by Lilian Darcy
Lucas couldn’t keep his distance, and Reba didn’t want him to. He couldn’t hold Maggie in his arms himself—his turn would have to wait until tomorrow—but still he could share in this. Angela found another chair for him, and positioned it hard against Reba’s.
“You can put your arms around her, Lucas,” she said. “Around Reba. Help her to support Maggie’s little bottom. Stay that way as long as you want.”
He did, and the heavy warmth of his arm and shoulder against her felt so good. Together, they “kangarooed” Maggie for nearly an hour while she slept in Reba’s arms. Her heartbeat stayed strong and her oxygen sats hovered in the high nineties, but Reba didn’t need the monitors to tell her that Maggie loved this, and that it would help her to thrive and grow.
It did tire her out eventually, however. She began to twitch and grimace, and her heartbeat slowed.
“We’ll put her back, now,” Angela whispered. “She can dream about the way you smell, Reba, and we can do it again tomorrow.”
Lucas’s mother appeared in the unit while they were still transferring the baby back to her isolette, and her eyes filled with tears when she hugged Reba a few minutes later.
“How wonderful,” she said. “Oh, I’m so happy for you! You deserve this so much, both of you! Go and celebrate together, and let me sit with her for a while.”
She almost pushed them out of the NICU, and told them not to come back for at least two hours.
“Two hours,” Lucas echoed to Reba, in the elevator. “Any ideas about celebrating?”
Their eyes met, and he was already grinning. There was something giddy and dizzying and almost painfully joyful in the atmosphere between them, after the wonderful hour they’d just spent with their baby.
“A few,” she admitted. “All of them back at the hotel.”
“Convenient! My number one idea involves going back to the hotel.” He laced his fingers behind her back and swung her around, and he was still holding her when the elevator hit ground level and opened its doors. “Feels like we’re on a new track now, that she’s out of the woods.”
As they walked across the lobby, he began to list all of the problems Maggie had avoided, the statistics that were in her favor, now, the benefits of her new nutritional schedule, the advances in preemie care over the past few years that had helped her so much, and Reba didn’t want to voice the fears she still had, or even think that maybe he was feeling too good, because, oh, it felt so great to be feeling good about Maggie!
How could she wish it away in either of them, how could she hold herself back, let alone Lucas?
She couldn’t.
So she pulled him into a quiet little corner near the florist’s store, reached up and stroked his jaw and began to kiss him instead, with the deliberate aim of distracting them both with the desire that burned inside them. It worked. The familiar heat and hardness of his body surrounded her and filled her senses, and they were so hungry for each other that the ten minute drive to the hotel seemed like fifty miles.
They kissed in the elevator, kissed along the corridor, clung to each other and kissed some more, the moment Lucas had fumbled with the key card and gotten the door of their room open. They didn’t even make it to the bed.
With clothes discarded all around them on the floor, they wrapped themselves around each other as tightly as if some unseen force was trying to drag them apart, and they both felt as urgent and impatient as they would have if they’d known the world was about to end.
This was going to happen here and now.
“Let me lift you against me,” Lucas said.
“Oh… Yes!”
His hands cupped her bottom, his forearms curving around her thighs, and she clung to his shoulders, bracing her back against the wall. He pushed deeply into her at once, and she was more than ready for him, crying out at the thrusting pressure, aching with the slick friction, and the sensation of being filled.
His body rippled as he moved, and his mouth swooped in to kiss her neck. She arched her back and gave him her breasts, knowing that their fullness against his hard chest would torment him and make him groan. His hips rocked back and forth harder and faster, then she felt him shudder as he attempted to hold himself back, waiting for her.
“No,” she told him raggedly. “Don’t stop. Don’t slow.”
“No, because I can’t,” he admitted, and thrust hard into her again. She gasped, gripped his shoulders and flung her head to the side, fast catching up to him.
He lifted her breasts in his hands and buried his face between them, then licked her peaked nipples and covered them with his hot mouth. Bracing one hand above her head against the wall, he reached the fingers of the other between the two of them and stroked her, and her universe pulsed and quivered and went blissfully dark.
He cried out, every muscle tight and shuddering, and they held each other tightly again, too shaken to speak, too overwhelmed to move.
So fast, so elemental, so important.
Reba didn’t want to let him go or open her eyes or ever come back to earth. She had tears on her cheeks. Her whole body was flooded with a precious, perfect sense of completion and rightness that she didn’t have words to describe. She wanted to pin all of it down somehow, hold it against her heart, preserve it forever, but she didn’t know how.
Chapter Thirteen
“You’re sorry but what?” Lucas said to the ground staff at the airline counter. “Delayed for almost two hours and now what?”
“I’m afraid, yes, the flight has been cancelled,” the woman at the counter confirmed.
“And it would have to be the last flight of the day, at this hour, right?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
In an upbeat, conciliatory tone, the woman outlined Lucas’s mother’s choices regarding compensation for the inconvenience, and her flight options for the following day, while Lucas reminded himself that despite the better days he and Reba and Maggie had been having for the past week or more, he was still chronically tired and chronically stressed, that an airline’s obsessive concern for mechanical safety checks was a good thing, and that it really wouldn’t help to yell.
