by Julia Kent
I don’t expect an immediate reply, but I get one.
No problem, he says. Not everyone can be up to date on service apps.
It’s not about being behind, I type back quickly.
Of course not, he says.
I start to put the phone away, but it buzzes again.
He added a smirking emoji.
Son of a bitch.
Just surprised an anarcho-primitivist is so up to date on technology, I add.
I’m an anarchist. Not a Luddite. Disruptive technology for the win, he shoots back.
I’m double-thumbing my answer when Shannon breaks my concentration. “Don’t forget–dinner at Mom and Dad’s tonight.”
Demons rise up out of my blood and make noises as I abandon the text.
“That’s tonight?” they growl, disembodied and pure. Evil has a function, after all.
“Yes.” She sighs. It’s a wind tunnel straight to Hades.
“Your mom is like a tranquilizer dart in my ass. Unexpected, painful, and within a few seconds I’m drooling and unable to speak."
“At least you’re out cold in that scenario. I’m the one who has to listen to her most of the time,” Shannon shoots back.
“This isn’t a competition, Shannon. We’re both miserable around her.”
“Not every single second, Dec.”
I don’t say a word. The demon is waiting. That’s what good predators do.
“Oh, come on! Everyone has redeeming qualities,” she insists.
Silence.
“I mean, even James has some.”
I snort.
“And don’t even think you can talk your way out of it,” she says, as if I weren’t standing here with all of the forces of darkness teeming through me. “We’ve postponed twice already.”
“Where’s a nasty case of the stomach flu when you need it?” Inspiration strikes. I grab my phone and text to AlcheMyAssistant: Get me out of dinner with my in-laws.
I get a damn autoreply.
Sorry, sir, but you have reached the contractual limits of our service.
Dave was wrong. Huh.
Turns out this app can’t fix every part of my life.
* * *
Shannon
* * *
The drive to my parents’ house in Mendon is an easy one once we get onto the Mass Pike, but the process of winding through the city traffic just at the beginning of rush hour is stressful. By the time we’re on the Pike and cruising along, we’re both silent. Dec is tense, but then again, he’s always tense when we go to dinner at my parents’ house.
“Mom knows,” I remind him. “One of her yoga students’ granddaughters saw me buying an ovulation predictor kit and the gossip grapevine worked.”
“I know.”
“I’m not quite sure what we’re walking into.” He knows she’s been texting me. He has no idea she’s been texting me thirty times a day, though.
“I’m sure it will be fine. Your mom has chilled out lately.”
If I were the one driving, I’d slam on the brakes right now. I openly gawk at him. “What?”
“It seems as if she’s mellowed. Is someone medicating her?”
Emotion–actual caring–comes out of his mouth.
Or at least a reasonable facsimile.
“Declan!” I sigh. “That’s not funny. It’s not kind to make fun of someone for–”
“Not making fun. Genuinely curious. She’s mellowed out.” Eyes scanning the road, he takes the journey from a position of relaxed vigilance. It’s Declan’s natural state. Ready to leap and act in an instant, he’s not anxious. Never nervous. Always present and aware, in a state of calibrated perfection. It makes me swoon inside, but I don’t mention that right now.
Because he’s being a bit jerky.
“She is texting me thirty times a day about the baby,” I blurt out. “That is the opposite of mellow.”
He tilts his head to and fro, as if weighing that information. “For Marie, that’s still restrained. I’d consider her at normal level if she tried texting me. I haven’t received a single text.”
I glare at him. “That’s because you ordered Grace to block my mother from your phone.”
“Oh. Right.”
We settle into a companionable silence, one I’m slowly getting used to. Declan is by nature intense. Not brooding or awkward. His steely presence is intimidating. He doesn’t use words to fill space or to kill time. Small talk for him is a waste unless it greases wheels and makes for a smoother journey, a means to an end.
At home, in the intimate hours, he reveals himself to me, the soft truth of a man who turns out to be more emotional than I ever imagined. The cool exterior isn’t a contradiction. Not per se. With Declan, what you see is what you get.
I, fortunately, get so much more.
Not that what you see isn’t enough. If all I had was that, I’d be thrilled. But the slow revelation of our layers, of the ragged edges of the souls we all polish on our way through life, is breathtaking. Sometimes it’s surreal. Interacting with people has its own reality. Being with Declan when we’re stripped down naked, in body and spirit, almost makes time itself ripple, like stirring the surface of water and seeing fractured realities.
We can be in bed, my ear against his chest, lulled by the steady thrum of blood through the four chambers of his heart that loves me with every fiber, and as I stroke the dusting of hair on his chest, I pause to absorb it all, every touch, every breath, the simple complexity of all the actions we took in the past to get to this moment.
Sometimes I cry.
He never expects an explanation, simply tightening his hold on me, as if he’s keeping me close so the surreal doesn’t pull me away from him into a different dimension where we aren’t together. If there is such a place as hell, that would be it.
“Why are you staring at me?” he asks, shattering my thoughts, deeply amused. His grin makes his dimples show, eyes amused and curious as he glances at me, darting his attention between maneuvering the SUV on the road and paying attention to me.
I melt.
