Chapter 25 Sage
SAGE
I am the luckiest single mother of triplets in the world.
I’ve had two months of Ronan showing up with groceries and opinions about my fridge and an apparently limitless patience for sitting on my sofa while I run through website analytics out loud, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, something has shifted in a way that I can’t pretend is just co-parenting.
The babies have changed. Bossy has discovered she can produce a sound that is not quite crying and not quite burbling, but is somewhere in between, a commentary track on the proceedings that she deploys constantly and at volume.
Baldy has grown the most delicate suggestion of blond fuzz on the top of her head, which Leigh cried about and I photographed seventeen times.
Guess I have to change her name at some point.
Boy continues to observe the world with his father’s gravity and occasionally produces a smile of such wholehearted warmth that it stops every adult in the room completely.
I am completely hooked on all three of them. This is not a surprise. What is a surprise is how thoroughly and quietly I have also become hooked on their father.
I call Leigh while Ronan takes the babies out for a walk—he does this every morning, all three in the triple stroller he researched and selected with the same methodical thoroughness he apparently brings to all decisions, and it gives me an hour that is mine, which is both wonderful and disorienting because I’ve forgotten what to do with an hour that is mine.
“Talk me through something,” I say when she picks up.
“Ronan,” she says immediately.
“How did you—”
“Sage. It’s been two months. Talk.”
I sit down on my kitchen counter and look at the ceiling. “I like him. I really, genuinely like him. Not just—not just the obvious stuff, though the obvious stuff is also very much present and accounted for.”
“The silver hair.”
“Among other things.”
“The accent.”
“Leigh.”
“I’m just saying it’s a strong foundation.”
“It’s not about that.” I press my fingers to my eyes.
“He listens. Like, actually listens, the way where you can feel that he’s filing what you say rather than just waiting for his turn to speak.
And he’s funny—like he occasionally says something so dry and precise that it takes me a second to catch it.
And he’s good with them, Leigh. With the babies.
He’s so good with them and not in a showy way. He just shows up and does the thing.”
“That’s called being a good father.”
“I know. I know that’s what it is. I’ve just never had one of those, so seeing it up close is…” I stop, trying to find the right words. “It’s a lot. It does things to me that I’m not prepared for.”
There’s a warmth in Leigh’s silence that I appreciate. “Yeah.”
“My track record is terrible,” I go on. “Connor was the last person I thought I could trust, and he cheated on me and disappeared into a bottle and then dumped me in a foreign country for content purposes. Before Connor, there was Marcus, who turned out to have a whole other girlfriend in Providence. Before Marcus—”
“I know your history.”
“Then you understand my hesitation.”
“I understand it,” she says carefully. “I also think Ronan Callahan is not Marcus or Connor or any of the rest of them, and that two months of his evidence outweighs your historical pattern. But it’s your call, obviously.”
She’s right, and I know she’s right, and the hesitation I’m feeling isn’t really about Ronan—it’s about me.
About the version of me that keeps expecting the floor to drop out, that has learned to brace for it so automatically that I brace even when there’s no reason to.
“He makes me feel like myself. When I’m with him.
I’ve been in relationships where I felt smaller.
Where I was constantly managing how I came across.
With him I just…” I shake my head. “I’m just me. ”
“Then what is there to think about?” Leigh asks. “Seriously.”
“I don’t know,” I admit. “I’m afraid of it going wrong. There’s more on the line now.”
“You’re afraid of everything going wrong.
You always have been. And things go wrong sometimes, and you handle it.
” A pause. “You handled a solo pregnancy, Sage. You handled triplets. You handled Connor proposing while high. If Ronan Callahan turns out to be a disaster, which I don’t think he will, you will handle that too.
Now let me babysit the trio, so you can have a real, grown-up date and try to figure this out. ”
My whole body tightens up. The idea of leaving my babies with someone else, even Leigh, is too much to bear.
But I also need this. “You’re right. I know you’re right.”
“Of course I’m right.”
I grit my teeth. “Okay.”
“Good girl. Now, ask the father of your children out on your first date.”
After I hang up I sit in the kitchen with my coffee, and I take a proper inventory of the past two months.
The groceries. The morning walks with the stroller that he researched for three days before purchasing.
The eggs in top hats, which has apparently become a standing event.
The evenings on the sofa where we watch things neither of us is really watching and talk instead, about everything—my mother, the Callahan Labs legacy and whether he ever felt the pressure of it, the physical education degree, and what I’d do differently if I went back.
The way he listens with his whole attention, the way he asks the second question, the follow-up, the one that means he was actually listening to the first answer.
The way he said, two weeks ago, looking at Boy in his arms, “Sometimes I think he already knows me.” And then looked immediately self-conscious about having said it, and I laughed, and he laughed, and something loosened between us that had been slightly held before.
By the time Ronan comes back with three sleeping babies and windswept silver hair and his coat collar turned up against the cold, I have made my decision official.
Clearly, it shows. He cocks his head. “You have a face on.”
“I have a face on,” I agree. “Leigh offered to babysit for us. I want to take her up on it. So, we can go on a date.”
Something shifts in his expression. Careful, measured, but underneath the measurement is something that is paying very close attention. “A date.”
“A date,” I confirm. “A real one. Out of the baby cottage.”
“I know a restaurant near my place.” He stops. Starts again, which is unusual enough that I notice it. “I’ve been hoping you’d want to try it out.”
“You’ve been hoping,” I say, and I can hear something warm in my own voice that I don’t try to suppress. “How long?”
He looks at me with that particular Ronan directness, the one that still gets me every time because most people don’t look at you like that, like you’re worth the full attention. “Since approximately the plane.”
