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roosterbruiser · 1 year ago

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𝐂𝐑𝐔𝐄𝐋 𝐒𝐔𝐌𝐌𝐄𝐑 — 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐋𝐎𝐆𝐔𝐄 𝐏𝐀𝐑𝐓 𝐎𝐍𝐄

—𝐃𝐄𝐒𝐂𝐑𝐈𝐏𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍: 𝐋𝐈𝐕𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐈𝐍 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐀𝐅𝐓𝐄𝐑. —𝐖𝐎𝐑𝐃𝐒: 𝟐𝟎.𝟕𝐊 —𝐌𝐀𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓 —𝐏𝐋𝐀𝐘𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓 —𝐕𝐈𝐒𝐈𝐎𝐍 𝐁𝐎𝐀𝐑𝐃 —𝐏𝐑𝐄𝐕𝐈𝐎𝐔𝐒 𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐋𝐎𝐆𝐔𝐄 𝐖𝐎𝐎𝐃𝐇𝐎𝐔𝐒𝐄, 𝐌𝐄 𝐒𝐓. 𝐆𝐄𝐑𝐌𝐀𝐈𝐍𝐄'𝐒 𝐇𝐎𝐒𝐏𝐈𝐓𝐀𝐋 𝐀𝐏𝐑𝐈𝐋 𝟏𝟓𝐓𝐇, 𝟏𝟗𝟖𝟖

The morning rarely comes.

Now that you’re here, living in the after, it always feels like night.

Some days, you feel like you’re in that tepid dreamless state between asleep and awake. You’re aware of the quickly-cooling coffee sitting on the table before you or the syringe in your hand and the patient below you or the phone ringing on the wall or Jake’s lips pressed to your temple, but you cannot get yourself to move. Every hinge on your body--your jaw and elbows and knees and ankles and wrists--is rusted over. You cannot bend. You cannot blink yourself awake.

Other days, you just feel like you’re in the dark. Walking down the trail, waiting to happen upon Mickey and Reuben’s bodies, holding the shotgun in your sticky hands. Standing in the mess hall by yourself, doused in blood, staring at the figure with a noose around your throat. Lying in your cabin, trying to catch your breath after having a nightmare. Walking into the quiet bus barn on wobbling legs, knowing deep in your gut that Bob is going to die. Even if someone followed you with a spotlight, one that would bring heat to your cheeks and inspire sweat on your scalp, you would still feel like you’re in a room with no windows.

Once in a while, when the moon is a thin piece of gold behind the wispy clouds and you cannot stop smelling irises, you feel alright. Not alright in the way that most people feel--not like things are going to be okay or like you’re moving forward. But alright like it’s okay to be stagnant for a while. You can be still and rust over and not bend and be in the dark.

By now, you’re familiar with the stages of grief. Dr. Messina goes over them with you during every hour-long session, which is every Monday and Friday, and asks you to tell her where you are.

When you feel like you’re in a dreamless state and everything is muffled and your ears ring like the ovens have just exploded all over again, you say depression. That must be what it feels like. Always on the outside, watching through a glassy gaze.

When you feel like you’re in the dark and there are no windows, you say anger--even though you don’t feel particularly angry. You feel scared--such a trivial and familiar feeling to have when you’re safe in your little house with Jake and all your second-hand furniture and the vases of honeysuckle you keep around. Angry is the closest to scared, you reckon.

And days when you just feel like being still and seeping in all this, you say acceptance. It’s true--at least a little bit true. You accept what happened at Camp Arcadia. You talk about it. You think about it. You rub your fingers over your throat and your ears and the scars on your arm and knees. You watch the news. You read magazines. You call news stations and then hang up. This must be what it’s like to accept something so ugly.

Today is an acceptance day. You know because you’re okay with where you are right now, sitting in this wooden chair at this thrifted table, watching cream swirl in the inky coffee in your still-steaming mug. Jake’s mug is sitting right beside yours, hot to the touch and with four heaping spoonfuls of sugar settling at the bottom.

His pills are there beside the mug, too--fluoxetine, iron, and aspirin. He’s finally weaned himself off morphine, which was not without sleepless nights and deep-seated ache. You’ve already choked down your pill today--a single prenatal vitamin. You try not to take anything else for the sake of the little stranger, but you’ve already discussed a fluoxetine prescription with Dr. Messina when you’re not in your current state anymore.

“When it’s over, you should try it on for size,” Dr. Messina had said, her eyebrows drawn together seriously and her glasses perched at the end of her nose. “I think it would significantly improve your quality of life.”

Significantly improve your quality of life. You chewed on the words, stretching them over your tongue until you felt like you could blow a big, pink bubble from your lips.

What life? You wanted to ask. But you hadn’t.

What you had said, in her stuffy and strange office, was: “Okay. Yes, I will.”

“Things’ll look up,” Jake had promised, too. He was practically a spokesperson for the stuff. “It’s keeping me going. Well--that and you and them.”

He cupped your belly then--it wasn’t very big yet. Only just beginning to round out, a blimp beneath your scrubs, still something that sent a chill up your spine when you looked down in the shower. It was still something--still is something--you were grappling with.

“You don’t even know them,” you’d said back, blinking a few times before turning away from his touch. It wasn’t often that you found yourself doing that--but his touch on your belly, the one that was carrying the child that was not his, stung. “They could be…I don’t know. You should have more to live for than just us.”

“I’ve got my happy pills,” Jake had told you. He wasn’t wounded that you turned away from him--he was sorry more than anything, apologetically holding your pinkie finger with his. “But you two help.”

How trivial that felt in the moment. A little pill, you, and the little stranger. That was all that was keeping Jake going through it all. And by it all, you mean the rigorous physical therapy and the nightmares and the guilt and the healing and the grief.

Jake’s been good, though. As good as he can be, which is better than you.

Really, he’s handled everything strikingly well. Astoundingly.

He didn’t cry like you did whenever Coyote came over for dinner a few months after it all--when he explained that he couldn’t see any way out, which was why he decided to enlist in the Navy. You had cried and that had made Javy cry. Jake responds to all of Javy’s letters, is a good sport about not knowing where his best friend is posted, and throws things in the cart at the grocery store for Javy’s next care package.

When Nat called in the middle of the night, the very same night Jake was finally released from the hospital, in crisis and needing friends, he drove the both of you to her. He held Nat’s hand while you gently explained that what was best for her--for everyone--was to have her get help. He drove all through the night, running on gas station coffee, to get her to New Haven Presbyterian Psychiatric Hospital. He sends her chocolates every month now and often calls her father, who is lonely without her companionship.

He was the one who sent flowers to everyone’s families--the Floyd’s, the Garcia’s, the Fitch’s, the Johnson’s. He attended the funerals despite his intense injuries, teeth grit and legs trembling as he stood by your side. You anchored him and he tried not to lean all his weight on you.

He was the one that suggested a private funeral for Bradley, one that took place in your living room and was composed of your body and his. He ordered Chinese and bought wine from the good part of the liquor store. He didn’t fuss over your tears. He lit candles and sat on the floor beside you. He hung Bradley’s guitar on the wall in the bedroom, above your bed.

Even the pregnancy, he has handled with nothing short of grace. Especially for a man that is not the father of the child you’re carrying--even if he is your partner in life now.

You were not surprised when you missed your August and September periods--which you attributed to trauma, stress. You were unable to leave the hospital without a camera bulb flashing in your face--unable to do anything without a coil of panic springing up inside of your gut and punching your chest hard. You were fielding phone calls from the families of the previous victims, from reporters, from your family, from doctors, from so-called psychics.

It was easy for you to explain away. The stress, coupled with the intense panic, was what was halting your cycle. And what was making you puke and cry all the time.

But then your breasts became sore and you cramped. That was when you realized that you’d been waiting for a period that was yet to come, explaining away symptoms that were synonymous with pregnancy.

You knew before the doctor called with the results: you were pregnant. You were so confident in your knowledge that you told Jake before the doctor even called.

“Are you sure?” He’d asked. He was speaking slowly, lowly--being careful with you like he always was. “Like, couldn’t it be something else?”

“I’m a nurse,” you answered him, pinching the bridge of your nose and closing your eyes to shield them from the bright light above you. “And I just…know. Do you believe me? Or do you think I’ve gone off the deep end?”

Jake grew up surrounded by women--his mama, his sisters, aunts, aunts of aunts, nieces, grandma’s, neighbors, godmother’s, friends, coworkers. He knew better than to argue intuition with you.

“I believe just about every word that comes out of your mouth, darlin’. This isn’t any different,” Jake said softly, careful not to contort his face this way or that. His heart was sitting in his belly. “What do you wanna…do?”

“I don’t know,” you’d said very seriously, very plainly. You couldn’t get your jaw to unclench. “I feel like this is the--like, this is the worst thing that could’ve happened to me.”

He found it odd, really--that an unexpected pregnancy was the worst thing that had happened to you after everything. But just as soon as he realized just that, he understood.

Yes, it was the worst thing that could’ve happened to you.

If you said it, then it was true. You don’t bullshit. You don’t pussyfoot.

“I’m so sorry,” he’d whispered to you. He held onto your cheeks and looked down at you with something between pity and reverence in his glassy gaze. “We’ll make it through.”

You were standing under the awning at a gas station, the scent of dirt and fuel and cigarette choking you as you squeezed the nozzle and leaned against the car. You were surprised by Jake’s touch, his hands soft from the soft care he received at the hospital, still scented with baby powder from physical therapy earlier that day.

“Why are you sorry?” You asked, bottom lip suddenly wobbling as you gazed up at Jake. His face was still shades of yellow and purple from healing bruises. Little scabs and scruff made up his cheeks, his jaw. “You didn’t do this to me. You know that, right?”

He knew already. Of course he did. The two of you had only had sex a few times since his hospital release. Once in the shower, very slowly and quietly and carefully. Again in the bedroom, faster and more desperate. A couple times in the living room late at night after the television signed off and the phone stopped ringing and dinner had been cleaned up. One time in the car in the hospital parking garage, when you cried your way through the last hour of your shift and asked Jake to pick you up early.

The baby wasn’t his. But you were his. And to him, that meant that whatever was yours was his, too. He knew deep in his gut, as he watched your eyes fill with tears under the blinking fluorescents, that the baby was going to be his if you allowed it to be.

“I know that,” Jake said to you. A beat passed. Somewhere in the distance, someone laughed a big laugh. “And you know that I’m not going anywhere, right?”

You did know that. On some level, somewhere in your foggy mind, you knew that already. But to hear him say it--to hear him utter it to you and really mean it--choked you up again.

“You didn’t sign up for any of this,” you told him. “I wouldn’t blame you if you--!”

“Neither did you,” he said. “I signed up for you, Gale. And that’s that.”

That’s that.

You’re still staring down at your coffee when an open palm cups your jaw, a soft tummy pressing against your shoulders and neck. Jake leans down and kisses the top of your head, thumb softly stroking the curve of your jaw.

“Christ,” you whisper, startled. The stranger jumps, too--mirroring your movements. Your permanent echo. “I didn’t even hear you coming.”

“I’m pretty stealthy with these things now,” Jake says softly, gesturing to his crutches. It’s silly--usually you can hear him coming from a mile away with those things, their plunking amplified off the wooden floors. “What, you lost in thought or something?”

“Yeah,” you whisper to him, tipping your head back and resting against him. “Here--start over. I’ll be sweet.”

Jake laughs softly, stroking your cheek with his thumb.

“Morning,” he whispers, voice still ragged from sleep. “I’m supposed to be the one making you coffee, remember?”

Smiling softly, you lean back against him. His body welcomes you warmly, arm falling around your neck and lips lingering on top of your head. His breath is warm as it fans out over your unkempt hair.

“I couldn’t get back to sleep,” you explain, tapping your mug. “Figured I’d get a jump on the day.”

“It’s hardly daytime,” he tells you. His hand falls down your chest until his palm falls over your bump. It’s warm, taut. “Something wrong? Another nightmare?”

You know what he’s asking you--is there something wrong with the baby? If we were to ask if there was something wrong with you--your mood, your day, your thoughts, your pain--there would be a laundry list.

And the nightmare--he always asks, he always cares. You don’t have the heart to tell him the truth most of the time.

“No,” you answer, swallowing hard. You’re lying about the nightmare. You look down at his fingers spread over your nightgown--the thing hardly fits you anymore. The scars on his knuckles are beginning to turn pink--pink like the folds on your brain where memories are ingrained, pressed between tissue and against blood. Pink like the stretch marks on your belly where your skin is splitting to make more space. Strange how time seems to turn everything pink. “It’s…all alright.”

“Xeno still cooking?”

Biting something between a smile and a snarl, you shake your head. Xeno is short for Xenomorph. It’s what he’s been calling the stranger since he saw an elbow drag across your skin one night.

It was dark in the bedroom and you were almost asleep as Jake stroked your hair, watching your belly absently. Shadows crossed your skin and your hair as you laid resting after a long shift, shirt pooled just below your breasts.

The movement was sudden and brash--emerging against your skin and drawing across it in the form of a dull point. For a moment, it stretched like it was trying to break through. And then it settled and your belly was just your belly again.

“Christ,” he’d hissed, partly amazed and partly terrified. “Did you feel that?”

Without opening your eyes, you nodded. Of course you felt it. The movement immediately unsettled your stomach, watered your lash line. You feel every single movement--it is just below your skin, looming ahead of you, a constant threat.

“Yes,” you’d simply responded.

“It’s trying to get out,” Jake had said. “Spooky!”

Dread pooled in your belly--ice cold and deep.

“I know,” you said.

“Aren’t you a regular Ellen Ripley?” Jake laughed. “Aw. Just a little Xeno in there. Xeno. How’s that for a name? No one else would even know what it’s short for, I bet.”

You wanted to say that Ripley never had a Xenomorph rip out of her. You wanted to say that out of all the horrors she faced, in those silly movies, she didn’t have to do what you have to do.

“You’re being a beast right now,” you whispered to him, face hot. “I’m trying to sleep.”

“Oh, darlin’, I’m teasing you,” Jake said, cooming forward to kiss your forehead. He lingered there when he felt the heat of your face--all that emotion lying just beneath the surface, that stuff you hid so well. “I’m sorry. It’s just a movie, huh?”

Horror movies, you thought, were only make-believe. And even if they weren’t, their horror was contained in minutes. One-hundred and sixteen. One-hundred and thirty-seven. Ninety-five. It ended for them--for you, though, you weren’t so sure it would ever end.

But you hated the tonal shift in Jake’s voice. You’d had a fine night--you were finally able to relax after a long day of different therapies. Guilt dripped down the back of your throat.

“Xeno’s got a ring to it,” you whispered to him, blinking away the water in your eyes.

“You have such a way with words,” you whisper. There is one singular moment where you think about laughing about it--Xenomorph. If you weren’t so scared, you’d enjoy the name. It’s clever. “Really go out of your way to comfort me, don’t you?”

“I do my best,” Jake says with a cool sigh.

A few more chaste kisses to your head and then Jake is reaching to hold onto the table. It’s sturdy, which is partly why you picked the thing out. You wait with baited breath as you slyly watch him, fingers tingling and ready if you see any sign of a tumble.

