“Approved,” I say, warmed by the picture: ceiling constellations, breathing synced, quiet as a weather system. “Four: a rocking chair that doesn’t squeak. The good kind, with the wide arms.”
He writesNON-SQUEAK ROCKERwith aggressive underlines. “Five,” he says, eyes flicking up to check my face, “a bubble.”
I blink. “A bubble?”
“An invisible one,” he clarifies, earnest. “That we guard. Where headlines aren’t allowed and people have to knock before they enter and we get to decide what ‘normal’ looks like. It can include hockey. It just doesn’t include other people’s ideas about us.”
My throat goes hot in a good way. “Put that in pen,” I say. He does, and then circles it until the napkin threatens to tear.
We drift from gear to rituals. Sunday walks even when it rains. Pancakes that are more memory than food. A rule about phones living in a bowl after eight. A rule about saying sorry without explaining why you’re actually right.
He pauses, pen hovering. “What about names?” he asks, too casual. He doesn’t push when I hesitate. “Later is fine,” he adds, and I love him for not turning this into a test.
“Later,” I echo, and the word lands gently instead of running away. “But we can do vows.” I nod at his napkin stack. “Practice.”
His grin is pure delinquent. “You want vows on hospital napkins? Peak romance.” He writesVOWSat the top like a header on a lab report, then chews the pen cap for a fatal second before I give him the trainer eyebrow and he looks chastened. “Right. No oral fixation near sterile things.”
“Focus, Maddox.”
He inhales, then writes in his messy, passionate commas:I vow to choose the quiet that keeps you whole over the noise that makes me look good.He pauses, glances up. “Too much?”
“Good,” I say, throat tight. “But your comma afterwholeis chaos.” I take the pen when he offers it and add one in the only place it belongs. He watches my hand like correction is foreplay.
“Again,” he says, softer. He writes:I vow to be late to practice if you need sleep, to learn how to braid, to never use the phrase ‘babysitting my own kid.’A wince. “I did once.”
“Never again,” I decree, correcting his apostrophe this time. “My turn.” I write in neat, no-nonsense print:I vow to love you in public without giving the public anything that belongs to us.I add:I vow to ask for help before I’m drowning. I vow to keep choosing boring when the world asks for spectacle.It’s not poetry. It’s a blueprint.
He reads it like scripture and kisses the back of my hand, pen forgotten. “Keep going,” he whispers.
So we do. We vow to argue fair, to label leftovers, to always carry a spare pacifier, to forgive the versions of ourselves that don’t get it right the first time. We draw a little bubble on the corner of the napkin and write our initials inside it like teenagers carving a tree.
A nurse pokes her head in and pretends not to see we’ve turned medical supplies into stationery. “How are we doing?”
“Shelved, rocked, bubbled,” Jason reports.
“Excellent,” she says, amused. “Hold onto those. People forget what they promise at three a.m.”
“Not this time,” I say, folding the napkin like a relic and slipping it under my pillow. It crinkles, loud and safe. Our bubble holds.
Time loses its corners. It smears into warm lamplight and the quiet choreography of nurses doing things I don’t need to understand. At some point the playlist loops and we don’t notice. At some point the drip finishes and the monitor decides to be boring, and then?—
Footsteps. Not rushed, exactly. Purposeful. Dr. Hassan’s face appears over me like a moon. “Okay,” she says softly, eyes kind, hands sure. “Let’s meet this baby.”
Everything telescopes. The room is smaller and brighter and full of instructions I only half hear because my body knows the rest. Jason is at my shoulder, breath syncing to mine, whispering counts like a metronome we both trust. The world shrinks to the length of my exhale and the heat of his palm.
“Now,” Dr. Hassan says, and I do something my brain doesn’t have language for and my bones understand perfectly.
There is pressure, and then there is relief that feels like a tide changing its mind. A rush of sound—cloth, hands, a small wet inhale—and then the noise I will measure all other noises against for the rest of my life: a first cry that is not loud so much as precise. It slices the room open and lets the light in.
Jason makes a sound I’ve never heard from him. It breaks and then builds into a laugh that’s too close to a prayer to call it anything else. My own breath shudders and finds a new rhythm. I don’t know if I’m laughing or sobbing. Probably both. The napkin with our vows crinkles under my shoulder like a witness.
“Hi there,” someone says—I think it’s the nurse, I think it’s me—and then warm, damp weight lands on my chest. The world redraws around that exact point of contact. Skin to skin. Heat and heft and the slick, astonishing reality of a person who was an idea and is now a fact.
He is smaller than my two hands and bigger than the universe. A cap appears on a tiny head. Fingers fan and curl against my collarbone with a strength I didn’t know belonged to anything that size. The room blurs at the edges; the center refuses to.
“Look,” Jason says, useless and perfect, because he’s already crying again. He touches one of the tiny hands with a fingertiplike he’s afraid of breaking a law. The hand closes around him anyway, stubborn and sure.
We count them because the world told us to and because ritual is a way to say thank you without sounding religious. One, two, three, four, five. Tiny nails pale as moons. We count toes too and laugh when Jason loses track and has to start again because he’s kissing my forehead and also trying to do math.
