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A/N: Please review! More is coming tomorrow, hopefully... especially if I feel motivated. ...hint hint. :)


Chapter 10: Baby

Kelly's due date was July second, and so I had taken the week off, flown back to Boston, prepared to help the happy couple out and see the baby she was calling my niece. She was an only child, and I'd told her that I'd lost contact with my brother once I went into foster care, and so she considered me one as well.

"We'll be each other's kids' aunts!" She had explained, before asking if I wanted—well, telling me, really—to be the baby's godmother. I had laughed.

"Do I really have a choice?"

"No." She replied with a smug smile, but she knew that I was happy about it.

And Eric was a very nice man—a lot like me, which was strange—I would have expected Kelly to marry someone a little more outgoing, more like herself. But I had once said that the pair of us balanced each other out, and maybe that was what he'd done for her. When I'd run away to Berkeley, she'd lost the person keeping her balanced. Maybe if I'd even interacted with other people, after I left, I would have felt the loss in the same way—found someone Kelly-like… but I had barely spoken to another soul after I moved for years, except at work.

Of course, she asked after my love life—that was Kelly. And it was harder to avoid when you weren't just on the phone… I told her I wasn't seeing anybody. The problem was, I'd spent six years avoiding Kelly's probing questions—she knew how I tried to be honest, first, and not tell too much, before I switched to outright lying. And she always knew if I was lying…

"So, you're not 'seeing' anyone, but there is someone that you're not seeing?"

I laugh. "What was that now?"

She grins, running a hand over the positively massive belly under her maternity shirt. "Someone you can't call a 'boyfriend,' but you're obviously hung up on… and have probably slept with, considering your track record." At my look, she clarifies. "I'm not saying you sleep around, but if you like someone, you're going to do them."

I blush furiously. "Do them, Kelly? Are we in sixth grade?"

"What's his name?"

I wrinkle my nose, upset at how easily she sees through me. "Gil."

She giggles. "As in Gilbert?"

I laugh with her—a surprised laugh. It hadn't occurred to me that it was a strange name until now… I seek to explain this. "…Well, he introduced himself as 'Dr. Gilbert Grissom'…"

She watches me for a moment, her eyes narrowed, and then they open wide. "Oh my god! That's the problem! He was a teacher!"

I blush—he wasn't, but it was too close for comfort. "No, no, he… he wasn't my teacher. He was at the conference I was telling you about…"

"But he's older than you." I let my shoulder rise and fall in tacit agreement—of course he was older. I hadn't seriously looked at someone my age since Michael. She watches me. "As old as Michael?"

I bite my bottom lip. Michael had been eleven years my senior… Gil was fifteen. As usual, she knows me too well.

"He's older than Michael?"

I laugh, unexpectedly, at the inflection in her voice. "He's not ninety… he's… forty-one." Her eyebrows raise higher, and I rush to defend myself, and him. "He is the sexiest forty-one you ever saw… bright blue eyes, brown curls with just a hint of gray at the temples, the sweetest little boy smile, and oh, god, Kel', you should see his arms…"

She grins—she hasn't seen me swoon over a guy in years. "…Is he good?"

I glare, but her grin is infectious, and once I'm smiling I can't hold back anymore. "Oh my god, he's amazing!"

She giggles, and I do too. I feel like I'm in college again. "Bigger than Michael?"

I tilt my head, considering. The fact that there had been years between the two certainly didn't help the comparison, but still, I was pretty sure. "Yeah, a little. Well, no… I mean, he's not really longer but… he's definitely… wider." I consider the description. "Or would it be… thicker?"

She rolls her eyes, and grins ear-to-ear. "Not being longer than Michael is still impressive. Didn't you tell me he was—"

"Alright now, enough walking down memory lane. It doesn't matter, anyway… I… broke up with him."

"What?! You're hung up on a guy, he's amazing in bed, and yet you're the one who ended it? …this is some crazy insecurity thing, isn't it? When are you going to stop letting your past ruin your future?"

She's angry, and she's probably even right, but I don't really want to admit it. Kelly doesn't really know—she knows more than any of the men I'd ever been with, but she still doesn't know. I had told her that I was put in foster care because my dad hit my mom when he drank, and she hadn't been able to take care of us on her own.

She doesn't know that they were both alcoholics, or that my father had hit all of us—my mother and my brother and me, often… and not just when he was drinking. She didn't know where my mother was now, or how close my brother came to death, several of the times he'd been beaten, or how I'd been in the room when my mother stabbed him… She didn't know that my mother had snapped and killed him when she walked in and saw that he was… so she doesn't understand.

I shrug, looking down. She takes it for emotion rather than deception. "It isn't even that… he just… he was still in love with someone else."

She gives me a sad smile now, and wraps an arm around me. "I'm sorry, hon. …Still, maybe it's for the best. You'd never make it in to that dream job you're working if you had all that man at home, waiting for you…"

I nudge her and she laughs, pleased that her vulgarity can bring a blush to my cheeks once more—when I had left Boston I had been all but immune to it. "Yeah, yeah… let's feed you and little Josephine, already." I say, rising to pull our frozen pizza from the oven—Eric's working late tonight, and we'd decided to stay in and pig out.

I cut it up quickly, giving each of us half—hey, we're pigging out, right?—and then we curl up on the couch, turning on a chick flick. But before I can even establish what dilemma beautiful woman is suffering from that beautiful, if somewhat cheesy, man is going to save her from, Kelly drops her entire plate of pizza onto the floor, and doubles up over her baby bump.

One look at her face tells me what's happening, and so I jump up, calling Eric at work in a near panic—but he calms me, tells me where the suitcase is—pre-packed, thank god—and says he'll meet us at the hospital. Kelly's laughing at me, even through her pain, and I throw her a glare.

"Just like you to be laughing through your contractions. …They're gonna get a lot worse you know…" I add, attempting to wipe the smirk off her face. I'm panicking and she's laughing?

She giggles, seeing through me. "You are so spiteful, Sara. Just laugh for once! I'm having a baby! You're going to be an auntie and a godmother! Go get the suitcase; I got a kid to pop out!"

"Josephine" turned out to be a Joey (they'd never let the doctors tell them, but Kelly had had a "feeling" it was a girl…), but Kelly did not seem disappointed in the slightest. She held him in her arms like he was everything that had ever been valued, throughout the course of human history, and then some. She passed him to Eric, and eventually to me, and I held the baby with the pinched little face close, breathing in the sweetness of his new-baby smell.

I hadn't liked the babies, in my foster homes… I was good with them, but it was because I had to learn how to be—everything went smoother if there was less crying. But Joey—I really liked him. …No, I loved him. How strange, that I had not been involved in the pregnancy, except at the very end, had not even really given a thought to my relationship with him, simply being happy that Kelly would be a mother… and yet here, this tiny, scrunched little body in my arms… and I was lost.

…Maybe I would want to be a mother, after all. …Someday. And then I'm crying—not sobbing, but single, silent tears slide down my cheeks. I'm not sure if this is because I'm overwhelmed at the realization of my emotions, or by the emotions themselves, or if it's with this epiphany that I realize the extent of my loss; I wouldn't want a baby with anyone but Gil, and I don't have him…

But then, I have to admit with frustration, maybe I had never had him. …All the evidence showed me that he had never, truly, been mine at all. I wipe my tears aside, and kiss Joey's chubby little cheeks fiercely, trying to ease the ache in my breast.

I would never have this.