Stay With Me 2

by Jessica Aniston

  “Lea?” she tries, resisting the urge to flinch back. The thing is so strange, she doesn’t know if she can get over it.

  “No,” Declan says, unenthusiastic.

  “Cally?”

  “No,” he makes a face like he thinks she’s strange.

  “Casthuria?”

  “No.”

  Karin huffs in mild frustration, feeling Gorman hover behind her shoulder and then moving around them to get them in one frame.

  “Oh lord, well what do you want then?” Karin asks her best friend, no acting necessary for her exasperation. “You can’t say no to everything.”

  “Declan Junior,” Declan jokes.

  “She’s a girl,” Karin reminds him snippily.

  “Gender is fluid,” Declan reminds her, matching her tone.

  “You’re fluid,” she mocks, sticking her tongue out at him like a child would. “Alright fine. Let’s go gender neutral then. Josh.”

  “Hm,” Declan considers, looks like he’s turning the name over in his head. “Josh Shelton. I like that.”

  “Oh, she’s getting your last name, huh?” Karin teases, feeling funny because honestly, this whole setup is ridiculous.

  “Josh Hanson-Shelton is fine, too,” Declan shrugs and finally puts the baby back down into her carrier.

  “No, just Shelton is fine,” Karin concedes with a smile. “Better for the Bronstownian acceptance.”

  Two weeks later in Bronstown, there is roaring applause at this line.

  “Any baby of ours is going to be accepted in Bronstown no matter the last name,” Declan promises her and she thinks he’s right. Not even in their sad little alternative universe, but in real life too. If in some strange world, Declan and her had a baby, his community would embrace him or her like they had embraced Karin all those years ago.

  “Well then Josh is all set for life,” Karin says, giving up the fight and deciding to make an honest effort to act like this whole challenge isn’t equal parts absolutely strange and really dumb.

  Then their plastic child starts screaming again.

  “She thinks so too,” Declan says to Karin and then reaches to get the doll back into his arms to comfort her, only this time Josh is not appeased until Declan has tried feeding her unsuccessfully and then laid her on her back on the desk, actually going so far as to spreading the changing pad on the surface so that their fake child doesn’t get cold or get non-existent dirty diaper contents on the slick designer furniture by accident.

  “She gets this from your side of the family,” Declan quips as he starts unbuttoning Josh’s tiny pink jumper and gets to work on changing her quickly and efficiently.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever be good at that,” Karin mutters once he is done, hovering behind him as he puts the silent doll back into the carrier once more.

  “How many times have you done it?” he asks her and Karin is worried for a second that this is bad for their cover because probably he should know if they truly were a couple? But then again they have known each other for so many years and it’s never came up before.

  “None and a half, maybe?” she jokes, not even attempting to act like she has any idea about children.

  “Whoa there, really? That’s a lifetime skill, Rinny,” Declan teases her. “Next time, I’ll teach you.”

  The next time happens when they have already divided into filming teams and Gorman has moved Karin and Declan and their fake daughter to the second TV and media room, which is fittingly called the “kids media room” in the villa’s floor plan. Declan tries rocking Josh at first, before he hands the doll to Karin and goes for the diaper bag. He starts setting up the impromptu changing station on the floor next to the grey leather couch Karin sits on, holding Josh gingerly until Declan is ready to take her again.

  “Alright, look here,” he says once he puts the ‘baby’ on her back, then reaches for Karin’s hand and pulls her down to sit beside him. “Most importantly, in case you’ve got the kid on an elevated surface to change, you always keep one hand on the baby, so it can’t roll off. If she’s on the floor, it’s fine. Just make sure there are s no small things lying around that she can put in her mouth and swallow. Those are choking hazards.”

  He sounds like a teacher, perhaps even a coach, and it makes Karin’s body hum all over, which is a strange sensation. It feels like it does when someone braids her hair or does her makeup, all tingling and warm and being cared for. He’s taking his time to show her how something works that she doesn’t know about yet and there is something about it that makes her a little bit woozy. That makes her a little hot and bothered, even. Enough to completely ignore the crying robot voice of their artificial offspring. She scoots a little closer to him as he rummages around in the diaper bag, going step by step, wanting to be close, wanting to hear his voice carry over the noise like it does when she watches him coach at the dance studio sometimes.

  “Next you get all of your things,” he continues. “Like the new diaper, the wipes and the crème and baby powder, like so.” He arranges it all neatly beside the motionless, little plastic body. “Then go see what you’re working with.” Declan undoes the jumper again and the diaper tags, too. “Let’s pretend this is a giant pile of baby business,” he says, gesturing over the spotless diaper like he imagines a violent green-brownish Jackson Pollock there. Karin decides that her baby had spinach, but maybe she can’t have food like that yet. Can she? How old do kids need to be to be able to eat spinach? Karin has no idea.

  “Let’s,” she agrees anyway and makes a face like she can smell the mess.

  “You have to lift the legs, like so,” Declan instructs and grabs Karin’s hand from her knee, working her fingers around his to then pick up the doll by her ankles and hold both the firm plastic and her hand in his grip and uses his free hand to start maneuvering the diaper off.

