(and i feel all right)

He spread the aloe over her skin in small careful sweeps. He kept waiting for her to flinch away from his touch and when she didn’t, he wasn’t sure if that meant he was doing it right or if she was just being patient with him. Both were possible. Both were equally hard to sit with.

“That’s good, feels better,” she said, before he’d done anything wrong. Like she could tell he was working it out.

“You sure?”

“Yeah, it’s cooling it already.”

He’d looked it up on his phone, earlier, when he’d caught the colour of her shoulders as she’d made her way inside. He’d known she’d need help with this. He wasn’t going to say so, but he’d Googled quickly before she’d asked - rubbed in versus let it sit, cool compress first or not, and none of the things he’d read agreed with each other. Putting aloe on after the sun wasn’t something the Tillman’s had ever bothered with. He’d gone back and forth on whether to stay back and let someone else help her, but before he could decide one way or the other she’d cornered him in the hallway, the others still out back at the grill, and now he was here, with her, his big dumb hands on her smooth skin.

That was new. The going back and forth on things relating to her. He’d had friends before, obviously, but most of them required nothing from him except showing up (usually with a six pack), and she… she expected him to pay attention. To think and be sure of things. He didn’t mind that the way he thought he would.

His thumbs found a knot in her left shoulder, just below the strap of her swimsuit, and without thinking he pressed into it.

“Ooh,” she hissed, but she didn’t move away.

“Too hard?”

“No.” She paused, turning just enough to catch his eye over her shoulder. “No, that’s… keep going.”

He kept going, working his thumbs into the knot until it softened, adding more aloe to the sunburn and soothing it in. She tipped her head forward a little. He watched the back of her neck, the small hairs there, and looked away.

There was a particular square of skin between her shoulder blades she’d pointed to earlier. Mostly there, I couldn’t get it. He’d nodded like it was a normal thing to be told. He moved to it now, spread the aloe slow, and he could feel the heat of the burn under his fingers, the way the skin was tight with it, and he thought, distantly, that she should have covered up sooner. But he’d liked seeing her in her swimsuit. He didn’t want that to end. So he’d said nothing, and now she was burned.

“You’re better at this than I expected,” she said.

“What’d you expect?”

“I don’t know. You always seem like a guy who doesn’t do things gently.”

He didn’t answer right away. His hands kept moving, the same careful circles.

“I can,” he said finally. “When it matters.”

She went quiet. The bathroom was small and warm and the only sound was the buzz of the bulb above the mirror. He could see the edge of her face if he looked up, not much, just the line of her jaw, the way she was looking down at her hands in her lap.

He didn’t know what they were, really. He’d been trying not to think about it directly, the way you don’t look straight at something bright. They were friends. That was true and also not quite the whole truth and he was pretty sure she knew it too, which was maybe why she’d asked him instead of someone else. Or maybe he was wrong about that. He was wrong about things sometimes.

“Can you do the sides too?” she asked. Her voice was a little quieter than before.

“I will,” he said. “I’m getting there.”

He wasn’t rushing. For once in his life, he was not rushing.

He smoothed the aloe into her sides, slow as the rest of it, then capped the bottle, placing it on the counter beside her.

She turned around.

He hadn’t quite prepared for that - for her facing him in the small space, close enough that he could see the dusting of freckles across her nose and the pink across her cheekbones that had nothing to do with the sun. She looked at him for a second, something working itself out behind her eyes, and then she leaned up and kissed him on the cheek.

Except she caught the corner of his mouth, just barely. Warm and soft and over before he could decide what to do with his hands.

She pulled back without a word. Reached past him for the blouse she’d draped over the towel rail and shrugged it on, leaving it hanging open, and then she was moving around him and the door was opening and he could hear the others out back, the grill, someone laughing at something.

The door didn’t quite close behind her.

The pasta was a Thursday. He’d spent ages figuring out your mom’s recipe without ever being asked to, and he’d stood at the stove and made it because he knew you’d had a hard week and he’d said he wanted to do something nice for you. You’d sat down to it, excited and a little touched because of the effort he’d put in, but you’d only managed four mouthfuls before your stomach turned over completely. The rich smell of garlic and cream that had always meant comfort had become something wrong, something your body wanted to get far away from, and you’d looked at his face - turned slightly toward you, waiting for the sounds of you eating, waiting for you to tell him he’d done something good - and felt such a gutting wave of guilt that you’d almost revealed your worry out loud right then.

I’m sorry. I think something’s wrong. I think I should have paid more attention.

You’d said you weren’t very hungry. He’d said okay. He’d put the rest away, too quiet, and you’d sat there watching him move around the kitchen and hated yourself a little.

The blue and white box with the test was in the bathroom cabinet on a Monday.

