Lightning Strikes Twice - Part 13
Title: Lightning Strikes Twice
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Pairing: Duh. (Mer/Der)
Rating: M
Timeline: Post Time After Time.
~~~~~
Derek found his mother knitting in the den. Crumpled sleeping bags were strewn all over the floor, and he had to work very hard to dodge them all without tripping. He was still moving slow. He felt like some sort of lumbering beast, leaning against walls and slide, slide, sliding along as he searched with his hands along the center molding for grips. The meclizine was working fine, but tiredness, a general sense of unwellness, and nervousness that the one time he let go would be the one time the floor would start spinning around and trying to make him topple, well, it all combined to make him very cautious. Very cautious, and very slow. He gritted his teeth in frustration as he stepped over another sleeping bag.
He'd dozed off for a few hours. He'd been vaguely aware of Meredith mentioning something about getting up to take a shower. The sex had been phenomenal, though he felt a little guilty that he hadn't contributed all that much. She hadn't been kidding when she'd whispered sexily that she could drive. But that, that and everything else, it had just been too much, and he'd been down for the count with post-coital, post-accident drowsiness before she'd come back from the shower. She'd since disappeared. Maybe one of his sisters had dragged her out.
He walked slowly over and let himself settle into the seat next to his mother. The two chairs formed a wide letter v in the corner of the room with the lamp table stuffed in the corner serving as the tip. This was his mother's favorite room to spend time in, and usually the first place he looked when he couldn't find her elsewhere. It was airy and cheerful, decorated with a flowery wallpaper and pastel colors. Huge bay windows lined both sides of the room, brightening everything.
She gave him a concerned frown as he sat down, blinking against the glare, but she said nothing. She went back to her looping stitches. Derek watched her for a moment, watched her weathered hands as her still lithe fingers wrapped the yarn around the hooks. The tips of the needles flashed under the sharp lamplight, and for some reason, he found it familiar, but he didn't know why. He'd never cared much about watching her knit before...
So, when's the knitting start?
He frowned as the thought blew away into nothingness like dust in a breeze, and he couldn't draw it back again. He tried, tried to pull it back, but the more he tried, the worse he felt, and the more it seemed like he was trying to pull one strand of hair from thousands.
He sighed and ran his thumb and index finger up along the bridge of his nose, pinching at the sudden ache that was developing in the sunlight and under the glare of the piercing lamp. The sudden ache that tried to scold him for remembering, for trying to remember. He swallowed, wishing that the general sense of awfulness he was feeling would just go away. It felt good to not be moving again, and that was depressing since he'd essentially only walked one flight of stairs and two lengths of hallway. He was nearing seventy-two hours since the concussion, and beyond the initial bounds of improvement, there hadn't been much else. And, well, it was miserable. He was miserable. He hoped the fatigue would at least let up, give him a break to actually enjoy this supposed vacation. Headaches, dizziness, nausea, at least there were good prescriptions for those. There wasn't much he could do about feeling tired all the time except sleep more, which made him feel like he was rotting his life away, made him feel like he was soaked in sickness.
"Are you all right?" his mother finally asked.
He blinked his eyes, exaggerated, once, twice, three times, trying to clear some of the haze away, but it stuck to him like the sinewy gauze of a spider's web, clotting on his fingers, billowing from the eves of memory in his head. "I'm tired, Mom. And I'm getting kind of tired of it. That's all," he replied, deciding to spare her the details of his slowly blooming headache.
"I meant about everything else," she said, her lips pursed in a firm line. Everything else. She said it like... like it was nothing more than a forgotten item on a grocery list, or a chore down at number eight on the dry-erase to-do board on the side of the fridge. Buy apples and milk, vacuum the living room, mop, everything else.
Except even with it phrased that way, even with it put so carefully, he felt the jabs of her disappointment, the jabs of her hurt. She didn't need to express them. He just knew they were there. He could see it riding shotgun beside her schooled expressions, her careful, concerned gazes.
