He walks through the aisles purposefully, picking up items with the practiced efficiency of a couponing soccer mom. Two percent for him, skim for Olivia, whole grain Cheerios and eggs, bread of course…
Peter's working on auto pilot, navigating the store through a sleep-deprived haze, there's no scope to be imaginative here, his aim being to restock their now painfully empty kitchen with something, anything that spells a modicum of sustenance, keep himself and Olivia on the right side of the nutrition index. He doesn't have the energy or inclination to look for the special deals, the two for ones or any of the extra savings tags. He sticks to staples, pausing by the produce section, he decides on a few things quickly, without any real deliberation, while men and women around him linger and contemplate the many colored fruit with more interest than he has to spare.
But still, he remembers to pick up avocados for Olivia
He knows he looks decidedly ragged, his bone deep exhaustion showing on his face. His standard scruff has turned into something short of a beard and in faded jeans and a shirt that he's not slept in last night, he barely makes it to this side of slovenly.
All things he couldn't care about less. After trying to do some kind of inventory in his head (they're out of peanut butter, its four aisles away, he's not going back- they'll survive without it) he turns to the last item on his agenda, forcing himself to come out of his stupor because this needs nothing short of his full attention.
The baby supplies aisle at the store is a maze of candy colored paraphernalia and for a minute, Peter has double vision. He tries to clear through the fog his mind has been in, and pulls out the list Olivia had hastily scribbled for him.
No one told him, the amount of stuff it takes to tend to a tiny human being. Four days old and their daughter has already been snared into the global consumer culture, he thinks with mild amusement as he proceeds to select the things from the list. His movements are not rehearsed, this is not an aisle of the store he's familiar with, and he has no skill set in the acquisition of these items - diapers, feeding bottles, baby wipes - it's an entirely new world. He pauses, slows down, limbs untensing, he reads packages carefully, scrutinizes the chemical compositions of things that most people wouldn't know anything about (Most people didn't fake being a chemistry professor at MIT).
He takes his time.
No one told him how much he would love being a father...it's like being shot up with a massive dose of happy pills, a supernova of emotions he isn't sure an entire lifetime would suffice to process. To say he's overwhelmed feels like a company line, a poor one word summation of what he is… which is simply everything and more.
A store worker comes up to him and offers assistance, reading his over analysis of the items he's picking up for general cluelessness, apparently common among new fathers.
He assures her he's got it, even shows her the list Olivia wrote out for him when she looks unconvinced and asks again. She nods with some superior feminine wisdom at the items on the list and tells him his wife clearly has a handle on things.
" She's not my wife." He blurts out without thinking and the woman looks immediately contrite, apologizing for the assumption and retreats to go find some other clueless customer, leaving him to think about why he needed to do that exactly, clarify the nature of his relationship to a complete stranger.
It's not that he minds the assumption, far from. He finds the term girlfriend… irritating. It feels reductive, to address the mother of his child in the same way a thirteen year old boy who just asked a girl to go steady would. Not that labels mean much to him, they're just words in the end. But even so, surely there has to be a better term for people in their thirties to use when talking about the people they loved and were not necessarily married to.
They're a family now. Aren't they? There is a house and a mortgage and a child… a child who depends on them to get their shit together and not dance around the future like it was some kind of rabid monster that will swallow up their present happiness. Stability is becoming a comfort in ways which feel alien and its unnerving, to know certainty this close up and not be able to trust it'll stay.
Peter is certainly no stranger to fluid, unformed situations, thrives in them to be accurate. But this is a deceptive amorphousness. The promise of forever lurks in the abysses, tempts him, tells him it's okay, he can stop living one day at a time. He can hold on a little tighter to what he has and not be scared it's going to be ripped away from him yet again.
But history is a spiteful bitch. It reminds him that nothing stays, nothing is forever, that things go wrong often. And it's likely he won't have a say in the matter when it does again, just like he didn't the times before.
He needs to have that talk with Olivia… he decides.
He gets home and after putting away the groceries, heads upstairs to their bedroom. Olivia's lying down on their bed, eyes closed. She sleeps better since the pregnancy, her restless borderline insomnia having given way to some semblance of balanced rest, partly because growing a human being simply wears one out and partly because Olivia had actively made an effort to eat and rest better, treating her body with the kind of well-deserved reverence that he'd never seen her do before, out of deference for their growing child.
He hopes the habit lives on. He likes not being the only one concerned about her well being.
Etta sleeps a few feet away from her, swaddled in a cream and blue blanket, a pillow on her other side to ensure she doesn't roll off, Olivia's one hand reaches out, laid softly across her little tummy. It's an irresistible tendency they both are all too prone to , to touch, to feel as much as they can, to keep her close and not let her out of sight beyond absolutely necessary.
His lips curve into what he knows is a hopelessly sappy smile when he catches sight of Etta's little hand peeking out from below the folds of the blanket, tiny fingers fidgeting as she sniffles in her sleep.
No one tells you….. how easily you fall in love with your child. How it feels like you got zapped by lightning the first time you look at her and she stares back at you with those bottomless blue eyes. How holding her in your arms feels like whatever contentment is supposed to feel like, and you know in that moment nothing will really compare.
Somebody should have warned him, Peter thinks...what he would feel, how much he would feel.
He might have not found himself so in over his head…so completely awash with strange and new emotions.
Olivia stirs, becoming aware of his presence in the way she always is, giving him a sleepy smile of acknowledgement. She looks a little less disheveled than him. Her hair is wet, dark, indicating that at some point while he was gone, she'd taken a shower and changed into a fresh pair of sweats and t-shirt.