And even though you’re trying to be sly about it, Jake sees you. He always does. You’re watching him below your lashes, trying to pretend like you’re not. You’re always looking out for him, hands ready to grab and knees ready to hit the floor. You’re always ready to take care of him. He thinks that’s probably what you’re made for--maybe it’s all you can do now.

“Watch out now! He’s going for gold,” Jake says, a strangled laugh tumbling from his mouth as he falls into the seat beside you. He pulls his crutches beside him, too, and leans them against the kitchen table. “Did I win?”

You nod, eyes earnest and kind.

“First place,” you say.

The expression on your face right now, with your eyes wide and your mouth slightly upturned, is the closest you get to smiling these days. Jake doesn’t push it. He drinks you in when you’re like this on one of your better days: features soft, face naked.

“What’s on the docket today, captain?” Jake asks, scooping the pills into his palms. “Seeing the shrink today, right?”

“Right,” you say. “It is Friday, after all. Time to go wild.”

He nods, throwing the pills back and swallowing dryly.

“Usual time?” He asks.

“After your P.T.,” you say. “Like always.”

“Big day for us,” he says softly. He takes a drink from his coffee, ignores the burn on his tongue. You always make it the best for him, somehow always keep it hot. “We’re pretty crazy these days, aren’t we?”

“Sure are,” you sigh, leaning back. You glance at the little square window above the sink and see that the morning light is beginning to filter in gray and white. “I think it’s gonna snow today.”

“Snow in April…I love Maine,” Jake chews out bitterly, glancing over his shoulder at the window, too. “We could always head to Texas. It doesn’t snow where I’m from.”

Jake’s brought this up a few times--bringing you home with him to Texas. Really, it’s something that he dreams about between doctor’s appointments.

He likes to daydream you there. Lying beneath the golden sky, sprawled out on the wooden steps and closing your eyes as his mama shells peas behind you. Taking long walks around the property so Jake can stretch his legs and you can look at the quarry and the old mine shaft and the pastures. He dreams of getting back up on a horse, tucking his feet into the stirrups, and gallivanting before you as you watch with a grin. A grin.

He’s thought about having the baby there, too. Having the baby at home like his mama had him and his sisters, staying up through the night and blotting your forehead with a wet washcloth as the cicadas sing. Sleeping in his old bedroom in a twin bed with you, stuffing a bassinet in the corner, covered in quilts older than the both of you. Taking the baby to the farmer’s market on Sunday’s, showing them off to questionless people, dotting a fingerful of honey on their toothless gums.

“Doesn’t it always feel like summer there?” You ask him.

He turns back to you, suddenly back in the dark kitchen with you and two cups of coffee. You’re looking back at him--grinless.

“Yeah,” Jake says. “I guess it kinda does.”

And that is the difference between the two of you.

Jake believes in solar power, always turning his face towards the sun.

You don’t--not anymore.

A quietness fills the kitchen. Sometimes there is so much silence that you feel like you’re drowning in it--you don’t know how to cut through it all without flailing. But then Jake takes your hand, covers your knuckles with his palms. He squeezes your fingers.

“Wanna take me to the corner store?” You ask, sighing.

It’s your way of extending an olive branch.

Jake, brows furrowed, gazes at you.

“Sure I do,” he says. “What for?”

Sighing, you lean forward and hold his hand properly. He’s warm.

“I need a raspberry-filled doughnut in a bad, bad way,” you say, wrinkling your nose. “Or I might croak.”

He grins at you--a big thing that eats his whole face, stubble and scabs and all. It pleases him when you do something, say something, that detaches you from the tragedy of last summer. When you do something you would’ve done before it all happened to you. When he can see that behind all this skin and hair, you’re still you.

“Can’t have that on my conscience,” he says. “I’ll grab your coat.”

♀

You were right about the snow.

The storm is brutal as it rages just outside the hospital walls. You’re watching the snow and sleet slam against the thick glass windows that stretch widely across the wall, watching the wind bend the dogwoods and take their budding white flowers. The sky is murky and gray, teetering on black. Even the snowflakes are fat and violent. Bad-tempered.

It’s funny, though--you can’t hear it at all. You know, logically, that it is because of the way the hospital is built. Strong metal beams that are layered with thick concrete that could hardly be chipped with a jackhammer. You understand that it is because hospitals must withstand extreme conditions--they are a safe haven. They are a sanctuary.

But this reaping of one of your senses--something as imperative and salient as your hearing--feels distinctly deliberate. It makes you feel like you are on the outside of something angry and inevitable. Something that is waiting for you to get brave enough to walk outside and feel it on your cheeks.

So, yes, you think. Sanctuary.

But it makes you feel like you’re back at Camp Arcadia--when it was burning down, when the oven burst, when your ears bled. You hadn’t been able to hear for a few days after the explosion--everything was muffled and quiet. The doctors carried a whiteboard with them so they could tell you that they needed to repair a sitch or check your heart rate again.

Heat bursts through the dusty vents jutting out from the white concrete walls, drying the corners of your heavy eyes and brushing against your calves like a slutty cat. There is sweat gathering on your shins where they’re pressed against your leather boots. And the sweater you’re wearing, the one you’d had to buy last week when you realized you’d have nothing warm to fit you during bad weather, is beginning to make your pulse points itch.

Fucking wool, you think, swallowing thickly and pressing the back of your hand against your cheeks. You’re warm alright--borderline feverish.

But even if there was no blizzard in April and you weren’t wearing boots and fucking wool--you’d be hot in here. You’re hot all of the time now, which is what Dr. Johansen told you would happen towards the end. You’d believed him, but every other nurse on your floor, that had been in your condition at some point or another, reiterated it to you like you didn’t.

“Just be happy that it’ll be over with before the summer!”

That was the one you heard most frequently, echoed by incredulous mothers and nurses alike. But summertime to you now is not what summertime is to them or anyone else. The thought of July rolling around once a year for the rest of your life makes the hairs on your arms raise and straighten like they’re praising something in the sky.

“Warm?” Dr. Messina asks, her glasses perched at the end of her nose as she leafs through last session’s notes. She peers at you, her eyelids painted a soft brown that matches her eyes and her hair, and smiles softly. Nodding, you smile weakly. “Sorry about the heat. I sent in a few maintenance requests, but I’m certain they ball them up and throw them out.”

“It’s alright,” you tell her. You nod to your belly, which looms before you like a full moon beneath your sweater. “I’m getting…used to it. I’m sure I’m freezing Jake out, though. I keep the house nice and frigid.”

“Nearing the finish line,” Dr. Messina says, raising her eyebrows. She notes the way that seems to make you squirm--the way you avert her gaze and sink further into the sofa, the way your fingers dig into the leather arm. “Shall we start there today? Or pick up where we left off last time?”

“Where were we last time?” You ask her quietly.

Sometimes when you need a reminder of when things are happening or where you’re supposed to go or what you’re supposed to be doing, the other nurses chide you.

Pregnancy brain, they say.

You appreciate that Dr. Messina has never said that to you.

“We were discussing the day of. When you attempted to resuscitate Mister Bradshaw.”

Oh. Right.

Pressing your sweaty palms together, you nod, blinking a few times under the fluorescents above you. Your eyes are too dry to be under these bright of lights.

“Yes,” you whisper. “I did attempt to resuscitate Bradley.”

Dr. Messina adjusts herself in her big, leather chair. You’re sure she lugged the thing from home--it is ornate and perfectly-oiled. Far too charming for this white-washed tiled office in the mostly empty east wing of the hospital.

“Why did you feel that was necessary?” She asks, notebook perched on the knee of her starchy slacks. Her pen lays at the ready, only a centimeter away from the creamy paper. “Given his actions prior.”

She means killing Paul, Bob, Reuben, and Mickey. And attempting to kill you and Jake.

Why did you try to save Bradley?

“I didn’t save him,” you tell her. You can feel his blood on you now, coating your hands and the cuffs of your sweater. Your jaw is clenched. “Does it matter?”

“Yes,” she says, nodding. “Yes, it matters. There’s always a why. Usually, I tell people that’s the point of therapy. The why. The how. The because.”

Chewing the inside of your cheek, you take a deep breath. The stranger beneath your skin moves, maybe jostled by your sudden inhale. It is only a few kicks against the top of your belly before they settle again and you can finally release the breath you’re holding in.

“I took an oath,” you tell Dr. Messina. Digging deeper into the arm of the couch, you avert your gaze from her glassy eyes and instead watch the storm continue to rage. “I will dedicate myself to devoted service for human welfare.”

“Sure,” Dr. Messina says. “But don’t you find that a bit impersonal? He’s the father of your child.”

Stomach turning, you hum. You don’t need a reminder of that. You know, very well and very thoroughly, that Bradley is the father of your child. You are reminded every time they move inside of you, every time Jake cups your belly, every time you have to listen to that staticky rapid heartbeat in a stark white office. You know that the father of your child is dead. He died at Camp Arcadia, in your grip, with his face turned away from you as if he was looking at someone else.

“Okay,” you say. You adjust on the sofa, clearing your throat. “I tried to save him after everything he did because I still…cared for him.” Dr. Messina writes something on her pad. You laugh dryly, gloomy and guilty. “What’s that make me?”

“Human,” she states simply.

She nods for you to continue. Your heart hammers.

“I attempted to suture the lacerations on his wrists,” you tell her. And your toes are numb because she thinks--everyone thinks--the lacerations were self-inflicted. But you put them there. You cut him open. “I administered epinephrine that was prescribed to one of the campers. Then I began life saving measures. Compressions and mouth-to-mouth. The whole…the whole deal.”

“Right,” Dr. Messina says. “To no avail?”

“He briefly gained consciousness,” you tell her. You don’t tell her that he said he was sorry--that he was begging you to stop trying to save him, that he knew he was dying before you did. “But he was delirious.”

Delirious. It feels like an insult.

“Delirium was brought on by…?”

“The blood loss,” you answer.

She writes something down again on her pad.

“And his blood--was it on you?”

Blood was slathered on your body in layers, each one thicker than the last. You found bits of it everywhere--between your molars, underneath your toenails, flaking off your scalp--for weeks.

“Some of it,” you answer.

And you’re not lying--only some of it was his.

You don’t know how you would even begin to articulate the grueling task of being thoroughly drenched in your friend’s and your lover’s blood. It’s something you can’t make yourself say, even all these months later.

“And what was that experience like for you?”

Harrowing.

“It was warm. It…itched when it dried.”

Dr. Messina pauses, pressing the block heel of her smart leather loafers into the ornate rug beneath her feet.

“If you could pin a feeling to that time, what would it be?”

“You’re asking the tough questions today,” you say softly. “What’s the occasion?”

She narrows her eyes.

“Am I?” She asks. “Asking tough questions, that is.”

Looking down at the carpet, you chew on your bottom lip. The baby moves again, a bit jerkier than before. A few steady pop-pop-pop’s before they nestle again, still and quiet. You wish they would stop. It’s hard to focus when they’re squirming.

Xeno.

“I was…surviving,” you tell her, taking a steady breath. “I was hungry and thirsty, but I didn’t even know that I was. It was a kind of tired that…like, my whole body hurt, but I just couldn’t rest. Even if I’d had time to lay down, I don’t think I’d have been able to…sleep. And there was a sense of duty there for me, too, I guess.”

“A sense of duty because…?”

“Because I had to keep everyone alive,” you tell her.

It sounds plain and simple because it is to you.

“Because you’re a nurse?”

Because you said you would. Because you needed to.

“Yes,” you answer. “Because I’m a nurse.”

“And did you ever feel scared? Hopeless?”

Terrified. Drained. Hopeless.

“Yes,” you answer her again, uncrossing your legs and smoothing out your plaid skirt. “A majority of the time. But it was overshadowed by this…”

You gesture, unable to come up with an accurate phrase.

“Sense of duty?” Dr. Messina offers.

Nodding, you sink further into the sofa.

“Yes.”

“But ultimately, your life-saving efforts did not result in Mister Bradshaw living,” Dr. Messina says. It sounds like she’s reading from a newspaper--like she’s only reciting facts to a stranger. Like you did not live this. “So, then there were five deaths at Camp Arcadia. And one of them was the father of your unborn child. How does that make you feel now? Almost nine months later.”

Saying nothing, you blink at the floor a few times.

“It makes me feel defeated,” you tell her.

“Why?” She asks. “You did what you could.”

Yes, you did what you could. But you slit Bradley’s wrists. You sent Reuben and Mickey down the trail. You didn’t hear Bob cry out. You pointed the gun at Paul until his very last moment. You heard Mable scream and didn’t come running.

“Is it possible for both things to exist?” You ask her softly.

“Yes,” she says, nodding. “But I feel the need to reiterate to you that you did what you could. In fact, according to Natasha T., Javy M., and Jacob S., you went above and beyond. They cite you as their reason for being alive.”

“I know they do,” you tell her, sighing. You hate it when they say it--you always have. “But I don’t feel that I did anything…heroic.”

“You cauterized a severed limb with a frying pan and extended Robert F.’s life by several days,” Dr. Messina says. “You administered emergency First Aid on two people that are still alive to tell the tale. Even you sustained injuries that required extensive repair, which you did not receive until days later when you were finally found. There were no camper casualties.”

Yes, you’ve been told these things since it all ended. You lived these things. They happened in July at Camp Arcadia, which was the last time you saw all of your friends alive.

You heard it on the radio, saw it on the news, read about it in the papers.

Really, you’ve relived it a hundred times over.

Shoddy specials on cable television, interrupted by infomercials and high-speed chases. Local networks covered it extensively, all repeating what the previous one reported, recycling quotes and mispronouncing names. You’d heard, very recently, that Warner Bros. had acquired the rights to the story. Who gave them that right--and who took it away from you and everyone else--you weren’t sure.

They talked about it on the radio, stations cycling through callers from all over the United States who had precisely nothing to contribute to the story. Girls you went to elementary school with who wanted deeply to be a part of something as heinous as the Camp Arcadia Annihilation. Boys you went on one date with in high school who claimed to have always known your strength. The occasional caller who would defend Bradley on the grounds of absolutely not knowing anything at all besides he was handsome.

The newspaper called you most frequently. At least three times a day in the very beginning--even waiting for you and the other survivors outside the hospital, stuffing their tape recorders in your bruised faces, shouting questions about axes and fear and God. You’ve flitted through a few different newspapers, not brave enough to read prose that begins with IT WAS A HOT AND DEADLY WEEK IN JULY… Mostly, you only looked at the pictures they printed. Grainy images, dressed in blotchy ink that turned the pads of your fingers gray, of camp. The flannel sheets covering the bodies, their ends singed and their iris flowers burned to dust. You standing with the other survivors when they finally found you, covered in black ash with blood leaking from your ears.

Dr. Messina clears her throat, ducking into your field of vision. Sometimes you do this--go far away, keep quiet, don’t answer.

“I’m sorry,” you whisper. You finger the stuffing inside the sofa, swallowing with difficulty. “Yes. I did do that. But I feel…I feel like it’s what anyone would’ve done.”

“But not just anyone did it,” Dr. Messina says, eyes narrowed. She leans forward ever-so-slightly and purses her lips, paused. “You did.”

Uncomfortably, you nod.

