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1. cheek
“Frank? We’re gonna be late – what’s taking so long?”
“Just a sec,” he calls back, smoothing down his hair and giving himself one last look in the mirror, top to bottom. “Be right out.”
He can practically hear Laurel roll her eyes on the other side of the bathroom door, and he doesn’t blame her; he knows he’s being ridiculous, and hell, right now, looking at himself in her mirror, he feels more than a little ridiculous, all gussied up in a three-piece suit for a damn doctor’s appointment like some prized poodle. He hasn’t worn anything like this in what feels like ages, the expensive fabric foreign against his skin, but Frank looks in the mirror, now, and he recognizes himself.
He knows the man staring back at him, again. He knows she will too.
So he ducks out, finally, stepping back into the bedroom where Laurel sits, waiting for him cross-legged on the bed, clad in a baggy grey Middleton hoodie and yoga pants and rubbing at her eyes, barely awake. Unsurprisingly, being seven months pregnant hasn’t done much to make her peppy or energetic in the mornings, especially sans her daily dose of caffeine he knows she’s always hailed as a godsend. Her eyes are glazed over when they first fall on him, but after a moment the sight seems to shock her awake, her brows knitting together, face taking on a look of bemusement.
Her mouth moves without words, for a moment. “What… Frank, what-”
He shrugs, a bit sheepish, tucking his hands into his pockets. “Too much, I know. Gotta make a good first impression on the little guy, though.”
“First impression?” Laurel scoffs, but there’s something behind her eyes, something sincere. Something with weight. “Just because we’re gonna see the baby doesn’t mean he can see you too. There’s no window.”
“Yeah? Thought that was what the belly button was for,” he jokes, lamely, and gets a weak little laugh out of her, which these days he knows he has to count as a victory. “I know. Just… feels like it, somehow.”
Laurel smiles, for a moment – actually honest to God smiles, like he rarely ever sees anymore – but it crumples quickly, withering and falling from her lips, until it’s some tiny, barely-there wavering thing. In the light of the new day, he can see her eyes glistening, inexplicably, and immediately he’s petrified he’s made a misstep, plodded clumsily over a landmine and triggered something within her, sent her scuttling back into herself. It happens often enough, these days, her hormones all hopelessly tangling and rewiring her emotions, and these days all he can really do is try his best not to fuck up.
Usually he ends up fucking up anyway, though.
“Hey,” he lowers his voice, until it’s as tender as a caress, and takes a step forward. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she says, voice thick, sniffling. She shakes her head. “It’s just… you look like you, again.”
He looks like himself. Like the man she met, the one she fell in love with in another life – not that creature he became after months on the lam, barely a person, closer to a snapping, rabid dog than anything, stripped of his humanity. And it’s true that maybe at times he’d put on this veneer of normalcy, all his suits and ludicrously expensive Rolexes to hide who he truly was, the darkness underneath, but this doesn’t feel like hiding, now. It feels like coming back to himself. Going back to how things were.
They can never be the same, not after everything. He knows that. But they can be okay, at least. They’re getting closer and closer to the realm of okay.
“Aw, c’mon,” he teases, reaching out a hand to help her up. Most days, now, she’s as immobile as a tortoise that’s been rolled over onto its back, and he knows she resents needing his help, but she doesn’t have much of a choice, either. “Don’t gotta cry about it.”
“I’m not crying,” she protests rather unconvincingly, and wipes her eyes, and he wants so badly to dry them for her, kiss the tears away, but keeps his distance, because knows how this goes, what this is.
He’s here in a friendly capacity only; she’s made that abundantly clear. That doesn’t mean he has to like it, though. Doesn’t mean he’s not allowed to want more, even if he’s content with just this, just being with her, starved for her presence like a man trapped in eternal night, longing for the sun.
She looks beautiful. It’s almost redundant, at this point, how many times each day he thinks that, how many times he says that – but it’s true. It never stops being true, even when she’s bloated and puffy and swollen and constantly complaining and exhausted to the point of dropping and pissed at him for no reason about a million different things, most of which he has little to no control over. He takes it all in stride, so long as it means being close to her, hovering somewhere in her orbit, no matter how distant.
They don’t feel distant in this moment, though. She’s so close, her eyes red and glimmering with tears, hair swept back in a messy ponytail, all disarmingly disheveled and overly emotional, and it makes him melt, makes his heart hammer and bash against his ribs like a wolf at the door.
“Hey,” he undertones, giving her a hesitant grin. “Don’t cry. ‘Course I’m me. I’ve been… me all along.”
Laurel gives a watery laugh, sniffing again. She looks happier than he’s seen her in ages. She’s almost glowing, too, like a little sun, and he knows she hates when people say cliché shit like that to her, but she is, even after everything, this mess they’ve somehow managed to wade their way out of, managed to reach some semblance of higher ground, together. She still hasn’t lost her shine, her strength, because nothing and no one can ever take that from her, he knows that. Sometimes he doesn’t think she knows how strong she really is.
Wordlessly, she reaches out, adjusting his tie and running her fingers over the silken material, resting her hands there for a moment, as if in contemplation.
“I forgot what you looked like, in these,” she remarks finally, the observation sincere in its absent-mindedness, like it’s flowed directly out of her with no thought whatsoever, no filter. “You look… good.”
There’s something deeper in her eyes, something darker and barely concealed. Something like wanting – and Frank knows they both do want each other, though somehow it feels wrong, when she’s like this, when she’s self-conscious of her changing body and wary of being touched and doesn’t believe he could want her at all. They can’t, he knows, and they won’t. It’ll be a long, long time before they’re back to touching each other, and he can wait.
