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“I dropped into the mass of you and I cannot find the way out. Sometimes I think I'm free, coughed up like Jonah from the whale, but then I turn a corner and recognise myself again. Myself in your skin, myself lodged in your bones, myself floating in the cavities that decorate every surgeon's wall. That is how I know you. You are what I know.”
– Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body
This is the sixth house they’re set to look at this week and Rebecca is tired. She’s seven months pregnant and her back hurts when she stands for too long or sits in a slightly odd position or just fucking breathes the wrong way, and the whole house-hunting bullshit was meant to be wrapped up months ago but, in a final act of paternal fuckery, her father had had the audacity to up and fucking die, and so here she is, roughly the size and shape of 18 watermelons stuffed in a tube sock, house-hunting in Kansas during one of the hottest summers on record.
It was a heart attack that took him. No one saw it coming, Rebecca least of all because she maintains that the man hadn’t had a heart to begin with, but whatever animosity she may have harbored toward him hadn’t mattered in the end because she was his daughter and there are certain things expected of daughters when their fathers die. So when the call came, she and Ted abandoned their carefully formulated plans, got on a plane, and crossed the ocean in order to attend Paul Welton’s funeral and help her newly widowed mother embark on the next chapter of her life.
That was three months ago. Deborah’s powers of persuasion and ability to guilt-shame her loved ones outrival the integrity of Ted’s backbone on a normal day; throw in the death of a husband and she may as well have collared him. Rebecca thinks he probably would have let her if he thought it would’ve made her feel better.
It’s not that Rebecca is entirely unsympathetic. She loves her mother; of course she doesn’t enjoy seeing her distraught. But every bit of mourning that Rebecca partakes in during their three-month stay at her parents’ house is carried out in sympathy.
She mourned the loss of her father a long time ago, back when she realized the sort of man he was. He was weak, and he was cruel, and whatever love and affection he was capable of giving were bastardized beyond measure and had the teeth of a wounded animal, and he didn’t care whose flesh those teeth tore into as long as it wasn’t his own, and he would never, ever change.
And he hadn’t.
Rebecca hadn’t had a father in years but she went back to the place she used to call home to bear witness as they lowered the man into the ground, to hold her mother’s hand and pretend not to notice that there weren’t many tears on her face despite the rather theatrical display of grief. Deborah Welton always has loved a performance. Perhaps that’s why she stayed.
Performance or not, Ted knows about a widow’s grief in ways Rebecca doesn’t. His own mother had stepped into it when he was a teenager and he says she never really came out the other side – not all of her, at least. They don’t see Dottie often, but Rebecca thinks she understands what he means by that, which is why she hadn’t protested when he said they should stay with Deborah for a while to help her manage.
Well, she hadn’t protested much, and she’s glad now that it’s done, glad to have gotten to know her mother in a way she never could when her father was alive. Deborah had been beside her when Rebecca first felt the baby move, had held tight to one of Rebecca’s hands while tears pooled in their eyes. She wants to try her hand at being a proper grandmother, she says, and Rebecca calls upon every ounce of grace that she can muster up and agrees to let her.
She’s never known the woman outside of Paul Welton’s shadow, and there must be something to be said for that. It could be terrible — it likely will be if history is any indication — but it could also be wonderful.
It's been decided that Deborah will fly out to Kansas the week the baby’s due. Rebecca can’t imagine her mother in Kansas, but she won’t have to imagine it for much longer and she doesn’t hate the thought as much as she once would have. When she’s in an honest sort of mood, she even admits to drawing a certain amount of comfort from it.
Though it won’t matter how Rebecca feels about her mother coming to Kansas to stay with them if they don’t have anywhere for her to bloody stay. The flat’s fine for her and Ted, but factor in a newborn, the newborn’s grandmother, and all of the shit that accumulates in preparation for the arrival of the newborn, and the cozy flat for two becomes a shoebox housing circus elephants.
So now they’re here, Rebecca closer to the end than the beginning of her pregnancy and feeling the effects of that more with every passing day, and Ted who, for all of his wonderfully good intentions, is the reason they’re still looking for a house to buy when they should already be settled into one, when they should be painting the nursery and assembling the crib and arranging the tiny baby socks and the tiny baby onesies and the tiny baby cuddly toys until they’ve created the perfect tiny place for their perfect tiny baby who’s due to arrive in a few short months.
