if we're strong enough / to let it in / we're strong enough / to let it go
April 15th, one year earlier.
"I'm starvin'!" were the first words out of Amanda's mouth once she and her new husband were alone.
It was three in the morning when the newlyweds stumbled out of their post-reception celebration and up to their seventh-floor hotel room at Lotte New York. Amanda was flushed pink and happy, drunk from hours of cocktails and champagne toasts. Sonny was, too, loud and clumsy behind her as she let them into their suite.
"Me too. I barely ate." Sonny took off his gray jacket and dropped it onto the floor, then tugged at his tie and tossed that aside, too. With uncoordinated fingers, he struggled to undo the first few buttons of his shirt beneath his vest.
She kicked off her heels, her aching feet instantly grateful for the plush carpet. "Me too." Amanda hitched up the delicate, silky fabric of her expensive wedding dress to crawl across the massive bed like an eager little kid. Her manicured fingers snatched up the leather-bound room service book on the nightstand. Flopping onto her back, she held it above her, the small font blurring before eventually shifting into focus. "They have pizza!" she exclaimed gleefully.
Sonny was yanking open the balcony door, distracted. He hadn't been up to the room yet, but she had spent last night there with Kim. "I want french fries," he announced, out of her line of sight as he presumably investigated the view.
Squinting, she pulled the menu closer. "They have those, too!" she slurred enthusiastically before accidentally dropping the book onto her face. "Ow," she squeaked as she fumbled to pick it up again.
"Call 'em!" he called from outside. "Do the have any cookies? Man, I could really use a cookie."
Amanda rolled over onto her stomach. A few hours ago, before all the booze had kicked in, she was anxious about the state of her dress, hair and make-up. Now, alone with Sonny - and very much married to him - she couldn't have cared less about her appearance. She reached an arm out and picked up the phone before she pressed the the button for room service. She rested one cheek atop her folded forearm as her other hand held the receiver to her ear. Someone picked up after the second ring. "Um, hi. I'm, well, my name's Amanda - oof, hey!" Sonny had taken a running leap and belly-flopped on top of her, his lanky frame practically smothering her own. Through her breathless giggling, she continued, "and my husband and I are hungry and, uh, can we order something?"
"Sure, ma'am," the kind female voice on the other line responded. "We serve till six in the morning."
"Oh, good! I'm so hungry..." Amanda felt Sonny shift a little of his weight off of her, but only to allow a palm to rove over a thigh and her ass - this is so soft! he observed loudly, despite her very obviously being on the phone - "...we just got married and there was a lotta food but I only had like, two bites, y'know?"
"Congratulations," the stranger chirped. "Yeah, I know how it goes. You get so distracted by having a good time that you forget to eat dinner."
"Yeah! Thanks! Aw, you're so sweet," Amanda gushed, in the type of blissfully intoxicated state that meant she found every kind person especially wonderful - and every asshole deserving of her wrath. Thankfully, she had only encountered the former that night. "I'm so glad I'm talkin' to you. What's your name?"
"Amy," the woman replied.
"Hi, Amy," she drawled.
"So... you want to order something?" Amy prompted.
"Oh yeah! Um, what do I want? What do I want..." she mused. She felt Sonny roll completely off of her. "I want a pizza. Pepperoni pizza. And an order of french fries. And a cookie. D'you have cookies?"
"We do," Amy answered easily. "Anything else?"
"No, that's it."
"I'll have it sent right up."
"Thank you so much. I, uh, don't know what room we're in," Amanda admitted.
"705, ma'am," Amy reminded her.
"Sure," she agreed amicably. "Thanks!"
After she hung up, she hauled herself into a sitting position. She started pulling bobby pins out of her hair, which had been in a perfectly-undone, half-up style thanks to the talents of one of Amanda's oldest friends. After so many hours, it was finally starting to give her a headache. Blindly, she began to yank the pins away from her scalp, then tossed each one aside haphazardly.
"How many thingies are in there?" Sonny asked curiously, sitting up next to her.
"I dunno, but... I can feel them... stabbin' me..." she grumbled, nose scrunched with her frustration.
"I'll get them," he offered eagerly. "Y'know, how monkeys are always pickin' at one another, helpin' each other out and shit? Like that."
She dropped her hands down into her lap and acquiesced. He was just as drunk as she was - if not more so - so she was skeptical about his fine motor skills. "Ow, shit!" she yelped almost immediately when he pulled at her hair instead of a bobby pin. She swatted his fingers away and tried again on her own. "A monkey could do this better than you."
"Well, a monkey probably didn't have... a lotta drinks," Sonny retorted with a smirk.
