I need her near-silent gasps when I slide my hand between her legs. When I find her already wet.
She takes off my clothes. And gets on her knees, arms braced on the edge of the bed.
We haven’t said a word. The only words I have right now would scare the hell out of her anyway. I drop to my knees behind her. And lean over her back. I run my hands along her sweet, hot skin, and she trembles.
“Tony,” she whispers, finally, and I find her pussy with the head of my cock and press in.
She makes a half-silent, strangled sound, and pushes back into it.
Her spine convulses as I go deeper. I take her hips in my hands.
For two months I have talked to her and been a friend to her and supported her. I’ve told her everything that’s happening in my life. I’ve tried to be as normal as I could—like a friend would be.
But this.
This was always here.
This need for her. This craving.
This love.
Rippling through me. Tying my hands.
Asking for more.
Because it’s not enough, only being Beth’s friend.
I want to be here on the floor with her—sweating, shaking.
Feeling the thick curves of her body, the way she moves against me, clutching the blankets in her fists, pushing back to get the full pressure of my cock.
I reach over her hip to stroke my fingers on her clit, and she presses her face against the bed and screams into it. Her hand comes back and grips my thigh.
I reach forward with my other hand to hold her belly, to brace her and protect her from our thrusts against the bed. I feel the weight of the baby and gentle my pace, sliding slow and thick into her wet heat. She shudders, her fingers digging into the tendons of my leg.
I drag my fingertips across her clit and press my cock in deep. And oh, God, I could live like this forever, in this moment. When everything is still possible between us. When I can believe this won’t be the last time. When I can convince myself if I love her well enough, if I make it feel right enough, she won’t wake up in the morning and tell me it’s over. We can’t be friends anymore. It’s too difficult.
Because it’s either that, or we try. We try to be together. Like this, joined—forever.
I push into her, and she comes—hard and deep, shivering and clenching on me. Whispering my name, over and over.
I let go, pulsing into her, and pray this isn’t the end.
Chapter 16
Beth
I open my eyes to a deep pain in my lower back, and realize it’s been coming and going all night—waking me from a fitful rest and then easing away enough to let me sleep again.
I went back to my own room last night after I left Tony. He held me in his bed for a long while, and we didn’t speak. I don’t think either of us knew what to say.
I might have stayed if we’d been in the house alone. But I wasn’t ready to be found like that, together, by Ray and Holly. I kissed him, and crept down the hallway in the dark.
The pain in my back is getting sharper now. I turn to my side and rub my palm in circles over my belly.
I’ve gotten used to a certain amount of discomfort over these past weeks. It’s much more difficult to sleep, for instance, especially since I have to pee every hour or so. I swing my legs over the side of the bed and stand, intending to head to the bathroom.
A flood of water rushes out of me and onto the floor.
Shit.
For a brief moment I think I’ve lost control of my bladder, which isn’t entirely illogical considering the weight and pressure of the baby. But I look more closely at my nightgown and at the floor, and a surge of panic rolls through me.
“Holly!”
I open the door and step gingerly out into the hallway. On the wall opposite my room is a note written in Sharpie.
Beth,
I think you and Tony could use a few hours to talk. We’re heading over to the garden. Back this afternoon. Call if you need anything.
Love, Holly
A dense, paralyzing pain seizes my belly. I brace myself against the wall and gasp out loud.
“Beth?”
Down the hallway, Tony’s door opens. When he sees me, head down, gripping the wall, he races to my side.
He takes in my wet nightgown and short, sharp breaths, and he immediately grabs my hands.
“Your water broke,” he says matter-of-factly. He finds my gaze and holds it, steadying me.
“I need…” I say. “Tony, I need…” The pain has passed, but there’s pressure in my pelvis—intense pressure—and my legs are wet and sticky.
“You want to wash up?” he asks. “Want me to help you to the bathroom?”
I nod, and he helps me down the hall and through the bathroom doorway.
“Can I call your midwife? Is her number in your phone?”
“Yes,” I say. “Megan. Can you—”
“Of course,” he says. “What can I do? Do you want help getting into the bathtub?”
I nod and take off my nightgown and underwear, and Tony helps me step into the oversized tub. It’s a Jacuzzi, really, but there’s a showerhead above. I lean over and turn on the water, and another pain hits.
I gasp, and he gets right into the tub with me, in his clothes, and holds me upright under the warm spray while the contraction takes me over. When it passes, he carefully helps me sit and adjusts the spray so that it’s not in my face.
“That was very close to the last one,” he says, crouching in front of me.
I breathe unevenly. “Yeah.”
“I’m going to call Megan.”
I nod and reach for the soap, and he steps out, squelching on the tile floor. He takes off his soaked shirt and pants and runs out the door in his boxer briefs.
I manage to wash and rinse quickly before the next contraction. Tony comes in, holding the phone, while I grip the side of the tub. The pressure on my pelvic floor has multiplied exponentially since the last one. A wave of nausea sweeps over me.
“They’re maybe two minutes apart.” He pauses, listening. “I think her water broke as soon as she woke up, yeah. So about ten minutes ago. I’ll put her on speaker, okay?”