Something breaks, right then, in the air between them; fractures and splinters into a million tiny pieces. And that’s when Laurel does it.
She stands on her tiptoes, raising her face to his, and presses a quick kiss to his cheek, near the corner of his mouth, his beard bristling beneath her petal-soft lips. It wrings all the breath out of his body, that kiss, though it’s hasty and a bit awkward with her unwieldy balloon of a stomach between them. She’s so close that he can smell her shampoo, the earthy, warm, devastatingly real scent of her skin that is more like home to him than any place he’s ever inhabited for any significant amount of time.
For a moment he feels like he’s been shot. Like he’s lost a limb and gone into shock, like this is a fever dream as he slips from consciousness – but when Laurel pulls back, flashing him a nervous smile, he doesn’t have to pinch himself to know he’s wide awake. He’s so awake he can feel every nerve in his body; they’re all screaming with her so close to him, electrifying his skin like the air before a thunderstorm, making every one of his hairs stand on end.
“Thank you,” she breathes, finally, appearing just as shocked by herself as he is, “for… coming today. It sucks to have to go to these things alone.”
He feels like a schoolboy, frazzled and rendered speechless by his first kiss, and it takes Frank a moment to come back to himself, muster up a smile to send back her way. He wants to kiss her again. Kiss her as many times as she’ll allow. Kiss her senseless, kiss her silent. She’s told him he can’t tell her he loves her, anymore, but he thinks he could settle for that, for just kissing the words silently against her mouth, pouring them into her that way.
He doesn’t, though. He just smiles, and nods toward the door.
“Let’s go,” he tells her, with a wink. “Like you said. Wouldn’t wanna be late.”
2. shoulder
There’s a light on down the hall when he awakens in the middle of the night.
Nothing in particular rouses him; nothing he can tell, at least, but Frank rolls off the couch nonetheless, frowning and squinting as his eyes adjust, and pads across the living room carpet, following the light before finally coming to a stop in Laurel’s doorway, where it emanates from. He doesn’t know what time it is – closer to dawn than midnight, he thinks, if he had to guess based on the grey light outside – but there Laurel sits regardless, wide awake on her bed, papers and files spread all around her. She’s in her pajama pants, alternating between biting her fingernails and worrying her teeth across her bottom lip anxiously. At first Frank thinks she’s only studying, but then he looks closer, sees what the files before her contain, and rubs the sleep out of her eyes, frowning.
“Laurel?”
Laurel jumps, so intently focused she hadn’t even noticed him approach, but doesn’t set down her papers, gives him only a cursory glance before looking back down at them. “Hey.”
“What’re you…” He drifts off. “Uh, what’re you doin’ up?”
“Looking at the files from the agency,” is all she gives him, tearing at her abused, gnawed-down thumbnail, and immediately Frank deflates, strolling over and sinking down lightly beside her, careful not to disturb her seemingly haphazardly-arranged papers, because there’s usually a method to her organizational madness when she gets this way, sleepless but intensely focused, painfully alert.
He glances down with her, taking in the sea of photographs, the smiling faces of prospective adoptive mothers and fathers and their files, their hobbies; all upper-middle-class bullshit, mostly, like horseback riding and fishing and sailing and hunting. Their house. Their jobs. Other children. Pets. Everything – their whole lives laid out before them, in a seemingly endless sea of Colgate smiles and picturesque suburban homes with immaculately trimmed lawns. He’s sure perusing these must make Laurel want to gauge her eyes out just as much as it does him, but she seems more nervous than anything, ripping at a hangnail on her index finger next until tiny droplets of blood seep to the surface.
“Laurel…” He drifts off, swallowing. This is still tenuous ground they’re on, sometimes, when she gets jittery and jumpy and anxious like this, and he doesn’t want to overstep his bounds, infringe on her decision making, when he knows how agonizing it’d been for her to swallow her pride and even go to an adoption agency in the first place. “You should get some sleep. This can wait ‘til morning-”
“Can it?” she shoots back, but there’s not much fire in her words. She picks up a photo of a blonde woman and a man in a pale-yellow sweater vest, posing in front of their house with a grey Schnauzer sitting obediently at their feet. “I only have a month left. I have to make a decision.” She pauses. “I have to make the right decision.”
“Yeah, but-” He sighs. “You can make it tomorrow, it’s not good for you to be up worryin’ like this.”
She shakes her head, almost as if she didn’t hear his words at all, and brings her hand up back to her mouth, back to her tortured thumbnail. “I have to make the right choice. I can’t… I can’t fuck this up.”
“You wouldn’t,” he urges, voice low, and it seems to steady her, tether her to earth, because he sees her muscles release their tension, if only a little. “You’re not gonna fuck this up.”
“I just…” Laurel gulps, and shakes her head again, finally meeting his eyes. “I can’t keep him. You know I can’t.”
“Laur-”
“I can’t,” she breathes, again. “He’s… good. Innocent. The only innocent thing in all this mess. And I’d just…” She pauses, lowering her eyes to her stomach, that growing curve that seems almost ominous to them, now, like a ticking time bomb. “I’d just ruin him.”
“You wouldn’t-”
She shakes her head. “I would. I can… give this baby everything. Everything money can buy.” A pause; long and pregnant, and heavy in the air. Finally, she releases a trembling breath. “But I can’t give him normal. I can’t… give him the life he deserves.”