"I'm sorry I didn't call," he said as he leaned his head against the high back of the chair.
The needles stopped their twisting and her hands went still. His mother looked up at him and sighed, sighed as if she'd expected him to talk about something else, about, maybe, the state of his life, not the stupid superficiality of not calling. Not calling was the least of his sins. Not calling barely even counted in the heaping pile of everything else.
Everything else was... Mark. And his marriage. And Meredith. And him not knowing what the hell was going on anymore... Him looking at his life and wondering if it really had been him who'd lived it, because now he just didn't know.
Everything else.
"When I found him..." Derek continued. "Mark... When I found him, my best friend, my brother, in my bed with my wife... I just couldn't take the family thing anymore. I had to get out. I had to go find something, and I didn't know what. I..." His voice trailed away as a sharp ache, like someone was slowly jamming one of his mother's knitting needles into his head, persisted and then flared, growing brighter, deadly like phosphorous.
"You can't turn your family on and off at will, Derek," his mother said behind the din of discomfort.
"I know... I just needed..." He twisted his fingers through his hair, pulling, yanking. The pain was a little stab behind the rest of it. Barely noticed. "I don't know what I needed. I just knew everything was wrong, and I had to get out," he said. He leaned forward in his chair and rubbed his face with his hands, worrying his index fingers against his throbbing eye sockets. This wasn't just the bright light... It hadn't been bothering him at all before now.
"And what about when Addison went after you?" his mother asked. "You still couldn't call then? She sent us Christmas presents from the both of you, though I could tell it wasn't your handwriting on the cards." The hurt in her voice was a tangible, cutting thing that slithered deep under his skin.
"I don't..." He shrugged helplessly, not looking up from the soothing dark of his palms. "I don't remember any of that yet, Mom. All I can think of is her walking in on Meredith and I before I had a chance to say anything, and I don't know exactly what happens next, but I've got the outline. I know it ruined something. I know it ruined something, but I don't know what yet, because I don't remember..."
His mother sighed. "Derek..."
"People keep telling me I tried with her again, and I don't know why," Derek said. The back of his throat started to ache, ache as he forced back his upset. He swallowed once, twice, again, trying to stop it all from overflowing. "I look back at everything, and I don't know why. Is there a hole? Am I missing something else? I just... I feel like I'm sitting down to watch a bad movie. I know what's coming, and I don't know why. And I want to hurt the writers... except I'm the writer. What..."
He sighed as the backs of his eyes stabbed him, not with headache, but with all sorts of other unsettling things. They stab, stab, stabbed. He tried to wipe away the mess with his hands as it spilled over onto his cheeks, but it didn't work, and suddenly his torso was heaving on him, not with nausea, but with those same unsettling things, and he was crying, and he couldn't stop. It was wrong. It was all so wrong. He didn't cry. Not like this. Where had this come from? And it just kept coming. It was exhausting, and ugly, and wrong. It made everything hurt more, not less.
And it just kept coming.
At some point, his mother set her knitting project down on the table and got up. At some point, she knelt next to the chair where he cowered, sucking down breaths, trying to stay afloat and failing. At some point, she wrapped her arms around his shoulders. At some point, he ended up with his nose stuck firmly in her shoulder, smelling her familiar perfume while she ran a soothing hand up and down his back.
"Derek," she whispered like a gentle wave in his ear. "Hindsight is sometimes a blessing, sometimes a curse. You can't let yourself drown in mistakes you've already made. I know it seems like all of this just happened, like it's all happening now, but it's done. You're with a beautiful, brave, supportive girl, and she's still here. So, you must have done something right. It's not all bad, Derek."
He sucked in a breath, and another, and another, trying to just make it stop. "I realized it... earlier." During sex. "I realized. Meredith made me believe again. And I apparently ran in the completely wrong direction."
Stupid, stupid, so stupid...