Feeling her head, Amanda ran her fingers through the wavy blonde strands, assessing. "I think they're all out." She shook her head side to side to loosen any that may have been hiding, and when she stopped, the room spun. "Much better," she hiccuped.
Through half-lidded eyes, Sonny looked at her wearing a dopey grin. He was rumpled and flushed, a lock of hair free from the otherwise neat style and hanging over his forehead. The festivities had taken their toll on his attire, but to Amanda, he was no less handsome now than when he had been waiting for her at the altar. In fact, she thought she preferred him this way. "Y'have fun?" he asked her.
She nodded, matching his smile. "'Course I did." She leaned in until her mouth encountered his in a kiss. "But I'm so hungry," she added in a moan.
Amanda felt the rumble of his laughter in the sloppy kisses that followed.
When there was a knock on the door, both of their eyes widened in excitement. Sonny clambered to answer it, and the moment the concierge left, they pulled the food onto the bed. Their legs bent beneath them, they sat atop the mattress and began tearing open containers anxiously. For a few minutes, they were silent as they shamelessly dove into everything they had ordered.
"Are we gonna have sex? I think we're supposed to," Amanda asked curiously, mouth full of greasy french fries. She licked ketchup off of her thumb.
Sonny snorted as he watched her and waggled his eyebrows. "I mean, lookin' at this, I'm pretty turned on..."
She burst out laughing, flopping back onto the mattress with the force of her amusement. When she collected herself, she sighed dreamily. Lolling her head to one side, she smiled at Sonny. "You're my best friend."
He popped a fry into his mouth. "You're my best friend," he told her thickly.
"No matter what?" she asked.
Sonny nodded. "No matter what, Rollins."
On the fifteenth of April, Amanda woke up slow. Blinking her eyes open, she saw that Sonny's side of the bed was empty, the covers rumpled in his wake. The alarm clock on his bedside table read nine a.m. - it was Sunday, but it was still the latest Amanda had slept in a very long time. Lazily, she flopped over to her other side. Her groggy gaze settled on her own nightstand, where she found a large bouquet of sunflowers and daisies - her two favorite flowers. Pulling herself up to sitting, Amanda leaned in to smell them, a grin tugging at her lips. She touched careful, curious fingertips to the soft petals of a sunflower.
It was she and Sonny's first wedding anniversary. They had agreed not to do anything or buy one another gifts given their massive investment in their house, but Amanda wasn't surprised that Sonny couldn't help but do something for her anyway. Still smiling, she got out of bed and shrugged on an old gray zip-up. She hugged the familiar fabric around her body as she walked downstairs, Fluffy right at her heels. She found Sonny in the kitchen by the stove, where he was gently prodding scrambled eggs in a frying pan. Luca was in his high chair eating pieces of what appeared to be a cut-up waffle.
"Mama!" the baby chirped when he spotted her, fist full of his breakfast.
"Hi," Amanda greeted Luca in the special voice she reserved only for him.
Sonny turned around and gave her the kind of grin that she first fell in love with - the sort that let her know that he was genuinely pleased to see her. To this day, Amanda had never met another person who could warm her up so instantaneously without a word. Her bare feet carried her to the stove before she stood up her toes, pressed a palm into his chest and kissed him. "Happy anniversary," she murmured. It was a special Sunday in the wake of a tragic one, but she didn't want the day to be clouded with sadness.
"Happy anniversary," Sonny repeated.
Pulling away slightly, she toyed with his t-shirt. "Thank you for the flowers."
"You're welcome." He held up the spatula in his other hand. "Y'want some eggs?"
"Sure." She slipped past him to move toward the coffee pot. "Where's Jesse?"
"She's in the livin' room playin' something on the iPad," Sonny explained, turning back to the stove.
Amanda filled her mug, now both Fluffy and Frannie at her feet, looking for attention. She crouched down to pet them each, one at a time.
"So, don't get mad..." Sonny continued.
"Don't start a sentence that way," she grumbled, straightening up again.
He kept his back to her, busy with the eggs. "...I know we agreed not to do anything today..."
"Sonny," she warned.
"No, it's nothing, really," he insisted quickly, glancing briefly over his shoulder at her. "I just thought... it's a nice day out, we could go down to the Botanical Gardens."
Amanda smiled over the rim of her cup at the sweetness of his suggestion. She peered into the living room. "I don't think that's gonna hold Jesse's attention for long..."
"I already thought of that," Sonny told her easily, turning around to look at her. "Audrey's gonna swing by."
She raised her eyebrows. "So, what you're tellin' me is, is that you already made up both of our minds?"
"Kinda." He offered her a charming grin and a full plate. "Here, have some eggs."