Frank knows she’s right, knows money won’t fix shit when everything else is hopelessly fucked beyond repair, the way their lives are, the way her life was when she was young. She doesn’t want that, for her baby, for Wes’s son, a cushy life with plenty of money to layer like a thick, gleaming polish over the ugliness festering beneath, the skeletons in their closet, the scars of everything they’ve done, blood that could drown them the second the dam holding it back bursts. There’s no way in hell this life of theirs wouldn’t fuck a kid up, bring them down to hell with the rest of them, and Laurel knows that.
And Laurel wants him. Wants to keep him. He can see it in her eyes, the pain this causes her, the agony. It’s killing her like poison eating away at her veins, withering her heart, chewing her chest hollow like acid, and all he can do is watch, help her when he can until they reach the end of this road and somehow, some way, come out intact on the other side.
“This couple’s out,” she declares, suddenly, tossing the picture in her hands into what Frank can only assume is the reject pile – which, as far as he can see, is the only pile she has. “They have a dog. Dogs can get… territorial with new babies. Might hurt him.”
Frank frowns. “File says he’s friendly.”
“These files are polished, proofread, edited bullshit and you know it. All the… pretty pictures and perfect biographies and houses in good school districts and country club memberships. Nothing is ever this perfect,” she retorts, jaw tight. “I’m going with my gut.”
Frank sits in silence, for a while, watching as she scans file after file, making snarky comments under her breath, rejecting most and putting a choice few into another stack, the stack of maybe’s. Frank isn’t too daft to notice she hasn’t found any definite yes’s, yet, and he doesn’t blame her; he knows she’ll have to meet these people first before she can make a decision, if she’s able to make a decision at all. All the while he just sits there, silent, for the most part, not interjecting, not trying to sway her in any way; this baby isn’t his, he never forgets that, and he doesn’t get a say, doesn’t get an opinion. Should count himself lucky just to be with her, now.
But he can’t deny that he’s gotten attached to this strange, unseen creature inside Laurel, during the course of all these months, in a way that isn’t because of biology, isn’t because of blood, a bond transcending the water of the womb. He loves him because Laurel loves him, passionately, hopelessly, because he loves all things Laurel loves; he’d never had a choice in the matter. Never had any choice but to love him.
Never wanted to do anything else anyway.
“What kinda mother does this?” she asks, suddenly, her voice cutting into his reverie. “Throws her own baby away like a piece of trash.”
He shakes his head, suddenly impassioned. “That’s not what you’re doing.”
She scoffs, setting down the file in her hands, abandoning her task altogether. “It is.”
“No,” he says, a bit too forcefully, so emphatically she blinks. “No, you’re not and you know it. You wouldn’t-” He cuts himself off, lowering his voice. “You wouldn’t be doin’ this if you didn’t love him, Laurel. You’re doin’ this ‘cause you love him. You coulda just…” Frank pauses, choosing his words carefully, pressing onward. “You coulda just got rid of ‘im, before. But you didn’t. You didn’t because you love him, and you want him to have a better life, a good life, and you’re givin’ him that.”
“I’m selfish.”
“You’re not selfish,” he tells her, and before he even thinks about it he’s leaning down, pressing a scratchy kiss to her bare shoulder, his old instincts taking control, his instinct to comfort her, like a loyal dog laying at her feet. They both tense, when they realize what he’s done; Laurel, especially. She bristles, but doesn’t bat him off, move away, and after a moment he dares to do it again, as if he can infuse her with his strength, somehow. Make her believe the words he’s saying. “You’re not. And… and we’ll work on this in the morning. You’ll make the right choice. I promise.”
Laurel closes her eyes, leaning into him almost subconsciously, her body seeking comfort, seeking him. He laces their fingers together, as tight as he can manage, and it’s been so long since he touched her like this that his systems are whirring out of control, overheating, panicking and shutting down, yet behind his eyes everything is somehow simultaneously quiet, completely calm. She’s always put him at ease, steadied him, been the serenity to his chaos, his equilibrium, and now, if he can do even the tiniest sliver of the same for her, he will.
All he can do, right now, is be here. He’s more content with that than he can ever say.
3. eyes
The apartment is silent and still when Frank steps inside.
All the lights are off, the quiet deafening. The living room is soaked in early evening sunlight, filtering through the blinds and patterning the carpet, and when he sets his keys down on the coffee table, the clank rings hollow on the wood. Laurel is nowhere to be found, though he knows her class must have let out hours ago.
He has a fairly good idea of where she might be, though.
He creeps down the hall toward her bedroom, course set like a Laurel-seeking missile, and lo and behold, there she is, buried underneath the covers, fast asleep in her bed. She’s rolled over onto her side, one hand resting on the pillow beneath her head, another pillow nestled between her legs, and that same dim orange sunlight is seeping through the blinds here too, pouring over her. Her face is relaxed, smooth as marble, serene and childlike in slumber, brow relaxed. Her chest rises and falls, her breathing pulling him in like the moon manipulating the tides, urging him closer, until the urge to feel it on his skin is so unbearable he can hardly breathe himself. She looks so at peace, and she’s never at peace much anymore – neither of them are – and for a moment all Frank can do is stand in the doorway and marvel, watching silent as a sentinel, wordless as a star.
God, he loves her. And that’s not something he ever forgets, something he ever stops doing, but sometimes, times like this, during these quiet little moments, it rips through him like a bullet between his ribs how much he fucking adores her.
