Fragile: Handle With Care - Part 9
trigger warning for depression
Alexei stepped off of the staircase just as Emma opened the door, with her keys still dangling in the lock. He moved the mail he was holding to one hand so he’d be able to stretch his arms out to match the wide smile spreading across his face. “Well hello, strangers,” he greeted them jovially as they removed their coats and scarves. Jenny watched with a small grin on her lips as he pulled Emma close and hugged her.
“Hi Papa,” Emma replied into his shirt, before he let her go and motioned for Jenny to take her place.
She did as she was silently instructed, and strong arms wrapped around her before squishing her in a bear hug that helped her feel safe. “I’d almost forgotten what you look like,” he teased, and the vibration of that low, fatherly voice made her eyes gloss over with tears.
With panic rising in her gut and swelling in her chest, she pulled back, and offered him a kind, though unsteady smile. I can’t do this, she acknowledged to herself silently. I can’t do this, I can’t do this, I can’t do this.
“Come on, everyone should be in the kitchen,” he said as he headed in that direction.
“I think I’ll-“
Emma turned to look at her, and the beautiful, happy smile on her face faded slowly with every passing millisecond.
Her gaze drifted to the ground by Emma’s feet, to avoid seeing it vanish altogether. She self-consciously tucked her hair behind her ear. “I’ll uhm, just, go and get cleaned up a bit,” she said timidly, and prayed that Emma wouldn’t question her as she bit her lip, trying to keep the tears out of her eyes.
“Okay,” Emma replied carefully, letting their locked gazes linger as she searched for something Jenny couldn’t have her find. Jenny forced her lips into a small smile, and handed her the bouquet of flowers before turning toward the stairs and carefully ascending them.
All she needed was a minute, she told herself as she reached the top floor of the house. Just a minute to pull herself together, and then she’d return downstairs, where she now heard the exchanged phrases of greeting in the kitchen merge and blur into one sound of distant happiness. The door handle to Emma’s room was cold beneath her touch when she quietly let herself in to calm her racing heart. She set her bag down beside the desk and steadied herself on the back of the chair. The tears in her eyes blurred her vision as her breaths grew shallower. She hung her tired head and covered her burning eyes with her hands, and the cold from her fingers was a stark difference to the hot flush on her face. She released a breath, heavy and slow and choked with some indescribable emotion that seemed to overpower her. Behind her cold hands, she scrunched her eyes shut tightly, and her head throbbed from the pressure.
She listened to the ticks of the clock, and heard the distant hum of voices from downstairs, and took another breath to keep herself afloat.
The scent in the room made her head swim. That house, that room, those favorite things of hers all seemed to pull up the chaos from deep inside of her. She still felt Alexei’s hug from downstairs, and how the low hum of his voice soaked through her skin, but the safety in those things failed to calm her.
She looked around the room through the tears swimming in her eyes, remembering the night before, remembering the struggle for air and the panic in her veins. Running a hand roughly through her hair, she tried to stop it, to keep from being swept away by the wave that was heartbeats away from crashing through her and wiping her out.
No, she begged defenselessly. Please, no.
She had to get out.
She backed out of the bedroom cautiously, feeling faint, and kept a constant hand on the wall for support. Hearing someone coming up the stairs, she ducked into the bathroom and shut the door quietly behind her. The tears stung in her eyes as they waited to fall, and her head began to spin. She thought she might throw up again. She reached blindly for the tap, and let the cold water run over her hands for a moment before bringing them up to the back of her neck. Her eyes closed as the cold water tried to fight and calm her prickly skin.
Her breaths came in unsteady gulps. She placed a hand on the counter as she tried to keep balanced. It felt like the world was crashing down on her - her parents, Ben, that forever-lingering sadness, feeling so lost for so long…and then there was Emma…Emma and her beautiful mind, and her warmth, and her disarming love, and the look in Ruben’s eyes, and her grandfather’s scruffy kiss and silly suit, and Claudia’s hugs and joyous smile, and the swell of her heart as Emma tried to slowly put her back together. It flooded her, and the tears began to spill uncontrollably from her eyes, big and hot, as her chest shook, trying hopelessly to keep up with her racing heart. She managed another three breaths before the floor beneath her feet began to spin.
