From Scott Summers' Personal Journal:

When Warren left, my whole body went weak with a flash flood of anxious adrenaline, which may sound ridiculous as I'd been waiting a week to be alone again with Jean, yet being alone with her scared me to death. This was like that afternoon, over ten years ago in a hotel room in Kavalla, when I'd almost choked on anticipation. We'd both lost our virginity that afternoon (however technical mine had been by that point), but it wasn't sex that unnerved me this evening, or not purely. It had been sex back then, but now, it was everything.

I'd suffered mild anxiety attacks off and on the whole time she'd been away bringing Madelyne's life to a close. Without the thin mental thread she'd set between us before she'd left, I don't know that I'd have made it through without breaking down and following her to be sure she didn't disappear on me in a puff of smoke. Once, I'd told Jean I was an eternal singular. That had been before I'd learned to be one of a permanent pair, and such is the folly of love. You know you can lose it, but you commit to it anyway, put your heart and soul in the hands of another. There were days I wished I knew how to be that eternal singular. Life might hurt less.

Right now, though, I felt all shocky with nerves, and kept swallowing. Jean was watching me - feeling me. I could sense her mental touch, and opened to her. I needed, and was afraid to need. Coming over to me, she snuggled into my arms and just held on. We didn't do anything else for a long time. I tried not to think about the body I held because if I did, I thought things like, 'made out of air,' and 'not hers,' and 'not real.' But she felt real. Her skin was firm and warm, her hair soft against the backs of my hands. Part of why her hair sometimes looks lank is that it's very fine, like a child's. I buried my nose in it, suddenly near tears.

"Go ahead," she whispered, "Let go - I've got you." Then she held me tight while I sobbed. We had to sit down after a while because my legs wouldn't hold me up anymore.

When the storm had passed, I was too drained even to think about sex. I just wanted to sleep with her next to me. Sometimes that's all I want, to have another body to hold that doesn't want anything from me except touch. So she led me by the hand into the bedroom and stripped me out of my clothes, then stripped herself (in the normal way, not by melting the clothes off), and we climbed into our bed. She held me until I fell asleep.

I woke again sometime after midnight. My sleep cycle was all screwed up. She was dozing beside me, not really asleep because she woke as soon as I did, raising herself on an elbow so that her mussed hair tumbled over pale shoulders. There was no light in the room except the glow of a yellow summer moon shining in the window. I'd fallen asleep in my glasses, not my goggles, and had to straighten them a little. "Hey handsome," she said, smiling.

"Are you crazy? I haven't shaved since yesterday evening and I think my hair's all sticking up."

Grinning, she smoothed my hair down. "I like your scruffy look."

The words were just banter, but they were also something we might have said a hundred times before, and I needed that familiarity just then, some compass in these new-old waters.

"Kiss me," she pleaded suddenly, and I leaned towards her, but hesitated - why, I wasn't sure. She bent down instead, finishing the connection. Our lips touched. And wasn't that how this relationship had always gone? I'd been the one pursued, not the pursuer.

Yet once committed, I met her kiss with nine months of pent-up emotion. It was all there, balled in my chest and belly, shaking through me like a storm of want. Everything turned suddenly fierce - the kiss, her nails against my back, and my grip on her arms as we rose to a sitting position. I grabbed her hair and pulled while biting at her lips. Normally, I wasn't so rough - rough turned me off, but not now. I wanted to eat her alive, and it scared me. It didn't scare her. She straddled me and came down hard, sliding me inside her with no more prelude than that, and the surprise of it nearly made me come on the spot. For a few seconds, we held still, fused, then she shifted a little and I supported her while she moved on me, slick and quick and panting. It didn't last long, climax spearing me straight through the balls and the base of my spine, shuddering my whole body. She moved up and down a little more, then stopped, resting against me. I wasn't sure if she'd come or not, but didn't feel confident enough to ask. We were both sweaty, and it was only then that I realized we'd made love without a condom. She'd assured me, back in Alaska, that she couldn't catch HIV from me, but it occurred to me now to wonder if she could get pregnant.

We'd both always known - before - that the only way we'd have a baby would be via a test-tube that didn't expose her to my 'viral pet,' as she'd sometimes called it in jest. Yet as we couldn't even seem to get married, we'd never (seriously) discussed having children.

Now, I found myself thinking about it. The proximity of death does that to you - starts you pondering what you're leaving behind as much as what comes next. Till now, the idea of kids had only made me anxious, worried that I might not survive to raise them. After all, I'd been a child left behind, and I already had a mansion full of kids, as it was. They needed to be first with someone, just as I'd needed that once. But now I considered it all from the other side. I'd been bereft when Jean had died, and for the first time, I understood the drive to procreate, to find immortality in the next generation, and to generate life as an expression of love - all those cliched things.

Probably sensing that I'd gone to mental ground, Jean leaned back enough to look at me. "Penny for your thoughts."

