Butterfly Kick
"This would never have happened if Stephanie was the one who was pregnant."
Stab him in the heart, strip him of his skin, that would be easier; holding her is hell, feeling life flutter beneath his hand and knowing it's no life at all.
"Stephanie would never have been the one who was pregnant. If I could take it back –" He wouldn't. "If I could go back to the way we were, and spare you all this pain, I would." But at what cost? "But even if I could go back, could take it back, I'd still be in love with you, we just wouldn't be together." Their lives have fluttered against each for so long, flirting with the idea of becoming whole.
Now, they're broken.
"It's congenital, not genetic." She tells him one more time even though he knows, because she's telling herself. "It's not you and me, it's you and me and that moment, that exact moment." That exact moment of conceiving this exact foetus, this child whose life she's already planned, this child whose coded perfection had one mistake, just one mistake that's already torn him out of her arms.
The butterfly kicks, and the beating heart, and the gush of love for him and them every time like a geyser is not even close to fair.
"This would never have happened if the baby was Matthew's."
And they do, although he doesn't believe, wonder if they're being punished for choosing each other. God proposed, and man disposed, and man and woman made a life out of hotel rooms and broken pencils. They were going their separate ways, fighting their separate corners. The fight, for air when someone seems to pull it out of the room, for peace when someone takes the war to you, for acceptance when the someone who always accepted you is the someone you can't let yourself lean on. The fight is what they do, and how they live, and how they love.
No life at all.
Not even close to fair.
Holding on is hell, but they have to hold on to each other.
Fin.