He sighed and drew away, dismayed to find that everything was shaking again, and there wasn't much he could do about it but watch it in frustration. He wiped the backs of his palms against his wet cheeks. But as the awful crying subsided, the headache came back. To put it lightly, he was a sick, unhappy mess. He resisted the swell of messy tears as they threatened to burst through again. He swallowed back on it, tasting bile.
"You're looking back on this now, and you know you end up with Meredith, that you're with her currently. It's messing with your perceptions, Derek. You're trying to analyze something that can't be analyzed, not like you're trying to, anyway," his mother said.
She ran her fingers along Derek's shoulder, through his hair in a comforting, familial, motherly way. She hadn't been that person, that comforting mother figure to him for a long, long time. He could remember nights, shortly after his father had died, when he'd been comforted like this. But not since then. He'd made himself not need it.
He sighed.
He had made such a mess of things. And he was still missing so much. He didn't want to remember trying again with Addison. He didn't want to remember leaving the comfort of Meredith to go back to... Living with Addison. Having sex with Addison. Not when all he could think of now when he thought of Addison was Mark. Heaving, sweaty, thrusty, post-coital Mark. It made his stomach turn, though at least thoughts of Meredith took the active, constant throb of it away.
"I love her," he said weakly. "Meredith. I loved her before I remembered. I love her right now. And I know I loved her at the moment Addison came up to us and introduced herself to Meredith. I know it. It's the one damned thing that I know without a doubt right now. Everything else is so confusing. But I know that. I know it, Mom. And I tried again anyway, and I don't know why."
His mother paused, crouching close to him, inches away, eyes glistening in the harsh light. "Do you love Addison?" she asked.
"No," he replied. It didn't even require thought. Not anymore.
"But did you?" she prompted.
"Yes..." he said, trying to think back, back, back. "I don't... I don't know when I stopped. But..."
But he had. At one point, he could honestly say he had. Back at their wedding, their honeymoon, Christmases one, two, three, four, and at least five. By eight, he wasn't so sure. By ten, Addison was a habit and not really much else. It had been a gradual loss. A gradual drifting, like two icebergs going east and west. But he had loved her. At one point.
His mother squeezed his shoulder, grunting as she stood. He felt a pang of guilt for being the weak one sniveling in the chair while she, sixty-five and somewhat arthritic, had been crouching on the floor.
"But you had a marriage license that confirmed it," she said as she straightened herself out. "You had a history that confirmed it. A ring. A family you didn't want to disappoint. You didn't love her anymore, but you had all those things telling you that you should, that if you tried, it might come back."
He sighed. "Mom..."
She looked at him with a hopeless, serious, understanding smile. "You try to follow the rules, Derek. You try to meet the expectations of everyone else around you. You try, but sometimes the rules, the expectations, they just don't make sense for the situation. And that's when you lose your way, that's when you break."
She sat back down in her chair with a sigh. She resumed her knitting with a frown. She pulled out a row and started over. He watched her for a moment.
My point is, knitting is good for surgical dexterity.
The thought from before came back, just for a moment, and then it flitted off again, an annoying butterfly against the snarl of his headache. He squeezed his eyes shut. Why the hell was he getting bent about knitting? His mother had always knitted.
The ache came down on him like the crush of high tide. He groaned and leaned back in his seat, drawing circles on his temples with his fingers. It didn't help. He dropped his hands into his lap and just sat there in silent misery.
He felt his mother's scrutiny even through closed eyes. There was a shuffle. She left the room for a minute, leaving him in silence, in the painfully bright room, sitting there, sick of being sick. She came back with a glass of water and some ibuprofen.
"Stop trying to pretend you don't have a headache," she said as she grabbed his right hand and dropped some pills into it. She curled the fingers of his left hand around the cool, crystal glass.
He took them without comment, sipping the water as he downed each one. She resumed her knitting again.
He swallowed thickly in the silence that followed. "I'm sorry I didn't call," he said again.