Her guilt and her grief were eating through her skin, and she couldn’t anymore. She wasn’t strong enough, and she never had been. A shuddering breath escaped her in one final attempt to hold herself together, and the sound of her panicked breathing achingly filled her ears. She drifted down until she was seated against one wall, and tucked her body close, pulling her knees to her chest. She felt so cold.
“Jenny?” she heard spoken softly from the other side of the painted wooden door.
Her chest shook raggedly from the sobs she kept in. She closed her eyes and lowered her head to her knees as the tears continued to spill freely. Her nails dug into the soft, worn jeans fabric covering her knees as she tried to stop them. She coughed up a heavy, hurting sob, and pressed her forehead into that warm denim fabric, trying helplessly to disappear somewhere that that empty, hollow feeling couldn’t follow her.
“Jenny,” she heard again, but the sound was closer, and less muffled, and she raised her blurred gaze enough to see Emma’s socked feet as the bathroom door beside her closed again quietly.
Her heart raced as it flooded with panic. She felt it happen, felt herself rust from the inside out before breaking into useless pieces. She heard Emma take a seat beside her on the cold bathroom floor, but couldn’t bring herself to stop crying. The heaviness of the tears that wouldn’t stop spilling down her flushed cheeks confirmed that she was broken, perhaps forever, that she hadn’t gotten better like she’d foolishly hoped. She felt helpless as that raw emotion poured through her.
She couldn’t breathe.
“Em,” she started to say, and it came out small, hiccuped, broken and desperate as her chest tightened. She brought her knees in further, because maybe if she took up less room, all of the overwhelming things she felt would seem smaller as well. “I’m sorry,” she breathed as the air heaved in and out of her lungs, because she couldn’t…she simply couldn’t anymore. It gripped her too tightly, and she couldn’t take it, couldn’t breathe. It was all too much.
She closed her eyes, so blurry with tears, and felt Emma gather her in her arms. Her body tensed as she choked on the tears in her throat, and cried into Emma’s sweater. The small room echoed the sounds of aching desperation that she released, as the peak of the wave finally hit.
In her fall to oblivion, she heard soft words begin to trickle into her ears. Emma’s arms encompassed her as she cried out the feelings she couldn’t understand, the words she couldn’t speak, and the images that haunted her mind. Emma’s words didn’t stop, all of them soothing and quiet, and while they didn’t eliminate the guilt and pain that coursed through her veins, as the minutes went by, they managed to contain it, and somehow quiet it, and slowly allow her to breathe again.
She felt them there in the room with her, those ghosts from the back of her mind, waiting patiently to take her back into that darkness, but then Emma kissed her temple, and she curled further into her side. As Emma repeated the motion, Jenny collapsed into her embrace, letting Emma hold her, and hold the thoughts and the guilt and the mess for a minute. Those ghosts couldn’t get to her as long as Emma’s words swirled around her mind, helping her see out of the fog.
It felt like an endless journey to catch her breath as Emma’s lips moved down to where her shoulder met her neck, and the words were spoken against the skin, as though Emma were trying to imprint them into the flesh to keep her from forgetting them again.
It was a somewhat hopeless attempt to clean herself up as she stood in front of the bathroom mirror. She pressed the cold water to her red-rimmed eyes, again and again, and when she finally stopped, she tried not to cry at her broken reflection.
Her eyes closed when Emma pressed a kiss to her shoulder. “You’re beautiful,” Emma whispered to her, and the pureness of her voice, and the calmness of her touch, and the honestly that had been a constant in Emma’s eyes had Jenny believing her amidst her endless doubt. She felt a smile ghost across her lips for a quick moment. She thought of the countless times that those words had been sent her way, always loud and flashy, in an attempt to impress her or aggravate someone else. Yet when Emma spoke those same words, they were always quiet and personal, the complement paid with far greater respect.
