I’m buried behind Dustin’s shoulder, my body tucked into the corner of the booth, and I’m thankful because I physically shudder at his words. I have to rub my legs with my palms to distract my nerves from kicking. He has no idea how close to home that sentiment hits for us, and I only hope he remembers his commitment to those words a little while from now—when I tell him he’s a father. That we are parents.
We spend the next ten minutes making tentative plans, and neither Dustin nor I correct Alysha when she invites us back for dinner, assuming we’re a couple. When she hugs me and tells me her son is lucky to have such a beautiful girl in his life, I cackle because of how messy our past and present are, glad that we made it through this meeting without my last name coming up once. If she connects me with my father, the attorney who fought against her, I’m not sure how beautiful she would find me. Dustin explains my response away as modesty, then he levels me where I stand, not so much with his words, but with the look that follows them.
“This world is a far more beautiful place because she is in it,” he says, adoring eyes lingering on mine long enough that my skin tingles from attention and my chest thrums with nervous energy. It’s when Dustin’s lips close in a loose, genuine smile as he swallows that I get the depth of his belief in me—in us. And my courage, it comes soaring back.
“Thank you for today.” Dustin’s voice cuts through the quiet.
We’re well outside Coolidge, somewhere between the small town and the edge of the big city, before either of us speaks. I figured Dustin needed to process everything he’d experienced, so I planned to be a quiet passenger for as long as it took. I’m also nervous. Afraid. I’m resolved to this path, though. Even more so after spending the day with Dustin and Alysha.
“You did it all. I only hitched a ride,” I say, turning to give him a genuine, tight-lipped smile—tight to hide the nerves attacking me from the inside.
Dustin rolls his hand open over the center console, the lines that cut a deep Y in his palm telling a story I’ve known since I was a little girl—that his lifeline and mine are the same.
I drop my hand in his, expecting the squeeze of friendship, but it’s clear the second our palms touch that things have changed. The connection between us has always been inevitable, the electricity palpable. This touch is different than the others before it, though. This one is eager. Willing and open. Desperate and hopeful.
It’s time.
Our fingers weave together easily, fitting with perfection, and I swallow down a sob, my chest caving in and breath becoming hard to find.
“Dustin, we have to talk,” I cry out.
He slows the car almost immediately, his gaze drifting from the empty desert road ahead to me and back again until he’s completely stopped on the side of the road. It’s winter, and maybe sixty degrees outside as the sun casts an orangey hue over the jagged rocks and cactus and the curvature of his face. I’m pouring sweat. I rip the sweatshirt over my head and toss it into the tight space behind me, balling my hair into a tighter bun and fanning my face with my hand.
“Are you all right? Are you sick?” Dustin unbuckles his seat belt and twists so he’s facing me as he cups my face. He roams my face with eyes full of concern, then rests the back of his hand on my forehead.
“You feel clammy. I have water in the cooler. Let me get you one.”
“No, I—” I’m too late to catch him before he rushes out of the car and pops open the small trunk space to fish out one of the bottles of water he packed for our trip.
I knead my hands into balls and bounce them on my thighs as I stare at the reflection in the passenger door mirror. I’m torn between wanting him to take forever to get me the water and having him appear magically, back in his seat, attentive and ready to listen.
“Oh, God,” I croak for only me to hear.
I must look worse because the second Dustin slips back into the car his eyes draw in and he feverishly unscrews the cap from the water bottle, spilling it in his haste. I wrap my hands around the bottle and his hands, stilling them as our eyes meet.
“I’m fine. I’m . . . it’s okay.” I breathe in through my nose and stare into his enormous pupils. I give myself one last look at the subtle rainbow in his eyes, the grays and golds and greens woven together like art—my favorite colors. Eyes like Bristol’s.
“My water broke at four in the afternoon, in the middle of the convenience store on the corner between the house and the art studio I’d been working at late into the evening most days. It was two weeks early, but who knows, I probably would have been casing the donuts anyway.”
Dustin remains sitting forward, but he’s let go of the water bottle. I blink a few times and rush a drink because everything from the tip of my tongue to the depths of my throat is suddenly sparse and dry. I run my hand over my mouth and regain the eye contact I let slip for a drink as I feel my way to the cup holder and set the bottle down. I keep the cap in my hand to give me something to fidget with.
This is not how I practiced this speech. The thousands of times I pretended to deliver this news, not once is this the route I took in my head. But it’s what’s coming out. It has him held still, and his eyes while panicked are motionless. So is his breath.
I continue.
“The clerk at the store was seventeen, maybe eighteen. He had his earbuds in and couldn’t hear me calling for help.”
Dustin’s lip ticks up, a little amused.
“I literally waddled my way to the checkout and ripped one of the buds from his ear, tossing it God knows where. I don’t remember whether I grabbed him by his collar or I imagine that’s what I did, but an ambulance came less than a minute later.”
The slight smile that was growing on his mouth stops. It doesn’t disappear, but it doesn’t rise into his cheeks.
“The labor was fast, too fast for the wonders of modern medicine. I felt everything. Every rip and tear all the way until, I swear, Dustin”—I pause, huffing a short laugh at the memory of that moment and the feeling that accompanied it—“I damn turned inside out. I was flipped inside out. I had to have been. And it happened in minutes. Mind you, minutes that felt like they took hours to pass, but minutes. I was buying a maple donut one second and then the next, a nurse was handing me a bundled, crying baby girl.”
His eyes are watering, the whites growing pink like a litmus test, only I’m not sure what it means. I begin to cry too, slow tears that well up in one breath and fall with the next.
“She was so beautiful and, ha . . . Dustin, she was so loud. She wanted the world to know she’d arrived. She wanted—” I choke and my mouth sours, my words no longer strong and ready. My hands shake as I try to press the cap into a flat piece of plastic and my lips fold down, quivering. “She wanted her daddy to hear her, because . . . because he was so far away.”
Dustin’s bottom lip vibrates as tears slip down his cheeks. Fat droplets run down my chin and land on my hands.
I shake my head but keep my eyes on his. As long as he stays, I stay. If he runs, I follow. I beg and chase.
I will fix this.
“Ten fingers. Ten toes. I counted twice,” I mutter through the most pathetic laughing cry. My chest shudders with a quick breath.