Yes, you know you did. You remember well. You remember when you sleep. You remember when the stranger kicks. You remember when you size up in jeans. You remember every time Joni Mitchell comes on the radio. You remember every time someone orders a rare steak at a restaurant. You remember every time you smell iris flowers. You remember every morning when you wake up to Jake’s slumbering face, blonde hair swept over his narrowed eyes and lips in a perpetual grimace. You remember every single minute of every single hour of every single day.

There is no forgetting. There is only depression as you stand on the outside of glass. There is only anger because it is the closest to fear. There is only acceptance because you sink further into the nothing, into the dark, into the cold.

Dr. Messina knows you have no response.

So, she glances back down at her pad and takes a deep breath, collecting herself.

“You put flowers on the bodies,” Dr. Messina says softly. “Why?”

“Not for occult reasons,” you say, unable to stop yourself.

It’s what a few papers reported.

“I wasn’t suggesting,” Dr. Messina says, pursing her lips.

You nod, biting your lip.

“Flowers are at every funeral,” you explain. “It felt like the right thing to do.”

“But they were not having funerals,” she says. “They were lying dead in the canteen and on the rocks in the courtyard.”

“Maybe I wanted it to be their funerals,” you explain. Your palms are sweating. “Bradley didn’t even…get one.”

Dr. Messina nods.

“Yes,” she says. “Would you like to talk about that?”

You shake your head.

“No one would accept him,” you say, fingering your skirt now. “It’s as simple as that.”

“That’s not very simple for you,” Dr. Messina says. “You were his friend before he did what he did. Does friend feel like an accurate description?”

Wringing your hands together, you suck in a deep and warm breath. God, you wish you could take your sweater off.

“Sure,” you say. You’re not lying. Above it all, below it all--you were friends. “Friends is adequate.”

“Your friend didn’t get a funeral because there was no funeral home that would accept him,” Dr. Messina says. Again, you squirm. “And there was no family to fight for him, right?”

“I tried,” you say, brows knit. Something thick and round is sitting in your throat. “I mean, I called--I tried to get someone to do something…”

“Right,” Dr. Messina says. “Do you feel like you got to say goodbye to him, then?”

Really, you did get to say goodbye. You got to hold him. You spoke to him. You were there when he slipped away. And that memory alone stays with you constantly. The exact weight of him in your arms. The warmth of his blood. The quiet rasps of his breaths. His broken words. The color drained from his face.

But you didn’t get to do with him what you did with the others. You did not wear a black dress and buy a bouquet of gardenias or chrysanthemums or bluebells for a torn family to hold beside a polished casket. You did not sit in oak pews and clasp your hands and pretend to pray. You did not hear Amazing Grace sung, you did not hear eulogies uttered, you did not throw a rose into a hole in the earth.

“I mean…I…I guess I thought I had said my goodbyes,” you tell her, sniffling. “I remember thinking very clearly when I was covering his body that I--that I wouldn’t see him ever again. I tried to…say my own version of goodbye.”

I could drink a case of you, darling. And still I’d be on my feet.

“But you did see him again,” Dr. Messina says slowly, earnestly. “In the morgue.”

With no family to identify his body officially--not even an aunt in California or a third cousin in Arkansas--you volunteered to see him again in the morgue to officially identify him on record.

And what struck you wasn’t that he still looked so much like himself or that he was given the same treatment as all the other bodies there despite his supposed wrongdoings. What struck you was how cold the room was--all that white tile, all the silver metal, all the crisp white sheets. What struck you was that he was alone--entirely, completely alone.

“Would you like a tissue?” The mortician had asked. “Or a moment alone with him?”

Shaking your head, you sniffled hard and wiped at your swollen cheeks. Your ears were still ringing from the explosion.

“Is he gonna be all alone down here?” You’d responded. “Like, are there other bodies here? Or is he separate because of what…”

You couldn’t get yourself to say it: because of what he did. Because of what everyone thought he did, but didn’t really do. Not him, not Bradley, the one lying dead before you.

The mortician looked at you the way he looked at all other hysterical woman that came in to identify brothers or husbands or boyfriends or fathers. He knew little of what happened at Camp Arcadia--just knew that you were brought here by the police. A special escort.

“He’s dead,” he’d said. “He doesn’t get lonely.”

But being dead--laying on the slab, completely still, in that dark and cold room. It sounded like lonely business to you. Lonelier than you felt each night in the plastic chair beside Jake’s hospital bed, watching him breathe as hours flitted on and on.

“I don’t want him to be alone,” you said to the mortician. You wiped your cheeks, straightened your shoulders. “He should be with the others.”

The mortician, entirely unamused, just grunted a response.

“Whatever you say, ma’am.”

“Maybe I don’t feel like I got to say goodbye,” you say now to Dr. Messina. “I was…I wish that the last time I saw him was at camp. When I covered him.”

“And why’s that?”

“Because if that had been--well, if that had been what happened, then I would’ve never known how cold the morgue is. And how…lonesome.” You feel that Dr. Messina is going to echo the mortician, just like any rational person would. So, you clear your throat and continue. “I guess I wish the last time I saw him would’ve been in any other condition. Like alive. But that’s just a…daydream.”

Dr. Messina nods. She scribbles on her pad.

“That’s understandable,” she says. You nod. “At camp, it would’ve been private. But not a lot has been private since then. How does that make you feel?”

“Lousy,” you say. “But I kind of always just feel…lousy.”

“And that could also be due to your condition,” Dr. Messina says. It’s another way of her saying it’ll pass. “And on that note--how have you been coping with the media frenzy? It hasn’t seemed to die down much. Are you still struggling with the conspiracies? With the constant limelight?”

“Like the one about occult rituals? Or the one about Bradley still being alive?”

Sensing a certain dry humor in your tone, Dr. Messina smiles small.

“Or that Bradley was possessed by the original killer?” She says.

Your heart falls into the cushion of your belly.

“Right,” you whisper weakly. “It’s all very tedious. It’s difficult to read, but…I guess it feels a bit like a new normal. I’m adapting.”

“You’re coping is what I’m hearing,” Messina says. She crosses her legs. “And, if I may repeat myself, coping will become easier when you’re not…in your current state anymore. You can have the prescription the moment you give birth, if you’d like. If you don’t plan to breastfeed.”

“I don’t,” you answer immediately, pennies under your tongue. The thought of giving more of your body to the thing that has stretched you to your limit makes your temple throb. “I’ll have it filled when I’m admitted.”

“Won’t be long now,” she says. “Are you having anxiety about the birth?”

“Doesn’t everyone?” You ask, eyes fluttering shut. “Everyone that’s young and-and stupid and unprepared, anyway.”

“You feel unprepared?” She asks you.

You nod, sighing. It feels like tacks on your tongue to even talk about this right now.

“Crib’s not even set up. Car seat isn’t installed. Things are just in…boxes right now.”

“Compartmentalized,” Dr. Messina says. “Tell me more.”

“We haven’t even talked about a name. And all the clothing--all the…everything we have is just stuff people have given us. Nothing we asked for.”

Dr. Messina nods, eyebrows knit.

“No baby shower?” She asks.

You laugh--no smiling mouth, no wrinkling of your eyes.

“I’m not exactly glowing,” you answer her, smoothing out your plaid shirt and simultaneously ridding your palms of sweat. “And besides, if people gave us more stuff it would still just stick around. In boxes, in a spare room.”

She doesn’t say anything about that special maternal instinct that’s supposed to have happened to you by now. She doesn’t say that you’re supposed to want to prepare for the arrival. That you’ll feel the innate desire to cook and clean and prepare. You should be wanting to paint the walls a soft yellow, you should be wanting to fold a thousand bibs and burp rags, you should be wanting to sanitize bottles and stock up on diapers.

“Tell me more about that,” she says. “Are you feeling like Jake is holding back because of the issue of paternity?”

“No,” you answer quickly, laughing dryly. “Not at all. It isn’t…I mean, it isn’t him.”

“Is it a matter of you being unable to be fully honest with him?” Dr. Messina asks, brows pulled together. “Like there are packed boxes in the spare room and inside of you.”

Swallowing hard, you give her a small shrug. Your tongue burns.

“I’m not sure,” you tell her.

She feels it when your walls go up, so she glances down at her notepad and then clears her throat.

“You said that Jake doesn’t hold back on account of paternity at all. What is that like?”

“He tries,” you answer simply. “He’s been game from the very start. He tries. He tries--he tries very hard.”

“Tries in what way?”

“In every way a person can,” you breathe.

And you’re telling the truth. When he calls his mama every week, to update her on his physical therapy and you, the conversation always turns towards the stranger. It’s when you leave the room every time, struggling to stand from your indented spot on the couch or pushing yourself out of one of the kitchen chairs. You don’t want to hear about Colic or sleep training or shaken baby syndrome. You don’t want to hear about the good stuff either--the Christening, the first words, the babbling.

Upon occasion, he tried to talk about a few things: name, gender, school, the birth. And usually, your response is that you’re too tired to talk about any of it. It doesn’t matter if it’s noon or midnight, if it’s sunny or rainy--you’re too tired. You’re always too tired to talk about something that chokes you with fear.

He’s even gone so far as to buy some catalogs--dog-earing the pages with cribs carved from solid oak or maple, circling indigo-colored quilted bedding, cutting out a few coupons for burp-pads or sleepers. He’ll sometimes leave them on your bedside table like some grand hint--but he always finds them neatly stacked on his bedside table when he comes back into the bedroom. It is a silent and serious gesture: no.

Dr. Messina writes something down on her pad.

“What are your exact anxieties about it?”

“The birth or the…?” You ask, brows furrowed.

“Both,” she answers.

Where to begin, you think.

“I’m scared of…I don’t know. Everything. Like, even the little things. I’m scared of being woken up in the middle of the night. I’m scared of making school lunches every day for thirteen years,” you list, wringing your hands together. A budding magnolia flower flitters past the window like a juvenile albino butterfly. You swallow hard. “I’m scared of…I’m scared of the baby looking at me in the eyes.”

Because if you looked into their eyes--what if you saw him? What if he saw you?

“You’re scared of the baby looking at you?” Dr. Messina asks. There is no judgment in her tone--only genuine inquiry. “Tell me more about that.”

Truly, you don’t know what else to say given her limited amount of knowledge of what happened to you and everyone else at Camp Arcadia.

How do you explain to her that you’re terrified of recognizing their eyes? Of seeing something in them that is void of life, of soul. Of looking into their eyes and seeing that those big, brown eyes don’t have any flecks of gold. Just monotonous darkness.

“What if they…look like him?” You whisper.

“Hasn’t that always been a risk?” Dr. Messina asks.

“Of course,” you answer. “Only now, it’s getting bigger. Unavoidable.”

She nods slowly.

“And would it hurt Jake if he saw a resemblance to Mr. Bradshaw?”

Humming, you swallow hard.

“At the end of it all…they were friends, I think,” you whisper. You know that Jake is grieving Bradley, too--despite their differences, despite it all. “I think it’s fair enough to say that it would hurt me more.”

Dr. Messina makes a sound of agreement.

“I think all of this hurts you more,” she tells you. “You physically carry the weight of it all. And you have been since this all began. From the very start.”

“Which is to say, I haven’t just been me,” you whisper. A beat passes and you laugh bitterly. “Christ.”

Dr. Messina lets you simmer in your emotion for a moment. You clear your throat, look up at her. There is a wobbling about you--your lips, your lashes. She doesn’t call attention to it.

“You just have to hang in there. As displeasing and vague as it sounds.”

Those silly cat posters come to mind when she says it: hang in there, baby!

“Easier said than done,” you tell her. Your eyes suddenly well with fat, fat tears. “I feel a bit like I can’t…I can’t even get a break at all. When I work, when I cook, when I feel even remotely happy, when I sleep, when I eat. It’s always…I’m just always coping. And I’m exhausted and I’m so preg…I’m just so tired, you know? But even sleep isn’t an option.”

Dr. Messina nods, eyebrows knit.

“So, you’re still having the nightmares?” She asks. You nod slowly, sniffling and blinking at the light as your tears dissipate. “Is it the same still? I know you’re someone who suffers from recurring dreams.”

“Yes, they’re all the same.”

Leafing through her notes, Dr. Messina reads softly to herself before glancing up at you again. It’s very hot in here now.

“So, you wake up strapped to a table and in immeasurable pain,” she reads to you. “And then you realize that you’re in labor and being prepped for a cesarean. The room is on fire and the flames are coming closer to you, but no one is responding. Everyone is going about like it’s business as usual… Do you want to continue?”

You don’t know how to tell her that you don’t want to talk about this--any of this. You don’t know how to tell her that you wish you could keep every single word, thought, feeling to yourself. Pack it deep, deep down. Compartmentalize. Have little boxes of memories lying about your head, gathering dust.

Taking a deep, warm breath, you nod.

“Before the operation can continue, the pain peaks and the…fetus bursts through my skin and it’s not a baby. It’s…” It’s the figure. A smaller version of it, one that was covert enough to curl up in your womb and incubate. “Something inhuman. I mean, it’s…a monster. It’s a monster. Rows of teeth and no eyelids and it’s…contorted. Not, like, deformed. But like--wrong. Just wrong.”

Dr. Messina nods along with you, watching you carefully. She can see your stunted breaths. It’s fear she sees written across your features now as you explain your nightmare--something she rarely sees you dressed in. Something people rarely see you dressed in, as she’s gathered the past nine months.

“And then what happens?”

Closing your eyes and chewing on your bottom lip, you press your fingers further into the couch.

“I’m bleeding out. The fire is getting closer. The…thing crawls up my chest and comes close to my face. And I’m so scared that I can’t--I can’t breathe, I can’t move. It kisses me on the mouth.”

Then it moves closer to you, close enough for bits of its hot drool to leak through the screen and fall onto your bare feet.

You can’t move as it presses its face against the screen too, it’s teeth clashing against your skin. It is not a bite, no, it’s a kiss--the realization sends a shiver down your spine. It is kissing you, moving closer, its breath putrid like vomit simmering in the sun, like the inside of a corpse. You can’t move, it’s coming closer--

“I see a lot of projection in the nightmare, which is normal for someone who has gone through what you have. It’s a valid response to trauma,” Dr. Messina says. She sets her pen and pad down, leans back in her chair and appears suddenly ultra casual--like the two of you are just in a coffee shop together. “Do you see any connections to real life?”

The nightmare has become you now. A fantastic amalgamation of your trauma seeping into real life, into real sleep, into real fear.

“The fire is obvious,” you say, sighing. “And the bleeding out…I know that it is because of Bradley. Because of what I…because of what I witnessed. Strapped down and unable to move projects…I don’t know, fear? Helplessness? It makes sense, I guess.”

“And the fetus being a monster? Or, rather, monstrous,” Dr. Messina inquires. Your toes are numb. It’s too hot in here--you feel like flames are licking your ears. “What do you suppose that is about?”

“I don’t know.”

