“Go sit down.” I started to argue and she cut me off. Phone in hand, she was already dialing. “No, ma’am. You’re white as a sheet. Hayes. Birdie’s not feeling well. She said it was a headache, but it’s making her nauseous and she’s pale... yes. Okay, see you in a few.”
Maggie shooed me onto the couch in her office and covered me with a light afghan draped over its back. I didn’t attempt to argue. I felt miserable. Closing my eyes, I let myself drift.
It wasn’t long before I felt a touch skim across my cheek bone and opened my eyes to see Hayes. He was squatting by the sofa, a line of worry bisecting his brow. I started to sit up, and with a hand at the middle of my back he helped.
“Big. I’m fine. You didn’t need to come out here.”
“I called the doctor; told him you had been having these headaches. He called a prescription for something in.” He handed me a cup of water and a couple of pills.
I studied them in my palm. “Is it something that’s okay to take when you’re pregnant?” Anxiety arose. I had not taken any medicine for the headaches since I had left the hospital. I was afraid to, afraid it would hurt the baby.
“Yeah, he made sure of that.”
I gave him a tired smile in response and took the medicine. The couch dipped as he sat down beside me and wrapped an arm around my shoulders, pulling me into his side. “Thanks. I missed you when I woke up this morning.”
Hayes looked at me curiously. “Oh, yeah?”
“Yes. I wanted to tell you: I remembered something.” Despite the pain in my skull, excitement hammered at me. I reached for his hand. “I’m not certain what the catalyst was, but I woke last night, well after midnight. And the memory was just there. It was like…” I bit my lip, trying to figure how to explain it. It barely made sense, even to me. “You know when you’re doing a jigsaw puzzle, and you have your edge pieces all framed out, and a few spots here and there completed, but then there are these gaps?”
“Of course.”
“All of the other pieces are pushed to the side, and you might have them sort of categorized…blues, pales, trees, skin. They’re right there. At the edges of your consciousness. You know they exist, but they make no sense. There’s no order to them. The Scrabble game was like finding the right spot for one of those pieces. When I awoke, it was slotted into place. It was as if the memory had been there all along.”
Dipping his head, Hayes kissed me softly. Our lips clung before he pulled back, breath shallow. “What did you remember?”
“The party at the baseball house.” I said. The look on his face was tender, open, and suddenly I was afraid I was giving him too much confidence. What if that was the only piece I ever regained? I tried to backtrack. “But Hayes…I don’t want you to get your hopes up. Right now, I just remember you as this guy I sat with beside a fire pit.”
He pulled away from me, jaw tight, and I set my teeth against the sudden chill.
“I hear you loud and clear,” he said. “Ready to go?”
“That’s not… Hayes, don’t be mad…”
“Come on, Birdie.”
The ride home was long and silent. Staring out the window as winter trees flashed by, I found myself longing bitterly for a time machine.
I desperately needed a do-over.
“I promise to plant kisses
like seeds on your body,
so in time you
can grow to love yourself
as I love you.”
Tyler Knott Gregson
December 13 │Birdie
HAYES PUT ME TO BED WHEN WE ARRIVED HOME, AND I SLEPT THE SLEEP OF THE DEAD. The medication, combined with the headache and normal pregnancy exhaustion, put me out. Distantly, I remembered him sliding into bed behind me, careful not to disturb me as he pulled me against him. I didn’t wake until the next day, when I stumbled to the bathroom and looked at my reflection blearily.
The extra sleep had left me feeling drugged and more tired than I had to begin with, but the pain in my skull had at least subsided. As I looked at myself in the mirror, at my pale skin and dark circles under my eyes, my stomach lurched, reminding me that I hadn’t eaten any crackers before getting up. “Ugh.” I moved to stand over the toilet, still as a statue, waiting for the roiling to cease. A wash of heat suffused me, intensifying the warning prickles drifting over my skin. I closed my eyes and willed it away.
I hated puking with a passion.
Finally, the feeling subsided enough for me to pee and make my way back into the bedroom for crackers. Sitting on the edge of the low platform bed, I reached for the sleeve on the nightstand and pulled a cracker free.
I was on my second, gaze wandering idly around the room as I chewed, when I noticed the elf. He sat on the dresser next to the bathroom door, perched in an oblong white baking dish filled with cotton balls. It took a second for my sleepy brain to catch up, but I figured out that it was meant to represent a bathtub.
A bottle of sparkling cider sat beside it, chilling in a steel bucket of ice. The note lying on the wooden surface of the dresser read simply, “Relax. No work today.”
The idea appealed. A day to be lazy? Yes, please. Figuring Hayes must have called Maggie to let her know I would not be in, I decided to do as he suggested, and soak in the tub.
Walking back into the bathroom, I turned on the taps of the clawfoot tub and adjusted the temperature, testing it with my elbow until I got it where I wanted it. I undressed, tossing my clothes neatly into hamper, and then piled my hair atop my head.
When the water level was deep enough, I lowered myself into its depths, resting my arms along the sides and propping my feet against the opposite rim. The toenails that Remi had painted during our sleepover were a bright pink against antique white, and on a whim I grabbed my phone from the small table beside the tub and snapped a close-up of my feet, slick with water against the white iron and just this side of flirtatious.
I sent it to Hayes before I could second-guess myself, then laid my head back with a sigh and closed my eyes.
Today I would relax.
│ Hayes
SHE WAS ASLEEP. I stood in the doorway to the bathroom a half hour after receiving her cheeky photo of her pink toenails. I’d arranged for my TA to collect the written assignment for my classes and had left almost immediately.
The text was friendly, for sure. It was more than that, though. It was flirty. Suggestive. Did she even realize where my head would go when I saw it, or had it not even occurred to her? I was assuming the latter, but I couldn’t ignore the possibility that a part of her was ready for more.
I leaned against the doorjamb and crossed my arms over my chest, allowing my eyes to roam. Hunger, my constant companion these days, was for once blatant rather than banked as I traced her curves beneath the surface of the water. Her head lolled to the left, her face turned away from me to exposed the delicate arch of bones in her neck. Her dark hair was piled atop her head, half in and half out of a loose bun.
It wasn’t sufficient to say she was beautiful. She was, with her luxurious dark hair and creamy pale skin. The tightness in my pants attested to that.
She was so much more than her looks, though. Sweetness and sass oozed from every pore. Her keen intelligence was as much a turn-on as her body. When I’d first seen her in Smokey’s, I was attracted to her looks, sure. But it wasn’t until she opened her mouth and set me straight with a few good-natured jabs that I realized I’d met my one. She’d made me work for it, and no ballfield victory had never been as sweet as the moment she’d agreed to be mine.