“Much better,” Mike said, a sad smile on his face.
“But…?” Dylan and Laura said in unison, drawing out the word like a question.
“Something’s off. I don’t know how to put it in words.” Mike pulled back, leaving Laura frantically scrambling inside, like a gerbil on a wheel. Not knowing how to get off, but getting nowhere by being so panicked.
Dylan looked as worried as she was, which was a comfort. It’s not just me.
“And maybe it is me, but it’s not just me,” Mike said. “We’ve been through so much in what feels like a short time span.” The look he gave Dylan made Laura focus on Mike’s eyes, so dark and conflicted, yet childlike in their openness and blessedly hopeful nature. The churning inside him was coming to the surface and she could taste his fear. What could be the source of this?
“Jill died, then we struggled, we met Laura, we screwed up—”
Her sudden laugh was like a guilty bark, making the baby jolt on Dylan’s shoulder, waking with a start and grousing. No amount of head stroking made a difference, and Dylan gave Mike a sympathetic look.
Mike seemed determined to continue now that he’d given himself permission to really share. “—Laura shut us out, we missed so much of the pregnancy, then the fire…and that’s not even the half of it.”
The fire. That’s right, Laura thought. The fire. Sometimes she blocked it out—needed to forget it—because the implications of what could have happened were too strong. Raising a baby without her mom was hard enough, but remembering how her grandparents died, her own confusion in the flames and smoke in her little apartment, how Dylan preternaturally knew what to do, instinct kicking in for him in a way that it should have for her…ruminating on it was too much.
She felt like a failure. The thought made the smallness return, a tiny ribbon of shame slipping into the cracks of her consciousness, where insecure dragons lurked behind every corner, waiting to attack.
“I can see you pulling away,” Mike said quietly, and she flinched. “It’s not just me.” A storm of emotions bubbled inside her, each feeling flying past as she tried to identify it, too slow and too late. By the time she could even feel anything, the feelings turned into a blur, like a tornado of chaos inside that was so enormous she needed to numb it. Kill it. Cover it.
Feed it.
Pretending it didn’t exist never worked, because the steady spiral of ever-moving tumult inside had a sound of its own, a high-pitched whine that made her vibrate from within. And not in a good way. Leaving her shaky and filled with trepidation, she knew this state only as discomfort.
Mike studied her; she felt his eyes lingering on hers, knew he sought to understand what she was thinking and feeling, and in that moment what she had always felt as extraordinary discomfort turned into a completely different sense.
Authenticity. Vulnerability. A peaceful, if painful, settling in that she could only do with Mike and Dylan. Only.
Ever.
“Hey,” Mike whispered, and then Dylan interrupted as Jillian let out a loud, juicy sound from her diaper region that broke the contemplative moment, shattering the deep resonance she had just begun to feel. Leave it to a baby to strip you bare of any sense of decorum or deep anything. They lived on the very surface of life, all sensation and experience, without any of the baggage adults drag around like anchors weighted with pain.
“Whatever I was thinking has been replaced by a fleeting thought of baby wipes. Do we have enough?” she asked Dylan, who just shook his head with a healthy dose of good humor, waving his hand in front of the stinky baby’s bum.
“We hit Costco last week, so we’d better.” A quick look rippled among the three, an acknowledgement that pragmatics trumped all. And, she hoped, a promise to revisit what had just been a turning point inside her. What it meant, she didn’t know.
Its evolution was more important than its purpose.
“I’m going to go take care of Stinkbug here,” Dylan said quietly, his voice modulated in an attempt to keep the baby calm, though she began to wiggle and fuss, rendering his attempts fairly useless. “I’ll change her and feed her and we’ll go for a nice, long walk,” he declared.
If he’d wiggled his eyebrows and thrown glow-in-the-dark condoms with lit sparklers attached, he couldn’t have been more obvious.
Mike managed to nod, frown, smile and sigh—all at once. “Thanks,” he said. Laura watched Dylan’s back and Jillian’s face as they faded down the hallway, his cooing adorable and Jillian so settled in (one of) her daddy’s arms that she could complain and still be taken care of and love.
That shaky vibration within settled a bit, too, especially when Mike took his hand, large and warm and so assured in its grasp as he reached for her hip and guided her toward the bedroom.
Oh.
Oh.
This was, most definitely, not where she thought their conversation would lead them, and yet it made her breath hitch in a radically different way, her jumbled emotions all convening for a brief meeting to talk amongst themselves, only to emerge twenty seconds later with extraordinary consensus:
Yes.
He wasn’t commanding, but he was clear in his intent, and as Laura felt the familiar need rise up she decided to flip this scenario and focus entirely on him. Maybe she’d taken him a little too for granted when it came to sex and bedroom intimacy, too. Focusing too much on her own newly resurgent sexual needs might have left her a little blind when it came to Mike. Dylan tended to ask openly for what he wanted, more assertive and dominant, while Mike could certainly go alpha when he needed to, but today was an example of how complex he was.
Deep layers and a quiet surface meant that she needed to be more incisive, infer more, when it came to truly being there for him. Right now, what she needed was to give selflessly. Fully. And not take one iota.
Not one bit.
Not even a drop.
Climbing on the bed, she pulled up onto her knees and yanked with more force than she expected, pulling him on to the bed, then straddling him. Without a single word, she untucked his shirt and began to undo his pants.
“Hello there,” he said with a sly purr, hands lacing behind his head, his triceps popping from under his sleeves. The look on his face said, Please, continue.
With a twinkle she hadn’t seen in a while.
“This all right?”
“When is this ever not all right?” he asked, an incredulous tone in his voice, but something unspoken was in the tone. A thank you. A touch of gratitude for knowing what he needed without being asked. Her fingers slid the waistband of his jeans over those carved hips, pulling down, setting him free and unencumbered of the burden of any layers between them. Just what he wanted.