Unarmed {part three}
Disclaimer: Still not mine.
This will be the last part. I could go on, but this chapter suffices as an ending. You’ll see why when you read it. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it. And thanks for reading; I really do appreciate it.
Part Three
Five months have passed since that day. The grief still comes and goes. It gets easier, though. There are sad days, but there are also days filled with joy. Those are the days they focus on. They’re alive, and they’re grateful for it.
As she gathers boxes with him in the attic, Meredith turns to her husband and smiles. He looks handsome, sexy even, thanks to his endless treks up and down the stairs today, hauling boxes and furniture with her out to the moving truck.
He wipes the sweat off his forehead with the sleeve of his tee shirt and grins at her. “What?”
“Nothing,” Meredith shrugs, biting her lip. “I’m just getting turned on, that’s all.”
“Yeah?” Derek asks. “Well, we’ll have to do something about that.”
“Later,” she tells him amusedly, grabbing another box off the shelf. “Otherwise we’ll never get moved out of here.”
Derek takes it from her and sets it on the floor, then kisses her. “Deal.”
Meredith kneels down and opens it, checking to see whether its contents would be moving with them to the new house, or going in the large trash bag in the center of the cluttered room. She pulls out a thick pink book from the inside and studies it. It was a book she’d seen only once before when she was five. Of course, she appreciates it a lot more now.
“What’s that?” Derek asks, taking a sip from their shared water bottle and dropping down next to her on the creaky wooden floor.
Meredith swallows thickly, running her fingers over the smooth cover. “My baby book,” she says softly.
“Yeah?” he asks. “Who made this?”
“My dad, I guess. My mom wouldn’t have had the time to put one of these together,” Meredith replies. She opens it to the first page and sees a picture of her newborn self, wrapped in a pink blanket, peach fuzz brown hair swept into a neat little bow, piercing blue-green eyes, a tiny fist under her chin.
“You were a beautiful baby,” Derek smiles.
“Hmm…” she hums. She rests her head on his shoulder and turns the page. “What about you, with the curly hair and blue eyes… I’m sure every little girl in your preschool class loved you.”
“Are you mocking me?” he laughs.
“A little bit,” Meredith admits. Her eyes grow wide in horror and she groans. “Okay, me on the potty. You don’t need to see these.”
Derek rolls his eyes, humored by her embarrassment. “Oh come on, every parent does this. I have my fair share of blackmail pictures, too.”
“I’ll have to ask your mom for those,” she teases him. “Only fair.”
“Hey, I was a cute baby. Not as cute as you, though,” Derek chuckles, studying a photo of her on her first birthday, covered in pink frosting as she smiles at the camera. He sees the tears pooled in her eyes and frowns. “What’s wrong?” he asks worriedly, brushing her bangs away from her face.
“Nothing,” Meredith replies, letting out a breath. “I don’t know. I just think about it sometimes.”
“The baby?” Derek whispers. He wraps his arm around her waist and hugs her to him. “It’s okay to think about it. I think about it, too.”
“It’s just… I think about what she’d look like-or he. And I know we can’t think like that. We weren’t meant to have that baby. It was only ours for a few hours,” she says, trying to push away the memories of that day. But it’s futile, trying to erase a day like that.
“Doesn’t mean we can’t miss it though,” Derek reminds her, kissing her temple.
Meredith nods, then turns toward her husband and smiles. “Yeah.”
“We can still remember it. We can still love it,” Derek tells her, a small twinge of sadness hitting him as he studies the pictures of the beautiful little girl in the book resting on Meredith’s lap. He wonders if this is what their child would’ve looked like. So does she.
“We were parents,” she says, her voice steady as she speaks. Not sad or happy, just assuredly, like she’s stating an undeniable fact.
Derek cups her cheeks in his hands and kisses her, slowly, lets her know that it’s okay to remember, to love, to grieve. “We were.”
Her fingers thread through his hair and she feels his fingers tugging at the bottom of her shirt. “And I almost lost you,” she murmurs, arching her back toward him as he lifts it over her head.
“But you didn’t,” Derek says softly as he finds the drawstring of her pants.
Meredith smiles against his lips. That’s something she’s grateful for every day. “No, I didn’t.”
Packing gets put on hold for a while, but neither of them particularly cares.
…
Meredith wakes up in her husband’s arms, their Post-It hanging above the bed, just like at the old house. But it’s not the sunlight pouring in through the bedroom windows of their new home that stirs her from her dreams. It’s a familiar wave of nausea, the same one she’d felt five months ago, the one she’s been feeling for the past few days.
She extracts herself from Derek’s arms and sits up, running a hand through her hair. “Hey,” he yawns, his eyes adjusting to the light. “What are you doing up? We don’t have to be in until seven.”
Before Meredith can answer, she bolts from the bed with her hand over her mouth toward the bathroom. Derek follows in after her, holding her hair back while she vomits.
Once she’s finished, Derek hands her a cup of water. “You okay?”
“What’s today’s date?” Meredith asks before gargling and spitting it out.
“The ninth,” Derek says, smiling slightly, suspiciously. They haven’t been trying for very long, but given their… diligence to the project, he can’t help but feel hopeful. “Mer.”
Despite the tumult going on in her stomach, Meredith smiles back at him. “I’ll steal one from work and we’ll do it tonight,” she says softly, wrapping her arms around his waist and resting her head on his chest.
His heart is healed, and so is hers. No matter what the test says, they’re okay. And happy. And given all they’d been through, even that was reason enough to celebrate.
Twelve hours later, they’re sitting on the ledge of the bathtub, the small white stick clutched tightly in Meredith’s hands. Déjà vu of the last time she did this crosses her mind, but for once, the thought isn’t accompanied by sadness. Her husband is by her side, and tragedy isn’t going to strike this time.
The wait seems endless, but then a prominent, pink plus sign appears in the tiny results strip, and she gasps. “Holy crap.”
Derek laughs, kisses her with all he has, and she fulfills her promise made many months ago of dirty sex into the early morning hours. They’re both too tired to go into work the next day, but they don’t care, because they’re going to be parents. They are parents.
…
In eight months time, Meredith gives birth to a baby girl, born with dark hair like her father’s but eyes like her mother’s, and the first time they see her, they can barely breathe, so overtaken by the beauty of the tiny little person they made.
She’s nothing short of miraculous, all six pounds of her.
Hours later, after the chaos of the day has settled down, Derek lies in the small hospital bed with his wife, their daughter in her arms. “God, she’s so beautiful,” he whispers, leaning in and kissing his wife, then pressing his lips to the tiny forehead slightly obscured by the pink cap.
Their daughter grabs hold of Meredith’s finger and wraps her tiny hand around it, and Meredith smiles, briefly taking her eyes off of her to look up at her husband. “I told you we’d make pretty babies.”
They’ll never forget what happened that day, and they don’t want to. Their past is what gave them their future, and they’re grateful for it. Especially when their daughter stares up at them with inherent trust, the kind of look a child reserves for her parents. They’ve been parents all along. To the baby they lost, and the daughter cradled in her mother’s arms. She curls her body into Meredith and sleeps, a tiny fist tucked under her chin.
Pick up your feet and take me home now