“Beth?” Megan says through the phone. “How are you holding up? Are you feeling any pressure?”
It takes a moment before I’m able to speak. When I do, my voice is high, strained. “Megan,” I manage. “I feel like I want to push. Is that…is that bad? Should I try to…hold it…until we get to the hospital?”
“Like you want to push?” Megan says. “Already? Okay, listen. Maybe I’d better come to you. Are you at home?”
“I’m at…Tony, can you give her the—”
Another contraction starts, and I can’t talk. I make a low, guttural sound and bring my knees up under the spray.
“Oh, boy,” Megan says over the phone. Vaguely, I hear Tony give her the address, and she says she can get to us in about ten minutes. She asks Tony some questions, but I can’t concentrate. My whole world shrinks down to the epicenter of pressure in my pelvis, and I hold my breath and try not to push against it.
It passes somewhat but not entirely. It’s like a fire tearing my body open. I fall back to the edge of the tub, panting, while Tony climbs in. He sits on his knees in front of me and asks if he can take a look. I scoot back the best I can and feel down between my legs. There’s something hard there, and sticky, and it takes me a moment to understand it’s the baby’s head.
“Why is it so…why is it so fast?” I manage, before the pain comes again, and a pressure so huge and terrifying that if I don’t push, I know with terrible certainty that I will die.
“I don’t know, honey.” Tony says. His breathing is shaky, but his voice is low and steady. “It’s happening, though. I think it’s happening right now.”
“I need to push, Tony.” It hurts so bad, I can’t breathe. But I have to breathe. Tony tells me to breathe.
“Push if you need to. Megan said it’s
okay. Go, Beth.”
I brace myself on the side of the tub and bear down hard against the pain. My knees are up at my chest and Tony is between them, his hands out.
“Good, honey. I see his head. Push hard.”
I do, and when the contraction passes I lean forward and see Micah’s head, bluish and covered in goo. The thick, purplish umbilical cord is wrapped around his neck.
“Tony,” I say, gasping. “The…the cord.”
“I see it,” he says, and takes the baby’s head firmly in his hands and unwinds the cord from his neck. He holds Micah’s head when the next contraction comes, and I push into it. I look at Tony’s face. There are tears in his eyes.
“You can do it, Beth,” he says, his voice breaking, and I do. I push the baby out into Tony’s hands, and he catches him and lifts him up onto my chest.
There are sirens in the driveway as Micah settles against my bare skin. He’s covered in a thick white paste, his hair is dark, and his little body is all arms and legs. I let out a quick, disbelieving laugh, and then suddenly the bathroom is filled with people. First the EMTs with their busy uniforms and crackling walkie-talkies, and then Megan, who greets me with a hearty laugh and takes out a blue, bulbous apparatus and suctions fluid from Micah’s mouth and nose.
“I called 911 on my way over,” she tells us. “Just in case.”
Micah lets out a cry and everyone in the room cheers. Megan wipes him down with clean towels and cuts the cord while Tony looks on, tears streaming down his face.
I hold my baby in my arms, and for a brief, out-of-time moment, everything slows down. Micah’s little mouth opens and closes, and when I say his name, his face tilts up toward mine. Tony laughs, breathless, and I look up into his eyes. He smiles at me, his lips trembling, and I lose it then. I cry and cry as everything speeds up again. As Micah latches on to my breast to nurse. As I’m loaded carefully into the ambulance and driven to the hospital. As I deliver the placenta, which is as magical and disgusting as it sounds.
I cry when he’s taken from me to be bathed, and I cry when Tony offers to help give him that first bath.
I cry when Holly arrives, and leans over the bed and rocks me gently when I tell her the whole story. And when my mother comes and holds Micah for the first time, and he wraps his hand around her pinkie and won’t let go.
I cry that night, when everyone’s down in the hospital coffee shop but Tony, still dressed in the jeans and T-shirt he threw on as we went out the door to the ambulance this morning. His face is unshaven, his eyes red, and he pulls a chair right up to the side of my bed and watches me holding Micah, in a tiny diaper, to my chest.
“He’s beautiful, Beth.”
I smile against my tears and nod. “Thank you, Tony. Thank you for…everything.”
He presses his lips together, his eyes filling again with tears. It does something to me—something deep down and primal—to see him moved like that. I remember his face as I delivered Micah. His fierce concentration. His composure.
“Tony…” I begin, but he stops me.
“I’m going now,” he says, and my heart drops out from under me.
“But—”
“I’m going to leave,” he continues, “and let you focus on Micah. But I want you to know something. Okay?” He takes a shaky breath. “I love you.”
I breathe in sharply, and Micah stirs on my chest.
“I love you, Beth. And I want you. And your child. Everything is what I want. That’s how it is.”
“Tony.”
“My timing is shitty, and I know that. So I’m just telling you, and then I’m going away. And you can take all the time you need, okay? A few months. A year. Just…get used to all this. Be a mother to Micah. And if you come through the other side of that and you want me, too, then…call me. Okay? And I’ll be here.”
