10. Odette
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Odette
The crib arrives in a box that weighs more than I do.
Elliott carries it up the stairs because the elevator in my building is broken again, and by the time he gets it through my front door he’s sweating and swearing and laughing at himself for not checking the weight before he offered to help.
“This thing is a death trap,” he says, setting it down in the middle of my living room with a thud that makes the floorboards vibrate. “Who designs baby furniture that requires a forklift to move?”
“Rich people who have staff to do the lifting.” I sink onto the couch and pull my feet up under me. “You didn’t have to do this. I could’ve hired someone.”
“You could have.” He crouches down and starts tearing open the cardboard. “But then I wouldn’t have an excuse to stay.”
The words sit there between us, and he doesn’t take them back. He doesn’t look up, doesn’t acknowledge what he just said, just keeps pulling pieces of pale wood and hardware out of the box like he didn’t just admit that he wants to be here. That he’s been looking for reasons to be here.
I should say something. I should tell him that he doesn’t need an excuse, that I want him here, that I’ve wanted him here for weeks now but I’ve been too scared to say it out loud. But the words stick in my throat, so instead I just watch him work.
And watching him work is its own particular torment.
He’s shoved his sleeves up past his elbows, and every time he tightens a screw the muscle in his forearm jumps, cords standing up under his skin, a vein running down toward his wrist that I can’t stop staring at.
His hands are big and careful. He wraps them around the slats of the crib and I think about them wrapped around other things and immediately hate myself for it.
When he leans over the frame his shirt pulls tight across his back, the fabric straining between his shoulder blades, riding up just enough to show a strip of bare skin above his waistband, and my mouth goes dry, actually dry, my tongue thick.
This is a crib. He’s building a crib for my baby. There’s nothing in the world less sexual than an Allen key and a page of Swedish diagrams, and I’m sitting here with my thighs pressed together and my heart going too fast, cataloguing the man like I’m memorizing him for a test.
I’m a terrible person. I let myself keep looking anyway.
The crib comes with instructions that are apparently written in a language Elliott doesn’t speak.
“This can’t be right.” He holds up a piece of wood and a handful of screws, squinting at the diagram. “It says to attach piece C to piece F using hardware packet seven, but there’s no piece F. There’s A, B, C, D, and then it jumps straight to G.”
“Maybe F is optional.”
“Nothing about cribs should be optional. This is where our baby is going to sleep.” He catches himself. Freezes. “Your baby. I meant your baby.”
“I know what you meant.”
The silence stretches. He goes back to the instructions, his jaw tight, and I watch the back of his neck turn red.
Our baby. He said our baby.
It should feel wrong. It should feel presumptuous, overstepping, too much too soon. But it doesn’t. It feels like a door swinging open in a house I thought I’d boarded up years ago.
The crib takes three hours to assemble.
By the time Elliott is finished, the living room looks like a bomb went off. Cardboard everywhere, plastic bags of unused screws, instruction sheets crumpled into frustrated balls. But the crib stands in the corner by the window, pale wood gleaming in the lamplight, perfect and waiting.
“Done.” Elliott sits back on his heels and wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. “Finally fucking done.”
“It looks beautiful.”
“It looks like I aged ten years putting it together.” He stands, stretching, and I hear his back pop. “But worth it.”
He’s exhausted. I can see it in the slump of his shoulders, the heaviness of his eyelids. He’s been running on fumes for days, taking care of me when he should be taking care of himself.
“You should sleep,” I say. “The guest room is down the hall.”
“The couch is fine.” He’s already sinking onto the cushions, his head tipping back against the armrest. “I just need to close my eyes for a minute.”
He’s asleep before I can argue.
I cover him with a blanket from the hall closet and stand there for a moment, watching him breathe. He looks younger when he sleeps. Softer. The worried furrow between his brows smooths out, and his mouth relaxes into something that’s almost a smile.
I want to touch him. The thought arrives unbidden and refuses to leave.
I want to brush the hair back from his forehead.
I want to trace the line of his jaw, the throat, the collarbone I can see where his shirt has come open.
I want to press my mouth to the pulse under his ear.
I want to climb onto that couch and straddle him and wake him up with my hips and find out what sound he makes.
What’s wrong with me? I’m four months pregnant with his brother’s baby and I’m standing in my own living room, wet and wanting, fantasizing about a sleeping man like some starved thing. A whole marriage of feeling nothing, and now I can’t make it stop.
I do none of these things.
Instead I go to my bedroom and change into an old shirt and try to sleep. But sleep won’t come. I lie in the dark and stare at the ceiling and think about Elliott on my couch, Elliott’s hands on the crib, Elliott saying our baby like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Our baby. Except she isn’t. Not his. That’s the thing I keep circling back to in the dark, the splinter I can’t work out.
No one has told me she’s a girl. I know it the way Elliott knew it in that small dim room, without a shred of proof.
This child I’m carrying, this daughter I already love with a ferocity that frightens me, is made half of Laurence.
His blood. His bloodline, the thing he wants so badly he’ll burn my life down to keep it.
