Feeling A Moment
Tick ... tick ... tick ...
The seconds pass slowly. Slower than usual, you're sure of it. Two minutes feels more like a lifetime. Harry's grip on your fingers is tight. So tight it's almost constricting. Rather than finding comfort in the gesture, it only serves to remind you that there's something to be worried about.
For one day a month, over the past seven months, you've repeated this routine; perched nervously on the edge of the bed, your right hand clutching Harry's own fingers, your left hand gripping a pregnancy test.
Sometimes, when the one-hundred and twenty seconds are up, you find you can't look. Sometimes Harry has to look for you. It's never difficult to tell from his crestfallen face, the gentle sorrow in his eyes, what the answer is going to be.
Sometimes, you don't even need words. All it takes is a slight inclination of the head or a tear to slip down a cheek.
You'd been together for just over a year when, after a pregnancy scare, you'd decided that perhaps bringing a baby into the world wasn't the worst thing that could happen.
But that scare is the closest thing you've been to pregnant since.
Conceited and naïve, you'd believed that it would be easy. Not once had the possibility that you'd still be desperately trying over six months later occurred to you.
At first it had been exciting. The baby-making itself had been more fun and adventurous than it ever had been. But now? Now it's more like a habit that you can't break. It's become so mundane you've even started pencilling it into your daily schedules. There are asterisks on the calendar in your kitchen to mark when you're most 'fertile'. You've timetabled sex. That's what your relationship has become.
"It's time," Harry mutters, nudging you gently and bringing you back to the present. As it does every month, that spark of hope ignites in the pit of your stomach. Slowly, you release the white stick from your fist and hold the end between your fingers. The tiny letters spelling 'not pregnant' are glaring up at you, mocking you, crushing that little hope that you had left.
"Nope, no baby," you say loudly, bitterly, your eyes stinging with tears. Tugging your hand from Harry's, you get up from the bed and throw the test into the bin with rather unnecessary force.
"Never mind," Harry says gently from behind you. "Next month. Next month it will happen."
"For God's sake, Harry!" you burst out angrily. "You've been saying that for the past six months! When are you going to understand that it's clearly not going to happen? I can't even get pregnant right!"
You don't mean to shout at him, not really, but he's always so optimistic about it all that it irritates you. You don't stop to consider that perhaps being optimistic is the only way he can deal with it.
"Nikki," he whispers. "It's not your fault."
"I know!" you shout, then add more quietly, "I know it's not."
He's right; the doctor had said that it was a combination of your unusually thin uterine wall and Harry's poor sperm motility. It wasn't really anyone's fault; it was still possible for you to get pregnant, it would just be more difficult than usual.
You fold your arms tightly across your chest, blinking away tears. With a sigh, Harry slowly crosses the room towards you. He tries to place a hand on your shoulder but you shrug him off.
"I don't know why you don't just leave me," you snap, the thoughts which have been plaguing you for the last few months bubbling to the surface. "Go and find some other woman with a perfectly healthy womb. At least then you'll have more chance of knocking her up."
"Don't be ridiculous," he says, sounding weary and unwilling to enter into an argument.
"Look what we've become, Harry!" you tell him, your anger mixed with desperation. "We used to be so happy, so in love, and now look at us! We can't stay in the same room for longer than ten minutes without arguing; every conversation we have now has the word 'baby' in it; and if your mother gives me one more tip on improving chances of conception, I swear to God..."
"She's only trying to help!"
"Well she's not! I don't need to be constantly reminded that I can't give you a baby!" you exclaim.
Harry walks away from you and over to the window. He presses his palms against the sill and you can see the muscles in his shoulders tensing.
"Yes, well, your moods don't help," he mutters with his back to you.
"My what?"
Spinning around, Harry says, "You! With your negativity all the time. We're not going to get pregnant if you keep telling yourself and everyone around you that it's not going to happen!"
Suddenly the will to fight escapes you. Your body visibly sags as you sigh deeply. "See, this is what I mean. Look at us! I'm going to make a drink. Let me know when you've calmed down."
Quietly, you leave the room and head into the kitchen of your apartment. Before all this, an argument with Harry had always been the worst thing in the world. But now ... now it was almost commonplace. These days it was best to just get away from each other for a few minutes – or hours, depending on the severity of the disagreement – until you were calm enough to talk it through.
In this case, it didn't take very long. Fishing the teabag out of your mug, you turned to put it in the bin when you saw Harry leaning against the doorframe. All traces of anger had disappeared from his face, to be replaced by nothing but a terrible sadness.
"I'm sorry," he mutters.
"So am I," you tell him softly, your tea forgotten about as you lean against the worktop.
"I do love you, you know," he adds quietly.
A tiny smile graces your lips. "I know. I love you too. But we can't keep going on like this, Harry – it's going to kill us."
Pushing off from the doorframe, he steps across the kitchen towards you. "So let's stop trying to get pregnant," he says simply.
"What?" you gasp, that being the last sentence you'd been expecting.
"I mean let's officially stop. We'll tell everyone that we've changed our minds. No more visits to the doctor, no more visits from my mother, no more concerning glances from Leo. But we won't actually stop."
"We're going to secretly try and get pregnant?" you frown.
"Kind of," he smiles. "I think part of the reason why we're finding it so difficult is because of all the pressure we're putting upon ourselves. Perhaps if we just relax."
"Keep having sex?" you ask coyly, giggling now.
"Most definitely," he says with mock-seriousness, then, "Right, so we're agreed? No more thinking about it?"
You nod, more sure about that than you are about anything. Grinning, Harry grabs the calendar from the fridge door and drops it into the bin. "No more planning," he says confidently.
"Oh, um, actually – there are other things on the calendar, we're going to need to get that out again..." you say, biting your lip as you look at the bin.
"Be quiet, woman," he laughs, then sighs and adds, "I don't know about you, but I hate what trying to get pregnant has turned us into. I want us back, how we were before all this."
He places his hands on the top of your arms and this time you don't attempt to push him off. Instead you lean into his touch, letting your forehead fall against his.
"Me too," you breathe. "I miss you."
It seems like an illogical thing to say; after all, it's not like he's been absent from your life. Yet, somehow it is like that. This moment right now, this is what you've been missing out on: the man you fell in love with all those years ago.
Gently, he presses his lips against yours for a second. You remain where you are when you break apart, unwilling to break this renewed intimacy. Screwing up your eyes tightly, you murmur, "Do you really think it will happen?"
"Yes. I really do," he whispers, his breath tickling the stray hairs on your neck.
And all of a sudden, everything seems like it might be okay.
Just a one-shot that occurred to me an hour or so ago. And no, I won't be doing a sequel, before anyone asks. Just because I wouldn't know how I want to follow it up... I'll leave it all to your imaginations. :)
There will be a new chapter of 'Death and All His Friends' soon, I promise. I'm halfway through writing it, I've just been very busy with uni stuff lately! It's all a bit stressful. ;)
Charlotte
xxx