“I couldn’t sleep. I was still thinking about that conversation we had with Ricky tonight.”
He stilled. “Which part?”
She paused for a long minute, turning back from Ricky’s door to peer at Rook through the darkness. “Do you ever just marvel at how young we were when we had Ricky?”
Understanding hit him. “Every day it becomes a little clearer to me, I think, how young we were. I mean, just look at her.” He gestured in at where Ricky lay asleep curled on one side, smack dab in the middle of the bed. Moonlight arced across her, turning her black hair into an inky puddle on her pillow. He was immediately swamped with love for her. “She’s sleeping just like she did when she was a toddler, all curled up like that. She’s so freaking young. And she’s only like two years younger than you were when we got pregnant. We were babies, May.”
“Yeah,” she agreed softly. May leaned forward and closed Ricky’s door, headed toward the stairs. For a moment, Rook wondered if she was ending their conversation just as abruptly, but halfway down the stairs, she turned back to him, one hand on the banister, and gestured with her head for him to follow her.
He bounded quietly down the stairs after her, feeling like a middle schooler who’d just gotten asked to dance by a pretty girl.
“But I didn’t feel like a baby,” she continued their conversation as she led them through the bunker and toward her room. “I felt like a grown up. I felt like a mother. Pretty much as soon as I got pregnant I felt like a mother.”
Rook followed her across the threshold of her room and tried not to think too hard on it. May went to sit crosslegged on her bed and he pulled out the desk chair and dragged it over, propping his crossed ankles next to her and leaning back on two legs of the chair to survey the ceiling. He considered her words carefully.
“You have always been such a good mom. Right from the start. But me? I was way too young to have a kid.” He scrubbed at his beard, at the back of his neck, caught a glance of her expression and knew he had to explain himself further. “Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t change a second of it. I would never do it differently. But my little, horny, teenager Neanderthal brain was so unready for what it meant to be a dad.”
He tipped back down onto all four legs of the chair and studied her. To his surprise, May wasn’t bristling. She merely nodded.
“Well, they say your brain doesn’t stop developing until you’re twenty-five. I think in a lot of ways we were too young. But that’s just the hand we were dealt.”
“Twenty-five? Wow.” He paused. Reality sunk in. “That’s how old you were when you asked for a divorce.”
“You didn’t give it to me until we were twenty-six.” She looked up at him, her expression measured and honest. “Sometimes I think we were too young to get married—”
He held up a hand to stop her from talking. Her words were like a magic spell. They made him instantly feel sick. He didn’t want to hear this, couldn’t hear this. That she felt that their marriage had been the mistake of two stupid kids.
“May, you know how you said that you felt like a mother right away?” he asked her. “That you were young, but it still felt right?” He made sure he had her eyes. “Well, that’s how I felt about being a husband. I knew I was young, but it didn’t matter to me. It just made sense. It felt right. I don’t regret it. No matter how young we were.”
May leaned back on her hands and pinned him with a look. “You didn’t let me finish. I was going to say that maybe we were too young to get married… but we were also too young to get a divorce.”
His stomach belly-flopped off the skydive. “What do you mean?”
May sighed and let her head drop back to look at the ceiling. He tried to ignore his Godzilla heart and recrossed his feet at the ankle to give himself something to do while she gathered her thoughts.
“I mean that when I was twenty-five I felt complete. Like I’d finally turned into the person I’d always meant to be. I had my degree. I had my dreams, I had this kickass kid.” She picked her head back up and looked him right in the eye. “And there wasn’t really room in my life for my feelings for you anymore. In my head, all the things that had held me back could be tied back to you somehow.”
Rook reeled back as if she’d slapped him but she just tumbled on as if she hadn’t noticed his reaction. “I didn’t go to school for so long because I couldn’t make it work as a single parent while you were gone. I lost friends because I was always at home with Ricky. I didn’t have a man to hold me at night. And in my head, all of that was because I was so crazy in love with you and so crazy mad at you at the same time. I think I thought that now that I had so much of what I’d always wanted, if I cut you out, I could have the rest of it. I thought of myself like a sailboat and you like an anchor. If I cut the line, then I could sail away.”
“May.” He landed his feet flat on the floor, needing the stability of the earth underneath him.
She shook her head at herself and laughed humorlessly. “But it was a silly way to think about it. A young way to think about it. Because I never thought that I’d end up right back here. Six years later and a different person than I was back then.” When she looked up at him this time, her eyes were glazed with tears. “I keep thinking that now that I’m here, in this particular moment, I’m the person I was always meant to be. That this is who I’ll be forever. But I never realize that tomorrow I’ll be different and so on and so forth. I never realize that I’m going to keep growing and changing until the day I die. And either you make it work with someone or you don’t. But there’s never going to be perfection. Life is work.”
“May,” he tried again.
“I never thought I’d be back here, Javi.”
“Where’s here?” he asked quietly, praying he understood what she was implying, and terrified that he was about to misinterpret what she was saying.