  “Keep the legs high and take off the diaper with one hand, and try not to get the stuff everywhere when you close it up again,” Declan narrates as he executes the task. “Tape the flaps down and done.”

  He puts the ‘dirty’ diaper to the side, still helping her hold up the baby as he grabs a couple of baby wipes from the package by his feet. “Then wipe down well. But you see, this is important: For boys and girls, always wipe away from the sex, so there’s no chance of bacteria getting in there. Always away, that’s very important. Then check the back for smears too and all the wrinkles, especially if you have a fat baby.”

  Karin laughs, imagining Declan with a very fat baby, sort of like a little infant Buddha. It’s a sweet mental picture.

  “Alright, then put baby cream on, especially if there’s redness,” Declan goes on, undeterred by her giggles. “Put the new diaper under the butt like so and finish with generous amounts of baby powder.” He just pretends to put products on the doll, because production has told them to please not do that since cleaning the dolls is a pain because of their specially textured ‘skin’ covering.

  “Let the feet down softly,” Declan finishes his instructions, doing as he tells her. “Adjust the diaper in the front by pulling gently, close up with the tape, careful that it fits snugly but not too tight. There, you’re done.” He looks at her, grins, and then looks back at the finished project. The doll looks exactly as it did before but Karin feels accomplished anyway, even if she didn’t do anything more than hold some legs.

  “You changed your first baby, Rinny,” Declan remarks, as if she had done it herself. “I’m proud of you.”

  “Why are you so good at this?” she wonders instead of taking the compliment because she doesn’t feel like she deserves it. He shrugs at her.

  “If it’s a real one I like doing it a lot actually,” he replies. “It’s like a really nice moment to bond. It’s just you and the kid and they’re very curious about what you’re doing, it’s quite adorable. They’re probably thankful as well that they don’t have to sit in their mess anymore.”

  He beams at her in remembrance of those moments and he looks so
happy and pleased, she can’t really contain it in her chest. She knows Gorman’s camera is still capturing every moment, so she has a good cover for leaning over, twinkling her eyes at Declan so he knows it’s coming, and kissing him softly on the lips. He kisses her back for a long, wonderful moment.

  “I think we’re great at this baby thing,” Declan murmurs after the kiss, still hovering close to her face and she thinks it’s so quiet they’re going to have to put subtitles on the frame in post production. They do.

  She hums an affirmation, not feeling like leaning out quite yet, and so she stays there a bit, close to his face, looking down on their doll and for the first time, she feels an odd sense of affection for it. It’s like pretending she’s real is finally starting to work. But the problem is that it doesn’t last longer than two o’clock in the morning, because by then, the little thing has cried on the dot every three hours, evidently getting increasingly louder the later it gets, and Karin has a mind to just rip the batteries out of the hellish robot and be done with it.

  “Why?” she whines dramatically, rubbing her eyes with her knuckles in the dim light of her nightstand light, rocking the doll exasperatedly on her chest. “God, I hate this. Why the hell do we have to do this at night, they aren’t even filming this,” she groans, almost louder than the doll’s frantic screeching.

  “Well, if they want to measure our data on how we’re dealing with them, they probably need the content: less than 24 hours with them probably doesn’t make for a very comprehensive evaluation.”

  “Do you have to be so smart in the middle of the night?” she accuses him, only half-kidding. She stops herself from shaking the plastic baby, if only for the reason that they’ll know she did it come morning. “I never want to have kids,” she declares, glaring daggers at the little monster.

  “Come on, it’s different when they’re real and when they’re yours,” Declan hums, moving in closer to her and rubs his palm up and down her back soothingly.

  “I haven’t slept a wink, Declan,” she complains. “I don’t care if that thing was real and mine, I hate it.”

  “You really don’t want kids?” he asks her, his voice so low and raw it makes her turn to look at him. She finds something bare there, open enough to make her honest.

  “No, I do,” she tells him. “Eventually. Just not right now. This is exhausting.”

  “Yes, not yet,” Declan agrees, his hand still moving across her pajama shirt.

  “It’s just such a big thing, you know,” she muses. “You need to love someone a whole lot to get into this with them.”

  “Yes,” he agrees absent-mindedly, turning his attention back to the fake baby and so she does, too.

  “I don’t know if I’ll ever find someone like that,” she mutters, keeping the ‘unless it was with you’-part of the sentence to herself.

  “Someone you love enough to have babies with?” he asks and then his eyes are tracing her face once more.

  “Or someone who loves me enough,” she shrugs.

  “Oh, I think you’ll be fine,” he breathes, sounding older than his years for once, his voice dropping so far into his throat. “You’re hard not to love.”

  They’re looking at each other and once again, even though she swore to herself she would stop thinking about it, she wonders if he’s trying to tell her something after all. If maybe there’s a chance, but no. It’s no use. She’ll just drive herself crazy with this, she’s been here too many times in her life, she can’t keep doing it. He’s being a good, supportive friend. If Mia or Luna or Kimberly told her this, she’d take it at face value, too. He’s just reassuring her that one day someone who is not him will come around and fall in love with her and be sure enough about it to go the distance. To take the plunge and start building a life, a family with her. It just won’t be him.