She turned to him and grinned. "I know. She's very pretty. A distraction, perhaps?"
He opened his eyes, unsurprised to find the room swimming a little before he focused. "Meredith?" he asked.
"Yes," his mother said as she nodded. "Does she want kids?"
He ran his fingers along the bridge of his nose and sighed. "Mom..."
"Sorry, I had to ask," she said. The unspoken, the part about how she was suddenly assuming that this relationship would be long term enough to even consider children, soothed him in a way no other assurance could, soothed him against the roaring ache behind his eyes, the ache at the back of his throat, the subtle spinning of the room that the meclizine couldn't fully obliterate. She winked. "You're my only holdout."
"Addison didn't want any," he said through gritted teeth, replied by rote, by habit. Everyone always asked him why he didn't have any...
"I know, Der," she replied with a frown. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't joke. I know you... Well, I know."
He ran his hands through his hair and leaned back, watching the swirl of the room as he moved his head. "So, you like her?" he asked.
"Der..."
"Yeah?"
"I am your mother," she said, definitive, clipped. "The only expectation I have for you is to be happy. Does she make you happy?"
"Yes."
She nodded. "Then I like her."
He closed his eyes again. The pulse of his blood, just behind his eyes, trying to squeeze them out with each thud, thud, thud was really starting to get to him, really starting to drag him down. He thought about getting up. Thought about going back to bed, back to his dark, quiet room. Steps seemed like a new form of self-torture. He stayed in the chair, reached down, pulled the lever, and forced it back a little so he could stretch out, so he could stop trying to keep his head above his neck through conscious effort.
"You should rest, Der," his mother whispered from far away. "You look awful."
He sighed. And he probably looked about ten times better than he felt. He listened to her as she took up her knitting again. The needles clinked when they hit each other from time to time. Her quiet breathing soothed him. The pounding headache throbbed into the background, and, somewhere along the way, somewhere between a stitch and a breath, he plunged into dreaming.
Every guy I meet turns out to be married...
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Pairing: Duh. (Mer/Der)
Rating: M
Timeline: Post Time After Time.
~~~~~
Derek found his mother knitting in the den. Crumpled sleeping bags were strewn all over the floor, and he had to work very hard to dodge them all without tripping. He was still moving slow. He felt like some sort of lumbering beast, leaning against walls and slide, slide, sliding along as he searched with his hands along the center molding for grips. The meclizine was working fine, but tiredness, a general sense of unwellness, and nervousness that the one time he let go would be the one time the floor would start spinning around and trying to make him topple, well, it all combined to make him very cautious. Very cautious, and very slow. He gritted his teeth in frustration as he stepped over another sleeping bag.
He'd dozed off for a few hours. He'd been vaguely aware of Meredith mentioning something about getting up to take a shower. The sex had been phenomenal, though he felt a little guilty that he hadn't contributed all that much. She hadn't been kidding when she'd whispered sexily that she could drive. But that, that and everything else, it had just been too much, and he'd been down for the count with post-coital, post-accident drowsiness before she'd come back from the shower. She'd since disappeared. Maybe one of his sisters had dragged her out.
He walked slowly over and let himself settle into the seat next to his mother. The two chairs formed a wide letter v in the corner of the room with the lamp table stuffed in the corner serving as the tip. This was his mother's favorite room to spend time in, and usually the first place he looked when he couldn't find her elsewhere. It was airy and cheerful, decorated with a flowery wallpaper and pastel colors. Huge bay windows lined both sides of the room, brightening everything.
She gave him a concerned frown as he sat down, blinking against the glare, but she said nothing. She went back to her looping stitches. Derek watched her for a moment, watched her weathered hands as her still lithe fingers wrapped the yarn around the hooks. The tips of the needles flashed under the sharp lamplight, and for some reason, he found it familiar, but he didn't know why. He'd never cared much about watching her knit before...
So, when's the knitting start?