With her breathing still ragged, she turned around and leaned back against the marble counter, tugged Emma closer, and kissed her soundly on the lips. When Emma leaned back with a lazy smile forming on across her features, Jenny hooked her fingers in the belt loops on her jeans and pulled her close again, letting their lips collide with tongues and teeth, desperate to feel something as overwhelming as the sorrow that lived in her heart.
She let Emma swallow the sound that escaped her throat when hips pressed her own against the counter, and she was glad they did, as the heightened emotion in the room made her knees utterly weak.
Neither one of them let up until they were both sufficiently out of air.
“Oh, and if my mother asks,” Emma said quietly as they descended the stairs hand in hand, “I fed you a full, balanced meal.”
Blame it on the countless baiting, lustful kisses they’d shared, her severe lack of sleep, or the overrun emotions that always seemed close by, but as Emma’s fingers tugged lightly on her own, her mind took those words to all kinds of places, and a tight smirk began curling one side of her lips.
Unaware, Emma continued her thought. “With vegetables.”
Her smirk paused, and her eyebrows hinted together, as that didn’t make any sense in her head.
“Otherwise she’ll get that look, you know, that one of building disappointment? And she’ll remind us of all of the many reasons that we shouldn’t have pastries for lunch. Even if they’re fresh, and from one of the better bakeries in the city.”
After a moment of hazy confusion, realization dawned on Jenny in a way that almost made her laugh when her stomach growled. Oh, she thought to herself, fighting not to say it out loud, that kind of meal. It was only then that she noticed that the air was filled with deliciously alluring scents of food wafting from the kitchen.
“I know that smile,” she heard Emma say beside her, and lowered her head as blush colored her face a faint pinkish hue. She leaned over and pressed a most innocent kiss to Emma’s cheek before continuing down the stairs.
She liked that Emma knew her smiles.
She liked that it felt easier to smile at all.
When she looked down between their bodies, she felt grateful to have held onto Emma’s hand for most of the day. “Just, uhm,” she whispered through a sudden rush of nerves as they neared the kitchen, “don’t let go?”
Emma squeezed her hand in return. “I wasn’t really using this hand anyway,” she replied, and Jenny looked up to watch a smile sweep across her face.
“Hello sweethearts,” Emma’s mother greeted them as soon as they entered the kitchen. She cupped Emma’s cheek and pressed a kiss to the other one, before motioning Jenny closer to do the same. “Thank you for the flowers, dear,” she added to her quietly, as she tucked a long lock of hair behind Jenny’s ear in exactly the same way Jenny remembered her own mother doing when she was little. “They’re lovely,” she concluded with a smile as she leaned back to get a better look at her.
Jenny smiled somewhat bashfully in return. “You’re welcome,” she answered quietly. She caught Ben’s gaze from where he sat at the table with Emma’s younger brother, and swallowed around the lump forming in her throat. She hoped it wasn’t anger that she saw flashing across his eyes.
“Oh, I almost forgot. Ruben phoned a little bit ago,” the older woman continued as she gave each of them a dish to bring to the table.
“Yeah?” Emma asked from behind the tray of soft bread rolls she was carrying.
“Yes, and he was quite upset.”
Jenny’s heart lurched in her chest. Her feet forgot which one’s turn it was to shuffle forward, and she suddenly grew incredibly lightheaded. She tightened her hold on the bowl in her arms, and prayed not to drop it as she heard Emma’s mother continue to patter around behind them in the kitchen.
“He wanted a detailed explanation as to why he hadn’t met our Jenny until today,” she explained, “and then he went on about kindred spirits.”
“Ma-ma,” Emma lightly scolded, in a tone that showcased her eye-roll.
“Seems he’s taken quite a liking to you, hon,” the older woman concluded merrily as Jenny felt her heart kick-start again in a wave of relief.
She let Emma take the bowl out of her hands and place it safely on the table, before taking a seat beside her. The boys were already seated across from them, and Emma’s hand found her own under the table when Tim spoke a shy, “Hey,” to her.
“Hey Tim,” she replied kindly, before her gaze moved onto Ben.
