1. Az
— ? —
Az
Seven years since that doorstep. Five years of marriage. Eleven weeks of this secret growing inside me that still doesn’t feel real.
And right now, Eli is sitting cross-legged on our bedroom floor, his face pressed against my stomach, singing absolute nonsense to our baby.
“And then the dragon ate all the pizza,” he’s saying, half-singing, half-speaking in that ridiculous voice he only uses when he thinks no one is listening. “And the pizza was spicy. Too spicy. The dragon had indigestion for a week.”
“That’s not a song.”
“It’s a song about a dragon who makes poor dietary choices.” He doesn’t look up, just keeps his cheek pressed to the barely-there curve of my belly. “It’s educational.”
“It’s deeply weird.”
“Our baby should know about the dangers of spicy pizza early. Prevention is key.”
I run my fingers through his hair, that dark wavy mess that still curls at the ends when it’s damp, and a homesick ache cracks open in my chest. This.
This is what I missed. This is what I’ve been starving for while he’s been gone, while he’s been everywhere that isn’t here, while his voice comes to me from strangers’ phones in grocery stores and coffee shops and the restaurant where I ate dinner alone three nights ago because he was in a different time zone, again, always again.
But he’s here now. He’s here, on our bedroom floor, singing about dragons to our baby, and I want to freeze this moment.
Trap it in amber. Keep it somewhere safe so I can pull it out later when he’s gone again, when the house is empty and I’m talking to the walls and Whiskers is the only living thing who’s touched me in weeks.
“How’s the dragon doing in there?” Eli asks my stomach. “Blink twice if you can hear me.”
“The baby can’t answer you.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I actually do know that. I’ve been reading-”
“Boring science books?” He finally looks up at me, grinning, and god, his face.
I forget, sometimes, when all I have are the screens and the distance and the memories.
I forget how much his face does to me. The sharp jaw, the light stubble, the way his eyes crinkle at the corners when he smiles like this.
“The baby doesn’t need science. The baby needs stories about dragons. ”
“The baby needs you to make breakfast before I eat my own hand.”
“Demanding.” But he’s already getting up, pressing one last kiss to my stomach before he stands. “Stay. I’ll bring it to you.”
“I can come to the kitchen-”
“Stay.” He points at me with mock severity. “You’re growing a whole human. You get breakfast in bed.”
I watch him leave, all six-foot-three of him, tattoos peeking out from under his t-shirt, shoulders that still look like they could carry the world.
I remember the first time I saw those shoulders, in a dive bar, under dim lights, carrying a battered guitar onto a makeshift stage.
I remember thinking he looked like someone who knew how to be alone.
He’s still good at that, it turns out. Being alone. He just does it in hotel rooms now, in green rooms, in the back of tour buses with Brynn and the crew and the label and everyone who isn’t me.
Stop, I tell myself. He’s here. He’s right here. Stop.
I press my palm flat against my stomach, feeling nothing yet but knowing she’s there.
Or he. We don’t know yet; we’re waiting for the blood-test results, but I’ve already started thinking of the baby as she and I don’t know why.
Intuition, maybe. Or just the desperate hope that if I have a daughter, I’ll be able to give her everything my mother never gave me.
Eli’s voice drifts back from the kitchen, still half-singing, something about eggs and dragons and a baby who’s going to have the weirdest bedtime stories in history.
Two and a half years ago, everything changed.
One song went viral, some TikTok thing I still don’t fully understand, and suddenly my husband wasn’t just mine anymore.
He belonged to everyone. The late-night shows and the arena tours and the streaming numbers and the fans who knew his schedule better than I did.
The team: Abbie handling publicity through Halo, VTG representing him, Grayson coordinating the touring deals.
And Brynn. Always Brynn.
Stop.
The smell of eggs reaches me, and bacon, and butter sizzling, maybe toast, and my stomach growls so loud that I actually laugh. I wasn’t kidding about eating my own hand.
