More even than Melissa, he was used to doing what he wanted. He had grown up with anything he desired at his fingertips, or soon to shuffle their way to that location. He rarely had to wait for things or do anything which didn't directly benefit his own stature and happiness. Of course, being a father was something which he wanted very much and he knew would make him happy; but he'd spent his life being able to fly off to Mozambique or Russia at a moment's notice, the better to quickly be able to swim with a deadly type of shark, or to try to go camping in the extreme cold.
He had actually done this once—tried to go camping without any direct sort of tent or sleeping bag, only a series of tarps and the clothing on his back and the uncooked food in his satchel—for a few days. It was a very survival-esque sort of weekend. He didn't die, but he didn’t thrive, either, and the frostbite he almost suffered on his toes very nearly made the experience not worth the trouble; but only very nearly. In actuality, he was very happy with the weekend. Although, when he told this story later to Melissa, he found that she wasn't as thrilled, and wondered aloud whether the child she would bear him would be just as foolhardy with his own young notions about survivability. She vowed that she would place him in some sort of training camp to learn better how not to do what his or her father had done, and just hoped that the children that they were going to have wouldn't be silly and think that hypothermia was a particularly fun way to spend a few days.
But here, while they were on the ship, their mornings and their days fell into a lovely, automatic sort of routine. Everything they did went unsaid, because they were following a specific sort of rhythm which both of them loved. It was like the slowest, least interesting dance which had ever been choreographed.
The mornings, for Melissa, usually began long after Rodger’s. She was finding herself to be much more tired than usual, which she supposed was only the sort of thing to be expected when her body was growing another human being inside of it.
So she’d wake up and stretch to the already bright light of day, and look cheerfully out of their state room window to the bright blue of the sky and the deep royal blue of the sea. She’d then roll over, hoisting her bump along with her from her right to her left, and feel her spine crackle as she stretched some more.
There would be a note left on the pillow beside her. Rodger had done this the first time that he'd woken up before her, and she'd loved it so much (and clearly shown that she'd loved it so much) that Rodger had done it every time since then. The note would invariably contain some clue as to the specific type of dangerous expedition that Rodger would be undergoing that day. He’d provide some recommendation for a cafe or diner on board the ship to try out for breakfast that morning. A particular favorite of both of theirs had been the shakshuka at the Indian restaurant down on deck three, an egg and tomato dish which was spicy and vibrant and very healthy; neither of them felt weight down by it at all when they sampled it, and so they'd decided to make it a perennial, recurring sort of dish.
After she’d gotten up and cleaned herself and trundled to breakfast, most of the time sitting blissfully by herself—she, again, knew that shortly she would never feel alone again, so she was taking advantage of it where she could—and making notes on her iPad or reading that day’s news or reading any of the books which she’d brought along with her (one of the more salient tips which she had gleaned from her career as a librarian and curator of good books was that good authors always take the time to read. If you don’t have the time to read, so the saying went, you don’t have time to write. It was the first question she asked of younger people who came to her wanting to know what it took to be a good author: what are you reading?).
Just now, she was reading Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo, and American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. She found that the former had a gravitas and romance to his prose—or, at least, the English translation of his prose—that she found wonderfully inspiring; and the depths to which he dropped his characters and the corresponding heights to which he raised them were incredible mountains, ones which she wished to mirrors for her characters to battle as well. And Gaiman’s works were just so readable! The whimsy and the voice leaked through with every letter and that was something which she wished to establish—her voice. That was the thing which all of the agents and publishers were looking for: voice. The tone with which your prose told your story had to be completely familiar and completely different in a way which only a few writers every generation ever get completely right.
Melissa desperately wanted to be one of those writers.
So she took herself up to one of the decks and sat in a pool chair and read and wrote, alternating whenever her brain began to hurt or her fingers began to tense up, for as long as she could stand it—generally until the rest of her began to hurt from sitting in one position for too long. She really got into the books, often finding herself laughing or crying, which was a good thing— the emotions she borrowed from the proven authors often made it into her own works. Of course, she knew that as she sat there on a public pool-side bawling and typing or reading she made the perfect stereotypical portrait of a pregnant lady, and she often saw pitying looks sweep over her from all angles as she went about her day. She didn’t care. As long as none of them came over to sit and talk to her, she was happy. And, as she'd already scared away Evelyn, it didn't seem that she was in any danger of this happening any time soon.
She’d go and get lunch in the middle of the day, usually just after the lunch rush, and sit before a window and stare out at the sea. Kipling had written it, she’d remembered: “Oh ye, who have your eyeballs vexed and tired, feast them upon the wideness of the sea.”
So she’d feasted, both to fill her stomach and to fill her eyes and mind and heart with the wildness and the perpetual motion and the deepness of the water surrounding them, in every direction as far as it met the eye. She figured that if the sentiment was good enough for Rudyard Kipling, another wonderful author with a fantastic voice, it was good enough for her.
After lunch on these lyrically quiet and relaxing days she’d typically find herself to be very tired. She’d meander down, then back to their states room, often sending Rodger a text on the way, hoping that he was having a good time jumping off whichever cliff he was jumping off, before she went to sleep.