You say it because you can’t tell her that you’ve seen the figure before--always with your eyes closed and never without fear intact. You can’t tell her that it is because of your tremendous fear that it wasn’t Bradley that had sex with you--that it was Damien Gwyar, who was the figure you saw from the start of it all, coming to you in the night and eating all that delicious petrification. You cannot tell her that Bradley wasn’t really Bradley and you didn’t know that when you conceived his child and that there is no way of knowing what the offspring you’re carrying will be like. You cannot tell her that you’re afraid of being eaten from the inside out, that you’re afraid of being torn in half when giving birth, that you’re worried that the thing you’re carrying will be something you cannot love.

Really, you cannot tell anyone this. It makes you feel hopeless. If the people that love you, the people you saved--the people who think you’re never afraid, the people who attribute you as being their sole reason for surviving--what would they have left? Already, everyone else is so fragile. Javy with his shaved head and call to orders, Phoenix with her Dixie cups full of pills and group therapy, Jake with his crutches and deep concern for you.

It is as clear to you as springwater: you cannot tell anyone how truly hopeless you are because they would have nothing left. And nothing is more than you have now, you think.

Dr. Messina clears her throat.

“You’re afraid the child will be like their father, maybe?” She suggests. But you know that it is what she thinks--it is less of a suggestion to her and more of a statement. “Or that nothing beautiful can be made in the aftermath.”

“Let’s go with that,” you say, nodding. You let your hands fall in your lap, motionless. “And the only way to get out…the only way to know…is to wait. Cope. Right?”

“Yes. Unfortunately,” she says. “Do you still feel like you did the right thing keeping the pregnancy? Given the circumstances.”

During one of your first sessions, you’d told her why through tears: even just the chance of having something left of Bradley was enough for you to cling onto it.

Even now, after everything, through your pregnancy, all the fear and anger and guilt and exhaustion--you think you did the right thing. But there is that little bit of apprehension sitting at the base of your spine, paralyzing you with every minute movement. What if you didn’t do the right thing? What if you’re ushering in a monster to live on this earth? What if it tears you apart when it is born? What if you die and it lives and Jake is alone? What if--

“I don’t know,” you answer and it feels real and true. You don’t know. Maybe it was wrong. Maybe you aren’t capable of loving anything that came from your time at Camp Arcadia, save a few friends and a lover. “It’s too late for me, though. Right?”

“Adoption is always an option,” Dr. Messina says. “I even have some pamphlets if you like. It’s never too late to change your mind.”

But the thought of it--of birthing something as evil as Damien Gwyar and unleashing them on an innocent family somewhere else in the world--makes you sick to your stomach. The sugar of your breakfast is sitting on your tongue again, mouth full of saliva.

“I couldn’t live with myself,” you whisper.

Then you glance at the clock and see that it is time to leave--how it has already been an hour is beyond you.

Time is funny like that these days. It passes.

♀

“What should we do for supper?” Jake asks when the two of you walk through the front door, slamming it shut with one of his crutches before the wind can whip your cheeks any more than it already has. “Whatever you want--I’ll make it. Boss me around! Have another craving, I dare you! I’m feeling good today, baby.”

He tosses the car keys into a ceramic bowl in the entryway and holds the small of your back as you lean against the wall, eyes half-shut. Everything about you feels heavy right now: your heart, your eyelids, your belly, your head.

“Mmm, I dunno,” you whisper. With a slight struggle, you sit down on the carpeted steps that lead upstairs and sigh when your heavy limbs finally go slack. “Just need these boots off.”

“Need some assistance?” He asks, brow quirked.

With a slight frown, you nod. It isn’t so easy to bend at the waist these days.

“Please,” you say.

Jake kneels slowly, teeth grit, and you watch with bated breath--always ready to spring into action. But his knees hit the tiles and he’s still upright, which pleases the both of you. He pats his knee, grinning at you.

“Give it to me, baby,” he says.

You raise your feet and Jake begins to peel your boots off. He watches you as your head tips backwards, as your eyes fall shut. There are snowflakes melting in your hair still from your trek from the car to the front door. And your cheeks are bitten with cold, just like your bottom lashes and lips. There’s a crinkle between your brows where they’re knit and the arch of your throat is enough to make him ache.

Poor bird. He knows you’re exhausted. Really, you always are. Finishing a twelve-hour shift, coming back from intense trauma therapy, carrying all the extra weight of the baby, making sure he gets to his appointments on time.

“How was it today?” You ask him, voice quiet and sullen. Your elbows are buried in the carpet. “Anyone blow you smoke? Or try and charm you again? Or--better yet--ask for your number?”

“Just one,” he teases. “And yes, she did ask for my number. I told her to hit the road.”

“Cassanova,” you whisper. “That makes six, right?”

“I guess I’m just irresistible to the ladies,” he tells you, setting your boot beside you and carefully rubbing your naked calves. Your skin is warm--almost feverish. “Especially ones in the medical profession.”

He folds your skirt up so it sits on your lap, your thighs bare before him. He presses a chaste kiss to your knee and then starts on your other boot.

That expression crosses your face again--like if you were still the you from last year, you’d be smiling. It’s almost there.

“Mmm,” you say. “And after another nurse asked for your digits, did you do any actual physical therapy? Or did you just tell ‘em you’ve got a very pregnant girl waiting for you in the car out front and watch her crumble?”

He pulls your other boot off and kisses all the way up your shin, stopping at your knee. You used to smell like jasmine--but now you smell warmer, darker. It’s a scent that makes him think of walking into his mama’s closet, which was windowless and warm and perfumed with a sweet musk.

“I told ‘em I’ve finally got the girl I waited all those years for and that I ain’t letting her go,” he says. “They usually run for the hills when I tell ‘em I’m gonna be a father, anyway.”

A father.

A rock sits in your throat, obstructing your swallowing.

“Mm,” you whisper as he rubs up your legs, pushing your skirt further up. Your head is growing foggy and heavy. “I’m tainted goods.”

“Oh, darlin’,” Jake coos. You don’t open your eyes as he rests his chin on your knees and holds your belly in his hands. The stranger moves--always excited to feel Jake’s hands against them. Your belly turns and pennies gather beneath your tongue. “You’re all I’ve ever wanted.”

“You must’ve been the kid that asked for socks for Christmas,” you sigh, eyes still closed. You breathe through your nausea. “‘Cause I don’t feel like much of a prize these days.”

Jake chews on his lip, shaking his head.

You remain, in his opinion, the best thing on God’s green earth.

“Seems like therapy was helpful today,” he says, only partly teasing. You open your eyes, peek at him. He’s looking at you seriously. “Was it? Helpful, I mean.”

All you can muster for a moment is a shrug. You’re deflating by the second, ready to go to bed for the next several days. And Jake--ever-hopeful, bright-eyed Jake.

How can you possibly infect him with your doom?

“Sometimes I don’t see the point in re-hashing everything like that,” you tell him. He kisses your knee again, pats your belly like you’re a loyal dog. “I’m just…it just…”

“What?” Jake prompts, earnest as ever. When you avert your gaze, attempting to look out the window at the snowstorm, he ducks into your field of vision with his brows pulled together. “You can talk to me, you know. I was there, too.”

Really, it’s what he wants. You steeled something away from him when Camp Arcadia burned down. What you faced, what you saw, you did it alone. And he thinks--he knows, really--that you’ve been alone since then. Little parts of you, big parts of you, are stored deep beneath the surface of your skin. He wonders if that’s why you always feel so feverish; all that truth is bubbling to the surface, begging to come out, begging to breathe.

“I know,” you tell him, eyes pouring into his. Hopeless, hopeless, hopeless. “I’m fine. Just feeling tired. I think I’m gonna lie down for a while.”

Jake deflates in real time, trying not to make it obvious. But everything he does is obvious to you--even just a little quirk in his brows, even just a momentary frown, even just a baited breath sitting heavy in his chest.

More than anything, Jake wants you to be honest with him. He wants to know the truth about what you’re thinking, what you’re feeling. And it isn’t even that you’re a liar--you’re just a withholder.

“You know, I wish you had more faith in me,” he says carefully, voice drenched in sincerity. “I love you. I always have. You couldn’t tell me anything that would change that.”

With your brows knit and your stomach in a knot, you reach out and hold his cheeks. He shaved this morning while you brushed your teeth, leaning against the wall, carefully following the grain. You watched, hypnotized by the beauty in something so mundane. And now, as you feel the smooth skin of his cheeks, you feel it again. There is such beauty in every single thing he does--even when he just leans into your palm and watches you watch him.

Who are you to disrupt that beauty?

“I love you,” you tell him. It’s the full truth. “I’m only tired, alright? I’ll feel better after I lie down.”

Jake sucks in a breath--his ribs ache. But he nods, eyes flittering down to your belly.

“Let’s get you to bed, then.”

♀

Jake is mincing garlic when the telephone rings--it’s shrill and incessant. He nearly stumbles over his own feet trying to get to it before it wakes you.

“Hello?” He says instead of your name or his name. He’s learned his lesson with the reporters.

“Hey, man,” Javy says on the other end of the line, voice crackley and far away--but jovial. “How’s it hanging, brother?”

Jake smiles, his shoulders falling.

“Slightly to the left. Boy, is it good to hear your voice,” Jake sighs, a grin tugging on his lips. “How goes it, my man?”

“A little sideways sometimes, but we’re on the straight and narrow now,” Javy answers. “Got some spare time to gab with me?”

Jake glances at the stove--his roux is going to burn. But he simply tucks the phone against his ear, walks across the kitchen as the curly cord stretches, and turns the gas off.

“Always,” Jake answers.

“Is Gale around?” Javy asks--he always asks.

“Nah, she’s sleeping right now,” Jake says.

“Shit--what time is it there?”

Jake glances at his wrist.

“Nah, don’t worry--it’s only about a quarter ‘til five. She’s just tired today--well, she’s kinda always tired right now But especially because she had an appointment with Dr. Messina today--you know how that goes.”

“Ah, so she saw the shrinky-dink today,” Javy says. Dr. Messina was the mandated psychotherapist all the survivors had to go to in the direct aftermath--it was something they had to do to get released from the hospital. Javy remembers her well--she was kind. “She alright?”

Jake walks to the kitchen table and eases himself into a wooden chair, the phone still tucked between his ear and shoulder as he sets his crutches beside him. The scent of butter is sitting thickly under his nose, permeating his mustache.

“She’s the same as she ever is,” Jake says. And before Javy can ask any more about it, Jake clears his throat. “And you? How’s it going in Wherever The Hell You Are? Don’t bullshit me either.”

Javy laughs. Jake misses that big, broad sound. He remembers the way that it fills up whatever space it occupies--like a liquid.

“Can’t complain,” Javy says. There’s a beat--somewhere on his end of the line, there’s a distant ruckus like men yelling or a sport’s game happening. “Well, I can, but what good’d that do us, huh?”

“Might make you feel better to get it off your chest,” Jake offers.

He wants--desperately so--for Javy to complain to him about where he’s stationed or his sergeant or some buck wild members of his outfit. Really, Jake wants Javy to fill all that quiet so Jake can just close his eyes, smell the butter on the stove, listen, and wait for you to wake up. He doesn’t want to talk about you or the way you can’t tell him things or the heat of your skin or the way you can’t even say the word baby.

Javy pauses. He’s sitting in an unreasonably hot warehouse-type building right now, hunkered down by the payphones with a cup full of quarters. There’s sweat dripping down his back despite the industrial-sized fans whirring above him--he’s fairly certain they’re just churning hot air.

“Nah,” Javy says. “The distraction is…good.”

“Enlisting was the right choice,” Jake says. “I knew it was. Right?”

Javy hums.

“Yeah,” he answers. “I mean…yeah. It was. I don’t know what I’d be doing if I was on the outside. Like…I couldn’t go back to being a waiter or anything. Would’ve been so depressing. At least this way, I feel like I’m…”

Jake allows Javy to think--then realizes that Javy doesn’t know what to say.

“You feel like you’re actually contributing,” Jake finishes for him.

Javy sucks on the back of his teeth.

“Not that y’all aren’t.”

“Oh, I’m not,” Jake says, laughing softly and dryly. “It’s alright, no offense felt. I mean, once I’m right and everything I plan on being a kind of functioning member of society. Like Gale. Or Nix.”

Neither of them say it, but they’re both thinking it--you’re really the only functioning member of society. Well, maybe Javy, too. But you’re the only one that has been strong enough to go right back to what you were doing before everything.

“Speaking of--how’s Nix? Heard anything from her lately?”

“Yeah,” Jake answers, nodding as if Javy can see him. “We just saw her over Easter weekend. She came out to the house and we dyed some eggs and stuff. Gorged on chocolate. We wanted her to stay the night, but…”

But Phoenix has a hard time sleeping anywhere outside of her room. Not just because her white concrete walls make her feel boxed in--which is to say safe or contained--but because of the fat sleeping pill they give her nightly. She sleeps like a log whenever she’s wrapped up in her powder-blue sheets and paper pajamas. She wouldn’t have been able to sleep a wink on your comfortable couch--it’s too cushioned. Too worn-in. Not sterile enough.

The hardest part for her in places that feel comfortable--such as a home like yours with signs of life like dishes in the sink and crooked frames in the hallway and an empty cardboard cylinder on the toilet paper holder and a beat up rug in the living room--is that she can imagine Bob there. Bob sitting on the floor around your walnut coffee table, cheeks pink from a few glasses of wine and playing cards in his lazy grip. Bob washed in blue light in the kitchen as he poured himself a cup of coffee--only after he poured Phoenix one first, though. Bob just sitting on the couch, curled up beneath an afghan, watching The Price Is Right with a peculiar prickling interest.

This is all to say that Phoenix prefers to stay in places where she knows Bob would never be--like New Haven Presbyterian Psychiatric Hospital.

“Right,” Javy says. Another beat. Javy wipes his forehead with the bottom half of his white t-shirt before tucking it back into his service pants. “She called a couple days ago. She sounded good--well, she sounded better. She told me Curtis has been asking to visit with her.”

Curtis Floyd is the only surviving Floyd child--which is to say that Curtis was Bob’s little brother.

“Yeah,” Jake says, eyebrows raised. “I think he went up there last weekend.”

“Oh,” Javy says. “Shit. How’d it go?”

“Good, from what I can tell,” Jake answers. “Apparently he’s as good as Bob was at chess, which seems on brand. Right?”

Javy laughs--the sound is more muffled now. Jake wonders if Javy has his hand cupping his chin, the lazy way he used to sit when he was bored at camp between activities.

“I’m having a Hell of a time imagining Nix playing chess,” Javy says. “Now--Bob, I can see. Well, I could…Anyway. Not a big shock that it’s hereditary.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” Jake says. He’s twirling the cord rapidly now. “M’hoping them spending time together does them both some good. He’s been taking it hard--Curtis.”

Javy sighs.

“Yeah. I remember.”

He’s talking about the funeral. Curtis Floyd was silent for the entirety of the service. He stood motionless beside his brother’s casket in a suit that was too short in the arms and too tight in the hips--probably because they didn’t have time to tailor him before the funeral. It had to be a quick turn-around.

People walked up to him, like you’re supposed to do at funerals, and whispered their condolences. Curtis didn’t so much as blink--it was like he was standing somewhere else, somewhere far away from anyone and anything.

The only time he reacted was when you made your way up to Curtis. You were holding Jake’s shoulder, wearing the same black dress you’d worn to Mickey and Paul’s service, green around the gills--which you’d attributed to trauma instead of the little stranger unknowingly growing in your womb.