Things are hard between them, still. He doesn’t think things will ever not be hard – at least not any time soon. The fire had left her scarred, in ways both visible and invisible, and he’s had to reacquaint himself with her, learn how to love her even in spite of her grief, her anger, and he doesn’t mind. He thinks that he’d love her in any universe, any alternate dimension where he is Frank and she is Laurel, because it’s coded in his cells, his biology, the very deepest parts of him. It feels like it was born in his blood, loving her, carved onto his heart from the start like one of the Commandments; the only Commandment he’s ever obeyed.
But there’s none of that, now. No fire. No grief. No anger. Just Laurel. He feels almost like hunter in the forest, watching a doe grazing from very far away and knowing he ought not move and disturb it, captivated by its beauty, spellbound in that quietly profound way she’s always evoked in him. She doesn’t have to do anything at all to take his breath away, and Frank knows he shouldn’t disturb her, should let her rest, but he also knows the last time this happened, she ended up sleeping until nine and getting pissed at him for not waking her up sooner.
So he steps forward, making his way over to the other side of the bed and sinking down onto the mattress hesitantly; it’s not like they don’t share a bed regularly, now, but he’s still cautious, afraid of overstepping his bounds. Ever the light sleeper, Laurel stirs when she feels the bed sink beneath his weight, and gives a muffled little hum into the pillow, turning back to look at him after a moment.
“Hey,” she greets, voice raspy, eyes bleary and unfocused. “Oh, God, what time is it?”
“Only five,” he chuckles, as she stretches out her arms, yawning. “You’re good. Thought you might wanna have dinner, though.”
Laurel smiles, and it’s not a measured, pinched, thin smile, like her smiles have become far too often as of late; it’s real, unbridled happiness, toothy and genuine, the haze of sleep banishing her worries from her mind. They don’t have many moments like this, these days, and Frank knows to cherish these, the ones they do.
“Mmm. In a bit,” she murmurs, eyelids drifting shut again, like they’re too heavy for her to hold up. “Swear this kid’s sapping all my energy these days.”
Her stomach is an indistinct lump beneath the comforter, that tiny third party in their lives. He knows it’s true; Laurel doesn’t seem to be anything but exhausted these days, the baby ballooning her up and out and in every direction and sucking the lifeforce out of her as he does, and sometimes he worries, worries she’s simply too tired, body and soul, to see this through to the end. She needs rest, needs to gather her strength; God knows she’ll need it in the weeks to come, her due date looming over them ominously, that day of reckoning. He worries more than he’ll ever admit.
But worry has no place, here and now.
“I can always have a talk with him,” he volunteers, teasingly. “Tell him to leave some for you.”
“No,” she sighs, adjusting the pillow between her legs to ease the strain on her back and hips. “Don’t wake him up. I think our sleep schedules are finally synched up; he hasn’t kicked once.”
“Good.” He pauses, looking upon her for a moment; she’s shut her eyes again, given him no indication that she intends to get up anytime soon, and so he opens his mouth again. “You, uh, want me to start dinner?”
“No,” she says, again, words slurred with sleep, and reaches out suddenly without opening her eyes, groping the sheets for his hand, before locating it, lacing their fingers together, and tugging it toward her. “Lay down with me for a bit.”
He’s almost certain napping now will fuck his sleep schedule indefinitely, but he’s always kept odd hours, and this is an invitation he wouldn’t dare to refuse; a miracle he’s not sure he’ll ever witness again. She wants him. Wants him with her. He’s known that all these months, known that he wouldn’t be here unless she wanted him to be, but sometimes this hits him like a bullet too, his amazement at her, his disbelief that she could ever want him – that anyone ever could.
Fuck, she’s so much more than he deserves. That’s a continual realization, too. It’s never something he forgets.
Frank doesn’t waste any time; he kicks off his shoes and obliges without a word, crawling under the covers, suit and all. It’s far from comfortable, but the instant he feels the press of her body, the heat of her skin, everything else in the world melts away, bleeds into the background, and suddenly there exists only Laurel; his only heaven and his only earth and everything in between. He breathes her in almost greedily, that distinct smell of her – fabric softener and coconut-scented shampoo – overwhelming his senses, setting him at ease. He loses himself in her so easily, and it’s almost too much, lying face to face with her like this. He thinks he can feel his hands trembling faintly, reverently, and yet somehow he’s completely calm, calm from loving her.
“How’re you feelin’?” he asks, lamely, though he already knows most of the answer, and Laurel huffs.
“Tired. Fat. Mostly fat. Is fat a feeling?” She doesn’t open her eyes, just keeps talking, the words pouring out of her freely, no constraints, no inhibitions, honest and free with him in her exhaustion. “I dunno. I was gonna wear that white blouse to class today, you know that one Michaela got me? But I couldn’t even look myself in the mirror wearing it. I looked like the fucking… Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.”
He can’t help but laugh, reaching up and tucking a piece of hair behind her ear. “I’m sure you didn’t.”
“I did,” she insists. “I looked like Mr. Stay Puft, I’ll show you later.”
“You do that,” he says, softly, voice little more than a whisper. “Get some sleep for now, though.”
“Yeah,” Laurel hums, taking a deep, slow pull of air into her lungs. “Yeah, I’ll… do that.”
She’s out like a light in what must be record time, but Frank doesn’t follow her; he doesn’t want to waste even a second of this on sleep. He wants to commit this moment to memory: the way her breathing washes over him, sucks him under, tosses him sideways and ties his insides into knots; the steady drumbeat of her heart, keeping time between them; the way her blood thrums hot beneath her skin and the power he can feel contained beneath that skin, the sheer strength of her. She’s so alive. So utterly real. She’s everything good in the world, the entire universe, and he buries his face into her hair, and all he wants is to be good like her. Good for her.
