#lerayon scribbles

Ginny’s runaway thoughts follow a similar track, but carry with them questions about how her changing body now functions.

Is she tired because she didn’t sleep well, or has pregnancy fatigue kicked in? How much water makes the difference between one middle-of-the-night bathroom visit and two middle-of-the-night bathroom visits?

For a woman so highly attuned to her body, these uncertainties are initially frustrating for her.

The best Mike can think to do is liken this to coming back from an injury. There are just some things her body will and won’t do right now, and everything comes in its own time. She narrows her eyes at the comparison (“A baby’s not an injury”), but eventually takes his point. He thinks it helps matters once he starts instigating the afternoon naps that have become a necessity for her, and his favorite daily indulgence.

“You sleep a lot, Old Man.”

“So do you, Rookie,” he replies, wrapping his arms around her when she climbs into bed with him and snuggles up close.

Through it all, Ginny is radiantly happy, and Mike can’t stop looking at her.

It’s a relief when they let family and a few close friends in on their secret. At this point, Mike is unable to contain himself. He’s newly in awe of Ginny – falling more deeply in love – and it’s all over his face, all of the time. He knows because he can’t stop smiling, can’t stop reaching for her. Plus, there’s Evelyn Sanders letting loose an operatic squeal whenever she catches them exhibiting what she calls, “Baby Bliss Behavior.”

Once Ginny pops, Mike absently wonders if he’s developing a pregnancy fetish. The baby was real for him the second Gin looked up from the test with shining eyes and a delighted laugh, but the reality of her growing belly unlocks something inside him that’s primal and possessive.

The dark side of those feelings reveals itself when they go public with the news, and the limits of Mike’s tolerance for outside opinions about his wife, her career, and their growing family are severely tested. He prefers to focus on the lighter side.

He didn’t think it was possible for Ginny to become more beautiful to him, but somehow she does. When her energy returns and brings with it an increased libido, Mike is reminded of their first months together – when they were insatiable for each other, and Ginny’s presence kept him in a constant state of arousal. These days, it’s nearly impossible for him to keep up with her.

His desire is now twined with fascination. Ginny’s growing a person, and it’s miraculous to him that her body just knows how to do that. To her begrudging amusement, he takes to documenting everything in pictures. He wants to remember this time; wants Ginny to see herself the way he does. He also wants their kid to grow up with photographs that tell the story of their eagerly anticipated arrival.

It’s serendipity that he catches a shot of Ginny mid-laugh the first time she feels the baby kick. But it takes him two days to grab a family-friendly image of her watching TV with a dinner plate balanced on her belly. She’s flipping him off in the first few attempts.

Around month seven, he gets really good at capturing stolen moments. Ginny floating serenely in the pool. Ginny in half camel pose. Ginny asleep in the nursery glider. Ginny and their Sprout.

If Mike could stop time and live inside those moments for days on end, he would.

Fairly early in the pregnancy, he was already daydreaming about baby’s first steps, and concocting scenarios that involved jumping through sprinklers, camping out in a pup tent, and a half-dozen other activities that would require grass and trees and enough space to let a kid and their imagination run wild. But in all the adventures he thought up, the kid was just a hazy vision.

Now it's months later, and he startles awake from a dream about a girl – a little curly-haired beauty with Ginny’s dimple and his eyes. He can still hear her peals of laughter. It’s too early to wake Gin, so he curls up beside her and whispers to the baby.

“Hey there, little girl. It’s Daddy.”

Later that week, Ginny awakens to find him quietly reciting to her belly the list of names they keep on his phone.

“Rosie. Georgia. Caroline. Sadie.”

It’s silly, but Mike had begun to hope the baby would kick when she heard one she liked, and he’d have a new angle to use in his campaign to finally convince Ginny to let them find out the sex and confirm what he knows to be true.

“Gracie. Sophie. Alice. Charlotte.”

“Wow, you’re really that sure it’s a girl.”

Mike looks her in the eye and nods.

“Alright. We’ll call the doctor today."

Three hours later, two months before making her debut, little Ruby Baker Lawson chooses her name.

Ginny sits dumbfounded and tries to track back through their short conversation to figure out where things took a turn. She looks down at the abandoned tablet to see that Mike had Googled “NYC Vacation Rentals,” but that’s not much of a clue. Spending the holidays in New York sounds great to her. Does he think she wouldn’t want to go?

After a minute or so, Ginny realizes she doesn’t hear Mike in the kitchen anymore. With a start, she reasons he must’ve gone upstairs, and jumps up to search for him.

“Hey. Lawson!” she snaps when she finds him in his bedroom.

He’s lying on the bed watching ESPN like the last several minutes hadn’t just happened. The deliberate way he reaches for the remote and mutes the TV when she enters drives Ginny crazy. So does the dumb look on his face; he’s looking at her like he doesn’t have a clue as to why she might be irritated, which instantly ramps up her irritation.

“Are you messing with me right now? Why’d you leave? What is going on with you?” Ginny feels like they’re heading into a fight, but part of her is still stuck on the pained expression Mike wore downstairs. Her brain tries to sort out the contradiction, and suddenly she's very tired.

