-willed, independent humans who would take the world by storm, but showered them with love and gifts. He remembers being a child with his grandpa reading him bedtime stories, breaking fights between him and Lexi when they argued over Legos.

Diana’s family was colder and lonelier together than they were alone.

He sat a few rows behind them to give them the space to grieve as the priest finished his poem. He found it profoundly sad that no one had come. It was as if the man had barely existed. Barely touched the world he walked through for five decades.

Diana turned around, no tears in her eyes as she mouthed ‘thank you’ to him. He didn’t know if she meant thank you for coming with me, thank you for not leaving me alone in this grief, or thank you for paying the expensive last-minute tickets on Thanksgiving weekend to go to my father’s funeral. Maybe it was all of it.

Once the priest finished his impersonal speech, the entire family stood up, all women wearing long black dresses, covering them from head to toe.

He knew Diana’s family was conservative and Mormon, but still, it shocked him. He didn’t grow up religious or with strict parents, so he found the whole dynamic mysterious and cold.

Diana found him at the back of the church and sat next to him in silence. She took his hand, and they both sat in silence. He didn’t know what to say to her. He couldn’t say he was sorry because that didn’t begin to cover her feelings; he couldn’t say it would get better when that seemed so insensitive and invalidated the grief she had in her heart.

He knew grief to be a plague that took over your whole body until you lay in bed at 3 pm looking at the ceiling, mourning yourself and who you could’ve been.

So together they sat, her head against his shoulder until she broke the silence.

Diana: So what’s the deal with your dad? Any daddy issues I should know about?

Spencer (sighs): Sometimes the hardest thing to do with people is to accept them as they are and not as who they could be. I learned that the hard way.

Diana: Stop being a therapist for a second and tell me really what’s going on. I mean, you never talk about him; it’s like he never existed.

Spencer: Dad left and had another family. He never tried to get in contact with us once he met his new wife. I have two half-siblings I’ve never met.

Spencer stood up, extending a helping hand to Diana, and followed her family outside, their face painted bridal white.

Mother: We’re going to have a commemorative lunch at home if you want to join. You’re also welcome to join, mhm-

Diana: Spencer, his name is Spencer.

Mother: Right. Well, thank you for coming. I didn’t think you would.

Diana looked at the floor as if she wanted it to swallow her whole, and her grip on his hand tightened.

Diana: Thanks, Mom, but we have a plane to catch. Sorry.

Diana’s mother bit her lip, resolution settling in. Spencer realized that before she had lost her husband, she had lost a daughter. Spencer guessed Diana had left the family fold due to their Mormon ideologies, and this was the last-ditch effort of a grieving woman trying to reconnect with an estranged daughter.

Diana had lied too; their plane wasn’t until 7 pm that night, and it was barely noon. They could’ve easily gone to lunch with her family had she wanted.

She didn’t say goodbye to her mother or sisters, sisters who couldn’t look her in the eye when she talked to them, then led Spencer back to their rental car.

Spencer: Should I take us back to the hotel?

Diana shook her head but didn’t say anything for a few minutes as she looked at the casket being brought out of the church in front of them.

Diana: We have another stop to make before we leave.

Spencer lit up the car, the radio playing some ridiculously upbeat song from the early 2000s, and Diana laughed.

Spencer: What is it?

Diana: She loved this song.

Spencer: Who?

Diana: My nana. She used to sing it to me to sleep, thinking Britney would make a great lullaby. We’re going to the cemetery; I want to see her one last time. I don’t think I’m ever coming back here.

Spencer started driving, his hand still in Diana’s as they sat in silence, listening to the pop radio on their way to the cemetery. In one way, he had never felt closer to her; he truly understood everything that made her, her now. The fear of intimacy made a lot of sense in the light of her family’s lack of warmth.

He’d never felt closer to her, and yet she was so distant. Barely there. He wondered if it had to do with the Tercian he had given her on the plane to stop her from crying, but he suspected it had to do with the fact that she grieved differently. She hid her feelings until she was in the privacy of her bedroom, a recluse inside herself.

They walked hand in hand through the headstones, shaming the dead with their hesitant life, until they stopped in front of a somewhat recent headstone with no flowers on it. Even though Diana’s family lived in the same town as their dead, they didn’t bother to make the trip to the grave, clean the dead leaves, or deposit flowers.

Then Diana’s mouth closed against his. He had dreamt of kissing her sober, of the taste of her tongue moving against his in the most sensual of tangos, but he never thought it would happen in a cemetery, after her father’s funeral.

He grabbed her shoulder and lightly pushed her away.

Spencer: You don’t mean this. You’re grieving; we shouldn’t- I shouldn’t take advantage of you.

Diana laughed; it was bitter, and it cut Spencer open like an old wound.

Diana: Spencer, I want this, I want you. I was sitting there at my dad’s funeral, and no one showed up. It was just Mom, my sisters, me, and you; none of the aunts and uncles he told us so many stories about showed up. Even his priest, whom he saw every week, didn’t have anything to say about him. It made me realize that I didn’t want there to be anyone at my funeral. My father didn’t matter to his family or his community. He didn’t matter at all. I want to matter. I want to make people smile and laugh. I want to love people so much that it kills me. I want to kiss you every day that I get to. I want, oh Gods, I want.

And this time, he was the one to kiss her. His lips closed against hers, slowly massaging hers, his hand in her hair in a fury of passion, heartache, and pain. It was messy, it was necessary, it was inevitable.

She started to straddle him, and she could feel his erection against her dress, grinding against it. Between their fervent kisses, he let go of the softest of hiccups against her cheek, and she grinned.

Diana: I love it when you make that sound. You only do it when you’re turned on. It’s the cutest thing.

Spencer: Flattering. However, we’re not about to have sex for the first time in a cemetery next to your Nan’s grave, are we?

For the first time. Diana loved the sound of that, as if there would be many other times coming in the future. Gods, she hoped there would be. Because he was everything. He was luminous, the most luminous thing she’d ever seen. It felt like the sun shone through him.

Diana: I don’t think the rotting carcasses care about what we do in a cemetery.

Spencer: What a beautiful thought. There’s one tiny problem, though.

Diana (glaring): What is it? Honestly, we’re losing the mood here. It was hot and heavy, and now we’re talking when I’m straddling you with your pants unbuttoned, with your erection against my pelvis.

Spencer: I don’t have a condom.

Diana (hissing): What?

Spencer: Well, I didn’t think I’d need a condom at a funeral. So this isn’t going to work. However, he carried her until he was on top of her and kissed her before lowering himself to her core, raising her dress. Yes, I can carry you; I’m a strong, masculine man, meow. And I can do this.

And it is there, in a cemetery next to an uncelebrated grave, kneeling in silent prayer, moving her dress up her hips, that he is ready to eat at the altar, and he had never felt closer to god.

Diana: This was your first ‘meow’.

Spencer pleasured Diana over and over, kissing her core with all the love and longing he’d had for her for all these months. He pleasured the pain away, and he could feel her grief building into the most beautiful climaxes, and yes, she made the same sounds as when she tasted his scrambled eggs, only louder and softer.

It’s hard to write a romance book without succumbing to the urge to write sex scenes in every chapter, but I wanted every instant they got closer to feel measured and realistic considering who these characters are.

I know this isn’t a proper sex scene with penetration or details and shit, but I wanted to do something on the grave the way Mary Shelley would’ve wanted ;)

From Marseille with Love,

*Vapes away*