She stood up off the bed and paced over to the window, looking out at the sky that was supposed to be black, but was instead dyed an orange-gray from the city lights. He thought for a moment that she wasn’t going to answer him. But then she spoke again. “I’ve been so many different people in my life, lived through so many different phases, constantly evolving. Sometimes, I look back and barely recognize myself. But you know the one thing that every version of myself had in common?”
She turned back around, crossing her arms across her chest. There were no more tears in her eyes, only a ferocity that he could barely translate.
“Loving you,” she answered her own question.
“May.”
“That’s why I say I was too young to divorce you, because I didn’t see it yet. I thought that leaving you was going to help me discover who I really am.”
She turned back to the window, the shadows dipping lovingly into the half inch of lower back that showed between her tank top and her yoga pants. Her hair was black fire over one shoulder. “I didn’t know that loving you defines me as much as anything else ever will. It’s not that I can’t be me without you, it’s that you’re the lens that helps me to see myself. You’re the only thing that ever helped bring me into focus. And I kicked you straight out of my life.”
Even from here he could see her knuckles had gone white where she gripped the doorjamb. He rose slowly from the chair, so freaking terrified that somehow the world was going to disrupt this moment, this fragile mood that was about to change the course of his life. “What are you saying, May?”
“I’m saying exactly what I’m saying. I was too young to get a divorce. Like a toddler playing with knives. I hurt us both.”
“I should never have agreed to it. I knew it was wrong. I should have pushed back.”
“You tried, Javi. You fought me for a year. You can’t make someone stay when they want to leave so badly.”
“But you didn’t want to leave, May.” He took two more steps toward her turned back. “And I knew that back then. You didn’t want a different future, you wanted a different past. When you divorced me, it wa
sn’t because you wanted to cut me out of your future, you were still trying to make sense of the fact that I’d cut you out of my past.”
She turned then, and there were barely two feet between them. She didn’t seem to notice. She seemed as hypnotized by this conversation as he was. “You didn’t cut me out, Javi. I’m not too selfish to understand that. You had a duty to do. Your country, your family. You did what was best.”
“I never should have left like that, May. God, it’s so clear to me now. I had no idea how to explain what I needed to do, my thought process, so I just left and hoped that one day you’d understand.”
“I still don’t understand. Not really.”
“But you’re calm… and being sweet,” he marveled, his eyes tracing every inch of her. “You’re never sweet and calm about something you don’t understand.”
She laughed through tears and pushed off the window sill, ducking around him and heading over to her suitcase. She pulled out a hair tie from one pocket and piled her hair onto her head in a messy knot. He knew from experience that this was step one of her bedtime routine. His heart galloped with nerves. Was she about to kick him out? Put an end to this magical, mercurial mood between them?
“Sometimes it’s really annoying how well you know me,” she told him drily. “I can be calm and sweet right now because I’ve accepted the fact that even though I didn’t—don’t—understand why you enlisted, you did it because you loved me. Everything you did back then was because you loved me.”
“May.”
She paused at the doorway to her ensuite bathroom, obviously about to go in and dismiss him. And then she did something that utterly and completely flabbergasted him. She turned on her heel and walked back over to the bed. She pulled herself back up and crossed her legs, balancing her chin in one hand. She wasn’t dismissing him. She wasn’t ending this conversation.
“I’m listening, Javi. I’m listening now, if you wanted to try.”
He lowered himself slowly back into the chair. “You… want me to explain why I enlisted?”
She nodded.
His thoughts whirled and he fought to gather them. He’d answered this question for her a hundred times in his head. He knew exactly what the answer was. But that didn’t stop his pounding heart from getting lodged in his throat. They were freaking communicating. And well. And calmly. If he’d had a Fourth of July sparkler, he would have lit it up and written her name in the air.
“Well, you know my dad. Rigid, unyielding, military man. Raising kids was women’s work to him. Until I got old enough to be an interesting military prospect, he barely even spoke to me. I didn’t even really realize that dads were supposed to be hands-on with their kids when they were young. I had no blueprint for how to be a good dad.” He dragged a hand over his face. “I really meant what I said about feeling blindsided about becoming a father but being ready to be a husband. I think, in a way, I just thought to myself, one thing at a time. I figured if I could be a good husband to you, then I could figure out the dad thing in time.”
“Which is exactly what happened.”
He snorted. “Thank you for the vote of confidence, but no, that’s not what happened. If I’d actually been a good husband, I wouldn’t have left like that. I would have listened to you when you begged me to come home.”
“I didn’t beg,” she retorted with an imperious sniff.
He smiled and rocked his chair back, on much more even footing now that he’d begun. “I just didn’t think it would be possible to be a good husband to you unless I was providing. And I didn’t have another way to provide that didn’t involve years of technical school or college, and who was gonna pay for that? Certainly not my folks, who thought the military was my only choice. And I couldn’t ask you to take on debt, not with the baby on the way.”
She nodded, like all of that made sense, and had most likely occurred to her before. And then a question came into her eyes. One that obviously made her nervous to ask. “Did any part of you… look forward to it? To forging out on your own? Leaving Brooklyn behind?”
