16. Kieran
Kieran
The NHL holiday break, in the architecture of an eighty-two-game season, is three calendar days the league throws into the middle of the calendar like a small clean window of personal time and then takes back.
Most years, I spend the window in this brownstone, alone, watching film on Christmas Eve and eating leftover pasta on the twenty-sixth and being on a plane to whatever city has the back-to-back on the twenty-eighth.
This year is not that year.
This year, I drive Greer to my house on the afternoon of the twenty-third with her duffel in the back of the SUV and a stack of clinical journals on her lap she has, in the seventy-five minutes of traffic on the Pike, opened exactly once.
She is fourteen weeks today. The small forward curve under the band of her work pants in October has, by the second-to-last week of December, become a curve I can see across a parking garage in a coat.
Her face has gone slow and round. The morning sickness has, by her account, finished.
She has been eating in the last three weeks.
The body next to me on the bench seat is, by every measure I have, the body of a woman whose pregnancy is moving along the way the books said it would.
She has not, yet, told Indie.
We have not, in the four weeks since Thanksgiving, talked about it anywhere outside this house, but we have, every night I have not been on the road, had a version of the same conversation in my kitchen at the island under the small lamp.
However it ends, Greer wants it to end after the All-Star Break, before the trade deadline, with us all in a room where Greer can answer every question Indie asks.
That is two months away.
We are, this afternoon, getting three days.
I park the SUV in the small private space beside the brownstone, get out, go around to her side, and open her door. The duffel comes out of the back with me.
Inside, the house is warm. I take her coat. I hang it on the hook. I put the duffel at the foot of the bench.
She turns to look at me in the front hallway. She puts both her hands flat against the front of my sweater the way she put them flat against the front of me in suite seventeen-fourteen the night I have not, ever, been able to stop carrying in my head.
"Three days alone in this house," she says.
"Three days."
"What do we do with them?"
"Whatever you want."
"That is not a useful answer, Kieran."
"It is the most useful answer I have."
She laughs the small contained laugh she has been doing since Thanksgiving, the one that does not, anymore, surprise her on its way out.
"Okay. I would like to put my bag upstairs. I would like to drink the decaf tea I know you have been buying. I would like to be in this house for three days and not be the head PT for any of them."
"Yes."
"And I would like, at some point this afternoon, to lie on your couch and not move."
"That is, in fact, already on the schedule."
She kisses me on the side of the jaw and goes upstairs to put the bag in the room that has, in the last three weeks, become the room with her half of the dresser drawers and a robe she left here three weekends ago and has not asked for back.
I make the decaf tea.
When she comes down, she is in sweatpants and one of my long-sleeved tees and her hair in a ponytail. She takes the tea. She kisses me on the jaw a second time. She goes into the small library on the back of the first floor and lies on the couch.
I do not, for the next two hours, ask her to do anything else.
I sit in the chair Cara used to write in and I read the three game reports my video coordinator has put in my inbox in the last forty-eight hours and I make notes for the New Year's road trip with one ear on the breathing of the woman on the couch eight feet from me.
She sleeps for an hour.
We eat a soup I have made, at her request, three times in the last two weeks because it is one of the few things she has been craving since the nausea lifted. She eats most of it. We do the dishes together. She is, in the kitchen, a different person than she is in her office.
We go to bed at ten.
I do not, that night, touch her the way a man touches the woman in his bed. I hold her the way you hold a friend who needs to be held.
She sleeps with her back against my chest and my arm under her ribs and my hand flat against the curve of her stomach.
I sleep four uninterrupted hours, which is the longest I have slept in weeks.
* * *
In the morning, on the twenty-fourth, I wake up before she does.
The bedroom is dark. Her body, against mine, is warmer than the body of a woman fourteen weeks ago. The sheets smell like her hair.
I have not, since Cara passed, woken up in this house with another person in this bed.
I lie very still and I do not, for a long time, move.