He frowned as the thought blew away into nothingness like dust in a breeze, and he couldn't draw it back again. He tried, tried to pull it back, but the more he tried, the worse he felt, and the more it seemed like he was trying to pull one strand of hair from thousands.
He sighed and ran his thumb and index finger up along the bridge of his nose, pinching at the sudden ache that was developing in the sunlight and under the glare of the piercing lamp. The sudden ache that tried to scold him for remembering, for trying to remember. He swallowed, wishing that the general sense of awfulness he was feeling would just go away. It felt good to not be moving again, and that was depressing since he'd essentially only walked one flight of stairs and two lengths of hallway. He was nearing seventy-two hours since the concussion, and beyond the initial bounds of improvement, there hadn't been much else. And, well, it was miserable. He was miserable. He hoped the fatigue would at least let up, give him a break to actually enjoy this supposed vacation. Headaches, dizziness, nausea, at least there were good prescriptions for those. There wasn't much he could do about feeling tired all the time except sleep more, which made him feel like he was rotting his life away, made him feel like he was soaked in sickness.
"Are you all right?" his mother finally asked.
He blinked his eyes, exaggerated, once, twice, three times, trying to clear some of the haze away, but it stuck to him like the sinewy gauze of a spider's web, clotting on his fingers, billowing from the eves of memory in his head. "I'm tired, Mom. And I'm getting kind of tired of it. That's all," he replied, deciding to spare her the details of his slowly blooming headache.
"I meant about everything else," she said, her lips pursed in a firm line. Everything else. She said it like... like it was nothing more than a forgotten item on a grocery list, or a chore down at number eight on the dry-erase to-do board on the side of the fridge. Buy apples and milk, vacuum the living room, mop, everything else.
Except even with it phrased that way, even with it put so carefully, he felt the jabs of her disappointment, the jabs of her hurt. She didn't need to express them. He just knew they were there. He could see it riding shotgun beside her schooled expressions, her careful, concerned gazes.
"I'm sorry I didn't call," he said as he leaned his head against the high back of the chair.
The needles stopped their twisting and her hands went still. His mother looked up at him and sighed, sighed as if she'd expected him to talk about something else, about, maybe, the state of his life, not the stupid superficiality of not calling. Not calling was the least of his sins. Not calling barely even counted in the heaping pile of everything else.
Everything else was... Mark. And his marriage. And Meredith. And him not knowing what the hell was going on anymore... Him looking at his life and wondering if it really had been him who'd lived it, because now he just didn't know.
Everything else.
"When I found him..." Derek continued. "Mark... When I found him, my best friend, my brother, in my bed with my wife... I just couldn't take the family thing anymore. I had to get out. I had to go find something, and I didn't know what. I..." His voice trailed away as a sharp ache, like someone was slowly jamming one of his mother's knitting needles into his head, persisted and then flared, growing brighter, deadly like phosphorous.
"You can't turn your family on and off at will, Derek," his mother said behind the din of discomfort.
"I know... I just needed..." He twisted his fingers through his hair, pulling, yanking. The pain was a little stab behind the rest of it. Barely noticed. "I don't know what I needed. I just knew everything was wrong, and I had to get out," he said. He leaned forward in his chair and rubbed his face with his hands, worrying his index fingers against his throbbing eye sockets. This wasn't just the bright light... It hadn't been bothering him at all before now.
"And what about when Addison went after you?" his mother asked. "You still couldn't call then? She sent us Christmas presents from the both of you, though I could tell it wasn't your handwriting on the cards." The hurt in her voice was a tangible, cutting thing that slithered deep under his skin.
"I don't..." He shrugged helplessly, not looking up from the soothing dark of his palms. "I don't remember any of that yet, Mom. All I can think of is her walking in on Meredith and I before I had a chance to say anything, and I don't know exactly what happens next, but I've got the outline. I know it ruined something. I know it ruined something, but I don't know what yet, because I don't remember..."