“Took you long enough,” Ben grumbled teasingly, and it relaxed her instantly that he was acting normally around her. Emma’s hand squeezed her own from where they were settled on her leg before she let go. Jenny turned to look at her, but then reminded herself that she wasn’t five years old, and Emma didn’t have to hold her hand all the time.
She watched Emma roll up the sleeves of her sweater, waiting for her hand to be free again.
“So you’ve finally taken up gang life, I see,” Ben smirked, motioning to the stamp cluster on her left arm.
Emma followed his gaze and shrugged at the flower, butterfly and set of stars that Claudia had left on her skin, looking completely unperturbed. “It was really only a matter of time,” she replied as she poured herself a glass of water.
Jenny smiled down at her still-empty plate when she felt Ben’s eyes on her. She raised only her gaze to quickly meet his, and saw his expression brighten.
“Oh, Emma honey, before I forget, will you help me with those cards after dinner? I want to try and get them all finished by tonight.”
“Sure, Mama,” Emma replied as she reached behind her for something. “Alright, presents,” she announced as she set her bag down on her lap. She began handing each item to its respective owner as her father joined them at the table, slowly but surely reducing the bag to a pool of canvas cloth as she ran through their entire indescribable day of errands.
It really did feel final suddenly, and Jenny tried to ignore that feeling that came to her whenever an ending was near. She looked across the table at Ben, and saw the hidden disappointment on his face at being the only one at the table to not receive a present, although the look on Tim’s face was a close second, as he thumbed through the endless pages of mathematics exercises awaiting him. She bit her lip as she reached over to dig through Emma’s almost empty bag, and found what she was searching for blindly. Her fingers wrapped around the limited-edition extra-large candy bars before tossing one to each of them.
Ben comically perked up as he caught his in mid-air.
“After dinner,” Emma’s mother scolded him quietly as she set down the final dish, leaving hardly any room on the table. Ben lowered his gaze and obediently put it away, but not before his gleeful eyes met Jenny’s.
That was how she knew that they were okay.
to be continued…
Alexei stepped off of the staircase just as Emma opened the door, with her keys still dangling in the lock. He moved the mail he was holding to one hand so he’d be able to stretch his arms out to match the wide smile spreading across his face. “Well hello, strangers,” he greeted them jovially as they removed their coats and scarves. Jenny watched with a small grin on her lips as he pulled Emma close and hugged her.
“Hi Papa,” Emma replied into his shirt, before he let her go and motioned for Jenny to take her place.
She did as she was silently instructed, and strong arms wrapped around her before squishing her in a bear hug that helped her feel safe. “I’d almost forgotten what you look like,” he teased, and the vibration of that low, fatherly voice made her eyes gloss over with tears.
With panic rising in her gut and swelling in her chest, she pulled back, and offered him a kind, though unsteady smile. I can’t do this, she acknowledged to herself silently. I can’t do this, I can’t do this, I can’t do this.
“Come on, everyone should be in the kitchen,” he said as he headed in that direction.
“I think I’ll-“
Emma turned to look at her, and the beautiful, happy smile on her face faded slowly with every passing millisecond.
Her gaze drifted to the ground by Emma’s feet, to avoid seeing it vanish altogether. She self-consciously tucked her hair behind her ear. “I’ll uhm, just, go and get cleaned up a bit,” she said timidly, and prayed that Emma wouldn’t question her as she bit her lip, trying to keep the tears out of her eyes.
“Okay,” Emma replied carefully, letting their locked gazes linger as she searched for something Jenny couldn’t have her find. Jenny forced her lips into a small smile, and handed her the bouquet of flowers before turning toward the stairs and carefully ascending them.
