#brain empty

“No, I still think you’re cuter.” Stubborn in the same way he is, you’re unwavering with your stance. He still remembers how you’d sat in his mother’s front room on Christmas Day, still adorning the paper crown you’d worn at dinner, with a photo album open in your lap and your bottom lip jutted all the way upon seeing him as a toddler waddling around in his winter coat, as though the notion of him once being so little and so cold was enough to make you burst into fits of tears. 

“You're biased, is what you are.” Noel watches you pour two sugars into your own mug and holds back his usual comment about how all your teeth are going to fall out one day. Instead, he nibbles on the inside of his cheek and smiles down at his feet, grinning at the contrast of his Adidas trainers next to your worn pink slippers, looking like your very own version of yin and yang, and laughs to himself. 

ii.

“I feel like we need a licence for it.” Flicking your indicators on to turn left, you lean forward slightly, as though being closer to the windscreen might help you see through the masses of rain hitting the glass. It was the middle of spring, and although the man doing the weather report earlier that morning had insisted on clear skies, you’d both been met with nothing but a big grey cloud and a row of paps with umbrellas as you rushed from the front door to unlock his car. 

“For turning?” Suddenly appalled, Noel moves from where he’d been wiping the condensation off the passenger window with the sleeve of his jacket, erasing all the little doodles he’d done to see you smile. He knows you can be an anxious driver, especially behind the wheel of the expensive cars he’d bought with his residual cheques, though this new notion seems incredibly far-fetched, even for someone who still avoids roundabouts years after passing their driving test.  

“No, for having a baby.” Ever since you’d come off your birth control pills and decided not to renew your prescription, fragments of this same conversation had begun to seep into the domestic routines of your shared life; just yesterday, while brushing your teeth, you’d explained to him how odd it was, finally not caring about getting pregnant, when you and your friends had spent most of your adult lives trying to aviod it like the plague, and treating pending pregnancy tests like the female version of russian roulette. “It feels wrong that anyone can just try for one.”

“If Liam’s done it, then any prick can have a go.” While Noel had welcomed being an uncle with open arms, hearing his brother talk about changing nappies and clearing up baby sick never failed to make him laugh; if anyone stood as a pillar of reassurance that you’ll never feel quite mature enough to have kids, it was Liam, who took more interest in his son’s baby toys than anything else during his wife’s pregnancy, despite insisting otherwise. “You’ll be perfect.”

iii.

“That nice?” Lips pressed against the side of your neck, Noel shamelessly darts his tongue out to taste your sweat; under the glow of his bedside lamp, with a gleaming sheen of it over your skin, you look like a cinematic wet dream, straight out of a sex scene in a romantic film he vaguely remembers seeing and hasn’t recalled until now. His breath stutters in his throat, caught there like he’s been stabbed in the chest, as his fingers slip between your thighs. “You’re so wet, Jesus.”

“Can’t help it.” For a moment, with your voice all needy, he sees a glimpse of the girl whose hands shook when you both slept together for the first time; back when he used to have to kiss your knuckles, and mumble jokes into your hair to calm you down. It was so uncharacteristic of you to sound like that now, though maybe part of you has reverted back to that mindset with the new weight of what you were doing, that this was something with a tangible purpose, an end goal.

“No, it’s good.” He reassures gently, trying to remember how to form a proper thought as his mouth falls agape at the sight of his fingertips going all shiny with your slick, and the little whiny moan you do at the loss of contact. Sometimes, he wishes he had a better memory so he could play that sound on loop, along with the visual of you fluttering your eyelashes shut and squeezing at his forearm as he presses his fingers in, sinking down to the first knuckle with the kind of practised ease that comes with years of love. “Fucking squeezing around nothing.” 

“Noel.” You breathe out, for no particular reason, in the same way he sometimes does with your name, just to feel the warm familiarity of the word on your tongue. It was remarkable the way you could turn something as simple as his name into something that sounded like tender poetry, especially after the years he’d spent rejecting it and dismissing it as nothing but a cruel joke that he was named after Christmas when he was born almost six months after the fact in late May. 

“Not gonna waste it. Gonna fill you up, swear.” Though it was early days and he had next to no knowledge of how this whole ‘trying for a baby’ thing worked, he could still grasp the common-sense aspect of it all and knew he would have to go against years of habit and try not to pull out at the last minute. Later, he’d perhaps read up on it, realise he probably has to time things better with your cycle, or try that old wives' tale of holding your legs up for ten minutes afterwards. Though this would be good enough for now, more than good enough actually. “I promise.” 

iv.

“Don’t. You might be pregnant.” Exhaling a plume of smoke from between his lips, Noel refuses your hand that’s reaching out for a drag of his cigarette. It was perhaps too optimistic a concern, though not a completely deluded one, since your pursuit of trying to have kids had expanded into having unprotected sex on most surfaces in the house, and tracking your period on the calendar in the kitchen with a pack of glittery gel pens you’d found in the junk drawer.

“God, you’ve gone and jinxed it now.” Chewing on the last of your cereal, you huff, letting your spoon clatter dramatically against the bowl. Upon opening the curtains and seeing a blue sky, you’d both insisted on eating your breakfast outside, completely undeterred by the wet garden furniture and the damp grass if it meant sitting in the sun and pretending like you were in the countryside, rather than a little patch of green behind a house in London. “Touch wood.”

“I’m not touching wood, it’s fine.” Only superstitious when he truly felt like it, Noel shakes his head and taps some cigarette ash onto his empty plate. Unlike you, he was a firm believer that words could never hinder biology or fate, and that talking about it all he liked would probably do nothing but bore you senseless; two days ago, he’d expressed premature worry about how he was going to teach his kid to swim when he couldn’t do it himself, and you’d had to reassure him that he didn’t even have one yet. 

“You have to.” Though your eyebrows are furrowed in the middle with concern, all Noel can think about is how cute you look in your pyjamas with his hoodie on to keep you warm from the mid-morning cold; for something to do with your fingers, you’d tied the strings up into a neat bow, and all he could do was joke about how much it made you look like a cartoon character, as he laughed through bites of his jam-covered toast. "Go on."

“Fine. Touch wood.” Giving in, Noel presses his palm against the top of the table, saying the words aloud like they might add an extra layer of good luck to soothe your worry. Truthfully, he knew it’d only be a matter of time before he did what you wanted, since denying you anything for too long felt like it would cause him physical pain; he’d once tried to explain to his brother how leaving you to go on tour sometimes felt like having a heart attack, though he’d only been met with a puzzled expression.