At his elbow, while her flight was being rescheduled by the click of computer keys, Mom kept apologizing. “I should have thought not to choose the last flight of the day, Lucas. I’ll take a cab out here tomorrow.”
“No need, because I’m meeting Dad off his flight at ten,” Lucas said.
“Ah. We’ll overlap.”
“Can you handle that?”
“I’m not going to throw a tantrum over it. He might. In his own unique way.” She sighed. “This is probably for the best. We shouldn’t try to avoid each other. Not when we’re grandparents to the same child.”
“You’re parents to the same child, too,” he pointed out mildly.
“Hmm. True. We did the best we could at the time, Lucas. I’m sorry. I know it wasn’t always enough.”
“One thing I’ve meant to ask, actually. Did you have anything to do with this visit of his? He’d told me he wasn’t coming until Maggie was…” He hesitated over the right word. Presentable? No, better to stay as neutral as possible. “Healthy and growing and out of danger. But then she got the infection. Was that what changed his mind? Or was it something you said?”
“The infection changed my mind. So I called and yelled at him. I told him for once in his life he had to commit to something even when it wasn’t providing an appropriate return on his investment—”
“You mean even when it hurt?”
“Exactly. And I told him that he’d already done you enough damage with his serial bail outs.”
“Damage?” Lucas echoed, a little surprised. Shocked, even. “To me?”
“Yes, to you.”
The desk attendant finished at her computer and told them, “All fixed up for tomorrow at one forty-five.”
They thanked her, and before they walked away Lucas’s mother cupped his cheek in the kind of caress he hadn’t let her g
ive him in years. She looked into his eyes.
“Don’t you think?” she said gently. “Oh, I know he’s always been so scrupulous in some areas. Never began a new affair until he’d already walked out of the marriage. Always made it clear from the beginning if he was promising a quick fling with the right gifts attached, or the more dubious gift of a wedding band. Generous with alimony and property settlements.”
“He always told me that was the correct and decent way to handle it.”
“Yes, but that still didn’t make all those rapid-fire marriages and divorces and serial short-term flings right. Not really. And as a result he’s somehow left you with the idea that life—and relationships—and feelings—are all much more boxable than they really are.”
“Boxable? Now you’re making up words.”
“Are you telling me you don’t know what I mean?”
“No, I guess I’m not,” he answered slowly. “I guess I do know. But if I have been damaged by all that, Maggie’s undoing the damage pretty fast.”
“She is? Tiny Maggie?”
“Maggie and Reba,” he corrected reluctantly. “Nothing in my life is boxable now. It’s scary. It’s horrible. And yet it’s weird. There’s a weird way in which I’m going to be…not thankful for this, but—”
“You’re going to look back and understand and value exactly what you’ve learned.”
“I think so. I hope so. But let’s not…uh…count the return on the investment just yet.”
They drove back to the hotel and checked Mom into a new room for one more night, then Lucas went to keep his usual nightlong vigil at the hospital, not as concerned about his parents coming face to face with each other tomorrow as he would once have been.
Mom was probably right. It would probably be a good thing. And with Maggie hovering like an unspoken blessing in the background, they’d handle it in the right way.
Meanwhile, his tiny daughter almost looked as if she was smiling in her sleep.
Lucas’s father arrived as scheduled the next morning, and he and Lucas’s mother and Lucas himself spent an hour and a half having coffee together in the airport bar. It wasn’t exactly a joyful family reunion, but it was civilized and surprisingly pleasant all the same.
They talked about Maggie until Lucas’s father said, “Can we wait until I’ve seen her? None of this will make real sense until I do.”
Then he asked Mom about her clothing boutique and they talked business. Dad even had a couple of constructive suggestions to make regarding its expansion. Finally, Mom said firmly that she’d be fine on her own from now until her flight, and the two of them should get to the hotel for Dad to check in and to the hospital to see Maggie.
Dad’s face tightened at this point, as if the business talk had allowed him to forget the reason for his visit, but when it came to the crunch he was actually okay about it—helped, no doubt, by the fact that Maggie seemed so much stronger now. He looked at her and touched her and smiled. He sat beside her for an hour at a stretch, twice in two days. He was courteous to the nurses, and didn’t say the wrong thing to Reba.
He studied Reba a little as if she was a horse whose bloodlines he had to check out, but apparently they were bloodlines he approved of, on closer analysis.
“You did well,” he told Lucas on the final morning of his visit, as they had breakfast together at the hotel. Reba had already gone to the hospital.
“Yeah?” Lucas answered. “In what area?”
“Well, if you’re going to have a baby with a woman you’ve got no intention of marrying, you could have done a lot worse. This one is bright and strong and loving. Maggie will have some good qualities in her make up.”
Yep, it was about bloodlines.
“She’s not a thoroughbred racer, Dad, and neither is Reba.”
“Well, she should be, in your eyes. A man with your background and your prospects should look at potential mothers for his children with an eye to the right attributes, just like a stud breeder does.”
“I’ll take that on board, Dad…”
“Do!”
A few weeks later, Maggie celebrated her two month birthday by nudging her weight up over 1,300 grams.