  The fake baby keeps crying in Karin’s arms but she barely hears it, she’s too enraptured in the stillness of his face and how it’s making his eyes look even wilder, like there’s a storm raging behind them. So when the baby hiccups and his head snaps around, she feels immediately like an idiot because he’s obviously been listening, his attention had been on the doll as he stared at her. He wasn’t looking at her at all, he was looking through her.

  “The sound is a bit different, isn’t it?” Declan mutters and snags the doll from her arms cautiously, as if it was a real baby, breaking up whatever moment they obviously didn’t have entirely. “She only does the hiccups when she’s hungry.” He scoots away from Karin so he can lean against the headboard. “If you pass me the bottle I can feed the monster and you can just sleep a bit, alright? I got her when she wakes up again. I don’t want you to be grumpy in the morning.”

  Karin is a bit peeved at that but it doesn’t mean that come morning, he doesn’t turn out right. But, yes, of course she is grumpy. In spite of him doing the remainder of the work through the night, her sleep has still been light and patchy and when she meets Rickard by the coffee maker in the morning, seeing the bleary-eyed frustration carved into his features is like looking into an unflattering mirror.

  “How was your night?” Karin asks him, adding a bit of milk and sugar to her mug-full of coffee.

  “Terrible,” Rickard groans, following her for his own serving of caffeine resurrection. “We barely slept. How do they get these dolls so loud?”

  “Why did we have to go through this when they didn’t even film us?” she blurts out.

  Rickard tilts his head at her: “But I thought they did? Didn’t Marietta say they turned on the night-vision cams in the rooms just for last night?”

  “What?” Karin asks, suddenly running way hotter than the breeze coming in from outside should allow. “When did she say that?”

  “Before she left. Come to think of it, I don’t even know if you were there for that ... ” Rickard answers and then laughs. “Why, did you get frisky in there last night?”

  “No we didn’t,” Karin says, trying for nonchalance when in reality her brain is going a million miles a minute, remembering the things Declan and her had said to each other the night before, about her never finding someone to have kids with. She had said it to her pretend boyfriend - on tape now, apparently. “We I might have just shook the baby a bit,” she makes up as she goes, thinking that this would be sufficiently unfortunate to not want to have caught on camera. “When are we starting to shoot today?”

  “Twelve, I think,” Rickard replies. That leaves Karin with an hour.

  An hour to go find the security room and somehow delete the recording before the production company can find and air it to give their game away. This is not to say that she thinks they would but they might. Since at the end of this whole thing, Karin and Declan have to get the country’s vote on their fake love, she better make those sound-bites disappear. She awkwardly clinks her mug against Rickard’s and ducks away from him apologetically, careful not to look suspicious. It’s difficult considering that her face is an open page, but if they’re to make it to the end of the competition and keep their secret, Karin has to make this work.

  “I have to take this to Declan,” she tells him, a little too high-pitched maybe, but still determined. “He was such a trooper last night.”

  Karin is mindful not to start running until she is safely around the corner, and then sprints the rest of the way to the room, spilling coffee carelessly left and right.

  “Declan,” she exhales when she crashes into the room and he’s sitting there with his shirt off, in the boxers he slept in, balancing a mewling doll on his lap before raising it high, so he’s holding it under its stiff arms, pretending like he’s playing airplane with it. It so seems that she just walked in on Declan playing with dolls at twenty five years old. He startles like he’s embarrassed but then actually apologizes to the bundle of machinery in his hands. She has to sigh deeply before she can go on.

  “We have a problem,” she announces eventually, setting the mug on the dresser to be forgotten about entirely. “You need
to help me. Bring the baby.” When he doesn’t move she uses her whole body to gesture him to hurry up and move. “Just get over here, I’ll explain on the way.”

  She does once he follows, cradling the doll to his body, walking deliberately, and this whole acting like the bunch of plastic and wires is real is getting a bit out of hand. Huffing, she takes him by the hand to get him to move faster while she gets close to describe the situation to him: that they might get made from their bedroom’s surveillance camera footage and that he needs to play lookout for her when she sneaks into the security room in the basement and takes care of it. Thankfully, he seems to understand and quickens his step accordingly. They race down the hall, careful not to step on the milky-brown splashes of coffee Karin spilled onto the floor, and then try to act normal as they pass the living room where Kaidan and Kaelan are ‘feeding’ their own doll and wave hello.

  “How did you both sleep?” Kaelan asks.

  “Not great,” Declan sighs. “Kids, you know…”

  “Yes, we’re trying to walk it off,” Karin adds and then turns her face into a cutesy apology and drags Declan on and into the foyer, where the staircase winds up onto the second floor and down into the basement. The whole time, she looks over her shoulder nervously, like they’re in a heist movie. She’s scared that Grace and Mimi might come down the stairs, afraid that their bare feet tapping on the marble floor are too loud, and terrified that the baby will start making dinosaur noises again as soon as Declan has taken his post at the security system monitoring room at the end of the dark, somewhat dusty hallway in the basement. It’s the last door on the right, just opposite of the laundry room. To their dismay, it’s firmly locked.