I hesitated. "This might be more on the dollar scale."

The corners of her mouth tipped up. "Oh? Spill."

She was still sitting on me with my cock inside her, which made thinking (or at least talking) a little difficult. "We just . . . Uh, no condom."

A tiny frown pierced her brows. "I told you not to worry about that." And she raised herself off me to plop down on the sheets at my side, bare arms around her drawn-up knees.

"I wasn't," I replied, "or not worrying in the same way. But - can you get pregnant now?"

Her eyes widened. "That is a dollar thought. If you're wondering whether we should go crib shopping, don't. But if you're wondering if it's possible - this body is just as real as yours, and it includes a uterus, two ovaries, and the requisite eggs, probably all healthier than the ones I had before. So yes, I can."

I nodded. "I wasn't sure. When you said before that you could keep from getting sick, I didn't know if you, ah - if the body was . . . ."

"Pinch me and I feel it," she said, "tickle me and I'll laugh, fuck me and I'll come." I blushed. "I still eat, and have to go to the bathroom. I'll still menstruate once a month - though really, I could do without that. But it comes with the package, and I'm glad to have the package back."

"But on the plane, you didn't sleep -"

"I slept for four hours yesterday - or Friday, I guess it was now. I wasn't that tired." She paused, then added, "I can push myself past limits, yes. I learned that when I was finding my way back. I can put off hunger for a while, and exhaustion. So I can adjust some things, but I don't know that I could eliminate them - or that I want to. I like having a body again." She licked her lips, then looked down, as if suddenly shy. "So if you want to make a baby together, we can."

"What about you? How do you feel about the idea?"

She reached up to take my glasses off my face. I still flinched a little when she did that, but not as much, and I understood why she might want to see my eyes right now. "I've wanted a baby for a while, Scott. I didn't think you were ready."

"I wasn't."

"Now?"

"I want to hold our daughter. I hope she has red hair."

She rolled up onto her knees and her arms went around my neck. "It could be a boy, you know."

Tilting my chin up to look at her and returning her embrace, I said, "I'll take either, as long as the baby's healthy."

"Well, it'll probably take a few days. I can't ripen an egg that fast - I don't think."

And that - the casual way she said it as if she were talking about dying her hair - brought me to a full mental stop. If I'd made it over the mental hurdle of the idea itself, I wasn't ready to start planning a nursery. But even more unnerving was the idea that she could make herself fertile just by willing it. "Uh - I didn't mean I wanted you to get pregnant right now. And not tomorrow, either. For one thing, you have to be back publicly, first. You can't show up five months pregnant after being gone a year, and have people believe the baby's mine."

She pursed her lips, as if irritated by the constraints of necessity, and let my neck go. "From the way you talked, I wasn't sure how soon you wanted to get started."

"Let me get used to the idea before you kill any rabbits, okay?"

"No rabbits have to be sacrificed these days. But don't make me wait till retirement."

"Half a year maybe. Then we can start trying." As much as I felt suddenly anxious to have a child with her, I felt equally reluctant to start. After playing dorm parent for a while, I was under no illusions that parenthood was easy, and we hadn't had to deal with midnight feedings and potty training.

"What are you smiling about?" she asked now. I hadn't even realized I had been.

"Believe it or not, I was thinking about potty training. If I can't housebreak a dog, how can I potty-train a kid?"

Her eyes danced. "Well, actually, I think diapers come first. You know how to put on a diaper?"

"Not a clue."

"I had some practice with Sarah's twins. You'll get the hang of it pretty fast."

And how had I gone from the crippling nerves of earlier that evening to thinking about diapers? Yet it . . . normalized this whole thing as much as it could be normalized. By whatever miracle, Jean was back, and we were talking about starting a family.

"I think Warren would like having a baby to spoil," she said now.

It made me blink, as I hadn't really considered how Warren would fit into the baby picture, and that seemed suddenly selfish. I was less sure than Jean how Warren would take the news. "Let's not say anything to him just yet."

"Why?" The question seemed so innocent.

I resisted shaking my head. "Jean, think - you, me, baby, family . . . Warren's going to feel on the outside of that."

She frowned. "Only if we make him. You're the tactician - think outside the box." I just looked at her, not at all sure what she meant by that. She huffed. "There's no reason why Warren can't take the baby sometimes. Imagine Uncle Warren in a business meeting with a baby in a sling on his chest."

That mental image was just too funny for words. "Spit up on his tie?"

"At the very least. Think he can change a diaper?"

"Probably no better than I can."

"So you'll both learn."

And that was essentially the end of the conversation. We petted and stroked each other a while, then made love again, slower and gentler, and I made certain - this time - that she came. I was feeling my way back into "us," resisting my tendency to over-analyze my feelings. Whatever else she might be now, she was still my Jean, who I loved to distraction. I had to start there, give it time; I was sure the hard, anxious ball in the pit of my stomach would go away eventually.