18. Sloane
Sloane
Ilook at her, then at the bowl, and I can’t stop the laugh that bubbles up inside of me. Eden starts laughing too, and suddenly we’re both doubled over, wheezing, clutching each other like idiots.
When we stop, I wipe my eyes. “It’s hideous. I love it.”
“Me too.” She hiccups.
“Is it food safe?” I ask.
She shrugs. “Define ‘safe.’”
It hits me then, the difference between now and last week: I’m not looking at the bowl, really.
I’m looking at Eden, and seeing her. Not the hyper-competent caretaker, not the crisis manager, but just…
her. My wife. Sitting at our kitchen table, one ankle wrapped around the other, equal parts stubborn and breakable.
I didn’t realize how much I missed this. Her, in the open, not armored up for my benefit.
The silence stretches. I want to fill it, but I also want to keep it, just for a minute. There’s nothing left in the world but the two of us and this horrible, beautiful bowl.
Eden picks at a fleck of blue glaze on the rim. “I keep thinking I’ll get better,” she says quietly. “At making them. At…everything.”
I take her hand, half to comfort her, half to anchor myself. “I like it. It’s got character.”
“Character is what people say when something is ugly and they feel bad for it.”
“Well, I feel bad for it,” I admit, and she snorts again, a tiny, involuntary laugh that makes the kitchen about a thousand degrees warmer.
She looks at me, really looks, and for a second all the pretending falls away. Her eyes are red and puffy. I wonder how much of that is from the kiln and how much is from not sleeping, not eating, not breathing unless she’s making sure I’m doing all of the above.
It’s almost funny how backward we got it. The entire time I’ve been afraid of breaking, she’s been breaking herself to keep me whole.
I run a thumb over her knuckles. “Thank you.”
She blinks at me, thrown. “For what?”
“For not giving up when I checked out. For being here. For…” I lose the thread, because if I say “for loving me,” I will actually collapse into a heap and leak salty tears all over the table.
Eden is quiet. She swallows. “You’re not the only one who gets to be a disaster, you know.”
I smile, watery. “Is this a contest? Because I think I’m winning.”
She squeezes my hand. “We can share the trophy. Put it in the bowl.”
“Perfect. It’ll be the only thing that ever fits in there.”
We sit in the companionable silence of two people who have nothing left to prove.
The only sounds are the ticking of the wall clock and the faint rumble of a neighbor’s dryer.
At some point, Eden stands up and puts the kettle on.
She does it without asking, because we both know that tea is the only logical step after a breakdown, no matter how American she’s become.
While the water heats, I drift toward the sliding glass door and stare out into the backyard.
It’s dark, the porch light glinting off of frozen grass.
There’s a lone, half-deflated soccer ball from the summer wedged against the fence.
I remember Eden and Bella kicking it back and forth, arguing about whether it’s called soccer or football, both of them pretending not to notice when I cheered for the wrong side.
Eden comes up behind me, presses her forehead to my shoulder blade. We stand like that, just breathing, until the kettle screams.
I follow her back to the table. She pours the tea, perfectly steeped, into a pair of chipped mugs. We don’t talk much. We don’t need to.
I reach across the table and take her hand again. “Can we just…not be brave for a while? Can we just be scared, and say it, and not have to fix it right away?”
She squeezes my hand so hard I think she might actually leave a mark. “Deal.”
We finish our tea in silence, the ugly bowl sitting between us like a mascot for all the things that shouldn’t work but do.
Later, in bed, I wrap myself around her.
Her hair is still faintly clay scented. I bury my face in her neck, breathing it in.
For the first time in days, I don’t feel the urge to check the clock, or count the hours until morning, or game out every possible disaster scenario.
I just want to stay here in this soft, raw moment, as long as the universe will allow.
Tomorrow will be what it is. Tonight we’re a mess together, and that’s all I need.
The problem with being married to someone who knows you inside out is you can never really bullshit them, not for long. I lasted about forty minutes.
In the morning, I wake to the sensation of Eden tracing letters on my skin with her finger.
She does this when she’s thinking too much—like if she keeps my body busy, her mind can slow down.
The covers are half off, sunlight slicing through the cheap blinds and painting a ladder on the bed.
For a moment, I pretend to be asleep so I can just exist in the quiet, the hush of her breath, the weight of her arm.
But the letters she’s tracing are SOS, over and over.
“Is it that bad?” I ask, eyes still closed.
She doesn’t even flinch. “Depends. Are you going to answer, or do I have to call in the Coast Guard?”
“I thought you hated boats,” I say.
“I hate drowning more.”
It’s too early for this level of metaphor, but she’s not wrong. I roll over and prop myself up on an elbow, careful to keep the duvet fortress between us. The urge to run from the conversation is primal, but I resist. Last night I promised myself I wouldn’t hide anymore.
“I’m not drowning,” I say, and even I’m surprised by how true it feels. “I’m floating. In the deep end, but with those foam noodle things. You know the ones?”
Eden snorts. “I love those. You can turn them into swords.”
“Exactly. If it gets bad, I’ll joust my way back to shore.”
She pretends to consider it, then nods. “Okay, but I’m going to be the lifeguard. Topless, obviously.”
“Obviously.”
She lets it hang for a second, then tugs my hand under the blankets. Her palm is cold, but her grip is fierce. We lie there, knuckles pressing together. “I’m still scared.”
“I know.” I don’t try to fix it, don’t try to swaddle it in data or jokes or borrowed optimism. I just let it be true.
I want to tell her everything all at once.
How there are days I wake up convinced the pregnancy is already over, that it was a trick of the universe to even let us try.
How I’ve built an entire encyclopedia of possible failures.
How much I hate it, this fear, but also how much I hate how easily it could have been worse, how we almost lost it.