His mother sighed. "Derek..."
"People keep telling me I tried with her again, and I don't know why," Derek said. The back of his throat started to ache, ache as he forced back his upset. He swallowed once, twice, again, trying to stop it all from overflowing. "I look back at everything, and I don't know why. Is there a hole? Am I missing something else? I just... I feel like I'm sitting down to watch a bad movie. I know what's coming, and I don't know why. And I want to hurt the writers... except I'm the writer. What..."
He sighed as the backs of his eyes stabbed him, not with headache, but with all sorts of other unsettling things. They stab, stab, stabbed. He tried to wipe away the mess with his hands as it spilled over onto his cheeks, but it didn't work, and suddenly his torso was heaving on him, not with nausea, but with those same unsettling things, and he was crying, and he couldn't stop. It was wrong. It was all so wrong. He didn't cry. Not like this. Where had this come from? And it just kept coming. It was exhausting, and ugly, and wrong. It made everything hurt more, not less.
And it just kept coming.
At some point, his mother set her knitting project down on the table and got up. At some point, she knelt next to the chair where he cowered, sucking down breaths, trying to stay afloat and failing. At some point, she wrapped her arms around his shoulders. At some point, he ended up with his nose stuck firmly in her shoulder, smelling her familiar perfume while she ran a soothing hand up and down his back.
"Derek," she whispered like a gentle wave in his ear. "Hindsight is sometimes a blessing, sometimes a curse. You can't let yourself drown in mistakes you've already made. I know it seems like all of this just happened, like it's all happening now, but it's done. You're with a beautiful, brave, supportive girl, and she's still here. So, you must have done something right. It's not all bad, Derek."
He sucked in a breath, and another, and another, trying to just make it stop. "I realized it... earlier." During sex. "I realized. Meredith made me believe again. And I apparently ran in the completely wrong direction."
Stupid, stupid, so stupid...
He sighed and drew away, dismayed to find that everything was shaking again, and there wasn't much he could do about it but watch it in frustration. He wiped the backs of his palms against his wet cheeks. But as the awful crying subsided, the headache came back. To put it lightly, he was a sick, unhappy mess. He resisted the swell of messy tears as they threatened to burst through again. He swallowed back on it, tasting bile.
"You're looking back on this now, and you know you end up with Meredith, that you're with her currently. It's messing with your perceptions, Derek. You're trying to analyze something that can't be analyzed, not like you're trying to, anyway," his mother said.
She ran her fingers along Derek's shoulder, through his hair in a comforting, familial, motherly way. She hadn't been that person, that comforting mother figure to him for a long, long time. He could remember nights, shortly after his father had died, when he'd been comforted like this. But not since then. He'd made himself not need it.
He sighed.
He had made such a mess of things. And he was still missing so much. He didn't want to remember trying again with Addison. He didn't want to remember leaving the comfort of Meredith to go back to... Living with Addison. Having sex with Addison. Not when all he could think of now when he thought of Addison was Mark. Heaving, sweaty, thrusty, post-coital Mark. It made his stomach turn, though at least thoughts of Meredith took the active, constant throb of it away.
"I love her," he said weakly. "Meredith. I loved her before I remembered. I love her right now. And I know I loved her at the moment Addison came up to us and introduced herself to Meredith. I know it. It's the one damned thing that I know without a doubt right now. Everything else is so confusing. But I know that. I know it, Mom. And I tried again anyway, and I don't know why."
His mother paused, crouching close to him, inches away, eyes glistening in the harsh light. "Do you love Addison?" she asked.
"No," he replied. It didn't even require thought. Not anymore.
"But did you?" she prompted.
"Yes..." he said, trying to think back, back, back. "I don't... I don't know when I stopped. But..."
But he had. At one point, he could honestly say he had. Back at their wedding, their honeymoon, Christmases one, two, three, four, and at least five. By eight, he wasn't so sure. By ten, Addison was a habit and not really much else. It had been a gradual loss. A gradual drifting, like two icebergs going east and west. But he had loved her. At one point.