He kisses her eyelids, once he’s sure she’s asleep; one firm press of his lips to each one. And he could swear this is the closest to heaven that he’s ever come.
4. forehead
All Frank knows is that he has no idea what time it is.
It’s either late at night or very early in the morning – just their luck they’d gotten placed in one of the windowless hospital rooms, and there’s no clock in here, and after her water broke he’d flown into a panic and forgotten his phone on the counter like the idiot he is. It’s been hours, he knows that for sure; hours that creep by like days.
It’s probably realistically only been twelve. But it feels like an eternity and a half in those twelve hours; reality feels distorted, in the confines of these four walls. Time is an illusion, anyway, elongating to an almost disorienting degree, until Frank can feel his grasp on reality slipping, his world consisting of nothing more than this room, the pungent smell of sweat and sterile plastic, Laurel’s groans and growls – which seem to grow louder by the minute, more agonized, and he doesn’t know how much worse it’ll get, how much more she can take before the pain breaks her.
“Oh, fuck. Fuck,” Laurel whimpers, suddenly, and grabs the handrail on the bed, bracing herself against it, preparing to weather the storm. “’nother one.”
Her contractions weren’t bad at first, only minor twinges and clenches, but by now they’ve built to a brutal intensity, her whole body seizing up and clamping down until she’s moaning without restraint; low and guttural, in a way he’s never heard before, in a way that doesn’t really sound human at all. The doctor doesn’t seem even the least bit concerned, even though Frank’s entire body is vibrating with anxiety, legs and hands shaky, unsteady. She’s in more pain than she should be, he’s sure of it, and something must be wrong, and all he wants to do is bear this in her place, be her Atlas and shoulder this burden for her.
He doesn’t care if it’d be ten times as bad, for him. He just wants it to stop, for her.
“You’re good,” he soothes, and goes to her, standing behind her, rubbing her back, providing whatever shitty comfort he can give though he thinks she’s barely hearing him, right now. “Hey, hey, you’re good. I got you.”
Her body sags, crunches, crumples, wars with itself. She’s sweat-soaked and beet-red and exhausted, and he doesn’t know how much longer she can do this, why things aren’t happening faster. She’d refused the epidural, fearing it for reasons she hadn’t articulated to him, and although he’s sure she’s regretting that now, she hasn’t given any outward indication of the fact. She endures, and he doesn’t know how, after everything, but she does.
She’s so strong. Stronger than he’ll ever be. Strong and selfless and amazing, and he’s sure she’s going to have broken every bone in his hands before this day is out, and he can barely bring himself to care about that at all.
“Fuck,” she spits, head falling forward as her hand goes to knead at her aching back. Her stomach hangs low on her frame, mostly obscured by the paper-thin hospital gown. It seems like it dwarfs her, swallows her up. “Fuck, I swear to God if he wasn’t dead I’d kill him.”
Him. Wes. He’s heard her curse Wes’s name in a million and one different ways tonight, with some admittedly pretty creative insults. She seems to seesaw back and forth from crying over him and wishing he was here to hurling profanities at his ghost, and he never knows what to say; most times he just shushes her, holds her until she’s ridden it out and the pain is starting to recede. There’s no sign this pain is receding now, though; it just seems to build, build, build like a tidal wave, until she’s tense enough to snap, until it feels like it’s going to break her back. The pain makes her restless, too, unable to lay down and sit still; it seems to help her to walk, to be up, and he spends the majority of his time steadying her, letting her lean against him when she needs to.
“’S almost done,” he murmurs, voice low, his demeanor outwardly cool, though on the inside he’s a nervous wreck, and he just wishes something, anything would happen, that things would progress. They seem to have ground to a standstill, though, leaving Laurel in the lurch. “Almost done.”
It seems to fade, slowly, bit by bit, the pain washing out of her, releasing her from its stranglehold, until she’s left breathing hard and wiping at her sweaty forehead, trying to push back the strands of hair plastered there. She stays there like that, for a moment, leaning against the bed with her head down, before she shifts, slightly, and looks up.
“You know what he said when I told him the condom broke?” she asks, suddenly, biting out the words on a laugh, and he can’t see her face, but the sound catches him off guard. “He just made a joke about how it was because his dick was so fucking big. That’s what he said to me. That fucking asshole. Fuck him.” She makes a sound like a sob. “Fuck him, for… doing this to me and leaving me to do this all alone. Fuck him.”
She sounds so hurt, so lost; frightened, and he’s only seen Laurel genuinely frightened a handful of times before, knows she never allows her fear to show. She’s a master at measuring her emotions with the tiniest teaspoons, but all that has been chucked to the wayside now, and nothing here is measured; her words or her emotions or her cries. The pain has broken her down, broken her.
Her words break him, too, and before he knows it he’s moving in closer, placing a firm hand on her shoulder, the other still rubbing at her back. He knows she won’t want him to get closer, burning hot as she is. “You’re not alone.”
Laurel shakes her head. “I am. I always am.”
“You’re not,” he urges again, and finally Laurel releases the handrail, turning to him and resting back against the bed, caught off guard by the passion in his words. There are tears on her cheeks, mingling with the sweat; he can barely tell where one ends and the other begins, but all he knows is that he can’t bear it if she thinks she’s alone in this, if she thinks he isn’t there to bear this with her. “I’m here.”
She releases a trembling breath. “Frank…”
“So please don’t…” He shakes his head. “Don’t feel like you’re alone.”