“God,” you whispered to Jake. Cold sweat dotted your hairline. “I mean--what can we even say to him?”

Everyone dressed in black and navy and gray was shifting forward with a monotonous step like you were on a finely-oiled conveyor belt. Jake reached up and squeezed your hand, lips twisted in grief.

“That we’re sorry,” Jake tried.

“Well, I am sorry. I’m very sorry. But what good does that do him?”

Jake wasn’t sure what to say. Pain was sitting heavy all over his body now--he wanted to go back home, even if he knew that meant a long and bumpy car ride home and you straining yourself to get him out of the car and into his wheelchair again.

“Maybe it sounds nice to hear,” Jake said. The line moved forward--a uniform shuffle. “Better than some of the other shit I’m sure he’s hearing.”

“Yeah,” you said softly. “True.”

Then you were at the front of the line, pushing Jake forward and stepping down on the brakes before bringing your eyebrows together politely.

“Thank you for coming,” Mrs. Floyd said to you, holding her arms wide open. She was clutching a yellow hanky. “I’m sure this isn’t very--very easy for the two of you.”

“We wouldn’t miss this,” Jake said, extending his hand for Mr. Floyd to shake firmly. Mr. Floyd held onto Jake’s one hand with both of his, his bottom lip trembling. “Bob was a good man--a good friend.”

“He hardly even got to be a man…” Mrs. Floyd said. She was hugging you close to her, weeping softly on your shoulder. You were hugging her back rigidly, blinking back tears as you stared into the light. “I mean--he was so young. I just can’t understand, I just can’t even--!”

Mr. Floyd put his hand on his wife’s shoulder and she paused in her ranting.

“He was…good. Gentle. He was very gentle,” you said.

Mrs. Floyd nodded, the tip of her nose bright red.

“Yes, he was.”

You turned to Curtis as Jake chatted with the Floyd’s some more, his face permanently fixed in a look of anguish. He was good at this public grief thing. You weren’t.

Curtis was already looking at you, his eyes a bit hollower than his parents and his gaze listless and despondent.

“Was he a good brother?” You asked him because you didn’t know what else to say or do or ask. “He seems like he would’ve been.”

Curtis blinked at you, eyebrows pinching slightly.

“Yeah, he was,” Curtis answered. His throat felt raw. “He used to…”

Curtis paused for a long moment. You didn’t push him. You just stood there before him, genuinely engaged with him, waiting.

He was going to say that Bob used to build Lego sets with him--that Bob was the one that was really good at it. He was going to say that Bob would’ve been secretly thumb-wrestling Curtis behind their parents’ backs if he was here now, trying to take Curtis’ mind off the grief. He was going to say that he used to sleep in Bob’s room on Christmas Eve every year and Bob never told him that he was too old to do that.

He couldn’t say any of it. Words evaded him, flocking towards the sea like lost gulls. He knew, though, that you didn’t need him to say it. There was something about the way you were looking at him--he knew that you already knew. You understood. He felt like it was the first time anyone had actually seen him that day--or at all since they got that phone call a few weeks ago.

Before you could register what was happening, Curtis’ body was slamming into yours. You stuttered something incoherent, eyes blowing wide and body rippling with the sudden weight of his embrace. He was hugging you--hugging you tight like you were someone he’d been missing forever.

“Honey!”

“Curtis!” Mr. Floyd said, stunned. “Curtis, c’mon, son--!”

He moved to take Curtis’ arm, but you were wrapping your arms around Curtis, accepting the embrace. You shook your head at his parents, who were embarrassed and in mourning and so tired, and just held Curtis Floyd.

The finely-oiled conveyor belt came to a halt.

Jake watched you for a long time as the boy who lost his only brother held you. Curtis would always be categorized this way, by this grief: the boy who lost his only brother after an unspeakable act of brutality. Even Jake felt that his category was concise, clear: the man who survived a direct attack. If he lost anything, it was the ability to walk--which he was told would return with enough effort.

He wondered how people would categorize you--you’d lost so much, gained so little.

Jake’s tongue is dry. He begins to twirl the curly cord of the phone around his index finger, watching it coil tighter and tighter before springing loose.

“Poor kid. Can you imagine? I mean…I know we can imagine. But like--your older brother. Man, my older brother is my hero. If he…” Javy sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I don’t know what I’d do. I’d be pretty lost.”

“I think Curtis is lost,” Jake says. “He’s visited us a couple times, too. Kid’s like a Monk.”

“Visited you and Gale or just Gale?”

“He mostly wanted to be around Gale, yeah,” Jake says. He twists a few of his mustache hairs and sniffles. “His ‘rents will drop him off and he just sits on the couch with Gale. Sometimes I’ll make ‘em dinner or something.”

“Do they talk?” Javy asks. “Or is it just…like, silent?”

“I get the feeling they do when I’m not in the room,” Jake answers. He takes a breath and then shrugs. “But whenever I come in, they’re usually just watching Happy Days re-runs.”

Javy starts to lowly sing the Happy Days theme song and Jake just laughs.

“Yeah. The irony of that isn’t entirely lost on me,” Javy sighs.

“Poor kid,” Jake says.

Javy nods as if Jake can see him.

“And…how about your kid?”

Jake doesn’t go cold at the mention of your child the way that you do. But he does sigh--all the air punches out of his lungs and into the space around him.

“Still baking,” Jake answers.

He knows he’s not gonna be let off that easily--but he doesn’t say anything else for a second.

“Gale been any more…” Javy struggles to find a word that doesn’t sound shameful. Maternal. Open. Awake. “Accepting?”

“No,” Jake answers, sitting back in the chair. “Not really. Same as before.”

“Just pretending like it’s not happening?” Javy asks--he asks this without malice, without judgment. Jake hums in agreement. “So, like, what’s she gonna do when she has the thing?”

“It’s not a thing, Javy. It’s a baby,” Jake says with a heave.

“Poor word choice. Sorry! What’s she gonna do when she has the baby?”

Jake doesn’t know what to say. He starts to pick at a hang nail.

“I’m not sure,” he answers.

“Do you think it’s gonna snap her out of it?”

“Snap her out of what?” Jake asks.

“Whatever realm she lives in now.”

Jake doesn’t say anything for a long, hard few moments. He doesn’t know. Maybe this is what you’re going to be like forever. Maybe you shouldn’t be having this baby. Maybe he should’ve put his foot down a little bit harder. Maybe he should’ve said all this to you already.

“She’s due tomorrow,” Jake says because he doesn’t know what else to say.

Javy sighs, shaking his head. He fans himself.

“You could be a dad tomorrow,” Javy says. “How nuts is that? Did you ever think this would happen?”

“In all honesty, yeah, I did,” Jake says. He’s always pictured the two of you together--playing house, having a baby. “Not like this, I guess.”

“Life’s laughable like that these days,” Javy says. “It’s what you thought it would be except…like, it’s…”

“Off-center?” Jake prompts.

“Yeah,” Javy confirms. “And, I don’t know--deficient.”

“Deficient?” Jake asks. “How many points is that? Are my tax dollars going to your Scrabble habit?”

“Up your nose with a rubber hose, man,” Javy laughs. A quiet, pregnant pause fills the air between them. He sighs. “Gale up yet?”

He wants to talk to you--ask how you are, try and get one strangled laugh out of you.

“No,” Jake says, peering down the dark hallway. “She’s still out.”

Javy has a hard time imagining you as you are right now. Stretched to your limit, ghostlike in appearance with your watery gaze and exhausted smile. He remembers you as covered in blood and holding a shotgun--so far away from sleep that it seemed like something you’d never do again..

“Do you think that’s a sign that it’s gonna be tomorrow?” Javy asks. “Shit, I don’t know how it all works. All I know is that when my cousin had her baby, she slept for like two days before. Like a fucking--like a hibernating bear.”

“She doesn’t seem ready,” Jake answers, which is true. “I don’t think she wants…”

Javy can fill in the blanks.

“What if she doesn’t ever seem ready?”

“Bleak outlook,” Jake sighs out, rubbing his eyes. “I try not to…”

Javy pauses, collecting his thoughts.

“Look, you’re my main man. I love you like I love my own flesh and blood--!” Javy pauses, cringing at the imagery. Jake doesn’t say anything. “And you know that I love Gale, too--shit, I really think I would’ve been dead meat without her. But this…this is serious, man. The two of you are bringing another life into the world and you haven’t even installed the car seat.”

“How do you know I haven’t installed the car seat?” Jake asks

“Have you?” Javy deadpans.

“No,” Jake answers.

There’s a pause again. Javy would laugh if he could muster the strength.

“What are you gonna do if she…?”

Another pause. He’s hoping Jake will fill in the blanks.

“If she what?” Jake asks. The question is bitter on his tongue.

“Stays the exact same way she is now,” Javy says. “And before you flip your lid, I know you love her. I love her, too, man. But she’s not her anymore. I mean, shit--none of us are. I know that. And I know it isn’t fair that she’s being held to this…different standard, but she’s gonna have a baby in a few days. It was her choice.”

Jake’s stomach is in knots. He closes his eyes.

“Either way she chose, it wouldn’t have been easy,” Jake says quietly. “Put yourself in her shoes. Think about what it would be like to…”

“I know. After all the death, the destruction--life finds a way. That irony isn’t lost on me either,” Javy says. “And I know you hate that for her. But you can’t be a caretaker and a single parent.”

“Jesus,” Jake hisses into the receiver. He’s gripping the cord hard. “She’s not--Christ, she’s not comatose. She’s depressed. Traumatized.”

“Jake, she doesn’t know how to help herself,” Javy says. “I get it. I do. I don’t know what the fuck I’m…but look, man. Something’s gotta give. Why don’t you press her a little bit? See if she’ll finally talk about a name or a crib or--something. Anything.”

“I don’t want to push her,” Jake says, his tone whispered. “I don’t…I don’t wanna keep staying this way either, though. She makes me--she really does make me happy. Shit, she’s the girl of my dreams. Still is. Always will be.”

Javy hums along with Jake, remembering when times were simpler. When the sun always felt good on their shoulders. When summertime felt fleeting but also everlasting in complete and utter tandem. When he could still poke fun at Jake for having that Polaroid of the two of you in his wallet.

“You’re not pushing her,” Javy assures Jake. “You love her the most out of anyone, right? And if you don’t push her now--if you wait until the little alien is here, she might already be too far gone.”

“Too far gone?” Jake says, chewing the words. He suppresses a gag.

“You know what I mean,” Javy says. “Just…stuck like that.”

“She’s not crossing her eyes,” Jake says. “She’s not…she won’t be stuck forever. We’ll make it through.”

“Is that enough for you?” Javy asks. “Just making it through? Always just making it through?”

“I don’t know, Jav,” Jake sighs. He doesn’t. “But I do know that it’s rounding on suppertime and I’ve gotta feed ‘er, alright? When can you call again?”

Javy shakes his cup of quarters--he still has a decent amount left.

“How about Monday?”

“Works for me,” Jake says. He’s readying himself to stand, his tongue stained from this conversation. “Keep on keepin’ on, alright, man?”

“Likewise, clydesdale.”

There’s another pause--both of them just breathing, waiting.

Jake sniffles.

“Give Gale my love,” Javy says. He looks down at his hands. “You’re not…shit, you’re not alone, man. You know that, right?”

“Says the guy who left us behind for some uniforms in an undisclosed location,” Jake says, only partly joking. “You couldn’t wait to leave us in the dust, buddy.”

“Ha-ha,” Javy says. “I think we’d be at each other’s throats if we--!”

Another pause. Javy is still learning that there are certain phrases, ones that used to seem so normal, that make his spine curl inward like it’s going to come hurdling out of his body in a c-shape.

“Take care, man,” Jake says because he knows Javy is chastising himself silently.

Javy is trying desperately to think of a better note to end on.

He settles on, “Be on the look-out for a stork.”

Jake smiles, cheeks tinted pink. Javy clears his throat, uncomfortable. He wipes another bead of sweat off his forehead.

“You know I will be,” Jake answers. The thought makes him dizzy.

Javy nods.

“You know I…love you, right?”

“Right,” Jake answers quickly. “And you know I feel the same.”

“Yeah, I do.”

They’re dancing around a goodbye--it is a bump in the road they’re walking down, one that is inevitable. It’s always hard for them to say goodbye to another. Javy always says it’s the Midwest’s effect on the body, Jake always says it’s his Southern hospitality. But really it’s because they’ve never been good at ending things between them, at turning their backs on each other and walking different ways. It just isn’t in their nature.

“I’ll call you if anything happens. Baby-wise, that is,” Jake says. His fingertips almost begin to tremble just at the thought. “Fair?”

“As fair as fair gets,” Javy says. He sighs. “Talk to you later.”

“See ya.”

And then Jake finally hangs up the phone. He stands alone in the quiet kitchen with his hand on the receiver for a while, just listening to the snow tap on the window above the sink and the empty dial tone ring out. The roux has congealed on the stove--he’s gonna have to start over.

It’s almost six now. Jake reckons he better get a move on.

♀

Jake walks down the hall carefully, not bothering to flick the light on. He can see in any and all dark now--or, at least, it feels that way. His crutches dig into the runner you laid out and he’s thankful that it’s dulling the noise--he doesn’t wanna wake you up.

It’s been a couple hours since he walked with you to the bedroom and sat at the end of the bed while you stripped naked. He watched you, still and silent, as you opened drawers and closed them, as you slipped into a cold t-shirt and a new pair of panties. He watched you take your makeup off and push your hair out of your face.

You looked like you were at the end, skin breaking where the baby has pushed you further and further--taking and taking. He watched your heavy-lidded eyes find him in the mirror, watched your brows come together.

“What?” You’d asked. “What’s the matter?”

He almost said nothing, baby. But then he thought about the way you withheld from him, thought about the way you hid little pieces of yourself. He thought about the way you were still going to therapy, even if it didn’t seem to untie the knots in your shoulders.

He was worried about what was to come, he realized.

So he was honest.

“You’re just…beautiful,” he said.

“So are you,” you said seriously and without missing a beat.

Then you looked down at your own belly in the mirror, the underside of it dipping out from beneath your t-shirt. There was always a piece of you showing since your body was made up of peaks and knolls now. And, looking at yourself, you saw it, too. You were at the end. You couldn’t take much more--well, really, you couldn’t give much more.

“Soup sound good?”

“Sounds stellar,” you’d whispered to him. “Perfect weather for it.”

You tore your gaze from your own reflection and then turned towards him, hands fallen to your sides. Usually, when Jake saw pregnant women, they were holding their bumps. Using it as an accessory, toting it around like this season’s bag. But you--you tried not to touch it if you could avoid doing so, which was almost always. He couldn’t imagine having a part of his body that he couldn’t--or wouldn’t--touch.

Here the two of you were, somehow still alive after it all and with a little stranger so close that you could almost see them through your skin, and you were talking about the weather, about soup.

“I love you,” Jake said suddenly, feeling desperate.

You tilted your head to the side the way dog’s do when they hear a familiar word.

“Yeah, I love you, too,” you said. You shifted all your weight to your right side, hip jutting out. “Is there something you wanna talk about? Because if it’s about before, then, baby I--!”