But I don’t want to drown her either.
“Do you remember when I crashed my car that summer, and you wouldn’t let anyone else drive me to physical therapy? Even when I was being a monster?”
She makes a face. “You were a bitch.”
“I was in pain.”
“And a bitch.”
I laugh, because she’s not wrong. “But you still drove. Every appointment. Even when I screamed at you for taking the wrong turn, or for parking too close to the curb.”
“I love you,” she says, voice small.
“I know,” I reply, and it lands differently than the last hundred times we’ve said it.
“I can do this, Eden. I know what it looks like when I can’t, and this isn’t that. I’m scared, yeah, but I’m not stuck. I promise I’ll tell you if I get stuck.”
She looks at me, and I can tell she wants to believe it.
“I’m not doing this alone. Neither are you. If you need to fall apart, just…fall. I’ll catch you.”
Her eyes glisten, but she wipes them hard and fast, like she’s allergic to sentiment. “Can I be the noodle, then?”
“You’d be an excellent noodle,” I say.
We don’t get up for a long time. Eventually, the smell of coffee from the timer in the kitchen overpowers even Eden’s emotional inertia. She slips out of bed, yanking on a t-shirt and a pair of shorts that used to be mine but are now too tight for my ass.
I follow and watch her move around the kitchen, dancing between fridge and coffee maker, still barefoot, hair wild and unbrushed. She’s humming an old Arctic Monkeys song under her breath, but with the words changed to be about toast. This is how I know she’s okay: she sings about food.
I join her at the table and we settle into a weird, easy routine. She pours me decaf coffee and I make a face at the taste, leading her to doctor it with obscene amounts of oat milk and sugar until it tastes like a melted ice cream truck.
For the first time in weeks, breakfast isn’t a minefield. We talk about normal things: the project she wants to start in the studio, whether we should try to replace the leaky faucet in the downstairs bathroom or just keep putting bowls under it, what show to binge next.
Afterward, she grabs her phone and starts scrolling through her group chat.
I watch her thumb fly across the screen, rapid-fire emojis and GIFs.
Her laugh is real, not the brittle one she uses to keep people at a distance.
She shoves the phone at me, showing off a photo of Bella and Becca’s latest animal addition.
It’s a new cat, who is even uglier than the bowl from last night.
“Should we get another cat?” she asks out of nowhere.
“You didn’t want the first one!”
“The Gremlin has grown on me.”
“Double poo!”
She grins. “Worth it.”
I shake my head, but I can’t stop smiling. It feels almost dangerous how good this is, like we’re tempting fate by being happy.
The rest of the day is a blur. She works in the studio while I catch up on clinic notes and answer emails.
We keep crossing paths—at the sink, in the hallway, when I’m making another cup of tea and she needs to put something in the microwave.
Each time we pause, touch fingers, make a face or a joke, then drift back to our orbits.
It’s nothing like how it used to be, when I’d disappear into my anxiety and Eden would hover at the edges, afraid to push too hard.
At night, she’s the one who initiates. It’s not frantic, not desperate, or penetrative. Both of us are taking my pelvic rest seriously. It’s still sexy, though. Just her crawling into my lap and kissing me slow, like she’s re-learning every inch.
I let her rediscover me. I let her kiss my jaw, my collarbone, the soft place at my throat that only she’s ever found.
We make love with the lights off but the blinds open, letting in the glow from the street. I keep my eyes open the whole time. Afterward, we lie tangled, her head on my chest, my fingers tracing circles on her shoulder.
“We’re not going to spend the rest of this pregnancy scared. I won’t let us,” I say, because I’m determined to kick anxiety’s ass.
She grumbles something into my ribs.
“I mean it. We can be nervous, or angry, or even a little sad, but we get to be happy too.”
She lifts her head and squints at me. “Is this another therapy thing?”
“It’s a Sloane thing.”
She closes her eyes, satisfied. “Good. I like Sloane things.”
I close my eyes, and for the first time in months I don’t dream about loss or running out of time. I dream about a kitchen full of ugly bowls, and the people who keep trying to make them over and over, no matter how many times they come out wrong.
In the morning, the bowl is still on the table, chipped and off kilter, but perfect in its own way. Eden fills it with oranges, the little clementines we both love.
She grins at me. “You know, in Japan they call this kintsugi. It’s when you fix the cracks with gold.”
“I like ours better,” I say. “Plus, there isn’t an ounce of gold in that!”
She nods, laughing, triumphant. “No gold, just pure Eden Sawyer sweat clogging up the cracks.”
We eat breakfast with our hands, peeling the oranges and dropping the rinds into the bowl. I don’t know what tomorrow looks like, or next week, or what flavor of terror will come for us next, but I know this: when it does, we’ll face it together, cracked and patched and beautiful anyway.
I start to say something, but she beats me to it.
“Hey, Sloane?”
“Yeah?”
She hands me an orange slice, kisses my cheek, and says, “Thanks for being my noodle.”
“Anytime,” I reply, and pop the orange into my mouth. It’s sweet and sour at once, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Instead of enjoying our sappy moment together, both of our phones start blowing up. It seems our friends have had enough of us avoiding them and are en route to crash our morning.
We brace ourselves, because the second they find out what we’ve been keeping to ourselves, they’re going to explode with a protective love that will definitely be aggressive in nature. Oh god, Bella’s going to start stalking me everywhere I go.
Becca will knit me a security blanket or something similar, and Pia…Christ, I have no idea what she’s going to do, but it’s going to be a lot.
Weirdly, the thought of them all converging on us as deranged protective angels makes me smile.
“Jesus, Pia’s threatening to wax my arse if we don’t come clean!”
I burst out laughing. “Why your ass?”
“I have no fucking clue.”