A/N: This was not heavily edited! I just wanted to get the chapter out for you guys to read! Let me know if there is anything that should be fixed in the comments below.
"Now this next performer has been away from us while she was on tour opening for Shy Baldwin! You know her, you've missed her!" Jackie looked over at Midge and Suzy, unable to hide his sleepy smile. "Give it up for our very own Queen of the Upper West Side, Mrs. Maisel!"
The gathered audience clapped and even a couple people 'hooted' out cheers as Midge made her way from the Suzy and the bar, to the stage. She snatched up Jackie's hand for a moment as they passed each other, and gave it a tight squeeze. It was good to be back.
"Well, hello there everybody!" Midge worked the microphone off the stand and threw the cord out of her way. She looked over the audience for people she recognized and allowed herself a moment of nerves at the number of new faces. "My God, is it good to be back home in New York!"
There were a few scattered chuckles through the room, so Midge dove into her vaguely planned talking points for the evening.
"No seriously," Midge held out her hand. "I just moved back to the Upper West Side after living either on the road or in Queens with my ex-husband's parents. Do you know the one thing that makes in-laws worse? When you aren't married to their son anymore."
"No, Ethan! Ethan! Ethan!" Abe followed his grandson down the hallway in an effort to get back whatever toy the young boy had unpacked. "Ethan Maisel, I'm speaking to you."
Midge and Rose were surrounded by pieces of luggage and packed up cardboard boxes. They only had one more day left to pack, and despite the offer to take the kids for the day, Joel hadn't arrived yet to retrieve them from the chaos. Midge briefly considered asking Lenny, but things with her and Joel were still rocky, and she didn't want to add fuel to an already pretty healthy fire.
"I don't know why you don't leave the kids here," Shirley huffed again as she stood unhelpfully in the doorway of the kitchen. There were boxes filling the foyer, making it hard to move around.
"Shirley, could you hand me that pen?" Rose tried to distract the woman fruitlessly; thought she did get her pen.
"They should be here, with family," Shirley continued to harp. She was now adjusting and re-packing various items while sadly looking at some of the kids toys. "Not in that big empty apartment with whoever the hell it was that you married."
"I got remarried when I was on tour," Midge announced with a little more confidence than she was feeling. "It has been an adjustment getting into that frame of mind again y'know? Getting remarried is a bit like when you give your children one of your old toys. The parts are still all there, you just hope they still work."
"Honey, I'm home!" Lenny's voice bounced off half-full boxes and poorly stacked books.
Midge rounded the corner just in time to see him bump into a pile of their records, now intermingled, just like the rest of their lives. She winced as her bare feet left the carpet and made contact with the cold wooden floors of the entryway. She'd cozied up in a thick sweater and her softest pants, while she unpacked, but her shoes were long gone.
"You were gone for ten minutes," she rolled her eyes, but stood on her toes to kiss his cheek anyway. She grabbed one of the brown paper bags from his hands and ushered him around and over her labyrinth of unpacked items that still needed a home. "The restaurant isn't even that far away."
"What the fuck happened in here?" Lenny was trying his best not to laugh at the sheer amount of newly unearthed items strewn across the floorboards and the carpeted floor in the living room.
Midge didn't dignify his question with an answer, knowing full well that he knew exactly what had happened. She wanted to feel more settled in their new home, and the most they'd gotten done was moving everything into the apartment. It was just a good thing that the kids weren't home as well, or they would have even more to contend with while trying to put stuff away.
Their new couches and chairs had yet to arrive, so Midge made herself comfortable on the floor, taking Chinese food boxes and chopsticks out of one of the bags. Lenny was digging around in a couple boxes until he procured some candles and a pack of matches.
"What's in the other bag?" Midge asked around a mouthful of rice. The second bag was soaking condensation onto the overturned coffee table, just out of her reach.
Lenny finished lighting the candles, creating the faintest glow against the lofted windows and large fireplace. He grabbed the bag in question, sat on the floor, and pulled out a six pack of Midge's favourite brand of beer.
"Oh," Midge moved her food so she'd have a hand free, reaching out with wiggling fingers for a bottle. "My husband is the best!"
They sat in companionable silence for a few minutes, drinking each other in between bites of food and sips of beer. The candles crackled slightly around the darkness of the lampless room.
"Hey, Midge?" Lenny looked up from his food, more serious than she'd ever seen him before. She matched his gaze, knowing deeply that this was a moment she wanted imprinted on her mind forever. Distantly, she wished for a camera to record this moment, and wondered if going to get one would ruin the mood. "I love you, honey."
"I love you too, Lenn."