He watched the valley of your chest rise until it was a hill and held his hand up to stop you. You were holding your breath.

“--No, no. I just felt like telling you.”

Blinking at him, you frowned.

“Well, now I feel like an asshole,” you said softly. You stepped forward--very nearly into his arms. “I’m sorry.”

He swiftly put his arms around you and pulled you close. Your belly grazed his throat, his chest. He wondered if the baby could feel his heartbeat, his breaths. He knew the baby could hear your heartbeat, feel your organs working and your blood rushing. He wished he could feel your life thrumming like that all the time. It would make him feel better.

“Don’t be sorry,” he told you.

The storm is still angrily knocking on the doors and rattling windows, hiding the yellow sun away. He’d been watching it out the kitchen window as he slowly finished supper, simmering chicken broth and rolling biscuits out.

When he reaches the bedroom door, it’s ajar and the light inside is tinted a light blue--a very cold shade of blue. Like it’s snowing inside of the bedroom. If he lets his eyes un-adjust, if he doesn’t focus too hard on anything particular, he can see the snow falling from the ceiling and over your still form. He can imagine a glass dome surrounding you, every book and glass on the nightstand suspended in water and antifreeze and glycerol. You’re here in your own little snowglobe and Jake is watching from the outside.

“Darlin’?” Jake whispers, pushing the door open with a crutch.

You do not respond.

He knows why as soon as he sees inside the room. You’re fast asleep on the bed, curled up on your side with your knees pulled up underneath your belly and your head bowed as if in prayer. There’s a crinkle between your brows and from where Jake is standing, he can see the goosebumps covering your skin.

As soon as he’s beside you, listening to your deep breaths and your silent slumber, he pulls the sheets over your body, tucking them over your shoulder. If you didn’t have a belly right now, he thinks you might disappear under there--but the belly strains against the covers, ever-visible.

Sitting on the bed, carefully tucking his crutches beside him, he rubs your arm over the sheet. You don’t stir. It isn’t often that you’re out like this--truly at rest. He knows he can’t wake you up for anything right now, especially not chicken soup.

So, for just a while, he sits beside you and watches you sleep. Jake thinks it might be the only time you look like the you that you were before everything happened. When you’re asleep like this, curled up and quiet, it isn’t hard for him to imagine you grinning or laughing. It isn’t hard for him to imagine you springing up with a tired smile, head lulling to the side as you stretch across the pillows.

With an open palm, he moves down your body until it rests on the curve of your belly.

Reality has dawned on him--really, it’s been here the whole time. From the moment you told him that you knew you were pregnant at the gas station, he was serious about this all. Yes, you are going to have a baby and so is he. He loves you--he’s loved you for a long time--and it never felt unnatural for him to love the baby you’re carrying, too. He thinks that’s what this feeling is that sits so heavy in his chest when the baby kicks his palm--it’s warm and soft. Love.

“Be good,” he whispers to the baby. He pretends not to be choked up. “I know you will be.”

You stir--he moves his hand away. And then he begins to stand slowly, not wanting to rip you from such a peaceful slumber. He begins to walk out of the room, content to let you rest for as long as you can. He’ll just put your dinner in the stove and leave the warmer on--

Abruptly, you sit up straight on the bed. Your hair is mussed from the pillow and your face is hot and sleep is sitting on your tongue.

Jake turns, brows knit in apology.

“I’m sorry, I was trying to be quiet.”

“It’s alright,” you answer him, breath caught in your throat. Your heart is beating so hard that Jake can see your pulse throbbing on your throat. “You didn’t wake me up.”

“What did?” He asks, glancing down at your belly again. He’s paused near the end of the bed, watching you. “Everything okay?”

“Fine,” you answer, breathing out hard. You were sleeping hard--which means that you were fully immersed in the nightmare. They always feel so real. “Do you--will you…get in bed with me?”

Jake complies immediately, setting his crutches against the closet doors before he tucks himself beneath the sheets to feel your skin.

“I’m freezing,” you admit as you shuffle closer to his body beneath the covers.

“Well, c’mere then,” Jake says quietly.

He’s wrapping his arms around you, pulling you as close as he can. You’re all sorts of warm besides the gooseflesh that makes up your skin. He nuzzles his nose against your temple and sighs softly.

He shifts, pulling the quilt over the two of you, too.

“Not a good nap?” He asks. You shake your head. “Bad dream?” He asks again. You just nod, not saying anything as you measure your breaths. “Wanna talk about it?”

“I don’t think so,” you tell him, an ache clustering behind your eyes at the thought of detailing your nightmare out loud again today. “Thanks a million, though.”

Jake nods--which is what he always does whenever you tell him no in a nice enough way. But then he thinks about what Javy said, how serious and sad he sounded on the telephone earlier today: After all the death, the destruction--life finds a way. That irony isn’t lost on me either.

“Why don’t you want to talk about it?” He asks--his voice is so low, so quiet, that it is very nearly a whisper.

You hear him, though. Your head is resting against his chest right now--it would be hard not to hear him.

“It was just a dream,” you tell him.

“I don’t just mean this time--this dream. I mean…” Jake sucks in a deep breath, blinking at the thrifted portraits on the wall as he strokes your hair carefully, softly. But you can’t be a caretaker and a single parent. “Everything. You don’t ever wanna talk about anything that happened.”

“Yeah,” you answer. You sniffle. “Do you?”

“Of course I want to,” Jake answers. “How else do you get past something like that?”

“I don’t know how,” you say.

He nods.

“I know you don’t,” he says.

Frowning, you look up at him. He’s ready to meet your gaze--his brows are pulled together in sympathy and his lips are frowning and there’s pink dusting his cheeks.

“What are you doing?” You ask him.

“I’m holding you,” he tries.

You sit up further, away from him. Your chest makes a hollow sounding thunk when you prop yourself up. Maybe it does--or maybe you just think it does. You don’t know.

“Stop,” you say softly, shaking your head at him. “Why are you fighting me?”

“This isn’t a fight,” Jake says immediately. His eyes are pleading--what they want, what they need you aren’t sure. But there is a sinking rock in your gut because you feel that whatever it is--you cannot provide it. “C’mon. I’m not trying to upset you.”

“Well, you are,” you say. A flame of despair reaches up and licks the roof of your mouth. “Can’t you see that I’m doing my best here?”

Jake says nothing.

A defeated scoff falls from your mouth and punctures the air around you.

Jake thinks, with an overwhelming amount of dread, that the room looks even more blue now. Colder. Darker.

“It isn’t that I think you’re not trying your best,” Jake says, attempting to diffuse this time bomb lying a few inches away from him. You watch him without blinking. “It’s that I…well, I just wish you would talk about it.”

“I do,” you tell him. “Twice a week. For an hour.”

“I meant with me,” he says. He takes a breath and shrugs listlessly. “I want you to talk about it with me.”

“Why?” You demand.

Jake scoffs now--a smaller and less aggressive noise. One that just says really? I have to spell it out for you?

“Well, one--because I love you. And two--because I don’t even know the full story except for what other people have told me. Like, after I got out of the cabin and between the mess hall and the nurse’s cabin…I don’t know what you went through. You’ve never told me what happened to you.”

Spine rigid, you nod.

“Good. I’m glad you don’t know,” you tell him. You sigh, rubbing your eyes. “I don’t…why would you want to know?”

“Refer to my first point,” Jake says, his tone a bit biting. “What--you think I can’t handle it?”

Biting the inside of your cheek, closing your molars over a piece of metallic tissue that dangles there, you think of what to say next. Jake just watches you think, watches your eyes fall over his face like you’re trying to rearrange his features with only your gaze.

“It’s not my job to say what you can or can’t handle,” you say. Your voice is calm, quiet. Honest.

Jake’s throat burns.

“Gale,” Jake says because he can’t think of anything else to say when he’s stunned the way he is now. His jaw hangs open, just a crack, as he watches you. Maybe he’s waiting for you to go back on your word, to try and explain what you really meant instead of what you said. But you just stare at him. “That feels…unfair of you to say.”

“Unfair?” You ask, brows knit. “What do you--I’m not insulting you, Jake. It’s not an insult to want to keep you from knowing all the shit I…endured.”

Jake stares at you--his green eyes are the color of treetops in the sunshine. His cheeks are darker now, redder.

“I got axed in the back so you wouldn’t be,” Jake says. He swallows hard. “I don’t know if you remember that or not. I’d do it again--every single day of my life--to keep you on God’s green earth. But you can’t even talk with me about what you’re feeling?”

“What are you doing?” You whisper. Your heart is beating fast again, but it’s a different kind of panic than the one you nightmare induced. This is like the rapid flaps of a hummingbird’s wings--too fast to count, too fleeting to feel. “C’mon. Let’s not.”

“No, I feel like…you know what? Let’s. Let’s talk about it. Get it all out on the table. You don’t think I’ve been through enough to understand what you went through. Is that it?”

“I never said that,” you say softly.

“Yeah, but you were thinking it.”

“You don’t know what I’m thinking,” you defend.

He points at you, a bitter smile tugging on his mouth.

“Exactly.”

A beat passes.

Somewhere a few miles down the road, a train passes. The horn blows. The wheels tumble on the tracks. The bells ring and the lights flash as cars wait to pass.

“It’s not a competition,” you say. You sound achingly like Dr. Messina. “Grief isn’t--what we went through isn’t a competition.”

“Yeah. I know it’s not,” Jake says. He pauses and turns his head to the side. “Do you?”

“If it’s not a competition, why do you want to know every detail? Why do you want me to…God, re-live that? I don’t ever wanna be back there ever again in my life.”

“I want to understand you,” Jake says, brows drawn together. He chews on his bottom lip. “I want to…I want to know why you do the things that you do.”

Offended, you just stare at him. The stranger stretches, flexes--it is a feeling you wish to never feel again. You cannot speak until it is over, until they go still, until they settle deep inside of you.

“Oh, because I’ve really been doing shit that’s out of pocket,” you say bitterly. “Like going to therapy and working a full-time job. Oh, and grocery shopping and going to the bank and doctor’s appointments.”

Jake just stares at you hard. His jaw is flexed.

“I feel like I don’t even…” He sucks in a deep breath and rubs his eyes tiredly. “I don’t feel like I even get you.”

“You don’t get me?” You ask, sniffling. “That stings.”

“Don’t take it that way,” Jake says, sitting up on his elbows now. “Of course I--I’ve always gotten you. I just don’t know, like, what you’re thinking now. What do you want? What do you know? What are you scared of? Do you ever feel sad? What do you enjoy? I look at you and your face and--there’s just nothing. I don’t know when you’re happy. I don’t know when you’re sad. I can just…feel that you aren’t feeling or you are feeling. I can’t ever, like, pinpoint you.”

“Do you want me to just shout out what I feel all the time?” You ask, throwing your hands up in exasperation. “Because I don’t think you’d like that any more than I would.”

“That’s not what I’m saying,” he tries, exasperated.

“Here--right now I’m feeling frustrated! No, not frustrated. Pissed. Pissed is the right word! I’m pissed right now, Jake. I’m pissed at everything.”

“Well, that’s real nice,” Jake says, eyes narrowed on you. You just look back at him defiantly, arms crossed. “Good to know.”

“You’re welcome,” you say softly.

Your voice is lethally quiet. It pushes Jake over the edge.

“I don’t even know if you want this baby!” Jake says finally.

An anchor has lifted and his shoulders snap back like a buoy that’s been held underneath the choppy surface. Your eyes are wide and your lips are parted and you just look at him.

“What?” You ask.

“Do you want it?” Jake asks, softer now. He looks down at your belly and watches as you begin to curl into yourself--protective. “Do you want this baby or are we going to…give it up?”

“Give it up?” You repeat, ears ringing. You sit up, still staring at him. “What are you talking about right now? We haven’t ever even talked about that. You know we aren’t doing that, Jake. I--!”

“--Maybe I don’t know exactly what you’re feeling,” Jake starts. A pain is spreading through his body--deeper than an ache and more stinging than a cut. He stares at you hard. “But I know that you aren’t excited about the baby--not like normal mother’s are.”

“Well, I don’t think I’ll be a normal mother. You know, all things considered,” you say, tone biting. You suck in a deep breath and then scoff again. “You wanna talk about unfair? That’s a low fucking blow.”

He looks at you sidelong, chewing his bottom lip. Guilt is nibbling on the cuffs of his shirt, the legs of his pants. He knows. He knows it isn’t fair.

“What’s gonna happen when they’re born? What’s gonna happen when they want you to hold them? Kiss them? Love them?” Jake watches your face contort in anguish. He wishes that it didn’t feel so good to say these things, but it does. It does feel good. He loves you and he loves them. He isn’t sure where you fall in that. “How are you gonna be a mother to them if you can’t even call them a baby?”

If he wasn’t right, you’d feel a lot angrier. If these weren’t things you’ve already thought, but never said…

There is still anger, but it is not permeating the air around your warm face. It is just sitting still and compliant on your tongue.

“I’ll figure it out,” you say softly.

“How?” He asks, shrugging in defeat. “I mean, you barely make it through any time someone says pregnancy. You don’t touch your belly, you don’t--you haven’t even let me talk about names. Nothing’s ready. Someone could walk into this house and just…not even know that we’re about to have a baby.”

“Congratulations,” you tell him. “You got me. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Me neither,” he says. He looks down at the sheets between the two of you, tries to measure the distance in fallen eyelashes. “We were supposed to figure it out together. But you’ve left me totally on the outside of everything.”

“On the outside?” You repeat. “Christ, Jake. Just because I don’t walk around with my…belly hanging out of my t-shirt doesn’t mean no one is allowed to talk about it. You can be excited about it--I never stopped you from being excited about it.”

“I’m not putting the blame on you,” Jake says. He swallows hard. “I just wonder if…we’re ready for this.”

You shake your head.

“We aren’t,” you tell him. “But we’re gonna do it anyway. That’s what we decided.”

“No, you decided it. And never for a second have I second-guessed it,” Jake says. You’re watching him with big, soft eyes. “I’ve been game from day one. I…Gale, I love that baby already. I’m all in. But are you?”

You don’t know what to say. There is a lump sitting perfectly in your throat.

“Ask me that tomorrow,” you whisper.

He says nothing, just nods. He hasn’t ripped his gaze away from the sheets.

You’re looking at his lips, his cheeks, his chin.

“I really, really love you,” he says. He blinks, lashes fluttering against his cheeks. “I want you to be okay.”

“I am okay,” you insist.

You don’t know why you’re lying, but it feels natural. Like second-nature.

He’s quiet for a moment, just thinking. Thinking about it all.

“Do you remember when you came back into the mess hall? After Bradley…When you laid down beside me and kept saying I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry?” Jake finally glances up at you and you’re staring at him with your eyes wide. Blue shadows cross your features, burrow into your hair. “You had the gun.”

“Yes,” you say, chin trembling. “I had the gun.”

He sniffles.

“But Bradley was dead,” he says. “You didn’t need the gun for protection.”

“No,” you answer. A few tears stream down your cheeks. “I didn’t.”

“And it was loaded,” Jake says. His throat is tight. “Right?”

“Right,” you confirm.