You’d seen it when you flossed your teeth that morning and stood there staring at it for a long moment, heart going strange in your chest, before you closed the cabinet door and went about your day and didn’t say a word. You didn’t know how he’d got it. You didn’t know how long it had been there. You thought about it for eight hours straight.

When you got home that evening you were so tired you could have cried, and you sat down on the couch and put it down, all of it, every bit of weight and worry you’d been carrying, and just wept.

He came and sat beside you. You felt the couch shift.

Something landed on the cushion between you. You wiped your eyes and looked down.

The box. The same one from the cabinet.

Your mouth went dry.

“Gator…”

“M’not mad,” he said. Quiet and immediate, like he’d been primed and ready. “I’m not goin’ anywhere. I just need ta know.”

You looked at his face. The scar at his brow that meant he always looked like he was frowning a little on one side. The set of his jaw that you’d learned to read over two years of falling in love with him.

“How long have you…?”

“Suspected? Little while.” He smiled, a little weak. “Didn’t wanna push.”

Something in you came apart at the seams. “I didn’t know,” you wept again, and heard your own voice fraying. “I thought it was stress, I thought - I wasn’t thinking, we weren’t even trying, we haven’t talked…” You stopped. Swallowed. “I’m sorry. I should have said something sooner, I just didn’t want you to -”

“Hey.” The word said firm and certain. He found your hand without hesitating, his fingers closing around yours. “I’m not goin’ anywhere.”

“You don’t know that yet.”

“Yeah,” he said, with conviction. “I do.”

You looked at him for a long moment. At the steadiness of him. At the fact that he’d gone and ordered a box of Clearblue and put them somewhere you’d find them and waited, and said ‘m’not mad’ before you could even finish a sentence, because he’d known that was what you needed to hear first.

You picked up the box, and took it to the bathroom.

****************

He hadn’t asked to come to the dating scan. He’d simply said he was coming, in the tone that didn’t leave much room, and you’d said okay and felt something loosen in your chest that you hadn’t realised had been wound tight.

You stayed close to him in the waiting room without making it obvious. You’d learned his navigation over time, knew when to be near and when to give him space, and he’d never had to ask you to learn it. That felt like something. You thought about that sometimes, how much of each other you’d figured out without words.

The room was small. The paper on the bed crinkled every time you shifted. He was in the chair beside you, close enough that you could reach out and touch his arm, so you did - just your fingers, just for a moment - and felt him turn slightly toward you.

You watched the small screen through all of it. You couldn’t help it. The technician spoke, and the image came up, and she began to describe what she could see, the shape of it, the size of it, and you were trying to follow and then the heartbeat came through the speakers and you stopped following anything at all.

Fast. Steady. Filling the room.

You felt his hand find yours. You honestly couldn’t have said which of you moved first.

“That’s…” you started.

Your throat closed around the rest of it. You didn’t have words for what it was. Too fast, you would have thought, if you’d thought about it beforehand - too fast, too small, too strange to be real. But it was filling the room and it was real and it was the size of a plum inside you, apparently, and it had a heartbeat, and you were around twelve weeks along and you hadn’t known, and somehow all of that hit you at once in a way it hadn’t until this very moment.

You felt his hand tighten around yours.

“I can hear it,” he said. Low. Almost to himself. Like he hadn’t meant to say it out loud but couldn’t keep it in. “I can hear it.”

You turned your attention from the screen to him. You couldn’t look away.

His jaw was tight. His free hand had come up and he’d pressed his fingers briefly to his mouth and then lowered them again, a gesture so uncharacteristic, so exposed, that you felt it like a physical thing somewhere behind your breastbone. He was still turned toward the speaker, toward the sound, listening with the same absolute focus he gave to things that mattered to him, but his face had come unravelled slightly at the edges. Quietly. In the way that, with Gator, meant everything.

You thought about all the things he’d never be able to see. The image on the screen right now, grey and blurry and miraculous. The way the technician was looking between the two of you with something soft in her expression. Everything that was coming, all of it, the whole enormous uncharted territory of it.

And then you thought about what he could do. What he’d already done. The pasta recipe he’d learned by sound and smell and your voice describing your mother’s kitchen. The way he’d known something was going on before you had. The box of tests, ordered and left where you’d find them, no pressure, just I’m here and I’ve thought ahead and I’m not going anywhere.

He was going to know this child by heartbeat before anything else.

“Yeah,” he said, finally, and his voice had gone rough at the edges in a way he wasn’t trying to smooth out. “Yeah, that’s mine…”

You leaned your head against his shoulder. He exhaled, and for once he didn’t pull himself back together straight away. He turned his face slightly toward your hair, breathing you in.

His thumb moved across your knuckles. Just once. The thing he did when he didn’t have any more words.