"The eggs. I think I've figured out the wrist angle."
I stop moving. I look at her. She looks at me with her face completely straight for approximately two seconds and then she breaks out into a laugh.
I start moving again. She's still laughing and the laugh becomes a different sound as I shift the angle and find the place she likes. Her hands tighten in my hair and the laughter dissolves into something lower, something urgent, and her hips start moving with mine.
I find the rhythm that works for both of us, slow and deep, her body meeting mine on every stroke. Her breathing changes and mine changes with it and we are moving together in the way that only comes from months of learning each other, the way that feels less like sex and more like conversation.
She comes with her face against my neck and a quiet sound that belongs to me, her body tightening around my cock in waves. I come right after.
I stay there. My weight on her, carefully. Her breathing against my ear. Her hand moving slow against the back of my neck.
"I've been watching you for a long time, Billie Callaghan," I say.
She puts her hand on my face. Her thumb against my cheekbone. Her eyes on mine.
"I know," she says. "I was counting on it."
THE END
Epilogue — Six Months Later
Our daughter is three weeks old and Declan Maguire has not slept since she arrived.
I'm not exaggerating. I'm not being dramatic. The man has not slept. He dozes — I've caught him dozing in the nursery chair at four AM with Claire on his chest, his eyes closed for maybe twenty minutes before they snap open and he does a full perimeter check of a sleeping infant like she might have developed an escape plan while he blinked.
I found him at two this morning in the nursery. The room that used to be his office, the room where I stood in the doorway holding a pregnancy test approximately a thousand years ago. He was in the chair with Claire on his chest, both hands on her, his eyes open in the dark. Just watching her breathe.
I leaned in the doorway and watched him watch her and I thought:this is the most Declan Maguire thing that has ever happened.The man who counted my freckles at two AM has found a new subject. She weighs seven pounds. She has his jaw and my freckles and his dark eyes and my hair, or what there is of it — reddish, fine, sticking up in ways that no amount of smoothing is going to fix. She is three weeks old and she already looks like a person who will have opinions.
She gets that from me. He gets no credit for the opinions.
We named her Claire.
My dad cried. Declan held my hand. I held the baby. The three of us in a hospital room with my mom's name on the bracelet and nobody saying anything because there was nothing to say that the name didn't already say. My dad touched the bracelet and looked at me and his face did something I'm going to carryfor the rest of my life. Not sadness. Not exactly. The face of a man seeing his wife's name on his granddaughter's wrist and understanding that the world keeps going in ways he didn't plan for and that some of them are good.
Sunday dinner. Our house. Lakeview Drive.
I'm making dinner, which is an ambitious word for what I'm doing. Declan offered to cook and I told him no because this is my house and my kitchen and my dad is coming for the first time and I want to be the one standing at the stove when he walks in. This would be a more powerful statement if I weren't currently googling "how to tell if chicken is done" on my phone while stirring something that may or may not be gravy.
Claire is in her bouncer on the counter, watching me cook with the expression of someone who has serious doubts about the proceedings. She gets that from Declan.
My dad's car pulls into the driveway at five.
I watch from the kitchen window. He gets out and stands there for a moment the way Declan stands in driveways — collecting himself, settling his face, getting ready for something that requires more of him than the drive did. Then he comes to the door.
Declan opens it.
I stay in the kitchen. This is their moment. Whatever passes between two men who've been each other's constants for thirty years and who are now something different and not yet sure what — that happens at the door. Without me. Without an audience.
I hear my dad's voice. Low. Something I can't make out.
Then Declan's. Lower. Something I also can't make out but that sounds, from the cadence of it, like two men saying things they've practiced in the car and that come out differently in person.
Then my dad is in the kitchen and he's looking at me and Claire is on the counter and his whole face changes. Everything that's been hard and hurt between us doesn't disappear. It just moves to the side, temporarily, because there is a baby on the counter and the baby is his granddaughter and she's wearing a onesie that says "I get my looks from my grandpa" which I bought specifically for today because I am petty and strategic and I know my audience.
"Oh, Billie," he says.
"I know," I say.
