this is your heart (can you feel it?)
thank you to everyone who helped me brainstorm/get in the henren zone on this post!
Karen comes home from the hospital after both her lab and her spleen exploded.
Hen fusses over her from the car to the front door to the couch. Karen is independent: she doesn’t usually let Hen fuss like this. Even though she laments the long weeks of boring recovery ahead of her, the very fact that she lets Hen take care of her tells Hen how much pain she’s still in. She lets Hen fuss over her for almost two weeks.
Once Karen recovers enough to take care of herself again—once the doctors clear her for light activities—Hen finally lets herself feel the panic of the last few weeks. She’d known that she’d been worried, she’d known that she’d been terrified, but now that the worst of the danger is officially over it hits her hard.
This is her wife. This is her best friend, the mother of her child, the love of her life. This is the person whose eyes light up at the idea of sharing a Costco membership with her; the person who makes going to the grocery store a fun adventure instead of a lonely chore. This is the person whose heart is so big that sometimes Hen is surprised it still fits in her chest.
Hen almost lost her. She almost-
But she didn’t. Karen is alive.
Hen makes them tea in their matching Mrs. & Mrs. mugs. She watches Karen stand at the stove, reheating her own damn can of soup at her insistence. She's leaning against the counter for support but she's undeniably steady. She's not pale anymore. She's not glassy-eyed from pain pills or restless from bed rest. This is Hen's wife: stubborn and determined. Strong.
After three terrible days in the hospital and two weeks on the couch, Karen is finally herself again. She's upright. Hen opens the tea bag packets and shakes with the understanding of just how close she came to losing this incredible, brilliant, vibrant woman.
Hen was almost a doctor. She knows exactly what Karen’s body went through. It's worse than knowing nothing at all. The tank shrapnel split Karen's side open, nicking her spleen. The spleen is a terrible place for an injury. It filters and stores blood, and at any given time it holds 25% of the body’s red blood cells and platelets, nevermind the important work it does with white blood cells. When damaged, it’s the most likely of all internal organs to cause life-threatening internal bleeding.
And it did. Karen’s heart stopped. Her big, beautiful, generous heart stopped.
Hen had had to kneel on the gurney next to Karen and keep her wife’s heart pumping with her own two hands. It’s something she’d done for hundreds of other people over the years, but it felt different when it was a heart she knew so intimately.
This was a heart she’d spent time with, up close and personal. In the time they'd been together, Hen had often laid her head on Karen’s chest and listened to her heart beat steadily, comfortingly; sometimes dozing off to its easy rhythm. She’d felt Karen’s heart rate race when they had sex, and she’d felt it settle down again afterward. She knew how to touch Karen, what to say to make her heart jump or skip a beat or pump extra blood up to Karen's face to make her blush, even after all these years. Hen had felt it beat against her body and under her fingers so many times she could map its rhythm from across the room.
But there, in that ambulance, Hen hadn't been able to feel it. There had been one-way communication for the first time since she'd held Karen in her arms the first night they slept together; the night they said this thing between them didn't have to be serious. That night, she'd felt Karen's heart beat fierce and steady, and it had stayed that way ever since.
For it to stop felt almost like a betrayal. Hen knew this heart. It knew her. It was supposed to respond to her touch. They were supposed to work together to make Karen happy. It wasn't supposed to give up on her like this.
But Hen's hands hadn't been the only ones on Karen in that ambulance. Chim had pushed epi, Bobby had shocked her, and Karen's heart hadn't responded to any of them. Her pulse was gone. Gone.
When Bobby shocked Karen again and again and finally restored her heartbeat, Hen had started hyperventilating. Lazarus, before her very eyes. A miracle. It was like she'd never seen someone's life saved before because none of those people mattered like Karen did.
Hen had felt the same then as she does now, watching Karen come back to life in front of her again. She feels the sudden absence of panic, followed by an absolute tidal wave of relief so strong it threatens to knock her over. A gasping understanding of just how close she came to losing her wife, and a desperate breath in because she didn't.
But she stays calm. She controls her breathing. She tries to stay as strong as Karen is. Hen watches Karen slowly pour the hot soup into a bowl and stiffly cross the kitchen to get a spoon. She wonders how she got so lucky.
This is the woman who gave up her dream of going to space to stay here on the ground with Hen and their son. This is the woman who supported Hen through two years of medical school and would have continued to support her through the rest, through residency, through the long hours of actually being a practicing doctor, and would have been proud to do it. This is the woman who adopted Hen's ex-girlfriend's baby as her own; who fosters other children who need a loving home, even briefly. This is the best person Hen knows.
Hen is so lucky to have Karen in her corner, in her life. It’s not that she's ever taken Karen for granted, but feeling the pulse leave her body knocked some fresh appreciation into Hen. She wants nothing more than exactly what she has. Denny had reminded her of that when Karen was still in the hospital.
So Hen had thrown away her resignation papers. She quit medical school and got Denny ready in the mornings. She sits in her kitchen and watches her wife eat soup and drink tea with healing cuts on her face and she knows this is where she’s supposed to be. She feels grateful to have it. She doesn't want to be a doctor if it means missing this.
In bed that night, Hen props Karen comfortably up against their pillows and lays between her legs like a prayer. She kisses Karen's soft thighs and holds her hand and rubs her clit soft and slow and then hard and fast with two fingers; just the way she likes.
Karen comes and Hen can feel every pulse and contraction of it under her fingers. She can feel Karen's heartbeat in her clit as she comes down. Hen has never stopped to appreciate that before now. She'll never forget to worship it again.
This is her wife. This is the love of her life. This is the best person she knows, and her heart is healthy and racing and pushing blood to every corner of Karen’s body under the guidance of Hen's instructions.
This is her heart and Hen can feel the proof of its vitality beating under her hands once again. She’s alive.
{give me kudos!}
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