She’s not saying that it’s Ted’s fault. But she’s also not not saying that.
And, to be fair to Ted, it was her father who waited until the least opportune moment to die. They wouldn’t have spent months in London if the selfish bastard had hung around for another year or two. Typical of him, really.
It’s just men, Rebecca decides, having worked herself into a tizzy in the passenger seat of Ted’s pickup truck, an all-American monstrosity that jumps 15 miles into the air every time they drive over a piece of goddamned gravel. Men are the problem. And pickup trucks. And gravel. But mostly men.
“Did she tell you she wants to be called ‘MeMaw’?”
Rebecca turns sharply to stare at his profile. The signs are faint, but you don’t love someone for a decade and not pick up on what their face looks like when they’re trying not to laugh.
“You’re lying.”
“Alright, yeah,” he admits, letting a smile slide onto his mouth. He jostles their hands a bit where they’re clasped atop the center console. “She said she wants to be called ‘Grandmother.’ I told her that that might be a mouthful for someone new to the whole mouth-forming-words shebang and talked her down to ‘Grandma.’ But I really think that with some persuading, she’ll go for ‘Granny.’”
Rebecca snorts. “‘Granny’ Deborah?”
“I was thinking more like ‘Granny Deb.’”
“She’ll cut you out of the will if you teach our child to call her ‘Granny’ anything.”
“Well, I— wait, I’m in the will?”
“You won’t be, is my point.”
Truthfully, Rebecca doesn’t even know if she’s in the will, but Deborah doesn’t have much in the way of family. As far as potential heirs go, it’s Rebecca, the book club ladies, and Tish.
Her money’s on Tish.
“That’s alright,” Ted says with a shrug. “Who needs money when you’ve got your dream lady, your dream baby, and your dream house?”
Coming from literally anyone else, she would roll her eyes, but Ted is sincere in everything when it comes to loving Rebecca.
The fucking bastard.
“I’m sorry,” she huffs, guilt surfacing and catching in her throat.
“What? Why?”
“For… you know.”
“Mmm, nope. Don’t think I do.”
“You know,” she repeats, waving her hand in a general sweep meant to encompass everything under the sun. “For the… for how grumpy I’ve been and for making you go out and get me food all the time and for being so fucking disagreeable about every house we look at when I know the perfect house doesn’t actually exist and I’m going to have to make some concessions and it’s just a matter of which ones to make. Fuck, I’m– we just need to pick one and I’ll deal with it.”
She sucks in a breath, pressing a hand to her belly and barreling past the threat of angry, frustrated tears, “Not to mention it was my father who died and screwed us. You were only trying to make sure my mother was all right, which is what I should have been doing, but what did I do? I gave you nothing but hell for it and I—”
Her diatribe breaks off when Ted slows the truck and puts on the indicator. The next turn-off for the house is another three miles down the road, so she’s understandably confused when he makes a u-turn and starts back the way they came.
“What are you doing?”
He smiles and lifts their hands to his lips, pressing a kiss to the knuckle of her thumb.
“The only food joint the way we were headed is McDonald’s,” he explains. “You got more options this way. Whatcha feelin’? Burgers? Pizza? Oh, y’know what, I think there’s an IHOP if you’re in more of a breakfast-y mood. They can prolly do you a chocolate chip pancake.”
Rebecca pauses. Blinks. Sucks in a breath and mutters, “With whipped cream?”
His laugh is her favorite sound in the whole world.
“Yes, darlin’. With whipped cream.”
Ted calls the realtor and lets her know they’re going to be a little late, apologizing profusely while explaining the severity of the situation and ending the call by asking if she would like anything from IHOP.
Rebecca feels marginally less embarrassed when the woman promises it’s no trouble and agrees to an order of bacon. If Rebecca’s remembering correctly, she has a few kids of her own.
“Triplets,” Ted confirms, putting the truck in park and shooting Rebecca a loaded look. “Grown now, but still.”
“Good lord,” she mutters, rubbing her belly instinctively.
“Right?” He rests a hand on top of hers for a moment before patting her knee and opening his door. “Alright, sit tight.”