“Just thinking about you,” I reply, the words empty and rote because what I was really doing was so heady, so impossibly evocative, like emotion had its own flavor.
“Your face changed,” he says, eyes on the road, voice controlled. “You looked otherworldly for a minute there.”
“My mind was a million miles away.”
“Past, present, or future?”
“Yes.”
Laughter, rich and open, pours out of him. “My wife, the quantum physicist.”
“No. Just in love.”
“That might very well be the same thing, Shannon.” His throat moves with a lusty strength as the words come forth. Arousal, normally a slow simmer quickening to a boil, sparks on me, lighting up my skin before moving inward. I’m ablaze, my belly tight and warm with need, my legs parting slightly as if readying.
When I meet his eyes, he doesn’t look away until forced by danger to protect us, the highway drive fast and unrelenting.
“Your face changed again,” he says in a choked, deep tone.
“How so?”
“You look like you want to climb into my lap and ride me right now, Shannon.”
I grin.
He groans.
There are no easy stops between here and my parents’ home. No fast exits until I-495, and at that point, we’re less than twenty minutes away. If it were an option, I’d beg Declan to pull the car over by the side of the road so I could do what he just described.
“Of all the times not to have a driver,” he says, voice thick with meaning, his chest rising slightly faster than before, fingers gripping the wheel. We’re turned-on, married adults who want each other but can’t do anything about it for hours.
“No one tells you about this part,” I blurt out.
“What part?”
“The part where we’re both turned on and can’t do anything about it.”
“Can’t do
anything about it?”
“I mean now. Right now. This very minute.”
“Not when we’re on the Pike going seventy-three,” he says, slightly dazed. “But there’s a service plaza in Natick...”
“How would you know?”
“The sign. Back there,” he says, thumbing toward the direction we just left.
“I refuse to have sex in a service plaza, Dec.”
“I wasn’t suggesting the service plaza. The car will do.”
“Declan McCormick, are you propositioning me to have sex in our car at a service plaza on the Mass Pike? What kind of woman has sex in a car at a rest stop?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t met a woman who has had sex at a rest stop.” He leers at me. “Yet.”
“You’re serious! You really want to stop?”
“Do you?”
This is a new game we’ve started to play lately, one with ill-defined rules. If I had to name it, the game would be called Who are you, really?
“I have to confess,” I say, reaching for the thick, tense heat of his right thigh, “that I know we can’t stop.”
“Right.” Tension seeps out from his clenched jaw like a snake hovering, ready to strike but unsure of the target. “We can’t.”
“We really can’t.” I move my hand up his thigh, the contrast between the thick cloth of his trousers and the coiled muscle beneath turning me on even more, my words in stark contradiction to what my hand is doing.
“Then don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Torture me like that.” For a split second, his eyes drop to my hand, but race back to the fast-paced road.
“Torture?” I croon, not moving a muscle. His breath quickens.
“I mean it, Shannon. We can’t stop.”
“There’s always Framingham,” I joke. “I know. I’m kidding. I’m sorry.” Retracting my hand feels like defeat. I lean back against the leather seat and let the headrest ground me. A long, frustrated breath does absolutely nothing to reduce my unquenchable need.
He laughs.
Laughs!
“What’s so funny?”
“You. Us. This.”
“This? What is this?”
“You’re right. No one warns you what it’ll be like when you’re with someone forever. I’ve never even heard of a couple in a situation like this. We have all the time in the world in regular life, but a simple drive to your parents’ house and we’re suddenly revving–with nowhere to go.”
“It’s crazy.”
“It’s life. And yet,” he says, slowing slightly as he gets into the middle lane, the Framingham service plaza now here and... gone. “And yet knowing you want me so much, even in daily life, in the middle of the most domestic, humdrum parts of our existence, feels like we’re cheating the universe.”
“Cheating?”
“Yes. Cheating. Not in the classic sense. We haven’t done anything wrong, or hurt someone else on the way to this kind of relationship. More that what I get from you, Shannon, is unearned. I feel like I’ve been handed the best deal of my life without having to work for it.”
“Why would you ever have to work for love?” I ask.
He just blinks. Over and over.
The silence stretches on for so long, I start to worry. Have I offended him somehow? That’s my go-to. When it gets awkward, I start inventorying all the ways it might be my fault.
“We do,” he says slowly, the blinking slowing down like his words. “We do work for love. We work damn hard for it.”
“We work to get along, sure. To make sure it’s all fair. To make sure the other feels wanted and needed and important. But the love itself doesn’t require that we work for it. I love you, Declan. I just do. You get my love by being you.”
More blinking.
“Dec?” I ask softly.
“I’m thinking.” He looks more like he’s feeling. The art of learning when to continue prying and when to back off is one that is subtle and not easy to perfect. I figure that’s the point of half a century with someone: by the time you understand them so intuitively that you’re a pro, you find relationship nirvana.
And then they die.
Wait. Hold on. Now I’m crying.
“Shannon? What’s wrong?”
“You’re going to die some day.”
“You just leapfrogged from how you love me because I’m just me to thinking about my death?”
“Yes.”
“Is there something you want to tell me?”