Some nights I put my hand on my belly and feel a flicker of something ugly, wondering what of him is in there, whether she’ll have his charm, his coldness, his gift for looking through people.
I hate that I think it. She’s innocent of him.
She didn’t choose where she came from any more than I chose to marry him.
And then there’s Elliott, who slid her picture into his wallet like a sacrament.
Elliott, who built her a crib with his bare hands and called her ours before he could stop himself.
He isn’t her blood either, and he looks at her like she hung the stars.
Maybe that’s the whole answer, if I’d let it be.
Maybe blood is just the thing that starts a person, and love is the thing that finishes them.
Maybe she gets to be made of whoever chooses to show up. Maybe I do too.
At midnight, I give up.
The baby is hungry. I’m always hungry now, at the strangest times, craving things I’ve never craved before. Tonight it’s eggs. Eggs and toast and maybe cheese if I have any left.
I pad to the kitchen in bare feet, trying to be quiet, but the floorboards creak and I hear movement from the living room before I even reach the refrigerator.
“Odette?” Elliott’s voice, rough with sleep. “You okay?”
“Fine. Just hungry.”
Footsteps behind me. The kitchen light flickers on, too bright after the darkness, and I squint against it.
“Let me.” He’s beside me before I can protest, his hair mussed, his shirt untucked, a red crease on his cheek from the couch cushion. “You shouldn’t be cooking at midnight.”
“I’m pregnant, not incapacitated.”
“I know.” He opens the refrigerator and starts pulling things out. Eggs, butter, cheese, a loaf of bread I forgot I had. “But I want to.”
I lean against the counter and watch him move around my kitchen like he belongs there. He finds the pan without asking where it is. Cracks eggs with one hand like a professional. Adjusts the heat without looking at the dial.
“Where did you learn to cook?” I ask.
“Taught myself.” He drops a pat of butter into the pan and watches it sizzle.
“Our parents didn’t believe in teaching their sons domestic skills.
That was what staff was for. But I got tired of depending on other people for everything, so I started watching cooking videos at three in the morning and practicing when no one was awake to judge me. ”
“That’s very you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just that you do everything quietly. In the margins. When no one is looking.”
He glances at me over his shoulder. Something flickers in his eyes.
“Maybe I was waiting for someone worth looking at.”
The air in the kitchen changes. Thickens. I’m suddenly very aware of how thin my t-shirt is, how bare my legs are, how close he’s standing to me.
“Toast with real butter,” he says, turning back to the stove. His voice is a little unsteady. “Because you deserve real butter.”
“I deserve real butter?”
“You deserve everything.” He says it simply, like it’s a fact. Like it’s obvious. “You’ve spent your whole marriage accepting less than you deserve. I’m not going to be another person who gives you less.”
I don’t know what to say to that. My throat is tight. My eyes are stinging. No one has ever talked to me like this before, like I’m worth something, like I matter.
The eggs are finished. He slides them onto a plate and adds the toast and sets it on the counter beside me.
“Eat,” he says.
“Thank you.”
I pick up the fork, but I don’t eat. I’m looking at him instead, at the way the kitchen light catches the angles of his face, at the stubble on his jaw, at the hollow of his throat where his pulse is beating.
My thighs are pressed together under the hem of my thin shirt.
I’m wet, have been wet since the crib, since the porch, since a hug three properties down from my husband’s other life, and there’s no lie I can tell myself anymore about what this is.
He’s looking back. His eyes drop to my bare legs, to the way the shirt is riding up, and I watch his throat work when he swallows.
We’re standing too close. I don’t remember moving, don’t remember him moving, but suddenly we’re only inches apart and I can smell the sandalwood on his skin and feel the heat coming off his body and I want, I want, I want, and I’m done being ashamed of it.
“Odette,” he says. My name sounds different in his mouth. Reverent. Careful.
“Yes?”
“I’m going to do something that I’ve wanted to do for a very long time. And if you want me to stop, all you have to do is say so.”
My heart is pounding. My breath is shallow. The eggs are getting cold and I don’t care.
“I don’t want you to stop.”
He closes the distance between us.
The first kiss is soft. Tentative. His lips brush mine like a question, like he’s still not sure if this is allowed, if he has permission, if I’m going to push him away.
I don’t push him away.
I reach up and fist my hand in the front of his shirt and pull him closer, and the softness turns into something else. Something hungry. Something that’s been building for weeks, maybe months, maybe years.
He tastes like sleep and want. His hands come up to cup my face, his thumbs brushing my cheekbones, his fingers threading into my hair. I make a sound against his mouth, something between a gasp and a moan, and he swallows it.
The pan behind us starts to smoke.
Neither of us stops.
His laugh vibrates against my lips.
“Practical,” he murmurs.
“Someone has to be.”
He kisses me again, deeper this time, and I forget about being practical. I forget about everything except the feel of his mouth on mine and his hands in my hair and the heat building low in my belly.
All those years of being invisible. Of cold touches and colder silences. Of lying awake wondering whether I’d ever feel wanted again.
I feel wanted now. I feel like I might come apart just from his mouth.
I kiss him back and reach behind him to turn off the burner without breaking away.