And yes I DO think that Shane was velcro baby with Yuna and I think she let it go on just a little too long. In my mind, Shane is a rainbow baby several times over and Yuna just...never quite gets past that with how permissive she is of him as a young child. So yes Yuna IS going to pick up Shane from daycare at ten-thirty AM on a Tuesday because the teacher called and said he was having a difficult time calming down after drop-off. And yes there is a stretch of six months or so when Shane is six and struggling with nightmares during which Yuna and David do not have sex one single time because Shane is in their bed like clockwork by nine PM every night. And yes Yuna continues picking Shane up and balancing him on her hip until she literally cannot do so anymore. And she cries, somewhere where nobody can see her, the first time Shane doesn't reach out to hold her hand in the grocery store anymore--and he's already too old to have been doing it for this long but fuck. Fuck. And from the day she brings him home from the hospital to the night before he moves out of her house permanently at age nineteen, if he is sleeping under her roof, and if she wakes up in the middle of the night, she cannot go back to sleep without cracking open the door of his bedroom and checking to make sure his chest is rising and falling.
Sometimes, occasionally, on random nights, she'll wake up and she won't know why and she has to call him to make sure it wasn't some kind of sign. And she knows it's probably bad and she knows it's probably not fair to his sleep schedule or to whatever personal life he may be trying to have but she just can't help it. And usually she only has to call once for him to pick up, voice bleary and sleep-deep, and he'll just say, "I'm fine, mom, go to sleep," because he knows her so well, her velcro baby.
And then once or twice it's two in the morning and it takes three calls for him to pick up and by the time he finally does she's pacing in the hallway in front of her and David's bedroom and the sound of his voice, slightly out of breath and strangely awake for this time of night, strikes her with icy relief.
"Mom," he sighs, "Sorry, I'm fine, I was just--I was, uh, asleep. And I didn't hear my phone."
"Oh, that's okay," Yuna says, even though she can tell he wasn't asleep and isn't sure why he's lying to her. She's been encouraging him to, like, live a little. Go out for more than just team bonding. Be a little fucking wild--be a twenty-something in one of the most interesting cities in the world. Surely he knows she wouldn't judge him.
And then she hears a rustle of sheets and a clearing of a throat that sort of very clearly didn't come from close enough to the phone for it to be Shane's throat it came from. And as soon as she hears it she knows that she shouldn't have, and that she needs to forget she did, and so she does.
"A-anyway, Mom, I gotta get back to sleep," Shane says. "We're on ice first thing in the morning and Coach isn't gonna go easy after that shitshow tonight, so..."
"Theriault always makes it personal about Boston," Yuna muses.
"Yeah, well, it's Boston. So, um. G'night and I love you and tell Dad that I'll see him on Thursday after his, uh, banquet thing."
"Will do. Love you too, sweetheart." There's a beat during which Shane should be hanging up the phone, but he doesn't, because he can probably tell that she has more she wants to say.
"Mom," he says, a little impatient, but he doesn't hang up. Sometimes, Yuna is glad that Shane is her only baby, because she genuinely doesn't know where she would fit twice as much love in her body.
"Just--are you...I mean..." She wants to ask are you happy, are you lonely, are you WITH someone right now and if you are please just tell me if they take care of you--
But, of course, she can't say any of that because Shane really, truly is not the baby in her arms or the child wrapped around her leg anymore, and she has to make her peace with that even if it means not knowing if he's okay.
"You know you can always talk to me, right?" she says finally.
And Shane just sighs, still a little impatient and frustrated, but his voice is gentle when he says, "Yeah, mom, I know."
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