He presses the button to lock the doors before he goes, same as he does every time Rebecca opts to wait in the vehicle while he pops into a store or restaurant. She’d thought that a decade’s worth of experience in being loved by him had worked out all the kinks in how to go about letting him do that, but the lump in her throat says otherwise.
“You’re going to love your daddy, button,” she whispers, watching as he holds the door for a family to enter the restaurant before him. “I can’t wait for you to meet him.”
His grin when he returned with the bags should have tipped her off, but the smiley face drawn with whipped cream and chocolate chips onto the top pancake still makes her snort in surprise when she opens the to-go container.
“Now open the little one,” he tells her, taking the larger box when she passes it over so she can follow his instructions. Upon opening the other container, she discovers a comically small stack of chocolate chip pancakes, an exact replica of her own down to the whipped cream smile and the chocolate chip eyes. “I told ‘em the pancakes were for my pregnant wife and look what they went and did. It’s for the gumdrop!”
“That’s adorable,” she admits. What’s even more adorable is the way he takes every opportunity to tell people about the baby, though she keeps this thought to herself. “I’ll be happy to pass them along.”
She plucks the little pancake from the box and drops it into her mouth, sighing in ecstasy and reaching for another before she’s finished chewing the first.
“I guess they’re a hit then, huh?” She levels him with a playful glare, making a show of pulling out the last one and considering it seriously before extending it to him. “For me?” he gasps, taking the offering with one hand and wrapping the other around her wrist, licking a bit of whipped cream from her pinky finger that she hadn’t seen.
It’s a silly gesture, something to make her laugh, but she wasn’t expecting the warmth of his tongue, that quick swipe of wetness on her skin. The sharp inhale through her nose doesn’t go unnoticed.
Ted cuts his eyes at her, a knowing smirk creeping onto his mouth. Rebecca can’t help the way she flushes, shifting in her seat as she awaits a good-natured ribbing, maybe a more purposeful bout of teasing. He loves to see how far he can push her, what it’ll take to work her up before she breaks, and she loves to let him.
But he only presses his smiling mouth to her finger in a quick kiss and squeezes her hand before releasing it from his grip, popping the mini pancake into his mouth and shifting the truck into reverse.
She stares at his profile for a half-beat longer before clearing her throat and reaching for the larger box, any disappointment at the loss of prospective car sex eclipsed by the lure of syrupy, chocolatey carbs.
It’s for the best anyway, really. They’re pressed for time as is, and while history might suggest they’re fairy adept at fucking in vehicles, they haven’t attempted it since Rebecca’s begun growing another human on the inside of her body, an ordeal which, while undeniably life-affirming, is rather inconvenient. She can’t even reach to do up her own sandals anymore.
“You ready to circle back around?” he asks after a while, interrupting the silence that had previously been filled only with the sounds of her chewing and Dobie Gray’s voice filtering softly from the speakers. At her questioning eyebrow, he clarifies, “That little Rebecca hate-train you boarded back there.”
She rolls her eyes even as the back of her neck burns hot.
“Ted, no–”
“Ted, yes,” he interrupts, shooting her a playfully stern glance. “And I know you’ve got all kinds’a hormones runnin’ through you that are prolly throwin’ your emotions all outta wack, but for my sake, you’re gonna have to let me tell you that it’s a privilege, not a chore, to go out and get whatever it is you’re hungry for no matter what time it is because I love you and because it makes me feel like I’m doing a good job, like I’m taking good care of you and the peanut.”
“You are,” she cuts in. “Ted, you do.”
“Good. Then I need you to keep lettin’ me.” He waits for her nod before continuing more soberly, “And look, I… well, I know you don’t really like to talk about your dad, and that’s okay. I respect that you’ve got some complicated feelings toward him, that it wasn’t always easy for you to love him.”
“Ted–”
“But it’s not your fault he died, honey. And I don’t regret a second we spent over there with your mom, even if it did mess with our plans a little. We do what we gotta do for family, don’t we?”
A rush of air escapes through her parted lips. Grinding her teeth, she pulls a napkin from the takeaway bag, wiping chocolate from her fingers before pressing a clean section to the corners of her eyes.