He cleared his throat even as his eyes filled. “… Yes. I guess it sounded really romantic to me. Going out into the world and doing brave shit, all while I had a pretty wife waiting for me back home.”
He couldn’t stop himself from sliding from the chair onto the bed, shoulder to shoulder with her. She stiffened, but it wasn’t because he was sitting next to her. Her body was braced against that very uncomfortable truth, the idea that he’d wanted bigger things for himself than she and Brooklyn had to offer back then.
He also couldn’t stop himself from throwing an arm around her shoulder and pressing his forehead into her hair. He didn’t want to hurt her, but he knew just how important the truth was at a moment like this. “But it wasn’t to get away from you, May. It was to—God, I can’t believe I’m admitting this. It was mostly to impress you.”
“Impress me?” She pulled back from him and searched his expression in the lamplight. Her onyx eyes threatened to drown him. She looked haughty and vulnerable all at once, a chord that only May could ever strike with such perfection.
He nodded.
“I knew we had something special,” he told her. “But I don’t think I realized yet just how special it was. I didn’t realize that, like, nobody loved as hard as we did. I think a part of me still didn’t quite believe that you’d chosen me. I’d loved you from afar for so long, you were so kind and wild and funny and beautiful. Literally every guy I knew had been a little in love with you at some point. I wanted to be worthy of you, May. And would I be worthy of you as a mechanic or an electrician or a welder? Now, I understand that, yes, I would have been. You would have loved me just the same as long as I was working hard and coming home to you and Ricky. But in my pea-sized teenage brain, I needed some grandiose occupation. Something that only really special people could do. I wanted to be special for you.”
She considered that for a long time before she turned back to him, into the circle of his arm, one of her knees pressing into the side of his thigh. “You don’t mean that you wanted to impress me. You mean that you wanted me to be proud of you.”
He sagged. Because it was a simple truth, but it was also deeply undeniable.
“The way your mother was of your dad,” she continued. She seemed to be realizing it all at once, putting all the pieces together.
“My parents don’t have the healthiest relationship, obviously. But yeah, she’s always been damn proud of my dad’s service.”
“Of being an army wife,” May supplied before she folded forward and jammed her forehead against his shoulder. “And, oh my god, there I was, griping and whining about it at every turn. Making you feel terrible. Fighting with you every time you had to leave.”
“Don’t beat yourself up, baby. That’s just the way it was. We both made major mistakes and that’s where we landed.”
She groaned and rocked her head back and forth on his shoulder like she was trying to erase her actions in the past. When she looked up, there was certainty in her eyes. “Javi, you never would have been satisfied with being a mechanic or electrician. It’s good work, but you needed to work with a team. That’s always been true of you.”
“I know. I know that now. It took a long time to forgive myself, but I finally understand it. I made the right choice, enlisting. I just didn’t communicate about in the right way.”
“Neither of us did.” She lifted her head from his shoulder and neatly smoothed the cuff of his T-shirt. “Javi, were you proud of you? Everything you did over there?
He thought for a long time. In many ways, he didn’t think that was a question he’d be able to answer for a very long time. “Yes. I certainly don’t regret my service, May. Not even the IED. And, ironically, I think serving with some of those guys, it’s actually what taught me how to be a good dad.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I definitely didn’t learn it from either one of our dads.”
May sn
orted in agreement.
“Not to belittle our dads, they’ve done their best. But they’re not exactly nurturing.”
“Or engaged. Or very nice.”
Rook laughed. “Yeah. But a lot of the guys I served with, they were dads. They were these badass soldiers and really good fathers and husbands. I watched them write letters to their kids and call every second they could. And video chat. I watched them cry when their kids called to say they’d graduated from second grade. I watched them kiss photos of their kids every time they left the base. Let me tell you, it was a bitter pill to swallow at first.”
“To realize that you could be a military man and a caring father all at once?”
He wasn’t surprised that she understood so instantly and succinctly.
He nodded. “And to realize that my dad just… hadn’t been that. And not because men who were in the military couldn’t, which was what I’d always told myself.” Rook’s eyes got distant. “Knowing what I know now, I’m sure my pops has some form of PTSD. And I don’t blame him. I wish he’d get help, I’ve tried to talk him into it. But you know him. Therapy is a curse word in our house.”
“You know what else is ironic?” May said in that candid way of hers. “That you enlisted in order to be a good husband, when you didn’t really know how to be a good dad. But it turned out that the military made you a great dad and a pretty shitty husband.”
For some reason, that comment just hit a release valve for both of them and they exploded into laughter. Long, cathartic laughter that felt as if it were scrubbing them clean with rough, thorough bristles. They sagged against one another in a friendly, comfortable way.
“You know I don’t really mean that, right?” she asked him, a long while later, wiping tears of mirth from her eyes. “You were an excellent husband. We just had no idea how to tell each other how we were really feeling.”
“You were an excellent wife.”
She scoffed. “I was not. I was moody and rude and withholding, and you know it.”
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