A moment of silence passes, and finally Laurel seems to relax, resting her hands on the bed and taking a seat. He moves in close, drawn by the inevitable pull of her gravity, resting a hand on her hip and holding one of hers with the other, massaging a finger back and forth in the space between her thumb and index finger, in the hopes it can ground her, distract her for even the briefest of seconds.
“It hurts,” she chokes out, and her voice is raspy from overuse, cracking pitifully on each word. The sound breaks him.
“I know,” he murmurs, and all at once, without warning, her face twists.
“No you don’t,” Laurel spits. “You don’t fucking know.”
“You’re right.” He shrinks back, a bit, and gulps, lowering his eyes. Still, though, he doesn’t move away; he knows she wants him here to anchor her, to moor her to earth, keep her from going delirious from the pain, no matter how many angry words she hurls at him. He knows she doesn’t mean them. “I don’t.”
But then Laurel deflates too, her eyes softening. “Sorry. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not,” she insists, though there’s not much power behind the words, and they come out on a sigh. “You don’t… even have to be here. And you still are. And I don’t… I don’t get it.”
The reason is simple. It’s always been simple, and she knows why, knows it as well as he does, but for some reason she refuses to believe anything could be that simple, any motivation so easy to discern. She’s lived in a world of liars since she was a child, has spent her entire life surrounded by ulterior motives and bad intentions, and he knows that as much as she may trust him, those memories will always be there. They’ll always keep her guarded, sealed off.
She doesn’t believe it, after everything that’s gone on between them. He can’t say he blames her. But right now, right in this instant, he just needs her to know.
“I love you,” he says, unflinching, and Laurel looks like he might as well have slapped her, the way she tenses, the way terror flashes behind her eyes, cuts through her harder than any contraction has thus far. Normally he’d hesitate, look away, but he simply stares back, says the words so fiercely, like he can somehow compel her to believe them by sheer force of will. She opens her mouth, starts to say something, but he continues before she has the chance. “I know… I know you said not to say that, anymore. But I need you to know that, right now. I need you to know you can do this.”
Her jaw is tightening, her body tensing, a low whimper peeling its way from her throat. He can tell another contraction is imminent, looming on the horizon like a tsunami ploughing towards them on the shore, and Laurel looks petrified, suddenly; scared stiff.
“I can’t,” she says, clenching her teeth. The words come out in a rough, jagged burst, scraping her throat like stones.
Frank shakes his head, resolute. “Yeah you can. You’re so strong. So fucking strong. You always have been.”
Her grip on his hand tightens until it’s almost vicelike, cutting off his circulation, but he doesn’t mind; he’s more than happy to let a few of his muscles atrophy for the sake of her comfort. “You’re… y-you’re wrong.”
“No I’m not,” he replies, so sure of the fact, and they’re close enough now that he swears he can feel her pain too, feel every assault of every merciless muscle inside her. Still, he keeps going, talking to her to keep her mind off the pain, draw her out of this world and into another with his voice. “Remember the night we met? When you came to the office and called me a misogynistic ass to my face then stormed out?”
That gets a laugh out of her; shaky, weak, but a laugh all the same. “You told me I’d just get knocked up. Became kind of a… self-fulfilling prophecy, didn’t it?”
“Maybe,” he concedes, chuckling with her. “But the way you looked me right in the eyes, called me an ass… I knew right then you didn’t take anyone’s shit. Knew you were a force to be reckoned with. So you’re strong.” He pauses, pulling a breath of her into his lungs, and she smells like sweat and burning skin, and if agony had a smell he imagines he’d smell it too, thick as humidity in the air. He closes both her hands in his, and Laurel nestles her face into the crook of his neck as she rides out the contraction, gritting her teeth against the urge to scream. “You’re the strongest person I know.”
It seems to soothe her, uncoil the tension in her muscles, as they stay there, locked in an embrace; her seated on the edge of the bed, him standing before her. He’d never imagined this could be so intimate, but holding her, coaching her, helping her bring her child into the world... It is. He's never felt so close to her before, never seen her so vulnerable and beautiful and impossibly brave. He's amazed by her.
He never stops being amazed by her.
The pain dies down, as it always does, granting her a reprieve, but her breathing is still coming in fast, gasping pants, like she can’t quite gulp enough air into her lungs, like she’s two steps away from hyperventilating, and so he lays a kiss on her forehead, cooing to her softly, sweet nothings, sweet somethings, sweet everythings, barely aware of what he’s saying but knowing only that he has to say something.
“Breathe,” he murmurs. “Breathe with me. It’s just you ‘n me here. Just you ‘n me.”
It doesn’t take any of the ridiculous Lamaze breathing to calm her, those exaggerated, puffing breaths; he simply breathes like he normally would, slow and steady and measured, in and out, and eventually Laurel matches that rhythm, letting him take the lead, relying on him to steady herself. Soon they’re so in sync he can barely tell where his body ends and hers begins; they’ve simply become one set of lungs breathing in and out, fused together, one head and one heart.
It’s just them, here. Just the two of them. They’re steady. He can keep them steady. He can breathe for her, now, if she can’t breathe anymore.
“Good?” he asks, after a moment, and Laurel nods, and the breath she lets out flows smooth and easy from her lungs, like she’s releasing the smoke of a cigarette into the air around them.
“Better,” is all she says, moving back slightly, tightening her grip on his hands. “Don’t… don’t go anywhere. Don’t leave me.”
He nods. They both know he won’t.
5. lips
The brush of a fingernail across his brow is what wakes him.