She says, “You know what, never mind,” and abruptly leaves the room.

Ginny’s putting on her shoes when Mike comes padding down the stairs.

“Gin, wait.”

She ignores him in favor of grabbing her bag and looking around for her phone. It’s on the coffee table in the living room, and Mike intercepts her on her way back to the front door.

“I’m sorry. Please, Ginny. It’s getting late; don’t leave.”

She tries to dodge him, but Mike is somehow quicker, and manages to stay between her and the door. She fixes him with a weary look and says, “You’re being really weird tonight, and I want to go home. Please just move.”

Mike stares at her for a moment, then sighs and opens the door for her. To her retreating back he says, “Will you text me when you get home?”

She nods as she makes her way down the front walk. She doesn’t look back as she drives away, but knows he stands in the doorway until her car disappears from view.

The next day, Ginny returns home from her morning run to find Mike parked near the back delivery entrance. She knows he’s aware that she prefers to enter and exit her building from this spot, but it’s still strange seeing him waiting outside in his car. She approaches the driver’s side as he climbs out.

By way of a greeting he hands her a water bottle and says, “I figured you wouldn’t want me to use my key today.”

Ginny doesn’t really have an answer to that. He’s right; she wouldn’t have appreciated finding him sitting in her living room when she got back. But still, the accuracy of his assumption twists painfully in her stomach. She gulps down some water to keep from replying, and gestures for Mike to follow her to the door. She taps her code into the keypad, and they share an awkward, silent walk to the elevator.

As they ride up to her condo, she keeps her eyes trained on the control panel and says, “I still have to stretch, and I wanna shower before we talk.”

Mike’s “Okay” is almost lost beneath the discreet ding that signals their arrival on her floor. Before stepping off the elevator, Ginny hazards a glance in his direction.

He looks tired. There are bags under his eyes, and a heaviness in his posture that tugs on her heart. She wonders if his night was anything like hers – lonesome and restless. Her bed was too big without his reassuring bulk beside her. After tossing and turning for hours, she’d finally ended up sleeping with her head at the foot of the bed, but woke up this morning disoriented and tangled uncomfortably in the sheets.

They fall back into silence as they head towards her door. Once inside, Ginny goes directly to her home gym for a quick stretch. As she moves through her routine, she can hear Mike in the kitchen pulling things from her fridge and chopping something on the cutting board.

In the shower, she tries to put her thoughts in order. This obviously isn’t the first time she and Mike have argued, but this time feels different to Ginny. Usually, there’s yelling or harsh words, followed by apologies and forgiveness. Sometimes, there’s passive-aggressive avoidance that eventually gives out; a caress or conciliatory look to signal that the mood has lifted. What occurred between her and Mike last night feels trivial compared to past arguments, yet somehow more consequential. She’s not all that sure what did actually happen, and even less sure how to approach whatever’s about to happen now.

While pulling on some clothes, Ginny vacillates between reticence (Okay, so this was just a dumb miscommunication that we don’t need to get into) and indignation (Screw that. Something weird is totally going on and he needs to talk to me).

For a minute she wonders if she could sneak out of the condo without Mike seeing to buy herself some more time. Chewing on her thumbnail and thinking about the sightlines from the kitchen to the front door, Ginny catches her reflection in the mirror (Shit, Baker, don’t be a coward), and decides to quit stalling.

Mike’s seated at the counter, and pushes a plate before the empty barstool when he sees her enter the kitchen. He’s made her a post-workout snack.

Ginny digs into the peace offering and waits for him to speak.

“I’m sorry about last night,” he says.

“What did you mean when you said ‘missing milestones’?” she asks around a mouthful of chicken and lettuce. That phrase had stuck with Ginny; she’d spent most of the night trying to parse its meaning.

Mike makes an apologetic face. “Yeah, that’s why I’m sorry. Something’s been gnawing on me for a while now, and last night was the first time I started to put things together.”

Ginny pushes away her half-eaten wrap and begins to steel herself. It feels like he’s ramping up to a serious speech, and she’s at a loss for where it might go. “Mike, what’s wrong?”

“Are you happy, Gin?” he asks. “Happy with me, I mean?”

Ginny immediately blurts, “Yes,” as her anxiety kicks up a notch. “I’m happy, I love you. But you are freaking me out, and I don’t understand what we’re doing right now.”

For three years it was her job to read this man from a distance of over 60 feet with his face obscured by a mask, but if Nike offered Ginny double her current endorsement deal to explain what Mike is thinking right now and what he expects her to do or say, she’d come up totally empty.

“Seriously Mike, this is the weirdest goddamn fight I’ve ever had--”

He interrupts her. “We’re not fighting, I swear. I’m doing a shit job of communicating. I’m sorry for that too.” Mike sighs and continues. “Lately, I’ve been wondering about the way we got together - how easily we fell into a comfortable place - and I can’t help but think that I’m failing you in some way.”