When she stirs, finally, she stirs slowly, the way her body has been stirring at this stage of the pregnancy. She breathes in. She turns her face into the inside of my arm. She breathes out.
"Morning."
"Morning."
"What time."
"Just after seven."
"Mm."
"How are you feeling."
"Hungry. Awake."
"Good."
"Very good."
"Toast?"
"In a minute."
She presses closer.
I say, into her hair, "Greer."
"Yes."
"I want to tell you something."
"Tell me."
"I am in love with you."
She does not, for a long second, move.
Then she lifts her face off my arm and looks at me.
Her eyes are slow and warm.
"I am in love with you too."
She closes her eyes. She presses her forehead, slowly, against mine.
I put my hand against the curve of her stomach.
I keep it there.
She kisses me on the mouth as I roll her onto her back.
I take my time.
I take off the soft cotton tee she has been sleeping in. I take off her sweatpants. I take off the rest of what is between us. I put my mouth on the curve of her stomach the way I have been putting my mouth there for the last three weekends, and I work up from there.
Then, I work down.
I slide a hand under her thigh. I open her.
She is wet before my mouth has gotten where it is going, and when it gets there she sighs.
I work her with my tongue the way I have learned to work her.
Slow at the start. Steady through the middle.
Then faster, with two fingers inside her and my thumb pressed flat against the place I have learned, opens her up.
She comes the first time with one hand in my hair and the other braced flat against the duvet. Her core clenches around my fingers, her thighs press against the sides of my head, and she makes a low broken sound against the duvet.
I work her through it.
When I sit up between her legs, she is looking at me with her face flushed and her hair in her eyes.
"Come here," she says.
I lean over her on both my elbows. I kiss her with her own taste in my mouth. She reaches between us. She guides me.
There is, between us, nothing.
I have not, in all this time of being allowed to feel her without anything between us, learned to take it for granted.
I push in slow.
She holds my face in both her hands.
"Hi."
"Hi."
I move slowly. I move shallowly. I keep checking her face. The third time I stop, she gets her hand around the back of my neck and pulls me down and kisses me hard and says, into my mouth, Kieran. Move.
I move.
I move with the steady measured pace of a man who has learned what she likes well enough to take her apart on a Tuesday morning.
I roll her onto her side and slide back into her with my hand flat against the front of her stomach.
She braces one hand against the headboard. I get the other under her thigh.
I tell her what she feels like. I tell her — the first night in seventeen-fourteen I did not know your name, and your body wrecked me. I tell her — three weekends in, fourteen weeks deep, the curve of you under my hand and the baby between us, you wreck me every time.
She comes the second time with my teeth at the back of her neck and the heel of my hand pressed against the small of her back. Her core grips hard around me, harder than it has gripped before, and she pushes back into me with the deep slow rhythm she has been finding in my bed.
I do not, this time, come with her.
I roll her again. I get her onto her back.
I get one of her knees up over my shoulder.
I push in deeper than I have and I move slowly, and I tell her, into the small space between our faces, that I love her, that I have loved her since October, that I am going to love her at twenty weeks and at thirty and at forty and all the months after.
She comes the third time with both her hands flat against my chest and her eyes open.
I come after her with my forehead against hers and her name in my mouth.
I stay on top of her for a long minute with my forearms holding my weight off the curve and my mouth at her temple and her heartbeat going through her chest into mine.
When I roll onto my side, I bring her with me. My hand goes back where it has been going. The skin under my palm is warm. Her breath, against my collarbone, is slow.
"Toast," she says, eventually.
"Toast."
"And tea."
"Yes."
"In a minute."
"In a minute."
We stay where we are for another long stretch.
When I do, finally, get up, I make her the toast and the tea and a soft scrambled egg, and we eat the breakfast in bed, because the duvet is warm and the morning is not, by either of our calendars, anywhere we have to be.
* * *
The team family event is at five in the Back Bay.
The franchise rents out the same restaurant every Christmas Eve for the players and their wives and their kids and the assistant coaches and the trainers and the medical staff, which this year includes the head PT.