His mother squeezed his shoulder, grunting as she stood. He felt a pang of guilt for being the weak one sniveling in the chair while she, sixty-five and somewhat arthritic, had been crouching on the floor.
"But you had a marriage license that confirmed it," she said as she straightened herself out. "You had a history that confirmed it. A ring. A family you didn't want to disappoint. You didn't love her anymore, but you had all those things telling you that you should, that if you tried, it might come back."
He sighed. "Mom..."
She looked at him with a hopeless, serious, understanding smile. "You try to follow the rules, Derek. You try to meet the expectations of everyone else around you. You try, but sometimes the rules, the expectations, they just don't make sense for the situation. And that's when you lose your way, that's when you break."
She sat back down in her chair with a sigh. She resumed her knitting with a frown. She pulled out a row and started over. He watched her for a moment.
My point is, knitting is good for surgical dexterity.
The thought from before came back, just for a moment, and then it flitted off again, an annoying butterfly against the snarl of his headache. He squeezed his eyes shut. Why the hell was he getting bent about knitting? His mother had always knitted.
The ache came down on him like the crush of high tide. He groaned and leaned back in his seat, drawing circles on his temples with his fingers. It didn't help. He dropped his hands into his lap and just sat there in silent misery.
He felt his mother's scrutiny even through closed eyes. There was a shuffle. She left the room for a minute, leaving him in silence, in the painfully bright room, sitting there, sick of being sick. She came back with a glass of water and some ibuprofen.
"Stop trying to pretend you don't have a headache," she said as she grabbed his right hand and dropped some pills into it. She curled the fingers of his left hand around the cool, crystal glass.
He took them without comment, sipping the water as he downed each one. She resumed her knitting again.
He swallowed thickly in the silence that followed. "I'm sorry I didn't call," he said again.
She turned to him and grinned. "I know. She's very pretty. A distraction, perhaps?"
He opened his eyes, unsurprised to find the room swimming a little before he focused. "Meredith?" he asked.
"Yes," his mother said as she nodded. "Does she want kids?"
He ran his fingers along the bridge of his nose and sighed. "Mom..."
"Sorry, I had to ask," she said. The unspoken, the part about how she was suddenly assuming that this relationship would be long term enough to even consider children, soothed him in a way no other assurance could, soothed him against the roaring ache behind his eyes, the ache at the back of his throat, the subtle spinning of the room that the meclizine couldn't fully obliterate. She winked. "You're my only holdout."
"Addison didn't want any," he said through gritted teeth, replied by rote, by habit. Everyone always asked him why he didn't have any...
"I know, Der," she replied with a frown. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't joke. I know you... Well, I know."
He ran his hands through his hair and leaned back, watching the swirl of the room as he moved his head. "So, you like her?" he asked.
"Der..."
"Yeah?"
"I am your mother," she said, definitive, clipped. "The only expectation I have for you is to be happy. Does she make you happy?"
"Yes."
She nodded. "Then I like her."
He closed his eyes again. The pulse of his blood, just behind his eyes, trying to squeeze them out with each thud, thud, thud was really starting to get to him, really starting to drag him down. He thought about getting up. Thought about going back to bed, back to his dark, quiet room. Steps seemed like a new form of self-torture. He stayed in the chair, reached down, pulled the lever, and forced it back a little so he could stretch out, so he could stop trying to keep his head above his neck through conscious effort.
"You should rest, Der," his mother whispered from far away. "You look awful."
He sighed. And he probably looked about ten times better than he felt. He listened to her as she took up her knitting again. The needles clinked when they hit each other from time to time. Her quiet breathing soothed him. The pounding headache throbbed into the background, and, somewhere along the way, somewhere between a stitch and a breath, he plunged into dreaming.
Every guy I meet turns out to be married...