But the marks of exhaustion mar every part of her face. She looks just about drained as he does, more so.
" You're back…" She whispers softly, in lieu of the sleeping infant, her eyes already half-closed again. " Did you get everything?"
He nods to her, surveying the state of their room, he bends down to gather all the clothes that have remain discarded over the past couple of days, adding his shirt and jeans to the pile, balling them up into a tidy heap.
"Are there any more clothes?" He whispers to Olivia who is watching him quietly. " I'll turn on the machine before I head into the shower."
" You look really tired, why don't you rest for a bit first?"
" In a while… et me just load the machine."
She smiles, shaking her head at him. " It'll get done." "Honey you can barely stand. Come here." She holds out her hand to him. "Lie down with me for a while."
He smiles at the invitation, drops the pile obediently, not needing much persuasion really. The back of his eyelids ache with fatigue. He allows her to pull him into bed next to her, as she takes his hand and wraps it around her waist, sighing as she folds into his embrace, her angles molding into his in a perfect arch.
She fits so well in his arms.
He inhales deeply, breathing in the clean scent of her freshly showered skin and her shampoo, fragrances he's become all too accustomed to over the years, his sensitivity to it has become sharper now, that he's been living in close quarters with her over the months.
" Did you eat anything?" He asks her a hand snaking up to her shoulder as he rubs slow circles with his thumb.
" Too tired to go downstairs." She mumbles in the negative, her hand coming up to play with his nape, she runs gentle fingers through his hair. " It's a wonder I didn't fall asleep in the shower."
" I'll bring you something." He makes to move, but she stills him with a firm hand. Stay, she tells him. He frowns against her skin, getting ready to express his displeasure, when she squeezes the arm around her, turning to face him.
" I'll eat later, promise."
He nods, pulling her closer, her forehead resting against his chest, she brings a hand up to his face, closing over his eyelids.
" I want you to get some proper sleep." She says, softly again, all their conversations have become exchanges in hushed voices. " You're running yourself into the ground doing everything."
He resists the urge to snort. He wants to remind her that she's the one who spent 23 excruciating hours in labor not to mention the actual birth, that she's the one who carried their child for nine months and put up with every annoyance because of it and that she's the one who's awake at 2:30 in the mornings for a late night feeding.
But he knows she'll shrug it off and so he simply murmurs in agreement against her neck, closing his eyes.
" I think we could both use some of that."
They lie together, in the place between wakefulness and slumber, too tired to be fully aware and yet unable to disengage with their surroundings, a restlessness that won't yield to the needs of their bodies. His left hand hand keeps busy, travelling down to the hem of her shirt, sneaking under the cotton it makes contact with skin. He caresses gently, calloused fingertips languidly running over the now once-again flat stomach. It feels softer than he remembers, loose, almost spongy where she was once lean and corded and all muscle. He traces the texture of a thin stretch mark that now marks her lower right abdomen, feeling the curves where there were once angles.
Its transformation, in more one ways than one, a body given over to nature's process and now slowly returning to original state. He can chart the differences like it were his own skin, because he knows her intimately, in all the ways he's not used to knowing women, never having shared so much time and space with anybody to be in so tune with shifts in their moods and their states, to bear witness to the changes in their physicality.
It's a knowledge he realizes he's more than thankful for, as he pauses his listless exploration, palm pressing softly against her belly, thinking about what that means.
If he'll have the opportunity to know her like this forever, for a lifetime.
" What?" She whispers as she senses the question in the touch. She's adept at decoding all his silences, his touches. He smiles at her knowing tone and pulls her lips into a kiss. Her lips still feel tingly from spearmint toothpaste, she must have brushed recently.
"This is nice. Yeah?"
He can feel her smile against his lips, knowing he's not talking about the sleep deprivation, or the aching joints or the general fatigue that has them both on the brink of a coma right then.
"It's very nice." She nods agreeably.
" You think we'll get to do this for good?"
She tenses slightly before relaxing again, eyes open now, watching him, shaking her head in a somewhat amused smile. They reflect a flicker of his own anxiety. He smiles too.
Optimism has never been their strong suit.
" I think…" She pauses, no doubt to choose her words carefully. Olivia never did like making promises she couldn't deliver on.
"I think there's a strong possibility that we will."
" Good." It's good enough for now, he decides, closing his eyes, giving into the lull that has been calling to him for over five hours now.
He almost sleeps for a glorious half an hour before Etta murmurs next to them and in that instance he knows they're both holding their breath, afraid to make a sound, lest she wake up. But she stirs anyway in a matter of seconds, crying out in half-hearted bursts. She doesn't like to be very loud, they've found.
Olivia sighs against him, turning over to attend to their daughter, picking her up from her cocoon of blankets.
"Let me take her." He automatically reaches out with his arms, taking the baby from her hands. He lays her on his chest, securing her with his arms.
"It's okay kiddo. I've got you." He rubs slow, feather light circles on her back, in a repeated motion that has had some success in soothing her before. "I swear she does this on purpose. Almost like she doesn't want us to sleep…ever."
Olivia smiles, her hand joining his. She rests her head on the other side of his chest, closing her eyes once again.
"Welcome to the next seventeen years of your life." She chuckles.
He smiles too. This is his future now and its also right now. And it doesn't make him afraid.
" Liv…"
" Hmm?"
" I think I never said thank you."
" What for?"
" For all of it." He tightens his hold over Etta. He wants to hold on tighter.
" For all of it Liv…"