“Failing me?” Ginny squints and thinks hard to understand where Mike is going with this. “I mean…yeah…we didn’t do the typical dinner-and-dancing, get-to-know-you, try-to-impress-me-with-your-wine-knowledge thing.”

He looks skeptical at that.

“Yeah, I know,” she continues. “You don’t know a ton about wine and I don’t care about wine. But you know what I mean. You’re my best friend. I got to know you sitting in the clubhouse and on the bus, and by talking on the phone. By the time we went on a proper date, we’d kind of already been dating. For years.”

At some point, Ginny had taken Mike’s hand, and he turns hers over now to trace the calluses on her fingers.

“Yeah,” he says, and smiles at her gently. He looks like he’s remembering something nice; Ginny’s thinking back to flirting with him during BP, and the blushing pride she felt in her ability to tease him into a powerful home run swing. She’s about to remind him of that day when his smile twists into something dark.

Mike drops his gaze. “Yeah, pep talks in the training room and card games on the bus. The stuff of lasting romance,” he mutters.

“Wait. Is this about baseball?” she asks. Ginny tugs on his hand to get him to look at her. When he does, he’s wearing that same distressed expression he wore the previous night.

Something in Ginny’s brain clicks into place. Vegas was a team trip; they went to D.C. for All-Star Week.

“Mike, do you think our relationship is only about baseball?”

He grimaces, and moves to pull away, but Ginny holds his hand tighter and asks again. “Do you?”

“No. Not…actively. I know we’re more than baseball. But, Gin, that’s where we started. And with me retired, with each day that passes, I’m getting farther and farther away from the game. What if you wake up tomorrow and it’s not enough that we used to be teammates?”

Mike is now clinging to her hand and looking at her with a desperation that threatens to overwhelm Ginny. In that moment, she comprehends that he is trying to will her to understand him and help pull him out of some kind of spiral he’s been fighting.

She takes a deep breath, squeezes his hand, and begins, “Okay, you are still freaking me out a little, and I don’t a hundred understand how you’ve tied retirement to romance, but here’s what I got:

“First, I love you. You have to know that I love you, and it’s not entirely about the game. But that’s who we are – ballplayers. And I fell in love with you while we played a game together that we have loved our whole lives, and I wouldn’t trade that away for anything. But at the same time, we are both trying to figure out who we are away and apart from baseball. And we’re doing that together too, just from opposite ends of our careers. And I know that’s scary for you, because you think that you’re starting too late, and a part of you thinks that you’re somehow holding me back. But you’re not, Mike. It’s a gift that we found each other when we did, and I feel so grateful that I get to watch you find parts of yourself that have nothing to do with this game, and be a part of that discovery, and also discover those parts of myself with you. I love you so much.”

Ginny realizes that she’s crying when Mike brushes tears from her cheeks, but he’s also smiling at her, so she smiles back and continues, “I don’t have, like, a list of the reasons why I love you. I just do. Deep down in my bones, I do. You’re not a former teammate. You’re my forever teammate for reasons that have nothing to do with the Padres. And you romance me all the time, babe. By making me this meal today. And stocking your fridge with my favorite beer.”

Mike laughs at her, and she rolls her eyes, but presses on, “Okay, yeah, I realize those examples are food-based, but the point is: You are sweet to me in a lot of really small ways, and that is romantic. And I like that we’re comfortable. I’ve fought too hard to find the right balance of comfort. I’ve had to learn how to remain comfortable in my own skin playing this game, while constantly reminding myself not to get too comfortable; not to let my guard down in case it all goes to shit. Comfortable is precious to me, and I don’t take it for granted. Especially not with you. Does that make any sense?”

Now it’s Ginny’s turn to try to will an impossible understanding from Mike. They sit in the quiet, staring at each other for a few breathless seconds, and then he gives her the slightest of nods before his face breaks into a brilliant smile.

Ginny launches herself at him, and he stands, hauling them up and enveloping her in a tight embrace.

“That was a really good speech, Rookie,” he whispers at her temple.

“I picked up a few things over the years,” she replies. She tilts her head back in a wordless request, which Mike obliges with a kiss.

Ginny pulls away and says, “You know, if you want to kick things up a notch in the romance department, I won’t complain.” She leans back in to murmur against his smiling mouth, “Let’s start with Christmas.”

They spend the afternoon on Ginny’s couch talking through Mike’s adjustment to retirement, their need to communicate better, and plans for their first vacation. Ginny wants to rent a place in NYC instead of staying in a hotel (which Mike knew), and she listens closely as he gets increasingly excited about the trip – filing away ideas for how she might spring some surprises on him while they’re away. Of the many things she’s learned sorting through this miscommunication, one is that Mike could do with a little romancing himself. Ginny thinks she’ll have a lot of fun making that happen.

So, I was way off last night when I posted that this fic wasn’t very long. It may be my longest one-shot ever. Blame Mike, who turned what was supposed to be a fluffy night in talking about dream vacations into something more angsty. And also Ginny, who decided to leave instead of talking things through that night.