“You bastard,” she mutters, reaching blindly for him with her free hand, closing her eyes with a huff when she hears him chuckle, feeling the warmth of his skin as he slides his hand into hers and squeezes. Something smooths over in her chest even as emotion continues to needle behind her eyelids. She keeps hold of his hand while drawing purposeful breaths, willing the tears to subside. One she’s gathered herself enough, she manages, “Thank you.”
He hums, bringing their hands to his mouth so he can kiss the back of hers.
“We’re gonna find a house,” he continues. “If it’s not this house, that’s okay. And if it’s not the next one, or any of the ten after that, then that’s okay too. Ain’t no rush.”
Rebecca releases something between a huff and a snort, waiting until he glances over at her before she pointedly drops her eyes to her belly.
“Last I checked, there’s nothing in the lease stopping us from having a baby in the apartment,” he jokes. “I don’t think we’re gonna come home from the hospital to an eviction notice on the front door.”
“I know you’re joking, but we won’t still be living there when the baby’s born,” she asserts. “Babies need things, Ted. A fuck-ton of things. Too many things to fit inside a tiny, 2-bedroom flat.”
“Which is why we’re looking for a house,” he agrees good-naturedly.
The little bit of steam she’s accumulated dissipates easily in the silence that follows, and when she feels his eyes on her, she meets his gaze with an involuntary upturning of her lips to match his.
“What?”
“Nothin’.” At her unimpressed stare, he continues, “‘S just, going back to whatcha said earlier–and, y’know, for the record and all–” He shrugs, cuts her a sideways glance, his face the picture of mischief and fondness in near equal measure. “You’re pretty cute when you’re grumpy.”
She manages a scoff but drops her gaze to her lap when her cheeks start to burn, a smile pulling at her mouth that she’s helpless against.
“Cute,” she grumbles, shoving a bite of pancake into her mouth and chewing with all the indignance she can muster, which isn’t a terrible lot; the pancakes really are very good, and Ted really is very handsome, and it’s rather hard to find fault with anything whilst indulging in both.
The house was perfect on paper: updated for functionality while still retaining the original bones, adequately sized without being excessive, far enough away from neighbors that they can walk out the door without stepping into someone else’s garden, close enough to town that going to the shops doesn’t feel like an ordeal, no glaring red flags.
Rebecca blinks up at the house, finding that, in reality–
“It’s perfect,” Ted says from beside her.
“Sshhh,” she hisses, swatting gently at his arm. “You’ll jinx it.”
“Oh c’mon, don’t tell me you’re goin’ superstitious on me now.”
“I’m not,” she insists. “But what’s that thing you always say? About chicken eggs?”
He furrows his brow before venturing, “Not to count your eggs before they hatch?”
“Exactly, yes.” She nods sanctimoniously. “It’s bad form.”
It’s clear that he’s torn between laughter and mild confusion. He runs his pointer finger and thumb across his mustache.
“Is that… I mean, do I really say that that often?”
She’s not given the chance to respond — and she’s glad, because truth be told she can’t remember a single instance where those words have left his mouth, which must mean that it’s an Americanism she’s picked up and taken to using in an unironic manner of her own accord, and she has neither the desire nor the facilities at present to further delve into that reality — because Carolyn the realtor has spotted them and is making her way down the front walk, calling a greeting and trilling happily when Ted hands over the to-go box with her bacon inside. They make idle chat while the woman eats, Rebecca even more thankful than normal for the way Ted never minds shouldering the social weight.
It’s difficult to give her full attention to the conversation, she finds, her gaze routinely drifting toward the house, taking in the original wood and the many windows, the stately front door, the overgrown but impressive gardens. Still, Rebecca manages to smile and hum and answer the odd question thrown her way about the pregnancy, tries to gather up enough threads of the conversation to pose a polite question of her own about the other woman’s family, her children and her husband. She thinks she does well enough, but then Ted’s taking a step and closing the slight distance between them, not missing a beat in what he’s saying but sliding an arm around her and squeezing her hip, his eyes flitting over her in a way that means he's noticed something’s off.
She does feel off, almost jittery, and though it’s not a bad feeling, it’s slightly disconcerting for how suddenly it’s come upon her. She wraps her own arm around Ted, returning his embrace and squeezing back in wordless reassurance, feeling better, more grounded, for having him pressed against her, his solid frame adjusting easily when she leans into him. Her free hand rises to rest against her belly, and almost immediately a tiny foot or hand or elbow bumps against it in greeting.