He opens his eyes, and wonder of wonder, miracle of miracles, it’s Laurel lying beside him, absentmindedly tracing the counters of his face with her finger. Her hair is still damp with sweat, matted, tears drying on her cheeks and leaving tracks like arroyos in their wake. Her irises are drained of their color in her exhaustion, dull, but she’s stunning even so, and before he can even take a breath she’s already stolen it away, taken it for herself.
“Hey,” she croaks, and he smiles
“Hey. Sorry. Didn’t mean t’ fall asleep.”
Laurel tucks her hands beneath her head, unbothered. “It’s okay. You’ve been up as long as me.”
The room is quiet around them, only a few machines remaining, a faint hum in the background as they monitor her. The air is thick, heavy in the aftermath, and the sheets beneath them are clean, and Frank thinks he wouldn’t trade this for anything in the world, waking up next to Laurel here – even if it’s not anything like he’d ever expected or imagined. It’s perfect.
She is, more than anything.
“Yeah, well. I didn’t just do what you did.”
Laurel fiddles with her hospital bracelet, something flickering in her eyes. “No. Guess not.”
He knows what she’s thinking about; the tiny, fragile, nameless boy she’d held for only a few hours before handing him off to his adoptive family, his new life. They’d insisted she could have more time if she wanted, stay with him overnight, but Laurel refused, certain parting would only be more difficult the longer she held on, terrified of giving in and changing her mind. That’d broken something in her, giving him up, watching the nurse walk away with her world held in her arms; he knows it had, as sure as she was that it had been the right decision. It being the right decision hadn’t made it any easier.
“I keep thinking,” she whispers, sniffing. “About him. Wondering if he’s scared, hearing… all these voices that aren’t mine, in some place he doesn’t know. All those strangers holding him…”
“They’ll take care of him. You know they will. That’s why you picked ‘em.”
Laurel mulls that over, but no tears bead in her eyes; she seems to have done all the crying she can do. She just takes his hand, playing with it idly, slipping their fingers together then pressing her small palm against his larger one, like she’d done with the baby only hours ago, as she’d pored over every miniscule detail of his body, memorizing them to have something to cling to, the only thing she’d have left of him; the ghosting of his silk-soft skin across hers, the memory of his diminutive fist tightening around her pinky with such fragile strength.
“Do you think it was the right thing to do?” she asks, at last, and at first he doesn’t know how to answer.
“Yeah.” He nods, grimly. “If everything we’ve done ever comes back on us, we go away…”
“He’d get put in the system,” she finishes for him. “Wes… he’d hate me for letting that happen. Not that he wouldn’t hate me for this, already.”
“I don’t think he would,” Frank tells her, earnest. “He’s not gonna grow up in the system. He’s gonna have a house. White picket fence. His own bedroom. Normal parents.” A lump forms in his throat, heavy as lead. “A dog, someday. Or a cat, if he’s a cat person. The whole shebang. He’ll be… happy.”
He can’t deny the heavy, sinking feeling settling in his stomach, because he can’t deny the love he’d felt for the baby, either, all those months he’d spent growing inside Laurel, all the nights he’d stay up late talking to him long after Laurel had fallen asleep, carrying on conversations about the world outside, about the weather, sports – sometimes world news – but mostly about Laurel herself. He’d fallen in love with him too, just like she had; there’s no way it could have been prevented, and he knows his pain can’t compare to hers, even remotely, but still it remains, festering below his sternum like a tumor.
There’s a light, in Laurel’s eyes; a muted spark. Something like hope. “I know.”
A moment passes, and Frank clears his throat, moving up so that their faces are closer together. “How’re you?”
“My whole body hurts. My vagina is killing me.” She pauses, grimacing. “Sorry, was that TMI?”
“After today, you really think there’s such thing as TMI with us?”
“You’re probably right. Anyone else would’ve run for the hills, after that.”
“There’s no place I’d rather be but here,” he tells her, and he means it. He means it so much he aches.
There’s a smile on her lips. It’s tentative, unsure. But all that matters is that it’s there, that she can still smile, after everything. “Yeah?”
He nods. “Yeah.”
Frank doesn’t know how long it is they lay there without a word, staring into each other’s eyes; they don’t need words, never have, those paltry things which never seem to be enough to express what they want to say. They speak to each other perfectly well in the silence, by doing nothing at all, and maybe they wouldn’t have been able to do this, once, with so many lies clouding the air between them, but now there’s nowhere to hide, nothing to hide, nothing garbling their signal. There’s a truth on their side, now.
This is all they need; this, right here. Nothing more. He’s content in a soul-deep way he’s never felt before, just to lie beside her, just to be with her in some capacity, whatever capacity she chooses to allow. This is everything.
“I’m gonna shower,” she states, suddenly, running a hand through her sweat-damp hair with a look of disgust. He stands, circling around the bed and helping her up, and she gives him a grateful smile. “I feel gross.”
“Want me to get one of the nurses to help you?”
“Can you?” Laurel asks, a bit hesitant, unsure if he’d want to. “I, uh… I’d rather it be you.”
She wants him. It’ll never stop surprising Frank. Perhaps he’ll never truly believe it – but she does, and so he nods, because there’s nothing he can say but yes.
“’Course. C’mere.”
She’s weak, more than a little unsteady on her feet, and he walks her over to the bathroom carefully, stripping the both of them, turning on the water, and stepping inside the little pod of a shower with her. She covers herself instinctively, at first, ashamed of the changes in her body, all the swelling and curves and weight and stretch marks that weren’t there before, but he doesn’t so much as bat an eye. All he sees is her. All he sees is beauty, the woman he loves, different and the same and no less stunning, and eventually she relaxes, opens up and lets him see her, even bloodied and scarred. He washes her back and hair attentively, hands gentle, letting her do the rest of the work, and it takes her a while, tired as she is, but eventually she gets the job done.