Eli appears in the doorway a few minutes later, carrying a tray with a plate of perfectly scrambled eggs, bacon, toast cut into triangles (the way I like it, even though I’ve never asked him to do that), and a glass of orange juice.
“Room service,” he announces, setting the tray across my lap. “Five stars on Yelp.”
“This is incredible.” I pick up a piece of bacon and shove the whole thing in my mouth. “You’re incredible. I take back everything I’ve ever said about your cooking.”
“You’ve only ever said nice things about my cooking.”
“I was being sarcastic most of those times.”
He clutches his chest, mock-wounded, and sits on the edge of the bed next to me.
His hand finds my knee through the blanket, just resting there, and I want to cry.
I want to actually cry, which is probably the hormones but might also be the fact that I can’t remember the last time we sat together like this.
The last time he was here long enough for breakfast. The last time his attention wasn’t split between me and the phone that’s always buzzing in his pocket, pulling him back to that other world where I don’t exist.
“Eat,” he says softly. “You’re thinking too loud.”
“I’m always thinking too loud.”
“I know.” He squeezes my knee. “Eat anyway.”
I do. The eggs are perfect. He’s always been good at eggs, even when we were broke and living in that terrible apartment with the leak in the bathroom ceiling and the neighbors who screamed at each other at two in the morning.
He made me eggs the morning after our first time together, standing in my tiny kitchen in his inside-out t-shirt, Whiskers winding between his legs and meowing for scraps.
This is what he does, I remind myself. He shows up. He’s wonderful. And then he leaves again.
“Hey.” Eli’s voice cuts through my thoughts. “Where’d you go?”
“Nowhere.”
“Liar.”
I look at him, at those blue eyes that still knock the breath out of me, and I try to find the words.
Try to explain the peculiar agony of having exactly what you want right in front of you while knowing it’s temporary.
While knowing that in two days, or three, or however long this particular break lasts, he’ll be gone again, and I’ll be back to eating dinner alone, talking to Whiskers about my day, falling asleep in the middle of a bed that’s too big for one person.
“I’m just-” I set down my fork. “This is nice, is all. Having you here.”
Guilt flickers across his face. Or maybe recognition. He knows what I’m not saying. He always knows.
“About that.” He takes my hand, threading his fingers through mine. “I’ve been thinking. About everything. About how much I’ve missed.”
“Eli-”
“No, let me-” His voice cracks, just a little, and he stops. Clears his throat. “When you called me. From the bathroom. With the test. I was in Berlin, did I tell you that? Berlin, in some hotel room that looked exactly like every other hotel room on this goddamn tour, and you-”
He stops again. His eyes are bright.
“You told me we were having a baby,” he says, “and I sat on that stupid hotel bed and I cried for an hour. By myself. In Berlin. Because I wasn’t there to hold you, and I should have been there to hold you, and I’ve been-” He swipes at his eyes with the back of his hand, impatient with himself.
“I’ve been so bad at this. At us. At being where I’m supposed to be. ”
My throat is tight. “Eli.”
“Your birthday’s coming up.” He squeezes my hand. “I’m going to be here. Not some video call from some city, not some present I had someone else pick out. Here. With you.”
“You don’t have to-”
“And the appointments. All the baby appointments. I talked to Brynn about the schedule, we’re going to figure it out, I’m going to be there for-”
“Brynn knows about the baby?”
The words come out sharper than I meant them to. Eli blinks.
“I had to tell her why I needed the schedule shifted. She’s the tour manager, Az. She has to know.”
“Right.” I pull my hand back, reaching for my orange juice like that’s why I did it. “No, of course. That makes sense.”
He’s quiet for a moment. Watching me in that way he does when he’s trying to figure out what he did wrong. I hate that I’m like this, that I can’t just accept what he’s offering without the thorns, without the part of me that’s been alone too long and doesn’t know how to stop being angry about it.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “That was… I’m sorry. I just-”
“You didn’t know she knew.”
“I didn’t know she knew before your parents. Before anyone.”