Her parents thought she was absolutely, fantastically, wonderfully huge, and brilliantly clever for digesting all that lovely breast milk coming through her naso-gastric tube without any of the gut problems her doctor had warned them about. Another sixty grams, and she would weigh three pounds, according to the weird, unfamiliar baby measurement system that the parents of nonpreemies unaccountably preferred to use when discussing their gargantuan offspring.
She was getting longer, and less scrunched up, her skin was not so translucent and red, and her black preemie hair was falling out to make way for her real hair to show its color later on. Would she be a brunette, a redhead or a blonde? With all three groups represented somewhere on both sides of the family, it was anyone’s guess.
She’d been taken off the ventilator, and that was a huge step, but she still needed supplemental oxygen through a tube in her nose. Soon, she would start to wean from that and onto room air.
Somewhat to her own astonishment, Reba had become a poster girl for the success of the pump, and she’d almost forgotten that there was any other way to do it—until Angela told her one morning, when Maggie hit 1,320 grams, “We’re going to see if she’s strong enough to nipple some of her feeds, now.”
“Nipple them?”
“Yep. Direct from Mom.”
Oh. Right.
Yikes.
She didn’t know whether to wish that Lucas was here, or to feel thoroughly relieved that he wasn’t. They’d been keeping strictly to their timetable since his father’s departure. Reba did days. Lucas did nights. Around twelve hours each.
The only thing that changed was that as Maggie grew and got healthier, their nursing shift-change equivalents in their hotel suite had tended to get longer. And steamier. And more relaxing and—and—funnier, actually, because they’d remembered how to laugh, just lately, and it felt so nice.
They went out, sometimes, too. Little snatches of another life. Ice-cream, or shopping. Greenery and fresh air. More laughter.
Lucas probably would have laughed at Reba’s first direct nipple-to-mouth breastfeeding attempt, if he’d been here to see it. She and Maggie were both in tears by the time they threw in the towel.
And towels literally were involved—and were thrown—because it got messy, and wet, and—
No. Don’t obsess about it.
“You did real well, honey,” Angela told her. “And so did Maggie.”
Reba gave a helpless laugh. “Oh, yeah, I bet you say that to all the girls.”
“No, I’m serious. It was your first time, both of you, and her mouth is still so little, and she’s never felt it all full of milk, so she panicked a bit and couldn’t work out how to suck and swallow in sequence. It’s really hard when she’s never done it before. We’ll get our lactation consultant in, next time. Want to keep holding her for a while?”
“Can I?”
“She loves it, now. It’ll calm her and relax her again. She’s a bit tense.”
“So’s her mom!”
“Want to change her diaper and give her a little wash, later on?”
“Now there, I’m a seasoned performer!”
It was really pretty amazing how quickly the day went by. In the afternoon, after Maggie had had a good, peaceful sleep and woken up to look alert and happy, they tried the nipple-to-mouth thing again with the lactation consultant in attendance, and made a little progress. For about a minute, Maggie looked as if she was getting the idea and liked it, but then she choked and got upset, and by the time Reba could soothe her again she’d gotten tired and gone back to sleep.
“But Angela and Helen both tell me I’m doing well, and I guess they wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t true,” she reported to Lucas back at the hotel that evening.
They celebrated the milestone with a three-course room serv
ice feast, including champagne, and got a little giddy. Lucas opened the window to let in the spring air, then put on the radio and found some 1930s big band swing music, and they pretended that they knew how to dance to it, swirling each other around, ending up just clinging to each other, whirling, dizzy and laughing.
Dangerous.
Even while it was happening, Reba somehow knew it was dangerous.
They were both too wired, too wound up, too intense. Because let’s face it, they were still sleeping badly, their nerves were still stretched thin, thin, thin. It almost seemed normal, now, to be running on empty like this.
And a baby had died in the NICU today. Reba hadn’t told Lucas, but he’d find out soon enough. The little boy had had severe birth defects and everyone had known it was just a matter of time. In fact it was almost a relief. Still, it broke your heart. And it scared you.
Thinking about it again, Reba pulled Lucas to a halt in the middle of whirling each other across the floor, looked into his face and said, “I’m superstitious. Let’s not dance. Not yet.”
She reached over to the remote control on the table and switched the radio off with a click.
He sobered up at once. She loved the shape of his mouth when it was steady like this, even though she’d loved his glowing grin, too. “The roller coaster?” he said.
“The roller coaster. I’m at the top of the ride and my heart is pounding, wondering where the track goes next.”
“She’s doing great though, isn’t she?”
He touched her face, brushing the hair back from her forehead, soothing the frown lines, tracing her lips. Coming through the open window from the hotel conference center ballroom at ground level below, they could still hear music in the clear spring air, and Reba recognized the haunting, slow-dance beat of “Unchained Melody.”
“Is it really so wrong to celebrate?” Lucas went on. “To let ourselves go, just for a bit?” His body still swayed to the lazy, three-beat rhythm they could hear. “You’re the emotional one, Reba. Shouldn’t you applaud me for loosening my reins, for not acting so rational, for once? You should be telling me you’re surprised I even know how to dance.”