It occurs to her then, in a manner that would be abrupt if her mind weren’t all wooly and languid, that this is the happiest she’s ever been, that she can’t remember a time she’s felt so at home in her own skin, but the thought slides like silk through her fingertips, leaving behind only the impression of something sweet. Her tongue darts out to lick her lips as though hoping for a lingering taste.
“Honey?”
She drags her gaze from the house and realizes that it’s only her and Ted, Carolyn having walked a few paces out into the garden, now turned away and speaking into her telephone. Rebecca hadn’t even heard her go; she’d been listening, she thinks, to a bird somewhere off in the distance, whistling its song.
“Hmm?” She blinks, smiling over at Ted when her eyes settle on his face. “Sorry, love. Did you say something?”
“You alright?” he asks, his thumb rubbing her hip, fingers giving another little squeeze. “You looked a little out of it there.”
“Mm, I guess I was,” she says. “My head ran away from me, I think.”
He hums, studying her face, his other hand moving to find the one of hers still laying atop her stomach.
“You sure you’re good? Not getting overheated, are you?”
She hums in the negative, letting him lace their fingers together. An involuntary, pleased sigh leaves her then, loud enough for him to take note, a curious grin ticking up the corners of his mouth. He’s so handsome it makes her feel a little silly.
He continues to study her carefully, and though she’s not exactly sure what expression she’s wearing, she doesn’t bother to rearrange it, not when she feels so content that she thinks she could probably rest her head on his shoulder and fall asleep standing up, lulled to slumber by the birdsong and the gentle breeze. Her body sways further into Ted’s of its own accord, and she sighs again when he tightens his grip on her hip, pulling her more securely into his side to counteract the way she’s shifted them slightly off balance.
“You know what you sorta remind me of right now?” he asks, eyes darting between hers. She lifts her brows in question, smoothing her hand up his back, enchanted by the way he plays at being scandalized when she slips the hand beneath his shirts so that her fingers connect with his skin. His chuckle rumbles through her, makes her press herself even closer to chase the vibrations of it, her head winding up resting atop his shoulder after all. “You remind me of you, but after you’ve had a few good orgasms, when you get all touch-drunk and cuddly.”
She can only laugh at that, pressing her forehead into his neck and admitting to herself that it’s not a totally inaccurate assessment.
“I think it might’ve been the pancakes,” she guesses. It’s true that it’s unlike any sugar high she’s previously experienced, but pregnancy has a way of taking things to the extreme. “Can we go inside now?”
“I told Carolyn we wouldn’t mind scoping out the yard while we wait for her,” he says. “It was her granddaughter’s first day of preschool, so she’s gettin’ the rundown.”
Rebecca’s minor impatience falls away as she lifts her head and looks over to where the woman paces in the grass, her mouth stretched wide in a smile as she presumably listens to her grandchild babble on at the other end of the line.
“That’s sweet,” she mutters. Ted hums, angling to press a kiss to her cheek before disengaging to tug her in the opposite direction, over toward the front of the house.
“The flowerbeds sure are pretty,” he notes, pointing to where the buds and blooms of a multitude of plants are vying for space, bright pops of color among the green vines and weeds. Her eyes catch on a patch of delphiniums, towers of blue and ivory and lavender poking their faces out from the rabble and making her smile; she’s always harbored a bit of favor for them. “Just need some TLC. A little guidance from a helpin’ hand, all that good stuff.”
“Your speciality,” she says with a teasing grin.
“Yeah right,” he snorts, rolling his eyes. “With people, sure, but I think we both know they’d pull up their roots and run for cover the second I put on a pair of gardening gloves.”
Rebecca giggles, knocking her shoulder against his. For all of his talents — and Rebecca, being the primary beneficiary of a great number of them, can attest to the man having many talents — gardening is not one of them. He’s prone to overwatering and overfertilizing, to under-pruning and letting the weeds choke out the rest of the garden because he “can’t kill ‘em when they’re just minding their own business, Rebecca. That just ain’t right!”