Neither of you say it out loud, because if you did there would be no taking it back. There would be no moving past it. If Jake hadn’t been awake, if Jake hadn’t lived--you shudder just thinking about it.

Instead, Jake reaches forward. He thumbs away a few of your tears, ignores his own.

“You lived because I lived,” he says. He shakes his head. “I lived because you lived. And here’s this…thing that’s you and him and me. Right? So, we can live for each other and we can live for them.”

Carefully, he moves to cup your belly. The stranger stretches again. Always excited when Jake touches them. They must love him more already.

“Okay,” you say. But there’s that far-away, not-home sound in your voice. “We can do that.”

Jake sighs, coming closer to you. The amber on your skin is burning his nostrils.

“Talk to me,” he begs. “Please.”

It’s on the tip of your tongue. His earnesty has pushed the words up, up your belly and throat and the syllables are biting the inside of your lips. You’re going to say it to him, going to let someone else in finally.

What if it’s a monster? What if the baby looks into your eyes and you just know?

“I’m…” you begin, voice wavering.

You and Jake feel it at the same time, his palm flush on your skin: the tightening. It’s the kind of tightening that makes your muscles quiver, that insists upon itself so fervently that it exhausts itself in the undertaking.

The both of you are looking down--down at his hand, at your skin, at the sheets. And no one is saying anything. You’re hardly breathing.

Something doesn’t feel right.

The ground you’re on is suddenly crumbling out from beneath you as a certain pressure comes to a raging boil inside of your body.

“What…?”

“I don’t know,” you answer and your voice is tinted with pain, with panic. “I just--!”

A knife drags across your womanhood, a searing and sharp pain. Breathing out shakily, holding onto the pillows, you stare at Jake.

“Say something,” Jake pleads.

“I don’t know, I feel--!”

The pressure peaks--with a small sound, something between a breath and a gasp, you release the sheets. Warmth spreads between your legs. Strikingly, it feels like blood. You remember this warm and wet and slick stuff.

“What’s going on?” He asks, alarmed. The color is draining from your face. “Darlin’?”

“My water,” you say--your voice sounds far away. You’re staring down at your legs, which are still covered with a sheet. “It just…I think it broke.”

“It did?” He asks before he can help himself.

Carefully and with shaking hands, you pull the sheet back and away from your body. And yes, there it is. A wet spot staining the sheets and seeping into the mattress. It is not blood, though--it is just your water.

“Oh,” you say quietly.

It isn’t relief that you feel. It’s something else--bigger, heavier. It is sitting on your thighs.

“It’s…it’s alright,” Jake says decidedly despite the cold sweat suddenly prickling his spine. He looks at you, at your parted mouth and wide and watery eyes, and musters a small smile. “Hey, that’s alright. It’s fine. This was…supposed to happen. It was--well, it was bound to.”

You feel like you’ve just been shot into space--like you’re outside of this planet’s orbit, free-floating, choking. Distantly, you hear what he says. It’s alright. It’s fine. But you’re reaching for him, desperate as ever, trying to anchor yourself to something as sturdy as him.

He scrambles to take your hands, not breaking contact with your wide-eyed gaze. Broken breaths fall from our parted lips and Jake smooths a hand over your hair.

“Does it hurt?” He asks.

There is a small cramp sitting down low, spreading across the underside of your belly and through your thighs.

You nod.

“Just a little,” you tell him.

He nods.

“Just breathe,” he tells you, brows knit. “Suck one in and blow it out, darlin’. You’re just fine. We’re fine.”

Again, you nod. Sucking in a deep and quivering breath, you hold it in your lungs for a moment and try to hear anything other than ringing. Your heart is hammering against your ribcage and your stomach is in knots and you feel like this is the end of everything.

He gets the distinct sense that he’s going to have to keep a very cool head right now.

“Let it out,” he says to you. Your warm breath puffs against his cheeks and throat. “Well…let’s not waste any time then. Right? Let’s go.”

“We aren’t--I don’t have a bag,” you say. You suck in a sharp and shuddering breath. “The baby--I--we don’t have a crib.”

“Yeah, we do,” Jake says. He watches your wide eyes fill with tears. “It’s just not--you know, set up yet.”

“Jake,” you cry. You’re holding tight to his arm. “Jake.”

“I know,” he says. “But we’re…we’re fine. We’ve survived worse. Like, much worse. Alright?”

It’s not alright. You say nothing.

♀

“The baby’s heart rate is low,” one of the nurses bellows. “We’re reading seventy-five B.P.M. over here! We’ve gotta move, we’ve gotta move!”

She’s reading the tall machines that are staked beside your hospital bed, her hair pulled back and her eyes wide with alarm. Other nurses and doctors are moving all around you in a sea of white and red--talking over each other, reading charts, breaking down your bed, slipping an oxygen mask over your mouth and nose, unlocking the wheels beneath your bed.

“I don’t have preeclampsia,” you’re muttering, hardly audible beneath your oxygen mask. You’re saying it because you know they’re going to ask. “No history of gestational diabetes either.”

Then you’re moving, not that you mind. All you’ve wanted since you got here is to be out of that hospital room where everything is pink and blue and quiet.

It’s all happening so fast. You used to roll your eyes when people said that. It happened so fast! Camp Arcadia didn’t happen fast. It happened slow--over the course of a grueling week, seeped in flannel sheets and nightmares and gravel.

But you understand it now. This is what people mean.

What they mean is that nothing happened for two hours. Contractions were constant, you were dilating half a centimeter per hour and the doctor was pleased with that. Nurse’s that you work with came in and out of the room, all toothy grins and big hugs. Jake kept asking if you wanted ice chips and you kept saying no. Dallas played on the shitty television mounted in the top corner of the room.

The hospital room has housed you for only a little bit over two hours now. You’ve been lying on your side, hands tucked beneath your cheeks, watching the snow fall outside as the epidural wedged between your vertebrae numbed everything below your chest. Jake has been sitting beside you in a wooden chair, stroking your hair, watching the monitors and trying to read them.

“How’re the drugs?” Jake asked, a grin tugging on his lips.

He was watching you, blissed out as ever, relax against the pillows as he stroked your hair. He’d been worried--privately, of course--that things would pick up and then not stop picking up. His vision of you giving birth was cushioned with panicked tears and speeding through stop lights and bloody sheets.

But here you were, the hint of a smile tugging on your lips as you looked back at him. It was the kind of look that reminded him yes, one day you will smile again and it will touch your eyes. He knew the drugs were helping.

“Fantastic,” you whispered to him.

“Gonna make a habit of this?” He asked, leaning forward to set his chin on the metal rail of your bed.

Reaching forward, you stroked his hair and hummed.

“Having a baby out of wedlock in the hospital where I work?” You asked. He grinned. “Or drugs?”

“Both,” he said.

He couldn’t get enough of the easy drawl of your voice--how this was the happiest, most relaxed he’d seen you since last July. He wanted to hear you talk forever in that little hospital room, even if it was about nothing at all.

“Can’t say I’d like to ever have another baby,” you said.

And both of you looked at each other with your brows slightly raised, unwilling to verbalize your mutual surprise so as not to puncture the thin membrane between right then and reality.

Baby.

You’d called the little stranger a baby.

“Well, that’s just fine with me,” Jake said. “You’re more than enough.”

“Is that a cute way of saying I’m a handful?” You asked.

He grinned again. Your chest was warm, blithe.

“I wish you were more of a handful,” he told you. You almost laughed--it was sitting pretty in your throat. “Maybe it’d force me to get back on my feet for good.”

“I’ll remember that,” you said.

“You’d better,” Jake said.

Perhaps what had relaxed you the most was how thoroughly numb you were. All of the movements inside of you were dull and distant. No kicking, no tumbling, no stretching, no turning, no rolling, no elbows, no hands, no knees, no feet, no contractions. It was just quiet in there. It was like your body was yours again.

Finally.

When you spiked a fever an hour after coming to the hospital, it didn’t feel alarming. Elevated body temperature is what Dr. Titus called it. It was disarming--less frightening than the word fever, which was punctuated with violent letters and evoked images from history textbooks. Lots of women developed elevated body temperatures during labor because of exertion, exhaustion. You knew that.

“We’ll monitor it,” Dr. Titus had said as he wrote something on your chart. “But I’m confident that it will fade as your labor progresses.”

You’d been just fine with that answer. Besides, it didn’t feel like much of anything besides heat in your cheeks and ache in your fingers. That was all. You could handle that. You’d handled much, much worse in the past.

“Great,” you’d whispered, yawning. Jake was smiling at you from his seat. “Am I allowed any jell-o, by chance?”

Dr. Titus, who had known you since you started at the hospital, smiled at you.

“Strawberry or lime?” He asked. “I’ll put in a good word in the kitchen.”

But then, abruptly, heat in your cheeks and an ache in your hands wasn’t all. You were having a hard time keeping your eyes open, having a hard time taking a deep breath. Monitors cried. People rushed in. Your chest felt hollow, cold. Your body was heavy. The skin on your tired muscles suddenly felt hot--too hot.

When had that happened?

When had you lost control of what was going on?

Everything was fuzzy--you weren’t sure.

“It’s alright,” another nurse tells you as she plucks the pillow from behind your head and lays you down on the mattress. “You and your baby are gonna be just fine. Can you hear me? Can you hear the sound of my voice right now?”

You can hear her. But you can’t seem to nod. Everything is heavy.

Jake is watching all this from behind, outside of the frenzy. He’s standing with his crutches tucked beneath his arms, tongue dry and throat aching as you are whisked away from him and this room.

“The doctor is going to perform a c-section. Do you know what that is? It’s a cesarean. She’s going to be put all the way under. Do you understand me?”

His heart is settled in his gut.

“What--?” He asks, attempting to step closer to the door. The nurse sidesteps so she’s in his way again. “Why? What’s happening?”

“The fetal heart rate dropped--probably because of the fever,” the nurse says. “You have to stay here. You’re the father, right?”

He looks down at her, unable to hear anything besides the ringing in his ears.

“What?” He asks.

“You’re the father. Correct?”

He doesn’t hesitate.

“Yes,” he says. “Why can’t I be in there?”

“We’ll bring both of them back when the operation is complete,” the nurse tells Jake instead of answering him. “You can see both of them then.”

“But--!”

But then he’s alone in the hospital room and you’re gone and all the nurse’s and doctors are gone, too. It’s just him in this quiet pink and blue room, standing with his crutches, blinking at the door they rushed you out of.

He didn’t get to say goodbye to you. He didn’t get to kiss your forehead and blink back tears and tell you that he’d see you on the other side. If something--God forbid--happened to you, the last memory of him you would have is him telling you that you’re looking a little green. That was the last thing he said to you before an alarm pierced his ears and you closed your eyes and were gone.

Because he doesn’t know what else to do, he falls back into the wooden chair beside the bed. His heart is racing. He picks up the phone and through his blurry vision, he’s able to dial the number.

It rings four times.

“Who on God’s green earth is calling me this late?” His mama answers all the way from their home in Texas. Jake can imagine her in her frilly pink robe and her hair set in curlers. “This better be an emergency and I mean emergency.”

He can’t speak for a moment, choked up, trying desperately to play catch-up with what just happened.

Just as his mama is about to slam the phone on the receiver and take her happy ass back to bed, she hears her son’s breathing. And she knows that it is his breathing--the heavy and soft way he breathes when something’s wrong.

“Jake?” She asks, voice soft now. She squints at the clock. “Jake, honey? Is that you? What time is it there? What’s going on? Hold on, baby, let me--!”

She scrambles, rubbing her eyes and flicking on the kitchen lights. It’s still dark outside. She can still hear him breathing on the other end.

“Ma,” Jake finally utters. “It’s bad.”

𝐅𝐎𝐎𝐓𝐍𝐎𝐓𝐄: SURPRISE, I HAD TO PUT IT IN TWO PARTS BECAUSE THERE ARE SO MANY WORDS :-) NEXT PART IS FINISHED, BUT I WILL BE POSTING IT LATER THIS WEEK!!!!

𝐌𝐘 𝐌𝐀𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓

𝐂𝐋𝐔𝐄𝐒

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baeklination · 1 year ago

Text

Rural

Date: 231110

Warnings: SMUT 🔞, general fucking, fingering

Pairing: Baekhyun x F. Reader

WC: 4k

NOTE: Story 3 of Theme BAMBI. This is a soft one.

Masterlist

¤¤

Some days blue, some days grey, the mountains roll in the distance. Even when you get as far as farm country they lie farther still. Silent and never changing - a mystery that lends solace.

Between them and here lies all you’ve seen in the world, but from the home where you grew up surrounded by golden fields and wind rushing through corn stalks to where you now live, on a very quiet edge of a very small town, it doesn’t seem so bad. In fact, with a little more than a modest salary you could save some each month and visit one of those big cities the ladies at the cafe are always talking about with so much shock and fascination…but it’ll keep.

If anything, what you would consider these days is a tour based on temperature; anywhere where it’s not scorching before the clock has struck eleven.

Scorching.

Scorching…

“Rats..!”

Sticking the pin in the paper haphazardly you run down from upstairs to the kitchen, knowing you’ll be met by smoke billowing out from the oven - but you’re not. Saying a prayer of please, please, please, you grab a mitten, open the oven and pull out the cobbler.

“Thank god..!”, you sigh, relieved to see you haven’t ruined the afternoon goodies you’ve promised Ms. Ethel to bring round before work.

Peering into the oven you see the culprit, a classic: edibles from a previous use turning into charcoal.

“All in a day’s work”, you mumble to yourself, scraping the burnt piece away.

“Oh, you hadn’t forgotten about me”, Ms. Ethel chirps as soon as she opens the door.

“It’s not that late, is it?”

“Not for an old hen like me, but you ought to be on your way already. Or are you taking the day off?”

“The week’s just started, Ms. Ethel, I don’t need to rest just yet”, you smile at her on your way to the kitchen. “I’ll be on time. Either way, Ida has a key as well and I don’t suspect they’ll be breaking down the door on a Tuesday. Now, what do you think? Presentable?"

“I think the ladies will be fighting over it. I’m fighting myself right now”, she laughs, smacking her lips.

“Go on, have a bite. It’s best fresh outta the oven.”

“And serve a cobbler with a gaping hole in it? Oh, the jokes would never end, sweet girl.”

“Come now, Ms. Ethel. You don’t serve it whole. Cut it into pieces before they come and they’ll never know the difference.”

“M-hm… Well, the cook knows best… I still have some coffee in the pot, it’ll go fine with a bit of sweet.”

“Go sit down, I’ll bring it.”

Having survived her husband of fifty-three years, Ms. Ethel is going on her seventh year alone. She says she isn’t lonely, and you reckon she mostly isn’t because she keeps herself busy with a visit here, a trip there all throughout her weeks, but nonetheless spending every morning with someone for fifty years is a habit you don’t wean off easily and that’s why you try to stop at hers a few days a week, to make sure. Suppose it is also for your own benefit. With your folks out on the countryside she’s become like a relative of sorts and being around her, doing little chores to alleviate her burden, is comforting.

Sometimes - like right now - seeing her sitting by the window, half smiling with curlers in her hair, she’s so cute it breaks your heart. You don’t know why exactly. It just does. But coffee and cake won’t wait for no one, so you snap out of it and join her in the living room.