It was during one of these naps that she felt the babies move for the first time. She was laying on her left side when suddenly she woke up, and she realized that she'd woken up because someone had poked her. But there was no-one in the room with her. The poking continued and kept intensifying—just a bumping feeling around the vicinity of her belly—before she realized that the poking could only be coming from one place.
She’d rolled over and texted Rodger before the moment passed. She took a video of her belly —if you looked close, when the bumping feeling happened, you could see the skin over her stomach bump out slightly—and sent it to him, and then laid there on her bed with her hands resting lightly on the skin of her stomach, waiting excitedly for it to happen again. She felt (she knew it: a bit ridiculously) as if she could communicate with her children (who now felt like her children!) in a way she hadn’t been able to previously. She now had a sense of what they liked. When she played music or when she laughed, they’d often start to move around more inside of her. When Rodger got home later that day, sweaty and starving from his day of adrenaline-filled activities, he’d hugged her closely and sat there and waited alongside her to feel another bump. It took a bit, but the twins began to react to his voice as strongly as they did to anything Melissa said.
They'd ordered pizza through room service that night and just watched movies—the Indiana Jones trilogy, to be exact (they didn’t count the last one)—and waited for their children to move around more so that they could put down their slices and coo in delight.
It was one of Melissa’s most favorites memories from her pregnancy.
Most evenings, however, they ventured out of their room. As their initial tour around the cruise h
ad indicated, there were almost more opportunities for evening entertainment than there were nights to be entertained. Melissa got her way and dragged Rodger to Cats one evening, after which he swore off musicals and vowed that he would never sit through one again, because while he acknowledged that the actors had been extremely talented the complete lack of story and overall 80’s vibe had repulsed him in every way. Two weeks later, when the original cast of Hamilton flew in one evening to give a performance for the elite on board the ship, he changed his mind; and after the two and a half hours of soulful rap and booming R&B that was Hamilton, he suddenly decided that he liked musicals again, as long as they had nothing to do with caterwauling felines.
They tried each of the really nice restaurants on board. There was La Roux, of course, which they tried several times, for brunch and lunch as well as dinner. Each time was better than the rest.
However, there were several other cuisines represented on board other than French. A Vietnamese restaurant that served authentic pho, with an oxtail broth which had, according to all reports, been simmering for as long as the ship had been sailing.
Melissa’s pregnancy cravings kept her going to the Chinese restaurants on board quite often, as she was pretty sure that the twins wanted to eat crab rangoon, and they wanted to eat it often. However, their favorite restaurant on board the entire ship had to be the Italian restaurant, which was so chic and authentic that it didn’t even really have a name. They went there first for the breaded eggplant dish which was served with a positively stunning amount of stewed heirloom tomatoes; but then they watched as a chef came out and spun pizza dough table side for guests who were also in the restaurant. They simply had to try that; and from there it was a row of dominos falling, as each time they were at that small Italian restaurant it seemed that there was another wonderful thing which they had to sample.
There were three days left in the cruise. They were at the Mexican restaurant, La Hacienda, enjoying some fried ice cream with gold leaf shimmered on top of it, when Rodger brought up the fact that soon they would be returning to real life.
Real life, Melissa mused. On the one hand, it would be extremely exciting to be back, because that would mean that they were that much closer to welcoming the twins. On the other, that would mean that she was that much closer to having to give birth to two babies, one right after the other. The thought still rather traumatized her. She was voraciously reading her pregnancy books and doing (when she remembered to do them) the sorts of exercises which promised to make labor significantly easier; but the thought of the pain, which was promised to be among the worst kinds of pain which humans can endure, was enough to make her feel squeamish even if her pregnancy morning sickness wasn’t doing that already.
“I’m excited to go back,” was how she summed up these complicated feelings to Rodger.
He was nothing but excitement to go back home. He loved these types of cruises, but it wouldn’t be long until he was on another, so the idea of getting off this one wasn’t the most painful feeling in the world. Besides, he had videos to upload of his adventures, friends to boast to that he’d survived each unsurvivable thing. Above all that, Rodger was incredibly excited to be a father, but—notably—he didn’t actually have to go through the birthing process, which made the entire thing a little bit easier to stomach, in Melissa’s opinion.
“Ha,” said Rodger. “I mean, that’s super convincing.” But then he looked at her with an odd expression on his face.
“What’s up with you?” Melissa wasn’t sure that she liked the way he was looking at her. It was as if he was missing her, and she was sitting right there.
“Oh, nothing much,” he said annoyingly. Admittedly, he and Melissa hadn't been together very long in the grand scheme of things, but she flattered herself that she knew when he was hiding something from her. This was one of those times.
“Nothing much at all,” she said. Rodger nodded, and then, after a few more moments, he looked at her again. “I’d like to ask you out on a date,” he said, formally.