All she needed was a minute, she told herself as she reached the top floor of the house. Just a minute to pull herself together, and then she’d return downstairs, where she now heard the exchanged phrases of greeting in the kitchen merge and blur into one sound of distant happiness. The door handle to Emma’s room was cold beneath her touch when she quietly let herself in to calm her racing heart. She set her bag down beside the desk and steadied herself on the back of the chair. The tears in her eyes blurred her vision as her breaths grew shallower. She hung her tired head and covered her burning eyes with her hands, and the cold from her fingers was a stark difference to the hot flush on her face. She released a breath, heavy and slow and choked with some indescribable emotion that seemed to overpower her. Behind her cold hands, she scrunched her eyes shut tightly, and her head throbbed from the pressure.
She listened to the ticks of the clock, and heard the distant hum of voices from downstairs, and took another breath to keep herself afloat.
The scent in the room made her head swim. That house, that room, those favorite things of hers all seemed to pull up the chaos from deep inside of her. She still felt Alexei’s hug from downstairs, and how the low hum of his voice soaked through her skin, but the safety in those things failed to calm her.
She looked around the room through the tears swimming in her eyes, remembering the night before, remembering the struggle for air and the panic in her veins. Running a hand roughly through her hair, she tried to stop it, to keep from being swept away by the wave that was heartbeats away from crashing through her and wiping her out.
No, she begged defenselessly. Please, no.
She had to get out.
She backed out of the bedroom cautiously, feeling faint, and kept a constant hand on the wall for support. Hearing someone coming up the stairs, she ducked into the bathroom and shut the door quietly behind her. The tears stung in her eyes as they waited to fall, and her head began to spin. She thought she might throw up again. She reached blindly for the tap, and let the cold water run over her hands for a moment before bringing them up to the back of her neck. Her eyes closed as the cold water tried to fight and calm her prickly skin.
Her breaths came in unsteady gulps. She placed a hand on the counter as she tried to keep balanced. It felt like the world was crashing down on her - her parents, Ben, that forever-lingering sadness, feeling so lost for so long…and then there was Emma…Emma and her beautiful mind, and her warmth, and her disarming love, and the look in Ruben’s eyes, and her grandfather’s scruffy kiss and silly suit, and Claudia’s hugs and joyous smile, and the swell of her heart as Emma tried to slowly put her back together. It flooded her, and the tears began to spill uncontrollably from her eyes, big and hot, as her chest shook, trying hopelessly to keep up with her racing heart. She managed another three breaths before the floor beneath her feet began to spin.
Her guilt and her grief were eating through her skin, and she couldn’t anymore. She wasn’t strong enough, and she never had been. A shuddering breath escaped her in one final attempt to hold herself together, and the sound of her panicked breathing achingly filled her ears. She drifted down until she was seated against one wall, and tucked her body close, pulling her knees to her chest. She felt so cold.
“Jenny?” she heard spoken softly from the other side of the painted wooden door.
Her chest shook raggedly from the sobs she kept in. She closed her eyes and lowered her head to her knees as the tears continued to spill freely. Her nails dug into the soft, worn jeans fabric covering her knees as she tried to stop them. She coughed up a heavy, hurting sob, and pressed her forehead into that warm denim fabric, trying helplessly to disappear somewhere that that empty, hollow feeling couldn’t follow her.
“Jenny,” she heard again, but the sound was closer, and less muffled, and she raised her blurred gaze enough to see Emma’s socked feet as the bathroom door beside her closed again quietly.
Her heart raced as it flooded with panic. She felt it happen, felt herself rust from the inside out before breaking into useless pieces. She heard Emma take a seat beside her on the cold bathroom floor, but couldn’t bring herself to stop crying. The heaviness of the tears that wouldn’t stop spilling down her flushed cheeks confirmed that she was broken, perhaps forever, that she hadn’t gotten better like she’d foolishly hoped. She felt helpless as that raw emotion poured through her.
She couldn’t breathe.
“Em,” she started to say, and it came out small, hiccuped, broken and desperate as her chest tightened. She brought her knees in further, because maybe if she took up less room, all of the overwhelming things she felt would seem smaller as well. “I’m sorry,” she breathed as the air heaved in and out of her lungs, because she couldn’t…she simply couldn’t anymore. It gripped her too tightly, and she couldn’t take it, couldn’t breathe. It was all too much.