I laugh. He smiles, and it’s the real one, the one that escapes before he decides to let it out, and I think, yes. That’s what I want. That smile, and the man behind it, and whatever comes next.
The date arrives with the particular energy of a day that has been anticipated.
Leigh shows up at six with her overnight bag and a level of enthusiasm for babysitting that is frankly excessive and which I find deeply endearing.
She holds Baldy and fluffs her hair as she says, “We’re gonna help Mama get laid. ”
I snort at that. “Classy, Leigh.”
She grins and I get dressed in my bedroom with the slightly surreal awareness that I am going on a date. A real one, with a restaurant and everything. Out of my cottage and into the city. Without a baby attached to any part of me.
I put on the green dress I haven’t worn since before the pregnancy, which fits differently now and fits well, and I do something intentional with my hair, slap some lipstick on, and I look in the mirror.
There she is. There’s the person who was in here the whole time.
Ronan picks me up at seven. He’s in a dark jacket and he looks different.
Not less like himself. More, maybe. The collar of a gray sweater under the jacket, his silver hair and the particular way he carries himself, the way he looks at me when I open the door like he’s deciding something and has decided it. “You look beautiful.”
“Thank you,” I say. “So do you.”
His smile grows. “You find me beautiful?”
I roll my eyes. “Come on, smart guy. Before I change my mind.”
The truth is, I do. He’s all refined features and muscles and there’s something intense in his eyes that just does it for me. Call it beauty, call it handsomeness, whatever it is, it works.
The restaurant is exactly what he described. Warm and low-lit, the kind of place where the menu is short because everything on it is excellent and they don’t need to do too much.
We get a corner table and wine I don’t know enough about to have opinions on and he explains it to me without condescension, which I clock and appreciate.
My steak is extraordinary. I eat with the enthusiasm of someone who has been subsisting on whatever is fastest to prepare for two months, and he watches me with the smile that still gets me.
“What?” I say.
“Nothing. I like watching you enjoy things.”
I consider this. “That’s either very sweet or slightly concerning.”
“Probably both,” he says, which makes me laugh, and the evening settles into the ease that I’ve been hoping for and slightly afraid of. The ease of two people who have been building toward something and are finally in the space to let it be what it is.
What that is scares the bejeezus out of me, but it’s also the only path forward, because I can’t stop myself with Ronan.
We talk for two hours over dinner and a second bottle of wine. When the topic of my half a degree comes up, I tell him, “I want to have done it. I want to know that when life got complicated I still chose to finish a thing I started.”
“That’s a good reason,” he says.
“But you don’t think I need it.”
“I think you don’t need it for the reasons people usually do it. I think you need it for a better reason. You need it for you.”
I look at him across the table. “You say things like that and you expect me to just… what? Carry on eating?”
He smiles, slow and deliberate. “I expect you to carry on eating, yes. The duck is excellent. Try a bite.” He feeds me a bite of his duck, and like most times, he’s right.
We walk to his place after. It’s cold and the streets are quiet, and somewhere between the restaurant and the corner of his block the distance between us closes until we’re walking close enough that our shoulders touch, and then his hand finds mine, and I look up at him and he looks down at me and we stop walking.
He presses me gently into the shadow of the alley entrance, and I go, and when his hand slides beneath my coat and finds my hip, I make a sound that I’m not proud of, but I don’t regret.
He doesn’t kiss me immediately. That would be too simple for him. He tips his forehead to mine in the way he did in my doorway two months ago and breathes me in before he murmurs, “I’ve been wanting to do this for a very long time.”
“Do what?”
He tips his head to the side and whispers, “This.” His hand slides from my hip to my ass and grips. “Might I continue?”
Continue touching me in neglected places? “If you don’t, I’ll become very cross with you.”
He chuffs a laugh before he kisses me. His lips taste like wine, and his tongue slips into my mouth, making me dizzier. I curl my leg around his, trying to grind against anything I can. I need his friction.
The next thing I know, his hand slides between my thighs and up my dress. “Let me touch you.”
I nod and lean back against the rough brick wall behind me. His touch is feathery at first. Unhurried. But then he leans one hand on the wall and stares into my eyes as his fingertips slip around my lacy underwear and finally, there.
My whole world shrinks to his fingertips and their electric touch.
I make unholy sounds as he draw circles around my clit. I’d be worried, but I’ve been wet since before we left the restaurant, and I was cleared by my doctor two weeks ago for anything I might want to do with Ronan. The advice was to go slow.
We’ve been going slow for two months. I’m going so slow that I’m losing my mind.
Not now, though. Just as Ronan’s fingers dip into me, he presses against me with another searing kiss.
He touches me just right—his palm on my clit, pressing, his fingers finding the other good spot, the one inside.
I grip his shoulders for balance, or I’ll fall.
He knows it too—his sounds have gone from not much to this low growl I feel in my marrow.
I palm him over his trousers, and he flexes against me, grinding into my hand. Makes my core clench around his fingers. If I wasn’t terrified of getting caught, I’d insist on more right here in this alleyway. I want to make him come. Want to taste him. Feel him.
But our kids can’t have both of their parents get arrested in the same night, so I hold back. It’s the only thing I hold back.
“Close,” I hiss in his mouth.
“Come for me, love.”
The orgasm that follows steals my breath, and I nearly fall. I’ve tried in the shower, hoping to figure out my new anatomy on my own before taking it for a test drive. But I couldn’t do it. I got close and chickened out. I wasn’t sure if it would hurt.
It doesn’t hurt. I’m too floaty to think straight.
Oh, right. I was touching him.
Just as I start to go to my knees for him, he keeps me on my feet. “Not here. Let’s go to mine.”
I nod and let him lead me out of the alley.