“That’s fair.” He reaches for my hand again, and I let him take it. “I should have told you. I wasn’t thinking about the order of things, I was just trying to make sure I could be here for you. For both of you.”
“You cried?” I ask. “In Berlin?”
“Like a baby.” His mouth quirks. “Which I guess is appropriate.”
“A baby crying about a baby.”
“Very meta.” He lifts my hand to his lips, pressing a kiss to my knuckles. “I’m going to be here for all of it, Az. The birthday, the appointments, the weird cravings, the part where you yell at me for no reason-”
“I don’t yell at you for no reason.”
“You absolutely do.” He’s fighting a grin and losing.
“Name one time.” I cross my arms.
“Last month you called me at three in the morning to tell me I was breathing too loud.”
“I was on a video call with you and you were breathing too loud.”
“I was sleeping.”
“Loudly!” I glare at him without heat.
He’s laughing now, and so am I, and it feels like…
god, it feels like before. Before the fame and the distance and the endless parade of cities that took him away from me.
It feels like that first year, when we couldn’t stop touching each other, couldn’t stop laughing at nothing, couldn’t believe we’d found something this good.
“I love you,” he says, suddenly serious. “I know I’m bad at showing it sometimes. I know I’ve been absent. But I love you, and I love this baby, and I’m going to do better. All of it, Az. I promise.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay?”
“Okay. I believe you.”
The smile that breaks across his face is the same one from that doorstep seven years ago, hopeful, relieved, like he can’t quite believe his luck. He pulls me into his arms, tray and all, and I bury my face in his neck and breathe him in.
This is what I wanted. This is all I ever wanted.
And for one perfect morning, I let myself have it.
The front door opens.
I hear it from the bedroom, the click of the lock, the creak of the hinges, the sound of footsteps in our entryway, and I freeze. We’re still tangled together on the bed, breakfast dishes pushed aside, Eli’s hand drawing lazy circles on my back.
“Did you hear that?” I ask.
“Hear what?”
“Someone’s in the house.”
“What? No, it’s probably just-”
“Morning!” A voice calls out, female, cheerful, horrifyingly familiar. “El, I brought coffee! The good stuff from that place on-”
Brynn appears in our bedroom doorway.
She’s holding a tray of coffees, her blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, wearing jeans and a vintage band tee and an expression that’s shifting rapidly from casual to startled. Her eyes land on me first, in bed, in my pajamas, clearly not expecting visitors, and then on Eli, and then back to me.
“Oh.” She blinks. “I didn’t realize you were… I mean, I knew you were home, obviously, but I didn’t think-” She holds up the coffee tray like it explains everything. “I brought coffee?”
“How did you get in?” My voice comes out flat. I don’t mean for it to sound like that, but I can’t seem to control it.
“I have a-” Brynn glances at Eli, and a glance ricochets between them, too fast for me to catch. “El gave me a key. For emergencies. Tour stuff.”
I look at Eli. He’s not meeting my eyes.
“You gave her a key to our house?”
“It’s not… it was for when I’m traveling, in case something needed to be-”
“A key to our house,” I repeat. “That you didn’t tell me about.”
“Az-”
“Why do you have a key to my house, Brynn?”
She flinches, just slightly, at the tone of my voice. Good. I want her to flinch. I want her to feel even a fraction of what I’m feeling right now, which is… I don’t even know. Blindsided. Betrayed. Stupid, for thinking I could have one perfect morning without something ruining it.
“It’s not a big deal,” Brynn says, but she’s already backing toward the door. “I should have texted first, I just… the LA date got confirmed and I wanted to tell him in person, and-”
“What LA date?”
Brynn looks at Eli. Eli still won’t look at me.
“The tour,” he says quietly. “There’s an LA show. It was last minute, the venue opened up, and-”
“When?”
He doesn’t answer.
“Eli. When.”
“It’s not… I was going to talk to you about it, I was going to figure something out-”
Brynn’s voice cuts in, too bright, too casual: “You didn’t tell her it’s on her birthday?”