She closed her eyes, so blurry with tears, and felt Emma gather her in her arms. Her body tensed as she choked on the tears in her throat, and cried into Emma’s sweater. The small room echoed the sounds of aching desperation that she released, as the peak of the wave finally hit.
In her fall to oblivion, she heard soft words begin to trickle into her ears. Emma’s arms encompassed her as she cried out the feelings she couldn’t understand, the words she couldn’t speak, and the images that haunted her mind. Emma’s words didn’t stop, all of them soothing and quiet, and while they didn’t eliminate the guilt and pain that coursed through her veins, as the minutes went by, they managed to contain it, and somehow quiet it, and slowly allow her to breathe again.
She felt them there in the room with her, those ghosts from the back of her mind, waiting patiently to take her back into that darkness, but then Emma kissed her temple, and she curled further into her side. As Emma repeated the motion, Jenny collapsed into her embrace, letting Emma hold her, and hold the thoughts and the guilt and the mess for a minute. Those ghosts couldn’t get to her as long as Emma’s words swirled around her mind, helping her see out of the fog.
It felt like an endless journey to catch her breath as Emma’s lips moved down to where her shoulder met her neck, and the words were spoken against the skin, as though Emma were trying to imprint them into the flesh to keep her from forgetting them again.
It was a somewhat hopeless attempt to clean herself up as she stood in front of the bathroom mirror. She pressed the cold water to her red-rimmed eyes, again and again, and when she finally stopped, she tried not to cry at her broken reflection.
Her eyes closed when Emma pressed a kiss to her shoulder. “You’re beautiful,” Emma whispered to her, and the pureness of her voice, and the calmness of her touch, and the honestly that had been a constant in Emma’s eyes had Jenny believing her amidst her endless doubt. She felt a smile ghost across her lips for a quick moment. She thought of the countless times that those words had been sent her way, always loud and flashy, in an attempt to impress her or aggravate someone else. Yet when Emma spoke those same words, they were always quiet and personal, the complement paid with far greater respect.
With her breathing still ragged, she turned around and leaned back against the marble counter, tugged Emma closer, and kissed her soundly on the lips. When Emma leaned back with a lazy smile forming on across her features, Jenny hooked her fingers in the belt loops on her jeans and pulled her close again, letting their lips collide with tongues and teeth, desperate to feel something as overwhelming as the sorrow that lived in her heart.
She let Emma swallow the sound that escaped her throat when hips pressed her own against the counter, and she was glad they did, as the heightened emotion in the room made her knees utterly weak.
Neither one of them let up until they were both sufficiently out of air.
“Oh, and if my mother asks,” Emma said quietly as they descended the stairs hand in hand, “I fed you a full, balanced meal.”
Blame it on the countless baiting, lustful kisses they’d shared, her severe lack of sleep, or the overrun emotions that always seemed close by, but as Emma’s fingers tugged lightly on her own, her mind took those words to all kinds of places, and a tight smirk began curling one side of her lips.
Unaware, Emma continued her thought. “With vegetables.”
Her smirk paused, and her eyebrows hinted together, as that didn’t make any sense in her head.
“Otherwise she’ll get that look, you know, that one of building disappointment? And she’ll remind us of all of the many reasons that we shouldn’t have pastries for lunch. Even if they’re fresh, and from one of the better bakeries in the city.”
After a moment of hazy confusion, realization dawned on Jenny in a way that almost made her laugh when her stomach growled. Oh, she thought to herself, fighting not to say it out loud, that kind of meal. It was only then that she noticed that the air was filled with deliciously alluring scents of food wafting from the kitchen.
“I know that smile,” she heard Emma say beside her, and lowered her head as blush colored her face a faint pinkish hue. She leaned over and pressed a most innocent kiss to Emma’s cheek before continuing down the stairs.
She liked that Emma knew her smiles.
She liked that it felt easier to smile at all.
When she looked down between their bodies, she felt grateful to have held onto Emma’s hand for most of the day. “Just, uhm,” she whispered through a sudden rush of nerves as they neared the kitchen, “don’t let go?”