At this, Melissa burst out laughing. “Rodger, isn’t that what this entire month has been? I mean, I’m literally carrying your child. Your children, in fact. So, I mean, I love the idea, but—”
“One last fantastic dinner at La Roux. Go shopping—you know there’s a mall floor—and get something that makes you feel beautiful. And then I want to have a special dinner with you, that’s all.”
He was looking at her so earnestly that Melissa felt she couldn't do anything but accept. They walked back to their state room, stopping to watch the sunset in silence, and went to bed. Melissa, who had slept perfectly well (like a baby, she thought, but then she instantly corrected herself, as babies in fact do not sleep very well, as a rule), for the entire duration of their trip so far, couldn't nod off effectively that night. He was hiding something from her. There was a surprise in store. She just didn’t know what it was. Which, she was aware, was the definition of a surprise. This clarity did not make her enjoy it any more than she had.
Eventually she got to sleep. She was only made aware of this because she later woke up to their bright-white cabin, clean, impeccable, and cozy—and to a note on Rodger’s pillow just beside her. He must have gone on another of his off-cruise excursions, even though he hadn’t told her that there was another one planned for that day.
She picked up the note and read it quickly.
It merely said that she should be sure to have a good day, and he was very excited to see her later that night for their special date.
She threw the note back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. She wondered why he was making such a big deal of this. It couldn’t be just to spite her, could it? That would be insane…
She cleared her throat and got out of bed and surveyed her clothing choices.
She was in the stage of pregnancy wherein maternity clothes still hung loose on her but none of her non-maternity clothing fit. Rodger had specifically told her to go and pick something up for their date that evening. He so rarely gave her explicit advice like that that she thought she’d go ahead and just do it; and besides, she also just wanted to look pretty. She knew that she was also in the part of her pregnancy wherein it was difficult, sometimes, to feel beautiful and she wanted to do away with that feeling.
So to the shops she went. She spent a long time there, because there weren’t that many pregnancy specific stores, so she tried rolling the dice with some larger, flower garments from regular parts of the fashion stores. She found, several hours later, a bright blue dress that had a low neckline, which accentuated some of the amazing pregnancy cleavage which she'd recently been thrilled to see was a perk of all of the suffering through which she was going. It set off her black skin amazingly; and the person who sold it to her recommended a way to keep her dark hair up and off her neck which would compliment the lines of the dress in a most becoming fashion.
Later that evening—Rodger had left her a note which asked her to meet him at La Roux at 8pm sharp—she was getting ready and she felt the babies kick again. She smiled. She continued putting on her lipstick and mascara, then shinnied into her blue dress. She sighed contentedly, and made a note to thank Rodger for asking her to buy herself a new dress. This was the most beautiful that she had felt in a very long time.
She walked down to the French restaurant herself, smiling magnanimously at each of the people she passed, and found herself missing this cruise experience before she'd even left it. Everything about the past few weeks had been comfort and luxury beyond her wildest dreams, and she’d even made decent headway on her book—enough so that she was beginning to think of how to wrap it up, and had started to do research on where to query it for publication. Big dreams were therefore rustling through her head when she entered La Roux. As the hostess and waiter turned to greet her, she noticed that there didn’t seem to be anyone else in the restaurant, which puzzled her—this was one of the last nights of the cruise; she would have thought that all of the nicer re
staurants would have been booked solid.
There was a teary, happy look in the waiter’s eye as he led her back to what she presumed was her table, the one with the curtains in the back of the restaurant, the one she and Rodger had sat in during their first night there.
She stopped and gasped when she saw the table—and Rodger, in front of it. Rodger, smiling happily. Rodger, down on one knee.
“Melissa, will you marry me?”
The room was still.
She smiled.
“Yes.”
Chapter 12
She remembered being surprised by the proposal—that was her hot take on it all; surprise. It had been all a moment of a suddenly dry mouth, of nothing in the world but Rodger’s eyes, and (inconsequentially) the realization that she’d have to figure out how to buy another, even prettier, much lighter dress.
But she was getting ahead of herself. (Wasn’t that what she did, though?)
She’d said yes, of course. Not only was it the practical thing to do, but she hadn’t remembered ever being happier than the last few months when she was with Rodger. She’d sort of—woken up, was how she’d confusedly put it to herself in the wee hours of the morning when she felt like meditating on such Deep Things.
And—suddenly!—she was engaged. It was quicker than she would have thought, and she didn’t feel any different, which surprised her. She didn’t suddenly flame out into an indescribable beauty (she had always thought that engaged women, somewhat like princesses, were always de facto gorgeous). The pain and awkwardness and bloating from her pregnancy didn't suddenly disappear (far from it; she’d moved through her relatively symptom-free second trimester into her third trimester, which was a world of pain, shortly afterward).
He’d slipped a far-too-gorgeous ring on her finger and stepped back to admire the effect; and then swooped in to kiss her, and then they’d hugged each other and laughed for the cameras. Rodger had rented out the entire restaurant, and so the wait staff had come in to see the reason why. They’d enjoyed a wonderful dinner which was brought out by the chef himself, and looked at all of the pictures which were rapidly sent to Rodger’s phone.
Be My Bride and Have My Baby Page 12