It’s worked out well because Rebecca’s always liked gardening, finds it calming, and her mind’s going fuzzy and soft again as she thinks of how often things seem to align like that for them, how his hand fits against her hand, how his fingers slot neatly into the spaces between her knuckles, and she sees herself so clearly then, standing in that garden with a wide-brimmed hat that Ted insists she wear to protect her skin from the sun, a pair of pruning shears in her gloved hand and her appraising eyes roaming the blooms in search of the most beautiful ones to snip and gather into a bouquet, and she sees the smile he wears as he takes the flowers from her hands and kisses her dirt-smudged cheek in thanks and blushes the prettiest pink when she tucks a bloom behind his ear before going to wash up for lunch, and she feels, oh how she feels, a near blistering maelstrom of feeling for how completely it’s washing over her, and she wonders if she might burn up from such bliss, or if maybe she already has and that’s why she’s been feeling as though she’s splintered into a million weightless shards and floated off toward the heavens.
“Oh, wow,” Ted’s voice cuts through the haze and finds her — he always finds you, doesn’t he? — and he tugs them until they’re climbing the steps of the porch and standing before one of the wooden beams. “Would ya look at that.”
Rebecca does look, but it takes some time before she’s able to see.
“Oh.”
Embedded in the porch beam are silver nails arranged into the shape of a heart; in the center of the heart, the letters “T” and “R” are joined together by a little addition symbol.
“Ted…”
“And Rebecca,” he says, laughing a little disbelievingly, turning to her with an astonished grin. “What do you reckon those odds are?”
The little noise she makes in response can hardly pass for an answer but he seems content with it, returning his attention to their initials in the wood and shaking his head. For her part, Rebecca also keeps her attention on their initials in the wood, but any sort of movement strikes her as near impossible. Gone is whatever fugue state she’d found herself in since arriving; her mind is extraordinarily clear, her senses so keen she almost staggers against the deluge of sensation.
But beneath everything else, the contentment remains, bright and warm and achingly familiar, and it’s of that sense of peace that she takes hold, using it to orient herself once more.
She’s exactly where she’s meant to be.
“Now, I don’t wanna count my chicken eggs before they hatch, but…”
“But it feels like fate,” she says so he doesn’t have to, finally tearing her gaze from the nailed letters to watch a stunned little smile slide onto his face.
“Rebecca Welton, talkin’ about ‘fate’,” he muses.
“10 years with you would wear anyone down,” she defends haughtily, though there’s a mirthful tenderness in her voice that only grows when he pulls her into his arms.
“Just imagine what another 10’s gonna do,” he says, leaning to kiss her softly. She hums against his mouth, not having to imagine because she’s certain that she already knows even if she can’t put it down to words.
She reaches to wipe a smudge of lipgloss from his mouth, sighing when he catches her hand and kisses the center of her palm, and she wants to tell him that she loves him but even that, she suspects, would fall short of what she really wants to tell him, which sounds more like “I know you” than anything else.
She winds up staying silent because something over her shoulder pulls his focus, setting off a twinkling merriment in his expression. His hands squeeze her hips before sliding away, and he steps around her with such a look of wonder on his face that she’s struck anew with anticipation at the prospect of seeing that same wonder on their child’s face one day, radiant and earnest as it is.
It’s a porch swing that’s enraptured him, and he tells her about some of his earliest memories, about him and his father out on the front porch at his grandmother’s house, eating popsicles on her swing because their hands would get all sticky with the melting ice and so they’d been banished outdoors to avoid making a mess. Rebecca smiles, picturing a little boy with chubby, dimpled cheeks and sticky hands sat beside the man she knows only from pictures to be Ted’s father, and then Ted sits down on the swing and she imagines another baby with Ted’s nose and her own eyes, with a laugh that comes from them both, sat on his knee and grinning with chubby, dimpled cheeks, reaching for her with sticky hands.
