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Chapter 23: The Quickening

George first noticed Scout's bump around the middle of November. By the best of his calculations, she was about seventeen weeks along, and she was so thin that any change in her body was noticeable right away, especially to him, because he looked at her all the time. She tried to be careful to cover up in front of him, and he knew she was doing this. It made him feel terrible, and he tried to respect her privacy, he really did, but he was desperately in love with her, and desperate for a glimpse of the baby, and just desperate in general.

Ever since her discovery of the attic, and the shrine to Tessa, Scout had not been comfortable being in uncovered in front of George in any way, and of course this meant that there had been no physical contact of any kind between them, except for the night of the nightmare. She always undressed in the bathroom when she bathed, and was careful to get dressed again before opening the door.

And at night, in bed, she always turned away after a careful, polite, good night, and a chaste, goodnight kiss, usually on the cheek. George had no idea what had caused her change, but assumed uneasily that it had something to do with her pregnancy, though he had a feeling, deep down, that it didn't. He pushed these feelings away, or tried to, anyway.

So their relationship, which had been a brand-new thing, of passion and discovery, of exploring and touching, even through her morning sickness and her body's changes, had become a sad, arid wasteland of loneliness for both of them, their bed a mute testament to non-communication and misunderstanding.

And George became a sneaking, peeping Tom, who would try to look away when she stood and stretched, but whose eyes would linger on her hips and belly when her shirts rode up. He would glance at her front when her small, pert breasts, which were swelling with her pregnancy, would poke at the front of her shirts when she'd lean back in her chair. His gaze would inadvertently drop to the top of her blouses when they'd gape away from her neck when she'd bend over to scratch the dogs' heads. He felt like a complete and total pervert, and he felt completely helpless to do anything about it. He wanted her so much he'd shake sometimes from it, and feel his hands balling into fists at his sides, and he'd just have to step outside into the cold air to wrench his mind to other things.

She was pregnant, he'd tell himself. He had no business thinking of her this way, especially when she'd made it so plain that she didn't feel that way. She was still feeling sick, throwing up regularly, poor thing, obviously she didn't feel like shagging all the time.

Scout, for her part, couldn't get the images of Tessa out of her head. She snuck up to the attic just about every day to commune with the scrap books. She'd sit with them in her lap, listening to the sound of the wind and the rain hitting the windows, looking at the beautiful couple, living the glitzy life she could never live. Or she'd pull out one of the VS catalogues, which was almost worse. Obviously George wasn't in those, but she was on page after page, a living, breathing advertisement for sex, a sultry goddess, no tan lines or protruding bones, just curves and voluptuousness everywhere. How long had it taken him to make these books, to preserve these images?

So Scout would work herself up to a state, then creep back downstairs and sneak back into the library to work on the books some more, usually with the dogs for company. Sometimes Sunil or Alfred would come into help her. They finally seem to have comprehended the shelving system she wanted to implement, and were slowly getting the shelves back in order as she input the data.

And she saw her bump, too, in the mirror, around the time George did, and she wanted to share it with him, but she was too ashamed to. She thought she looked funny, misshapen, almost. She'd gotten used to seeing Tessa's body every day in the catalogues and scrapbooks, and she looked pale and odd to herself.

So she just finished getting dressed and went downstairs to the library to sort books. It was a rainy November day, close to Thanksgiving, Scout thought, though she was no longer sure. Funny how quickly those holidays just slipped away when the superficial accoutrements were stripped away and there was nothing around to remind you.