mine {h.s.} | {b3}

CHAPTER EIGHT

— CHAPTER EIGHT —

february, year one.

A frown curls on my lips. "I'm sorry—"

"Kid, I swear, I'm trying really hard not to lose my patience right now, but if you apologize one more time—"

That's all it takes; a slightly raised voice and the perception of any sort of disdain. Just shy of the nine month mark in my pregnancy, everything feels like a personal attack. Anything and everything can set me over the edge. If I thought I was fragile before, that is nothing compared to how I am now. At this point, I'm just tired of being pregnant. I want the little bugger out of my body. I want my body to be my own again. The miracle of life is nearly complete. The bun cooking in this oven is just sitting now. Every day I wake up and have a moment of bliss before I remember that my c-section is scheduled two weeks out.

Two more weeks.

My tears these days start the same. First, it's the sniffles. I'm frustrated with how much I cry. The crying that I've done in these past nine months is more than the rest of my life combined. Everything makes me cry. Everything. When I'm not crying, I find something else to make me cry. Like last night; Harry was being very patient with me, very actively trying not to make me cry and naturally, I made myself cry anyway by contemplating whether he was being so delicate because he loves me or if he is just getting fed up with me crying so much—totally a natural response—and that made me question whether he was falling out of love with me. My emotions these days are very nonlinear.

So I sniffle first. It's a very concentrated motion. The sniffling stage is the most consequential. There are some occasions in which I can stop the crying in the sniffling stage, but once I progress past that point, there is nothing that can be done.

Today, I soar right past the sniffling stage. Guilt makes it worse, and today I have guilt in abundance. Waterworks leak from my eyes with an alarming frequency. Beside me, Harry doesn't groan or complain. He just sits down on the bed beside me and pulls me into his arms. I'm limp beside him, moving in just the way that he wants me. In spite of myself, I find myself falling in love with the way that he will hold me like this.

"Gray," he says, his fingers brushing through my hair. "I promise you—it doesn't matter."

"But it does," I whine, not so easily giving up on the fact that it is his birthday and we are confined to the walls of our house with just the two of us for such a special day.

"Why?" He tests me, tucking his finger under my chin and encouraging me to look up at him. "How is this different than any other birthday?"

"It's a pattern," I maintain, exasperated now. All night I've been trying to explain this to him.

For as long as I've known him, his birthdays have followed a very specific pattern. The first year, I had only found out that it was his birthday on his birthday. I didn't have time to pull together something special. Instead, I just gifted him the pearls that sit around his neck now. Absentmindedly, I reach up to toy with them in my hand. The second birthday had been after the loss of my baby. I threw myself into planning a party for him because I figured that was all that I could do; it was all that made sense to me in that moment. The next birthday had gone by relatively uncelebrated. Will had just left me and Harry was very adamant that he didn't care about celebrating his birthday when it was so obvious that I wasn't up for the celebrating alongside him. The year after that had been the party that pushed us together; the night in which we had drunkenly hook up and the next morning, my mother turned up out of the blue. The year after that—last year—we had something more muted, a day for just the two of us when Fitzy came to dinner and then we spent the rest of the day with just the two of us.