It’s an addictively sweet image, a snippet of possibility that nearly intoxicates her, and she means to walk toward the swing, to sit beside Ted, to share this joy with him and feel it doubled in doing so, but when she blinks back into focus she realizes that she’s turned once more toward the beam and is reaching a hand up to trace the silver nails, to press the pads of her fingers to the “T + R” secured inside the heart, the steel gleaming and strikingly cold against her skin…
And then suddenly there’s the far-off sound of yelling, the roar of a crowd, of thousands of people screaming and chanting, infectious waves of glee and dismay and passion pouring in and collecting around her and washing away her fear, and there’s the smell of something sweet and oddly familiar, something that makes her mouth water, makes her think of home, though not any home she’s ever known, not one she can remember outside of her own body anyway, and there’s the shine of stadium lights filtering in through big office windows and a desk with a little pink box sitting atop it and two chairs on the other side and—
And there’s a man, sitting in one of those chairs, calling her “boss”, and he may be older and his eyes may be sadder but she’d know him anywhere because he’s—
He’s calling her name.
Rebecca startles at the light touch on her shoulder, her hand falling away from the wood and moving automatically to the swell of her stomach, relief coursing through her when she feels a kick against her palm.
“Hey,” the voice says from beside her. “You sure you’re feelin’ alright?”
She turns and traces with her eyes the features she knows best of anyone’s in the world, the face she gets to see every day of her life, the one that will age alongside her own until they’re both old and grey, and she doesn’t realize she’s crying until Ted moves to wipe a tear away with his thumb.
“You’re startin’ to scare me, darlin’. Is it–”
The hand he’d been reaching to lay against her stomach gets crushed between them when she flings her arms around his neck and presses herself to him. He takes it in stride and cradles her close, kissing the top of her head while she fights to settle her emotions with her face nestled in the crook of his neck.
“I’m all right,” she manages, lifting her head and finding herself unable to say more while he runs his eyes and those gentle hands over her body in soothing, almost mindless touches.
“You sure? Because the hospital ain’t that far. I can get us there in—”
“No hospital,” she cuts in. It seems like he might argue but he only looks her over intently for another long moment before giving a nod. For all that he might worry, he trusts her.
Even so, she knows she needs to give him something, and while she briefly considers blaming the pregnancy hormones, maybe citing a sugar-crash, what she ends up saying is the simplest, most truthful thing she can think of, which is, of course, “I love you.”
His whole countenance melts — she watches it happen, and then she watches his gaze flit to the “T + R” embedded in the wood behind her and feels his fingers twitch like he might reach out and touch it, might press his fingertips to the place hers had been moments before, but he only smooths his hand along her back and returns his attention to her face.
“I love you, too,” he says, and she nods because she’s known he loves her for as long as she can remember but it’s always a gift to hear him say it. “You wanna head home? Come back another day?”
She shakes her head. “No. I think… I’d like to see the rest of the house.”
Ted grins widely, dimples that practically demand to be kissed forming in his cheeks. Rebecca leans first to kiss one, then the other, and afterward, when he directs her mouth to his own, it’s the easiest surrender she’s ever known.
“Good,” he mutters, tangling their hands together and leading them down from the porch. They slowly make their way back to where Carolyn, having finished up with her granddaughter, is beckoning them in from the door. “Because I know we just got here, but I’ve got a really good feeling about this place. I’ve been dreamin’ about the kitchen since I first saw the pictures on the website. I could make all kinds of stuff with those ovens.”
A thought strikes her so forcefully she nearly stumbles, though she recovers well enough to ask, “Shortbread?”
He furrows his brow, turning with a curious lilt of his lips.
“Shortbread? As in, cookies?”
She rolls her eyes.
“Biscuits, but yes.”
The curious grin morphs into one of delight.
“Heck yeah. I think we can manage that.” Halting their steps, he bends so his face is level with her rounded belly and says, “Good choice, jellybean. Much better than peanut butter and mustard sandwiches.”
Rebecca gives him an unimpressed look. Ted glances up innocently.
“What? You know I’ll make you whatever you want, honey pie, but you gotta admit that that was just gross.”
She sniffs. “Yes, well. It was your daughter wanting it, so a bit of introspection might be in order here.”
“Oh, alright, I see how it is.” He returns to his full height, finding her hand again and restarting their journey toward the door. “So she’s my daughter when she…”
With immeasurable fondness, Rebecca rolls her eyes and listens as he goes on about the tiny human growing inside her belly. Just before they enter the house, she glances back at the wooden column and imagines the day they might add another letter beneath the two already there.
It almost feels like a memory. Rebecca smiles and squeezes Ted’s hand. He squeezes back.
Together, they cross the threshold.