“You can’t die.”
“I... wish I could control that.”
“I mean it!”
“I know you do,” he says, taking his hand off the steering wheel and patting my knee. His double take as he looks at me just fuels more tears. “Are you crying?”
“You’re going to die!”
“A minute ago you were ready to have sex with me in a service plaza, Shannon, and now I’m going to die. You’re going to die, too. We all die one day.”
“And that isn’t faaaaaaaiiiiiiiiir,” I wail.
His sigh is so familiar.
As Declan calmly flips on the turn signal and moves the car onto the exit ramp, I try not to succumb to the chest-cracking feeling that won’t let go of me. Without thinking, I move my hand to my belly, wondering. It’s too early to know, and it’s only day fifteen of my cycle. Why am I suddenly obsessed with Declan dying?
Wiping my tears carefully with my pinkie fingers, making sure my mascara doesn’t run, I sniff and say, “I know I’m being ridiculous, but we don’t have each other forever.”
“We’ve talked about this before,” he says kindly, turning right onto the familiar road that takes us home.
Er, to my parents’ house, I mean.
“Yes. Just because we talk about something once doesn’t mean it’s magically resolved.”
“You’ve taught me that lesson quite well, honey.”
I whack his shoulder.
He gives me a half grin, complete with dimples. I wonder what those dimples will look like on our child.
My fingers tickle my belly.
But I can’t help myself, laughing through the tail end of my strange tears. “You make my life so much easier yet oh, so much harder, Declan McCormick.”
“How so, Shannon McCormick?” All the pieces of my childhood rush past me in a blur as we drive the last half mile to my parents’ house.
“If you think I am going to sit here and list it all, you’re crazy.”
“You’ll have to show me, then.” I love the smile on his face as we pull into Mom and Dad’s driveway.
It fades quickly as Mom appears.
“Shannon!” Her eyes go straight to my midsection. “You look great!” Her hug is simultaneously a rote ritual and a fleeting pleasure. “Declan, don’t you think you’re getting out of yours!” she calls out to him as he makes it to the second step on their front porch. Pivoting, he comes back and lets her reach up around his neck, planting a kiss on the side of his cheek.
She leaves a bright red lip imprint.
“Jason’s out back, tinkering in his man cave. Carol and the boys just got here. How are you feeling?” she asks me.
“Fine,” I say, a little confused. “And you?”
“I’m not the one who’s trying to have morning sickness,” she says, nudging me with her elbow. “That ship sailed a long time ago.”
“I’m going to say hi to Jason,” Declan says as he demonstrates his Olympic-level sprinting technique.
“Once they removed my uterus, I never had to worry about getting pregnant again,” Mom continues.
“That’s generally a guaranteed outcome, Mom.”
“At least they left the cervix. Because sex would feel really different if I didn’t have–”
“Mom. Stop.” I hold my hand over my belly.
“You are pregnant! I knew it! Your face just turned green!”
“No. I’m not pregnant. I’m just nauseated.”
“Mor
ning sickness!”
“You are just making me sick to my stomach. Stop talking about Dad and sex.”
“That’s how babies are made, you know.”
Carol saves me. “Mom, boundaries.” The way she says it is so fierce and clipped, like she’s borrowed from dog obedience trainers. Carol the Mom Whisperer.
It works. Mom straightens her spine and gives me an apologetic look. “Sorry.”
“Sorry?”
“Sorry.” A sniff in the air and panic blooms across her face. “My popovers!” she squeals, running down the same hallway Declan departed through.
“What was that?” I ask Carol, impressed. “I’ve never seen anyone stop her like that.”
“Dad and I are working on it. Operant conditioning.”
“Like Pavlov and the dog and the bell?”
“Like the Terminator and the crusher machine.”
I want to ask her how she did that–voodoo? Did she go to Salem and join a modern coven? But before I can, Carol gives me a great big hug, one that’s a little extra tight. “You okay? Sure you can handle this?” she whispers. I melt a little, relieved. Big sisters are the best when you’re hurting, even if it’s just a little scratch in the big picture of a really great life.
“I’m good. We’re young. We have plenty of time.”
“I wish my freakish fertility had rubbed off on you. All Todd had to do was blow a kiss my way and bam! Ovaries turned my eggs into a rock slide aimed for his sperm.”
“That fast?”
“Pretty sure I was pregnant before the first bedspring squeak.”
“Thanks for that image, Carol.”
“At least I’m not as bad as Mom. Nothing like finding out I’m named after where I was conceived.”
“South Carolina? North Carolina?” My mind races on to complete all the computational possibilities involved in the name Shannon. I know they’ve never been to Ireland, so...
“No. Against a brick wall in an alley after they went Christmas caroling.”
“Ew! How do you... know this?”
“Have you met our mother?”
“Please don’t tell me Shannon has some hidden meaning involving Mom and Dad’s warped sex life?”
“Not that I’m aware of. You know. First Pancake Syndrome.”
“First what?”
“First Pancake Syndrome. You know how the first one you make is always a mess because it’s the one you experiment on? You get the oil in the pan just right, the temperature perfect, but that first pancake is always the one you calibrate against?”