While other women may have spent all day getting ready for a big date to celebrate their first wedding anniversary, Amanda looked ordinary that afternoon. In jeans, sneakers and a teal plaid shirt, she ran a comb through her straight hair and rolled clear gloss over her lips. Given the mild weather, she wore a leather jacket - only to come downstairs to find Sonny wearing his, too, over a black henley. That made her smile; somebody once told her that old, married couples eventually started to look like one another.
The Botanical Gardens were just as beautiful as they had been a year ago: dogwood trees bloomed bright pink and green and shaded new daffodils, while waterlilies floated atop the ponds. They walked hand-in-hand down a path flanked with azalea bushes, quiet for awhile, but it wasn't uncomfortable. It was enough to simply be with one another.
"I can't believe I didn't know about this place before you," Amanda finally said.
"You didn't?" Sonny replied.
"No. I only found it on some wedding website that I will never again admit to going to," she explained with a smirk.
"You lived in New York for like, four years before you met me. How'd you never know about it?"
"I was... preoccupied."
He grunted.
"I'd rather it this way, though," Amanda concluded, glancing over at him. "Y'know, 'cause now it makes me think of us getting married."
"I like that, too," Sonny agreed.
She squeezed his hand. "This was a good idea."
He gave her a wan smile. "I thought it'd be good to get outta the house."
She nodded in agreement and bowed her head thoughtfully, watching her feet keeping a leisurely pace with her husband's. "Y'know, I've been thinkin'..."
"'Bout what?" Sonny asked her curiously.
With her free fingers, she tugged at her lower lip. "The baby."
He didn't say anything.
"I feel guilty saying this. It's just..." Amanda had practiced verbalizing her nagging thought aloud, but now it just felt jumbled and trapped in her throat. She glanced over at Sonny again, who appeared to be waiting patiently for her to finish her sentence. In the past there had been so many times when expressing her inner most feelings to him - to anybody - would have been the last thing Amanda wanted to do. It had taken years, but now she trusted Sonny with everything, even the ugly, uncomfortable stuff from the darkest corners of her mind. "I'm not, it's not that I'm looking to replace him, but... I do wanna have another one."
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Sonny nod. "I know you do."
"Do you?" she asked him meekly, almost afraid to look at him.
"Yeah," he told her quickly, then added with a little more restraint, "of course I do. It's just, for the past couple of weeks I've been tryin' to... give you space. I didn't want to bring it up and upset you. I know how hard this has been for you."
They hadn't talked about what they would do next. In the days immediately following her miscarriage, Amanda couldn't, and she had come to realize that Sonny couldn't, either. He was hurt, too, even if it was in a different way. As weeks passed, the pain dulled but didn't disappear completely. Broaching the subject now seemed right, although she wasn't sure why. She hadn't wanted to cast a pall over their anniversary, but at its core, the discussion was rooted in hopefulness.
"I'm afraid it'll happen again," Amanda admitted quietly. "I know Dr. Miller said it usually doesn't, but... it's just, I wonder... I don't think I have it in me to go through something like this another time."
Sonny nodded.
"But I... I want to have another baby. I'm afraid, but I want it," she continued honestly.
He exhaled. "Don't get mad-"
"Don't start a sentence that way," she warned him weakly, for the second time that day.
"-but you keep forgettin' the part of this where you lost almost two liters of blood," he reminded her grimly. "If you hadn't gone in when you did, if it had happened at home by yourself, you could have died."
"I would rather hemorrhage a million times - or have whatever other horrible thing happen to me - than know what it's like to lose a baby," Amanda asserted.
"You're missin' my point 'Manda: I don't wanna lose you." There was a hitch in his voice and he cleared his throat. "Two outta three times that you've been pregnant, you've scared the shit outta me. As much as I want more kids, I think about that a lot."
So consumed by her own grief, she hadn't considered the situation leading up to the loss of their baby. It had all happened so quickly: all she knew was that she had woken up in the hospital, no longer pregnant. "I mean, I..." She closed her mouth, not sure what she was trying to say. "If I go back to the doctor and they tell me the risk is too high, we won't do it," she eventually conceded.
"Yeah..."
"I just, I want to see." She sounded almost like she was pleading. "I used to think kids would ruin my life. But now, they are my life. They're the best part. You've told me that they would be all along."
A smile played at his lips as he glanced over at her. "So what you're sayin' is: I've been right all along," Sonny concluded smugly.
Amanda was relieved to hear his familiar humor. "That's what I'm saying." She tugged at his hand, stopping the both of them in the middle of the otherwise empty path so she could look him in the eye. "I just... I don't know when I'll actually be ready, but... eventually I do want to talk to the doctor and try again."
"Okay." He looked down at their entwined fingers before meeting her gaze. "Just... keep talkin' to me, would you?"
She nodded earnestly. "No matter what."
