Epilogue
Kimmie
Four months later
The box says three minutes. I’ve used up about forty seconds of that standing at the bathroom sink in my robe with the test balanced on the edge of the basin. I have no plan at all for the rest of them and I’m already losing my mind.
My dress is hanging on the back of the door in a color Delilah calls oxblood red.
My hair was curled at eight this morning in Sammie’s kitchen, with Lilah handing her the clips one at a time and getting hairspray in her eye for her trouble.
I have been instructed not to touch it for any reason.
Downstairs Natan is getting ready with Eduard and Jasper.
The whole street is due at the church on the hill at eleven, and I need to swing by the gallery before that to unlock it.
I’m still surprised Delilah wanted her reception there, but she said, besides the cafe, it’s the place she most feels happy.
I think it’s because Bea’s painting is still on the wall.
I bought the test yesterday at a drugstore in the city, four streets from the apartment Natan doesn’t live in anymore.
Not since he moved in with me. If I had bought it on this side of the bridge, someone would have had the information before the bag was closed and there would be a stroller in my hallway by Thursday.
It’s only been two days. But I’m never late, and I’m the sort of regular you could hang a calendar off, the sort who knows in February which weekend in July is going to be inconvenient.
I check my phone. One minutes and six seconds left, and the little window has already gone ahead and answered.
Two lines. The second one is not faint. The second one is sitting there as blue and certain as the first, and my knees do something unhelpful, so I sit down on the closed lid of the toilet with the stick held in both hands.
I say his name once, at a volume that would embarrass me if I had any attention left over for that.
He’s on the stairs before I’ve finished saying it, and then he’s in the doorway with his shirt open at the collar and one cuff still undone, filling the frame the way he fills every frame he has ever stood in, reading my face for damage.
“I need you to look at something,” I say. “And I need you to know I only bought it yesterday.”
He takes the test out of my hand. He looks at it for a long moment, and then he picks up the box off the shelf and takes the folded leaflet out of it and reads that too, all the way down, turning it over for the diagram on the back.
“What are you doing?” I ask, because surely even men know how a pregnancy test works?
“It says the second line can be faint.” He puts the leaflet on the shelf. “That one isn’t faint.”
“No.”
“How late?”
“Two days. Which for me is unprecedented. I have never in my life been even a day late.” I hear my voice climbing and let it climb, because there’s nowhere else for it to go.
“I know we said next year. And the gallery has three shows booked before April…” I drag my hands over my face.
“And I have thought about approximately none of the logistics, so if you need a minute that’s fine, because I need a minute, too. ”
He crouches down in front of me, putting us almost level. He takes both of my hands, and holds them in one of his with the test, and with the other he opens my robe over my stomach and lays his palm flat below my navel, keeping it there.
“Say it out loud,” he says.
I roll my eyes, which are now embarrassingly moist. “You always want it in words.”
“I do,” he agrees.
“I’m pregnant.”
His head goes down. He rests his forehead against mine and stays there long enough that I get my fingers into his hair. When he lifts his face, he’s looking at me the way he looked at me in the gallery on the day he proposed.
“Say it again.”
“We’re having a baby.”
“Yes, we are,” he says, and kisses me. It starts as a thank you and stops being one about four seconds in. His hand slides up to my ribs, his mouth is open against mine, and I make a noise into it that has no business being made in a bathroom at nine forty in the morning.
“The church,” I manage. “Delilah. Eleven o’clock. There is a woman getting married today who will hunt me through this town if I’m late.”
“Then don’t talk.” He stands, and he lifts me by the waist and sets me on the edge of the counter next to the sink, the mirror cold against my shoulder blades. “Hold on to the edge.”
“Natan.”
“How long?” He’s already pulling the tie of my robe loose. “Tell me the number.”
I look at my phone on the shelf. “Fifteen minutes.”
“That’s generous.” He gets both hands under my knees and drags me forward to the very edge of the counter, pushing them wide. “I only need five.”
He goes down onto his knees on Eduard and Sammie’s bathroom floor, and he doesn’t do anything fast. His hands come up the inside of my thighs and hold them open, thumbs pressing into the soft part where my leg meets everything else, and he looks at me for a second with an expression I don’t have a word for.
Then his mouth is on my pussy and words stop being a thing I know.
He licks me in one long flat stroke, right through the middle, and he doesn’t go near my clit.
He goes back and does it again, slower, causing my hips to lift off the counter and he lets them, holding me open with his thumbs.
On the third pass he pushes his tongue into me, and I hear myself say his name in a way that is very close to begging.
“Please. Natan.” It comes out quietly, thank god, because the last thing I need is everyone knowing what’s happening in here.
He puts his mouth over my clit and sucks, and then works me with the flat of his tongue while his hand comes up and two fingers slide into me, thick and slow and completely unhurried. He curls them, and my hand goes into his hair and grips.
“There. Right there, don’t move,” I whisper.
He hums against me, and keeps his tongue exactly where I told him.
His fingers work in that same steady rhythm, and I look down the length of myself at the top of his head between my thighs, his shoulders taking up the whole space between the counter and the tub, and the muscle in his forearm moving.
“You’re going to ruin your shirt,” I say.
He lifts his mouth off me for exactly as long as it takes to say, “I’ll borrow one.
” and then he’s back on me, and this time there’s nothing patient in it.
He works my clit hard and fast with his tongue, driving his fingers into me and I feel it coming up from the base of my spine.
I get one hand back on the edge of the counter and the other stays fisted in his hair.
I come with my thighs shaking on either side of his head and my heels drumming once against the cabinet door.
He works me through it. Keeps going, slower, gentler, until I’m making small helpless sounds and pushing at his shoulder, and then he presses his mouth against the inside of my thigh, and then just above my hipbone, and then flat and open against my stomach, low down, and he holds it there.
“Oh,” I say weakly, up at the ceiling. “That’s not fair.”
He stands, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and looks at me sitting on the bathroom counter with my robe hanging off one shoulder and my legs still open, and there is nothing at all on his face except enormous satisfaction.
Natan kisses me, right on my mouth so I can taste myself, then pushes my robe from my shoulder and slips the oxblood dress over my head.
“You’re perfect,” he says, then leaves the bathroom.
I get to the Gallery just in time to unlock the doors for the caterers, then jump back into the car that takes us up the hill to church. I don’t tell Sammie or Delilah my news, this is Dee’s day. Not mine.
Bill walks Delilah down the aisle in a suit he keeps telling everyone he’s had since 1987, and Delilah comes up that aisle in ivory with the fabric let out at the waist and her hand already resting on the curve of it.
Jasper, who I have never once seen surprised, has to look at the ceiling for a second before he can look at her again.
I cry through all of it and have to be passed a tissue by Sammie, who hid a packet in her bouquet. Daisy snaps photos of us from every angle, which I’m glad for, because I want to remember this day exactly as it is.
At the reception, Sammie makes a speech. Eduard makes a shorter one.
Natan stands beside me at the back with a glass of champagne he isn’t drinking, and at some point, his hand comes to rest low on my back and then slides around to my stomach, flat and warm and hidden by the way I’m standing.
Delilah catches my eye across the room, holding a glass of apple juice, and her face does something suspicious, because she has known me for seven months and could read me like the specials board from the first day we met.
I look around and know that this is my family. These are my people. And my life is as beautiful and full of hope as the painting on the wall.