He starts to back away.
“Wait, Tony.”
But Micah stirs against me and starts to cry, and automatically I look down and adjust my position, and rock him a little to comfort him.
And when I look back up, Tony is gone.
Chapter 17
Tony
I go back to my life in Queens, and it’s not a bad life. I have my daughters, who acquired bicycles with training wheels for Christmas, and who now require several hours a day of freezing-cold riding in the park near our house. Alexa is duly impressed with me for delivering a baby and presses me for details about Beth, about where we go from here. I don’t know what to tell her.
I’ve made it clear what I want, for maybe the first time in my life. But there’s no guarantee that I’ll get it, and that’s the hard truth. It’s what stopped me, maybe, from asking for what I wanted before, or even figuring it out to begin with—the fear that it wouldn’t matter. That I’d be left like Charlie Brown, trying to kick the football, only to have it whisked away at the last possible moment. I’d be exposed in my hapless eagerness, in my need, and stuck anyway—in responsibilities and obligations I couldn’t find a way out of.
It was cowardly, though. I see that now. I hid behind those obligations. They kept me safe from my own longing, which since my father died has been too overwhelming to face.
It taught me something, that Beth faced it. She faced me head-on and didn’t flinch. And her openness is a gift I’ll always carry, no matter what happens next.
I try to hold on to that. To remember and cherish it.
But God, I miss her.
I miss her laugh, her smell. I miss her spirit.
And I go on anyway. I go to work and oversee the store renovations, which are extensive and stressful but finally end right before Christmas. We have a free wine-tasting party to celebrate the completion. It brings in significant traffic from the neighborhood, which continues all through the holidays.
Ray calls and tells me that Beth is doing well. At first I try to act like I could take or leave this information, but eventually Ray asks who, exactly, I think I’m trying to kid.
“Everyone knows, Tony. Sparks come off the two of you every time you’re in a room together.”
I don’t know how to respond. I make some sort of inarticulate sound over the phone line, and Ray blows out a slow breath.
“I’m sorry, man,” he says. “You must be going crazy down there.”
“A little bit,” I admit, and then sigh. “A lot.”
I ask him about Micah, and he tells me he’s started smiling. I picture Beth holding him, looking into his eyes and making him laugh, and for a moment I can’t speak.
“She wants to know how you’re doing, Tony,” Ray says after a while. “What should I tell her?”
“I don’t want you in the middle,” I say.
He snorts. “It’s a little late for that.”
“I didn’t mean for it to happen. It just…happened. I’m sorry for putting you and Holly in this position.”
Ray sighs. “I think it’s a little worse for you than it is for us, all things considered.”
“I don’t want to make your life difficult. Or awkward. I mean, I’ll figure out how to handle it, on the holidays and all that. I’ll…I’ll get my shit together, okay? I just need a little time.”
“Time for what, Tony? To get used to this? I mean, to losing her?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know”—I can almost hear Ray shaking his head over the phone—“for a smart guy you can be pretty dumb. Why the fuck are you not calling her? Why are you not up here, knocking on her door?”
“I’m not going to pressure her, Ray.”
“Okay,” he says. “But there’s no law that says you can’t come for a visit. See the baby you helped deliver.”
I breathe out. “I don’t know how she’d feel about that.”
“Well,” Ray says, “there’s only one way to find out.”
“I just…I don’t know,” I say again, and he doesn’t push me past that. We talk about other things—about the restaurant he’s planning, about his acceptance to c
ooking school. And when we hang up, I sit in my room and stare at the wall for a very long time.
I know we can’t go on like this forever, in this interim space where being together is still a possibility. Eventually, we’ll have to choose. And if what she chooses is to move on, I’ll have to respect that decision. As much as it would hurt. As much as I want more.
I meant what I said to Ray, though. I won’t pressure her.
If she comes to me, it won’t be because I have coerced or persuaded her.
It will because she wants this.
As much as I do.
And as scared as I am to find out once and for all where we stand, I have to know. I have to know whether Beth can love me the way that I love her.
Either way, I won’t have any regrets, I know that. It’s changed me, knowing her. There’s no going back now to the place inside myself where I’ve been hiding all these years. For better or worse, she found me out.
And now here I am, as open as she is.
Open, and waiting to see what happens next.
Chapter 18
Beth
I haven’t slept a full night in six weeks. My hair is a mess, my clothes are covered in breast milk, and every corner of my apartment is littered with baby gear and toys.
It’s snowed twice a week since Christmas. Holly, Mom, and other friends come to visit every day, but because of the cold I spend long swaths of time trapped at home with Micah, trying heroically to keep him from falling off the changing table or suffocating in his crib or starving to death because I haven’t fed him enough. Luckily, I’ve managed to keep him alive so far.
Go me.
But he cries, day and night, and wants to be held constantly. Let me correct that: he wants to be held while I am moving, which means the minute I sit down, he starts wailing. Every minute I’m awake, I’m rocking him, shushing him, nursing him, comforting him, or he weeps plaintively.
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