Emma squeezed her hand in return. “I wasn’t really using this hand anyway,” she replied, and Jenny looked up to watch a smile sweep across her face.
“Hello sweethearts,” Emma’s mother greeted them as soon as they entered the kitchen. She cupped Emma’s cheek and pressed a kiss to the other one, before motioning Jenny closer to do the same. “Thank you for the flowers, dear,” she added to her quietly, as she tucked a long lock of hair behind Jenny’s ear in exactly the same way Jenny remembered her own mother doing when she was little. “They’re lovely,” she concluded with a smile as she leaned back to get a better look at her.
Jenny smiled somewhat bashfully in return. “You’re welcome,” she answered quietly. She caught Ben’s gaze from where he sat at the table with Emma’s younger brother, and swallowed around the lump forming in her throat. She hoped it wasn’t anger that she saw flashing across his eyes.
“Oh, I almost forgot. Ruben phoned a little bit ago,” the older woman continued as she gave each of them a dish to bring to the table.
“Yeah?” Emma asked from behind the tray of soft bread rolls she was carrying.
“Yes, and he was quite upset.”
Jenny’s heart lurched in her chest. Her feet forgot which one’s turn it was to shuffle forward, and she suddenly grew incredibly lightheaded. She tightened her hold on the bowl in her arms, and prayed not to drop it as she heard Emma’s mother continue to patter around behind them in the kitchen.
“He wanted a detailed explanation as to why he hadn’t met our Jenny until today,” she explained, “and then he went on about kindred spirits.”
“Ma-ma,” Emma lightly scolded, in a tone that showcased her eye-roll.
“Seems he’s taken quite a liking to you, hon,” the older woman concluded merrily as Jenny felt her heart kick-start again in a wave of relief.
She let Emma take the bowl out of her hands and place it safely on the table, before taking a seat beside her. The boys were already seated across from them, and Emma’s hand found her own under the table when Tim spoke a shy, “Hey,” to her.
“Hey Tim,” she replied kindly, before her gaze moved onto Ben.
“Took you long enough,” Ben grumbled teasingly, and it relaxed her instantly that he was acting normally around her. Emma’s hand squeezed her own from where they were settled on her leg before she let go. Jenny turned to look at her, but then reminded herself that she wasn’t five years old, and Emma didn’t have to hold her hand all the time.
She watched Emma roll up the sleeves of her sweater, waiting for her hand to be free again.
“So you’ve finally taken up gang life, I see,” Ben smirked, motioning to the stamp cluster on her left arm.
Emma followed his gaze and shrugged at the flower, butterfly and set of stars that Claudia had left on her skin, looking completely unperturbed. “It was really only a matter of time,” she replied as she poured herself a glass of water.
Jenny smiled down at her still-empty plate when she felt Ben’s eyes on her. She raised only her gaze to quickly meet his, and saw his expression brighten.
“Oh, Emma honey, before I forget, will you help me with those cards after dinner? I want to try and get them all finished by tonight.”
“Sure, Mama,” Emma replied as she reached behind her for something. “Alright, presents,” she announced as she set her bag down on her lap. She began handing each item to its respective owner as her father joined them at the table, slowly but surely reducing the bag to a pool of canvas cloth as she ran through their entire indescribable day of errands.
It really did feel final suddenly, and Jenny tried to ignore that feeling that came to her whenever an ending was near. She looked across the table at Ben, and saw the hidden disappointment on his face at being the only one at the table to not receive a present, although the look on Tim’s face was a close second, as he thumbed through the endless pages of mathematics exercises awaiting him. She bit her lip as she reached over to dig through Emma’s almost empty bag, and found what she was searching for blindly. Her fingers wrapped around the limited-edition extra-large candy bars before tossing one to each of them.
Ben comically perked up as he caught his in mid-air.
“After dinner,” Emma’s mother scolded him quietly as she set down the final dish, leaving hardly any room on the table. Ben lowered his gaze and obediently put it away, but not before his gleeful eyes met Jenny’s.
That was how she knew that they were okay.
to be continued…