“Here you go. Give me your most- second most honest opinion.”

“You never disappoint. If these hands of mine were still working proper I’d tell the ladies I was the baker.”

Lifting her spoon in cheers, she winks before eating it, and since it’s rude to wait for an evaluation you look out the window. Her view is almost the exact same as from your own, barring the houses farther down the street being visible here. You could tell the day was heating up fast on your way over, and the cat resting under the neighbour's tree tells the same story. A car breaks first the silence then your view; your heart skips. Shielded by the angle and speed, the frame is gone in the blink of an eye, but that's all you need - the tan arm, checkered shirt rolled up, holding the steering wheel of that red truck, is his.

“Mm!”, Ms. Ethel exclaims, bringing you back. “Sweet and deep just like I like it!”

You’re a capable woman. A business owner - albeit small - making and mending clothes, paying rent on time, handling salary and meetings with your accountant by yourself. Even got your own house and home. But one hint of him and you turn silly. Knowing Baekhyun’s in town rattles your brain and instead of solely focusing on the job at hand you’re preoccupied with thoughts of how to see him. Should you head over to Joe’s pretending to need some electrical advice and hope Baekhyun’s stopped in to buy some new tools? Or the grocery store? The diner? You don’t want to be too obvious and get the folks talking - so maybe it’s best to stay put? Look as if you’re only minding your own and hope he’ll stop by and say hello. But what if he doesn’t? If you occupy yourself with something in the front part of the store, say fixing the mannequins or do a bit of sweeping you might see him across the road. Of course, one waves in such a situation - and of course, he’d be encouraged to come over…

This ridiculous merry-go-round occurs every time he's in town. Only a few times have you missed each other, be it because you were tending to a customer while he was loading up his truck or you stepping out just before he came in looking to buy a set of assorted buttons you know he didn't need.

Oh, but why is he such a fool? There have been times you know he’s on the verge of taking a step towards confessing, but being interrupted or simply not quite finding the courage he’d held his tongue. He’d smile and chuckle, squeeze the fedora in his hands before saying goodbye with a hint of sadness.

And while neither of you said anything it could be weeks before you saw each other again and sometimes you'd imagine that next time he wouldn't be alone. How uncomfortably the pit in your stomach sits when you think he might’ve been set up with a “nice girl” from there and you’ll find out about it on a regular day like this. Like the day the little bell over the door chimed, announcing his entry - accompanied by a woman you didn't recognise. He must have seen it then. How your stomach churned, making you too sick to even greet her with a smile. You knew it was all over, too late, on account of your own cowardice. And he must have seen how vigour was breathed back in your body when he explained how the woman had merely asked for directions; a visitor driving through town finding herself in need of a seamstress due to an unfortunate rip of her trouser leg.

Sometimes you acknowledge that driving the matter forward can't fall solely on him. After all, everything you've gained since you were seventeen has been by your own efforts and decisions. You've lived precisely as you've wanted to - with courage. So why is this so difficult..? If it were to end up a fiasco you'd barely see him anyway, right?

Right!

But if it did end up a fiasco you'd still be wretchedly in love with him. Not giving him a chance to say yes also means he can't say no.

You saw him way across the street but of course put on a smaller act of coming out to give your little café set in front a wipe with a cloth - just in case.

"Hiya, Byun..! How's that crop 'o yours surviving..!", Humphrey, owner of a small shop for tinkers to the far left of you, jovially shouts.

"They're hanging in there, Mr. Thomas..!", Baekhyun calls back to him. When his head is turned a thin veil of sweat on the back of his neck glistens in the sun, carrying down the way under his shirt collar. Sympathizing with his situation of doing manual labour in this heat, you think how uncomfortably warm it must be under both flannel and undershirt. Before you're aware, the thought that he must have that film of sweat over his shoulders and chest comes into your mind. If his skin was touching yours…

"I'm sure your fabrics are doing fine as ever in spite of the sun?"

"Oh… yes. I guess I picked a good product", you smile, certain a flush is branding your cheeks, that he knows what you were thinking just now.

"You have a long drive home, let me get you something to drink. Sit."

Going to the back of the store to fetch a bottle you take a quick look in the mirror and can determine your facial colour hasn't undergone any dramatic change. Thank you.

On your way back you stop for a second, mesmerized by the way Baekhyun wafts his hat in hope of some alleviation. The awning has gotten him away from direct sunlight but the heat is so pressing it's only a marginal change. He looks up from his seat when he hears the click and fizzle, and humbly accepts the bottle of Nehi soda. Gulping half of it down in one go he exhales loudly, the way all of us do after drinking carbonated drinks and tips the bottle in your direction.

“You're a lifesaver.”

“It's just a soda on a hot summer's day… So, are they? Your crop hanging in there alright?”

When it comes to Baekhyun, you're terrible at smalltalk, but luckily he doesn't seem to notice or leastways not mind.

“I’m not in any peril just yet. I upgraded my irrigation system last season. Cost me a penny, but it's been worth it. You know how-” Stopping, he chuckles and knits his brows. “I'm sure this isn't the least interesting for you.”

“No… But it's all French to me…”

“Well, then, how's your folks doing? I think it's been a while since I saw their car passing out there. They move?”

“They're still out there. But my father took a tumble, so they've been staying in. On account of his leg.”

“Oh, that doesn't sound too good. Has he been to the doctor's?”

“Mm. It's broken. I'm going over on Friday to stay the weekend, do some work around there. If the buses start going again, that is…”

“I can give you a lift.”

And just like that, an opportunity like no other opened up.

“I’m sure you’re busy, I wouldn’t like to put you–”

“I always have time for you.”

To say your mind has been preoccupied elsewhere this Friday is an understatement. At times it seemed like time wasn't moving quickly enough. Other times it was moving too fast, no doubt a result of nerves. It was a tiny, white lie you told Ida about having tons to do before you depart and therefore would be locking up early, but she didn't mind either way - an extra few hours of weekend is nothing to complain about.

The tons you had to do was to give in to vanity; change into a fresh dress, dab some powder on your face. The lipstick stayed in the drawer - you don't want to be too obvious. And not fully admitting it even to yourself, if Baekhyun sees you put some effort into it he might not wish to smud- anyway, your folks would wonder about the pageantry.

You can’t help wondering if he really was planning on coming up here or if he made it up. Of course he didn’t make it up; driving all that way just for you? Maybe he would. He said he always has time for you.

“I always have time for you…"

Such butterflies go through your body when you think back on how he said it, so matter-of-factly, and you promise yourself that, if he doesn’t take the first step today, as the sun is your witness, you will.

You were ready forty minutes ahead of time and after sitting on the hallway chair for ten minutes you got so restless that you decided to step over to Ms. Ethel's. It was actually a good thing since she'd just done the laundry and hanging it to dry gave you something to do as well as it unburdened her.

You've learned to recognise the sound of his engine after all this time so he doesn't have to come into view for you to know.

"That will be your lift then?", Ms. Ethel asks when she sees your reaction.

"Seems it is. You're alright, nothing else you need? Trash to take out?"

"Go on, I'll make due. Say why isn't Mr. Byun married yet? A fine gentleman like him ought to have a wife, don't you think?" She's not blind. Her eyes twinkle when she opens the door and continues "Mm. And a fine woman like you should have a husband…"

You want to confirm what she already knows, share your secret, but now is not the time so you simply swat your hand smile.

"I'll see you Monday, Ms. Ethel.”

If smalltalk is one of your weaker points, then smalltalk around a subject is weaker still. All throughout the hour-long drive you spoke about this and that. Mostly memories from when you were growing up, the difficulties of Baekhyun having a different background than most, why you left, why he stayed and so on, but in the back of your head you tried to find an “in”, as they say. Some way to get talking about the two of you, but whichever line you had seemed contrived, and plainly put: you were too scared. But when he offered to lend your parents a book about irrigation and new gadgets, you jumped at the chance, deciding that following him in under the guise of wanting to have a look at the old place, would create the perfect moment to tell him. Away from the road and him having to concentrate on driving was best anyway.

You take a few steps before realizing it's raining. Calling it rain is almost an overstatement. It's what you refer to as god's flower mister; rain so fine it feels like someone is using a giant sprayer from up above.

Baekhyun leaves the door open so you walk in, curious to see if it's stayed the same. It mostly has. Maybe a new kitchen table or sofa, you don't remember that well. It's only a minute until he's back with the book and it's too soon. You can't even find anything unnecessary to say, some remark about the place.

“Do you want to have a look around?” He's awkward and fidgety. He's thinking the same thing as you are. “It's all the same, but…”

You're on the verge of doing it. Right there, with a lump in your throat. He must know what you're thinking.

“Oh, okay. Well, then I think I know it already.”

You turn around and grab the doorknob, your lungs tight and pulling. Say it. Say it, say it, tell him! You know you can't do it. A coward.

It's over…

"Wait."

Baekhyun's hand goes to the door. Tentativeness like never before is painted on his face. You dare not move and ruin the delicate momentum. Sliding from the door to the knob, he takes your hand, holding it with the utmost tenderness…then bends forward and presses his mouth onto yours. A whirr goes round your head. His lips are so soft. Moving back he considers your expression then leans forward again, sighing out his relief just before your lips touch. Parting yours, you let your tongue slide onto, under his, feeling his hands gently close around your waist. This elation might not be emotional - if you were to look down you might see your feet hovering an inch off the floor, so wholly does the weight off your shoulders and happiness in your heart feel.

During a moment's breath, Baekhyun glances at the stairs - a Freudian slip of the eye or a question? Either way you do the same then allow him to take your hand and lead you upstairs.

It's just a short walk but nervousness, giddiness, impatience all fit in there.

The room doesn't look like you remember it from growing up, when it belonged to his folks, but neither does it seem like he's taken an earnest interest in the decor, not minding a frill on the curtains or flower pattern on the bedlinen.

It's really happening.

Amidst the softness of his lips you can't help noticing the fumbling of his hands against your neckline.

"I'm a klutz", he laughs shyly, leaving the dress buttons to you.

All of a sudden you become vulnerable. While getting undressed in the course of kissing follows a natural flow, taking your own clothes off with eyes wide open leaves you exposed and becomes somewhat of a revealing of your body. But you gather Baekhyun feels the same way, slightly turning as he does, to put his own garments on a chair. When the undershirt pulls up along his back you can't help pausing; his lean muscles are a testament to years of physical labour and carry on over his shoulders, arms and his torso. In front of you he's turned from the sweet man to infinitely alluring.

Oh…

You're glad that he's the one to remove your bra. After he's pushed the straps from your shoulders you let it fall to the rug beneath and his fingers whisper over your back; biding his time, perhaps waiting for courage.

Then, you feel the touch of his palm as he puts it to your breast, as lightly as if you were made of glass, but daring to put some pressure on it once your lips meet again. Taking a few steps forward he carefully steers you to the bed where he pulls the covers aside for you to get in.

The hairs on his legs against yours with none, the press of his stomach on yours. Him. Stroking hair from your brow, he studies your face with warmth then smiles.

"I guess you've known for some time that I love you."

You take a deep breath, trembling because finally, it's been said. You nod, pull his head closer.

Under your fingers you feel the muscles on his back contract and relax with his small movements. By his fingers the hem of your underwear slips down to be taken off completely when you raise your hips. When he latches his thumbs under his own you're shy to look, as if being attracted to that part of him is shameful, but you are. He's hard, swaying, when he lies back down. Further opening your legs, he guides himself to your entrance amidst showering you with his lush lips; a hint of salt and imagined earth.

On your slick coating he slides the head in with ease, distributing buzzes and whirls as moves.

"Uh……." His soft sigh over your face is a treasure. Pushing further in each time until completely lodged he whispers "Tell me if I'm going too fast."

His elbows frame you in and props him up, leaving only his stomach against yours as he softly claps with his groin.

Allowing you to sneak through with your arms you put your hands on the small of his back, feeling the billowing from below.

Pushing your leg up, he thrusts faster, resting his head on your shoulder so that his hair tickles your cheek. The gentle hums and moans are replaced by heavy exhales and short groans while he's coming closer to climaxing. Your insides swirl and twinkle. The evening hour doesn't matter - in this heat, sweat accumulates between your rocking bodies and mixes with the damp smell of a weathered house.

Panting hard, the quiver in his voice giving it all away, the clapping eventually turns irregular and unbridled, ending with his orgasm.

His heartbeat is on fire - yours is too - and the heat feels strong enough to burn your chest, but even with the desperation for oxygen, his weight on top of you is a rapture unmatched.

Looking at his hands intertwined with yours you're struck by how well he's managed to keep them decently gentlemanlike in spite of his work. He's been perfectly still for some time now. Since he managed the mammoth task of moving his body to lay behind you. Just as you start listening for sounds of snoozing his nose feathers across your back, then he kisses the same place and unclasps his hands. Propping himself on the elbow, he puts his head against your arm and moves his hand over your stomach.

"Do you think you'd like it if I…"

You feel silly not understanding what he means, especially if he's embarrassed to say the words, but you can't do anything other than wait for him. He huffs, bites his bottom lip and rolls you onto your back.

"If I…touched you…" Seeing the perplexion in your face he quickly wants to reassure you "We don't have to, it's okay. If you don't like-"

"No, it's not…" Truth is, in your limited experience with men, none of them ever did or asked to do something like it, so you don't know what it would be like if someone else did it. But you feel like you want him to. "I, um…"

The words wedge in your throat, but he understands you perfectly by the touch on his arm. Placing a dollop of saliva on two fingers, he lets them disappear under the sheet.

"Ah-h…"

You can't help catching your breath when you feel his fingertips run softly over your clit. Slowly lowering his face, he envelops your lips with his, pushing them in sync with his delicate movements. Up and down he caresses, then gathers some more liquid from below and rubs his fingers quickly from side to side.

Turning into the pillow, Baekhyun's face hovers over your side with anticipation so strong it's felt in his breath against your cheek. The whirr intensifies, coming up to the surface, your backside and thighs go tense, you press your hand on mattress, open your mouth…and just then the dam bursts, spilling over electric magic between your legs, inside you, while you shake and try to smother your whines.

Baekhyun groans mutedly and repeatedly places kisses on the side of your face as he draws big circles with the new fluids.

You find him sitting on the patio, watching the sun between clouds in pinks and lilacs. There's not a sound except the grasshoppers so you almost don't want to go out for fear of disturbing this picture. The patio flooring is damp under your feet and only a tiny squeak here and there is heard, save from the swish of the blanket you've wrapped yourself in. Looking your way, he takes a deep breath and opens his arms for you.

“Hi there.”

“Can I ask you…”, you say, playing with his hair. “Why did you look so sad right before you kissed me? Surely you already knew?��

“But I didn't know. I thought. Suspected. So I thought, if I'm wrong and you turn me away, this might be the last time I see you.”

“But you're happy now. Right?”

“Mm. All I want is you and me.”

Looking at the sun you can tell what time it is, so you sigh.

“I think we have to get going…”

Finding his way under the blanket, his hands gently caress your waist, breast. Cupping your face, he presses his lips onto yours.

“Once more before I take you..?”

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#baekhyun #baekhyun smut #BBH-NET

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