Slow and steady. They can do things slow and steady, from here on out.
He holds her beneath the lukewarm spray of the water, afterward, arms curled around her like a stronghold, Laurel’s face burrowed into his chest. Her hands are clasped behind him at the small of his back, her body leaning against his, and it feels intimate in a way that’s so much deeper than sexual; there’s none of that desire here, now, and they don’t need it. This is them at their most real, stripped down to their bones, exposed. This is a kind of happiness he’s never known, too; simple and quiet and soft, and he knows better than to write off these precious moments, after he’d been so certain once he’d never have them again.
If there’s more to life than this, than standing here with Laurel, holding her fast against him, feeling the pull of each breath she takes, then he has no goddamn clue what it must be.
“You fallin’ asleep down there?” he asks, after Laurel hasn’t moved a muscle for a good five minutes, and she makes a soft, sleepy noise against his skin.
“Maybe.”
“C’mon. Let’s get you back to bed.”
Laurel shakes her head, pulling back and meeting his eyes, and she’s adorably drowsy, words thick and tongue heavy. “Can we stay like this for a bit? I wanna stay like this.”
Frank nods, of course he does, because he’s a slave to her desires; he’d give her anything she asked, anything he’s capable of giving her. And maybe he can’t give her the world, but he can give her his world, even if it’s not much, even if it’s nothing more than this, pitiful and undeserving of her. He’s bad, rotten to the core. He’s done terrible things, and the best thing his unworthy heart ever did was love her, and that’s what he is: unworthy. Unworthy of her. Unworthy of this moment. So unworthy it blows his fucking mind.
But he’s better, for her. With her. It’s not her job to make him that way, he knows. She doesn’t even have to try – and she doesn’t. She lifts him up, simply by way of her presence, and with her he just feels better, wants to be better. Is better.
“What are we?” she asks out of nowhere, her eyes sharpening through the haze. A droplet of water dribbles down her cheek, and he follows it with his eyes, inexplicably fascinated and unable to answer, before clearing his throat.
“I, uh, thought we agreed I was your honorary baby daddy.”
She smiles. “Well, yeah. But… us. I mean us.”
“After all this, if I’m not at least your boyfriend by now…” he jokes, and she rests her forehead against his chin, laughing softly.
“You are my boyfriend. I don’t know, that just… Doesn’t feel like enough.”
Not enough. Yes, Frank thinks, she’s right; boyfriend and girlfriend don’t feel like apt titles. They feel too trite and frivolous to describe what they are, what they have; there is something far more enduring between them now, something that runs deeper, something Frank doesn’t think words can encompass at all. He doesn’t know what it is. Can’t pin it down, give it a name. All he knows is that he feels it.
All that he knows is that it’s the realest thing he’s ever had in his life, and he’d sooner die than lose this again.
“We don’t gotta label it,” Frank murmurs against her forehead, finally. “Don’t gotta do this a certain way. I just wanna do something.” He pauses, and she meets his eyes, and he can’t breathe. He can never breathe right, around her; she sets the oxygen around them aflame, or perhaps just sucks it right out of the air altogether, and God, the most striking thing is that she seems to have no clue what she does to him at all, the hold she has on his heart. “I just wanna be with you.”
She’s kissing him before he can say another word, and even if he had any more words to say in the first place, they’d be long gone now, forgotten as soon as her lips touch his. It’s a gentle kiss, chaste and close-mouthed, sweet as honey, and Laurel ends up doing most of the work because Frank’s lips simply forget how to operate altogether when hers touch them. He tenses, but he melts into it quickly, melting like ice which never stood a chance against the scald of her skin.
It’s the first time she’s kissed him on the mouth in what feels like forever, and it’s not like it’s any different than all the times they’ve kissed, in other places, not made any more significant because of its placement. Still, he can’t help but lose himself in it, in her, kissing her beneath the spray of the water until he barely feels the pelting of the drops at all, until he’s conscious only of the brush of her breasts against his chest, the softness of her eager lips, the give of her skin when he presses his fingers against her upper arm. It’s all simple. It isn’t much.
It’s enough. So much more than enough.
Laurel gives him a heavy-eyed smile when they break apart – probably because he looks thunderstruck, and he’s sure he does, because he is. “I, um… I missed that. Kissing you.”
Somehow, he harnesses his voice from somewhere deep in his throat. “Yeah. Me too.”
“You missed kissing yourself?”
“Yeah, yeah, smartass. You know what I meant,” he chuckles, and kisses her again, kisses her with everything he has in him, kisses her until they’re both smiling giddily against each other’s lips and it’s barely a kiss at all.
She’s exhausted, he can tell, worn down by this battle of a day, but she’s come out like a warrior on the other side, scarred, broken, but as fierce as she was going in – maybe even more so. For a while, afterward, he just stands there looking at her, captivated, bewildered and paralyzed and amazed and God, really everything, before she breaks the silence again.
“I wanna kiss you all the time,” she declares, words garbled, eyelids drooping, and he laughs.
“I think that can be arranged.”
He’s not sure how long he holds her, after. He doesn’t think it really matters. Could be minutes, hours. Days. Years. He could live his whole life in that moment, in that shower with her, blurring every line, erasing every beginning and end, scrambling all the dates, burning all the calendars, rewriting the story of his life. As far as he’s concerned, he was born in her arms and he’ll die there too – and really, Frank thinks, he can’t imagine a sweeter end than that.