She tip-toed around her relationship with Lenny like it was a mine waiting to be set off. There were traps set around every letter of his name, and the cheese was every single detail of their lives together. The moment Midge caught herself getting up while he was still asleep, only to lay back down when she realised that she didn't care if he saw her with rollers and face cream. And the morning he woke up first, and cooked her pancakes, even attempting animal shapes for Ethan and Esther.
She didn't share those details though; not all of them at least.
"You know what the most shocking part of waking up married in Las Vegas, in a hotel room filled with yellow teddy bears after a drunken bender with your best friend while on tour with Shy Baldwin is?" Midge rushed through the words, not even quite sure herself if she was making sense, but having practiced it with Lenny this morning, knew that it sounded funnier the faster she was able to make the words come out. She paused long enough that she was able to get two laughs and a thumbs up from Suzy. "The most shocking part; the part that really is like a kick in the ass," another pause, another laugh. "My parents love him. And I don't just mean that my father gets along with him and my mother laughs at his joke during dinner parties. They love him."
"I think you should get pregnant again."
They had been sitting in a comfortable silence before Rose's sudden suggestion. They both had magazines to look through, often turning the pages towards each other for opinions and comments. Midge lowered her magazine to look at her mother, mouth slightly agape. Rose's face was still blocked by her's, clearly deciding that her comment was no big deal.
"I'm sorry?" Midge must have misheard her, or imagined what her mother just suggested.
"You're still young, married to a lovely, handsome man…" Rose was still hiding behind her magazine pages. "Three before thirty, I've always told you that."
"Mama…"
"Just something to keep in mind!" She turned her page and shrugged her shoulders. "It would be a shame to waste such beautiful features."
"We both have kids from our first marriages," Midge danced across the small stage with more vigor than she'd had before. The audience was giving her a new wave of energy that she was sure got packed away with her hats. "So we're already a packed household, and yet I feel that itch, you know? Well, women know anyway. Sometimes I look at his happy smile, or I watch him playing with our little girls at the park, and I think, 'we don't need a guest room'."
There was a woman at one of the front tables laughing until she snorted. Her hand was up over her face, but Midge zeroed in on her right away.
"Do you have kids?" The woman nodded her head through her laughs, then held up four fingers. Midge made a sound of pain, making the woman's laughter start up again. "So you know what I'm talking about then. You were closed for business after they gave you a little less drugs for the second birth, then your husband fixed a pipe, or you saw him shaving one morning and thought, 'they make bunk beds'." The woman in the audience gestured to one of the good looking men she was sitting with as an example that she knew exactly what Midge was going through.
This was a new experience for Midge. No matter how long she and Joel were together for, she can hardly recall more than a handful of times that she was present for his morning routine. Watching Lenny shave in their bathroom mirror was now her new favourite way to start the day.
Normally, she would have been off to the races with prepping the kids for the day, or sneaking off to do up her own face and make breakfast before her husband was even out of bed. Now, however, that had changed, and just a few days in, she already liked this morning more than all the others.
"God, this stuff is everywhere!" Lenny flicked some of Midge's face cream off of his hand over the bathroom sink. "How is this contained, and yet on every single surface?"
Midge sat on the vanity, still in her nighty, and still in rollers. Lenny had kindly decided to stay undressed while they got ready for the day together. He had shaving cream all over his face as he leaned over the sink to clear away the dark hair that had grown overnight.
She leaned back against the large mirror and watched as he methodically swiped away at his cheekbones and strong jawline. She moved her eyes down, and down, then lingered until he cleared his throat to get her attention. He'd kept glancing at her as he went, watching her as she watched him back.
"If you keep looking at me like that, we aren't going to get anything done today."
"I could be up for that," she glanced down again and raised an eyebrow, then met his eyes.
Lenny shook his head and turned back to the mirror. They both knew that Midge staying in the bathroom would just lead to no good, so she shifted in an effort to hop down to the floor. He placed a hand on her waist, to help, she thought. But instead, he leaned in and pressed a shaving cream covered kiss to her lips. He tasted like toothpaste and the chemical's that were spread across both of them.
"Go back to bed, I'll be there soon," his words were low and filled with purpose. Midge felt a giddy excitement and a newfound want to leave the bathroom. Just as she was about to flop herself back onto their bed, Lenny stuck his head out the ensuite door. "Maybe clean that shit off your face though, yeah?"
"Well, that's it for me tonight!" Midge walked back to centre stage and shoved the microphone back onto the stand. "You've been a lovely distraction from the moving and my parents, but I have a handsome husband to get back to, and apparently some eggs to fertilize!" She smiled through her final laugh of the night. "I'm still sort-of Mrs. Maisel! Thank you, and good night!"
